Welcome to the blog of Martin and Margot Hodson! You can find out a lot about us by visiting our web site at www.hodsons.org We do not think we will use this blog very often, but we will use it to let people have details of some of our publications our speaking engagements and conferences. Some of these things seem better on a blog than on a web page, and this looks a bit easier to do as well.

Tuesday 24 December 2019

Christmas Letter 2019 Martin and Margot Hodson

St Mary's, Haddenham

Happy Christmas for 2019 and 2018 – here is our news:

In February we celebrated ten years in Haddenham! It has been a great ten years and so much has happened. We are taking many happy memories with us and especially many friends. We also celebrated ten years of Haddenham in Transition. Thank you everyone for giving us such a special time in Wychert Vale Benefice. We miss you lots!

Moving house
In August this year we moved house to Filkins in West Oxfordshire. This came was a result of a change of roles for Margot (see below). We are enjoying our new home – though we still have unpacking to do and all those jobs needed with a new house The garden is huge and the house is big enough to have space to have people to stay, space to work, and to set up a study-library for people studying environment and faith to make use of. We still find it a bit of a surprise that we are living in the Cotswolds and it is a great place to be.

Swapping one job for two
St Peter & St Paul's, Broadwell-
one of Margot's new churches.
Last year we realised that we needed to explore a change of role for Margot. She was loving her role as Rector of the team in Wychert Vale but the environmental education work was growing well beyond a spare time activity and the John Ray Initiative (JRI) board asked Margot if she would take on an even more up-front role in speaking and teaching. We needed to find a different way of doing things. We found ourselves exploring a half-time vicar-post for Sundays and two days midweek. Shill Valley and Broadshire Benefice has lots of small parishes and the Rector, Harry MacInnes, leads the benefice as an integrated team.
The JRI Board made Margot half-time Director of Theology and Education on a self-supporting basis. Margot is really enjoying both new roles and they are keeping her busy!!

Christmas in bed!
We spent Christmas 2018 in bed with one of the worst illnesses that we could remember – we have recently concluded that it might have been whooping cough and it knocked us out for weeks. Hence no Christmas cards. The folk in Haddenham were wonderful and brought food, including Christmas dinners and lots of love. The team covered all the Christmas services, Radio 3 gave us lovely music and we emerged in January to find the Christmas tree looking all dressed up with nowhere to go!

Environment and JRI
This has been getting really busy! Our distance learning course, CRES has grown considerably, and we are now taking some overseas students. We have been speaking at evening events and day conferences and writing resources. Margot continues to do some teaching at Ripon CollegeCuddesdon and we have been running training courses for Oxford Diocese. We both continue to mentor for the IFES Graduate Impact Programme – we have a fantastic group of environmental post-grads from all over Europe and beyond.



Martin’s News
Wheat Phytolith
Martin’s work is now about 30% secular science and about 70% with the Christian environmental movement. He still teaches at both universities in Oxford, although not as much as before. Martin’s research on plant silica has suddenly taken off in quite a major way! After nearly 40 years working on it, everyone is interested. He published a major paper on carbonsequestration in phytoliths in July, which has had a lot of interest. While in the midst of the move Martin wrote three more papers which should be out next year. He has a very good collaboration with a couple of archaeologists in Brussels. That promises to make 2020 quite interesting!
During 2019, Martin passed ten years as Operations Director of JRI. Basically, he does his best to keep the whole show on the road and to supervise his wonderful administrative team, Karen and Lynda. He also leads the CRES course. Possibly the biggest change in the last year has been a considerable increase in speaking engagements. These come from many directions: JRI, A Rocha, Christians in Science, Oxford Diocese, U3A and our personal contacts. Martin’s biggest engagement this year was to speak at the Harvest Supper and two morning services at Bath Abbey! The diary is already filling up next year. Definitely not slowing down towards retirement…….

