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The very name of this journal, Frontiers in Education, begs the questions of where the "frontiers" should be at present in education research, and how we can ensure that breakthroughs at these frontiers be rapidly put into practice. In this context, this short opinion article argues that in order to answer these two questions adequately, we, educators, should stop zeroing in on the content or skills we want students to have acquired right at the end of a cycle of studies, be it elementary, high school, or university. Instead, we should not be afraid to ask people who are many years, even decades, past formal education what they think we should focus on, where our teaching can be most effective. My own experience with two eye-opening events suggests that from this lifelong perspective, teaching activities that are likely to be most influential over the course of a person's life do not necessarily follow traditional formats. In terms of facilitating implementation of innovative teaching activities, since it seems very arduous to convince schools to add anything to already overloaded curricula, perhaps this is not where we should concentrate our efforts. I argue that the easiest way to implement change may be to first demonstrate practically to future teachers, enrolled in teacher education programs, that even brief learning activities can have enormous merit. Input from the "real world"If one considers that the objective of high-school and university education is to eventually equip students, at the age of 22 or 23, with the "body of knowledge" and skills that are relevant in their field of specialty, then the frontier one needs to consider in research encompasses all the novel approaches currently under development to better achieve this specific objective. Alternatively, one might adopt the perspective that what happens at the end of undergraduate studies is not necessarily that meaningful, given the fact that graduates will generally work for 42 or 43 years afterwards, change jobs a number of times, and end up doing things for which the content and skills acquired during their undergraduate studies may not be relevant at all. In that lifelong context, one could assume that the "frontier" on which our research in education should focus relates to novel activities that would prepare individuals for the constantly changing landscape that they will face all along their life, including, but not exclusively, during their professional career. One way to get ideas about novel teaching activities we should develop in that latter context consists of simply asking individuals who were in school or at the university 20, 30, or even 40 years ago, to identify the part of their education, taken broadly, that was most valuable to them. The idea is not entirely new, of course, since it was adopted 60 years ago already in the pioneering work of Bertrand Schwartz, in preparation for his landmark reform of the School of Mines in Nancy (France) during the late 1950s (Lambrichs, 2009). Nevertheless, given the strong emphasis in education research on psychometric tests and the application of statistical methods to surveys of large cohorts, a perspective centered on individuals' opinions is likely to be criticized as "anecdotalist", potentially biased, and not sufficiently rigorous. Fortunately, it is not necessary to simply rely on individuals' perceptions, which may indeed be occasionally off if questions are not asked appropriately. Over the last few decades, various educational theorists (e.g., Dominicé, 2000; Dhunpath and Samuel, 2009) have proposed and perfected several techniques to indirectly derive meaningful information about the education of individuals by carefully analyzing biographical stories they may have written. Perhaps, as in the field of self-directed learning (Baveye, 2003), this "life history" approach could help us establish on a firm foundation the expanding frontier(s) in education. This message is clearly conveyed by Goodson and Gill (2014), who argue that "life narratives" can help educators shift from a disenfranchised tradition to one of empowerment.Of course, clearly, this incorporation of the experience of people "in the real world" into school and university curricula needs to be carried out cautiously. It would not be appropriate for economic and competitive interests of groups outside the school community to sway the educational process in a direction that is not ultimately in the best interest of students. One also needs to be careful not to disenfranchise teachers or weaken their agency and collaboration. Because they are intimately involved in the educational process, any discussion about its evolution in the future absolutely needs to involve them directly. Anyway, in this context of input "from the real world", the question of which activities were most influential in my education has intrigued me a lot over the last two or three decades. Clearly, the answer is not to be found in the formal lectures I attended, since I promptly forgot just about everything I learned from them, except in a few rare instances where I had a strong prior motivation to learn the material, on my own if need be. Even in these few cases, most of the content and skills I learned back then turned out to be obsolete after a decade, and had little influence on my later career in science. Careful reflection suggests that by far the most significant learning experiences of my entire schooling were associated with two very short, active learning events, which perhaps paradoxically, had nothing at all to do with the training I got at the university.Short teachable moments…The first of these two influential events took place when I was 17, in 1974, many years before Internet or Facebook existed. One of the teachers in my junior year in high school asked our class to attend a politically-motivated