Thinking with Soils: Material Politics and Social Theory

237 Pages·2020·3.44 MB·English

by  Juan Francisco Salazar (editor), Céline Granjou (editor), Matthew Kearnes (editor), Anna Krzywoszynska (editor), Manuel Tironi (editor)

Th inking with Soils
i
Also available from Bloomsbury:
Anthropologies and Futures, edited by Juan Francisco Salazar, Sarah Pink,
Andrew Irving, Johannes Sjö berg
Organic Food, Farming and Culture , edited by Janet Chrzan, Jacqueline Ricotta
Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia, Carole Counihan
ii
Th inking with Soils
Material Politics and Social Th eory
Edited by
Juan Francisco Salazar , C é line Granjou , Matthew Kearnes ,
Anna Krzywoszynska , and Manuel Tironi
iii
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in Great Britain 2020

Copyright © Juan Francisco Salazar, Cé line Granjou,
Matthew Kearnes, Anna Krzywoszynska and Manuel Tironi and contributors, 2020

Juan Francisco Salazar, Cé line Granjou, Matthew Kearnes, Anna Krzywoszynska and
Manuel Tironi have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identifi ed as Editors of this work.

Cover Design by Ben Anslow
Cover image: The curb erosion from storms showing the layers of
soil and rock © NOPPHARAT689/Shutterstock

