Customizing Soil-Water Expertise for Different Users
Our lives depend upon and determine the fluxes of water and chemicals in the environment. Atmospheric, aquatic, and terrestrial systems are all characterized by transfer processes that make our lives possible. Some of these processes deliver the air, water, and nutrients that we need to produce food and fiber. Other transfer processes relocate our wastes as environmental contaminants that must be properly managed. As society grows in absolute numbers, so, too, must our concern for maintaining the balance between the wise use of our natural resources in a sustainable manner on the one hand, and the misuse of these resources through short-sightedness and mismanagement on the other hand. Utilization of our resources must be accompanied by protection of them, and knowledge of the role that transfer processes play in this balancing act is important. Management for the long term means that wise decisions in the short term are based on two key issues. First, there is a crucial need to further understand how natural processes, particularly transfer processes, operate. Without this knowledge base, we are unable to formulate logical and lasting solutions to environmental problems. While soil scientists have always focused on tabulating land characteristics in the form of soil surveys, there now is the need to translate these static characterizations into dynamic land qualities, such as soil transfer processes. As important, but less appreciated, is the fact that scientists are becoming increasingly accountable to our clients, the public, for approaches to solve problems that are important to society. This is particularly true for those scientists knowledgeable in transfer processes, for the obvious reasons of public focus on environmental management and pollution prevention. The decisions regarding the impact of our science will be debated, enacted, and enforced outside the scientific community. As we now realize, this means we must consider solutions to environmental problems that are endorsed not only by the scientific community, but also by the public citizenry and regulatory bodies. Many soil and water scientists are experts on transfer processes in the unsaturated zone of the soil.