Presentation short abstract

Join the dialogue between German peat bodies & Amazonian muddy agents. More-than-human soil beings resist human control through deforestation, drainage, carbon schemes, constantly moving, eroding, and reassembling. We report first insights from multispecies peace dialogues toward just land futures.

Presentation long abstract

Come in and join the dialogue between German peat bodies and Amazonian muddy agents. Listen to more-than-human beings resisting pre-modern hegemons and their power games of deduction and death (Foucault, 1978:89; Foucault, 1995 [1975]:47ff.).

In the Amazon, soil beings face death through deforestation, cattle-driven pasture expansion, road openings, and mercury- separating gold from their soil-kin. In Lower Saxony, machines once split the hybrid water–soil family in the name of agricultural order—only to attempt, decades later, to reunite them under the banner of “re-naturing.” Today, the modern hegemon seeks to take power over rainforest and moorland by optimizing carbon-sinking capacities, aiming to “control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it” (Foucault, 1978:136).

Yet playful as soils are, they do not submit easily. Entangled across rainforests and moorlands in a shared meshwork (Ingold, 2012), they move, erode, swell, soak, retreat, and reassemble—performing carnevalesque third places (Bhabha, 1994; Werbner & Modood, 2015) of instability: sudden die-offs, mineral flight, soil hardening, and dust or mud as material tactics. While such disturbances are widely noted, far less attention has been given to soils as unruly, resistant beings, or to the quiet, translocal threads connecting Amazonian muddy agents and German peat bodies within global power relations. We report first insights from discourse analysis and translocal multispecies peace dialogues, co-constructed in conversation with soil beings toward multispecies just land futures (cf. Celermajer et al., 2022; Tschakert et al., 2021). In this way, we turn toward futures shaped with, rather than merely upon, soil.