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iv
Contents
List of Figures vi
Notes on Contributors vii
Acknowledgments xi
Foreword Maria Puig de la Bellacasa xii
1 Th inking-with Soils: An Introduction Juan Francisco Salazar,
C é line Granjou, Anna Krzywoszynska, Manuel Tironi, and
Matthew Kearnes 1
2 Soil Th eories: Relational, Decolonial, Inhuman M anuel Tironi,
Matthew Kearnes, Anna Krzywoszynska, C é line Granjou, and
Juan Francisco Salazar 15
3 Mapping Soil, Losing Ground? Politics of Soil Mapping
Juliette Kon Kam King and C é line Granjou 39
4 Soils and Commodifi cation S alvatore Engel-Di Mauro and Levi Van Sant 55
5 Knowing Earth, Knowing Soil: Epistemological Work and the Political
Aesthetics of Regenerative Agriculture M atthew Kearnes and
Lauren Rickards 71
6 To Know, To Dwell, To Care: Towards an Actionable, Place-based
Knowledge of Soils Anna Krzywoszynska with Steve Banwart
and David Blacker 89
7 Soiling Mars: “To Boldly Grow Where No Plant Has Grown
Before”? Filippo Bertoni 107
8 Geosocial Polar Futures and the Material Geopolitics of Frozen
Soils Juan Francisco Salazar and Klaus Dodds 123
9 A Mend to the Metabolic Rift ? Th e Promises (and Potential Pitfalls)
of Biosolids Application on American Soils Nicholas C. Kawa 141
10 Reclaiming Freak Soils: From Conquering to Journeying with Urban
Soils Germain Meulemans 157
11 Soil Refusal: Th inking Earthly Matters as Radical Alterity M anuel Tironi 175
12 Geophagiac: Art, Food, Dirt Lindsay Kelley 191
Index 211
v
List of Figures
1.1 Coonawarra, Australia. Image: Charles G [https://unsplash.com/photos/
WO7rUJFaJwQ]. 2
2.1 Soil n’ Stuff . Local business in Sydney, Australia. Image by Matthew Kearnes. 16
2.2 Soil n’ Stuff . Local business in Sydney, Australia. Image by Matthew Kearnes. 16
6.1 Th e Critical Zone. Diagram by Steven Banwart. 93
6.2 DIY water infi ltration test. Photo by David Blacker. 100
8.1 Permafrost in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, 2017. Credit:
David Houseknecht, USGS. Public domain. 126
9.1 A pile of Com-Til—composted woodchips and biosolids from the City
of Columbus, Ohio—releases steam as thermophilic microbes “do
their work.” Photo by Nick Kawa. 147
9.2 A photograph that demonstrates the diff erence that biosolids application
can make. Photo by Nick Kawa. 151
9.3 A large mound of Class B biosolids are hauled across a future dryland
wheat fi eld near Mansfi eld, Washington. Photo by Nick Kawa. 152
10.1 Henri and the Petite Ceinture garden in winter 2013, not long aft er he
started gardening on the old train platform. Photo by Léonard Nguyen
Van Th é. 163
10.2 L é onard Nguyen Van Th é sets the fi rst layers of a new mound on the
abandoned platform. Photo by Germain Meulemans. 166
10.3 L é onard Nguyen Van Th é builds a dry-stone wall around a tree of heaven
( Ailanthus altissima ) on a brownfi eld site in Aubervilliers. Photo by Jens
Denissen. 167
11.1 Barren soil in Campiche, central Chile. Photo by Manuel Tironi. 180
11.2 Doing magnetotellurics in C á huil, central Chile. Photo by Manuel Tironi. 183
12.1 “Santuario de Chimay ó Prayer Room With Discarded Crutches and
Testimonials” by Marshall Henrie, 2004. 198
12.2 “Haitian Dirt Biscuits” by Feed My Starving Children, 2011. 202
12.3 Lindsay Kelley, recipe card produced for S tarvation Seeds (2008).
Reproduced with permission of the artist. 205
vi
Notes on Contributors
Steve Banwart is the Director of the Global Food and Environment Institute, University
of Leeds. His core science expertise is basic chemistry that is also applied to the study
of soil systems and natural waters. He champions integrating research into Earth’s
Critical Zone, the surface layer of the planet from bedrock to atmospheric boundary
layer that provides humans with most of their life-sustaining resources. He has
published extensively on soil functions within the Critical Zone.
Filippo Bertoni obtained his PhD from Amsterdam University, focusing on earthworms
and their scientists. Currently, he is a researcher at the Museum fur Naturkunde, in
Berlin, where he investigates the transformation of animals into objects and data across
the city’s natural history collections and zoological gardens. Embracing an undisciplined
approach, the stories he gathers play with genres, styles, and media at the edges of
imaginative fi ction and various forms of academic writing. Animating the tension
between reality, science, and (science) fi ction, these stories resist the universalizing push
of Western modernity, opening up to the multiplicity of worlds already around us.
David Blacker is a third-generation arable farmer and contractor working in the Vale
of York in England. Since 2013, he has been experimenting with using strip-tillage
methods. He has become a spokesman for sustainable soil management, and has
discussed his experiences in multiple press articles and at farming conferences.
Klaus Dodds is Professor of Geopolitics and Director of Research for the School of Life
Sciences and Environment at Royal Holloway University of London. He researches in the
areas of geopolitics and security, media/popular culture, ice studies and the international
governance of the Antarctic and the Arctic. He has worked for the UK Parliament as
specialist adviser to a House of Lords Select Committee on the Arctic and the House of
Commons Environment Audit Committee. He is co-author with Mark Nuttall of Th e
Arctic: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2019). He has been a
recipient of a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust 2017–2020 for a
project on the Global Arctic. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in the UK.
Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro is Professor at the Geography Department of SUNY New
Paltz, He works on soil degradation, urban soils, trace element contamination,
ideologies on soils, and socialism and environment. He has also published on critical
geographies, the European Union, ethnopedology, Indigenous Peoples’ struggles, and
pedagogy. He is chief editor of Capitalism Nature Socialism . His recent teaching
subjects include physical geography, gender and environment, people–environment
relations, and soils.
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viii Notes on Contributors
C é line Granjou is a Senior Researcher in Environmental Sociology at the French