street demonstration held during the week end in the nearest big city. The protest was against an exhibition that was organized to promote tourism in a foreign country, which at that time was under a brutal dictatorship. Many non-governmental organizations and citizens' groups were staunchly opposed to the exhibition. The experience of attending the peaceful demonstration, among a crowd we estimated to be around 250,000 to 300,000 people, was eye-opening in itself, but what made it unique was what happened in school the following Monday. In the early morning, the teacher had purchased all the local newspapers he could find. He assigned us to read and analyze the different accounts these newspapers provided of the street demonstration. Whereas left-leaning newspapers reported that upwards of 500,000 people had marched peacefully through the streets, right-wing journals described the demonstration as a small gathering of merely 50,000 people, and commented incorrectly that some of them had become violent. Several newspapers did not report the protest at all. Meanwhile, the police account of the demonstration mentioned an intermediate number of approximately 200,000 people. After less than an hour of reviewing the different articles, many of us admitted in the ensuing discussion that we were stunned by what we had found. Even though nowadays "alternate facts" have become common place, at the time none of us anticipated disparities to be so blatant between different newspapers. In hindsight, I feel that in one hour of hands-on, discovery-based exposure to a variety of perspectives on the same event, I learned more about the need for a critical analysis of texts, and for a proper account of the socio-economic and historical context in which texts are written, than in any of the formal courses I took on the subject later on in college. Undoubtedly, my upbringing in a family of intellectuals made me particularly receptive to this kind of teachable moment, and individuals reared in very different environments may not as fertile ground as I was, but the fact is that I have never looked at the written word after this single exercise as I did before, nor for that matter at anything that lecturers would talk about in the courses I took afterwards (some of which turned out after a little scrutiny to deliver information that was obsolete or even erroneous). The second event occurred during the Summer just before I started attending the university. My high school had made it possible for a group of students to help with development activities in what was still commonly referred to at the time as the "Third World". Specifically, we were supposed to help missionaries in Rwanda with various practical, mostly agricultural, projects. In the evenings, in the tiny village where we were staying, there was very little to do, except play card- and board games. A favorite activity of the missionaries was to play Scrabble. On one of the first nights I was there, we started a game with them, and basically I played the way my mother had shown me, to try to win by placing words that would earn me more points than what the other players could do with their letters. After a couple of moves, the missionaries stopped the game and told me that this was not how they played it at all. They proceeded to show me how each of them was trying to place words in such a way that all players together would eventually make the most points possible. So instead of proudly putting "taxes" in one move, someone would only put down "ax", then another would add a "t", to obtain "tax", then a third could make it "taxes", and finally, someone could add "sur" to come up with "surtaxes". All in all, that means that the points of the very valuable letter "x" would count five times instead of one, increasing the combined score of all the players at the end of the game. The details of the Scrabble strategy do not matter that much, but what was really a revelation in what the missionaries showed me is that rules can easily be changed to maximize the benefits, in this case the enjoyment, for all involved. The original rules of Scrabble require individual competition among players, and they invariably lead to one player being happy at the end while all the others are less so, to put it mildly. The lesson I got was that it is easy to transform the game into something that is eminently collaborative, such that everyone feels pretty much the same way at the end, depending on how well the group did. As a result, what could be a divisive pastime, especially if one of the players happens to be unreasonably competitive, becomes an activity that strengthens the cohesion of the group and enhances team spirit.Long-lasting lessons learned…Over the years, during my subsequent career as a researcher, I have had many occasions to reminisce about these two events. The older I get, the more I realize how extremely significant they were in my education, overshadowing many other aspects of it. As short as it was, the newspapers-related activity singlehandedly shaped my attitude toward the written word. Every single time I now read an article or a book, I remember the fateful Monday when my classmates and I compared multiple newspaper clippings. As a result, I never take any text (or, for that matter, lecture notes) for granted any more, and I am compelled to systematically look for alternative perspectives on the same topics before I formulate my own opinion. This critical attitude toward texts has played a key role in my work, as it has stimulated me not only to keep learning efficiently on my own, as a self-directed learner, from a variety of sources, but also to try to foster self-directed learning in my students (Baveye, 1994). This capacity is particularly crucial in fields in which phenomenal technological breakthroughs occur at very regular intervals, and the need to renew one's knowledge base is constant.

