The fate of soil science - part 2
Posted by Hari Eswaran 15 Dec 2000 14:32:11
THE TIME HAS COME FOR "THUNDER BOOKS"
Richard Arnold December 5, 2000 You may have forgotten what a thunder book is, or maybe you didn't ever use that name. A thunder book is a collection of statements, special symbols, equations, relationships, standards, crib notes, and "rules of thumb" that provide quick, handy information when you want to answer a particular question. It is a handy reference to those things you need to know about soils and how they behave. It is an abstract of many of things you know about how soils are distributed, how soils form many of their properties, how those properties influence the movement of air and water, and what is linked to the fertility and productivity of the soils.
Do you think that the entire computer databases and tables for just about everything can answer the questions you are being asked? Well, if you knew how to use them as pages in a thunder book it would surely be a good start, but you need something uniquely yours.
What triggers your knowledge base, what do you recall when you need to discuss nitrogen availability, or the drainability of soils of mixed mineralogy that are clayey in texture? How and when are colors useful indicators of something? What do you relate to texture, and/or texture in relation to mineralogy? What are the steepest slopes that the most common farm machinery can work reasonably well without being unstable? How thick is a good rooting zone for your sandy soils, and for the clayey ones? How many different ways can you describe soil variability so that a user will understand what you are trying to tell them? What are the limits of the relationships that you use to make predictions of behavior?
In my experience soil survey comprises those activities that are based on pedological concepts and principles. Soil morphology, soil geography, soil genesis, soil classification, soil processes, soil functioning, and statements of expected behavior are all important components of soil survey. It has always been my belief that the mission of a soil survey is to help people understand and wisely use soil resources.
Consider each question to be a bolt of lightning! Somebody wants to know something, or to verify something that they think you may be able to help them with. A bolt of lightning - sharp, quick, cuts to the chase. It releases untold energy, it jolts your very being, it seems to be instantaneous, and it begs your attention.
In most instances, the lightning is followed by thunder. Some is a long slow roll of deep bellows, other thunder is rapid, loud, and shivers your timbers, and some is still far away and not very insistent in its reverberations. Thunder is a response to lightning. A thunder book is a source of information to help you respond to questions, to those streaks of lightning that are flashing all around you.
If you were a soil surveyor you undoubtedly had something equivalent to a thunder book about the kinds of soils in the survey area, their major properties and features, their common occurrence in the landscape, and how they merged with landscape associates. This ended up in a set of symbols that you recorded on a map along with your estimate of the boundaries separating portions of the landscape into meaningful units for the purpose of the survey.
But what you may not have had, were all those pages that referred to behavioral relationships among the properties and processes that are thought to take place in the soils. For this you needed to listen, and heed, the counsel of many other specialists. Some specialists were the indigenous people who have thunder books tucked away in their memory banks, other specialists work with controlled experiments, often dealing with nutrient interactions and the biomass responses to different kinds of manipulations, and yet other specialists are a little farther removed but deal with the holistic interactions of ecosystems and humankinds efforts to deal with such complexity.
Guidelines to help you develop your own thunder book of relationships are contained in most textbooks about soils. Chapter after chapter suggest generalities that are known for many soils, but seldom are they designed for your specific area or the soils in your region. There are hundreds of good statements about soil properties, and relationships between those properties and the behavior that has been observed. These serve as the starting place for the local, specialized "rules of thumb" that give you the confidence to convey such predictions to others. You always give a caveat, an amount of uncertainty, and provide an opening for differences that might be due to chance and are unexplained by the relationship that you are using to understand the soil behavior.
Variability and uncertainty are inherent properties of information, especially in the natural world, and you must work diligently to explain this to users of soil information. Much of your credibility relates to your ability to properly discuss the consequences of using soil information, whether it is from your thunder book, or from other sources.
