What is the value of soils? International organizations like the Food and Agriculture Organization and European Commission draw attention to how soils are degrading worldwide, making it a global priority to reinstate healthy soils for human wellbeing, climate change adaptation and mitigation, and long-term economic goals, among other things. We must care for soils! – these institutions declare. These declarations are accompanied by calls for broadly increasing soil knowledge and popular societal engagement, thus increasing soil literacy and, thereby, soil care. Yet, the kind of care outlined in response to these declarations of the need for urgent soil action are characterized by particular assumptions. These assumptions foreground economic motivations that base the values of soils on their utility and importance for human wellbeing. The risk that accompanies these assumptions is that the fantastic complexities of soil ecosystems and our human entanglement with them is ironed out. Our capacity to care for soils gets boiled down to a litany of scientifically-based, human-centered actions. Soil sciences as a way to broaden our understandings of soils are important. However, the value that Eurocentric cultures have placed on these particular scientific ways of knowing about our world, has meant that diverse values of soils that emerge from other ways of relating to soils, beyond their capacity to sequester carbon or grow food efficiently, have been marginalized. Soil literacy, or the idea that we need broad public awareness of soils and their value, risks becoming a project that upholds dominant soil values. So what other values of soils might be encapsulated by a different, more pluralistic approach to soil literacy? What soil literacies could emerge if science-based knowledges could freely mingle with more intrinsic or relational ways of knowing?
I had the pleasure of participating in a conversation hosted by Vetenskap och Allmänhet and Färgfabriken at the contemporary art museum in Stockholm together with Daniel Urey of Färgfabriken, Tord Ranheim Sveen, soil ecologist at SLU, and Emil Sandström from the rural development unit at SLU to discuss some of these questions related to the value of soil. This blog post reflects some of the thoughts prompted in me during and since this conversation.
Luckily, we were well-prepared to discuss soils after first paying a visit to the “Carnival of the Underground” and “Taking Root” exhibitions curated by Färgfabriken. In the Carnival, we donned silky fabrics, glittering masks, and ballooning overalls so we could masquerade and dance as and with microbes. It was ridiculous and fun. I loved the way the artists invited us play with relationships, to make the invisible thinkable and tangible – a “window to the underground” as their project is called. As a way to think about the values of soils, this, to me, constitutes a form of soil literacy, but one guided foremost by imagination. The writer Sophie Strand talks about imagination as a relational practice that draws us out of ourselves and towards others. It is an ecological practice. In this way, microbial dances in the carnival create a window to something more than ourselves, inviting us to imagine and rehearse how we could meet soils differently.
As we convened in a neighboring room for our conversation, Tord shared that as a soil ecologist, he has spent most of his education behind a computer screen to learn about soils. What a difference in windows! What does this distance created by the screen do? And does close contact with soils, for example putting our hands into soils, do something else? Perhaps it is not useful to move within such binary ways of understanding how we might relate to soils. For example, I do not find it particularly constructive to assume that if more people had different kinds of daily contact with soils that more care for soils would intrinsically follow. We are pretty good at romanticizing, for example, what societies could be like if more of us were in touch with soils through growing food, tending to omit the demanding and often back-breaking nature of what growing food entails in our society as it is currently organized. On the other hand, having more knowledge about say, how soil ecosystems work, does not either necessarily lead to soil care. We have decades of experiences with climate change science informational campaigns that demonstrate this. What is interesting to me, and what we touched upon in our conversation, is surfacing the many ways that people might collectively come to feel responsibility towards and care for soils that fall outside of and in between what we might see as the instrumental and intrinsic value camps. What about relational values?
Discussing soils as relational in their character offers a different set of questions about the futures we desire, how we collectively move towards those futures. Globalized, standardized data offers particular ways to understand soils that is often about efficiency and management organized towards a specific technically defined goal or biological sustainability. Yet, this data cannot account for the relationships and cultures that form soils. The comparison was drawn that creating standardized soil health indicators and then looking individually at them is like looking at a person’s blood pressure alone to determine their overall health. So, what data do we need to tell stories about soils, to increase so-called soil literacy? We were and I am left with this question, among others. With relationships as the heart of our conversation, and with a small step away from the idea of literacy, I am moved to think with Simone Weil’s thoughts on the need for roots, the inspiration for the title of the other exhibition. Roots imply life, vitality, support, and relationships, as we learn more and more about the symbiotic relations in subterranean ecosystems. The severance of one’s roots, then, could be catastrophic, filled with grief, but also renewal, as the exhibition evokes. Ideas about our place in the world, geographical and metaphysical, can create roots. Imagining with and through roots is an ecological practice, a way to imagine a kaleidoscope of soil values – a way to imagine relational soil literacies.
I am grateful for this rich conversation in this carnival of underground ideas!
