An animation highlighting the intriguing dependency of humans on ecosystems. The princess, Nausicaä, embodies an ideal human being who integrates non-compromising scientific curiosity, persistence, courage, sympathy, compassion, and ethics.

Scripts from the animation:

ASBEL: The reason the Wasteland came to be...? You're a girl who thinks strange things.

NAUSICAÄ: Humans polluted the trees of the Wasteland. They came to be born in order to purify this world... Taking the Earth's poisons into their bodies, they become pure crystals, and die, becoming sand. This underground cave could do the same thing.

A story about a mother and her daughter who were prisoned in the middle of vast coastal sand dunes. Incessant movement of sands, which threatens the survival of the women, dominates the scenes. Creeping sand dunes are so gracefully captured that I almost forgot the agony over the three generations of the women. Interestingly, the first human encounter since they were abandoned is with scientists (astrophysicists) who came to the remote place to confirm Einstein's general relativity during the event of eclipse.

Scripts from the film:

"What is not earth is sky."

The closing dialogue from the daughter, when she re-visited her mother after two decades, was about the human's first landing on the moon.

"What did he find on the moon?" "Nothing. I heard he just found sand, sand, sand..."

A documentary film on the artist Andy Goldwarthy. This film made me wonder about museums where objects enjoy the architectural backdrops. What if the backdrops become natural landscapes? What object would make a perfect match with the landscapes? Andy Goldwarthy has answers to this question across diverse landscapes including forests, streams, lakes, sea, and soils. His objects are created out of the materials constituting their own backgrounds.

Scripts from the animation:

"What lies below the surface affects the surface."

If you ever read a book on soils, this is the book.

Feel the force of the author in the following statement.

"How can I stand on the ground every day and not feel its power?"

"How can I live my life stepping on this stuff and not wonder at it?"

If you have read "Guns, Germs, and Steels" and "Collapse" by Jared Diamond and still like to proceed further with more specifics, this is the book for you.

Old and sick Charles Darwin investigated earthworms. Though his observations were made on the small creatures in his backyards and local gardens, the integration of the observations and the far reaching insight from them is no less significant -I think- than his earlier works on evolution. This book showcases Charles Darwin as the first professional soil scientist or a geomorphologist who envisioned topographic signature of life.

If Darwin's previous book is too scientific or too Victorian to read, this book could be an amusing alternative.

I particularly liked a chapter on earthworm invasion. Cindy Hale-who published a series of remarkable papers on the ecology of earthworm invasion-guided the author to her field site. I read this book about the same time that I became aware of Cindy's work. Soon I called Cindy to figure out the possibility of working at her site to test my ideas on weathering. A year later, she guided me to her field site, and we are now collaborating on the impact of earthworm invasion on mineral weathering and carbon-mineral interactions.

Andy Goldworthy Digital Archive

Ansel Adams Gallery