Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
soil cycling in urban areas. This was not only a profound intervention into nutrient
cycles, but created a hygienic menace as well. Human feces, when discarded into
open water used for drinking, can lead to transmission of several diseases such as
typhoid fever. In Japan or China, nightsoil collection worked also in urbanized
areas, leading to better hygiene and less nutrient loss. But with much more livestock
on the land in Europe, human feces were commonly less economical there.
Concern about lost nutrients accompanied urbanization and predates soil science.
The alchemist Johann Rudolf Glauber (
1704
) had already described a nitrate cycle.
He based his reasoning on observations that saltpeter (nitre) could be obtained from
the clearing of cattle sheds, and hence had to be the product of the digestion of
vegetable matter, as it could not be a product of the animals themselves.
While in a process of trial and error, guesswork and experiment, with many
wrong alleys taken but many advances, too, an understanding of chemical elements,
their cycles and the intricacies of nutrient uptake by plants developed from the 17th
century onwards, having a
s agricultural chemistry.
Land-use, however, stayed traditional: Cultivation practices had to be adapted to the
soil, in an agro-economy which was at the same time an agro-ecology.
71
Erosion and measures against it were a concern on slopes and valleys in
Northern Europe, too. Terracing, especially for vineyards, continues to shape some
of the most renowned cultural landscapes. But when one third of the total erosion of
the past 1500 years in the middle part of Germany happened within one week in
July, 1342, due to excessive rainfall and subsequent
rst culmination in Liebig
'
oods, when gullies were cut
into landscapes, roads and infrastructure buried under precious topsoil washed away
by the current, medieval Germans had no remedies.
72
Subsequent centuries brought
an increase in
oods and the erosion they bring
will always be part of human life, which has been concentrated in the rich alluvial
landscapes along rivers and coasts. Humans are, where soil is, and although they do
not appreciate the dynamic of riverine ecosystems, their life does in part depend on
the fresh soils brought by the rivers.
oodwater protection measures, but
3.3.3 Soils Over the Long Course of Human History:
Sustainability and Ecological Inheritance
Rather than discussing soils in industrialized societies as a series of case studies, a
long-term view will place the role of soils in industrialized societies in perspective.
Whoever visits the rice paddies of China, the terraces of the Rhone valley vine-
yards, the poldered
elds of the Netherlands or the
'
Danger, No Entrance
'
signs
'
'
around a patch of polluted soil, faces an
. This concept has
been elaborated by evolutionary biologists Laland, Odling-Smee, and Feldman in
ecological heritage
71
Krausmann (
2004
).
72
Bork et al. (
1998
).
