Particulars in Context: Maintaining a Balance in Soil Geography

A s society faces increasingly complex environmental and social problems, calls for integrative, interdisciplinary solutions are growing (e.g., Cairns 1993; Patten 1994; Lubchenco 1998). As participants in an integrative discipline, geographers have often considered themselves ideally situated to tackle these questions. Geography has always been (and remains) a generalized-as opposed to a specialized discipline. Its viewpoint is one of broad understanding, states one introductory physical geography textbook (McKnight 1996: 3). Another emphasizes, Geography is in a unique position to synthesize the environmental, spatial, and human aspects of all these (Christopherson 1997:5). We often make similar statements to our students or otherswhenever we need to explain our discipline to outsiders. But privately, among ourselves, we may question the veracity of these assertions. The bewildering multiplicity of subspecialties within geography makes communication across subdisciplinary boundaries difficult, and we wonder whether, as a discipline, we have carved up the world to such an extent that we have lost the right to make claims to synthesis or integration. Have we prodigally sold our integrative inheritance and run off to squander it on the glittering, reductionist high life? Behind these vague feelings of unease in the discipline lie valid methodological questions. In this paper, I discuss a few of the methodological implications from the vantage point of the subdiscipline of soil geography.I I argue that, despite the difficulties, we must strive to bridge the gap between subdisciplinary reductionist research, on the one hand, and society's real-world concerns on the other. I begin by describing two approaches to research in soil geography, the state-factor approach and the process-based approach. The tension between these two orientations embodies a key methodological issue in soil geography today. Next, I examine the relative merits of reductionism and synthesis in soil geography. I conclude by reflecting on the nature of disciplinary identity and the struggle of integrative disciplines like soil geography to maintain a balance between the particulars (i.e., research involving detailed scales in space and time) and their overall context (the broad-scale outlook generally considered integrative).