Talk:Soil retrogression and degradation

message: The following insight may apply to the article:
"Before I started up the Pygmy forest staircase, I believed any natural ecosystem improves over time, that roots would hold the essential soil minerals and add topsoil, increase in stability and maybe increase diversity. Or if the ecosystem should happen not to improve, at least it would stay constant indefinitely. By the time we headed back to Berkeley, the pillars of my ecological understanding had been shaken. In the younger first and second terraces away from the ocean, the redwood and Douglas fir forest loomed up around us. Terrace three was a transition zone that included Jeffrey pine, and terraces four and five (the older) were pygmy forest, severely stunted in appearance."
"Over the next several weeks, letters were exchanged, and finally, about four months after the field trip, a letter came from Hans saying he was unaware of such a concept as steadily improving ecosystems. He said such a "sunshiney belief rests on a neglect to appreciate the soil as a dynamic — either improving or degrading — vital component of land ecosystems." There was little comfort in the fact that I had had it half right."
"Fundamentalism sometimes dies hard. Staring into a soil pit dug into the fourth terrace, I could sympathize with the churchmen who refused to look through Galileo's telescope. Even there, with the evidence before me, I protested, saying that good farming can improve the soil. "Yes," Hans said, but "the extent depends on what kind of a soil, virgin or depleted, the farmer begins with." He thought it would be difficult to improve a good virgin Iowa prairie soil by management techniques, except perhaps by applying nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium."
"This was the beginning of an important lesson for me. Since then I have burdened myself and my students with the question: Why should a look to nature, as we work out our relationship to the earth, provide us with easy absolutes?" 
"As you can see, this is a story that lends itself neither to sound bites nor bumper stickers. It is not a story to discredit organic gardening, but it is a story that illustrates, for all practical purposes, that soil is as much of a non-renewable resource as oil." 
from: Fertility and the Age of Soils by Wes Jackson. The Land Institute
Based on the above, one would have to conclude that soil climax is not truly sustainable under natural conditions.  Climax in soils is still a workable concept in the shorter timescales involving 100's and 1000's of years relevant to issues of land use ethics, stewardship and sustainability.  The concept of climax often doesn't hold for geologic timescales of 10,000s and 100,000s of years.  Perhaps there is a way to improve the article in this regard without diluting the central message.
Paleorthid 05:55, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Climax 

message: I freely admit to knowing little about the topic of this article.  But shouldn't it in fact be named Soil retrogression and degradation?  Silverhelm 00:46, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article name 

message: :Don't panic.  I can't express how pleased to see a response to my concerns. I was losing hope.
:You indicate above that the statements in the introduction currently tagged  are supported by Précis de pédologie by Philippe Duchaufour.  This indicates Précis... was published in 1960. I have added in the ref and removed the tags.
:To respond, the circumstances here did not seem usual to me. Consider that we American soil scientists are not exposed to the concept of soils retrogression. Without a verifiable source, this article had fatal deficiencies that land degradation did not. I proposed merging soils retrogression and degradation as a constructive (supportive, respectful) alternative to nominating it for deletion as a violation of WP:OR.  I tagged it  only after the  tag had gotten stale.  
:The history (and availability) of our individual edit contributions would not disappear in a merger - a redirect should preserve the article history. Am I missing anything? -- Paleorthid 03:02, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I left off that if article cut&paste procedures would result in the loss of important edit history, the history can also can be moved, and should be moved for copyright reasons. I had forgotten about this aspect, thanks for needling me into recall.  I don't really understand how this works and not clear if it would work for (or is intended to apply to) moving sections. It takes an admin, which I am not. If I ever cut&paste to move significant content between articles, I'll be sure to get an admin's advice before attempting it. -- Paleorthid 13:40, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  removed tags for mergeto and fact 

message: Adding the above qualifier to the introductory sentence reconciles the discepancies in term use presented earlier. The meaning of soils retrogression and soil degradation changes depending on the national school of pedology. -- Paleorthid 14:07, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  in the French school of pedology 

message: As far as I know, no editor of this article has actually read the cited reference. Someone, in the Soil WikiProject perhaps, needs to review the citation against the article. See article assessment at Wikipedia:WikiProject Soil/Worklist -- Paleorthid 18:43, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Expert needed