Beyond a Rhetoric of Soil and Ecosystem Recovery.

Disturbance and recovery are important to the thinking and discussions of soil and ecosystem science. Scientists have made many short-term observations of how soils and ecosystems are altered by a variety of disturbances, but many fewer that describe soil and ecosystem changes over the decades that follow. We frequently use language and arguments that assume that post-disturbance changes tend to lead to recovery. These assumptions are questioned and suggested to be more than academic, as the majority of Earth’s soils and ecosystems are accumulating legacies of disturbance and management impacts. Regeneration may be more appropriate to recovery in characterizing changes in post-disturbance systems.