In my PhD research, I have engaged in the context of carbon farming in Sweden and the EU. Carbon farming is part of efforts to shift to sustainable agriculture practices that create healthy soils, reward farmers and land managers financially for these changes in practice, and mitigate climate change by sequestering greenhouse gases in soils. Carbon farming is still relatively new, and efforts are ongoing across the EU to test carbon farming through pilot schemes, including in Sweden, where more established schemes are now being launched. Many also link the changes to land use in carbon farming to regenerative agriculture. So it is a part of a larger agri-food context where big questions arise concerning how we approach making changes for more sustainable futures.  

My work has thus explored the question if, when, and how can carbon farming practices and strategies contribute to the making of sustainability transformations? My biggest inspiration in approaching this topic comes from philosophies that speak about that climate change and related socioecological issues as relationship problems. For example, relationships between humans and nature or, in the case of my research, human and soil relations. This is an interesting approach to any wicked problem because it helps to shift our attention away from seeking solutions through new technologies or social innovations and instead invites us to look at our interdependencies – how we rely on and need each other (humans and nonhumans) in different ways that are necessary for life. For me, this lies at the heart of environmental communication.  

I have been inspired to think about communication through the works of Nora Bateson and Vanessa Andreotti, among others. What they both speak to are ecologies of communication – where at least I start to imagine what good or healthy communication might look like. And I start to think of places like old growth forests, or rain forests where a huge amount of life is in constant interaction, in mutual exchange, in conversation to create continuous change, and at the same time some kind of balance. It is a vibrant relational place. So, in a healthy ecology of communication, communication is to make common, to share, to participate and thus it is very little about transmitting or translating – I see communication then as about being in relationship where how we listen to others matters for what we are able to say or express. This has been expressed by feminist thinkers, like Donna Haraway, in that “it matters what stories tell stories”. Communication is about relationships and what we are attentive to – and what interests me the most is how we can collectively tend to the premises of what it is possible to communicate. Bateson and Andreotti talk a lot about what creates unhealthy ecologies for communication, or what they call monocultures of communication which according to them are oriented around ideals of control, linear thinking and values that uphold modernity. These types of ecologies of communication are ones that I have witnessed in my own research and which I think are important to name, but what is needed is also to really start thinking practically and speculatively about how to create more thriving and diverse communication.  

Some of the ways I have tried to work with this understanding of communication is through creative writing of poetic vignettes from interviews with farmers, working with futures thinking methods to lift the seeds of alternative futures amongst grassroots stakeholders, and thinking with the idea of telling the time with soils to explore relationships and their timings in the context of carbon farming. One of the things I therefore hope my research offers are openings, not for how transformation in agriculture should be, but some speculative ingredients at the heart of which are questions about how we want to relate to soil ecosystems.  

Read more about work in Focus area 5 – Transformation here.