Long-formulated, significant questions remain unanswered about how humanity is transforming the earth's soil. These questions are complex as soil-forcing functions operate over multiple time scales: we require a human-integrated pedogenesis that telescopes over years, decades, centuries, and millennia. The notable absence of an active network of long-term soil experiments (LTSEs) directly limits understanding of decade- and century-scale pedology, specifically how contemporary land management, climate, and pollution change soils over time scales of human generations. Because soils result from high-order interactions of physics, chemistry, and biota, models are no substitute for direct long-term observations of soil change. Due to humanity's extensive history of impact on the earth's soil, contemporary soil change is increasingly conditioned by historic human use. Pedogenic processes also operate on millennial to multi-millennial time scales, and soil change is determined by mineralogy, landform, long-running climates, and many generations of biota. For practical purposes, three time scales are proposed for understanding contemporary soil change: multi-millennial (long-running pedologic process), centurial (the accumulation of historic human impacts that remain persistent in the soil's memory), and decadal (changes driven by the active functioning of the current ecosystem). Human affected changes in acidification and Fe-redox cycling in soils of a long-term soil experiment in southeastern North America illustrate the potential for considering soil pedogenesis with three temporal perspectives: i.e., contemporary, historic, and multi-millennial.