What can we learn from the industrialized, agriculturally oriented societies about chapters in a thunder book. I think the big thing to see is that one can recognize a problem, like water erosion of soils, and then suggest norms or standards for management practices designed to address the problem. A practice is a component of a management system and seldom can be applied in isolation. It is a unit of technology for specific needs, such as grassed waterways, or contouring field crops. A standard indicates the purpose and conditions where a practice applies and criteria for its minimum performance. This suggests that certain relationships among factors and properties and processes are being considered in the expected behavior of the practice. Carrying this further, there is a practice specification that provides the technical details for various operations to do the practice, what kinds of materials are used, and a basis for acceptance of the work required to implement the practice. Now this all sounds pretty rigid and formal, but it is a pattern that you can use to flesh out various parts of the framework of your thunder book.
Do you know why standards and specifications are given so much attention? It is so that a practice can be installed or implemented by non-professionals with a reasonable degree of certainty for successful performance. And surely that is what we are trying to do with most of our soil survey information. We are supposed to be the professionals who have more experience that many other folks but we can't do the work. We are advisors, we are councilors, we are servants of the land users and we would like others to do well. If our thunder books are well stocked and the pages full of good ideas that we believe in and that others have found meaningful, then we are confident that the correct use of the information will be for the good of the environment and for a sustainable world.
So here we take ideas that others have found helpful in the wise management and use of soil resources. You don't transfer the specifications but you can build on the idea of being aware of soil-related problems and stating standards for practices of management that make sense. Specification are local in that you need to know the soils that you are working with and which relationships have good track records. It is your job, it is your responsibility, it is your professionalism that is on the line. And you and I and everyone else need all the help we can get.
Research journals are full of little tidbits that help you confirm or improve or extend your thunder so that it is better than before. You slowly reduce the variability of your thunder and it becomes concentrated and relevant to the lightning that prompted it.
Thunder books are collections of good common sense. They contain ideas of how to achieve a better harmony with Nature. They can be misused, of course, and so you continuously talk, discuss, explain, demonstrate, and keep learning more. Is a political thunder book different than a scientific thunder book? Oh, the words are not the same but the intent is truly the same. You want to help others understand soils and to have soil resources used wisely. And this means today and far into the future. One may emphasize policy development, and the other may emphasize ways to modify management, but hopefully the betterment of a global habitat is where we all are headed.
Can you assist others in building their thunder books? Can you pull out of the textbooks those ideas that are good generalizations that could be headings for sections in the thunder book? Can you find other examples from engineers, or consultants, or mining specialists, or ecologists, or geographers, or any other group of specialists that are soil-related behaviors? Can you together formulate the relationships that lie behind these statements? Can you see how to adapt the information to your specific area of concern? Do you know how to help each other? Can you lead others along the journey of building their own thunder book?
Each of us has done bits and pieces of all the things I have mentioned above and so the know how is there. You have done it, you know how to do it. Now it takes a new resolve
to care enough to find a new synthesis,
to build local flexibility,
to give away all the ownership of soil information that you can,
to make others look good,
knowing that the pride of good stewardship will be in the hands of our children's children.
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Hello All:
The question asked by our colleague weather the soil survey in its traditional role is diminishing (so called in a death-bed). I would like to say that I am not one of those believing this. I personally think that nowhere on earth we finished our job and never will be. My experience in South America, Asia, and in East Africa, tells me that information in developing countries is far lacking to satisfy sustainable use of soil resources. If we believe that we are soil scientists, we must continue rigorously increased understanding of world soil resources.
All sciences established by mankind are evolving with time. We all agree that the need for soil information is becoming very important in terms of sustainable land management, ecosystem health, cycling of biogeochemicals, land degradation, carbon sequestration, soil technology etc. Should we start discussing about where in academia we can teach soil science or produce future soil scientists other than Agriculture? The spirit of 60s and 70s in FAO and elsewhere in the world need to be resurrected as this largest UN office is charged to deal with the food security issue on our planet. European is now re-evaluating their soil information. There is a talk in Agriculture Canada to restructure the soil information unit for sustainable use of natural resources. I am sure similar re-evaluation is now going on in USDA as well.
