 This talk is Humus Sapiens by Julia Moritz-Scholley, Maldelasen and Maya Minda. And it's about their open-sile research. Please give them a great round of applause and welcome them to the stage. And if you have questions during the talk from the internet, please use our channels on IRC or Mastodon or Twitter and just use the hashtag Eliza. Are you guys ready? Totally. Awesome. Looking forward to it. Thank you for your introduction. And I'm glad you all made it here today. And yeah, we're really excited to tell you about our project. So to get started, we want to summarize like I would like to give an introduction, a short introduction into soil science, the definition of humus and some major facts to get us all on the same page here. And Julian will introduce the Humus Sapiens project and what it's all about. And after that, Maya will give a short introduction of open science and art. And we actually reserved 30 minutes of our time for an open discussion at the end because we think it's mostly very fruitful to have discussions rather than having a monologue on you. So we're really looking forward to that. And yeah, first thing, humus. So what comes in mind, it's probably that. And I can assure you it's really delicious. But we want to talk today about the soil, the humus soil. And therefore, we want to give you a definition of what soil actually is. And there are a lot of definitions. Historically, the science about soil arose from different perspectives, from scientific research, from ecological perspectives to agricultural perspectives. And the perspective really matters if you define something. So you can see it as a productive system for your agriculture efficiency. But you can also see it as a four-dimensional natural entity that actually is made of sand, silk, and clay, also a base layer of rock. And the soil actually develops over time by climate influences direct or indirect. And another content of soil is humus. And this is what we want to talk about today. And humus essentially is the dark layer that you see on the top, which is actually made of organic matter. And this organic matter, this humus part, is also found in deeper layers of the soil. So there's always a mobilization of humus by water, for example, in deeper soil levels. And the humus is super important for the soil because it contains the major part of carbon and nitrogen, which is essential for plant nutrition. And it holds a very complex and diverse multitude of species, fungi, bacteria, protozoa, atropods. They're countless of individuals per square centimeter. And yeah, it's massively influenced by climate factors. So to give you a short introduction about the complexity, I oversimplified with a little sketch I made it on my phone this morning. To give you a short introduction of the soil food web. It's actually, you can consider it as a bioreactor. It's a very complicated system. And to just give you an idea, the first stage, the first level of the soil food web is the photosynthesis. You can say it's the input parameter. So we have organic waste from bacterial residues. We have plant that give residues from the roots, but also plant matter like litter from the top. And all this is processed on the second level by the decomposers. And the decomposers are fungi, essentially bacteria. And the third level, they feed on those decomposers. Those are the shredders, grazers, or also pathogens. This is a protozoa, or amoeba in German. And the level four are predators. So the organisms, they grow larger. And then we come to a level where we have a lot of predators. They feed off the smaller organisms. And those are nematodes and atropods. And on the next level, we have, for example, larger animals like birds, or different kinds of mice. So one important thing to mention is that trees act as a nutrient pump or base pump, you can also say in science. So if you have a soil, you always have the release and the binding of carbon and nitrogen and this fixation and this mobilization that occurs is very important to understand that if you have water, like the rain is coming, and it flows down those nutrients that are released. So it's very important to have vegetation because the deep-rooting vegetation is actually sucking up those nutrients and bringing it up to the tree and every autumn it's falling down as leaves, for example. And those leaves accumulate in the soil top layer and will become humus. And this is very important to understand when we think about climate change and rising temperatures, the microbial activity will increase and this leads to more greenhouse gas releases. And to show you why this could be a problem already now with the rising temperatures, it's important to understand that the carbon stock distribution is, if you look at the latitude of our planet, on the southern hemisphere, the equator, this is where we are based right now and the northern hemisphere, you can see that the accumulation of carbon stocks in the deeper soil levels, so we are here at 150 centimeters, increasing the further you come to the north of the planet. And this is due to the fact that it's colder. So the microbial activity is slower, so the accumulation of carbon is increased. And even though that the vegetation stock is relatively low in comparison to the equator, the carbon stocks are really high. So if we speak about global temperature rise, we have to keep in mind that we will have an increase in microbial activity, prospectively. And you can also see there's also the