{"title":"Exploring the artistic dimensions of soils in the vadose zone","authors":"Gerd Wessolek, Alexandra R. Toland","doi":"10.1002/vzj2.20308","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The rise of industrialized agriculture, coupled with a global demographic shift toward urbanization, has marginalized every‐day connections between individuals and soils. This societal shift has led to a decline in the appreciation of and cultural identity with soils. Amid a broader movement aimed at fostering soil awareness and environmental action, many artists and designers have been instrumental in bringing soils to the cultural mainstream, figuring their esthetic, social, political, and ecological dimensions. Contemporary artists place great importance on the underlying idea of animating soils through artistic practice, often transcending the physical artifact itself to assign agency to soils and the myriad beings that occupy them. Artists harness a multitude of media to articulate human‐soil relationships. From the early environmental art movements of the 1960s and 1970s to contemporary works centered on urban and industrial brownfields, soils’ multifaceted roles in CO2 transformation, water and nutrient cycling, agriculture, and as living bodies buffering against pollution have become ground for public discourse. What could this mean for the vadose zone in terms of reflecting on material flows in porous media beyond understandings of soil physics? In this paper, we draw on over 20 years of experience in studying the portrayal of soil in various arts genres to deliberate the potential of creative thinking about and thinking with the vadose zone.","PeriodicalId":23594,"journal":{"name":"Vadose Zone Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5000,"publicationDate":"2024-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Vadose Zone Journal","FirstCategoryId":"89","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1002/vzj2.20308","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"地球科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The rise of industrialized agriculture, coupled with a global demographic shift toward urbanization, has marginalized every‐day connections between individuals and soils. This societal shift has led to a decline in the appreciation of and cultural identity with soils. Amid a broader movement aimed at fostering soil awareness and environmental action, many artists and designers have been instrumental in bringing soils to the cultural mainstream, figuring their esthetic, social, political, and ecological dimensions. Contemporary artists place great importance on the underlying idea of animating soils through artistic practice, often transcending the physical artifact itself to assign agency to soils and the myriad beings that occupy them. Artists harness a multitude of media to articulate human‐soil relationships. From the early environmental art movements of the 1960s and 1970s to contemporary works centered on urban and industrial brownfields, soils’ multifaceted roles in CO2 transformation, water and nutrient cycling, agriculture, and as living bodies buffering against pollution have become ground for public discourse. What could this mean for the vadose zone in terms of reflecting on material flows in porous media beyond understandings of soil physics? In this paper, we draw on over 20 years of experience in studying the portrayal of soil in various arts genres to deliberate the potential of creative thinking about and thinking with the vadose zone.
期刊介绍:
Vadose Zone Journal is a unique publication outlet for interdisciplinary research and assessment of the vadose zone, the portion of the Critical Zone that comprises the Earth’s critical living surface down to groundwater. It is a peer-reviewed, international journal publishing reviews, original research, and special sections across a wide range of disciplines. Vadose Zone Journal reports fundamental and applied research from disciplinary and multidisciplinary investigations, including assessment and policy analyses, of the mostly unsaturated zone between the soil surface and the groundwater table. The goal is to disseminate information to facilitate science-based decision-making and sustainable management of the vadose zone. Examples of topic areas suitable for VZJ are variably saturated fluid flow, heat and solute transport in granular and fractured media, flow processes in the capillary fringe at or near the water table, water table management, regional and global climate change impacts on the vadose zone, carbon sequestration, design and performance of waste disposal facilities, long-term stewardship of contaminated sites in the vadose zone, biogeochemical transformation processes, microbial processes in shallow and deep formations, bioremediation, and the fate and transport of radionuclides, inorganic and organic chemicals, colloids, viruses, and microorganisms. Articles in VZJ also address yet-to-be-resolved issues, such as how to quantify heterogeneity of subsurface processes and properties, and how to couple physical, chemical, and biological processes across a range of spatial scales from the molecular to the global.