What is the Earth? The best way to understand it is to build one yourself.
In this episode, we discussed how to make an Earth history observation kit, which is perfect for Cosmic Education in Montessori. We hope you’ll get hands-on and try making one for yourself!
We’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to share your comments!
Profile
Yati Obara
Editor-in-Chief, Scientific Montessori
Based in Japan, born in 1989. CEO of Motherhand and Co-Director of the nonprofit think tank Polymath Research. Holds an M.Eng. and is an AMI-certified teacher. Focused on Montessori developmental theory and AI. Mother of two.
Hiro Obara
Publisher, Scientific Montessori
Based in Japan, born in 1990. Works as a software developer and a weekend farmer. Father of two.
Hands-on recreation of how the Earth was formed.
Yati
For ages 6 to 12, I’d like to introduce how to make an “Earth Pod,” which we’re practicing at home. Simply put, an Earth Pod is a large planter with various plants growing in it. The concept is to observe an ecosystem.
Hiro
First, get a pot. We use a big commercial planter, about 60 liters, but it doesn’t need to be that large. Around 20 liters should be enough. For soil, get pumice, the drainage stones for the bottom of pots, plus akadama, a red granular clay soil used for bonsai, and dark, humus-rich topsoil.
Yati
Just those three.
Hiro
Seal the bottom of the pot so soil doesn’t leak out. Then layer from the bottom: pumice, akadama, topsoil. Get a sapling from a nursery and plant a tree. Place it in the center of the pot after adding a good amount of akadama. A small tree is fine, like a little blueberry. Any fruit tree you like.
Yati
Something edible. A Japanese pepper tree or a lemon tree would be nice too.
Hiro
Those get quite large. Start small, and figure it out yourself. Any deciduous fruit tree works.
Yati
After placing the tree, add the topsoil. Why do you layer pumice, akadama, and topsoil from the bottom?
Hiro
This mimics Earth’s soil layers. In soil science, they’re classified as A, B, and C horizons. Soil is earth that contains humus, which allows plants to grow. People call Martian material “soil” too, but without humus, plants won’t grow.
Yati
What’s humus?
Hiro
Remains of past organisms decomposed by microorganisms. That’s what makes the topsoil dark and rich.
Yati
And the akadama?
Hiro
Akadama doesn’t contain much humus. It’s accumulated volcanic ash. Pumice is weathered rock. Let me talk a bit about chemistry. There’s nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, used for stem growth, fruiting, and root development respectively. Magnesium, calcium, and carbon are also needed. These are abundant in the topsoil and supplied from there. You might wonder, “Don’t we need fertilizer?” or “Don’t we need potting mix?” The answer is no.
Yati
Why not?
Hiro
Potting mix has nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium pre-mixed in large amounts. That’s not natural. In nature, fungi and microorganisms fetch what’s needed. For example, legumes have root nodule bacteria in their roots that fix nitrogen. Nitrogen fixation means converting atmospheric nitrogen gas into bioavailable ammonia that can be used in the soil.
Yati
Since 78 percent of the atmosphere is nitrogen, rather than adding ammonium nitrate as fertilizer, it’s better to have microorganisms near the plant take it from the air.
Hiro
Exactly. Nitrogen is essential for growth, for humans too, and for all kinds of organisms including microbes. Microorganisms and fungi bring it and make it usable. In return, plants give them sugars produced through photosynthesis.
Yati
When making bread or yogurt, you add sugar for yeast or lactic acid bacteria. Plants do the same thing in nature.
Hiro
But when humans ignore this process and add fertilizer, microorganisms stop working, and problems arise.
Yati
Like the human supplement problem. Your body can make vitamin D naturally, but when you take it as a supplement, you can end up with too much, and that causes problems. It’s the same with folate during pregnancy. Folate matters, but it’s become almost automatic to tell every pregnant woman to take synthetic supplements, and we strongly disagree with that. You can’t solve everything with a pill. The vitamin A in supplements isn’t the same as the carotene in vegetables. Your body converts only as much carotene as it needs, but supplement vitamin A goes straight in, and too much of it can harm a baby. It’s better to improve your diet and get these from natural foods, like plenty of vegetables and seaweed.
Hiro
Adding fertilizer causes excess of something, so insects come to break it down. Cabbage and leafy greens get ravaged. By giving unnecessary things, that part becomes weak, and insects can see it, so they come to eat it all.
