I’m standing in a field in the Indian Creek Valley in Utah. The Sundial and Six-Shooter formations watch over me and track the remaining time in the day. It is the winter solstice, so I have about 9 hours of daylight today, but the air is cold in the early morning making it impossible to sample soils before 10 am. I am instead looking out at my first field experiment, 8 m x 20 m of abandoned pastureland covered in annual weeds that are starting to green-up already beneath dried stalks caked to the soil surface by snow. I have 175 plots. Each one cleared of weeds by hand, mimicking the action of grazing animals. Each plot sprinkled with magic-microbe dirt, photographed, sampled, and left to grow for the next 5 years. They call this innovative ~ the integration of microbial restoration where plant restoration techniques have failed. Native plant seeds are spread on the site with perfect timing, just before the wet season, and yet, these seeds do not germinate. Those that do germinate fail to grow. Instead, an endless consortium of weeds decorate the soil surface. I wonder what it means for a landscape to be useless, to be so degraded that humans abandon it. I think of the endlessly vast Wyoming plains where humans do not dare intrude – useless not from use, but by lack of imagination.
But these magic-microbes do not see these spaces as useless. They are made to thrive here, where plants cannot. In the harsh sunlight, they produce sunscreen. In the driest summers, they desiccate and patiently wait for a drink of water. They live not as individuals but as teams. These cyanobacteria live tightly packed into bundles inside of sheaths. Inside protective sleeves, they are able to slide over one another from the soil surface to a few millimeters below to soil surface where the soil protects them. This living layer creates a green band in the orange desert sand, a band that can only be seen when you bend down, scoop up the soil into your hand, and delicately rotate the soil into profile-view. Eventually these cyanobacteria are joined by mosses, lichens, and many other soil microorganisms in a forest only a few inches tall. Small enough for you to step on without notice, to crush out of existence in a single step. But this process of growth is slow. Five years is no time at all for this land to “restore”. Ants, deer, ground mammals work at my human time-scale. The building of a microbial community with sufficient alteration of soil nutrients, water retention, soil structure takes much longer. While the different organisms compete for space and light, they also must share resources to survive, making deals, bargaining, and bartering for life’s vital needs. Like an interidal zone, these microbial communities must survive temperature swings, intense storms, UV exposure. Like the intertidal zone, the unseen effects of human impact also operate and challenge the soil community in new ways they may or may not be equipped for. And so here I stand attempting to reverse human decisions & actions of 150 years of human use. Attempting to speak or learn the language of microbial beings. Hoping that one day I’ll glean their secrets of communal living, adaptations for surviving harsh conditions, and how to give back to the Earth while necessarily taking from it for my own needs.
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AuthorSierra is a graduate student in the Barger Lab at CU Boulder studying microbial ecology for dryland restoration. Archives
August 2023
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