Regenesis

Life on the earth’s surface has become severely impoverished. The situation in England, the author’s birthplace, and the chosen focus of his study, is particularly critical; the diversity of plant life above ground there is at an all-time low. Large predators and large herbivores have disappeared, fallow land is scarce, and even the visible presence of flora has been dramatically reduced. Nevertheless, underneath the surface, it's a whole other story. Underground, there is a packed and varied world, a world whose existence we tend to overlook, but which is vibrant and full of life.

To help us understand the dynamics at play here, the author focuses on an orchard that he helps manage, and which produces a large variety of apples. Just beneath the topsoil, a single square metre of the orchard plays host to a myriad of different animal species, literally thousands. By observing a small chunk of earth in an orchard you can discover a multifaceted environment that is a veritable underworld of industry: centipedes that coil and unwind, others that vanish, beetle larvae, and woodlice, just to name a few. Using a 40x magnifying glass, the show becomes even more spectacular: you will see collembola, olive coloured, round creatures that shrink from the sunlight. There are isopod crustaceans, mites which look like crabs, and nematodes, worms which (under certain conditions) can multiply twelve times in one day.

Almost all of these creatures are capable of scuttling away from the light at great speed, and many of them we still know nothing about. Then there are hyphae, filaments of fungi which resemble nylon threads. In soil where the plants are well rooted, there is about a kilometre of fungal filaments in every gram of earth. Of course we cannot forget the bacteria, which are responsible for the soil’s distinctive smell. Going beyond the surface of the ground we see means entering a new, unseen dimension, which we still know very little about.