Living Soil: A Universe Underfoot, is the topic of Gustavus Adolphus College’s 54th annual Nobel Conference, taking place October 2-3 on the college’s Saint Peter, Minn., campus.
Why soil? Scoop some up and consider that there are more organisms in that handful of soil than humans who have ever lived. Soil is a living entity in its own right, a community of micro- and macro-organisms that interact with the earth’s mineral resources to create this complex entity that undergirds all life on the planet.
Speakers include Rattan Lal, a member of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; Claire Chenu of the Paris Institute of Technology for Life, Food, and Environmental Sciences; Raymond Archuleta, a farmer and soil expert who worked for 30 years at the National Resources Conservation Service; Jack Gilbert, co-founder of the Earth Microbiome Project and American Gut Project at the University of Chicago; David Montgomery, MacArthur Fellowship winner and professor of earth and space sciences at the University of Washington; Suzanne Simard, an expert on mycorrhizal networks between fungi and plants at the University of British Columbia; and Frank Uekotter, an author and environmental historian at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom.
The two-day conference will dive deep into the importance of soil health, educating a general audience about topics such as how sustainable agriculture practices can protect against erosion, how soil can mitigate rising carbon levels in the atmosphere, and how climate change impacts soil.
Tickets
Tickets for the 54th Nobel Conference are still available and can be purchased at the Nobel Conference Information Desk in Lund Center.
Livestreaming
The Nobel Conference will be livestreamed on the Nobel Conference website. Lectures will be archived and available for viewing on request beginning in mid-October.
About The Nobel Conference
Following the dedication of the Alfred Nobel Hall of Science in 1963 at Gustavus, the Nobel Foundation granted approval for an annual science conference to be held at the College. For five decades, Gustavus has organized and hosted The Nobel Conference, which draws about 4,500 people to the college campus in Saint Peter, Minn. The conference links a general audience, including high school students and teachers, with the world’s foremost scholars and researchers in discussion centered on contemporary issues relating to the natural and social sciences. The Nobel Conference is the first ongoing educational conference of its kind in the United States. It is made possible through income generated by a Nobel Conference Endowment and the support of annual conference contributors.
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