The very name of this journal, Frontiers in Education, begs the questions of where the "frontiers" should be at present in education research, and how we can ensure that breakthroughs at these frontiers be rapidly put into practice. In this context, this short opinion article argues that in order to answer these two questions adequately, we, educators, should stop zeroing in on the content or skills we want students to have acquired right at the end of a cycle of studies, be it elementary, high school, or university. Instead, we should not be afraid to ask people who are many years, even decades, past formal education what they think we should focus on, where our teaching can be most effective. My own experience with two eye-opening events suggests that from this lifelong perspective, teaching activities that are likely to be most influential over the course of a person's life do not necessarily follow traditional formats. In terms of facilitating implementation of innovative teaching activities, since it seems very arduous to convince schools to add anything to already overloaded curricula, perhaps this is not where we should concentrate our efforts. I argue that the easiest way to implement change may be to first demonstrate practically to future teachers, enrolled in teacher education programs, that even brief learning activities can have enormous merit. Input from the "real world"If one considers that the objective of high-school and university education is to eventually equip students, at the age of 22 or 23, with the "body of knowledge" and skills that are relevant in their field of specialty, then the frontier one needs to consider in research encompasses all the novel approaches currently under development to better achieve this specific objective. Alternatively, one might adopt the perspective that what happens at the end of undergraduate studies is not necessarily that meaningful, given the fact that graduates will generally work for 42 or 43 years afterwards, change jobs a number of times, and end up doing things for which the content and skills acquired during their undergraduate studies may not be relevant at all. In that lifelong context, one could assume that the "frontier" on which our research in education should focus relates to novel activities that would prepare individuals for the constantly changing landscape that they will face all along their life, including, but not exclusively, during their professional career. One way to get ideas about novel teaching activities we should develop in that latter context consists of simply asking individuals who were in school or at the university 20, 30, or even 40 years ago, to identify the part of their education, taken broadly, that was most valuable to them. The idea is not entirely new, of course, since it was adopted 60 years ago already in the pioneering work of Bertrand Schwartz, in preparation for his landmark reform of the School of Mines in Nancy (France) during the late 1950s (Lambrichs, 2009). Nevertheless, given the strong emphasis in education research on psychometric tests and the application of statistical methods to surveys of large cohorts, a perspective centered on individuals' opinions is likely to be criticized as "anecdotalist", potentially biased, and not sufficiently rigorous. Fortunately, it is not necessary to simply rely on individuals' perceptions, which may indeed be occasionally off if questions are not asked appropriately. Over the last few decades, various educational theorists (e.g., Dominicé, 2000; Dhunpath and Samuel, 2009) have proposed and perfected several techniques to indirectly derive meaningful information about the education of individuals by carefully analyzing biographical stories they may have written. Perhaps, as in the field of self-directed learning (Baveye, 2003), this "life history" approach could help us establish on a firm foundation the expanding frontier(s) in education. This message is clearly conveyed by Goodson and Gill (2014), who argue that "life narratives" can help educators shift from a disenfranchised tradition to one of empowerment.Of course, clearly, this incorporation of the experience of people "in the real world" into school and university curricula needs to be carried out cautiously. It would not be appropriate for economic and competitive interests of groups outside the school community to sway the educational process in a direction that is not ultimately in the best interest of students. One also needs to be careful not to disenfranchise teachers or weaken their agency and collaboration. Because they are intimately involved in the educational process, any discussion about its evolution in the future absolutely needs to involve them directly. Anyway, in this context of input "from the real world", the question of which activities were most influential in my education has intrigued me a lot over the last two or three decades. Clearly, the answer is not to be found in the formal lectures I attended, since I promptly forgot just about everything I learned from them, except in a few rare instances where I had a strong prior motivation to learn the material, on my own if need be. Even in these few cases, most of the content and skills I learned back then turned out to be obsolete after a decade, and had little influence on my later career in science. Careful reflection suggests that by far the most significant learning experiences of my entire schooling were associated with two very short, active learning events, which perhaps paradoxically, had nothing at all to do with the training I got at the university.Short teachable moments…The first of these two influential events took place when I was 17, in 1974, many years before Internet or Facebook existed. One of the teachers in my junior year in high school asked our class to attend a politically-motivated street demonstration held during the week end in the nearest big city. The protest was against an exhibition that was organized to promote tourism in a foreign country, which at that time was under a brutal dictatorship. Many non-governmental organizations and citizens' groups were staunchly opposed to the exhibition. The experience of attending the peaceful demonstration, among a crowd we estimated to be around 250,000 to 300,000 people, was eye-opening