Very Very Important Studies of Very Very Important People Berkeley Edition
The Ground Beneath Your Feet
Exposing the states of endangered soils
by Charlie Koven
http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/articles.php?issue=6&article=soils
The next time the soles of your shoes rest on something softer than asphalt or tile, something older and wilder than the green lawn in front of the library, stop and think about what you are standing on. Do you notice the soft aroma rising from subterranean fungi nourished by California’s winter rains, or the sound of water as it percolates through grains of sand? If you were to dig down deep enough, you would eventually encounter bedrock, but what would you dig through before you got there? And most important, would something irreplaceable and unique be lost if the place where you stood were unearthed by the plow or the backhoe?
UC Berkeley professor Ron Amundson of the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management ponders that last question quite a bit. He and his colleagues recently published a paper in the journal Ecosystems that catalogues which of the thousands of individual soils recognized in the United States are the most endangered by human activity and at the greatest risk for extinction. At first, the words “endangered” or “extinction” may sound odd, because scientists have not traditionally viewed natural soils as living entities in need of the same types of diversity conservation as plants or animals. But Amundson and his colleagues make a clear argument for the need to start changing our thinking; like species, soils are unique and diverse assemblages whose natural life cycle is several orders of magnitude longer than humans’. At our frenzied pace, we are destroying much of this diversity. And while the extinction of plant and animal species is apparent, we are only now developing tools to perceive the extent of the destruction of our soils.
Soil vs. Dirt
Most soil scientists shudder a bit at the mention of the word “dirt.” To pedologists, those who study the structure and formation of soils, dirt is the components of soil--sand, clay, humus--taken out of context. Dirt is a pile of debris next to a construction site, while soil is the product of thousands of years of plant growth and decay, dissolution of minerals in rainwater, and burrowing by earthworms and gophers. Soil is what anything--granite bedrock, windblown dust, river muds--eventually turns into if left exposed at the earth’s surface. When pedologists classify soils, they seek to interpret this history; to do so they rely on characteristics such as the material from which a soil formed, the presence of layers rich in certain minerals, and the chemistry of a soil’s clay. In the process they reveal stories about the formation of the landscape we see today.
The roles that soils play in ecosystems, both natural and agricultural, are well known: storing water, providing mineral nutrients to plants, and hosting microbes’ recycling activities. Soil scientists have long promoted practices to sustain these soil functions on farmlands, but Amundson’s work broadens the discipline’s historically agricultural focus. “Traditional soil conservation has been to take land that has already been converted to some use and maintain its quality and productivity, which I think is a really important issue,” he says. “But then there’s the question that I wanted to bring up, about preserving the undisturbed land that we still have, helping to minimize the impact of urbanization and cultivation on those areas.”
In the United States, scientists classify soils under a soil taxonomy developed by the US Department of Agriculture. The USDA system’s hierarchical structure is modeled after the Linnaean system in biology; instead of kingdom, phylum, etc., soil scientists have order, suborder, on down to series, the pedological equivalent of a species. The coarsest level of classification has 12 orders. Examples include grassland soils (“mollisols”) and desert soils (“aridisols”). On the fine end of the system is the series, a unique soil type that has well-defined characteristics and is specific to a certain region. Currently, there are 13,129 soil series recognized in the United States, an example being the Valentine Series, which blankets most of Nebraska’s Sand Hills. California, with its varied topography and climate, is blessed with an abundance of soils. Its 1,755 series represent by far the highest soil diversity of any state, and 1,113 of those soils are unique to California.
The USDA system is designed to be insensitive to all but the most extreme changes in land use, grouping both soils in their natural condition and their agricultural counterparts under the same series. As a result, a soil map might show that a certain series covers an extensive area, even though very little is left in its natural state. Amundson and his colleagues confronted this ambiguity by using maps of land use compiled from satellite observations. These maps differentiate agricultural, urbanized, and relatively undisturbed land, and show the extent of the human footprint: two to three percent of our country is urbanized and nineteen percent is agricultural.
To measure the human impact on specific soils, Amundson and colleagues compared these land-use maps with a geographical database containing each soil series in the United States. They first identified “rare” soils, which cover less than 1,000 hectares (roughly the size of Tilden Park), and “unique” soils, which occur in only one state. They compared these rare and unique soils to land-use maps and termed a soil “endangered” if more than half of its area is covered by agriculture or urbanization. They found that the midwestern farming states have the highest numbers of endangered soils--in Indiana, for example, 82 percent of the naturally rare soils are endangered. In certain cases, their results showed a real cause for alarm; 31 of the nation’s soil series are so heavily used that they have effectively become extinct in their natural form.
