ABSTRACT
This is an Article about soil. In consequence, it is also an Article about our relationship to land, and about how that relationship can and must change to confront the many environmental crises facing the United States. Questions about our relationship with the physical environment around us necessarily come to the fore in conversations about soil because of its several identities. It is one of Earth’s most precious resources – the substance responsible for allowing plants to grow, filtering pollutants out of water, providing habitat to countless organisms, sequestering carbon, and providing many other valuable functions. Soil also, however, makes up the top layer of land, or the ‘portion of the earth’s solid surface distinguishable by boundaries or ownership’.
These kinds of dual identities are not unusual for conversations surrounding natural resources and private property rights. What is notable about soil governance in the United States is the lack of mechanisms to mediate between its identities as resource and property. Soil lacks the more robust statutory framework that resources like air and water have. Instead, the federal law dimension of soil governance offers a top-down, parcel-based approach generally devoid of benchmarks or action-forcing provisions. And the level of government historically vested with land-use planning and management responsibility in the United States – local governments – offers a dimension of soil governance focused much more on property rights and values than on environmental health …
Sarah J Fox, Soil Governance and Private Property, 2024 Utah Law Review 1.
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