Published October 20, 2016
Review & Analysis—Soil & Water Management & Conservation
H. Henry Janzen*
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
5403 1st Avenue South
Lethbridge, AB T1J 4B1
Canada.
Core Ideas
• Sustainability can only be measured
over long time periods.
• To evaluate sustainability, therefore,
we need a way of keeping track—a
memory.
• Soil offers such a memory because
the soil stays.
• An underlying aim of soil science is to
extract and describe soils’ memories.
Soil Science Society of America Journal
The Soil Remembers
Terrestrial ecosystems worldwide face mounting stresses and upheavals,
mostly from human demands and interferences. Our search for better ways of
living on these lands, however, is constrained by a most vexing variable: time.
The final outcomes of our management choices—well intended or not—will
often fully emerge only after decades, when we are no longer there to see
them. A way around this dilemma is to view a longer span of time by studying
the land’s own memories, notably those in the soil. Most ecosystem elements
flicker and fade, much as we do, but the soil stays, … and the soil remem-
bers. In this essay, I propose that the fundamental aim of soil science is to
extract and describe the narratives embedded in soils’ memories, and I pon-
der some ways of doing that. This guiding motive, perhaps, may offer hope
not only for our science but also for our lands everywhere—on which we and
those who follow us will always depend.
S
ixty years ago, leading scholars from many fields assembled in Princeton,
NJ, to ponder the human role in “changing the face of the Earth” (Thomas,
1956). They fretted about spiraling population; about depleting reserves of
land, food, and energy; about threatened species, the fouling of air and of water;
and yes, already then about emissions of CO2. Among the luminaries there was
Charles Galton Darwin, a physicist and grandson of his more famous namesake.
Citing Rutherford, he said: “[M]ost of the problems presented to us by nature
could be defeated by experiment but … there was one thing which would always
defeat us, and this was time” (Darwin, 1956). “Some of the things we want to
study,” he mused, “depend … on time itself, and then everything becomes much
more difficult.”
The litany of troubles that prompted the Princeton gathering afflicts us still
today, but at a quickening pace, widening scale, and mounting urgency. And, as
then, the most vexing variable in addressing global change is time. By definition,
change can be seen only with the passage of time. It is time, driven irreversibly by
growing entropy, that relentlessly shuttles the ever-coming future into the past,
leaving in its wake remolded forms on the land as evidence of its passing (Mumford,
1956; Carroll, 2010; Tiezzi, 2003, 2006). And often enough, especially in recent
decades, the signs of its passing—more CO2 in the air, bio-depleted ecosystems,
nutrient-polluted waters, for example—are symptoms of the human presence, ves-
tiges of our acts and aspirations. For this reason, the ecologically minded, intent on
assuaging or healing human damage to the biosphere, are “haunted by the conse-
quences of time” (Hardin, 1993, p. 15).
But always, in addressing biospheric change, we are constrained by Darwin’s
dilemma: the consequences of our actions, reckless or benevolent, are fully re-
vealed only over lengths of time exceeding our brief cognizance (Foster et al., 2003;
Kümmerer et al., 2010; Raffaelli and White, 2013). The changes happening now
reflect lingering repercussions of events and choices made before our tenure. And
Soil Sci. Soc. Am. J.
doi:10.2136/sssaj2016.05.0143
Open access.
Received 10 May 2016.
Accepted 15 Aug. 2016.
*Corresponding author (Henry.Janzen@agr.gc.ca).
© Soil Science Society of America. This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC-ND
license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
the presumptive benefit of what we do today—the practices we
adopt, the policies we enact—will be fully realized or refuted
only when we are no longer around to see it. In every ecosystem
worldwide, and in the biosphere itself, we are now performing
a long experiment, with no controls (Revelle and Suess, 1957).
Owing to inscrutable complexity, our ecosystems’ future vitali-
ties can never be predicted precisely (Boyd, 2012; Weinberger,
2012; Sutherland et al., 2013; Villa et al., 2014)–only time, across
a span exceeding our view, will reveal their evolving, interwoven
trajectories. We seek to manage our lands sustainably, we say;
but we cannot know in advance whether our well-intentioned
practices will, in fact, enhance our ecosystems’ future function-
ing (Costanza and Patten, 1995; White, 2013). Time is the final
arbiter, the eventual judge; and it renders its verdict only halt-
ingly, unhurriedly, often only after decades, centuries even, when
we are no longer there to hear its judgement.
How then do we resolve Darwin’s dilemma? How do
we extend our purview of changes beyond the fleeting human
span (Schlesinger, 2010)? The answer, emerging from dispa-
rate fields of study, lies in scrutinizing the lands’ own memories
(Dokuchaev, cited by Sokolov, 1996; Hyams, 1952; Hoskins,
1955; Drabble, 1979; Schama, 1995; Bowker, 2008; Perring et
al., 2016). Cumulative memory binds together events, scattered
over time, into a meaningful continuum, connecting all that hap-
pened in the past to what is happening now, as the future gradu-
ally displaces the malleable present. The memory of land duly
records responses to unfolding stresses and upheavals, foreshad-
owing injuries and renewals yet to come.
