The Science of Dirt

by Jeremy Vetter

Have you ever wandered through the A's (A=Agriculture) of the government documents section in a big research library? Then maybe you've noticed shelves upon shelves of big thick books, often thousands of pages long, called the Field Operations of the Bureau of Soils and dating back to the turn of the twentieth century. Perhaps you've never been tempted to open one up--after all, what could sound more boring than a soil survey report from a hundred years ago--but, as you can see (at right), I've done just that. In fact, as a historian of the environmental sciences, I've been increasingly convinced of the importance of soil science to how we have come to know the natural world in modern society, and I have found myself opening up, reading, and thinking about more and more of these soil reports. Each one features a fold-out map showing where different soil types are located--this one depicts the whole western half of North Dakota. It was published as part of the 10th volume reporting on the field operations of the U.S. Bureau of Soils, for the year 1908 (Macy Lapham and Party, "Soil Survey of Western North Dakota," pp. 1155-1228).

What makes this particular soil survey report noteworthy is that it was the first time that the Bureau was attempting a "reconnoisance"[sic], as they called it, "covering an area only slightly less than the total area of the State of Ohio, and greater than the combined area of the States of Maine and New Hampshire" (p. 1156). Most of the reports before that--and afterward as well--were on a smaller scale, usually of a single county or irrigation project. Yet the demand for environmental knowledge was especially intense around this time on the Great Plains due to the land boom based on dry farming (i.e. without irrigation) that was occurring then. So the Bureau decided to abandon its more usual, detailed field procedures in order to cover a lot of ground quickly. Instead of making finer distinctions based on different soil textures, the Bureau instead defined soil types over larger areas "based upon similarity in origin, in agricultural value, and in importance for dry farming, the principal object of this survey being to supply a demand for general information regarding the possibilities of dry-land farming and to delimit in a general way the areas suited to farming, mixed farming and grazing, and grazing alone" (p. 1191). Indeed, as was often the case, the written report covered much more than simply the soil types themselves: everything from climate and crop growing techniques to transportation and the availability of markets, thus providing a more all-encompassing view of how scientific knowledge might contribute to a particular vision of economic development in a sparsely populated region. This whole story takes on a greater poignancy if one knows that around a decade later the entire northern Plains region would experience a devastating economic bust due to drought and leading to the depopulation of much of the region--a predecessor of the more famous Dust Bowl of the early 1930s.

This soil survey of western North Dakota is simply one example among a huge number of how science in this period was heavily shaped--including how soils and other parts of nature were categorized and mapped--by the era's dominant capitalist economic development assumptions. In this case, as in many others, the role of science was envisioned as rationalizing that development process in order to match human activities to the landscape more efficiently--and the soil scientists were probably correct to observe that more haphazard and environmentally disastrous settlement choices were already occurring in the absence of such knowledge. Then, as now, science was touted as a means of harmonizing economic development with environmental reality. It is much the same vision that has guided more recent attempts to use scientific knowledge to measure economic value for "ecosystem services" and even to mitigate climate change by trading permits for greenhouse gas equivalents. Such efforts are in one sense laudable and perhaps better than nothing, though there is a growing and persuasive body of critical social science that calls into question whether it is even possible to use science in this way without material interests intervening. Perhaps a more thoroughgoing public discussion is in order about what values and goals should guide the way we do environmental science. Can science save economic development from itself by making it more rational and efficient, or will the human relationship to the whole Earth be more like the boom and bust of agriculture on the northern Great Plains?