>Hi Ted - > >Very interesting! I do not believe I have ever had a sample sent in, but as a >child, I visited the Amazonian rainforest, and I recall the rich, dark, dark >brown earth in places. I agree, the micro-organisms in that material must be >amazing. We need to re-create it in our own soils here, where we retain the >humic acids instead of plowing and plowing, adding toxin after toxin, and >destroying the "savings account" of our soils. > >Thank you so much for the information! > >Elaine > >Allan Balliett wrote: > >> <read carefully -or- jump to the 2nd section. You probably know all >> about this already, to me, this is a very humbling post. -Allan >> >> Here's an interesting read with soilfoodweb implications. The March cover >> story of the Atlantic Monthly is "1491" by Charles Mann. The article >> examines the belief by some archaeologists, anthropologists and historians >> that the pre-Columbian western hemisphere was much more heavily populated, >> more developed, and more sophisticated than many of us learned in school. >> Like Jared Diamond's _Guns, Germs, and Steel_, Mann's article points out >> that Old World diseases actually conquered native peoples, destroying an >> overwhelming majority of the population--perhaps 95%. But this article >> goes further in examining the agricultural accomplishments and ecological >> impact of American Indians. Whereas Diamond points to the multiplicity of >> crops developed and spreading from the Tigris-Euphrates breadbasket, Mann >> says, "...in agriculture they [pre-Columbian farmers] handily outstripped >> the children of Sumeria." >> Another controversial topic is the possible impact that large Indian >> populations may have had on the Amazonian river basin -- what >> "improvements" they may have made on what is now viewed as true wilderness. >> In the midst of that discussion were these intriguing paragraphs: >> ======= >> ...According to William I. Woods, a soil geographer at Southern Illinois >> University, ecologist's claims about terrible Amazonian land were based on >> very little data. In the late 1990's Woods and others began careful >> measurements in the lower Amazon. The indeed found lots of inhospitable >> terrain. But they also discovered swaths of <terra preta>--rich, fertile >> "black earth" that antropologists increasingly believe was created by human >> beings. >> >> <Terra preta>, Woods guesses, covers at least 10 percent of Amazonia, an >> area the size of France. It has amazing properties, he says. Tropical rain >> doesn't leach nutrients from <terra preta> fields; instead the soil, so to >> speak, fights back. Not far from Painted Rock Cave is a 300-acre area with >> a two-foot layer of <terra preta> quarried by locals for potting soil. The >> bottom third of the layer is never removed, workers there explain, because >> over time it will re-create the original soil layer in its initial >> thickness. The reason, scientists suspect, is that <terra preta> is >> generated by a special suite of microorganisms that resists depletion. >> "Apparently," Woods and the Wisconsin geographer Joseph M. McCann argued in >> a presentation last summer, "at some threshold level ... dark earth attains >> the capacity to perpetuate -- even regenerate itself -- thus behaving more >> like a living 'super'-organism than an inert material." >> >> In as yet unpublished research the archaeologists Eduardo Neves, of the >> University of Sao Paulo; Michael Heckenberger, of the University of >> Florida; and their colleagues examined <terra preta> in the upper Xingu, a >> huge southern tributary of the Amazon. Not all Xingu cultures left behind >> this living earth, the discovered. But the ones that did generated it >> rapidly -- suggesting to Woods that <terra preta> was created deliberately. >> In a process reminiscent of dropping microorganism-rich starter in plain >> dough to create sourdough bread, Amazonian peoples, he believes, inoculated >> bad soil with a transforming bacterial charge. Not every group of Indians > > did this, but quite a few did, and over an extended period of time. >> ======= >> >> Maybe Elaine Ingham has already done microbe counts on this <terra preta>. >> >> The current issue has not yet been posted at the magazine website, >> http://www.theatlantic.com/ >> so I'm uncertain whether the full article will be available on-line. >> Enjoy, -Ted Patterson
