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STRATEGIES IN SOIL PROTECTION - MISSIONS AND VISIONS
Citation:
Chaney, R. L., J A. Ryan*, AND P. G. Reeves. STRATEGIES IN SOIL PROTECTION - MISSIONS AND VISIONS. Presented at Symposium on Soil protection in the United Europe, Vienna, AUSTRIA, September 05, 2001.
Impact/Purpose:
To focus and discuss the needs and methods for soil protection.
Description:
The focus of this paper is the progress to reach our present understandings of the needs and methods for "Soil protection." Soil is critical to human life, needed for production of foods safe for lifetime consumption. Soils must be protected for support of human societies. Until the industrial revolution, soil was seldom at risk from human contamination processes except for microbial contamination. By 1970, most agronomic and environmental scientists recognized that some soil contamination processes were global, some were regional, others were local, and that extreme soil contamination with some metals prevented plant life. "Pollution prevention" and "green manufacturing" were widely adopted in the developed countries since 1970, and source controls have been very effective in reducing most important soil contamination processes. Yes, there are land areas which require remediation because of historic contamination, but new contamination is rare in developed countries. perhaps the battle is not fully won, but we should agree that scientific progress in risk assessment, pretreatment of industrial wastes and recycling of metal wastes, and in remediation methods for metal contaminated soils, have given us tools to protect soils to the extent needed to protect humans and the environment. Some will not agree with this conclusion, and we attribute that to the difficulty of understanding risk assessment and the fullness of present food-chain safety assessment. This paper is an overview of progress in understanding the potential risks from metals in soils. Soil Protection includes physical, chemical, and biological protection of soils to maintain function. From a human perspective, soils need to remain capable of producing high yields of nutritious foods, yet protect other aspects of the local and regional environment. It is important to note that a rational consideration of this need does not require keeping soils pristine (free of any contaminant from anthropogenic sources); indeed, pristine soils are often very infertile and unproductive. And pristine soils can be metal rich from geogenic sources and comprise unacceptable metal risks. From the perspective of environmental contaminants of agricultural soils, our goal should be to maintain soils so that foods safe for lifetime consumption can be produced, and that humans, livestock, wildlife, plants and soil biota are not harmed by consuming the soil, or crops, livestock or wildlife produced on the soil, or from runoff, volatilization or leaching of contaminants from the soil. Indeed, "agronomy" covers these wide topics of sources, soils, plants, and animals. The agronomy of soil heavy metals in the environment has been a complicated topic for research and regulation because so many areas of science must be considered to achieve comprehensive risk assessment needed for Soil Protection judgments.