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Short abstract:

This paper follows the recent history of urban soil remediation science in France, defining a grey zone where soil caring practices, the slow violence of pollution, and neoliberal city making meet.

Long abstract:

In recent years, the ideas and methods of restoration science have growingly spread in areas that reach far beyond their original field of application. Contemporary attempts to reclaim healthy soils in urban environments are an instance of this extension. Building on restoration science’s key idea of relying on the work of ‘ecosystem engineer' species to repair ecosystems, urban soil construction projects often start with various mineral and organic materials – usually waste generated by human activities – and attempt to ally up with the metabolic powers of soil beings (worms and bacteria).While they frame themselves as remedies to the damages of decades of careless urban soil pollution and degradation, campaigns of urban soil restoration also create new mediations between knowing and engineering nature, between science and industry. In the Paris area, forms of industrialization of soil restoration have emerged in a context of neo-liberalisation of public research. Soil ecologists soon allied up with industry and start-ups in the field of waste management, while at the same time dissociating themselves from citizen groups which were also developing soil construction experiments. Soil restoration techniques were made scalable over the course of real-world experiments, where both technical processes and ways of collaborating between research and industry were experimented and formalised. The coordination of different actors within these experiments participated in the redefinition of what soil is, what its reparation might be, and the professional fields at stake, as ecologist became consultants while excavation worker became ‘ecological engineers’.

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Long abstract:

The soil humanities are committed to unearthing alternative onto-epistemologies and praxeologies of soils and soil relations which challenge hegemonic conceptions of soils as resources. Sympathetic to this program, this paper seeks to contribute to it by providing a more historically substantiated understanding of how this resource-being of soils can be theorized by outlining a hegemonic cosmopolitical history of the sciences of soils.

This history is explored and organised around three scientific paradigms around soils which predominated in (European and North American) debates in a roughly chronological fashion since the 19th century: agrochemistry, agrogeology, and earth system science. These paradigms have generated particular problematisations of the resource-beings of soils and have thereby been involved in the construction of technologies and practices through which soils are used and governed.

Rather than uniform and uncontested, then, the historical resource-being of soils involves an ongoing resourcing of soils in which soils’ resourcefulness (i.e. their values and functions) and their resourcelessness (their liminalities and vulnerabilities) are redefined. Furthermore, these soil resourcings have responded to and generated concerns over widespread soil destruction since the 19th century onwards, giving rise to projects and imaginaries of (re-)fashioning human societies’ values and metabolic processes through soils. Through this theorisation of the resource-being of soils, this paper seeks to raise more sharply the question of appreciating and articulating the historically situated differences and relations between alternative conceptions of soils and resource-ontologies of soils that is central to the soil humanities.

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Long abstract:

The production of knowledge about anthropogenic soils involves multi-generational, multi-sited, multi-disciplinary relays. A point in case is Rothamsted Research in the UK, a globe node of agroecological research which has been conducting continuously running experiments in things like soil fertilization and cultivated wilderness for more than 150 years. This research requires collaborations across extreme distances and differences, including divides between nonhuman life, human experts, and technological systems. In these archives and knowledge infrastructures, data produced at a given time might become valuable for a user so removed in time, space, and expertise that they were unimaginable to the originator.

In this paper, I will expand our understanding of anthropogenic soils as process to include a wider array of past and future temporalities, with longer durations. Based on preliminary field- and archival research at Rothamsted, I will explicate the living ties between agricultural research at the center of empire in the 19th century, and the futures of soils that are cultivated at Rothamsted.

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Soils, grounds and lands are increasingly treated as climatic actors in environmental knowledge production and policies. In Norway, a recent ban on cultivation of virgin peatlands was made on the grounds that these land types contain a vast amount of carbon and cultivation would interfere with governmental commitments to reduce national anthropogenic greenhouse gass emissions. For many Norwegian farmers, the ban created a sense of invasion into their landownership rights and their right to drain and cultivate peatlands into arable soil, infringing upon their economic flexibility. At the same time, agricultural soils are highlighted internationally as having major capacity for carbon capture and sequestration through practices such as specific grazing management and changing farming techniques.

In contrast to the protection of virgin peatlands, agricultural soils and their carbon storage abilities are more difficult to model or quantify. Since 2020, all farmers in Norway are encouraged to use a climate calculator to take control of their farm's greenhouse gas emissions. Yet soils, consisting of a multiplicity of multispecies relations, resist this standardisation. In this contribution I look closer at the emerging understanding of soil as a container for carbon, a terrestrial sink. Through discourse analysis, readings of scientific literature and media outlets, and interviews with agricultural and climate advisors in Norway, I explore the implications of this new way of relating to soils and land, and ask what is rendered invisible when framing soils and grounds as a climate frontier.