in itself, but what made it unique was what happened in school the following Monday. In the early morning, the teacher had purchased all the local newspapers he could find. He assigned us to read and analyze the different accounts these newspapers provided of the street demonstration. Whereas left-leaning newspapers reported that upwards of 500,000 people had marched peacefully through the streets, right-wing journals described the demonstration as a small gathering of merely 50,000 people, and commented incorrectly that some of them had become violent. Several newspapers did not report the protest at all. Meanwhile, the police account of the demonstration mentioned an intermediate number of approximately 200,000 people. After less than an hour of reviewing the different articles, many of us admitted in the ensuing discussion that we were stunned by what we had found. Even though nowadays "alternate facts" have become common place, at the time none of us anticipated disparities to be so blatant between different newspapers. In hindsight, I feel that in one hour of hands-on, discovery-based exposure to a variety of perspectives on the same event, I learned more about the need for a critical analysis of texts, and for a proper account of the socio-economic and historical context in which texts are written, than in any of the formal courses I took on the subject later on in college. Undoubtedly, my upbringing in a family of intellectuals made me particularly receptive to this kind of teachable moment, and individuals reared in very different environments may not as fertile ground as I was, but the fact is that I have never looked at the written word after this single exercise as I did before, nor for that matter at anything that lecturers would talk about in the courses I took afterwards (some of which turned out after a little scrutiny to deliver information that was obsolete or even erroneous). The second event occurred during the Summer just before I started attending the university. My high school had made it possible for a group of students to help with development activities in what was still commonly referred to at the time as the "Third World". Specifically, we were supposed to help missionaries in Rwanda with various practical, mostly agricultural, projects. In the evenings, in the tiny village where we were staying, there was very little to do, except play card- and board games. A favorite activity of the missionaries was to play Scrabble. On one of the first nights I was there, we started a game with them, and basically I played the way my mother had shown me, to try to win by placing words that would earn me more points than what the other players could do with their letters. After a couple of moves, the missionaries stopped the game and told me that this was not how they played it at all. They proceeded to show me how each of them was trying to place words in such a way that all players together would eventually make the most points possible. So instead of proudly putting "taxes" in one move, someone would only put down "ax", then another would add a "t", to obtain "tax", then a third could make it "taxes", and finally, someone could add "sur" to come up with "surtaxes". All in all, that means that the points of the very valuable letter "x" would count five times instead of one, increasing the combined score of all the players at the end of the game. The details of the Scrabble strategy do not matter that much, but what was really a revelation in what the missionaries showed me is that rules can easily be changed to maximize the benefits, in this case the enjoyment, for all involved. The original rules of Scrabble require individual competition among players, and they invariably lead to one player being happy at the end while all the others are less so, to put it mildly. The lesson I got was that it is easy to transform the game into something that is eminently collaborative, such that everyone feels pretty much the same way at the end, depending on how well the group did. As a result, what could be a divisive pastime, especially if one of the players happens to be unreasonably competitive, becomes an activity that strengthens the cohesion of the group and enhances team spirit.Long-lasting lessons learned…Over the years, during my subsequent career as a researcher, I have had many occasions to reminisce about these two events. The older I get, the more I realize how extremely significant they were in my education, overshadowing many other aspects of it. As short as it was, the newspapers-related activity singlehandedly shaped my attitude toward the written word. Every single time I now read an article or a book, I remember the fateful Monday when my classmates and I compared multiple newspaper clippings. As a result, I never take any text (or, for that matter, lecture notes) for granted any more, and I am compelled to systematically look for alternative perspectives on the same topics before I formulate my own opinion. This critical attitude toward texts has played a key role in my work, as it has stimulated me not only to keep learning efficiently on my own, as a self-directed learner, from a variety of sources, but also to try to foster self-directed learning in my students (Baveye, 1994). This capacity is particularly crucial in fields in which phenomenal technological breakthroughs occur at very regular intervals, and the need to renew one's knowledge base is constant.