Of particular urgency, now in the Anthropocene, is discern-
ing human influences, recorded in the planet’s lands. “There ex-
ists … in external material nature, an ineffaceable, imperishable
record … of every act done, every word uttered, nay, of every wish
and purpose and thought conceived by mortal man, from the
birth of our first parent to the final extinction of our race,” wrote
Marsh (1864, p. 548–549), a little floridly, in an early treatise
on global change induced by humans. Lowdermilk (1953, p. 1)
concurred: “In a very real sense the land does not lie; it bears a re-
cord of what [humans] write on it.” Few if any lands, now, world-
wide, remain untouched, untrampled by the ever more pervasive
human presence (Ellis, 2011). Exploring the memories of lands
can divulge the lingering traces of human missteps as well as our
inspired choices and show us how, in coming years, to tread more
tenderly on land.
The land archives its memories in many media; a long-lived
tree, for example, records the human signal on the atmosphere
through centuries of time (Hartley, 2010). But its longest, most
lasting and indelible memories are recorded in the soil (Richter
and Yaalon, 2012; Lin, 2011; Richter et al., 2011). People come
and go, trees will burn or rot away, but the soil stays, and the soil
remembers.
The soil is at the confluence of energy and matter fluxes in
the ecosystem (Targulian and Sokolova, 1996). Most of the so-
lar energy trapped by photosynthesis in carbonaceous molecules
passes through the soil; the nutrients coursing through the ecosys-
∆ Soil Science Society of America Journal
tem stream through the soil in endless cycles; pollutants released
into the sky are neutralized within the soil. And in their passing
through, the energy, the nutrients, the pollutants leave behind a
trace, indelibly etched into the memory of the soil, recorded there
in chemical, isotopic, biological, and physical script. Perceptive
analysis of the soil can thus disclose the burning of ancient fires
(Schmidt and Noack, 2000), changes to climate in another era
(Monger and Rachal, 2013), the ingenuity of farmers long forgot-
ten (Wiedner et al., 2015; Pagano et al., 2016), the signatures of
vegetative cover no longer present (Balesdent et al., 1988; Ertlen
et al., 2015), the ripples from plowing a century ago (Ellert and
Janzen, 2006), the release of pollutants from smelters decades ago
(Schindler and Hochella, 2015), the explosion of an atom bomb
half a world away (Jenkinson et al., 2008). Today’s analysis of a soil
reveals its instantaneous construct, but the time-attuned analyst
sees in that moment the residues of centuries. By virtue of its mem-
ory, the soil is a seamless continuum, connecting ecosystems not
only over space but also over time. By careful reading of the soil,
then, the landscape becomes a “timescape” (Buell, 2001, p. 77).
Perhaps the soils’ most illuminating memories are those of
things once living, recorded in organic matter. The “decay of ani-
mal and vegetable matter,” said Burroughs (1908, p. 199–213),
long ago, is the process “that gives the humus to the soil, in fact,
almost humanizes it, making it tender and full of sentiment and
memories, as it were, so that it responds more quickly to our
needs and to our culture. The elements of the soil remember all
those forms of animal and vegetable life of which they once made
a part, and they take them on again the more readily.” The study
of soil organic matter, then, is really a study of biotic memories,
of how living things, whether bacteria or people, reshape and are
themselves reshaped by their habitat, through many generations.
It is an investigation of the interweaving of land and life that
might guide us to a more symbiotic future.
The memories of soil may be most instructive to us in
farmlands and other managed ecosystems. Here, especially, the
memories speak not only of natural processes; they speak more
forcefully about our influence, of how we have rearranged the
land and modified its processes. Such potential insights, still not
fully seen, might impel us to consider time more explicitly in our
studies, probing the soil’s memories, hoping to see in the length-
ening past the first inklings of what is yet to be. Soil science then
becomes not a study of what is, but of what is happening, and
of what is yet to happen (Sears, 1935); it becomes a study not
only of how things are, but also of how they are evolving. As an
example, consider the question of land health (Leopold, 1949).
What matters most, perhaps, is not how the health of the land
varies across space–is its health “better” here than there?—but
how the health of a given field or meadow or woodland is chang-
ing with time under our lengthening stewardship. Is it holding
up or building, or is it slowly waning? The soil can tell of such
things, for the soil remembers.
