Soil Change and a New Worldview of Soils.

Taking a holistic and evolutionary view, this paper examines various types of soil change over time and space. In particular, the paper emphasizes a new worldview of soils that facilitates the understanding of complex soil changes. This new worldview emphasizes the interwoven nature of conservation and evolution, the intimate link between internal organization and system function, the systems between extremes, and the unprecedented impacts of anthropogenic activities. In the spectrum of things in nature that range from nonliving to living, soils fall right in the middle—functioning as the bridge between the biotic and the abiotic worlds and possessing enormous internal power as the nurturing ground for life. The co-evolution of fast and slow changes in soils is the nature’s way of sustainable development, where hidden forces drive natural succession and non-closed fluxes lead to structural and informational accumulation over time. A new kind of physics is suggested to enhance the understanding of soil change, including 1) the modification of the Newton’s three laws of motion, 2) the internal organization (rather than externality) of soils in response to perturbations, and 3) interactions and feedbacks in the medium number systems (i.e., systems too complex for classical analytics and too organized for statistical treatment). Modern soil vulnerability to global change and anthropogenic threats requires better monitoring and quantification of soil changes of various kinds to truly understand and protect precious soils.