The Human Impact on Soils
To appreciate what is lost when these unique soils disappear, imagine standing in a grassy field and digging up a shovelful of soil to search for the organisms living in it. Plant roots and leaf litter are the most obvious; they form the food base of the soil ecosystem. Next you find large animals: rodents, earthworms, ants and the like, known to soil microbiologists as macrofauna. Now zoom in to look at smaller creatures, the soil mesofauna, roughly half a millimeter in length: a large diversity of tiny insects, arthropods, and roundworms. In your shovelful you probably have at least a thousand of each. Zooming in further you find the microfauna: millions of protozoa, algae, and fungi, billions of bacteria, trillions of viruses. These microfauna do the most transformative work of recycling nutrients and forming soil organic matter, the dark-colored, carbon-rich substance that, by providing nutrients to plants and microbes, is truly the foundation of the ecosystem.
How do humans affect these ecosystems? According to UC Berkeley soil microbiologist Mary Firestone, “One of the most easily documented, well understood, and huge change is cultivation, plowing of soils. That reduces by orders of magnitude the presence of mesofauna and macrofauna: reduces diversity, reduces number, and to some extent eliminates their functional role. The function that’s being lost is in part the role of decompositon, but it’s also the role that they play in moving organic matter around and chopping up organic matter into smaller pieces.” In terms of long-term effects on the soil itself, continues Firestone, “the major impact of cultivation is the loss of soil organic matter.”
In addition to depleting what Firestone calls “the nutrient capital of the soil,” this loss has deleterious effects on the environment. Soils store a significant portion of the world’s carbon, and when it is lost from soils it is converted into carbon dioxide by respiration of soil microfauna. This carbon dioxide, along with that released by the burning of fossil fuels, is humanity’s main contribution to global climate change. Further, the loss of fertility that accompanies a soil’s loss of organic matter forces farmers to use more fertilizers to sustain productivity. But the nutrients in fertilizers are much more mobile than those locked up in soils; they drain off farmlands to pollute rivers, lakes, and coastal environments. Heavy use of nitrogen fertilizer also causes microbes to produce excess nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas whose concentration in the atmosphere has risen almost 10 percent in the past 300 years. These environmental effects raise the issue of the long-term role of natural, undisturbed soils in our nation’s landscape.
For Amundson, the greatest loss accompanying human transformation of a soil is that of the information and deep history the soil holds. He first looked into the problem of vanishing soil diversity when he realized, after 19 years of teaching the same field class on California soils, that many of the sites to which he used to take students no longer existed. “Science and the preservation of the natural history of the state were the reasons that I got into this,” he explains. “I look at soils as reservoirs of earth history. By disturbing soils, irrigating them, mixing them up, you basically destroy this historical record.”
Ecosystems Growing on Ancient Soils
Some of the most interesting and rare soils are extremely old--millions of years rather than merely thousands. As Amundson explains, “Segments of the earth’s landscape that are geologically old are rare because the random rejuvenation through erosion or deposition on the landscape keeps the very veneer of the earth’s surface relatively geologically young. So any landscape segment that somehow manages to evade those rejuvenation processes is by default a rare occurrence on the earth’s surface.” The unique properties of these old soils make their conservation both important and difficult.
To see how soils and the ecosystems which rest upon them have developed over such long periods, one can drive a few hours north of Berkeley to the coastal terraces of Jughandle State Park in Mendocino County. Here, millions of years of plate-tectonic motion have slowly and constantly raised the earth’s surface. As these forces push up the land, ocean waves plane it to a flat wall, causing the landscape to rise like escalator steps. Today one sees a staircase of successively older landscapes rising from the coast, from young soils near the coast to ancient soils--over one million years old--on the highest terraces. The lower steps tell a pleasant story of plant succession as redwoods predictably displace the coastal scrub. But continuing up the staircase, this simple story turns stark. The oldest steps contain a strange forest of stunted trees instead of towering redwoods. If you dug you’d find the cause: shallow soil bleached white with red spots. The colors indicate an almost complete loss of nutrients, leached by acids from roots and decaying pine needles until only pure white quartz sand and occasional red deposits of iron remain. In the 1960s the great UC Berkeley soil scientist Hans Jenny first realized that this soil, the Blacklock Series, revealed the importance of time in forming soils. He fought to preserve the landscape, which is now protected by the UC Natural Reserve System.
