What Lies Beneath

26:56One is that we do mark the moment where we lay the body into the vessel because it's the minute that this transformation is going to begin. And so our staff will do what we call a laying in ceremony where the body is on a cradle in front of the vessel. We lay plant material on the body. We then load the body into the vessel. And, you know, the closing of that vessel door isn't totally unlike the burial, I guess, in a lot of ways. I think the difference for me is that we have like a dozen staff people working in this facility. We have this array of hexagonal vessels. They're white and inside of most of them is a body decomposing.

27:42And there's this kind of liveliness about the place in a way. So really, I mean, And we like to, on the day when we're laying someone in, we often play the music their family said they loved. So sometimes we'll have like Bob Marley going in the background. And so I think there's something about this, the place where this is happening and knowing that the transformation does end and a new person joins the hive, if you will. That is a little bit more lively than your typical cemetery, perhaps. I have to imagine that while there are people who are very supportive of your work, there must also be people who are not Katrina.

28:24I mean, I have to say, when I have mentioned this to people, human composting, they take a beat and they kind of look at me like, what are you even talking about? And I wonder for some people, like, you know, not only is it maybe shocking, but also perhaps disrespectful. You know, the first thing is that I have certainly had folks take a beat when I mentioned what I do. And then a lot of the time, if you went back to those people like a few days later, you'd be surprised. After giving it some thought, thinking about the current options, a lot of people are like, actually, this is actually pretty nice.

29:04You know, it's not for everybody. There's no question. and I really think everyone should have the option they want as long as they're being intentional about it I don't think there's really a wrong way you know yes it's more polluting to go with cremation but also I drive a car so it's like a little hypocritical to say that you shouldn't have whatever option you want I think but the problem is that people choose their death care or they I should say they don't choose their death care they just go with the default a lot the time. It's not a meaningful choice. It's just, well, I guess I'll cremate grandma.

29:41So I assume you want to be composted, right? Wouldn't it be weird if I said no? That would be really weird. I mean, but I have to ask just to make sure. Yes, I do want to be composted. But mostly what I want is for my kids and partner to do something every year, like mark my death in any way every year. So what do you mean by that? Like, like play a song or go to a place? Because that is what we do now, right? Like we go to pay our respects in a graveyard. We go to a stone if the person is cremated. Like what you're kind of suggesting is that we we pay our respects to the dead in a very different way.

30:20It's not about going somewhere. It's about the ground beneath our feet and knowing that they are there with us in some way. Yeah, I mean, think about what happens during the composting process is our molecules are rearranged and we cease to be human. And that is pretty powerful, I think, to just think about truly going back to the earth and then kind of dissipating. Like, the entire planet is supported by the process of decomposition. That is how soil is created and what all of life is based on. So if you can just get into that mode and think, okay, I'm going to just be jumping into the stream of creation, you know, yeah, I think it can feel pretty joyous.

31:12That's Katrina Spade. she's the founder of Recompose, a company that composts human remains. You can see her full talk at TED.com. As we just heard, Katrina wants to make burials more eco-friendly by harnessing soil's power to decompose a body and then hold onto the carbon that gets released. Keep that carbon underground. This process is called carbon sequestration. And our next speaker says it could be used to solve the biggest problem that our planet faces. The health of the soil system is an extremely important part of addressing the climate crisis. This is Asmaret Asafow-Bearhey. I'm a professor of soil biogeochemistry at the University of California in Merced.

32:03Asmaret has been studying dirt for decades. The hook for me happened when I realized how important soil is in regulating life as we know it in the Earth's system. And the more Osmeret learned about soil, the more she realized that we humans were squandering its superpowers. Here she is on the TED stage. Climate change happening because of increasing amount of greenhouse gases we keep releasing to the atmosphere. You all know that. But what I assume you might not have heard is that one of the most important things our human society could do to address climate change lies right there in the soil.

