Hello there! Welcome to Saving Our Soil.
When you think about pollution, the image that pops in your head is probably of smoky air, or perhaps plastics choking the ocean. A more silent, but equally important pollution crisis is happening underfoot, in the world’s soils. In this blog, I hope to turn your attention away from the skies and seas for a moment, and instead do a deeper dive into the ground beneath us that is often overlooked in pollution discourse and understudied.
Soil has often been described as the Earth's skin - living, breathing, and in need of care and attention. Soil is the foundation of nearly every terrestrial biome. Ecosystems in their own right teeming with biodiversity, soils help provide 95% of our food through supporting agricultural systems (UN News, 2018). This 5-ingredient mixture can store vast amounts of carbon, up to three times more than the atmosphere (American University, 2020), among providing several other ecosystem services, from preventing floods to recycling nutrients. Yet, worryingly, soil health is being seriously compromised by pollutants that are increasingly ubiquitous in the Anthropocene or Capitalocene.
Figure 1. Functions and ecosystem services that are provided by soil. (UN FAO)
Soil pollutants come from both anthropogenic and natural sources. When there is a higher than normal concentration of pollutants, reaching toxic levels, it can lead to adverse impacts on soil organisms and ecosystem services. Often, the effects of soil pollution can not be seen visually, hence why it is often called an invisible crisis. Pollutants that enter the soil are vast and diverse; and so are the sources of the pollutants. When the pollutant source is not easily identifiable it is "diffuse” pollution, and when it can be linked to a specific activity or area the pollution is a “point-source” type (FAO, 2018).
Agricultural, municipal, industrial, and even war activities have historically treated soil as a dump yard for pollutants. If the pollution cannot be fully remediated, soil pollution effects can last for decades on end. What are the soil pollutant 'culprits' and mechanisms through which they pollute soils? Where do they come from? How do soil pollution and its effects differ across space, society, and temporally? What are the solutions to combat soil pollution, and is there anything we can do to save our soil? These are some of the questions I look forward to unpacking in this blog.
References
Fact Sheet: Soil Carbon Sequestration. (n.d.). American University. Retrieved January 13, 2022, from https://www.american.edu/sis/centers/carbon-removal/fact-sheet-soil-carbon-sequestration.cfm
Needelman, B. A. (2013) What Are Soils? Nature Education Knowledge 4(3):2
Rodríguez-Eugenio, N., McLaughlin, M. and Pennock, D. (2018). Soil Pollution: a hidden reality. Rome, FAO. 142 pp. https://www.fao.org/3/I9183EN/i9183en.pdf
Soil pollution ‘jeopardizing’ life on Earth, UN agency warns on World Day. (2018, December 5). UN News. https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/12/1027681