Earth

Pedobiology

Soil is the ‘place’ where materials essential for ecological equilibrium are formed and decompose, but it is also where our food is produced. Unfortunately, it is also the waiting room of a number of environmental problems that begin in it and terminate elsewhere. Nevertheless, studies regarding soil biology (pedobiology), respect to those regarding let’s say, air and water, are still rather slow: why? The main reason is that the scientist perceives Nature in the same manner as everyone else, which is not always the correct way of understanding it. In other words, to understand Nature well, one must go beyond what one can see (or hear), and understand Nature by using simple reasoning. Let us consider for example our difficulty in imagining the many processes that take place at a microscopic or sub-microscopic level, such as those that occur in the sphere of cells; or the difficulty in adapting our way of perceiving the passing of time to the scale of biological evolution, that is measured in hundreds of millions of years. Well, these limits have represented one of the most important factors in the orientation of scientific research, in some cases with results that were rather negative for our knowledge: which is the case of soil biology.