Holidays
Chough on Newquay walk
We had a super holiday in Mid-Wales in May, partly at Llanarth near the coast and partly in the mountains where we had a wonderful time staying with John and Maya Bimson. It was also great to visit John and Sheila Houghton.

In November we had a very special holiday with Greg and Pam and family for a Hodsons Thanksgiving. It was wonderful to be with the family again. The grandchildren are growing up fast!

That’s all our news! Have a wonderful Christmas and New Year.

Love from Margot and Martin


Saturday 22 June 2019

Can Phytoliths Save the World?


Can Phytoliths Save the World?
Or: Plants do Carbon Capture and Storage Quite Naturally

Can Phytoliths….. Can what?? Many people have never heard of phytoliths, but I have worked on them for nearly 40 years, so let me tell you a little about them, and then I will describe some of my recent research. Yes, these unheard of phytoliths might help in the fight against climate change. But read on.
Pampas grass
Have you ever cut your hand pulling up grass? Have you noticed how sharp the edges of Pampas grass are? Have you ever been stung by a stinging nettle? This is all due to phytoliths! Soluble silica is taken up by the plants and is deposited in some of the cells as hard, solid phytoliths. If you know a little Greek you will know phyton is plant and lithos is stone or rock, so phytoliths are plant stones. They take the shape of the cells they are deposited in. So if you had a microscope you would be able to see that the edges of Pampas grass had razor sharp prickles made of silica. If you looked at the lower surface of nettle leaves you would see silica hairs which act like minute hypodermic syringes to inject poison into your skin.
When a plant dies the leaves, stems and flowers fall into the soil and are incorporated into the soil organic matter (humus). But the phytoliths are much more resistant to breakdown in the soil and can persist for hundreds or thousands of years. Because they last a long time, and have shapes and sizes that are characteristic for the plants they come from, phytoliths are used by archaeologists and palaeoecologists to work out what people grew and ate, and past environments and climates.
There is increasing interest in carbon sequestration in soils. It is recognised that the soil is a huge carbon store and that if we could find ways of increasing that storage then it could really help to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. But one of the big problems with this idea is that carbon sequestration in the soil is reversible. So once plant materials enter the soil and form humus it is susceptible to breakdown, releasing the carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere.
Back in 2005 some Australian phytolith experts, Parr and Sullivan, had a brilliant idea. They realised that phytoliths encapsulate carbon within their structures. According to their calculations, phytoliths store a lot of carbon in the soil and potentially sequester it within the silica for a very long time. Their paper and their idea created a whole new area of phytolith research. The idea has not been without controversy, particularly over how much carbon can be stored in phytoliths. Nonetheless, the area remains a major focus for phytolith research.
In the 1980s I spent a long time looking at how phytoliths developed within the plant, and I have kept up this interest, publishing a major review on the topic in 2016. Plants have two main types of phytolith: those developing in the cell lumen; and those that form in the cell wall on a carbohydrate (largely cellulose) matrix. If you did biology at school you might remember the cell wall as a kind of box around the lumen. The lumen contains the cytoplasm and all of the organelles, including the chloroplasts, nucleus etc.
I was invited by the Frontiers journal organisation in 2017 to be a guest associate editor for a special collection of papers, "Frontiers in Phytolith Research". I assembled an editorial team of experts from around the world and started to invite potential authors. But what would I write my own paper on? I decided that I wanted to look at one aspect of the carbon sequestration in phytoliths story that I felt had been neglected. Which types of phytolith are most important in storing carbon in the soil? Is it the cell lumen or the cell wall types?
Wheat inflorescence phytolith
To answer this question I needed to consult a wide range of literature. I began by outlining the history of carbon sequestration in phytoliths and discussing the major methodological controversy over how much carbon they contain. Next, I wanted to determine exactly which phytoliths were cell wall phytoliths. In most cases, it is pretty obvious, but there is one important type where we lack clarity. Then I looked at what is known about carbon concentrations in the two types of phytolith, and not surprisingly the cell wall types have much more carbon than the lumen types.
I then needed to find out what happened to the two types of phytolith in the soil. The received wisdom is that cell wall phytoliths break down faster in soil than lumen types. But I carried out a major literature survey looking for evidence to support this contention, and I couldn't find any! Moreover, when I investigated the archaeological and palaeoecological literature I found that cell wall phytoliths were present in a wide range of contexts and could be found in samples that were thousands of years old. Having done all this, I then constructed two hypotheses: one to consider what happens to phytoliths when they are prepared in the laboratory (this also addressed the question of how much carbon is stored in phytoliths); and the second concerned what happens in the soil.
Can phytoliths save the world? Probably not! But I think we need to look far more carefully at the rather neglected cell wall phytoliths. As I say in my paper, phytoliths are unlikely to be a "silver bullet" for climate change, but they may have a role to play. We are spending large amounts of time, money and energy on trying to get carbon capture and storage to work on power stations. Why not see if plants can do it naturally? Can we find ways to increase carbon sequestration in phytoliths and in soils? In my paper, I have outlined a whole lot of work that we need to do over the next few years. Let's get on and do it!

