This past week, I had the opportunity to listen to a talk by soil scientist, Dawit Solomon. I found the discussion to be very interesting because, although I hope to pursue a career in biology myself, I have never really learned very much about the role of soil in the natural world. As it turns out, soil is incredibly important, and not just because it allows us to grow the crops that sustain us. We learned that significant amount of Earth’s carbon is contained in the soil. In fact, there’s 4x more carbon in soil than there is currently in the atmosphere! This has huge implications for climate change, because if we continue to misuse the land as we have been, all this carbon will be released into the atmosphere, potentially devastating the environment.

Interestingly enough, the speaker touched upon the fact that, although soil carbon could be a tremendous issue, it could also be the solution to the exact same problem. If we can develop better ways to put carbon back into the soil, we could actually start to reverse what has already begun. For me, this really highlighted just how important it is to compost and responsibly dispose of your waste products. I admit that I’ve never entirely understood the importance of composting. I kind of assumed that it just kept unnecessary trash out of landfills, with the useful fringe benefit of being a good fertilizer. I now see, however, that it’s much more than that. By composting responsibly, we can actually help fight global warming by returning carbon back to the soil it came from.

All in all, this was a very interesting and informative discussion.