32:48Human actions are now releasing 9.4 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. But the concentration of carbon dioxide that stays in the atmosphere is only increasing by about half of that. And that's because half of the carbon we keep releasing into the atmosphere is currently being taken up through a process we know as carbon sequestration. So in essence, whatever consequence you think we're facing from climate change right now, we're only experiencing the consequence of 50 % of our pollution. But don't get too comfortable. The ability of these natural ecosystems to take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it in the natural habitats is currently getting compromised as they're experiencing serious degradation because of human actions.

33:47We treat soil literally like dirt. We haven't been taking care of the soil, even though soil has actually been making our lives possible. In a moment, more from Asmaret Asafal-Beerhey on the climate change solution that's right beneath our feet. I'm Anoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

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35:59It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, what lies beneath? We were just talking to Asmaret Asafal-Bearhey, a soil scientist at the University of California. I love soil in all forms. I think soil is just beautiful. Asmaret says that soil is one of our best tools for fighting climate change because it can store vast amounts of carbon. Here she is again on the TED stage. There is about 3 ,000 billion metric tons of carbon in the soil. That's roughly about 315 times the amount of carbon that we release into the atmosphere currently. And there's twice more carbon in soil than there is in vegetation and air.

36:46Think about that for a second. There's more carbon in soil than there is in all of the world's vegetation, including the lush tropical rainforests and the giant sequoias, the expansive grasslands, all of the cultivated systems, and every kind of flora you can imagine on the face of the earth. Plus, all the carbon that's currently up in the atmosphere combined and then twice over. Hence, a very small change in the amount of carbon stored in soil can make a big difference in maintenance of the earth's atmosphere. But soil is not just simply a storage box for carbon, though. It operates more like a bank account.

37:36And the amount of carbon that's in soil at any given time is a function of the amount of carbon coming in and out of the soil. Carbon comes into the soil through the process of photosynthesis when green plants take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and upon death, their bodies enter the soil. And carbon leaves the soil and goes right back up into the atmosphere when the bodies of those formerly living organisms decay in soil by activity of microbes. One of the things that makes soil such a fundamental component of any climate change mitigation strategy is because it represents a long-term storage of carbon.

38:18Carbon that would have lasted maybe a year or two if it was left on the surface can stay in soil for hundreds of years, even thousands and more. So soil has this amazing capacity to store carbon. But we humans have been messing with the soil. And in your talk, you say that half of the world's soils are considered degraded. Is that one of the reasons why we have a warming planet? because we've damaged the soil. So it can't take in as much carbon as it used to and as much as we need it to. Yeah, so human actions in particular, the way we've changed land use and land cover globally, including through deforestation and intensive cultivation practices, they typically contribute about 15 % of the CO2 that we keep releasing to the atmosphere every year.

39:14So it's a big portion of the CO2 we keep releasing to the atmosphere. Carbon that would have stayed in the soil system is not staying, it's rather going back to the atmosphere as greenhouse gases because we keep cutting down the trees. We keep overtilling the soil and disturbing the soil to a point where its ability to hold on to that carbon is diminishing. And since the human community started engaging in agriculture in a large scale manner, we've released on the order of about 120 billion metric tons of carbon that was in soil into the atmosphere. Yeah. So and this the fastest rate of loss has been happening in the last 200 years since the Industrial Revolution.

40:00So remember that the most important ways we use soil as human community is for supporting plant productivities. But we also build the infrastructure, right? It's where we build our roads and bridges and everything. And those are the part of the processes that are responsible for the large scale degradation of soil globally. Close to half of the soils in the world right now are considered degraded, meaning their ability to support plant production and to support life is compromised. So that means like all the rainforests that have been cut down and all the millions of heads of cattle that are grazing on plains, all of that means that the soil underneath is not as rich as it once was.

40:51Yeah, and all of these intensive deforestation and grazing practices, in particular overgrazing, beyond the capacity that the land can support, all of that compromises the physical stability of soil, the chemical nature of soil, including provision of the nutrients that are needed to support the microbial communities. So this is why it becomes really important to think about managing soils in a climate-smart way. Fortunately, I can also tell you that there is a solution for these two wicked problems of soil degradation and climate change. And the solution lies in simultaneously working to address these two things together through what we call climate-smart land management practices.

