Soil Repair: Recuperating Human-Soil Relationships

Abstracts

Care under constraint: post-mining soil remediation techniques in the tropical forest

Nassima Abdelghafour, Centre Alexandre-Koyré / IFRIS; with Liliana Doganova and Brice Laurent

As the mining industry is being urged to implement post-mining rehabilitation and revegetalization, the questions of whether and how it is possible to reconstitute pre-mining environments on a scarred and eroded soil become pressing among regulators, mining companies and ecological experts. Building on fieldwork carried out in French Guiana during several research visits from 2019 to 2021, we analyze the debates and ongoing experiments on post-mining rehabilitation and revegetalization in the tropical forest. Most protagonists have foregone the dream of bringing mining sites back to their initial state. Amidst the uncertainties surrounding post-mining ecological reparation, we ask: what exactly is to be regrown or restored then? On which instantiation of the tropical forest is it possible to act? Describing the technologies developed by various companies offering their services to the mining industry, we analyze ways of articulating scientific knowledge, regulatory constraints, and markets for rehabilitation and revegetalization techniques. We explore different versions of the gesture of reparation, both on a material and on a moral point of view. Which beings are cared for or considered in the process? We focus on how these different techniques engage with soil and propose to transform it. We build on our empirical case to entangle the notions of "ecological reparation" and "economy of repair" in a new way: contrary to cases when companies can offset the damage caused somewhere by acting elsewhere, the regulatory and economic assemblage in French Guiana pushes the mining industry to "stay with the trouble" of the damage it causes.

The Multiple Enactments of Contamination: Rethinking Military-Industrial Sites Redevelopment in the Tel Aviv Region

Uri Ansenberg, The Hebrew Univeristy of Jerusalem

The remediation and redevelopment of industrially contaminated land is a complex challenge for urban regions worldwide. Yet the literature mostly addresses this as a technical problem through dichotomic and anthropocentric terms, contrasting the passive-negative role of the contamination itself – as a toxic entity in the ground – with the active-positive roles assigned to human actors such as planners, developers, and communities. This article contests this prevalent view by tracing in detail debates concerning the remediation of three highly-contaminated Israeli Military Industries sites in the Tel Aviv metropolitan region. Drawing on notions of ontological multiplicity and enactment from Science and Technology Studies and on qualitative analysis of a vast database of planning protocols and court hearings alongside interviews with key stakeholders, we uncover how contamination is enacted in multiple ways - i.e. as mobile/immobile, unified/fragmented, remediable/irremediable. Furthermore, following one of our field’s inherent controversies – whether to fully map the contamination prior to planning the sites – the article highlights the attempts to regulate this multiplicity and replace it with a single coherent contamination. Our theoretical approach and empirical evidence offer a nuanced understanding of urban contamination while pointing to novel ways to redevelop contaminated sites in more equitable and sustainable ways.

Encounters in Soil: Remediating Entangled Relations through Mycorrhiza

By Shiho Satsuka, University of Toronto

This paper explores how mycorrhizal mushrooms guide humans to cultivate attentiveness towards a dynamic multi-dimensional world in soil. In particular, it examines the practices of scientists in a large Japanese research project on the “artificial cultivation” of matsutake mushrooms. “Artificial cultivation” could be an exemplary case of the modernist pursuit of economic profit by exploiting nonhuman organisms. Yet, the research team’s practices do not quite fit this one-dimensional assumption. As scientists try to solve the puzzles in the intricate relationships that the fungi form with their host trees and other beings, they are also trying to find a way to heal environmental damages inflicted by industrialization. They are drawn to the animating power of the mycorrhizal fungi and attend to the multispecies events in the soil. Through an ethnographic examination of the research team’s practices, the paper discusses how the matsutake stimulates humans to open their senses to the entangled life and dynamics of a multi-dimensional world. The paper argues that the potential directions of “artificial cultivation” are changing and contested as encounters are ceaselessly occurring and influencing the trajectory of events. The paper draws insights from Japanese naturalist Minakata Kumagusu’s (1867-1941) idea of en—or a chance encounter of trajectories—and examines the quotidian multispecies politics which are constantly shaped and reshaped by the encounters of heterogeneous trajectories of various life-forms. The paper also explores the ontological politics and rich multispecies history that shape the anthropogenic soil in Japan as well as research connections between Japan and Nordic countries.