But while old soils may be inhospitable to growth, they are hardly wastelands. As Amundson points out, “Old landscapes, even if they are in benign climates, can be considered to be extreme environments that have dictated or allowed evolution to produce rare plants and animals that have adapted to these locations.” The heavy hand of evolution can result in species that grow only on certain soils. The highest terraces of the Mendocino staircase, for example, are the sole habitat for several species of tree, including the Bolander Pine, Fort Bragg Manzanita, and Mendocino Cypress. The link between diversity of soils and of plants occurs across the nation; Amundson and his colleagues found strong geographic correlation between rare, endangered soils and rare, endangered plants.
All of these issues--rare, ancient soils with endemic plant species, encroachment of agriculture and urbanization, and conflicting ideas about how best to maintain natural diversity--recently came to a head with the planning of the new UC campus in Merced County. The county, on the broad, western flank of the Sierra Nevada south of the gold country, rests largely on terraces left behind by the meandering of rivers that once drained the mountains. Many of the soils are one to two million years old and harbor some of the last remnants of landscape features known as mima mounds and vernal pools that once pervaded California’s valleys. Together, these alternating mounds and pools constitute a hummocky landscape overlying a flat, concrete-like impermeable layer called a duripan. As the water level rises with winter rains the vernal pools fill with water, which recedes slowly throughout the spring. Botanists particularly admire the pools because they provide a habitat for a unique and beautiful assemblage of endemic wildflowers, which bloom along their margins.
“When the UC [campus] was proposed for that area I was concerned and frankly dismayed,” says Amundson, “because it was going to be on this wonderful, broad, million-year-old landscape that there isn’t really much left of.” The controversy which arose over the potential loss of the landscape, however, caused people to become more aware of this irreplaceable resource. The final location of the campus, moved over just a bit, “turned out to be a win-win situation,” Amundson says. “They’re going to take a small and insignificant amount of this [native soil] out of its natural state for the campus, but the result is that the state and the Nature Conservancy went around and started paying ranchers for the development rights to their broad ranch regions that ring the entire campus. I don’t think that, without having the UC campus there to focus all this attention, there would have been this coordinated effort to keep this broad remaining open area in its natural state.”
The relationships between soils, plants, animals, and humans can be critical to the success of such conservation plans. In this case, as Amundson describes it, the final plan “keeps the ranchers in business. It gives them a huge infusion of money and incentive to stay in ranching. Actually, ranching is needed to maintain the biology of the vernal pools now, because if you take cows away, the invasive grasses would grow so thick that they would choke out the native plants. So now cows are an integral part of the ecosystem, and you have to have ranchers there to keep the unique plants growing around the vernal pools.” For Amundson, these examples point to the fundamental role of soils in conservation plans: “We want not only to have contiguous areas, but areas that maintain the geological and pedological diversity of the area that allowed this mosaic of things to develop in the first place.”
Looking to the Future
To save the landscapes that are most endangered, scientists and planners need first to identify the most endangered soils. Amundson and his colleagues’ research, then, is critical; theirs is the first systematic comparison of individual soils’ distributions against patterns of land use across the country. Perhaps their most important result is to reveal the strain that agricultural and urban land use places on natural soil diversity. This realization comes at a time when, as Amundson notes, “Our population is expanding, agriculture is expanding, and basically at the end of this century there won’t be much land left to convert to agriculture. So I’m not suggesting that every segment of these incredibly old parts of the earth’s surface be preserved, but I think keeping a healthy and interesting diversity of segments of these areas in their natural conditions would be warranted for future generations.”
Ultimately, for preservation to succeed, more people need to appreciate the value of soils. “This generation has the choice about what we’re going to leave in terms of the earth’s surface for the next generation and beyond. It’s a serious responsibility that I think we at least need to consider. I’m just here to provide data and raise the conceptual issues that I think are worth talking about,” says Amundson. “I guess my view is to approach these parts of the earth’s surface with some sort of awareness that they represent time beyond anything we can imagine in biology. You know, the oldest trees on earth are insignificant compared to some of these landscapes that we destroy without even a second thought.”
Charlie Koven is a graduate student in environmental science, policy and management.
Oh God, Charlie. I've nearly had a heart attack. I didn't know the very ground I walk on was endangered! I've been treating it...well...like dirt! I know better now...
