Bill Patrick's legacy is bringing focus to understanding biogeochemical processes in wetlands.  The omic technologies, especially the genomic ones, have rapidly advanced yearly so that we now have the blueprints of, and hence a peak into, the biological machines that drive critical environmental processes.  Two approaches have been most revealing: the study of phylogenic and functional genes that reveal diversity and patterns that are the outcomes of selection by habitat conditions, and the second is the omic study of example microbes or populations of microbes, that can reveal how particular organisms respond to environmental change. So far we know that the microbial world is enormous, both in gene and organism diversity, that patterns of both are discernable and can often be explained in an environmental context, and insight the basis for different strategies used by different microbes to find their place in the "sun".  I will show a few examples of each type including 16S rRNA genes, functional gene patterns for the former, and for the latter, examples from the nitrate and metal reducer  - Shewanella - and the versatile carbon degrader, nitrogen fixer and rhizosphere colonizer - Burkholderia. I will also give a vision for the new field of metagenomics and what it can provide for the soil biologistÉ and opportunity to be captured.