The Soil Sponge: A New Narrative to Unify Regional Action on Soil Carbon
The “soil-carbon-as-drawdown” narrative offers a limited view of soil biology’s full role in landscape function and climate mitigation, and may not be sufficient to drive actual change in land management.
What happens when we focus on soil carbon’s structural and functional role in the world of water, public health, local economies, and resilience to extreme weather events?
In this course, Didi Pershouse explains how the terms “soil sponge,” “soil carbon sponge” and “soil health” provide more accurate images of the living matrix of carbon-rich soil, and why these terms are uniting action among liberal and conservative farmers, policy makers, and citizens in the United States and elsewhere.
This new narrative frames the soil sponge as a living system that provides interrelated benefits—abundant clean water; a longer green growing season; more nutrient-dense foods; healthier people, plants, and animals; localized cooling through transpiration; habitat for biologically diverse species; and reduction of flooding, drought, erosion, algae blooms, and wildfires.
This course also provides effective visual ways of demonstrating how a carbon rich living “soil sponge” maintains its porosity and structural integrity when wet, and thereby increases the ability of a landscape to capture, store, and filter water for all life on land.
What happens when we focus on soil carbon’s structural and functional role in the world of water, public health, local economies, and resilience to extreme weather events?
In this course, Didi Pershouse explains how the terms “soil sponge,” “soil carbon sponge” and “soil health” provide more accurate images of the living matrix of carbon-rich soil, and why these terms are uniting action among liberal and conservative farmers, policy makers, and citizens in the United States and elsewhere.
This new narrative frames the soil sponge as a living system that provides interrelated benefits—abundant clean water; a longer green growing season; more nutrient-dense foods; healthier people, plants, and animals; localized cooling through transpiration; habitat for biologically diverse species; and reduction of flooding, drought, erosion, algae blooms, and wildfires.
This course also provides effective visual ways of demonstrating how a carbon rich living “soil sponge” maintains its porosity and structural integrity when wet, and thereby increases the ability of a landscape to capture, store, and filter water for all life on land.