greatest amount of soil microbial mass in the northern hemisphere. So another drawing from my phone, super important to mention as well is that vegetation covers from sunlight, it covers from wind erosion and also from water erosion. So if we want to preserve the fertility of the soil, the healthy soil, if we want to build up humus, it's very important to protect the soil. And there's a natural system that evolved over millions of years, and it doesn't need any maintenance and is actually sequestering that carbon forest. It's called a forest. And it's actually hosting all those microorganisms in all the varieties they have. And if we protect the systems that we have and we increase the number, we can actually sequester quite a huge amount of carbon. So there's quite a lot of studies about that topic. And I just read this morning that we could sequester roughly about 20% of the carbon emissions from the last 20 years if we plant 1.7 billion trees. And it's a rather cheap option to sequester all those carbon emissions. And our problem nowadays is that there's not enough drive, not enough force. And we have to deal with really inappropriate land management practices worldwide. And there is a tremendous amount of work we have to do. And this is the reason I will hand over the presentation to Julia now and why we started with the project. Thank you. Thank you very much, Manitou. You can all hear me. So yeah, it's my honor to introduce a bit about the project itself. Main questions, who, where, and what. And also, how did it all start? Here I would like to tell you a bit about the Clintile Biohack retreat in 2017. I see some people in the audience who have been there. And it was organized by wonderful Maya Minda, who will talk afterwards after me. And Marc Doucetier, also founder of Hectoria, who can unfortunately not be here today. And yeah, so at this retreat, we were sitting together and the three of us kind of developed the plan to work on soil and the future and then we had another meeting later. And we decided to basically integrate what we were doing already, so our own networks and throw them together to create something new and bigger. So with all those projects that people were involved, this is incomplete summary of the network, which was partly already there before the project and partly it grew together through the last two years of Homo sapiens. So there are universities involved, like Lucerne and Weimar. There's also Fab Lab and Hacker Spaces, Biohacker Spaces and Art Association and yeah, some communities and camps and yeah, several things all together. And yeah, then we thought we're so many people who are interested in these topics we should try to raise some money. And we did a crowdfunding campaign, we actually, we also hacked it a bit, I can tell you more about that later. So we got a bit of money, I would like to show you the video, how can I play it. Just to give you some impression of how it looked like there in Klöntal, so the footage is from Klöntal and so it's artists and hackers and biologists, makers, engineers, nanotechnologists, biochemists, all sorts of people coming together there and also filmmakers, so it was nicely documented, several short movies came out of that and so also people with their families, so kids were jumping around and we worked with what we found there, so we did excursions in the mountains and got inspired by everything that is around and yeah, tried to implement it in our daily work and yeah, a few interesting projects and also new collaborations came from that and that's also the spirit that we then integrated into the retreats in Homo sapiens, so it's about diversity, interdisciplinarity and this interdisciplinary collaboration and mainly about long-term projects, so it's not so much about finishing something within these few days but to think about what we want to focus on in the future and who we want to work with and also about having a good time together, so it's definitely meeting interesting people, yeah, yeah, I just, yeah, we integrated some images of what is going on right now and we suggested these two projects in the crowdfunding campaign to retreats and actually, no it's not working, actually we did much much much more, so there's a wiki which is even incomplete with all the stuff that happened within Homo sapiens in the last two years and it's been in 2018 alone three retreats and loads of workshops and yeah, I will shortly go through a bit of the where and what, so three pillars of Homo sapiens that I would like to introduce, one is the retreats, open collaborations, so you already know what it's about, we did one in Switzerland, we were sitting at the campfire a lot which was very great but we were also working hard and soldering stuff in the open and working on the soil respiration chamber, I will tell you later and we were talking a lot and doing a lot of excursions, so as you see we like to sit around in forests and we also did that in Germany a lot recently this autumn in the last retreat and yeah we also sometimes get into cities, this was in Stuttgart container city, in cities we like to sit on chairs and go to the local urban garden and get some samples there and yeah as I said before it's about getting together and yeah meeting interesting people and growing the networks together so this map of networks that I showed before, the people need to meet in real life, it's nice to collaborate online but it's much nicer to really sit together as you know here on