Excerpt
AS judged by conventional resource and environmental textbooks, most of society still seems to believe that soils are a renewable resource. However, this is not academic opinion in some countries, such as Australia, where largely fragile, leached, or depleted soils have been worked hard for several generations.
The leading edge of academic thinking now is that a majority of world soils, apart from the deepest and most rapidly forming, are nonrenewable within a human lifetime. Estimated rates of soil formation are so slow as to be negligible in real terms or less than the rate of nutrient extraction from upper zones of the soil profile.
The question of renewability
The data, analysis, and proof that soils are, with few exceptions, nonrenewable can be used to show that short-term time frames are not really appropriate for sensible land use planning, the conversion of one land use to another, or monitoring land use factors. Land development planning has become burdened by the short-term political decision process that rests upon change taking place within …
Footnotes
Joe A. Friend is a lecturer and researcher with the Department of Agronomy and Soils, University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351, Australia.
- Copyright 1992 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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