OK, so this post is gonna make me seem like a Giant Geek.
I have to build a stock of continuing education credits as part of the certified professional soil scientist thing (I need forty hours in two years I think). This is kind of new to me, so I'm trying to get a jump on things and figure out how much of this I can do without actually going to $600 conferences (or whatever the going rate for these things is). I can get up to 10 or 20 credits just by reading journal articles. The nice thing is that I'm real close to OSU and they have plenty of journals to choose from.
So, one of the weekly e-mails that I get is from the National Academies and it mentioned a soil science related workshop. I went out and retrieved the headline paper related to the workshop and read it as my first CEU credit. It was called Advancing the Frontiers of Soil Science Towards a Geoscience and contained very little practical information about cleaning up a petroleum spill in the oil field, figuring out how to make synthetic Hanford groundwater, or some of the other challenges that confront me from time to time. In the paper, somebody is making a noisy case for introducing yet another hyphenated discipline into the field. Anyway, the paper had all sorts of BIG IDEA topics that I suspect academic proposal reviewers would eat up like girl scout cookies.
The take away point for me: Sometimes the scope of a scientific discipline is only limited by the boundaries placed upon it by the practitioners - its all about the conception of soil science by the people that do it. Soil Science used to be an applied science about making crops grow better. Now it has evolved and works in the environmental arena (my emphasis), and is starting to take on global climate issues.
It was published in an issue devoted to Hydropedology: Bridging disciplines, scales and data (When I asked Holly to pull the paper, she exclaimed "who ever heard of Geoderma". Beats me.). It looked like it had all sorts of good stuff in there for someone who is looking at soil/water interactions. For example: Soil moisture patterns in a forested catchment: A hydropedological perspective.
Anyway, by now it should be apparent that this post is simply a way to make a couple of readers that I know are out there aware of some stuff out there in the literature (literature that I have no business reading, I think) that might or might not be of interest.
At this point I will stop pretending to be a grad student. Go check out Kenny Roby's new album called the Mercy Filter. This guy was from the Clemson, South Carolina area and rocks harder than you.
2 comments:
Henry Mancini? Mike and the Mechanics? Michael Bolton?
Sounds like a tough crew (or shall I say: "tuf cru").
Geoderma is an international journal of soil science that takes a comprehensive perpspecitve on soil issues. The big wheel of ideas in soil science.
I recommend the 1998 issue on soil isotopes.
I whole heartedly agree with your take away point. I think we have to shatter the walls that constrain the soil scientist. Set them free and let them roam across these vast lands to spread the word of Jenny and Dokuchaev! Let their whetted auger penetrate the black boxes of unschooled disciplines so that minds will be borne anew...ok I'll stop.
But seriously, good point. If you are curious, check out C.S Holling's article on Panarchy in Ecosystems. Its an interesting article about the birth and death of ideas. Apparently there is some weird story behind this guy.
-What about G.Love and special sauce- are they from S.C.?
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