the congress it's the same kind of thing, only a few more people, so the retreats were usually about 15 to 30 people and focused on soil, also Mark went to Finland for for quite a while to do some projects there and together with Maya they went to Indonesia, this year I had a three-day workshop in Lithuania where we found this wonderful soil profile in a local park which where you can see like the picture that Malta showed before the hummus layer and then the human waste layer and then the rocks, they were quite creative and in Slovenia maybe some of you know Pithkamp, I was there this summer, yeah but let's go to the second pillar the workshops so it's about sharing knowledge and making science accessible basically, also through open source instructions and just getting people again together to get their hands dirty and work with soil and we also again like to do excursions and be outside but usually those workshops are more in an urban setting because that's where the participants are, this was in Paris it's a bit harder to find the soil there and Fab Labs sometimes like Spaces hosted us to do workshops there, this was in Lucerne at the Fab Lab and this was in Berlin and in that case we go out with all the participants and we collect samples and we just have to bring the dirt inside basically, yeah to continue to work with it and we also did children workshops so it's again open for everyone and even old people sometimes join the workshops and at the end of these workshops it's usually a big mess maybe this is a bit dark but it's a table full of stuff and in this case this was in Stuttgart we afterwards just declared it to be an installation now so it was open for another two weeks I think and people could watch what the mess we were leaving after our workshops and retreat so and third one is the open hardware you are probably quite familiar with this stuff again on soil research so this is I'm not a real hardware soldering kind of person but I actually did assemble this soil respiration chamber it has been developed quite a lot further if you're interested look at the bacteria wiki it's well documented there's stuff on github but everything is there and it works really well and it also works with a solar panel if there's a lot of sun maybe use a bigger panel next time but it did work and yeah so I'm personally a biologist so I'm actually more interested in the wet wear so what about open wet wear maybe if you'd like to discuss about that later or outside in the t-tent or whatever I'm very open to that now I hope I kind of clarified a few questions on the project itself and would like to give over the word to Maya so hi everybody I'm Maya I'm not a biologist I'm not a geologist I'm not I'm coming from the arts and I'm calling myself now a fermentista so what I do I learned it all myself so I have this DIY approach I would like to give you my view on soil through fermentation which is a altered history on science as well a science which is 10 000 years old compared to academic science which is 150 years old and I want to talk about like how homo sapiens tries to open up disciplines as well to involve the people who are dealing with the soil because we're digging into the soil and touching it to grow gardens and there's this question is it enough to grow your own garden so your own garden at home in the city your shepherd garden or you have a farm and the question is is it and maybe it is so fermentation has been knowledge or a cultural heritage since 10 000 years old and people started to ferment as something which is magic as well like yeast itself has the Greek origin word of magia and they did not know what they do there because they couldn't see the microbes and the organisms but within those 10 000 years we developed something which is always regional adapted to the climate adapted to the soil as well and to the nature so fermenting means you become aware of your seasons in your country if you have seasons have seasons or not and you become aware about what is growing where and how and how it grows better and how to preserve the food how to make food more more tasty and less toxic so there's maybe the link to the soil as well because soil needs to feed us and the question is how are we going to feed us within the next 50 150 and 200 years so what I wanted to say is that we maybe can also say that we've always been bio hackers in that way that we always were dealing with the microbes and the organisms which I also like to call the invisible helpers and through fermentation science now has started to have this approach to talk about the holobiont or you can also say like the microbiome most of the people know about the microbiome we carry each one carries two kilograms of microorganisms inside himself but there's also the surrounding which is around us which we carry around us like a halo which we also exchange when we talk to people and which is always connected to the environment as well so through breathing through eating we are in continuous exchange with our environment within science which is mainly a male dominated sector there has been lin margillus and lin margillus she came up with the theory of the endogenesis so the the symbiosis and the idea of like how the eukaryotic cell maybe some of you remember remember from biology interesting biological classes so how so you see like the the microorganisms are divided by archaea probe eukarya and the bacteria so the step from the bacteria to the eukarya lin margillus made up