Soil resource assessment and monitoring is entering a new era, in terms of quality of information produced by new information technologies through the innovative use of GIS and remote sensing. Today we generate knowledge not only traditional biomass production but moved to multi-functionality of land management approach. Considering the quality of the work we have completed in the past we have a golden opportunity to enhance reliability and functionality of the land resource information.
Restriction of our studies to the 1 or 2m soil profile has isolated soil science from other associated science. To understand the complex system, soil scientists must go beyond this self imposed limit to better understand the vertical and horizontal processes taking place on the landscape. Salinization is an example that shows how geology and hydrology influence the formation of saline and sodic soils. I work with civil engineers at our University and I can see the type of maps they are in need for their own use. These are just examples.
We must work hard through the UN to make sure that we have a world convention for SOILS. This is very important. The future of soil science in my view looks stronger than before and the demand for soil scientists will be greater than before.
Best regards,
A. R. Mermut (Chairman, Commission V, IUSS)
mermut@skyway.usask.ca
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Hari,
I feel the same. In Malaysia, less and less money is being allotted to the implementing agencies(like DOA) for the purpose.
Shamshuddin
samsudin@agri.upm.edu.my
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Dear Hari:
Soil survey has been dying for some time in many countries of Asia. It is only the large countries such as China and India, and some of the richer countries like Japan where there is still an active program. In other countries such as the ASEAN region, the status quo is being maintained but with a systematic diminished budget in real monetary terms.
I see three reasons for such trends. One is the decision in many western countries where universities reduced or obliterated their Soil Science Departments or merged them with a larger animal called Natural Resources. The consequence of the last is that traditional methods of teaching soil science have to be reduced. We, in the third world, cannot argue against such momentous decisions and convince our decision-makers that our situation is different.
Second, we are paying a price for advances in information technology. Modelers and GIS specialists are unconsciously suggesting that walking across fields is not necessary and that they could model everything. They do not realize that today we have the situation where zillions of models are chasing around small or non-existent data sets.
Thirdly, our decision-makers that are not soil scientists see the fantastic contributions of gene technology and ask the question, why do we need soil science? We as soil scientists have not convinced anyone that our science has an equal role to play.
Are we dying as a breed? YES. Can we do some thing about this? YES.
E. Padmanabhan (Malaysia)
Peswaran@frst.unimas.my
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Dear Hari, Many thanks for all the copies of answers to your queries. Though I don't quite fathom what the 'thunder books' should contain and how they would help, Arnold' s crowning contribution prose is always a pleasure to read and few of us can compete with him. Good read. Why did you leave out Mermut's? His 'soil convention' mention and support is a good reminder that this too needs to be discussed by all concerned (coordinated with WG of Hans Hurni) and used as additional reason for the soil survey information and assessments needs.
In order to bring your commendable efforts to some kind of positive conclusion, it is my considered opinion that instead of a keynote address, preaching to the more or less already involved, you should prepare now, on the basis of all this good advise and your own thoughts, a fairly short POSITION PAPER. After consulting with whoever you choose, it should be ready for the IUSS Bangkok Congress 2002. It should deal with the relevance and future needs of soil survey, essentially addressed to environmental scientists and decision makers. It can be discussed in one of the Working Groups or Commission meetings and if generally acceptable, then recommended for IUSS-EC approval. Don't bother to invite stakeholder farmers - you should know from experience what should be the approach.
Except that, for the desired impact, don't call it 'soil survey' which does not seem to be a favored term in the non-soil world, but prepare a Position Paper on SOIL RESOURCE ASSESSMENT AND MONITORING (SORAM for short), with a subtitle THE NEED FOR INFORMATION FOR LOCAL, REGIONAL TO GLOBAL SOIL INVENTORIES AND SOIL HEALTH DATA EXPLAINED - for use in local and regional development and management projects. Maybe Dick Arnold can help with some ringing prose.
Eventually such an illustrated SORAM flyer by the IUSS should be widely
distributed at non-soil events and to people we wish to reach. How about this? This is the best and most useful IUSS can do. Hoping that you may accept this suggestion, with best wishes, Dan Yaalon yaalon@vms.huji.ac.il
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