In every region of the world, one can find numerous instances of the "presence in the soil of a chemical or substance out of place and/or present at a higher than normal concentration that has adverse effects on any non-targeted organism." This soil pollution is increasingly the cause of major societal concern, and policy makers at all levels are more and more recognizing that it urgently needs to be addressed. In this context, in May 2018, the Global Symposium on Soil Pollution (GSOP18) was held in the FAO headquarters in Rome, with over 500 participants from 100 different countries. The leitmotif of the symposium, "It is time to fight soil pollution: Be the solution to soil pollution", stressed the extreme urgency to protect soils. The GSOP18 presentation video (available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHcY-iFSYZM) emphasized the fact that soil contamination is a hidden danger beneath out feet. The filtering, buffering, and attenuation capacities of soils have been widely documented in many situations, but so is the fact that these capacities are finite; If and when they get exceeded, human health, as well as water- and food quality, may all become threatened. The book by Rodríguez et al. was prepared in advance of the GSOP18 symposium and was "released" during the symposium, in order to stimulate debates. It attempts to summarize the state of the art of soil pollution, and to review the main pollutants, their sources, their effects on human health and the environment, as well as implementations of soil reclamation and management practices. Special attention is devoted to those pollutants that are present in agricultural systems and that reach humans through the food chain. Of the 91 pages of text (supplemented by 50 pages of references), the first section, dealing with the question of "What is soil pollution?", is the longest (40 pages). It describes the basic principles of soil pollution: the differentiation of contaminant/contamination from pollutant/pollution (sometimes misused as synonyms); types of contamination (point-source and diffuse); sources of contamination (natural and anthropogenic); main soil pollutants; and the interaction of pollutants with soil constituents. Much of the chapter reiterates what is typically found in any textbook on soil contamination, but it nevertheless provides a very good (and appealingly typeset and illustrated) compilation of a wide range of contaminants emanating from different sources, including some that are not readily evident or significant, and are therefore sometimes ignored even by soil experts. Examples in this respect are the corrosion of vehicles as a source of urban contamination, military activities and war as a sizeable source of metal contamination, and the release into the environment of other hazardous substances about which relatively little research has been carried out so far. The chapter is illustrated by many examples of contamination episodes especially in Europe (which has an estimated 3 million contaminated sites!) but also worldwide. One of the high points of the first section of the book is that it provides a very good discussion of emerging pollutants (subsection 1.4.7). According to the Web of Science, more than 3500 papers have dealt with the topic since 2010, evincing its significance in the scientific community. Regarding these pollutants, the authors point out the huge risk of reusing urban wastewater, sewage sludge, or livestock residues, such as improperly treated manure, as sources of antimicrobial substances, which are leading to the presence of antimicrobial resistant bacteria in soils (Martínez, 2008, 2009; Rizzo et al., 2013; Kuppusamy et al., 2018). This issue is one of the major problems facing regulatory agencies and decision-makers at the moment, since it is estimated that antimicrobial resistant infections may become the leading cause of death in the world by 2050 (O'Neill, 2014). Emerging contaminants also include manmade or "engineered" nanoparticles, which cause significant concern at the moment. Another positive aspect of the first section of the book is the inclusion of a discussion on the bioavailability, mobility and degradation (subsection 1.5.2) of the main groups of contaminants (heavy metals, radionuclides, pesticides, persistent organic pollutants, N and P). Unfortunately, since the preceding subsection on the interactions of the pollutants with soil constituents is comparatively very succinct, the text cannot analyse in depth the influence that these interactions have on the fate of pollutants in the soil environment or on the physical, chemical, and biological processes that, combined, affect the bioavailability of pollutants. The second section ("The impacts of soil pollution on the food chain and ecosystem services") is the shortest section of the book, and describes the conditions leading to uptake by plants of different types of pollutants, and their impact on human health and soil ecosystem services (mainly related with agricultural and livestock practices). The text also focuses on the toxicological effect of the main groups of contaminants, and describes the main exposure pathways for humans. This section stresses the need for further research on the long-term impact of soil pollution on human health. Also, basic toxicological data and research on exposure pathways or on what constitutes "acceptable" doses are direly needed at this point (Landrigan et al., 2018). The third section ("Management and remediation of polluted sites") describes several approaches to manage polluted sites. The text includes a discussion of the assessment of risks involved, as well as a brief review of available remediation techniques and recommended agronomic practices to reduce soil pollution and degradation. The authors argue in Section 3.1 that it is mandatory to investigate the toxicity of complex mixtures of pollutants for accurate soil risk assessment. Indeed, regulations usually include a chemical-by-chemical approach, or just estimate the risk of a mixture as the cumulative risk of the individual pollutants. At this point, it is not clear at all that this simple, additive method to compute the toxicity of mixtures is ever warranted.

AbstractOver the last two decades, there has been a documented decline in public trust toward science. This evolution has often been attributed to the fast expansion of Internet, making it very easy to spread alternate viewpoints. In the present perspective piece, it is argued that the unethical behavior of some researchers also has fueled the public distrust toward science. In this context, a solution could come from creating publicly accessible registries that would provide all the information needed by the public to determine whether a given researcher could safely be presumed to be an 'honest broker', i.e. to act in a disinterested manner about particular issues being debated. In the development of such registries, academies would be particularly suited to provide oversight, since some of their senior members, by virtue of their retirement from active duty, meet many of the conditions to effectively be honest brokers.