this theory that it was made by one bacteria eating up the other bacteria and then instead of that just digesting it realizing hey we can also live in a symbiosis lin margillus she marked like a change of concept in biology of the history of evolution itself so when you go to charles Darwin as well charles Darwin he was marked by the term the survival of the fittest and lin margillus's concept is like contradicting this concept when the survival of the fittest has been as well emblematic for a slogan of capitalism and hyper capitalism we could now say that within the time of entropocene we could now maybe change back again to the idea of the symbiosis as well and what I also wanted to say that Louis Buster Louis Buster he marks also this time when we started to vaccinate ourselves so he's the inventor of the vaccination as well the inventor of fermentation so symbology and he I always say he was a promoter of how to haunt the germs down so through pasteurization there's this start of phobia against microbes and which has now been marked in agriculture how we try to erase just everything in the soil through fungicide has pesticide herbicides and try to break down this diversity which is maybe for humans invisible but it always been here and the forest as we had before as an example it always was self-sustaining and living for itself so through bacteria what we do in our workshops we try to make those microbes visible as well and we try to teach those beautiful pictures to bring them to the people as well because we're still human so we have our senses and the visual sense is something which is very strong like pictures talk more than thousand words and so to show the people that there is much more in a drop of water on the soil makes them also become aware of this invisible force so now again we are in the entropocene and I would maybe say let's just skip the entropocene and go further and I have one one interesting aspect of the entropocene is we can use this word entropocene or climate change climate warmth but the what was before the entropocene was the holocene and there's the parallelity as well the holocene also it started 9,000 10,000 years before so with the settlement of humans with humans becoming farmers as well so we just skip and we just skip agrar industry is the biggest industry in the world and it implies 1 billion people let me just skip let me just skip so here I just wanted to show you want to show you now small projects of people getting involved into soil or microbes and our projects those are mainly and projects which have a different approach of how to bring these things back to the people and I don't want to say like the Homo sapiens is like superior and da da da what I noticed is that more and more people are starting to distribute and show this knowledge in form of our pieces and practices as well so it's like similar it's similar like to fermentation it's started to become like a movement as well like a global movement farming urban farming urban gardens also community gardens and community farm and all those projects we all get involved to yeah this was the circular soil chromatography by Emilia Esgari and this is a really nice technique which is which is based on a technique of photography so invented 150 years ago so she uses silver nitrate and mixes it together with soil probes which she dilutes in water and this is the result we have afterwards after the test and what I think is the beauty in it here it combines the art with the science as well because for the interpretation of those samples you have to use the creativity creative potential of analyzing and interpretation and this is something which still belongs to the human not to the machines and so it's quite a beautiful way how pictures again the pictures can help to activate humans creativity as well this is a project I would like to introduce you because it's done by a single person in the city of Zurich this person Moris Maki he now becomes a lot of rewards for his project but he was doing this project flour gorilla since 30 years secretly and just just one person who was seeding seeding the whole city every small green quarter and square meter he found he would seed new seeds and within those 30 years suddenly the city of Zurich got really stroked about the diversity of plants and flowers we have within the city and so this shows for me this this is an example that it shows how um we might or um intoxicated about all the weight and heaviness of responsibility we have to take care about against global warming and stuff but how much just one person can do with consistency and as well with time this is another project about okay yeah so this is the last project I wanted to show you it's um from Sasha Spalach and um she works with um with the mycobacteria together which is uh just recently scientists found out that this bacteria lives in the soil and it has uh healthy benefits that it can improve your immune system and can make you happy so that's a wonderful finish isn't it okay so we like to thank you very much thank you so much guys so we have time now for some questions please queue up by the microphones and we'll get to you thank you so much and if you want to stay in contact we have a few options for you here um so the mycobiomic website was done by more truly my brother was sitting over there no wordpress no mailchimp nothing you can safely sign up to the newsletter um and a wiki forum twitter just write us an email whatever and if you