Presentation short abstract

This contribution theorizes how soil participates in newly emerging metabolic forest politics, in which its role as a reservoir of nutrients and its role as a more or less hospitable environment for forest regrowth become a crucial locus of intervention, care, and experimentation.

Presentation long abstract

As forests are suffering under the compound effects of global warming, the spread of pests and plagues, pollution, and human encroachment, soil has come to the fore as a novel object of concern and care for a variety of publics, ranging from ecologists to forest authorities. Aiming to render forests ‘resilient’ to ongoing and future stressors, soil is increasingly occupying a central role in imaginaries and practices of future-oriented, climate-adapted forestry. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Dutch foresters in the Dutch State Forestry Agency, this contribution attends to these emerging forms of concern and care, and specifically highlights 1) how soil is emerging as a new object of knowledge as foresters engage with the question what good soil may be and seek to know the quality of the soil through expert knowledges and embodied knowledge practices; 2) how soil emerges as an object of care in planning interventions in the forest, specifically when foresters try to introduce ‘soil nursing’ tree species and seek to develop alternative ways of felling to mitigate soil damage. Analyzing these emerging practices in and on forest soil, this contribution theorizes how soil participates in newly emerging metabolic forest politics, in which its role as a reservoir of nutrients and its role as a more or less hospitable environment for forest regrowth become a crucial locus of intervention, care, and experimentation.