It’s hard to know if Google hits accurately reflect the priority issues in the world, considering that Lady Gaga generates 209 million results.
But when air quality leads to 131 million results and soil quality produces eight million hits, it probably indicates the public doesn’t understand or appreciate the value of soil.
“Air quality and water quality (issues) are widely recognized in the U.S. and I would suspect in Canada as well,” said Paul Bertsch, past-president of the Soil Science Society of America (SSSA) and a professor at the University of Kentucky.
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“Everybody talks about food security, everybody talks about water security … but very few people understand that the soil resource really underpins all these challenges.”
In an attempt to shine more light on soil’s value, Bertsch and his SSSA colleagues launched an initiative in October called the Soil Science Grand Challenges.
The document, which can be found on the SSSA’s website, is a list of critical research needs that connect soil to a number of critical issues, including water quality, medicine, climate change and food production.
“Many of the objectives (in the Grand Challenges) revolve around making sure you’re treating the soil right,” said Sally Brown, an SSSA member and University of Washington soil scientist.
“So it (soil) can do the services we need it to do. That goes from feeding people to sustaining ecosystems to making sure we have good water quality and carbon sequestration.”
Having a focused list of research priorities provides a way for soil scientists to get the attention of politicians and policy makers, Brown said.
It’s hard to pick out one area of soil research that is particularly crucial, Brown said.
However, a better understanding of the bacteria and microbiological communities in soil is definitely high on the list.
“Our emphasis in society in the last 75 to 80 years has been on killing bad microorganisms rather than fostering good ones,” said Brown, whose web page says she is focused on cleaning things up, specifically contaminated soils.
“What if we got this backwards? What if the right approach is to foster the good ones and let them kill the bad ones?”
Alan Moulin, an Agriculture Canada soil management scientist in Brandon, said scientists don’t understand how and why plants respond to nutrients like nitrogen.
Current knowledge is based on years of field trial data, in which an amount of nitrogen is added to a crop to produce a particular result.
“But do we really understand what’s happening in terms of biochemical processes in the microbial community? Which microbes are involved in denitrification…. What percentage is attributed to each microbial pool?”
While the Grand Challenges may help soil scientists lobby policy makers, it’s hard to envision how it will get the public excited about soil.
Bertsch acknowledged the SSSA and other organizations need other programs to educate the public, but they have had a few successes, including a soil exhibit that ran at the Smithsonian for 18 months.
When the SSSA first approached the museum, Bertsch said, staff weren’t convinced that people would want to learn about soil.
“What happened, though, is that it became one of the most successful exhibits of its kind at the Smithsonian,” said Bertsch, who added the exhibit, which closed January 2010, drew more than two million visitors.
The nuggets of information in the exhibit fascinated many people, he said, such as information on soil’s connection to public health.
“That the biodiversity in soil, mostly microbial, is related to most antibiotics and most anti-cancer drugs that are discovered,” noted Bertsch, who specializes in soil and environmental chemistry at the University of Kentucky.
Aside from medical implications, Bertsch said the public should know modern civilization could collapse if soil is mismanaged.
As proof, he pointed toDirt : The Erosion of Civilizations,which was written by David Montgomery of the University of Washington.
“It largely provides anthropological evidence that the destruction of the soil resource is ultimately what destroyed societies.”
