Reparative soil science: Soil, colonialism, and environmental justice between scientific knowledge and local cultures

Soil is a repository for historical accounts of power, dispossession, and cultural continuity. This paper proposes the development of “reparative soil science,” a new paradigm that combines soil remediation with theories of environmental justice, decolonization, and multi-knowledge systems. We define it as an orientation within soil science that treats the discipline’s own concepts, classifications, and survey conventions as historical products, and that couples the biophysical repair of degraded soils with repair of the rights, relations, and forms of knowledge that colonial land regimes displaced. By analyzing examples from around the world, the paper shows how colonialism and postcolonial land governance have resulted in the devaluation of local epistemologies and the transformation of socioecological systems. Results indicate that successful integration of scientific and Indigenous knowledge requires mutual legitimacy, long-term trust-building, and equitable sharing of decision-making authority and benefits. It is argued that reparative soil science should extend beyond the purely technical rehabilitation of degraded soils to challenge existing structural inequalities and help restore cultural and ecological relationships between humans and the land. Soil is our entry point, but the same reasoning extends to land, territory, and natural resources more broadly. The perspective positions soil science within global agreements such as the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, the Sustainable Development Goals, and Land Degradation Neutrality, and argues for a pluralistic, participatory, and politically aware practice serving both ecological resilience and social repair.