The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health

4.6 | 347 ratings

Price: 21.83

Last update: 01-03-2025

About this item

A riveting exploration of how microbes are transforming the way we see nature and ourselves - and could revolutionize agriculture and medicine.

Prepare to set aside what you think you know about yourself and microbes. Good health - for people and for plants - depends on Earth's smallest creatures. The Hidden Half of Nature tells the story of our tangled relationship with microbes and their potential to revolutionize agriculture and medicine, from garden to gut.

When David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé decide to restore life into their barren yard by creating a garden, dead dirt threatens their dream. As a cure, they feed their soil a steady diet of organic matter. The results impress them. In short order, the much-maligned microbes transform their bleak yard into a flourishing Eden. Beneath their feet, beneficial microbes and plant roots continuously exchange a vast array of essential compounds. The authors soon learn that this miniaturized commerce is central to botanical life's master strategy for defense and health.

They are abruptly plunged further into investigating microbes when Biklé is diagnosed with cancer. Here, they discover an unsettling truth. An armada of bacteria (our microbiome) sails the seas of our gut, enabling our immune system to sort microbial friends from foes. But when our gut microbiome goes awry, our health can go with it. The authors also discover startling insights into the similarities between plant roots and the human gut.

We are not what we eat. We are all - for better or worse - the products of what our microbes eat. This leads to a radical reconceptualization of our relationship to the natural world: By cultivating beneficial microbes, we can rebuild soil fertility and help turn back the modern plague of chronic diseases. The Hidden Half of Nature reveals how to transform agriculture and medicine - by merging the mind of an ecologist with the care of a gardener and the skill of a doctor.

JWood

NOBODY DOES IT BETTER

Reviewed in the United States on February 1, 2020

What a terrific book! I am a long-time gardener and much interested in regenerative agriculture and personal health.
This is a personal evolutionary story of the married authors' (environmental biologist and morphogeologist) experience in discovering the significance of soil and microbial life beginning as newbie gardeners in their new Seattle home as a young couple. This led to quests to understanding the microbiome of plants in natural enriched soil and the surprising discovery of how much better plants grow in good soil.
This led to discoveries of good composting, use of animal manure, and water management.
This led to a detailed study of soil microbes, mycorrhizal fungi and the mutually supportive relationship and with plants.
This, of course, led to the symbiotic relationship of healthy plants, healthy food, healthy humans and animals. The human microbiome is reviewed and I loved the multiple historical stories of scientific discoveries revealing the evolutionary path of our understanding of "The Hidden Half of Nature."
Very helpful glossary, footnotes, and extensive bibliography. I found the book to be not too technical although I had to slow down some to get through the microbiome discussion. No surprise the ratings are so high - really great read and reference source!

Russ Conser

Profoundly exceptional

Reviewed in the United States on March 6, 2016

"The Hidden Half of Nature" (HHN) is a profoundly exceptional book. Montgomery’s previous “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilization” was the book Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” could have been. In “Dirt,” Montgomery, an insightful geologist, much more rigorously than Diamond (in my view), documented the ‘long red thread’ of history as being a story of the rise and fall of civilizations first tapping and then depleting their soils. In HHN, he is joined by his wife, Anne Bikle, a biologist, and catalyzed by their own life experience, they connect the dots across seemingly disparate domains of soils and the human gut that I believe have the potential to form the ‘long green thread’ of a prosperous future for everyone except the fertilizer salesman.

Montgomery and Bikle begin with an enjoyable story of how, much to their own surprise, they were able to rapidly turn their dead soil into a living and productive garden by focusing on naturally building soil organic matter using things like mulch and composts. They then use this window and their scientific backgrounds to go on a rigorous journey about how all of this works. We learn that much of this insight was hypothesized long ago, but true scientific understanding has only emerged in recent years. I found the chapter on “Underground Allies” especially informative about the metabolic interconnectedness of root exudates with soil bacteria and fungi.

We then pick up where other recent ‘human microbiome’ authors have left off (e.g. Blaser’s “Missing Microbes” and Velasquez-Manoff’s “Epidemic of Abesnce”) to explore how microbial communities in our gut are not only essential for our own health, but function using the exact same principles as the soil system ecology. It’s not just an analogy, its sign of much more fundamental evolutionary principles at work.

The implications of the book are both practical and profound. In personal health, the book can be seen as providing the scientific basis for Michael Pollan’s famous tag line “Eat real food, mostly plants, not too much.” But it also helps us understand that the health of all of that "real food" begins with the functioning microbial ecosystem in the soil – without which, not only do the plants not grow, but they are short in the vital micronutrients that make you healthy.

Whereas ‘germ theory’ was a boon to 20th century civilization, Montgomery and Bikle now help us understand that whether through antibiotics or agri-chemicals, killing everything in order to kill a few things we can't see is a path to our ultimate destruction. Furthermore, many of the things we have been doing (e.g. synthetic fertilizers, eating *refined* grains) have been unintentionally killing more things than we realized. But they also offer a different and more prosperous path – options to intervene in the system in way to boost the things that allow the system to keep it’s own balance so that everything thrives.

The root of it all is, quite literally, soil organic matter. Build it, and we all prosper. Degrade it, and we all suffer… at least in the long run. I highly recommend this book so that we can all open our eyes to the (previously) hidden half of nature.

Sheryl A. Hammond

Sustainable soil and biology for dummies

Reviewed in the United States on August 29, 2023

I’m a MS Sustainability student and my concentration is soil conservation and water mitigation. This is like a guide to biology of soil and a whole lot more in a brief but all encompassing book. It’s a real gem and I’m so glad I found it. It’s so informative and talks about early scientific ideas and theories/ scientists, and brings all the concepts together in a way anyone can understand. I don’t have a biology degree, and this is where this book really helps me understand in common language. Brilliant!!

Amazon Customer

A View of Life under our feet and in our gut.

Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2017

There is an explosion of books on the subject of Nature and our understanding of its workings. Their similarity of content and lack of completeness is a reflection of our current knowledge. We are just getting to the hard work of discovery and harder work of understanding Nature. The Hidden Half of Nature remains hidden. My modest library on soil science will have to be updated every few years; new findings will demand it. So, what is the contribution of the Montgomery family's newest book? What they produced adds not only to our understanding of soil biology but also argues effectively for the importance of the subject to our very existence. The breadth of the book relates the health of the soil community to the production of plant life that our fore-bearers found complete in the nutrients they needed to nurture and sustain life. The consequences of quest for higher yields at the expense of nutrition benefit is convincing. Anne Bikle's story on the contribution of vegetables and fruits from healthy soil to her successful battle with cancer stand as evidence that we all have to be caretakers of what Nature provides. The narrative is grounded in real experience. I found the discussion of how our body is organized to process and convert food to products it needs to be of immense interest. I have a new respect for my colon. The discussion of how the body detects and mounts an attack against the bad guys, is the realm of magic; better than science fiction.David Montgomery, ever the scientist digging for facts, has wonderfully led we general public types through a history of how we arrived at this point and what we now know. It is supported by an extensive Sources list. I have found that his presentation probably relieves me from reading other sources. It is that good a read.

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