Cultivating commons in the ruins of agricultural industry

Malou Juelskjær, Aarhus University

I will weave a myriad of entanglements in relation to agricultural soil, through a specific piece of agriculture plot (in Vallestrup, Seeland, Denmark), formerly used for generations in conventional, industrial agriculture. Now bought by a water utility company to protect the water drilling area and ‘the water intended for human consumption – and handed over to a group of citizens who will explore ways of ‘listening to the soil’ and of figuring out how humans may assist in biodiverse processes and processing. They will be assisted by a forester and by artists (as artists-on-soil-residency) who are already working with questions of nature-soil-care. These processes will take place in the upcoming months wherefore insights are yet-to-come. In the background of these activities are analyses that I have already conducted exploring the ontology of soil when enacted as a substance of interest in relation to the risks of pesticide residues in drinking water (monitoring of soil and water). I have also done some conceptualizing and historicizing the layered assemblages of anthropogenic soils: Many of the estates of the area were connected to Danish colonial activities – and this requires scrutiny. But also at the moment I am looking into 400 years of Danish agriculture history, the land reforms and the laws regulating the peasants in order to be able to diffract the specificities of the questions of the plantations/plantationocene. Further, the Vallestrup plot is an experiment in creating new types of commons, gathering on re-learning a more-than-human-living with/of ‘abandoned’/’freed’ industrial agricultural soil

Lying fallow: practices and knowledges

Anna-Katharina Laboissière, University of Oslo

The practice of intentional fallowing, edged out by the advent of synthetic fertilisers in the 19th century, nevertheless continues existing as an object interest in agricultural policy and microbiology in recent years; it responds to a growing concern with the depletion and regeneration of soils in agricultural and environmental policy. Fallowing can variously function as a technique for agricultural productivity through improved soil fertility, an additional arrow in conservation biology’s quiver of potential restoration tools, and as a promising resource of micro-organisms that could be used to engineer novel plant holobionts. In the process, fallowed soils emerge as sites where a variety of interests and projects converge and where these take up, replay, and extend questions of productivity and idleness, growth, and alternatives to economic expansion.

This paper will present an overview of the first phase of the research project “FALLOW: Generative idleness and gestures of reparation”, and ask how fallowing practices function as tools mediating different forms of human-soil relationships and allowing the formation of certain kinds of knowledge about soils and soil ecosystems.

How to compensate for loss of nature - the implementation of ecological restoration practices in the transport sector of Norway

Ulrika Lein, Norwegian Institution for Nature research

IPBES and IPCC calls for a transformative change to achieve the sustainable development goals regarding reducing biodiversity loss, combat climate change and to ensure human wellbeing. Anthropogenic land use such as agriculture, forestry, and urbanization are the main drivers of biodiversity depletion. To reverse the trends of expanding land use, IPBES recommends a massive upscaling of ecological restoration – the intentional activity that initiates the recovery and repair of a degraded ecosystem. The practice of ecological restoration and compensation is not widely used within public or private sector, thus, initiating a knowledge gap on practices of soil repair and maintenance of depleted nature. 

Based on semi structured interviews and document analysis, this paper investigates the implementation of ecological compensation of a protected wetland area in the southeast of Norway. This empirical case of a highway-upgrade was considered a pilot for implementing ecological compensation in the construction sector. Compensation refers to the practice of mitigating building impact by financing habitat restoration in another location with an equivalent ecological value. In addition, our work aims to evaluate the concept of compensation in a network consisting of actors from environmental management, road administration, state actors and other. In this retrospective case study, we follow the concept of compensation through the stages of construction, from planning to building. By using theoretical framework that is based on the field of STS, the main approaches include framing and translation of knowledge of ecological compensation, ontological politics and technologies of government 

