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The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health
The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health

The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health

The Hidden Half of Nature is a good inductive integration of the roots of plants with the guts of animals. The synopsis on Amazon says:
When David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé decide to restore life into their barren yard by creating a garden, dead dirt threatens their dream. As a cure, they feed their soil a steady diet of organic matter. The results impress them. In short order, the much-maligned microbes transform their bleak yard into a flourishing Eden. Beneath their feet, beneficial microbes and plant roots continuously exchange a vast array of essential compounds. The authors soon learn that this miniaturized commerce is central to botanical life’s master strategy for defense and health.

They are abruptly plunged further into investigating microbes when Biklé is diagnosed with cancer. Here, they discover an unsettling truth. An armada of bacteria (our microbiome) sails the seas of our gut, enabling our immune system to sort microbial friends from foes. But when our gut microbiome goes awry, our health can go with it. The authors also discover startling insights into the similarities between plant roots and the human gut. We are not what we eat. We are all―for better or worse―the product of what our microbes eat.

This leads to a radical reconceptualization of our relationship to the natural world: by cultivating beneficial microbes, we can rebuild soil fertility and help turn back the modern plague of chronic diseases. The Hidden Half of Nature reveals how to transform agriculture and medicine―by merging the mind of an ecologist with the care of a gardener and the skill of a doctor.
The books shows us that we can learn about how plants achieve optimum function and health by applying (in a species-appropriate way) what we know about how we achieve optimum function and health. And vice versa. Wow. The book identifies and elaborates on a fundamental connection amongst all life, a connection of vegetable to animal to man, and a fundamental connection of us to our world and ecology.

The authors apply biological thinking and solutions to biological issues and problems — they do not run into the dead ends of chemistry or physics, as too many do today in things biological. The Hidden Half of Nature is a great book for those who are interested in and care about logic, induction, science, the law of causality, and the law of identity — i.e., who care about living in this natural world according to its terms and laws.

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