really like what we do there's also several possibilities to support us um either through the website through the donations uh bitcoin um lightning yeah feel free so there are some people right microphone number two please uh yes first of all I would like to make a comment and I think it's really important also to stress that uh afforestation is not a very good tool for carbon capture because what we're doing is we're moving carbon from the geogenic uh from the geogenic space to a biological space and the biological space is labile highly labile as you can see with the forest fires so I think it's really important to consider that but I really like to talk nevertheless and um I would like to talk to you about maybe building a soil moisture sensor but maybe later on there are several versions of soil moisture sensors documented as well the the funniest is in the shape of a mole you can find it on the wiki um yeah but there are more serious applications the mole just makes sound and blinking LEDs according to the moisture but you can also plug it to uh some Arduino okay great I'll have a look at that thank you thank you microphone number three please maybe to the question or the common to me as well it was just a comment that we might if you want to discuss it now we can talk about it but there are other people also having questions I guess yeah maybe very short no you want to did I understand the question correct uh you you said reforestation is not a good choice well it's a it is good choice we should reforest definitely but we shouldn't view it as a carbon capture uh as a good carbon capture option because it biogenic uh I don't know how to say Speicher is very labile and what we're doing is when we're burning carbon in fossil fuels we're taking it from the soil or from actually a geogenic source yeah moving it to a biological storage so what you basically say is it's a fossil carbon stock that we release into the atmosphere exactly and by just uh you know capturing it via the biosphere we should actually put it back into the ground that's what you're saying right yeah it's not possible which is why afforestation is still a very good option because there are not so many other options but um it sometimes in a lot of newspaper articles it gives the impression that oh we can fix this we just need to plant more trees and that's just that's just one part of it it's also very real that trees are very vulnerable to storms to climate change to forest fires to land use change all these kinds of things and um what a lot of papers also don't consider is that they work with geodata of course but they don't um sometimes consider who is already living on that land and a lot of recommendations for afforestations yeah go to the global south where people actually use that land to live yeah um one comment to that the narrative is horrible because the narrative just implies that we can do business as usual and plant a few billion trees yes and that's the problem but i think anyway uh re-growing forests uh makes a lot of sense and also maybe food forests that we can actually use um but we can discuss about that later i think it's a too big topic our message would be that um it's not only saving saving the plant but not only planting tree but also create more humus so we forgot to talk about composting that's really bad yeah we should talk more about compost and there's this one technique of the pyrolyse uh pyrolyse oven you know and yes terra preta techniques where you burn like um those those things you can't put into compost so like citrus citrus skin and dried bread and stuff and you paralyze it make carbon out of it and then you can put it back to the i think there's always small ideas like creative solutions which we can use yeah but we're speaking about like large scale carbon sequestration here and maybe next question next question i mean it's a super important topic i mean just give your input i mean if you're interested just shout out your questions i mean should be a living full discussion right so i think it's a very very important point and we can talk a lot about that um probably we skip it for later and just listen to the other questions and i think the topic will rise again and i have way more things to say about that but let's listen to the next i'm just around so we can talk about it sure thanks a lot microphone number three please yes thank you very talk i found your workshops they look very interesting and you said a lot about it but i still have no clue what actually you did could you get a bit more into detail what exactly you were exploring and the workshops or the retreats the workshops you did and also the the field explorations and stuff with all the sensors and yeah so the workshops are mainly so what i call a workshop is usually like a three hour format or something like that sometimes it was longer but that's around the shortest that i did and that's more or less science communication that it's getting city people to dig in the soil and doing microscopy with it and seeing whoa it's full of life there's it everything's going on in there and within this retreats the the combinations of workshops we do is always based on the participants so it's changing every retreat is changing a lot and we start with like brainstorming we get our idea like people introduce themselves and tell about what they have to teach to the others and so it's this idea of unlearning and do it together as well so i think if you want to describe it science