An impossible restoration? Soil imaginaries and living with (toxic) legacies in Bitterfeld-Wolfen, Germany

Carolin Maertens, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich

Bitterfeld is a post-mining and de-industrialised town in Eastern Germany, once infamously known as the “dirtiest town in Europe” for its pollution and environmental destruction under the regime of the German Democratic Republic. In the wake of Germany’s re-unification, restoration efforts transformed the former mining area into a pretty lakeland: a natural idyll appreciated by visitors and locals. Today a prime example of post-mining and post-socialist transformation, the clean-up remains incomplete. Highly toxic waste in abandoned unselaed mines keeps contaminating the groundwater and soil. In many places, for instance, it remains prohibited to use subterranean water in gardens and consuming garden produce is discouraged, while basements require insulation against toxic outgassing.  This paper draws on fieldwork around Bitterfeld, taking soil as a starting point to address experiences of profound environmental and socio-cultural disturbance and transformation as well as living in and with toxic legacies. In particular, it builds on four ethnographic encounters underscoring different yet coexisting soil imaginaries. These are: the art performance “Sweat of the Soil,” curated by Berlin-based artists in collaboration with local residents; the techno-scientific and legal-administrative work of local authorities managing potential hazards; private gardening as a form of care that can acquire a hint of protest; and the protection of ecological succession on seemingly barren soil. Moving from such encounters, this paper offers preliminary reflections on practices and imaginaries of (impossible) soil and groundwater repair, the everyday public and hidden lives of toxicity, and the layered legacies of post-industrial soils and post-socialist history.

Asymmetries in a multistakeholder participatory project on soil reparation

Tiffany Mak, The Novo Nordisk Center for Biosustainability (DTU Biosustain); with Joshua Evans and Leonie Jahn

Coffee is one of the most widely consumed beverages and a highly traded global commodity. Coffee production is the mainstay of over 100 million people worldwide, with producers primarily located in over 70 tropical and subtropical countries. Many of these coffee producing regions are also biodiversity hotspots, where farming practices have direct impacts on surrounding biodiversity and climate. The current cultivation practices in most conventional coffee plantations are intensive and costly, with heavy reliance on pesticides, chemical fertilisers and irrigation.

This paper focusses on a multistakeholder project that sets out to address the deteriorating human-soil relationship in commercial coffee production in Brazil. The project in question investigates alternative field management strategies to reduce the reliance on chemical fertilisers in coffee farming, as well as improve the circularity of coffee production through increasing the utilisation of current by-products generated from coffee production. Jointly funded by a philanthropic foundation and a multinational coffee retail company, the project is a research collaboration between coffee farmers and university research partners with backgrounds in soil sciences and microbial ecology. This paper offers a personal account of my experiences as a microbial ecologist participating in this multistakeholder project, and some reflections on the asymmetries in priorities, perceptions and expectations I observed. With this experience, I aim to illustrate how ‘soil ontology’— seeing soils as dynamic, living biological systems or as inert, static pools of geological and chemical resources—strongly influences the methodologies used to know them, and consequently the strategies used to manage and recuperate them.

Displaced monoliths, noisy biota and edible earth; sensory values and “soil connectivity” as curatorial practices in contemporary soil exhibition.

Elise Matilde Malik, IKOS, UiO and Vitenparken Campus Ås

In my industrial doctoral project on science dissemination, I explore curatorial practices around soil. Using sensory museology as my theoretical starting point (Howes 2014), I investigate how a diverse selection of soil exhibitions contribute to “soil connectivity”. In addition to the world´s 38 permanent soil museums and 34 permanent exhibitions (Richer-de-Forges et al. 2020) we now see a continuously growing scene of art and science constellations facing the global soil crisis with temporary soil exhibitions.   

What kinds of material and imagined soils do we find in these exhibitions, how are they curated and in what sense do they initiate care and repair of soil for artists, scientists, exhibition institutions and the audience? While some artists create a reciprocal relationship with soil by reconnecting bodily made and displaced soil monoliths (Soil Works) others lick and digest parts of soil, collecting edible clay and curate soil tastings (Edible Earth Museum). Placing technological ears to the ground have also resulted in sensory exhibitions, revealing the surprisingly noisy place of agricultural topsoil, due to the myriad of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, springtails and earthworms (Sounding Soil).  

