Soil Lessons from Indigenous People - Reflections of an Indigenous Scientist from Mayan Community

Author: Dr.rer.nat. Yolanda López-Maldonado, Indigenous Maya earth systems scientist.

This reflection piece, written by Dr.rer.nat. Yolanda López-Maldonado in honor of Indigenous Peoples Day on August 9th, explores Indigenous understandings of our relationship with nature and soil, as well as traditional soil stewardship practices rooted in these worldviews.

At Indigenous Science our vision is a world where Indigenous knowledge systems are elevated and operationalized as rigorous, distinct, and indispensable pillars of global knowledge, fostering mutual respect and equitable collaboration to build a sustainable future for humanity and the planet

Indigenous peoples have developed sophisticated, place‑based sciences over millennia, rigorous systems of observation and theory grounded in reciprocity. We take only what we need and give back in equal measure to the land, water, and more‑than‑human relatives. This is not just philosophy; it is a governance framework for sustainability. Indigenous Earth observations are both scientific data and ethical practice, a covenant of balance that global science must honor

These understandings are rooted in a fundamental principle that shapes how many Indigenous communities relate to the natural world called Principle of reciprocity - a fundamental understanding in many Indigenous cultures that humans are not separate from nature, but part of a web of relationships in which giving and receiving must remain in balance. Rather than viewing land, water, forests, animals, and soil as resources to extract, Indigenous Peoples often see them as relatives, teachers, or living beings with whom humans share reciprocal responsibilities.

The components of reciprocity include:

• Mutual care: If people take from nature, they also have a responsibility to give back.

• Responsibility above ownership: Not owning land, but caring for it; being a caretaker rather than an owner.

• Intergenerational reciprocity: Decisions are made with consideration for future generations, often guided by concepts such as planning for the next seven generations.

• Respect and gratitude: Harvesting plants, hunting animals, or cultivating the land is accompanied by practices of gratitude and respect, recognizing that these are gifts rather than commodities.

• Balance: Ecological, social, cultural, and spiritual well-being are interconnected.

Many Indigenous communities harvest only what they need, leaving the rest on the land for regeneration and for other species to feed on. Sacred groves, community forests, and customary fishing rules are managed to ensure that ecosystems continue to support life across generations. This shaped how land was actually used. Mayan communities farmed continuously for over a thousand years without exhausting their soil through careful rotation, fallow cycles, and water management, with cities, fields, forests, and gardens treated as one cared-for whole rather than land carved out of wilderness.

The milpa system, for example, lies at the heart of Maya agricultural and cosmological order. Rather than large fields growing a single crop, the milpa system involves smaller plots cultivating a wide diversity of species together, a system born from a lifetime of observation by the farmers who practice it.  Far from the outdated image of simple “slash-and-burn” subsistence, the milpa is a highly refined, knowledge-intensive form of traditional precision agriculture that integrates soil classification, nutrient cycling, agroforestry, and hydrological management. Maya farmers developed detailed ethnopedological knowledge, reading soil colour, texture, depth, and micro-topography to match specific crops and practices to particular soil micro-environments. They enhanced fertility through deliberate strategies such as adding household organic waste, ash, nightsoil, and wetland muck to fields; constructing terraces and raised beds to reduce erosion; and managing fallow cycles so that forest regeneration restored soil organic matter and structure.

This Indigenous science of soils enabled the Maya to thrive in the seasonally wet, often nutrient-poor tropical lowlands for millennia. By embedding agriculture within a broader milpa–forest–garden landscape, they created resilient, biodiverse production systems capable of supporting dense populations and complex urban centres without exhausting the land.

The milpa embodies a whole Indigenous science of soil, water, and biodiversity governance, an Indigenous Earth systems approach that sustained one of the world´s great civilizations and continues to offer critical insights for contemporary sustainability and climate adaptation.

This is not merely anecdotal resilience. Rigorous data now substantiates what generations of milpa farmers have long understood experientially. A survey spanning nearly a thousand households in Guatemala's Western Highlands found that milpa systems deliver higher total productivity than monocropped maize, measured in total energy yield, and outperform monocultures in meeting recommended daily allowances across fourteen essential nutrients. More than two-thirds of the 1,205 surveyed plots operated under the milpa system, reflecting a striking diversity of crop combinations rather than a single standardized approach.

Archaeological and historical evidence identifies the milpa as the backbone of agriculture across a region spanning from northeastern North America to southern Central America since pre-Columbian times. Farmers continue to adapt milpa variants today across climates ranging from arid zones to tropical lowlands, tailoring the system to local soil, topography, and traditional knowledge rather than imposing a single formula.

