Integrating New Perspectives to Address Global Soil Security: Ideas from Integral Ecology

Global soil security is complex, encompassing technical, socioeconomic, and political issues and people’s beliefs and values. Our thesis is that global soil security and the soil health crisis we face today are due to a lack of awareness and understanding of prominent values and benefits soils provide to sustain humanity. In this paper, we use the integral lens to explore global soil security. The integral ecology model uses four interconnected perspectives (the individual-interior, collective-interior, individual-exterior, and collective-exterior) to study wicked environmental issues. We assert that cognizance is the key integrator to bring forth awareness, knowledge, and understanding within and across the four equally important perspectives. It has profound significance for global soil security because it reveals the underlying causes that jeopardize the security of soils and identifies chasms that constrain the sustainability of soil ecosystems. Cognizance is the (i) awareness and perceptions held by individuals and people (interior perspectives), (ii) the facts, knowledge, and understanding of external phenomena (exterior perspectives), and (iii) their interactive effects (i.e., integration across all four perspectives of the integral map). Importantly, cognizance is preceding any other dimension of soil security (connection, codification, capital, condition, and capability). Reductionist approaches that are one-sided (e.g., “soil science will fix the global soil security crisis”) ignore people’s beliefs and values and are non-cognizant of interconnected perspectives are doomed for failure. Ecological awareness is composed of exterior “scientist/observer/3rd person” qualities and interior “people/subjective” qualities. To achieve global soil security, it is necessary to grow ecological awareness evoking to value, care for, and secure the natural world including soils. Recognizing the significance of global soil security is closely linked to moral values and ethical beliefs people hold relative to soils. These beliefs provide the motivation and appropriate actions needed within cultural, social, environmental, and institutional contexts to secure soils.