It has almost been a full decade since scholars seriously started investigating sensory experimentation in contemporary curatorial practice, but there has been little effort towards soil exhibitions as a field of enquiry. This paper seeks to uncover the curated and musealized soil, a boundary object (Star & Griesemer 1989) and an extreme form of anthrosol - soils formed or heavily modified by humans.  

Using my own sensorial soil exhibition experience as a starting point, I go on to investigate how different soil exhibitions can be interpreted as sensory spaces/zones. Focusing on the tapestry of senses I analyze a diverse group of soil exhibitions across the art and science field.

The “social life” of soil and antimicrobials: connecting soil ecologies and antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

Paula Palanco Lopez, University of Oulu

The future of our planet is filled with uncertainty, with global and complex challenges – and we are increasingly realising that these issues are not straightforward, nor isolated. This paper will argue for the importance of understanding as interrelated two traditionally separate problems: soil ecologies and antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Furthermore, I will argue for the importance of seeing this relationship from an anthropological perspective, that is, from the perspective of their embedment in the configuration of social life. Dominant thinking has traditionally regarded soil as fundamentally infrastructural (as the waste-absorbing and processing ‘substrate of life’), and antimicrobials as products, made by and for human consumption (even when used in agriculture and farming). In this paper, I will explore both the problems that lie within this distinction and potential routes forward, considering soils and antimicrobials not as products nor infrastructures, but as interlinked material processes generated and generative of context. This paper draws on initial PhD research examining the relationship of soil ecologies and antimicrobials, critically engaging with current global frameworks, such as One Health, One World and Planetary Health. In this paper, I will examine how these frameworks portray both soils and antimicrobials in relation to the broader concept of ‘health’. I will then present my planned fieldwork in Latin America and Finland on AMR and environmental management practices. This work draws from the novel field of soil ecology and the more public-health-oriented research on AMR, attempting to make a cross-disciplinary contribution to our knowledge of the ever-changing, co-influential relationships that exist within the world’s ecology.

Composting in the (post)Arctic

Ida Højlund Rasmussen, The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Institute of Urbanism and Landscape

Can a pile of horse manure and a bag of food waste be valuable resources? When does something actually “become a resource”? This, I have asked myself when dealing with soil construction and future small-scale farming in Vardø, a community in the Norwegian high north. Here, there is a growing wish for vegetable farming – both on grassroot and municipal levels. To support the Vardø community in their quest for locally produced vegetables, I direct my attention towards the “waste” of the island, and the relation between municipal land-use objectives and existing small-scale initiatives dealing with composting.

In northern Varanger, food waste is not managed locally but transported two hours away to Tana. This might imply a possibility for implementing more circular waste management strategies in Vardø. Managing waste locally might, however, intervene with questions of productivity, profit and private property rights. But what happens if soils are seen as working (Krzywoszynska, 2020) and understood as part of a (post)Arctic resource network, along with seaweed, human labour, food waste, Hügel beds, and other biological agents? 

Drawing on field work conducted last summer, and thinking with STS and multispecies studies scholars who consider soils as living and ask whether it is possible to envision possibility while still recognising catastrophe, I ask whether the ontology of soil as a resource may be shifting, and how this relates to a local community with a scarcity of soil, but plenty of willpower. Can rethinking waste management and approaches to soil form more fertile human-soil relations in a place, that one from a southern perspective could consider a “temperature periphery”?

