Aspects
The term soil health is used to assess the ability of a soil to:
- Sustain plant and animal productivity and diversity;
- Maintain or enhance water and air quality;
- Support human health and habitation
The underlying principle in the use of the term “soil health” is that soil is not just a growing medium, rather it is a living, dynamic and ever-so-subtly changing environment. We can use the human health analogy and categorise a healthy soil as one:
- In a state of composite well-being in terms of biological, chemical and physical properties;
- Not diseased or infirmed (i.e. not degraded, nor degrading), nor causing negative off-site impacts;
- With each of its qualities cooperatively functioning such that the soil reaches its full potential and resists degradation;
- Providing a full range of functions (especially nutrient, carbon and water cycling) and in such a way that it maintains this capacity into the future.
Read more about this topic: Soil Health
Famous quotes containing the word aspects:
“The happiest two-job marriages I saw during my research were ones in which men and women shared the housework and parenting. What couples called good communication often meant that they were good at saying thanks to one another for small aspects of taking care of the family. Making it to the school play, helping a child read, cooking dinner in good spirit, remembering the grocery list,... these were silver and gold of the marital exchange.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“I suppose an entire cabinet of shells would be an expression of the whole human mind; a Flora of the whole globe would be so likewise, or a history of beasts; or a painting of all the aspects of the clouds. Everything is significant.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.... Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)