David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé
Geologist David R. Montgomery and biologist Anne Biklé will share insights and discoveries from their book The Hidden Half of Nature about humanity’s long and tangled relationship with the microbial world. Moving through twists and turns of history, science, and personal experience, they’ll share the journey that brought them to the strange twin worlds of the human gut and the roots of plants. New microbiome science reveals the common ground and parallel purpose of these twin organs. Roots and guts, it turns out, do far more than perhaps any of us have imagined, well beyond merely acquiring nutrients. These organs also carry on a symbiotic relationship with their respective microbiomes to collect and share biological intelligence. This ceaseless process, it turns out, forms the foundation of health and well-being for plants and people. Montgomery and Biklé bring us full circle, showing why, whether in the agronomic world or the human world, health flows from living soils—and how many mainstream practices in agriculture and medicine could be updated to better work with the hidden half of nature.