International audience ; In every region of the world, one can find numerous instances of the "presence in the soil of a chemical or substance out of place and/or present at a higher than normal concentration that has adverse effects on any non-targeted organism." This soil pollution is increasingly the cause of major societal concern, and policy makers at all levels are more and more recognizing that it urgently needs to be addressed. In this context, in May 2018, the Global Symposium on Soil Pollution (GSOP18) was held in the FAO headquarters in Rome, with over 500 participants from 100 different countries. The leitmotif of the symposium, "It is time to fight soil pollution: Be the solution to soil pollution", stressed the extreme urgency to protect soils. The GSOP18 presentation video (available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHcY-iFSYZM) emphasized the fact that soil contamination is a hidden danger beneath out feet. The filtering, buffering, and attenuation capacities of soils have been widely documented in many situations, but so is the fact that these capacities are finite; If and when they get exceeded, human health, as well as water- and food quality, may all become threatened.The book by Rodríguez et al. was prepared in advance of the GSOP18 symposium and was "released" during the symposium, in order to stimulate debates. It attempts to summarize the state of the art of soil pollution, and to review the main pollutants, their sources, their effects on human health and the environment, as well as implementations of soil reclamation and management practices. Special attention is devoted to those pollutants that are present in agricultural systems and that reach humans through the food chain.Of the 91 pages of text (supplemented by 50 pages of references), the first section, dealing with the question of "What is soil pollution?", is the longest (40 pages). It describes the basic principles of soil pollution: the differentiation of contaminant/contamination from pollutant/pollution (sometimes misused as synonyms); types of contamination (point-source and diffuse); sources of contamination (natural and anthropogenic); main soil pollutants; and the interaction of pollutants with soil constituents. Much of the chapter reiterates what is typically found in any textbook on soil contamination, but it nevertheless provides a very good (and appealingly typeset and illustrated) compilation of a wide range of contaminants emanating from different sources, including some that are not readily evident or significant, and are therefore sometimes ignored even by soil experts. Examples in this respect are the corrosion of vehicles as a source of urban contamination, military activities and war as a sizeable source of metal contamination, and the release into the environment of other hazardous substances about which relatively little research has been carried out so far. The chapter is illustrated by many examples of contamination episodes especially in Europe (which has an estimated 3 million contaminated sites!) but also worldwide. One of the high points of the first section of the book is that it provides a very good discussion of emerging pollutants (subsection 1.4.7). According to the Web of Science, more than 3500 papers have dealt with the topic since 2010, evincing its significance in the scientific community. Regarding these pollutants, the authors point out the huge risk of reusing urban wastewater, sewage sludge, or livestock residues, such as improperly treated manure, as sources of antimicrobial substances, which are leading to the presence of antimicrobial resistant bacteria in soils (Martínez, 2008, 2009; Rizzo et al., 2013; Kuppusamy et al., 2018). This issue is one of the major problems facing regulatory agencies and decision-makers at the moment, since it is estimated that antimicrobial resistant infections may become the leading cause of death in the world by 2050 (O'Neill, 2014). Emerging contaminants also include manmade or "engineered" nanoparticles, which cause significant concern at the moment.Another positive aspect of the first section of the book is the inclusion of a discussion on the bioavailability, mobility and degradation (subsection 1.5.2) of the main groups of contaminants (heavy metals, radionuclides, pesticides, persistent organic pollutants, N and P). Unfortunately, since the preceding subsection on the interactions of the pollutants with soil constituents is comparatively very succinct, the text cannot analyse in depth the influence that these interactions have on the fate of pollutants in the soil environment or on the physical, chemical, and biological processes that, combined, affect the bioavailability of pollutants.The second section ("The impacts of soil pollution on the food chain and ecosystem services") is the shortest section of the book, and describes the conditions leading to uptake by plants of different types of pollutants, and their impact on human health and soil ecosystem services (mainly related with agricultural and livestock practices). The text also focuses on the toxicological effect of the main groups of contaminants, and describes the main exposure pathways for humans. This section stresses the need for further research on the long-term impact of soil pollution on human health. Also, basic toxicological data and research on exposure pathways or on what constitutes "acceptable" doses are direly needed at this point (Landrigan et al., 2018). The third section ("Management and remediation of polluted sites") describes several approaches to manage polluted sites. The text includes a discussion of the assessment of risks involved, as well as a brief review of available remediation techniques and recommended agronomic practices to reduce soil pollution and degradation. The authors argue in Section 3.1 that it is mandatory to investigate the toxicity of complex mixtures of pollutants for accurate soil risk assessment. Indeed, regulations usually include a chemical-by-chemical approach, or just estimate the risk of a mixture as the cumulative risk of the individual pollutants. At this point, it is not clear at all that this simple, additive method to compute the toxicity of mixtures is ever warranted.

