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Paper short abstract:

India has emphasized urea-spreading smallholders are central to soil decline and nitrogen/carbon overshoot. I call for a more sympathetic view of synthetic nitrogen, arguing that urea vilification sidesteps core questions about the politics of planetary change across global and national scales.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last several years the Indian government has promulgated a vision of chemical free agriculture in India, and particularly focused on farmer self-made alternatives to synthetic nitrogen (i.e., urea), which the government heavily subsidizes for the Indian farmer. Arguing that natural farming is central to address planetary overshoot in both nitrogen/phosphorus flows and atmospheric carbon, it identifies the Indian farmer (a smallholder, to be sure) as a crucial actor in protecting mother earth from modernist decline that comes with “indiscriminate” chemical fertilizer use. This paper draws on ethnographic research and textual analysis to analyze government calls for a form of farmer "lifestyle environmentalism" as a particularly potent form of neoliberal environmentalism that differs from Gandhian notions of self-reliance in the spatialities and temporalities of social change, collectivization, and care. It places this rhetoric within a global politics of responsibility for planetary boundary overshoot and argues the nation-state, as a colonial invention, is an inadequate spatial scale to resolve global environmental injustices - arguing that attempts to destabilize geopolitical hierarchies can come at the expense of reinforcing 'domestic' ones. While debating the politics of responsibility around biogeochemical flows and soil resources, I argue for a more sympathetic treatment of the role synthetic nitrogen might play in sustaining soil-based economies like agriculture and ask how environmental “crises” can do the work of politics in electoral democracies like India.