A World Without Soil: The Past, Present, and Precarious Future of the Earth Beneath Our Feet

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Bryce Richter/UW-Madison

A close-up of Jo Handelsman.

Jo Handelsman, director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (WID) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The erosion of topsoil and climate change are two challenges facing our shared planet that are tied together; if one gets worse the other will as well. We have the science to slow the decline, but will it be employed in time? This event hosted by the UW Center for the Humanities shares its title with a 2021 book, A World Without Soil: The Past, Present, and Precarious Future of the Earth Beneath Our Feet The author, Wisconsin Institute for Discovery director Jo Handelsman, will discuss the topic as part of the "Focus on the Humanities" series.

UW Center for the Humanities "Focus on the Humanities" lecture, Room L140.

media release: Humans depend on soil for 95% of global food production, yet we let it erode at unsustainable rates leaving vast tracts of farmland barren of topsoil and thus unable to support food production for a growing population. The crisis is worsened by the mutually reinforcing relationship between climate change and soil erosion, which generates a dangerous vicious cycle of environmental destruction. The good news is that we know how to stop soil erosion and replace destruction with a virtuous cycle of improving soil health and reducing greenhouse gases. All we need is the collective will to act.

Jo Handelsman is the director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and a Vilas Research Professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and previously served as a science advisor to President Barack Obama. Handelsman studies how bacteria communicate with each other in soil microbial communities and pioneered the field of functional metagenomics, a molecular approach to understanding bacteria that are recalcitrant to growing in laboratory culture. She authored A World Without Soil, a book that presents the soil erosion crisis for a general audience.