communication yeah but what kind of research did you do you had this field explorations with all the sensors i still have no clue what you were looking for actually so what i'm interested in is the microbial life and i will just while the next question is asked put a few videos of microscopy i'm trying to get a clue with low tech equipment get a clue of the microbial diversity in the soil and activity the activity is relatively easy if you just abstract it and say it's equivalent to co2 so then you can use the soil respiration chamber and and measure the co2 and you get a rough activity you don't get like how much nitrogen is fixed of course but we can work on that in the future and with microscopy actually low tech microscopy you can get an idea about the diversity i'm still not sure how well it works nowadays if you talk with soil scientists i did a lot of talking with soil scientists they all say ah this is old school we all do metagenomic sequencing that's the only thing how to do it now and might be true might be also like a bit too much for what we want to do like have a simple tool for gardeners to assess the soil quality but we might also work on metagenomic sequencing it gets cheaper and easier accessible every day basically so next year maybe we talk about that it's about breaking down science but also the approach from the other side bringing science so low tech approaches for for people and community also mainly community yeah i mean we are at the brink of a fundamental change how we do agriculture how we do our economics and i think we're we're trying to be on the forefront of that and try to deliver knowledge try to like we're still in the process of involvement so to to look okay what kind of solutions do we need what kind of research do we need to do what kind of workshops do we need to perform it's a matter like it's a it's a very organic process i would say yes and and those are fun and so the idea of open services everybody can make it yeah great thanks a lot and we have a question from the internet please are you aware of any open accessible do-it-yourself methods to detect heavy metal pollution in the soil should i yeah i know of a project in indonesia at the live patch with some collaboration partners who basically work with i don't know which species but they grow microorganisms that are sensitive to heavy metals and by doing a dilution basically and growing them you can see you can see what amount of heavy metals you have it's not specific like you can say this is which kind of heavy metal is in there but you can see that there's something very toxic in there and roughly how much if you standardize it on on on some stock solutions where you know the concentration and also a small tip most of the documents are most of the projects are documented on the hectarea wiki and there's also a forum which is freely accessible it's hectarea forum forum hectarea dot org and you can just ask questions inside the forum which then links to a great network of artists DIY scientists and people who are talking on this topic thanks a lot microphone number two please hi great thanks for your really really interesting talk i have two short questions so the first one is what is the microorganism which was mentioned in the last or what is the exact name of the microorganism mentioned in the last project um which makes our immune system active and makes us happy yeah this is the mycobacterium but i can i can write it down for you or something like that or they call it golden bacteria also have you heard of it before but you can it's and no not yet unfortunately that's that's the thing that's why we become happy if we do garden but one one one thing to that i think it's also a bit of oversimplification uh science always tries to get the one bacterium that does something nice like that's the one you need to be healthy and then you can buy it in the pharmacy and eat it and then you're healthy but i think that's not how it works it makes a good news headline definitely drink more kombucha yes but if you if you look at the human gut uh but diversity is actually the key to stability and therefore a stable health psychological health yeah good good health healthy food and gardening composting composting makes you happy dirty okay thanks and my second question is when is the or have you planned any retreats for the upcoming year when and where uh yes um the idea to be in Slovenia sometime in 2020 came up about there's no fixed date or anything but there's a newsletter and we rarely send it like every two months or something but if we send it then there's news in there or again like like you can you can organize one yourself or you can invite people as well just get in touch yeah if you have a place and buy this take a hint thank you microphone number three please okay i'm a supporter of the project already and i would like to um ask if whether they already had experiences in a context with for example pollution from toxic waste i come from Napoli and there's a abnormal incidence of certain kinds of cancers and malformations of my uh i'm trying to develop a project a sort of a research lab uh with the projects similar to this for detection of low cost distributed detection of mutagens for examples i don't know if you have a previous experience with this i i heard you probably this is a more general question of the one or the previous one about heavy metals so so far i mean so far we don't have um techniques but i know like the heavy metals