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Short abstract:

The soil humanities challenge resource-conceptions of soils by unearthing alternatives. This paper provides a richer understanding of this resource-being of soils through the cosmopolitical history of the soil sciences, in which soils' resourcefulness and resourcelessness are (re)defined.

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.