Naming, Knowing, and Understanding – Towards a Transdisciplinary Epistemology of the Soil.

On December 20, 2013, the UN General Assembly declared 2015 the International Year of Soils as an outreach strategy to “raise awareness and promote sustainability of limited soil resources.” The question arises as to what kind of information, knowledge, and language is necessary for raising soil awareness. Historically speaking, epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of knowledge and deals with the sources, structures, and scope of knowledge creation, knowledge networks (such as organizations and disciplines), as well as the subjective beliefs and doubts that arise with truth claims. To date, discussions on the epistemology of soil mainly refer to the understanding of local knowledge systems pertaining to land use practices (e.g. Akouegnon et al., 2006) and more generally to the practice of soil surveying and mapping as a way of representing and communicating scientific knowledge about the properties, distribution, use, management, and technical observation of soils at various spatial and temporal scales (see Bui, 2004 and Grunwald et al., 2012). In this paper, we go beyond existing epistemologies of the soil from a natural sciences point of view to explore soil terminology used by two very different groups of professionals that work with soils: scientists and artists. Using qualitative data gathered in a mixed-methods study of 103 artists and a follow-up opinion survey of fifty leading soil scientists and fifty artists world wide, we look at the language scientists and artists use in naming, knowing, and understanding the soil. This paper presents a “transdisciplinary epistemology of the soil” that considers the relevance of such a pluralistic epistemology in approaching the conservation and outreach goals set out by the UN for the International Year of Soils and beyond.