Agroecosystem integrity and the internal cycling of nutrients

This chapter evaluates the origins of our soil stewardship instinct and asks whether or not the soil health paradigm embraced by agroecology is principally derived from current science or, instead, from social movements developed in reaction to modern agriculture and reductionist approaches to research. Humans associated soil organic matter with fertility and sustainability long before scientific evidence gave support to this notion. Early beliefs in the lithic origin of life that resulted in the use of soil as a metaphor for human well-being explain why soils are revered. The attack on the humus theory that took place in the nineteenth century was a rejection of this spiritual or metaphysical view of soils. Historical recountings emphasize that the humus theory wrongly argued that plants obtained their mass by consuming soil but leave out the fact that the theory considered questions about the origins of life and decay that trace back to Aristotle.