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Long abstract:

Contradictory as it may seem, (European) urban development agencies have long neglected or ignored the presence and qualities of soils, though they are in charge of land use transformations. Soils have historically been taken into account mostly in cases of pollution, but barely integrated in urban project as an entity to take into account and to make count as a matter of concern. Yet, converging recent European environmental regulations and the pressures exerted by climate accelerations have allegedly disturbed one such equilibrium, leading to forms of ecologisation of urban planning practices (Salomon-Cavin and Grandjou, 2022). Drawing from embedded research within seven French public urban development agencies and observations of a brand new institute on soils transitions, this presentation explores this transformation of the attention to soil in urban settings, to see how urban development agencies can be bound to soils. The presentation will focus on both the modes of knowing of soil by urban projects stakeholders and the practical modalities of soil integration in mundane practices of urban projects. Throughout the inquiry, attention to soils has taken various forms, such as recent attempts by local authorities or urban development agencies to develop soil cartographies (like in King et al., 2020) as well as efforts to integrate soils functions in urban projects accounting schemes. They both reveal contested forms of valuation to which soils are subject and which will be unfold during the presentation.

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Long abstract:

This paper presents the preliminary findings of an ongoing multimodal research project focusing on soil-making and land occupation political experiments in the southern drylands of Portugal, particularly in Alentejo. Despite facing challenges such as drought and soil erosion due to historical and contemporary monoculture practices, this region is notable for its history of sociopolitical revolutionary experiments in land collectivization during the 1970s, as well as for contemporary innovative soil regeneration projects and pioneering agroforestry experiments like syntropic farming.

The research integrates artistic and anthropological approaches to understand biosocial practices and onto-epistemologies surrounding Alentejo's soil. It examines its past, present, and future, along with the intricate web of multispecies relationships it sustains. Drawing inspiration from Verónica Gerber's concept of "Escritura Compostaje" (compost writing), it aims for an “Etnografia-Compostaje” by blurring the boundaries between archive and fiction, past and present, language and materiality. The current multimodal approach seeks to delve into the soil's past through the retrieval and reappropriation (via drawing, phytography, and experimental eco-cinema) of previously overlooked visual archives documenting the land occupation in the 1970s revolutionary period. Simultaneously, this study involves hands-on ethnographic research with agroforest human and non-human actors engaged in present-day transformative practices that nurture and regenerate soils affected by intoxication and erosion. By combining artistic methods and ethnographic inquiry, this case-study aims to reveal a complex assembly of past, present, and future soiling and worldmaking practices.

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Long abstract:

Between 2020 and 2021 I made a short documentary film that follows the quest of neighbors and organizations in a working-class town in the Parisian suburbs to turn a brownfield into fertile ground. The film looks closely at how different people engage with this polluted soil using their bodies, tools, techniques, senses and imagination. Together, the different accounts and practices give a sense of what it means to live, play, work and grow in this toxic land. In this presentation I reflect on the filmmaking process as a space for collaborative theorizing. Filming this documentary provided an opportunity to push the thinking of polluted places in two interesting ways. The first is to consider fertility and toxicity not as opposed but coexisting, in multiple and complicated ways. The second is to attend to fertility and reproduction not as something happening to individual bodies, but as a collective, multispecies process that cannot be properly understood when severed from the land, even when the land is mostly covered by asphalt and concrete.

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Long abstract:

Fertile soil is currently being depleted faster than it can be renewed, a crisis referred to as Peak Soil. Soils are now on the list of environmental issues that need global care and caring for them entails caring for those who depend on them. Earthworms are one of the symbionts of soil life and are necessary for living soils.

Considering the urgency of creating new cultural aesthetics of soil care practices and expanding the notion of more-than-human sociality, Glocal Worm-ing project explores, through design, ways to nurture mutual human-soil relations together with earthworms and active citizen-participation to enhance multispecies co-existences in cities. The project seeks to provide emergent soil care practices in public spaces with earthworms. Earthworms as companion species to humans open up the need of building relational networks by applying soil care practices in order to care for the Earth, each other, and other living beings.

The design research approaches include multispecies ethnography, participatory action research, agonistic design through interventions, and workshops. A key design harvest of the project is the Earthworm Manifesto as a transformative storyline weaving relations of humans with the world of the earthworms and the underground.

The project was exhibited from 2022 to 2023 in various exhibitions such as the Museum of Nature South Tyrol and the Long Night Research at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano and encourages visitors to encounter earthworms as kins of humans, weaving and co-creating facts and fables (SF) to build other stories, relations and other worlds to come.

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Short abstract:

The collective project we use for thinking soils is related with one of a tiny forest that includes participants as students, teachers, researchers, employees and residents of the neighborhood. Can a small piece of land in a educational campus help the “research thinking with, from, and for soils”?