41:41And we can accomplish this by putting in place deep-rooted perennial plants, putting back forests whenever possible, reducing tillage and other disturbance from agricultural practices, including optimizing the use of agricultural chemicals and grazing, and even adding carbon to soil whenever possible from recycled resources such as compost and even human waste. this kind of land stewardship is not a radical idea it's what made it possible for fertile soils to be able to support human civilization since time immemorial in fact some are doing it just right now there's a global effort underway to accomplish exactly this goal this effort that started in France is known as the 4 per mil effort.

42:35And it sets an aspirational goal to increase the amount of carbon stored in soil by 0.4 % annually, using the same kind of climate smart land management practices I mentioned earlier. And if this effort's fully successful, it can offset a third of the global emissions of fossil fuel-derived carbon to the atmosphere. But even if this effort's not fully successful, but we just start heading in that direction, we still end up with soils that are healthier, more fertile, are able to produce all the food and resources that we need for human populations and more, and also soils that are better capable of sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and helping with climate change mitigation.

43:30I'm pretty sure that's what politicians call a win-win solution. Wow. Okay. So if we could reduce our CO2 buildup by a third just by focusing on soil, Asmarit, why aren't we talking about that in the same breath as how we're going to save our oceans or making sure that the polar ice caps don't melt away? I think in some ways it's because we had grown so accustomed to take soil for granted. And part of this is because the group of people that are affected and the group of people who have been addressing it have been two distinct groups. Right. And I personally feel it's important to highlight the human element of this discussion, because in many ways, a lot of the impacts of climate change are going to be felt by, economically speaking, the least fortunate amongst us, the folks who live in poor nations, you know, small island nations near the equator in coastal margins.

44:32But their voices, especially until recently, had not been part of our climate conversation. And the fact that climate change has become a threat multiplier, i.e. it's actually exacerbating the problem of food and nutritional insecurity, water insecurity in many parts of the world, had not gotten enough attention in our discourse. So you're saying that, you know, if there was more diversity in the people who are calling attention to all these climate change problems we have and the potential solutions, that more people might understand the role that soil plays, which would in turn help us all. Exactly.

45:18Yeah. In many cases, it's like whenever we have more diversity in science, we end up addressing societally relevant questions, right? Yes, that is correct.

45:31You know, I'm sitting here and I'm thinking about how rarely I actually touch soil. I live in a city. I go to the park all the time. But when was the last time I actually felt the dirt? Not recently. Yeah, I think that's true, right? Human communities evolved in agricultural societies where they were intimately aware of the land around them, its properties, and they knew what it could support and what it couldn't. And they worked the land, literally speaking, to support their livelihood. Many of us in modern times don't have that connection. And in many ways, we've lost the connection to a point where soil is just the stuff beneath the asphalt or the concrete that we step on every day, right?

46:19It's not even the thing we experience unless we're out hiking in the trail somewhere or in a park. And so that connection is lost. We all can have a role to play here. We can start by treating the soil with the respect that it deserves. respect for its ability as the basis of all life on Earth, respect for its ability to serve as a carbon bank, and respect for its ability to control our climate. And if we do so, we can then simultaneously address two of the most pressing global challenges of our time, climate change and soil degradation. And in the process, we would be able to provide food and nutritional security to our growing human family.

47:14Thank you.

47:18Asmaret Asafal-Beerhey is a soil scientist at the University of California, Merced. She's also President Biden's pick to lead the Department of Energy's Office of Science. You can find her full talk at TED.com. We want to wrap up our show about what lies beneath with a paleontologist. Recently, researchers reported that they believe the Spinosaurus may be the largest ever carnivore in history. And that finding builds on the work of paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim, who in 2014 found the fossils that proved the Spinosaurus hunted its prey in rivers 97 million years ago. Here he is on the TED stage.