Restoring pedo-semiosis: The work of sign recovery in post-Iron Curtain soils

Markus Rudolfi, Goethe University Frankfurt

The Iron Curtain is mostly known as a metaphor for geopolitical separation between the Soviet Union and “the West”. It is less known as a technology of ecological damage for which forests were cut or mires were drained – even less since the European Green Belt initiative claimed the collateral ecological value of the former militarized border. In the study area, the transboundary protected area Bavarian Forest (Germany) and Šumava (Czech Republic), soil scientists and conservationists are working towards the recovery of wetlands which were drained for the instalment of the materialised Iron Curtain border apparatus and for the mining of peat. Whereas the work on wetland restoration itself is broadly supported and praised as a strong instrument to tackle climate change, particular histories and meanings of local soil seem to be neglected. In addition, as wetlands resurge quite slowly, they demand a different “pace of care” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2015). Hence, my fieldwork wants to highlight that soil is told in different ways and that mire restoration in post-Iron Curtain landscapes is not only the work on a potential climate future; it is also the slow work of recovering signs of past realities that do not always fit well into contemporary realities. The study uses a praxiographic approach to soil semiosis which emphasises the situated production of meaning of anthropogenic soils during sampling trips. Rather than using (eco-)semiotics as a formal way of analysis, “pedo-semiosis” is introduced to demonstrate signs-in-action in particular landscapes.

The concept niche construction as an entry point to a more relational and interdisciplinary understanding of soils

Henrik Sinding-Larsen, Dept. of social anthropology, University of Oslo

Soils are complex ecosystems with a long history of human interference. Understanding soils today presupposes understanding the human-soils relationship. Transforming this relationship in a sustainable direction requires physics and related disciplines for understanding the soil’s non-living processes, biological disciplines for understanding soil’s living organisms, and social science and humanities for understanding soil’s relationship to humans. In addition to interdisciplinary oriented soil specialists the challenge will also necessitate innovative interdisciplinary collaboration across the human science – natural science divide. A major challenge is to identify concepts and distinctions that are accepted as important and meaningful across wide disciplinary divides, concepts that can act as bridges and catalyze common insights. Daniel Richter (2007; 2020) has described changes through the history of soil science and how a central dilemma has been where to draw the line between humans, other living organisms, and the soil’s non-living physics and chemistry. There exist pitfalls of attributing both too much and too little autonomous life to an ecosystem. The panel invitation proposes a more relational understanding as a way forward. But what does this concept mean? The paper will explore the concept niche construction and how controversies around this concept in evolutionary biology can exemplify and substantiate the concept relational understanding in a way relevant for an interdisciplinary understanding of soil and soil repair. Insights in these issues are in part based on my 2019-2022 participation in the radically interdisciplinary research group “Evolvability: A New and Unifying Concept in Evolutionary
Biology?” at Centre for Advanced Study (CAS), Oslo.

Making With Soil Bodies

Serina Tarkhanian, Arkitektur- og designhøgskolen i Oslo (AHO); with Sigrid Espelien

The current conflation of ecological and social crises has made visible the close and vulnerable relationship between humans and the environment, pushing the practices of artists and designers to rethink habits, trajectories, and relationships with the material world. This realisation has translated into an urgency for creative practitioners to reconsider material thinking and its intricate ties to extractivism. In light of this, we – a designer and a clay artist working with local clay bodies such as the Oslo blåleire and Charlottetown soil – have been engaged in defining ways in which material praxis might become healing, re-politicising how our respective fields converse with soil matter. As part of this panel, we would like to propose both a literal and hands-on conversation with matter, that is, facilitating a small hands-on exercise with local soil to somatically experience our ongoing research around grounding with clay (Espelien) and co-healing with soil and bodily microbes (Tarkhanian). As conference goers and panelists come into contact with soil bodies, we will provide insights into the ways in which we as practitioners and researchers “make with” soil to unsettle extractivism, such as hosting body-on workshops in which people forage for local clay (in construction sites, landfills for unwanted masses, or the forest) and experimenting with clay 3D printing to reveal invisible entanglements. The panel will be an opportunity for the audience to better understand how critical design and art explore “what could be” when engaging with healing and care as both practical and conceptual frameworks for material work.