Learning from the soil’s memory demands a long view, peer-
ing ahead into the future from our vantage in the remembered
past ( Janzen, 2001); it invites us to look beyond the instinctive
preoccupation with current productivity to see the long-unfold-
ing trajectories, for ecology uses a slower clock to measure time
than does the economy (Arnold, 2006; Berry, 2005). One way
of fostering this long view is through “listening places” ( Janzen,
2009; Schaefer and Tillmanns, 2015)—places set aside for pa-
tient and oft-repeated measurements, where our observations are
melded into those of our predecessors, then handed off as heir-
looms to those who follow us. In that way, we bequeath a length-
ening legacy—a library expanding with time—from which to
read the soil’s memory and elicit portents of what is yet to be.
What we learn from such long-term listening places, of course,
cannot be extrapolated directly—each place responds to time
uniquely—but it helps us calibrate the reading of soil memory
against our current measurements. Long-term sites are case stud-
ies from which to decipher nature’s language recorded in the soil,
much as a scrap of ancient parchment is used to translate an un-
known script: “I wish to learn this language …”, said Ralph Waldo
Emerson (Whicher and Spiller, 1966, p. 26), “that I may read the
great book which is written in that tongue.”
The underlying aim of soil science, in thinking about time, is
to reveal the narratives of our lands, stories of how we are shaping
the land by demands and practices imposed on it. In the end, it is
narratives we seek by probing the memories of the soil, not merely
data or statistically significant differences. Narratives are what pull
together disparate observations scattered over time into a long
continuum that is heading somewhere, offering meaning, impart-
ed by a destination still not fully seen (Hyams, 1952; Haff, 2014).
And the legacy of our science depends not only on discerning these
narratives but also on finding more compelling ways of recounting
the stories we bring to light. As Jenny (1984) admitted frankly, we
have not always told those narratives in lucid and appealing ways:
“our soil language is lifeless, and the soil descriptions in our pub-
lications are utterly boring.” This may be, in part, because soil has
been seen as merely material, not as memory; as a resource, not
a repository of stories, binding together life and restless elements
through the stream of time (Taylor, 2008). The soil’s still-evolving
narratives, wisely perceived and passionately recounted, are what
make our studies so inviting and enriching; it is the stories residing
in soil, told by those who have learned to read its memories, that
may finally enamor all who rely on soils’ manifold functions.
Looking at soil as memory, a repository of recorded changes
and renewals, may yield what some say is most urgently needed in
biospheric research today: a forward-looking outlook—a sense
of hope. That quaint, distinctly non-scientific term is cropping
up now, more and more, even in the august academic literature
(Swaisgood and Sheppard, 2010; Garnett and Lindenmayer, 2011;
Orr, 2011; Balmford, 2012, p. 1–17; Knight, 2013; Stevenson and
Peterson, 2016; Head, 2016). It is the interface between memory
and yearnings, the tension between what is remembered and what
can yet be. The soil, by virtue of its memory, is a conveyor of hope,
foreshadowing tomorrow’s fruitfulness in insights sprouting today.
Seen across long durations, soil is innately resilient, often able to
renew itself, to resurrect its life-sustaining functions, even after
damaging upheavals and disturbances. A century ago, for example,
www.soils.org/publications/sssaj ∆
scientists expressed alarm over humus loss from newly cultivated
prairies (Shutt, 1910), but longer observation showed the soil ad-
justing and then restabilizing, mostly by its native resilience (Shutt,
1925). Given time enough, even a soil willfully denuded can some-
times slowly regain vitality (Larney et al., 2016); even a soil de-
spoiled by reckless mining practices can gradually recover function
(Bradshaw, 1997). Looking at soil over multi-decadal time, as re-
corded in its memory, may move us from merely mourning and
denouncing past degradation to patiently awaiting soil’s slow and
subtle promise of renewal. It may move us beyond merely scram-
bling to avoid more losses to also asking: how can we aid and abet
soil’s indigenous, relentless processes of restoring itself and the land
in which it is embedded? What unfinished narrative lies latent,
still unseen and undiscovered, in the degraded monoculture wheat
field, the trampled mud on the river’s edge, the overgrazed eroding
pasture land, the clearcut forestland, the weedy urban lot? Time is
not only a constraint, it can also be an ally if we have persistence
enough, and foresight enough—and hope enough.
Only after decades will time divulge how well we have lived
in each of our places and within the larger biosphere. Only unfold-
ing time, its narrative faithfully recorded in the soil, will resolve
Darwin’s dilemma. It is by studying soil, and by nurturing it, that
we lengthen and strengthen our own hopeful communion with
the land along the continuum of time. For the soil remembers, and
one day, for better or for worse, it will remember also us.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Funding was provided by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. I thank
Kimberley Beattie for assistance in preparing the manuscript, and several
reviewers and the associate editor for offering insights that strengthened
its content. Most of all, I am grateful to countless mentors, those I have
worked alongside and those I know only through their timeless writings,
for wisdom that continues to inspire.
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