International audience ; In every region of the world, one can find numerous instances of the "presence in the soil of a chemical or substance out of place and/or present at a higher than normal concentration that has adverse effects on any non-targeted organism." This soil pollution is increasingly the cause of major societal concern, and policy makers at all levels are more and more recognizing that it urgently needs to be addressed. In this context, in May 2018, the Global Symposium on Soil Pollution (GSOP18) was held in the FAO headquarters in Rome, with over 500 participants from 100 different countries. The leitmotif of the symposium, "It is time to fight soil pollution: Be the solution to soil pollution", stressed the extreme urgency to protect soils. The GSOP18 presentation video (available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHcY-iFSYZM) emphasized the fact that soil contamination is a hidden danger beneath out feet. The filtering, buffering, and attenuation capacities of soils have been widely documented in many situations, but so is the fact that these capacities are finite; If and when they get exceeded, human health, as well as water- and food quality, may all become threatened.The book by Rodríguez et al. was prepared in advance of the GSOP18 symposium and was "released" during the symposium, in order to stimulate debates. It attempts to summarize the state of the art of soil pollution, and to review the main pollutants, their sources, their effects on human health and the environment, as well as implementations of soil reclamation and management practices. Special attention is devoted to those pollutants that are present in agricultural systems and that reach humans through the food chain.Of the 91 pages of text (supplemented by 50 pages of references), the first section, dealing with the question of "What is soil pollution?", is the longest (40 pages). It describes the basic principles of soil pollution: the differentiation of contaminant/contamination from pollutant/pollution (sometimes misused as synonyms); types of contamination (point-source and diffuse); sources of contamination (natural and anthropogenic); main soil pollutants; and the interaction of pollutants with soil constituents. Much of the chapter reiterates what is typically found in any textbook on soil contamination, but it nevertheless provides a very good (and appealingly typeset and illustrated) compilation of a wide range of contaminants emanating from different sources, including some that are not readily evident or significant, and are therefore sometimes ignored even by soil experts. Examples in this respect are the corrosion of vehicles as a source of urban contamination, military activities and war as a sizeable source of metal contamination, and the release into the environment of other hazardous substances about which relatively little research has been carried out so far. The chapter is illustrated by many examples of contamination episodes especially in Europe (which has an estimated 3 million contaminated sites!) but also worldwide. One of the high points of the first section of the book is that it provides a very good discussion of emerging pollutants (subsection 1.4.7). According to the Web of Science, more than 3500 papers have dealt with the topic since 2010, evincing its significance in the scientific community. Regarding these pollutants, the authors point out the huge risk of reusing urban wastewater, sewage sludge, or livestock residues, such as improperly treated manure, as sources of antimicrobial substances, which are leading to the presence of antimicrobial resistant bacteria in soils (Martínez, 2008, 2009; Rizzo et al., 2013; Kuppusamy et al., 2018). This issue is one of the major problems facing regulatory agencies and decision-makers at the moment, since it is estimated that antimicrobial resistant infections may become the leading cause of death in the world by 2050 (O'Neill, 2014). Emerging contaminants also include manmade or "engineered" nanoparticles, which cause significant concern at the moment.Another positive aspect of the first section of the book is the inclusion of a discussion on the bioavailability, mobility and degradation (subsection 1.5.2) of the main groups of contaminants (heavy metals, radionuclides, pesticides, persistent organic pollutants, N and P). Unfortunately, since the preceding subsection on the interactions of the pollutants with soil constituents is comparatively very succinct, the text cannot analyse in depth the influence that these interactions have on the fate of pollutants in the soil environment or on the physical, chemical, and biological processes that, combined, affect the bioavailability of pollutants.The second section ("The impacts of soil pollution on the food chain and ecosystem services") is the shortest section of the book, and describes the conditions leading to uptake by plants of different types of pollutants, and their impact on human health and soil ecosystem services (mainly related with agricultural and livestock practices). The text also focuses on the toxicological effect of the main groups of contaminants, and describes the main exposure pathways for humans. This section stresses the need for further research on the long-term impact of soil pollution on human health. Also, basic toxicological data and research on exposure pathways or on what constitutes "acceptable" doses are direly needed at this point (Landrigan et al., 2018). The third section ("Management and remediation of polluted sites") describes several approaches to manage polluted sites. The text includes a discussion of the assessment of risks involved, as well as a brief review of available remediation techniques and recommended agronomic practices to reduce soil pollution and degradation. The authors argue in Section 3.1 that it is mandatory to investigate the toxicity of complex mixtures of pollutants for accurate soil risk assessment. Indeed, regulations usually include a chemical-by-chemical approach, or just estimate the risk of a mixture as the cumulative risk of the individual pollutants. At this point, it is not clear at all that this simple, additive method to compute the toxicity of mixtures is ever warranted.

Over the last few years, considerable attention has been devoted in the scientific literature and in the media to the concept of "ecosystem" services of soils. The monetary valuation of these services, demanded by many governments and international agencies, is often depicted as a necessary condition for the preservation of the natural capital that soils represent. This focus on soil services is framed in the context of a general interest in ecosystem services that allegedly started in 1997, and took off in earnest after 2005. The careful analysis of the literature proposed in this article shows that, in fact, interest in the multifunctionality of soils emerged already in the mid-60s, at a time when hundreds of researchers worldwide were trying, and largely failing, to figure out how to put price tags meaningfully on "nature's services." Soil scientists, since, have tried to better understand various functions/services of soils, as well as their possible relation with key soil characteristics, like biodiversity. They have also tried to make progress on the challenging quantification of soil functions/services. However, researchers have shown very little interest in monetary valuation, undoubtedly in part because it is not clear what economic and financial markets might do with prices of soil functions/services, even if we could somehow come up with such numbers, and because there is no assurance at all, based on neoclassical economic theory, that markets would manage soil resources optimally. Instead of monetary valuation, focus in the literature has been put on decision-making methods, like Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) and Bayesian Belief Networks (BBN), which do not require the systematic monetization of soil functions/services and easily accommodate deliberative approaches involving a variety of stakeholders. A prerequisite to progress in such public deliberations is that participants be very cognizant of the extreme relevance of soils to many aspects of their daily life. We argue that, as long as this prerequisite is satisfied, the combination of deliberative decision-making methods and of a sound scientific approach to the quantification of soil functions/services is a very promising avenue to manage effectively and ethically the priceless heritage that soils constitute.

