\u00bbSoils have become a matter of concern and care not just for what they provide for humans but for ensuring the subsistence of soil communities more broadly.\u00ab<\/blockquote>\r\nFrom Productionism to Service\u2014and Care?<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nSoil biologist Stephen Nortcliff speaks of a change in focus from research in the 1970s and 1980s, when sustainability concerns focused on \u00bbmaintaining yield\u00ab rather than the \u00bbsoil system\u00ab: \u00bbHow things have changed as we have moved into the 21st Century! Whilst maintaining agricultural production is still important the emphasis now is on the sustainable use of soils and limiting or removing the negative effects on other environmental components\u00ab5<\/sup>. Nortcliff is not alone. A disciplinary reassessment seems to be taking place. This could be a significant shift in the historical orientation of soil science, as summarized by soil scientist Peter McDonald:\r\n
Soil science does not stand alone. Historically, the discipline has been integrated with all aspects of small farm management. The responsibility of maintaining good crop yield over a period of years was laid upon the soil. Research into soil fertility reflected this production-oriented emphasis during most of the nineteenth century . . . the focus of their efforts remained, and to a large extent still remains, to benefit overall harvests.6<\/sup><\/p>\r\nGuaranteeing yield through production is obviously an essential drive of the agricultural effort. But critical research on agriculture refers to productionism<\/em> more specifically in terms of the intensification that drove agricultural reform in Europe from the seventeenth century onward. This culminated in the mid-twentieth century with the industrialization and commercialization of agriculture and the international expansion of this model through the Green Revolution\u2019s assemblage of machines, chemical inputs, and genetic improvements. In The Spirit of the Soil<\/em>, philosopher of agricultural technology Paul B. Thompson argues for an ethics of production and summarizes productionism as the consecration of the aphorism \u00bbMake two blades of grass grow where one grew before.\u00ab7<\/sup>\u00a0Critiques of productionism address the absorption of agricultural relations within the commercial logic of intensification and accumulation characteristic of capitalist economies. In other words, productionism is the process by which a logic of production overdetermines other activities of value.8 <\/sup>Agricultural intensification is not only a quantitative orientation \u2013 yield increase \u2013 but also a way of life, and a qualitative mode of conceiving relations to the soil. While it seems obvious that growers\u2019 and farmers\u2019 practices, whether grand or small scale, pre-or postindustrial, would be yield-oriented, productionism colonizes all other relations: everyday life, relations with other species, and politics (e.g., farmers\u2019 subjection to the industry-agribusiness complex). The increasing influence of logics of productionist acceleration and intensification through the twentieth century can be read within scientific approaches to soil. One notable example can be found in chemistry\u2019s contribution to turning cultivation into a productionist effort. Soil physicist Benno Warkentin explains how early studies on plant nutrition were first based on a \u00bbbank balance\u00ab approach by which nutrients assimilated by plants were measured with the idea that these had to \u00bbbe added back to the soil in equal amounts to maintain<\/em> crop production.\u00ab But the \u00bbbalance\u00ab emphasis changed after 1940 with an increase in off-farm additions to the soil, bringing artificial fertilizing materials, external to a site\u2019s material cycles and seasonal temporalities, in order to bolster yield. The aim of this increase was to ensure \u00bbavailability of nutrients for maximum growth, and timing for availability<\/em> rather than on the total amounts removed by crops\u00ab9<\/sup> \u2013 that is, not so much to maintain but to intensify the nutrient input in soils beyond the rhythms by which crops absorb them. These developments confirm a consistent trend in modern management of soils to move from maintenance \u2013 for instance, by leaving parts of the land at times in a fallow state \u2013 to the maximization, and one could say preemptive buildup, of soil nutrient capacity beyond the renewal pace of soil ecosystems.10<\/sup> This makes visible how the tension between production and sustainability at the heart of soil science involves misadjusted temporalities: between soil as a slowly renewable entity and the accelerated technological solutions required by intensified production.\r\n