Soilkin – Relational Exercises with Soils and Stones

Alex Toland, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

In the essay About a Stone: Some Notes on Geologic Conviviality, Hugo Reinert (2016, p.96) poses the question: “What modes of passionate immersion – or love, or intimacy could a stone afford?” Drawing on ideas from multispecies ethnography, Fluxus performance, queer-feminist STS, and the history and philosophy of soil science, the Soilkin project responds to Reinert’s research in the far north by tracing the journey of kindred stones from Sámi lands in Norway to the end moraine landscape and sandy soils of the Biosphere Reservation Schorfheide-Chorin, located just north of Berlin. Situated in a fluid space between environmental humanities and artistic research, the Soilkin project develops a series of relational exercises to frame three basic propositions: 1) a non-normative, animistic understanding of geologic subjectivity could trouble accepted criteria for life on earth, leading to kinship with geogenic entities; 2) soil formation (pedogenesis) could be interpreted as a performative process of learning and becoming, rather than simply weathering and aging, with appreciable ontological implications; and 3) soil kinship is situated within a dynamic interplay of resistance and consent, demanding that the terms of reciprocity between humans and soils be mutually beneficial and appropriate to the slowed-down timescale of events in which soil-beings live and operate. By integrating theoretical provocations with performative scores, the aim of the project is to expand and sensitize soil-scientific knowledge while, at the same time, contribute to multispecies scholarship on kin-making with geogenic and pedogenic others.

The social life of manure: Contested technologies of soil repair inhabiting different worlds

Bertram Turner, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Organic manure is part of a soil repair assemblage. It is a coproduction of plants, animals, humans, worms, insects, microbes, and others and is applied to enrich the soil for plant life. Such assemblage involves the maintenance and design of soil structure such as terraces, the regulation of rain with drainage systems, irrigation technology, active protection against erosion and much more. It demands multispecies cooperation with active human involvement and reacts sensitive to environmental challenges. In the Moroccan Souss, however, it has become an integral part of cash crop supply chain infrastructures. This region has been designated a UNESCO biosphere reserve on account of its worldwide unique argan forest ecosystem. At the same time, it is also a ‘Garden of Europe’, i.e. the site of high-standard agrobusiness. Manure constitutes one of the links connecting these worlds. It integrates small-scale conventional agro-forestry into highly technicized cash crop agribusiness thereby transforming it. Beyond its importance for a sophisticated conventional system of agroforestry, it proves also indispensable for the fertilization of irrigated land in high-end modern cash crop production where chemical fertilizers cannot replace it successfully. However, this demand for manure has significantly contributed to the demise of small-scale agriculture and the exploitation of a protected forest ecosystem for a capitalist agroindustrial infrastructure. The paper explores the social life of manure as an assemblage repairing exhausted soil from its origin in agro-forestry to its use in industrial cash crop production and the concomitant transformations of multispecies relationalities.

Soil Trust (泥玩): Collectivised compost logistics and soil care practices for pluriversal livelihoods

Markus Wernli, School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Organic residues are a valuable ingredient for soil ecologies, energy recovery, and carbon capture, manifesting the ideal of circularity. Yet their inherently volatile, heavy, messy, and smelly character, organic residues prompt a range of biological, sociotechnical, and cultural challenges. What kind of recovery practices and arrangements are necessary to reintegrate and revalue such lively matter? Through practical implementation, how might we counter the impact of urban food excess while contributing to the regeneration of soils and agricultural sector depleted by climatic and socioeconomic changes? To address these concerns, we established the Soil Trust experimental farm over the past two years. This collaborative research enterprise between farmers, hospitality professionals, food localization families, design students, and ethnic minority gardeners is prototyping a reverse supply chain for directing eggshells, fruit peels, rice bran, and veggie trimmings from the city into arable soils on the urban fringes. Drawing on insights from science and technology studies, diverse economies, and codesign, we consider a broader range of economic possibilities revolving around soil care practices. Following Ethan Miller, we think, feel, and act “with the world,” particularly with food scraps, buffalo manure, and soils as the basis for enabling interdependent livelihoods: living-making activities connecting humans, microbes, cities, and soil ecologies to a pluriversal future. Thus, we understand Soil Trust as an instance of what Çalskan and Callon denote as economization: making and stabilizing relationships that facilitate exchange and perspective. It also reconfigures local landscapes that, in turn, are predicated on a process of design-led social invention.