Soil Properties and the Political Aspects of Soil Quality

Abstract

As argued in Chapter 2, soil knowledge systems are context-specific, but they overlap because soils also exist independently of society. Associations of interacting organic and mineral materials, organisms, air, and water (i.e., soils) occur independently of how we explain them. Explananda are anyway not reducible to their explanantia. The biophysical sciences cross social contexts, even as they are socially constructed. Besides there being no single version of science, the biophysical sciences should not be conflated with Western European ideological predominance since they are the historical product of the workings of different interacting social systems and people- environment relations. In this work, mainstream scientific views about the environment, including soils, are used and placed under scrutiny because they form the basis for global comparisons and the backbone of soil knowledge generally, even among the most ardent critics of “Western” science, who do not jettison, for example, studies on soil erosion or climate change on account of the studies’ social provenance (see also Blaikie 1999). With such understandings of science, soils can be defined as both land and, to a limited extent, subaqueous phenomena comprised of bound mineral and organic materials, together with living organisms, water, and air.