Exposing the states of endangered soils
by Charlie Koven
http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/articles.php?issue=6&article=soils
The next time the soles of your shoes rest on something softer than asphalt or tile, something older and wilder than the green lawn in front of the library, stop and think about what you are standing on. Do you notice the soft aroma rising from subterranean fungi nourished by California’s winter rains, or the sound of water as it percolates through grains of sand? If you were to dig down deep enough, you would eventually encounter bedrock, but what would you dig through before you got there? And most important, would something irreplaceable and unique be lost if the place where you stood were unearthed by the plow or the backhoe?
UC Berkeley professor Ron Amundson of the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management ponders that last question quite a bit. He and his colleagues recently published a paper in the journal Ecosystems that catalogues which of the thousands of individual soils recognized in the United States are the most endangered by human activity and at the greatest risk for extinction. At first, the words “endangered” or “extinction” may sound odd, because scientists have not traditionally viewed natural soils as living entities in need of the same types of diversity conservation as plants or animals. But Amundson and his colleagues make a clear argument for the need to start changing our thinking; like species, soils are unique and diverse assemblages whose natural life cycle is several orders of magnitude longer than humans’. At our frenzied pace, we are destroying much of this diversity. And while the extinction of plant and animal species is apparent, we are only now developing tools to perceive the extent of the destruction of our soils.
Soil vs. Dirt
Most soil scientists shudder a bit at the mention of the word “dirt.” To pedologists, those who study the structure and formation of soils, dirt is the components of soil--sand, clay, humus--taken out of context. Dirt is a pile of debris next to a construction site, while soil is the product of thousands of years of plant growth and decay, dissolution of minerals in rainwater, and burrowing by earthworms and gophers. Soil is what anything--granite bedrock, windblown dust, river muds--eventually turns into if left exposed at the earth’s surface. When pedologists classify soils, they seek to interpret this history; to do so they rely on characteristics such as the material from which a soil formed, the presence of layers rich in certain minerals, and the chemistry of a soil’s clay. In the process they reveal stories about the formation of the landscape we see today.
The roles that soils play in ecosystems, both natural and agricultural, are well known: storing water, providing mineral nutrients to plants, and hosting microbes’ recycling activities. Soil scientists have long promoted practices to sustain these soil functions on farmlands, but Amundson’s work broadens the discipline’s historically agricultural focus. “Traditional soil conservation has been to take land that has already been converted to some use and maintain its quality and productivity, which I think is a really important issue,” he says. “But then there’s the question that I wanted to bring up, about preserving the undisturbed land that we still have, helping to minimize the impact of urbanization and cultivation on those areas.”
In the United States, scientists classify soils under a soil taxonomy developed by the US Department of Agriculture. The USDA system’s hierarchical structure is modeled after the Linnaean system in biology; instead of kingdom, phylum, etc., soil scientists have order, suborder, on down to series, the pedological equivalent of a species. The coarsest level of classification has 12 orders. Examples include grassland soils (“mollisols”) and desert soils (“aridisols”). On the fine end of the system is the series, a unique soil type that has well-defined characteristics and is specific to a certain region. Currently, there are 13,129 soil series recognized in the United States, an example being the Valentine Series, which blankets most of Nebraska’s Sand Hills. California, with its varied topography and climate, is blessed with an abundance of soils. Its 1,755 series represent by far the highest soil diversity of any state, and 1,113 of those soils are unique to California.
The USDA system is designed to be insensitive to all but the most extreme changes in land use, grouping both soils in their natural condition and their agricultural counterparts under the same series. As a result, a soil map might show that a certain series covers an extensive area, even though very little is left in its natural state. Amundson and his colleagues confronted this ambiguity by using maps of land use compiled from satellite observations. These maps differentiate agricultural, urbanized, and relatively undisturbed land, and show the extent of the human footprint: two to three percent of our country is urbanized and nineteen percent is agricultural.
To measure the human impact on specific soils, Amundson and colleagues compared these land-use maps with a geographical database containing each soil series in the United States. They first identified “rare” soils, which cover less than 1,000 hectares (roughly the size of Tilden Park), and “unique” soils, which occur in only one state. They compared these rare and unique soils to land-use maps and termed a soil “endangered” if more than half of its area is covered by agriculture or urbanization. They found that the midwestern farming states have the highest numbers of endangered soils--in Indiana, for example, 82 percent of the naturally rare soils are endangered. In certain cases, their results showed a real cause for alarm; 31 of the nation’s soil series are so heavily used that they have effectively become extinct in their natural form.
