I didn’t realize how little I knew about soil until I attended Dr. Solomon’s talk last week. Of course I understood that rich soil is essential to agriculture and that soil depleted of resources can be devastating for a community, but I didn’t think it affected the world much beyond that. Dr. Solomon’s passion about the impact that soil has not only on us but also on the environment as a whole, however, quickly made it clear that this was not true. His ideas about how we can deliberately use soil as a carbon sink to help reduce climate change were inspiring, and I really appreciated hearing about climate change and possible solutions from a perspective totally different from anything I had ever heard before. I also appreciated that Dr. Solomon gave us an overview of some of the research that he does, and I was a little surprised by the amount of advanced technology that goes into the study of soil. The bone fertilizer that Dr. Solomon showed us is a great example of how new innovations can still be applied to the soil that we use.