Long abstract:

Intermediary objects became a classical in science studies – a conceptual and analytical tool describing the social-technical connection and ‘‘represent[ing] the network, by being both visible and standing for it, and translat(ing) it in time and space’’(1). Vinck et al. (2) describe intermediary objects as those allowing communication and exchange between professionals and users, improving the understanding of a problem, enabling the expression of different viewpoints and knowledges and compromising on collective action. We make the hypothesis that this concept can contribute to investigate critically the role of soil in eco-social transformation.

We present the collective creation of a tiny forest at the campus of Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Portugal, whose processes relate soil, land, forest but also communities, social links and values. The tiny forest aims at both social and ecological regeneration and is the result of participatory learning and creation, including the Miyawaki method, preparing the land, creating and marking the design, planting and caring the soil. The Miyawaki method consists of densely planting native species of all strata of the forest. Because they benefit from rich soil and water in the early years, these species compete only for sunlight, stimulating growth and mutual protection. While seeing the tiny forest as an intermediary object illustrates the webs it is embedded in, its complex action by doing soil, community, and knowledges, invites us to go beyond the technicality and materiality of soil and answer an urgent call to discover a new understanding of soils and humans (3).

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Short abstract:

By investigating the relationship between soil science and design practice through analysis of landscape architectural projects, this paper provides insights into dominant ways of making anthropogenic soils as well as revealing possibilities for alternative configurations.

Long abstract:

No longer merely a stable substrate supporting the city's surface, today an optimal urban soil is one that provides valuable ecosystem services. It is a sponge—or maybe a sink—metabolizing waste, absorbing stormwater, and supporting vegetation. Such soils are designed, the result of collaborations between landscape architects and soil scientists. As part of development schemes and infrastructure projects, designers attempt to establish living soils to provide certain aesthetic and ecosystem services. And yet, the more lively the ground becomes, the less predictable the results. The design of soil is thus always what Annmarie Mol would call a negotiation with a more-than-human community. And while designed soils play an important role in catalyzing and justifying novel forms of green development, design simultaneously provides tools for making soils otherwise. By understanding soils as malleable, contingent, and unpredictable, design practice can contribute to conceptualizing and theorizing soil in ways that enable much-needed transformations.

This conference paper links design practice to the soil humanities through two empirical cases investigating soil specifications. The first explores the relationship between soil scientists and designers in the context of a contested project transforming a contaminated former port in Toronto into a park-cum-flood protection infrastructure. To reveal the limitations of this status quo approach, the paper then describes a design research project in Switzerland that cultivates collective soil relations amid contamination from the pharmaceutical industry. Analyzing the two projects provides insights into dominant ways of making anthropogenic soils as well as revealing possibilities for alternative configurations.

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Long abstract:

Wheal Maid, in Cornwall’s Poldice Valley, is an Acid Mine Drainage (AMD) site and one of the most contaminated locations in Britain. Known as ‘the Cornish Mars’ for its distinctive red soilscape, arsenic and other heavy metals are leaching from the site’s tailing lagoons into the valley soils and waterways. Bacterial communities mediate the hazards and relationships between soils, people and the wider ecosystem at Wheal Maid in little understood ways; certain species may have a role in remediating such landscapes by helping to detoxify the soil. Interest in this research is growing due to nearby lithium reserves, in which many see energy for the future of electric vehicles as well as a chance to revive the skilled and well-paid employment of Cornwall’s industrial past and the communities who depended on it. These issues are of global significance, with tens of thousands of AMD sites across the world, and the cost of remediation estimated at $100bn globally.

This paper examines how forms of encounter between humans and microorganisms are recognised and regulated in the service of Wheal Maid’s industrial pasts and futures. The site’s anthropogenic soils have arisen through entwined social and ecological histories, where microbes act to constitute contested versions of the location’s past and future as well as its ongoing materiality. Extending existing studies of ‘soil microbiopolitics’ from agricultural to mining soilscapes, this paper focuses on contested forms of extraction and regeneration that emerge from the interplay of human and microbial communities within ‘the Cornish Mars’.