48:06These dragons from deep time are incredible creatures. They're bizarre, they're beautiful, and there's very little we know about them. I've been on a quest to uncover new remains of a giant predatory dinosaur called Spinosaurus. A few bones of this animal have been found in the deserts of Egypt and were described about 100 years ago by a German paleontologist. Unfortunately, all his spinosaurus bones were destroyed in World War II. So all we are left with are just a few drawings and notes. From these drawings, we know that this creature, which lived about 100 million years ago, was very big. It had tall spines on its back, forming a magnificent sail.

48:55And it had long, slender jaws, a bit like a crocodile. But that was pretty much all we knew about this animal for the next 100 years. My fieldwork took me to the border region between Morocco and Algeria, a place called the Kemkem. It's a difficult place to work in. You have to deal with sandstorms and snakes and scorpions. And it's very difficult to find good fossils there. But our hard work paid off. We discovered many incredible specimens. the largest dinosaur bone that had ever been found in this part of the Sahara. We found remains of giant predatory dinosaurs, medium-sized predatory dinosaurs, and seven or eight different kinds of crocodile-like hunters.

49:44These fossils were deposited in a river system. The river system was also home to a giant car-sized coelacan, a monster sawfish. and the skies over the river system were filled with perasaurs, flying reptiles. It was a pretty dangerous place, not the kind of place where you'd want to travel to if you had a time machine. So we were finding all these incredible fossils of animals that lived alongside Spinosaurus, but Spinosaurus itself proved to be very elusive. We were just finding bits and pieces, and I was hoping that we would find a partial skeleton at some point. Finally, very recently, we were able to track down a dig site where a local fossil hunter found several bones of Spinosaurus.

50:30We returned to the site, we collected more bones. And so after a hundred years, we finally had another partial skeleton of this bizarre creature. And we were able to reconstruct it. We now know that Spinosaurus had a head a little bit like a crocodile. Very different from other predatory dinosaurs. Very different from T-Rex. But the really interesting information came from the rest of the skull. We had long spines, the spines forming the big sail. We had leg bones, we had skull bones, we had paddle-shaped feet, wide feet. Very unusual. No other dinosaurs feet like this. And we think they may have been used to walk on soft sediment or maybe for paddling in the water.

51:12We also looked at the fine microstructure of the bone, the inside structure of Spinosaurus bones. And it turns out that they're very dense and compact. So that's useful for buoyancy control in the water. We CT scanned all of our bones and built a digital spinosaur skeleton. And when we looked at the digital skeleton, we realized that, yes, this was a dinosaur unlike any other. It's bigger than T. rex. And yes, the head has fish eating written all over it. But really, the entire skeleton has water loving written all over it. Dense bone, paddle-like feet. and the hind limbs are reduced in size. And again, this is something we see in animals that spend a substantial amount of time in the water.

51:55So as we fleshed out our spinosaurs, I'm looking at muscle attachments and wrapping our dinosaur in skin, we realized that we're dealing with a river monster, a predatory dinosaur bigger than T-Rex, the ruler of this ancient river of giants, feeding on the many aquatic animals. So that's really what makes this an incredible discovery. It's a dinosaur like no other. And some people told me, wow, this is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery. There are not many things left to discover in the world, right? Well, I think nothing could be further from the truth. I think the Sahara is still full of treasures.

52:31And when people tell me there are no places left to explore, I like to quote a famous dinosaur hunter, Roy Chapman Andrews. And he said, always there has been an adventure just around the corner. And the world is still full of corners. That was true many decades ago when Roy Chapman Andrews wrote these lines, and it is still true today. Thank you. That's paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim. You can find both his talks at TED.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show this week about What Lies Beneath. This episode was produced by Katie Monteleone, James De La Housie, Fiona Guerin, Sylvie Douglas, and Matthew Cloutier.

53:14It was edited by Katie Simon, Rachel Faulkner, and James De La Housie. Our TED Radio production staff also includes Deba Motisham and Margaret Serino. Our audio engineer is Brian Jarbo. Many thanks to Catherine Seifer for her help with this episode, too. Our theme music was written by Ramteen Arablui. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Phelan, Michelle Quint, Sammy Case, and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Manoush Zomorodi and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

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