The Human Impact on Soils
To appreciate what is lost when these unique soils disappear, imagine standing in a grassy field and digging up a shovelful of soil to search for the organisms living in it. Plant roots and leaf litter are the most obvious; they form the food base of the soil ecosystem. Next you find large animals: rodents, earthworms, ants and the like, known to soil microbiologists as macrofauna. Now zoom in to look at smaller creatures, the soil mesofauna, roughly half a millimeter in length: a large diversity of tiny insects, arthropods, and roundworms. In your shovelful you probably have at least a thousand of each. Zooming in further you find the microfauna: millions of protozoa, algae, and fungi, billions of bacteria, trillions of viruses. These microfauna do the most transformative work of recycling nutrients and forming soil organic matter, the dark-colored, carbon-rich substance that, by providing nutrients to plants and microbes, is truly the foundation of the ecosystem.
How do humans affect these ecosystems? According to UC Berkeley soil microbiologist Mary Firestone, “One of the most easily documented, well understood, and huge change is cultivation, plowing of soils. That reduces by orders of magnitude the presence of mesofauna and macrofauna: reduces diversity, reduces number, and to some extent eliminates their functional role. The function that’s being lost is in part the role of decompositon, but it’s also the role that they play in moving organic matter around and chopping up organic matter into smaller pieces.” In terms of long-term effects on the soil itself, continues Firestone, “the major impact of cultivation is the loss of soil organic matter.”
In addition to depleting what Firestone calls “the nutrient capital of the soil,” this loss has deleterious effects on the environment. Soils store a significant portion of the world’s carbon, and when it is lost from soils it is converted into carbon dioxide by respiration of soil microfauna. This carbon dioxide, along with that released by the burning of fossil fuels, is humanity’s main contribution to global climate change. Further, the loss of fertility that accompanies a soil’s loss of organic matter forces farmers to use more fertilizers to sustain productivity. But the nutrients in fertilizers are much more mobile than those locked up in soils; they drain off farmlands to pollute rivers, lakes, and coastal environments. Heavy use of nitrogen fertilizer also causes microbes to produce excess nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas whose concentration in the atmosphere has risen almost 10 percent in the past 300 years. These environmental effects raise the issue of the long-term role of natural, undisturbed soils in our nation’s landscape.
For Amundson, the greatest loss accompanying human transformation of a soil is that of the information and deep history the soil holds. He first looked into the problem of vanishing soil diversity when he realized, after 19 years of teaching the same field class on California soils, that many of the sites to which he used to take students no longer existed. “Science and the preservation of the natural history of the state were the reasons that I got into this,” he explains. “I look at soils as reservoirs of earth history. By disturbing soils, irrigating them, mixing them up, you basically destroy this historical record.”
Ecosystems Growing on Ancient Soils
Some of the most interesting and rare soils are extremely old--millions of years rather than merely thousands. As Amundson explains, “Segments of the earth’s landscape that are geologically old are rare because the random rejuvenation through erosion or deposition on the landscape keeps the very veneer of the earth’s surface relatively geologically young. So any landscape segment that somehow manages to evade those rejuvenation processes is by default a rare occurrence on the earth’s surface.” The unique properties of these old soils make their conservation both important and difficult.
To see how soils and the ecosystems which rest upon them have developed over such long periods, one can drive a few hours north of Berkeley to the coastal terraces of Jughandle State Park in Mendocino County. Here, millions of years of plate-tectonic motion have slowly and constantly raised the earth’s surface. As these forces push up the land, ocean waves plane it to a flat wall, causing the landscape to rise like escalator steps. Today one sees a staircase of successively older landscapes rising from the coast, from young soils near the coast to ancient soils--over one million years old--on the highest terraces. The lower steps tell a pleasant story of plant succession as redwoods predictably displace the coastal scrub. But continuing up the staircase, this simple story turns stark. The oldest steps contain a strange forest of stunted trees instead of towering redwoods. If you dug you’d find the cause: shallow soil bleached white with red spots. The colors indicate an almost complete loss of nutrients, leached by acids from roots and decaying pine needles until only pure white quartz sand and occasional red deposits of iron remain. In the 1960s the great UC Berkeley soil scientist Hans Jenny first realized that this soil, the Blacklock Series, revealed the importance of time in forming soils. He fought to preserve the landscape, which is now protected by the UC Natural Reserve System.
