David R. Montgomery - Wikipedia
David R. Montgomery
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David R. Montgomery is a Professor of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he is a member of the Quaternary Research Center. Montgomery received his B.S. in geology from Stanford University in 1984, and his Ph.D. in geomorphology from University of California, Berkeley in 1991. His research addresses the evolution of topography and the influence of geomorphological processes on ecosystems and human societies. His published work includes studies of the role of topsoil in human civilization, the evolution and near-extirpation of salmon, geomorphological processes in mountain drainage basins, the evolution of mountain ranges, and the use of digital topography. He has conducted field research in eastern Tibet, South America, the Philippines, Alaska, and the American Pacific Northwest. Montgomery's first popular-audience book, King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon explored the history of salmon fisheries in Europe, New England, California, and the Pacific Northwest. It won the 2004 Washington State Book Award in General Nonfiction. Montgomery's 2012 book, The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood explores the relationship between catastrophic floods in the distant past, flood legends, "Noachian flood geology", and geologic discovery over the past several hundred years. It won the 2013 Washington State Book Award in General Nonfiction. After the catastrophic Oso mudslide in Washington State in March, 2014, Montgomery appeared on various news segments to discuss the science behind landslides.[2] He appears in DamNation the 2014 documentary film about dam removal in the United States. In 2016, Montgomery published The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health, a collaboration with Anne Biklé. The book addresses the relationship between microbial life, plants, and people.
His most recent work, Growing A Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life, was released with W.W. Norton and Company in May 2017. References[edit]
Further reading[edit]
- Montgomery, David, R. (2003). King of Fish: The Thousand-year Run of Salmon. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. ISBN 0813341477.
- Montgomery, David, R. (2012). The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 9780393082395.
- Montgomery, David, R.; Biklé, Anne (2015). The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 9780393244403.
- Montgomery, David, R. (2017). Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 9780393608328.
External links[edit]
$14.72
Dirt, soil, call it what you want—it's everywhere we go. It is the root of our existence, supporting our feet, our farms, our cities. This fascinating yet disquieting book finds, however, that we are running out of dirt, and it's no laughing matter. An engaging natural and cultural history of soil that sweeps from ancient civilizations to modern times, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations explores the compelling idea that we are—and have long been—using up Earth's soil. Once bare of protective vegetation and exposed to wind and rain, cultivated soils erode bit by bit, slowly enough to be ignored in a single lifetime but fast enough over centuries to limit the lifespan of civilizations. A rich mix of history, archaeology and geology, Dirt traces the role of soil use and abuse in the history of Mesopotamia, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, China, European colonialism, Central America, and the American push westward. We see how soil has shaped us and we have shaped soil—as society after society has risen, prospered, and plowed through a natural endowment of fertile dirt. David R. Montgomery sees in the recent rise of organic and no-till farming the hope for a new agricultural revolution that might help us avoid the fate of previous civilizations.
$9.99
"Sure to become a game-changing guide to the future of good food and healthy landscapes." —Dan Barber, chef and author of The Third Plate
Prepare to set aside what you think you know about yourself and microbes. The Hidden Half of Nature reveals why good health—for people and for plants—depends on Earth’s smallest creatures. Restoring life to their barren yard and recovering from a health crisis, David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé discover astounding parallels between the botanical world and our own bodies. From garden to gut, they show why cultivating beneficial microbiomes holds the key to transforming agriculture and medicine.
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Finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
"A call to action that underscores a common goal: to change the world from the ground up." —Dan Barber, author of The Third Plate
For centuries, agricultural practices have eroded the soil that farming depends on, stripping it of the organic matter vital to its productivity. Now conventional agriculture is threatening disaster for the world’s growing population. In Growing a Revolution, geologist David R. Montgomery travels the world, meeting farmers at the forefront of an agricultural movement to restore soil health. From Kansas to Ghana, he sees why adopting the three tenets of conservation agriculture—ditching the plow, planting cover crops, and growing a diversity of crops—is the solution. When farmers restore fertility to the land, this helps feed the world, cool the planet, reduce pollution, and return profitability to family farms.
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How the mystery of the Bible's greatest story shaped geology: a MacArthur Fellow presents a surprising perspective on Noah's Flood.
In Tibet, geologist David R. Montgomery heard a local story about a great flood that bore a striking similarity to Noah’s Flood. Intrigued, Montgomery began investigating the world’s flood stories and—drawing from historic works by theologians, natural philosophers, and scientists—discovered the counterintuitive role Noah’s Flood played in the development of both geology and creationism. Steno, the grandfather of geology, even invoked the Flood in laying geology’s founding principles based on his observations of northern Italian landscapes. Centuries later, the founders of modern creationism based their irrational view of a global flood on a perceptive critique of geology. With an explorer’s eye and a refreshing approach to both faith and science, Montgomery takes readers on a journey across landscapes and cultures. In the process we discover the illusive nature of truth, whether viewed through the lens of science or religion, and how it changed through history and continues changing, even today.
$8.72
The salmon that symbolize the Pacific Northwest's natural splendor are now threatened with extinction across much of their ancestral range. In studying the natural and human forces that shape the rivers and mountains of that region, geologist David Montgomery has learned to see the evolution and near-extinction of the salmon as a story of changing landscapes. Montgomery shows how a succession of historical experiences -first in the United Kingdom, then in New England, and now in the Pacific Northwest -repeat a disheartening story in which overfishing and sweeping changes to rivers and seas render the world inhospitable to salmon. In King of Fish, Montgomery traces the human impacts on salmon over the last thousand years and examines the implications both for salmon recovery efforts and for the more general problem of human impacts on the natural world. What does it say for the long-term prospects of the world's many endangered species if one of the most prosperous regions of the richest country on earth cannot accommodate its icon species? All too aware of the possible bleak outcome for the salmon, King of Fishconcludes with provocative recommendations for reinventing the ways in which we make environmental decisions about land, water, and fish.