how to measure them is mostly by spectrometry and there's even people here in the audience who do they build or they give workshops on diy spectrometry build like build your own spectrometer which is actually it's not so difficult you have arduinos and small cuvettes and and this is the first approach about detecting them and then for sure there must be some mushrooms around which can help us the mushrooms would actually be then remediating the soil so to get all the toxic stuff out that's what the mushrooms do it doesn't they yeah depending on the mushroom depending on the soil it's i wouldn't say it's an easy approach excuse me well i to be honest i don't know too much sorry um yeah the mushrooms are not enough he just said it's the mushrooms are not enough to get the heavy metals out of the ground yes yes i just saw some statistic that um the most use of fungicide is mainly by uh fruit tree plantages so like all kinds of apples pears and peaches and things and like massively use of fungicides and there are some people who say like that on the countryside you have you have less fungi than inside the city because we are using fungus fungi sites inside the city makes sense thank you and microphone number two please yeah thanks a lot i wanted to ask a practical question um there is a small forest in brandenburg that i wanted to a forest three forests because it's like it's a very sad forest it only has this key for i don't know in english just need needle trees and so also the soil is like only these needles and looks very sad so i wanted to ask if it would be maybe a good idea to get a small soil samples from other places so that some mushrooms can grow there or what if you have any tips there um yeah in germany what's happening right now is the so-called wild umbau it's it's a transformation of our forests back from those coniferous trees or in that case pine trees to a broad leaf tree forest or a mixed forest and this is essentially the best measure you can take so by just changing the kind of vegetation you have you don't have to bring in any compost you don't know just just leave nature do the work for you so what you can do is i mean i don't know the site i don't know how the stock actually looks like but you can thin it out and plant manually or if you have a broad leaf trees around your site they would actually seed and germinate if they have the right conditions but it's totally up to the stocking and the kind of trees we can have a discussion about that later this is actually my major this is what i studied so you can i also live in Brandenburg so i know i know about those forests and i know that the problem is that the soil of those uh yeah needle humus is very very acidic so yeah there's not much life in there but just come to me after the discussion and i will explain to you what you need to do thank you but very yeah as far as i understood if you just do nothing it will transform by itself because our climate is not appropriate for those trees only the mountain climate but he wants to experience yeah yeah sure you want to accelerate it a bit yeah there's also the example of the lotar lotar um uh storm storm yeah storm there was a huge storm in 2008 in switzerland which uh broke down many many thousands of trees and big square kilometer and by then it was a catastrophe and now 12 years later they found out that those trees which are re-growing there by nature those are mostly like birches and trees that are much better adapted to climate warm as well so like nature is reinstoring itself and then another another direction is also that people start or scientists they start to imply um um microbes around seeds so they provide the seeds with natural uh resilient like resilient um self defense as well so this is this is the whole idea of uh bio fertilizer as well like how to bring back the microbes into the soil and i think for for land which is devastated and you have no organic living anymore you can as well help so vermicompost as well that's the nicest thing you do you just if you have too much soil when you do produce soil through vermicompost you just threw it out into the street yes yeah she's bringing in a lot of different topics now if you want to get into um mycorrhizae and why you have to bring in spores sometimes we can also go into that uh conversation i can teach you probably something about that um and uh yeah the the storms that you were speaking about um and the vegetation that is arising after that is called p and v it's the potential natural vegetation that is actually adapted to the site and um if you if you leave uh a conventional um it's a plantation you can call it so if you if you have a pine tree forest it's it's basically a plantation of really young uh same aged trees for uh wood production wood pop production or whatever so it's an industrialized agricultural site you can say so if you leave it it will die sooner or later uh insects will come storms will come and it it's just eradicating all the plans that are not naturally adapted to the site so you can just leave it and do nothing and everyone will complain oh my god the the bark beetle is coming and it just kills all the trees but it's natural they're not adapted so yeah next question great thank you so much and uh microphone number three please thank you so much for the presentation and sharing this beautiful collaboration project um i come from an art science background as well so i'm familiar with the language however from what i've seen um