Research Institute for Environment and Agriculture (IRSTEA), University of Grenoble
Alps, and research fellow at the Interdisciplinary Laboratory on Science Innovation
and Society (LSIS) in Paris. She has a background in Science and Technology Studies,
Political Sociology, and Environmental Sociology. Her current research interests
include health and environmental risks, nature conservation policies, biodiversity
politics, climate governance, anticipation studies, environmental humanities, soil and
human–soil relationships.
Nicholas C. Kawa is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and a core faculty member
of the Initiative for Food and Agricultural Transformation (InFACT) at Th e Ohio
State University (USA). His research centers on questions of human–environment
interaction with specifi c emphasis on human relationships to plants and soils,
particularly in the Amazon region. Currently, he is developing a new project that
investigates the production, application, and management of “biosolids” (treated
sanitation sludge) in American agriculture. He is the former President of the Culture
and Agriculture Section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA).
Matthew Kearnes is an Associate Professor and member of the Environment and
Society Research Group at the School of Humanities and Languages, University of
New South Wales. He also currently services as a CI with the ARC Centre of Excellence
in Convergent Bio-Nano Science & Technology (CBNS, 2014–2021) and was an ARC
Future Fellow between 2014 and 2018. Matthew’s research is focused on the social and
political dimensions of technological and environmental change, with current projects
exploring regenerative agriculture and carbon farming, and is situated between the
fi elds of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Human Geography. His most
recent book is the co-edited volume with Jason Chilvers, R emaking Participation:
Science, Environment and Emergent Publics (Routledge, 2016). Matthew is an associate
editor for Science as Culture (Taylor & Francis) and serves on the editorial board of
Science, Technology and Society (Sage).
Lindsay Kelley is Senior Lecturer at UNSW Sydney in the Faculty of Art & Design as
well as Honorary Research Fellow, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, the
School of Philosophical and Historical Enquiry, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,
in association with Sydney Environment Institute, the University of Sydney. Working
in the kitchen, her art practice and scholarship explore how the experience of eating
changes when technologies are being eaten. Her published work can be found in
journals including parallax , Transgender Studies Quarterly , Angelaki , and E nvironmental
Humanities . Her fi rst book is B ioart Kitchen: Art, Feminism and Technoscience (IB
Tauris, 2016). She is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early
Career Researcher Award.
Juliette Kon Kam King is a PhD candidate in Human Geography at the French
National Research Institute for Sustainable Development and at the Leibniz Centre for
Tropical Marine Research. Having a background in Science and Technology Studies,
Notes on Contributors ix
she has worked on soil–society relationships in the French context and currently
focuses on ocean governance and marine conservation issues in the South Pacifi c.
Anna Krzywoszynska is a Faculty Research Fellow at the Department of Geography,
the University of Sheffi eld, and an Associate Director at the University of Sheffi eld
Institute for Sustainable Food. Her work investigates how environmental knowledges
and ethics are made, communicated, and contested in spaces of food production. She
is currently fascinated by soils and their publics, and she has published on soil ethics,
sustainable soil management communities of practice, and soil non-human labor. She
is the founder and coordinator of the Soil Care Network (soilcarenetwork.com), which
brings scholars and practitioners from across disciplines and geographies together
around soil issues.
Germain Meulemans is an anthropologist interested in the environment, creativity,
and perception. Aft er receiving his PhD from the Universities of Aberdeen and Li è ge
in 2017, he joined the Centre Alexandre Koyr é (EHESS, CNRS, MNHN) in Paris as
an IFRIS postdoctoral fellow. His current research focuses on the increasing concerns
for urban soils in the soil sciences and urban planning, and on the ontological
implications of working with anthropogenic environments for the natural and social
sciences. He has collaborated with artists on several art-research projects bearing on
soils and sustainability, and is a founding member of the Chao ï ds collective.
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary
Methodologies, University of Warwick. She works at the crossing of science and
technology studies, feminist theory and the environmental humanities. Her most
recent book Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (University
of Minnesota Press, 2017) connects a feminist materialist tradition of critical thinking
on care with debates on more than human ontologies and ecological practices. She is
currently researching the formations of novel ecological cultures around human–
soil relations, looking at how connections between scientifi c knowing, social and
community movements, as well as art interventions are contributing to transformative
ethics, politics, and justice in troubled naturecultural worlds.
Lauren Rickards is an Associate Professor in the School of Global, Urban, and Social
Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. A human geographer with a
science background, her research is situated at the interface of climate change and
agriculture. Lauren is a Lead Author with the forthcoming Sixth Assessment Report of
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an Earth Systems Governance Senior
Fellow of Future Earth, and convener of the Institute of Australian Geographers’
Nature, Risk and Resilience study group.
Juan Francisco Salazar is Professor at the School of Humanities and Communication
Arts and at the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS), Western Sydney University. He
is an anthropologist and documentary fi lmmaker with interests in Indigenous media,
community-based adaptation to climate change, social-ecological transitions, futures,