Yati
And instead of stopping fertilizer use, people use insecticides. We talked about that in our episode for ages 0 to 3.
Hiro
Some argue that without fertilizer, you only grow tiny vegetables. That requires some study.
Yati
We actually tried it, and we grew a really tiny watermelon. Can you really grow things large without fertilizer?
Hiro
The point is, if the soil’s microbial network isn’t active, it can’t fetch what’s needed.
Yati
So if only small vegetables grow, the soil’s microbes aren’t connected yet?
Hiro
It’s not that they’re not connected. There just aren’t enough. Low quantity, low diversity. Like how a small village doesn’t produce big tech companies.
Yati
And it takes years to increase them. People can’t wait, so they add fertilizer.
Hiro
But if you keep doing that, microbes will never increase, and you’ll have to keep adding fertilizer forever.
Yati
Many places are already dependent on fertilizer. Can they really change?
Hiro
You might think you have to endure in the short term, but there are ways to avoid that. It’s a trade secret, so look it up yourself. There are methods to activate soil microbes and speed up their establishment. We experienced this early on with our Earth Pod.
Yati
Back to making the Earth Pod. I forgot to mention planting various seeds and seedlings around the tree.
Hiro
It would be great to find seedlings grown without pesticides.
Yati
You plant about ten times more varieties than people expect. There’s this image of monoculture, planting just one type in a field, evenly spaced as the seed packet instructs.
Hiro
Ignore the packet instructions. I’m not sure if we should call it “synecoculture,” growing many species together like a natural ecosystem, but there’s monoculture and polyculture. Modern agriculture is based on monoculture. But planting massive amounts of a single crop leads to enormous environmental destruction.
Yati
It’s shocking.
Hiro
In nature, this is abnormal. If one species takes over, something’s wrong. Normally, many things grow. If you went to a forest and only one plant grew there, that would be abnormal.
Yati
This connects to Montessori education. Mixed ages, and the more diversity the better.
Hiro
Self-organization happens there. When self-organization occurs at the ecosystem level, that’s a natural forest. Animals too, from small to large, and microorganisms. How has Earth developed? Various species emerged, all cooperating, eating and being eaten. Predator-prey relationships formed, and that’s how we got here.
Yati
Right.
Hiro
In the Cambrian period, there was a time when species diversity exploded. Why did the Cambrian explosion happen? This is just my personal theory, but I think it’s because predator-prey relationships emerged. What I mean is, when eating-and-being-eaten relationships form, like A eats B, but B eats C, relationships become incredibly complex. If you think about it in terms of logical structure, it’s the same as the explosion of language. There’s “you” and “me,” self and other. First, what is self? What is other? Then there’s the self within the other. Then, “The other will think this, so I should do that.” And the mind becomes increasingly complex and develops. What’s happening is that you simulate the other’s mind to understand yourself. Take it further: the other within yourself within the other’s mind. Logical structure becomes more complex through nesting.
Yati
I see.
Hiro
If you study computer programming or mathematical logic, you’ll understand. When this happens at the biological level, organisms became able to express incredibly complex forms.
Yati
Like the mitochondria in our cells, which were originally separate organisms that were incorporated.
Hiro
Yes. There’s talk of viruses as another domain of life. Cells may have acquired nuclei by incorporating viruses. Life has always been about eating and being eaten. If you view eating-and-being-eaten negatively, it’s killing and being killed. But it’s incorporation. Living things, if they’re eukaryotes, have DNA. Seen as a programmatic act of incorporating DNA into yourself, it’s just nesting.
Yati
That’s an interesting way to think about it.
Hiro
Plus, from mouth to anus, it’s like a pipe, with things temporarily staying in between. We call it digestion. Breaking down, extracting ATP and energy in mitochondria, aerobic respiration, anaerobic respiration. People think all organisms have stomachs, but some don’t. Carp and goldfish have no stomach. Stomachless fish.
Yati
Straight to intestine.
Hiro
So there’s no stomach digestion. Eat and excrete. No stomach acid. Carp eat anything, but they’re not tasting it, just passing it through. By human standards, lots of things can’t be explained. But at this logical level of eating and being eaten, nesting structures, and logical structures, you can treat plants and animals equally, and the microbial world equally too. So imagine you’re a god, creating single-celled organisms, then multicellular organisms, then mammals, insects. How do you make all these emerge? What would you do?
