Last week Dr. Dawit Solomon spoke at the rose cafe. His lecture was on why soil matters. I took a soils course last semester and now I am taking a soil crop management course. As a double major in agricultural science and plant science I was required to take soil science classes and am becoming more and more aware of its importance in our society. In now way do I know anything and everything about soil, but I do no more mundane facts than most people outside of my field. I was more intrigued by the audiences’s response to the lecture than the actual lecturer. Dr. Solomon introduced the significance of soil and the ramifications on our society in a way that intrigued a lay audience.  It felt like taking someone on a roller coaster for the first time, just how shocked they were that something so minuscule and mundane as soil touches everything that our society is about. All of the societies of the world were literally and figuratively built off of the soil beneath us. Not only does soil impact the crops that we grow, but it impacts our infrastructure and engineering. There is not one faucet of society that is not linked one way or another to the soil because it all comes from the soil.

I think that students were surprised to learn that Cornell has a department devoted to soil science and that soil matters to more than just farmers. This lecture was a great example of how everything has an origin and greater things are linked to more mundane materials.