Abstract
Soils are an essential element in sustainable food systems and vital for ecosystem services. Soils are degrading, because of urbanization, poor soil management, depletion and mining, over-use of inputs and impacts of climate change. Poor soil management resulted from short-term yield maximization caused by changes in land tenure, property rights and land use. We argue for soil protection based on the concept of soil telos defined as the combined purposefulness in agricultural production and terrestrial ecosystem optimization. It includes the right of mankind to use soils, provided norms and values are respected based on the soil’s usefulness, its natural purposefulness and its right to be protected (including its physical, chemical and biological cycles). Finding a sustainable balance between these values and rights on the one hand and the need to use living soils for agricultural production on the other hand requires a new approach to soil management based on widely accepted norm- and value-driven decisions on unavoidable trade-offs. Reconciling man-made telos and natural telos, requires (i) empowering the soil to achieve its man-made telos (e.g., by restoring degraded soils); (ii) empowering the soil to achieve its natural telos (e.g., by restoring water courses); (iii) raising awareness about the need to reconcile these two teloi (e.g., by acknowledging rights of soils); and (iv) monitoring tools to assess successful reconciliation (e.g., by evaluating soil health).
Highlights
Soils encompass the cover of the earth reaching from mountain tops to ocean depths and consist of minerals, organic matter, water and air; at the same time soils are living ecosystems involving a wide range of micro, meso- and macro-flora and -fauna, such as bacteria, algae, fungi, nematodes and other microorganisms, as well as arthropods, earthworms and mammals
We explore what soils mean to humans; we examine whether awareness of the importance of soils can be converted into respect for this essential resource opening up a new route towards holistic soil management based on soil ethics
We investigate whether soils have some kind of ‘telos’, i.e., a meaning of their own, in congruence with our previous paper on the telos of crop plants and farm animals [12], which could help provide a basis for value-driven choices in soil management
Summary
Soils encompass the cover of the earth reaching from mountain tops to ocean depths and consist of minerals, organic matter, water and air; at the same time soils are living ecosystems involving a wide range of micro-, meso- and macro-flora and -fauna, such as bacteria, algae, fungi, nematodes and other microorganisms, as well as arthropods, earthworms and mammals. Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the UN Post-2015 agenda; To support rapidly enhancing the capacity to collect information on soil quality and to monitor changes therein, at different scales (global, regional and national) These objectives clearly underline that—besides the quality of water and air—soil quality is one of the three components of environmental quality. We reflect on how the UN-FAO’s Year of the Soil “Healthy soils for a healthy life” [8] woke the world’s awareness for the immense eroding and poisoning effect that our culture at large has on the health of the world’s soil ecosystems: the basis of our nutrition and carbon and nitrogen cycles This applies to the present practices in agriculture that often harm the soil ecosystem, as is visible in soil compaction by heavy machinery, declines in pH by poor fertilization practices, killing of microorganisms by applying herbicides, fungicides and pesticides, disturbing the soil microbiome by deep ploughing, disrupting the water, nitrogen and carbon cycles, etc. The paper has been compiled by the team of authors through an iterative process of literature research, writing of narratives, commenting on these narratives, debating on the various emerging views, and asking advice from key informants over a period of 2.5 years
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