Member

I am going to add an extra colour to the mix. I want to think about valuing brown spaces, about valuing the soil, which is the foundation of the greenery we are aiming to cultivate. I attended a round table yesterday with the Sustainable Soils Alliance and Durham University, chaired by Dr Merlin Sheldrake. We heard from some academics doing wonderful, innovative research at the National Resources Institute Finland—known as Luke—looking at the public health impact of living, healthy soils. They found that living soils in nurseries had a range of positive impacts on preschoolers, from their immune systems to their asthma rates to their diabetes rates. It was calculated that people living in healthy soils could save the NHS £19 billion a year. So, let us have green and blue, and let us add brown as well. When we are talking about biodiversity, far too often we hear people say that good soils are vital for biodiversity. No: good soils are biodiversity, and we need to focus on that as a living probiotic world, a pro-health world, for all of us.