with um international environment policies and also our economic driven industries we are mostly focusing on carbon emissions and how to measure our impact on the environment through that and minimizing and our industrial impact based on this without noticing that biodiversity and soil health is more essential to planet health and our overall sustainability whatever um we like to call it um so i will my question is more of i would like to ask you to share your visions on for example science communication how can we convey the idea to the majority of the population who are under you mentioned anthropocentric perceptions so we are fundamentally separating our human population from nature and majority of the people would still found and soil being dirt and would like to everything to be sterile and cleaned in our human perceptions these are what's what i'm struggling in in my life because personally i love nature i love like swim in soils and forests and dust and everything so i just would like to i would like to um um ask you to share your visions how we can share this love for nature with others thank you some short words so sharing the love spreading the love is really nice that you say it like that we also sometimes talk about social humus building social humus within those retreats and it's i think the way to go is to involve your direct surrounding your family your friends and so on and start talking with them about these things and people who really never get out of the city just take them out of the city but i'm actually not that optimistic that we we just spread this love and then everything will change and be fine i think there's a much more fundamental problem um uh deeply rooted in our capitalist society and we need really a fundamental system change and talking about reducing emissions especially talking about reducing emissions doesn't help and uh in reference to the soil what um what i usually use are just two very simple numbers one is from the united nations which talks about the certification so erosion and it's something really insane like 23 billion tons of soil that we lose each year due to land mismanagement praxis it's hard to imagine this number and i still didn't come up with a good comparison but it's not that the soil gets less good and that we lose humus or fertility no it's gone it's the ground beneath our feet is gone it's washed into the rivers into the oceans that's the one thing with the rest that is still here in our so-called developed countries we like to build things on them so in german we have a nice word for that it's called flächenfrass so eating up the country and it describes the conversion from agricultural land and forest to building land and each day in germany at 61 hectares for that i have a comparison so the big glass hall at the center of this place here is two hectares so about every 47 minutes this area is lost um and this goes on day and night day and night cities are growing and growing and growing and growing infrastructure is growing we build logistic centers everywhere it's just quite crazy and we need to embrace a real um yeah degrowth economy and degrowth political system whatsoever how it might even look like i mean 2019 has been a good year for us at least that i think the word of climate change is the the word of 2019 um so to talk if language is a virus as well like this is communication communication about sharing ideas and thoughts and concepts and with with this phobia of dirt and microbes as well like through fermentation again you can teach the people like building up your microbiome because babies are born sterile is to let them play in dirt and this is this this basic knowledge like you have the first three years to build up your microbiome is slowly slowly like sedimenting in society as well so this first experience as a child with nature as well is most important yeah thank you yeah thanks um yeah i think education knowledge is the base um to understand something and to protect it i mean if you know about the vulnerability of the systems that we're living in and how much we depend on them uh it's obvious that uh we shouldn't speak about uh protection of nature as some yeah i don't know detached entity that we are not connected to but we should actually speak about the conservation of uh human um living conditions or human preservation human habitat preservation or something probably we relate more to it then because if you argue uh about um topics like that especially to people who are totally into that capitalistic world uh they're also they're always really detached to it and our language is also detaching us from those biospheres from those ecosystems but we're not and uh basically i think there's just a big lack of knowledge and that's the reason i'm i'm working with julian because i i believe in this alternative uh how um yeah um simplified yeah or yeah alternative simplified DIY hacking um environment because we can provide provide the knowledge in my from my perspective that is very important that probably people wouldn't have access to otherwise yeah by enjoying and sitting inside the forest on the ground and looking at whiteboards great thank you so much i think the discussion has to continue maybe outside uh we don't have time for any more questions but thank you so much my impression is that you guys will hopefully be around to just answer something out here maybe a bit more elaborate but thank you so much and please give them a great round of applause