Over the last few years, considerable attention has been devoted in the scientific literature and in the media to the concept of "ecosystem" services of soils. The monetary valuation of these services, demanded by many governments and international agencies, is often depicted as a necessary condition for the preservation of the natural capital that soils represent. This focus on soil services is framed in the context of a general interest in ecosystem services that allegedly started in 1997, and took off in earnest after 2005. The careful analysis of the literature proposed in this article shows that, in fact, interest in the multifunctionality of soils emerged already in the mid-60s, at a time when hundreds of researchers worldwide were trying, and largely failing, to figure out how to put price tags meaningfully on "nature's services." Soil scientists, since, have tried to better understand various functions/services of soils, as well as their possible relation with key soil characteristics, like biodiversity. They have also tried to make progress on the challenging quantification of soil functions/services. However, researchers have shown very little interest in monetary valuation, undoubtedly in part because it is not clear what economic and financial markets might do with prices of soil functions/services, even if we could somehow come up with such numbers, and because there is no assurance at all, based on neoclassical economic theory, that markets would manage soil resources optimally. Instead of monetary valuation, focus in the literature has been put on decision-making methods, like Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) and Bayesian Belief Networks (BBN), which do not require the systematic monetization of soil functions/services and easily accommodate deliberative approaches involving a variety of stakeholders. A prerequisite to progress in such public deliberations is that participants be very cognizant of the extreme relevance of soils to many aspects of their daily life. We argue that, as long as ...

Over the last few years, considerable attention has been devoted in the scientific literature and in the media to the concept of "ecosystem" services of soils. The monetary valuation of these services, demanded by many governments and international agencies, is often depicted as a necessary condition for the preservation of the natural capital that soils represent. This focus on soil services is framed in the context of a general interest in ecosystem services that allegedly started in 1997, and took off in earnest after 2005. The careful analysis of the literature proposed in this article shows that, in fact, interest in the multifunctionality of soils emerged already in the mid-60s, at a time when hundreds of researchers worldwide were trying, and largely failing, to figure out how to put price tags meaningfully on "nature's services." Soil scientists, since, have tried to better understand various functions/services of soils, as well as their possible relation with key soil characteristics, like biodiversity. They have also tried to make progress on the challenging quantification of soil functions/services. However, researchers have shown very little interest in monetary valuation, undoubtedly in part because it is not clear what economic and financial markets might do with prices of soil functions/services, even if we could somehow come up with such numbers, and because there is no assurance at all, based on neoclassical economic theory, that markets would manage soil resources optimally. Instead of monetary valuation, focus in the literature has been put on decision-making methods, like Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) and Bayesian Belief Networks (BBN), which do not require the systematic monetization of soil functions/services and easily accommodate deliberative approaches involving a variety of stakeholders. A prerequisite to progress in such public deliberations is that participants be very cognizant of the extreme relevance of soils to many aspects of their daily life. We argue that, as long as this prerequisite is satisfied, the combination of deliberative decision-making methods and of a sound scientific approach to the quantification of soil functions/services is a very promising avenue to manage effectively and ethically the priceless heritage that soils constitute.

In the continuing fight against organic environmental xenobiotics, the initial success attributed to bioremediation has paled, in part due to the low availability of xenobiotics entrapped within a soil or sediment matrix. This has generated a very significant wave of interest in the bioavailability issue. However, much experimental evidence is puzzling or contradictory, mechanistic theories are embryonic, and implications for the practice of bioremediation or concerning the natural fate of xenobiotics are still tentative. The debate in Europe and the USA is vigorous. Eastern Europe, following the liberalisation of the economy and political life, is evolving in a similar direction. In many cases, however, limited access to literature sources, severe language barriers, and the lack of a strong pluridisciplinary tradition are hampering the adoption of state of the art techniques. Originally intended to allow scientists in East European countries to become acquainted with the key aspects of the bioavailability debate that is unfolding in the scientific literature in the West, and with its implications for bioremediation efforts, the present book presents a very complete coverage of the theoretical and practical aspects of the (limited) bioavailability of organic xenobiotics in the environment