Contribution short abstract:

Understanding ‘waste’ as an untapped resource that “[yearns] for transformation” (Lau, 2022 p.2), I will consider the (dead) human body as a waste matter that can be 'recycled' through the practice of natural burial and, therefore, made available to a broad network of more-than-human others.

Contribution long abstract:

In death, the human body undergoes a number of transformations. First, there is a physiological change – breathing stops, the person becomes unresponsive – and then there is an ontological transition: the person is declared dead. Without further intervention, the body will begin to decay. Taking a ‘waste perspective’, I will consider the management of the body once it is known to be dead and explore the recent (re)emergence of nature-based interventions in deathcare. Specifically, I will explore how natural burial sites deploy the language of ‘recycling’ as a means of repurposing the aesthetics of rot and decomposition towards environmentally beneficial ends.

Increasingly popular in the UK and the US, natural burial offers a low-carbon alternative to cremation and avoids the use of toxic substances, such as formaldehyde, associated with standard burials. Through the work of microbes and other soil-based life, the body is transformed and (re)integrated into the environmental milieu. In this way, death no longer represents a terminus but, through the technologies of decay, an opportunity for future life. This leads to the body being redefined, in death, as a porous entity that is open to more-than-human entanglement.

By reworking the aesthetics of death, and avoiding the language of decay, natural burial sites allow for the body to undergo an ethical and emotional transformation that makes it available to a diverse ecology of actors and agents. As a waste matter, the (dead) human body therefore acts as a bridge between human and more-than-human worlds.

Contribution short abstract:

Since the 1950s slatted floor stables replaced solid manure stalls. Largely negative attitudes towards slurry alternated with short phases of consent. Using topic modeling, we analyzed German newspapers from 1971 to 2020 and found five themes ranging from negative to positive reporting on slurry.

Contribution long abstract:

The intensification and expansion of livestock farming in Europe since the 1950s led to the introduction of slatted floor housing systems, which made bedding material obsolete and caused a switch from farmyard manure to slurry.

As livestock numbers increased, there was an increasing mismatch between the amount of slurry and the fertilizer requirements of farm fields, and, manure went from being a valuable organic fertilizer to a waste product that had to be disposed of. In the 1950s/60s the significant increase in demand for livestock products, in the 2000s the German government’s commitment to an energy transition and, since 2020, the German bioeconomy strategy which identifies agricultural waste and residuals as potential products in a circular economy, helped to raise the value of slurry.

In our contribution we aim to elucidate the public debate and representations of slurry. Using topic modeling, we analyzed more than 2,000 digitally available articles from four leading German newspapers from the years 1971 to 2020.

We identified five themes that are representative of different public discourses and their development over time. Coverage of the (i) structural change, (ii) non-sustainability and (iii) governance themes tended to be problem-oriented and the representation of slurry was negative. The (iv) techno- and bioeconomy theme presented slurry in a positive way as a by-product of agricultural production that can either be controlled or even used for economic benefit. Finally, the (v) rural idyll theme reflects a romanticized vision of agriculture in which slurry is a rather unpleasant but indispensable feature.

Contribution short abstract:

Ethnographic accounts in India detail the contradictory temporal relationship between agro-industrialization and cow dung scarcity. This contribution discusses the gendered spatio-temporal implications of recent state efforts to commodify cow dung and move manuring labor from household to state.

Contribution long abstract:

India has made a recent rhetorical turn towards promulgating chemical free "natural" farming as central to the political vision of a "self-reliant" India. Focused on agro-inputs produced from the waste of the Indigenous Indian bovine, there has been a rise of public and private commodification of cow dung as both a "raw" bioresource and also a value-added product (i.e., as farmyard manure or fermented soil inoculants). These efforts at commodification respond to longstanding village reports that depict cow dung scarcity as both the cause of modernizing agro forces (i.e., synthetic nitrogen, cooking gas) and also, somewhat contradictorily exacerbated by these technologies' widespread uptake. In addition to digging into the contradictory temporal relationship between cow dung scarcity and modernist technology, this contribution will examine some of the gendered and spatio-temporal implications of Indian state's efforts to procure "raw" cow-dung for cheap and process it into more potent agricultural inputs for profit. First I will consider the spatio-temporal contradictions of commodifying cow dung - an 'indigenous' resource - through looking to modernist, spatially gridded forms of cattle management in the eastern Indian plateau where open grazing has long dominated. Second, I will examine the role of the often unpaid reproductive labor historically needed to sustain cow dung economies, and theorize how labor may become valued differently when cow dung management moves from the household to state bureaucratic interest and control. I conclude by reflecting on the ways that global theories of justice might offer alternative valuations of cow dung and its management.

Contribution short abstract:

The B2 enclosure experiment was a materially closed, energetically open environment, designed as a bioregenerative molecular economy. This work unpacks the bodily transformations that simultaneously facilitated and complicated the experiment, and the resulting environmental and cultural values.

Contribution long abstract:

Biosphere 2’s “Human Experiment” [B2] was the most comprehensive synthetic, bioregenerative, long-duration, life-support enclosure experiment conducted to date. Produced by a diverse group of interdisciplinary designers/inhabitants, its building envelope was materially closed but energetically open, operating similarly to Earth’s gravitational well. More than two orders of magnitude tighter than the space shuttle, it required the invention of synthetic environments, uniquely engineered eco-technologies, and design processes in order to conserve and transform all atoms inside through life sustaining cycles. Inspired by Ecological Systems Theory, the Biospherians developed a generative design approach that facilitated tracing and quantifying biogeochemical transformations. Ultimately, they produced a unique molecular economy, 30 trillion times smaller than Earth’s.

B2’s Mission 1 [1991-1993] was largely successful, supporting 8 people and many species of flora and fauna, for 2 years and 20 minutes. Accomplished by overpacking species and organic compounds [minus some liquid oxygen added mid-mission], and carefully controlling potentially toxic substances from entering its environment, B2’s hum/animal and non-sentient molecular transformers successfully, but painfully, sustained a hungry and increasingly breathless group of Biospherians. Through time, species went extinct, others proliferated, while the Biospherians leached DDT and other environmental toxins from their bodies. Simultaneously, they testified experiencing a sense of dissolution of their skin-barrier while becoming one with their larger B2 environment, which they untimely anthropomorphized as “The 9th Biospherian.” As their bodies tuned to B2’s, they reported deep satisfaction while drinking water that was once their urine, purified through B2’s non-human transformers, among other life-supporting essentials.