"Relational soil literacies"
What is the value of soils? International organizations like the Food and Agriculture Organization and European Commission draw attention to how soils are degrading worldwide, making it a global priority to reinstate healthy soils for human wellbeing, climate change adaptation and mitigation, and long-term economic goals, among other things. We must care for soils! – these institutions declare. These declarations are accompanied by calls for broadly increasing soil knowledge and popular societal engagement, thus increasing soil literacy and, thereby, soil care. Yet, the kind of care outlined in response to these declarations of the need for urgent soil action are characterized by particular assumptions. These assumptions foreground economic motivations that base the values of soils on their utility and importance for human wellbeing. The risk that accompanies these assumptions is that the fantastic complexities of soil ecosystems and our human entanglement with them is ironed out. Our capacity to care for soils gets boiled down to a litany of scientifically-based, human-centered actions. Soil sciences as a way to broaden our understandings of soils are important. However, the value that Eurocentric cultures have placed on these particular scientific ways of knowing about our world, has meant that diverse values of soils that emerge from other ways of relating to soils, beyond their capacity to sequester carbon or grow food efficiently, have been marginalized. Soil literacy, or the idea that we need broad public awareness of soils and their value, risks becoming a project that upholds dominant soil values. So what other values of soils might be encapsulated by a different, more pluralistic approach to soil literacy? What soil literacies could emerge if science-based knowledges could freely mingle with more intrinsic or relational ways of knowing?
I had the pleasure of participating in a conversation hosted by Vetenskap och Allmänhet and Färgfabriken at the contemporary art museum in Stockholm together with Daniel Urey of Färgfabriken, Tord Ranheim Sveen, soil ecologist at SLU, and Emil Sandström from the rural development unit at SLU to discuss some of these questions related to the value of soil. This blog post reflects some of the thoughts prompted in me during and since this conversation.
Luckily, we were well-prepared to discuss soils after first paying a visit to the “Carnival of the Underground” and “Taking Root” exhibitions curated by Färgfabriken. In the Carnival, we donned silky fabrics, glittering masks, and ballooning overalls so we could masquerade and dance as and with microbes. It was ridiculous and fun. I loved the way the artists invited us play with relationships, to make the invisible thinkable and tangible – a “window to the underground” as their project is called. As a way to think about the values of soils, this, to me, constitutes a form of soil literacy, but one guided foremost by imagination. The writer Sophie Strand talks about imagination as a relational practice that draws us out of ourselves and towards others. It is an ecological practice. In this way, microbial dances in the carnival create a window to something more than ourselves, inviting us to imagine and rehearse how we could meet soils differently.
As we convened in a neighboring room for our conversation, Tord shared that as a soil ecologist, he has spent most of his education behind a computer screen to learn about soils. What a difference in windows! What does this distance created by the screen do? And does close contact with soils, for example putting our hands into soils, do something else? Perhaps it is not useful to move within such binary ways of understanding how we might relate to soils. For example, I do not find it particularly constructive to assume that if more people had different kinds of daily contact with soils that more care for soils would intrinsically follow. We are pretty good at romanticizing, for example, what societies could be like if more of us were in touch with soils through growing food, tending to omit the demanding and often back-breaking nature of what growing food entails in our society as it is currently organized. On the other hand, having more knowledge about say, how soil ecosystems work, does not either necessarily lead to soil care. We have decades of experiences with climate change science informational campaigns that demonstrate this. What is interesting to me, and what we touched upon in our conversation, is surfacing the many ways that people might collectively come to feel responsibility towards and care for soils that fall outside of and in between what we might see as the instrumental and intrinsic value camps. What about relational values?
Discussing soils as relational in their character offers a different set of questions about the futures we desire, how we collectively move towards those futures. Globalized, standardized data offers particular ways to understand soils that is often about efficiency and management organized towards a specific technically defined goal or biological sustainability. Yet, this data cannot account for the relationships and cultures that form soils. The comparison was drawn that creating standardized soil health indicators and then looking individually at them is like looking at a person’s blood pressure alone to determine their overall health. So, what data do we need to tell stories about soils, to increase so-called soil literacy? We were and I am left with this question, among others. With relationships as the heart of our conversation, and with a small step away from the idea of literacy, I am moved to think with Simone Weil’s thoughts on the need for roots, the inspiration for the title of the other exhibition. Roots imply life, vitality, support, and relationships, as we learn more and more about the symbiotic relations in subterranean ecosystems. The severance of one’s roots, then, could be catastrophic, filled with grief, but also renewal, as the exhibition evokes. Ideas about our place in the world, geographical and metaphysical, can create roots. Imagining with and through roots is an ecological practice, a way to imagine a kaleidoscope of soil values – a way to imagine relational soil literacies.
I am grateful for this rich conversation in this carnival of underground ideas!