Book Review: The Hidden Half of Nature

The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health by David R. Montgomery


This book starts talking about gardening, segues to talking about microbiology, and finishes by talking about gardening. It’s basically about the microbial world and how it impacts us. Most of this is information I’ve read about in other books, but it was a broader overview, and it touched more on the rhizosphere than the other books I’ve read, which tend to focus mostly on human gastrointestinal tracts.

So what fun things did I learn from this book? The rhizosphere, the top layer of soil, is an entire ecosystem in which plants, fungi, bacteria, and other organisms interact with each other. It’s easy to disrupt this by adding fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, anti-fungal, or tillage. The author talked about the western science of agriculture which pretty much went “let’s not do it the old way, let’s try adding guano” to “guano is great, but there isn’t enough of it” to “wow, we made fake guano! Look how the plants are doing!” to “hey, the plants aren’t doing well anymore, no matter how much fertilizer we add” to “let’s do it the old way.” Like a bastion of agricultural science makes an amazing discovery by just basically watching the way traditional cultures have never stopped doing agriculture.

The book also talks about the gut biome, and explained why eating plants, especially fibrous plants, is important. Even though we can’t digest it, the byproducts of the bacteria in our colon that can digest it are beneficial to us. And part of the reason why only eating refined food is bad is the speed it takes to the lower tract and how many sugars are left over afterwards. So I guess I don’t understand it well enough to explain it, (and I finished it a couple of weeks ago) but it was interesting.




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