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Long abstract:

Social sciences and humanities usually examine soils as multi-species communities that offer original insights into the processes of soil health and soil repair. But once we turn our attention to frozen soils―the focus shifts. Instead of facing concerns with the soil’s fertility, we encounter worries about the ground’s stability and incapacity to provide a more or less reliable foundation for built and natural environments. This paper examines the rise of scientific attempts to monitor the thermal states of frozen earth known as permafrost (or vechnaia merzlota) currently warming, thawing, and degrading in ways hard to predict. It draws upon interviews with permafrost scientists from Russia, Norway, the United States, and Sweden to present a detailed analysis of a seemingly self-evident practice: measuring permafrost's thermal state. I start by outlining conceptual tensions that Soviet frozen earth scientists encountered when defining permafrost and its degradation already in the 1930s. I then examine sporadic national attempts at measuring changes within permafrost dynamics, followed by more systematic attempts at building an international system of monitoring permafrost in the 1990s that turned that ground into a planetary environmental object. Finally, I dig into the intricacies of choosing the 'right' way to measure permafrost's thermal state to find out what notions of frozen earth―it being a territory, a process, or a sensitive medium―each of those methods make possible. As a result, the paper questions the notion of permafrost's thawing as a unitary process, which has vast consequences for our understanding of degradation and preservation.

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Short abstract:

By approaching soils as infrastructure, this paper examines the multispecies relationships between soils and sheep in the shadow of intensified agriculture and politics of rural and agrarian change in Norway.

Long abstract:

In this paper, I suggest that a conceptual approach to soils as infrastructures can help us rethink multispecies ethnographies. Soils as infrastructures frame soils as “structures of contact and circulation” (Barua, 2021: 1483), and “matter that enable the movement of other matter” (Larkin, 2013: 329). Soils as infrastructures centres the diverse materiality of soils, the role of both humans and nonhumans, as well as the relationship between the “built” and “natural” world (Rippa, 2023: 16).

Soils are dynamic compounds consisting of many other species as well as metabolic and chemical processes, providing key ecosystem functions for biodiversity as well as human survival. In Norwegian outfields, soils have enabled and co-evolved with the movement of sheep, who have fertilised the soil and spread seeds through their faeces, cutting grass with their teeth and promoting photosynthesis by keeping landscapes open (Blix 2018). However, the relationship between soils and sheep has begun to erode.

Through an ethnography of grazing, soils as infrastructure places multispecies ethnographies alongside studies of power relations and politics. I begin in the Norwegian outfields, the contact zone between soils and sheep, to explore how industrialised agriculture has caused ruptures in multispecies relations. Changes in agricultural politics demonstrate how multispecies relations are in active engagement with socio-political processes. In this way, I see soils as infrastructures as way of “making things possible”, which opens an analytical space for understanding shifting material processes through both ethnographic, political, and historical attention to specific multispecies relations through the movement of matter.

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Long abstract:

A hand-written sign at the entrance of the Rhiannon ecovillage, located deep in the valley of Malchingui (Ecuador), reads: “Another World is Possible”. This paper begins in media res—between decay and flourishing, digestion, and ingestion –with the care-full act of folding human and non-human excrement into a compost cake. Earth care practices reconfigure and revalue compost through trans-corporeal (Alaimo, 2010) webs of soil kinship. Caring here is a sensual performative matter which invites an awareness of often discounted materialities such as excrement and soil. Rather than declensionist stories of ecological collapse, composting activates a sense of contingency where building other worlds becomes possible. How do these speculative embodied practices reconfigure relationships of mutuality with a bioregion, with bodies, and with selves? What are the limits of these performative speculative practices?

This paper explores the promises, challenges, and limits of the kind of ethos upon which these multispecies utopias are built. While mundane, recursive, and affective earth care practices can offer a multispecies sensual immediacy and entanglement, there are limits to the sense of situatedness it offers. While aspirational, performative earth care practices do not necessarily reckon with the epistemic and physical violence perpetuated by colonialism on human and more-than-human bodies. Does earth care open space for, or does it merely co-opt, often discounted indigenous ontologies and epistemologies while omitting the communities from which these emerge? Finally, we explore how an indigenous soil futurism could rewire multispecies utopias through situated story-telling and knowledge sharing practices.

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In the 1980s, a young ethnobotanist from Yale University (USA) collected about three hundred specimens of cultivated rice varieties with/from local farmers of mountain provinces in northwestern Philippines. The specimens were pressed, catalogued, and stored in various herbarium collections, where they remained largely untouched for the next few decades. In 2020, an evolutionary biologist from Kew Gardens (UK) began to look through the folders and noticed that the plants’ roots still held soil, dried and preserved over the years. Following a hunch, the biologist experimented with techniques to sample and sequence the soil, collaborating with a mycologist to develop ways of reading the soil for the microbial and multispecies assemblages that may have been important companions for Ifugao rice plants. What kinds of lives and stories does the soil hold? What might the soil tell scientists about the naturecultures of Ifugao rice cultivation that existed before and after the introduction of so-called modern, high-yielding rice varieties distributed by state agricultural agencies? This paper explores how the materiality of these soil samples and genetic sequences is tethered to and transformed into multiple, differential technoscientific imaginaries and semiotic registers. Whether they hold lost worlds or livable futures remains an open question, and perhaps not the most critical one. What does the soil ask of STS?