ABSTRACT
The idea finds its origin during the period of increasing awareness and public concerns about deteriorating environmental quality of Mother Earth, facing the debilitating effect of acid rains and global warming during the early 1970 and 1980s. In the melee to add the term environmental to almost anything in science, soil science was no exception. Fearful of losing its momentum in the already decreasing students’ interest in soil science, environmental soil science was born at that time. For many universities, it was a tool to enhance their declining enrollment in soil science, and therefore a variety of interpretations are available for the meaning of environmental soil science. To some it is the science of human interactions with the pedo-, bio-, litho-, hydro-, and atmosphere, whereas to others it is the science of mixing-linking soil science with physics, life and environmental sciences, as exemplified by the public statements of enrollments at the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, and the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences of the University of Delaware (Fritton, 2007; Sparks, 2004). A better formulated concept so far is perhaps from the College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences of Washington State University that defines its environmental soil science course as the basic principles of
soils in their role as the components of agricultural and natural ecosystems in affecting the quality of the environment (William, 2007). These are just a few examples, and many other variations available are not mentioned here for fear of becoming long-winded, since they all are practically bringing the same message. Some of them are narrow in scope and others are using only the term environmental science for emphasizing soil and land use problems and their effects on surface and subsurface waters. In a very narrow scope, environmental soil science is often interpreted as the study of remediation of soils and waters degraded by pollution and contamination. A good example in this respect is perhaps the concept of environmental soil science at Purdue University, where it is perceived as the study on how toxic and hazardous wastes, sludges, metals, fertilizers, and pesticides may affect the environment. However, these are only just a few among the many components, which Hillel (2004) tries to sum up nicely in his book. All these components together with still many others, as will be pointed out below, will make up the science that we call today environmental soil science. The term e.soil science, proposed by Pennsylvania State University (Fritton, 2007), is perhaps somewhat out of context, since “e” is commonly used today for “electronic,” such as in e-mail, e-book, etc.