Yati
That’s tough. Just allowing DNA to take various patterns isn’t enough, right?
Hiro
I can’t think of any way to increase diversity other than creating nesting relationships. Rather than lengthening the DNA chain, I think the concepts of parasitism and symbiosis are necessary.
Yati
Mitochondria come from the mother. Nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA. Two different DNAs coexist within us.
Hiro
So there’s the “endosymbiotic theory,” the idea that chloroplasts and mitochondria became symbionts within cells, which was the origin of complex cells. It was proposed by Lynn Margulis, a female biologist.
Yati
She’s like Maria Montessori. Intuitively sharp.
Hiro
But at the time, Darwinism was dominant in the scientific community. “No way,” people said. She was attacked harshly. But eventually, biology changed. Endosymbiosis was proven correct. Such organisms were actually found. A bit of trivia: Lynn Margulis was the ex-wife of Carl Sagan, the astronomer and physicist, who also wrote science fiction. A genius.
Yati
Ex, though. Like Maria Montessori, maybe she had some punk-rock, intense personality.
Hiro
Women really do pick fights and change things. Maria Montessori picked a fight with the education world and changed it. Lynn Margulis picked a fight with the biology world and changed it.
Yati
I need to pick a fight with something.
Hiro
Right. I’d like you to pick a fight with mathematics. That’s what Buckminster Fuller’s synergetics is about.
Yati
We should also mention Rachel Carson. Silent Spring really is arriving. We’re recording this while driving to a big farm near us, and you can see cows grazing and running around.
Hiro
There’s a Japanese method called yamachi rakuno, where cows graze freely on mountain pastures of native grass, around the clock, all year round. Look it up for details. Calves can run around, race down slopes, play. Their legs get strong and healthy. That’s the essence, I think, for children’s environments too. Current Montessori education has been optimized for how to make children smart and healthy indoors. But where have cows lived? How have they lived? Not indoors. Would living indoors from now on make cows happy? Definitely not. The same applies to humans. Have people always been shut inside buildings? No. We adventured to various places, traveled, and came back. So that should be the standard for how children spend their time and learn. If you regularly talk with children about things like the Cambrian explosion, they’ll naturally become smart even if you give them freedom every day. So it’s not about materials. It’s about culture. Freedom and culture.
Yati
Maria Montessori said similar things. She said ironically that schools need museums. So the point is: try working with a real Earth Pod. We should clarify: “Don’t do this to harvest vegetables or fruit. Do it to cultivate and observe an ecosystem.” Even when aphids or insects come, don’t use chemicals. Just watch.
Hiro
Right. A pod for cultivating ecosystems, not crops. A kit for observing Earth’s history. Food chains form on their own.
Yati
Also, since you plant various seeds, different sprouts emerge, and it’s fun to research what they are.
Hiro
Please plant seeds from various families, like the nightshade family, the daisy family, and the bean family. Look at field guides, research characteristics, and you can have a Linnaeus-like experience, the botanist who classified plants. From there, you’ll become interested in what things are, on roadsides and in parks. Also, in 6 to 12 there’s a material called the Timeline of Life for learning life’s history, but the microorganism section is really weak. Japan had Kumagusu Minakata, a naturalist famous for his research on slime molds, who published more solo papers in Nature than anyone. Experiment with microorganisms in your Earth Pod and have a Minakata experience. Enjoy getting into slime molds.
Yati
And it’s nice to harvest too. The taste of no-fertilizer, no-pesticide cherry tomatoes or edamame from the Earth Pod is completely different. For us, having herbs readily available was great. At first, I worried when my younger daughter kept picking herbs, but picking them actually makes herbs stronger and they grow more.
Hiro
I don’t want to give away too much, but this principle applies to all plants. When you pull weeds, keeping what you need and pulling the rest, the weeds get stronger and grow back. You’re doing the opposite. It’s better to take just a little of what you need. Herbivores eat just the tops, the tasty parts, and leave the rest, and that actually becomes good stimulation for the plant. A little stress, and the plant puts down deeper roots and tries to grow more.
Yati
It really is the opposite of textbooks. Instead of every kid growing the same bean sprout in a cup, people should try growing 10 or 100 varieties. We look forward to hearing about your Earth Pod experiments.