Martin J. Hodson
(July 2019)

Images:
1) Pampas grass image- Shirley Hirst on Pixabay:
https://pixabay.com/photos/grass-pampas-grass-pampas-56993/
2) Wheat inflorescence phytolith- MJH

Sunday 27 January 2019

Hodsons on the Move

Margot and Martin Hodson
Margot and Martin Hodson will be moving in the summer to West Oxfordshire to take up a new ministry. The Hodsons have been looking for a way to give more time to their environmental work while keeping their roots in local parish ministry. They are delighted to announce their move to the Shill Valley and Broadshire Benefice, where Margot will be licensed as half-time Associate Minister in early September. Alongside this post, she will be taking up the part-time (self-supporting) role of Theology and Education Director for the John Ray Initiative (JRI).

St Matthew's Church Langford



Shill Valley and Broadshire Benefice covers a group of parishes south of Burford and is led by the full-time Rector, Revd Harry MacInnes. Margot is delighted to join Harry on his team and will be looking forward to meeting everyone in the benefice. The Hodsons will be moving to the vicarage in the village of Filkins in the summer.

Margot will continue to support JRI, A Rocha and the wider church with her environmental work in theology and education across the UK and beyond. She plans to help to develop courses and educational initiatives to resource church leaders and wider church members in caring for God’s earth as part of Christian mission and discipleship. The JRI office is in Gloucester and much of the Hodson’s teaching is in and around Oxford. So the new location will be very positive.

St Mary's, Haddenham
Margot is currently Rector of Wychert Vale Benefice, leading a team serving parishes between Thame and Aylesbury. She has been in ministry there for ten years and in that time has overseen a major benefice merger. Each church has a special identity and she has loved seeing each one flourish in its own way. Margot has also appreciated getting to know the wider communities. The Hodson’s home has been in the village of Haddenham and they have enjoyed being involved in many aspects of village life, including local environmental initiatives. They will really miss Haddenham, Kingsey, Cuddington, Aston Sandford, Stone, Dinton and the other villages!


Wheat Phytolith
Martin’s work will not change very much. He will carry on teaching for both universities in Oxford, and with his academic research. Martin works one day a week for JRI as their Operations Director, is Principal Tutor for Christian Rural and Environmental Studies (CRES), a distance learning course that is based at Ripon College Cuddesdon, and speaks and writes widely about faith and environment. He may also continue with a little preaching.

About JRI: The John Ray Initiative is an educational charity with a vision to bring together scientific and Christian understandings of the environment in a way that can be widely communicated and lead to effective action. JRI's mission is to promote responsible environmental stewardship in accordance with Christian principles and the wise use of science and technology. Much of the environmental work the Hodsons intend to pursue will be carried out through JRI, and if you would like to support the work of JRI please go HERE.

This is the start of a new venture and the Hodsons will value the good wishes of all who know them and prayers from those of faith as they embark on a new stage of life and ministry.