7 - Implications and Potentials of a Process-Oriented Soil Science

Abstract

Soil science has become an integral part of many different fields of study, ranging beyond agronomy to include archaeology, physical and landscape geography, resource sustainability, and even climatology in terms of potential and long-term carbon sequestration. The importance and implications to these various fields of study in this distinction between understanding soils as open or closed systems is briefly addressed in this chapter. Soils are critical components in research outside of agronomy and engineering, and modern soil science's epistemological limitations constrain the kinds of research questions these other disciplines are able to address. Modern soil science evolved out of the study of and concern for plants, and not from a concern for the nature of soils themselves. The five-factor model and the chains of causality defined by the 13-paired processes of modern soil science evolved to simplify the complexity of one aspect of food production: soil as a plant growth medium. Second, modern soil science's classifications and inventories do not allow for the study of soils as dynamic self-organizing systems capable of changing or impacting on the five factors and the broader environmental context within which these interact. Therefore, non-agronomic discipline needs for analyzing and understanding soils, as a dynamic component within their research cannot be adequately addressed with the current models and paradigms of modern soil science.