Celebrating Soil ─ Discovering Soils and Landscapes

This book celebrates the diversity, importance, and intrinsic beauty of soils around the world and helps the reader to understand the ways that soils are related to the landscapes in which they form. The book unravel the complex bound between humans and soils and the importance of soils in our cultures and everyday lives.

Soil is critical to terrestrial life on earth. It underpins human food supply and provides materials on which we build our lives. Soil is out of sight and often out of mind, thus easy to overlook. Yet soil has tremendous variety and intrinsic beauty for those who care to look. Soil contains a memory of the events that have shaped the landscape and the environment. With help you can look at a soil and understand the stories that it has to tell.

Written in a reader-friendly way, The Beauty of Soil is a wonderful handbook for farmers, horticulturalists, naturalists and others who are concerned about how soils are formed, work and are used.

Dr Megan Balks has over 30 years of experience in soil sciences. she is based in New Zealand (at the University of Waikato) and is specialized in soil fertility, irrigation of city wastewater onto land, soils of Antarctica.
Prof. Darlene Zabowski has a BS in Forest Ecology and an MS and PhD in Soil Science.
She worked as a Research Soil Scientist for the US Forest Service before moving to the University of Washington in 1993. Her work has mostly focused on forest soils, but has often included comparative research with soils from other ecosystems and a variety of landscapes.