But while old soils may be inhospitable to growth, they are hardly wastelands. As Amundson points out, “Old landscapes, even if they are in benign climates, can be considered to be extreme environments that have dictated or allowed evolution to produce rare plants and animals that have adapted to these locations.” The heavy hand of evolution can result in species that grow only on certain soils. The highest terraces of the Mendocino staircase, for example, are the sole habitat for several species of tree, including the Bolander Pine, Fort Bragg Manzanita, and Mendocino Cypress. The link between diversity of soils and of plants occurs across the nation; Amundson and his colleagues found strong geographic correlation between rare, endangered soils and rare, endangered plants.
All of these issues--rare, ancient soils with endemic plant species, encroachment of agriculture and urbanization, and conflicting ideas about how best to maintain natural diversity--recently came to a head with the planning of the new UC campus in Merced County. The county, on the broad, western flank of the Sierra Nevada south of the gold country, rests largely on terraces left behind by the meandering of rivers that once drained the mountains. Many of the soils are one to two million years old and harbor some of the last remnants of landscape features known as mima mounds and vernal pools that once pervaded California’s valleys. Together, these alternating mounds and pools constitute a hummocky landscape overlying a flat, concrete-like impermeable layer called a duripan. As the water level rises with winter rains the vernal pools fill with water, which recedes slowly throughout the spring. Botanists particularly admire the pools because they provide a habitat for a unique and beautiful assemblage of endemic wildflowers, which bloom along their margins.
“When the UC [campus] was proposed for that area I was concerned and frankly dismayed,” says Amundson, “because it was going to be on this wonderful, broad, million-year-old landscape that there isn’t really much left of.” The controversy which arose over the potential loss of the landscape, however, caused people to become more aware of this irreplaceable resource. The final location of the campus, moved over just a bit, “turned out to be a win-win situation,” Amundson says. “They’re going to take a small and insignificant amount of this [native soil] out of its natural state for the campus, but the result is that the state and the Nature Conservancy went around and started paying ranchers for the development rights to their broad ranch regions that ring the entire campus. I don’t think that, without having the UC campus there to focus all this attention, there would have been this coordinated effort to keep this broad remaining open area in its natural state.”
The relationships between soils, plants, animals, and humans can be critical to the success of such conservation plans. In this case, as Amundson describes it, the final plan “keeps the ranchers in business. It gives them a huge infusion of money and incentive to stay in ranching. Actually, ranching is needed to maintain the biology of the vernal pools now, because if you take cows away, the invasive grasses would grow so thick that they would choke out the native plants. So now cows are an integral part of the ecosystem, and you have to have ranchers there to keep the unique plants growing around the vernal pools.” For Amundson, these examples point to the fundamental role of soils in conservation plans: “We want not only to have contiguous areas, but areas that maintain the geological and pedological diversity of the area that allowed this mosaic of things to develop in the first place.”
Looking to the Future
To save the landscapes that are most endangered, scientists and planners need first to identify the most endangered soils. Amundson and his colleagues’ research, then, is critical; theirs is the first systematic comparison of individual soils’ distributions against patterns of land use across the country. Perhaps their most important result is to reveal the strain that agricultural and urban land use places on natural soil diversity. This realization comes at a time when, as Amundson notes, “Our population is expanding, agriculture is expanding, and basically at the end of this century there won’t be much land left to convert to agriculture. So I’m not suggesting that every segment of these incredibly old parts of the earth’s surface be preserved, but I think keeping a healthy and interesting diversity of segments of these areas in their natural conditions would be warranted for future generations.”
Ultimately, for preservation to succeed, more people need to appreciate the value of soils. “This generation has the choice about what we’re going to leave in terms of the earth’s surface for the next generation and beyond. It’s a serious responsibility that I think we at least need to consider. I’m just here to provide data and raise the conceptual issues that I think are worth talking about,” says Amundson. “I guess my view is to approach these parts of the earth’s surface with some sort of awareness that they represent time beyond anything we can imagine in biology. You know, the oldest trees on earth are insignificant compared to some of these landscapes that we destroy without even a second thought.”
Charlie Koven is a graduate student in environmental science, policy and management.
Oh God, Charlie. I've nearly had a heart attack. I didn't know the very ground I walk on was endangered! I've been treating it...well...like dirt! I know better now...
posted by Conservotarian Emmy at 12:26 AM
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