The deeper challenge, as with soil restoration more broadly, lies in recognizing its legitimacy at scale. The milpa's long fallow cycle, spanning roughly twenty years and keeping at least two-thirds of the land under forest cover at any given time, reflects a fundamentally different relationship with land than one built around continuous extraction. It treats soil not as an input to be depleted, but as a living system to be restored and returned. That distinction between land as a resource and land as a relationship is precisely the shift that regenerative agriculture movements are now asking the wider world to make. The milpa has simply been living that answer for millennia.

One of the interesting pieces of knowledge about soil comes from the Purhépecha community, an Indigenous group in the volcanic highlands of Pichátaro, Mexico, who developed a soil classification system that weaves together symbolic, cognitive, and practical understanding. They recognize soil as a three-dimensional living body, composed of earth material, air, fluids, organic matter, and living organisms, including plants and animals, organized in layers.

The Purhépecha describe soil as breathing, sweating, and swelling, nourished and watered by air, organic matter, and small creatures like worms and beetles. This theory of soil health reflects a delicate yet intricate balance of many elements, and is something that communities must learn to read and tend to, much as one would care for a living body. Land also carries spiritual weight, seen as a primordial symbol that has sustained families for centuries through a relationship of mutual care.

This living knowledge is organized with real intellectual sophistication, a four-level hierarchy that moves from the broadest sense of "all soils" down to the finest, most particular distinctions the community might make while standing in a single field.

The Pichátaro soil classification moves through four levels of increasing detail, from all soils as one family, kin to the plants, animals, and people who share the land, down to five major types: dusty (dark, rich, and most trusted), clayey (dense and flood-prone), sandy (loose and generally unsuitable for farming), stony (dusty soil broken by lava rock), and hard, soapy soil (dense and the most demanding to farm). Beneath these lie fifteen finer subtypes based on colour, organic content, and stoniness, and, at the deepest level, farmers recognize varieties and blends since, as they acknowledge, a "pure" soil is rare and real soil is usually a mixture.

The most significant part of this lies in how they treat soil depth. Modern technical soil classification systems generally give limited attention to the diversity of topsoil characteristics, largely because these properties can change relatively quickly under human influence. In contrast, the Purhépecha system places strong emphasis on topsoil characteristics, as these largely determine land suitability for food production, as well as soil management and conservation practices.

The Indigenous peoples knew that soil has always been a living system interconnected with all other elements of the ecosystem, sitting at the nexus of air, water, animals, plants, and human and planetary well-being. This holistic Indigenous worldview on soil is more relevant now than ever. If humanity is to save itself from ecological collapse, these ways of relating to soil and nature at large should be preserved and shared with all, offering a chance to reflect and adopt an alternative relationship with the environment that holds us. Indigenous worldviews can serve as a compass for loving, compassionate, holistic decision making in our race to achieve global land, biodiversity, and climate targets before it’s too late. 

At Indigenous Science, we do not speak of ‘integrating’ Indigenous knowledge, but of elevating it to authority in global environmental governance. Our approach seeks recognition of Indigenous knowledge systems as legitimate and central decision-making frameworks, not complementary inputs, in UN processes and in decision-making at local, regional, and national levels.

Indigenous communities have always understood: survival was never about bending nature to human will, but about learning its rhythms and moving with them. For thousands of years, Indigenous communities have adapted themselves to the landscapes around them, reading the language of soil, rain, and season with a precision no textbook could teach. That knowledge deserves a place in international policy spaces, not as folklore or as a footnote to modern science, but as an independent knowledge system and science in its own right, built on generations of lived experience, tested and refined long before laboratories existed. In a world racing to invent new solutions to the climate crisis, drought, land degradation, and so many other environmental problems, perhaps the oldest answers have been here all along, waiting patiently in the memory of the people who never stopped listening to the earth.

About the Author

Dr. Yolanda López-Maldonado is an Indigenous Maya Earth systems scientist from Yucatán, Mexico, whose work centers Indigenous knowledge systems within global conservation science and environmental governance. Born and raised in the wetlands of Yucatán, she grew up immersed in Maya ecological knowledge before training as a Human Ecologist and Geographer and earning her PhD from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany. Her scientific work focuses on complex Earth systems, particularly groundwater and water systems, drawing on Indigenous Earth observations and ancestral knowledge to deepen understanding of global environmental change.

Dr. López-Maldonado is the founder and director of Indigenous Science, an Indigenous-led organization advancing Indigenous science diplomacy and elevating Indigenous knowledge systems within global environmental governance. She has served as Lead Author for the Indigenous and Local Knowledge section of UNEP’s Global Environment Outlook (GEO-7), and is a Review Editor for the Second Global Assessment of IPBES and a Contributing Author to the International Panel on Earth System Governance. Through her research, diplomacy, and engagement with scientific and Indigenous communities, she works to ensure Indigenous sciences are recognized as rigorous, distinct, and essential knowledge systems in environmental decision-making.