Soils and Their Classification: Ecological Processes and Social Struggles

Abstract

Prior to discussing soil quality or degradation, it is helpful to examine, even if to a limited extent, what soils are and how they change. The issue of defining soils is complicated in part because soils are assemblages of different materials and organisms that are often independent of one another, even as they form a whole. Soils usually grade seamlessly into each other and their boundaries can be ambiguous. Another source of difficulty is that field observation is frequently contingent on the degree to which one can dig to expose soils. Even then, if one looks attentively, the staggering complexity of the material tends to thwart any straightforward definition (Arnold and Eswaran 2003, 29; Schaetzl and Anderson 2005, 3).