\u00bbOrganisms are soil. A lively soil can only exist with and through a multispecies community of biota that makes it, that contributes to its creation.\u00ab<\/blockquote>\r\nThis is not to say that soil scientists \u2013 or even practitioners who live by the productionist credo \u2013 have not taken care of soils. Remediating worn-out soils has been at the heart of the development of soil science since its beginnings and was related to the socioeconomic concerns that influenced early soil studies.11<\/sup> Numerous soil scientists have been committed to conserving soils and working with farmers to foster ways of caring for them while maintaining productivity: \u00bbsoil care\u00ab is a notion widely employed.12 <\/sup>Moves to interrogate productionism seem nonetheless to question conceptions of soil care in the light of a broader societal realization of the untenable pressures on soil. In science and beyond, the persistent productionist ethos overlaps today with an \u00bbenvironmental era\u00ab starting in the 1970s and influenced by a conception of environmental limits to growth that place \u00bbthe living earth . . . in a central position\u00ab13<\/sup>. This has marked soil science \u2013 many researchers, for instance, pointing at the unsustainable destruction and deterioration of natural habitats associated with an excessive use of agrochemicals. Most sociohistorical accounts of the soil sciences since the early 1990s recognize this \u00bbecological\u00ab turn: \u00bbin the present era of soil science . . . the questions are on a landscape basis, have an ecological nature, and ask about the sustainability of natural resources.\u00ab14<\/sup>\r\n\r\nWhat can a critical analysis of the articulation of the temporality of productionism and relations of care contribute to these transformations? In a sense, there is an inherent ambivalence contained in these relations whereby the future is simultaneously hailed as central and \u00bbdiscounted,\u00ab as Adam emphasizes with regard to short-term thinking that pushes to exploit natural resources today at the expense of future generations.15<\/sup> And yet, the temporality of productionist-oriented practices in late capitalist societies remains strongly future-oriented: it focuses on \u00bboutput,\u00ab promissory investments (led by so-called agricultural futures), and on efficient management of the present in order to produce it. This is consistent with how, as described above, restless futurity renders precarious the experienced present: subordinated to, suspended by, or crushed under the investment in uncertain future outcomes. Worster\u2019s account of the living conditions of farmers who outlived the destruction of successive dust bowls to see the return of intensified agriculture and successful grand-scale farming are also stories of discontent, debt, and anxiety, echoing farmer experiences worldwide living under the pressures of production.16<\/sup> So though the timescale of soil productionist exploitation discounts the future by focusing on the benefit of present generations, the present is also discounted, as everyday practices, relations, and embodied temporalities of practitioners embedded in this industrious speeded-up time are also compressed and precarious. Productionism not only reduces what counts as care \u2013 for instance, to a managerial \u00bbconduct\u00ab of tasks to follow17<\/sup> \u2013 but also inhibits the possibility of developing other relations of care that fall out of its constricted targets. It reduces care from a coconstructed interdependent relation into mere control of the object <\/em>of care.\r\n\r\nAnd it is not only human temporalities, but also more than human, that are subjected to the realization of this particularly linear timescale focused on intensified productivity. It could be argued that within the productionist model the drive of soil care has mostly been for the crops \u2013 that is, importantly, plants as commodifiable produce (which also begs the question of what kind of care is given to plants reduced to crop status). In the utilitarian-care vision, worn-out soils must be \u00bbput back to work\u00ab through soil engineering technologies: fed liters of artificial fertilizers with little consideration for wider ecological effects or made host for enhanced crops that will work around soil\u2019s impoverishment and exhaustion. In sum, soil care in a productionist frame is aimed at increasing soil\u2019s efficiency to produce at the expense of all other relations. From the perspective of a feminist politics of care in human\u2013soil relations, this is a form of exploitative and instrumentally regimented care, oriented by a one-way anthropocentric temporality. This direction could be troubled by moves perceptible in the way the soil sciences are reconceiving how they see soil as a natural body, with important consequences about how to care for it. We can see changes supported by a notion that soils are of more \u00bbuse\u00ab than agricultural production. An emphasis on the multiplication of \u00bbsoil functions\u00ab18 <\/sup>means that they are valued for other purposes than agriculture, or building. This points at a diversification of the applications of soil sciences as soils become providers of a range of \u00bbecosystem services\u00ab \u2013 for example, including social, aesthetic, and spiritual value \u2013 beyond commercial agricultural needs.19<\/sup> The ecosystem-services approach looks at the elements involved in an ecological setting or landscape from the perspective of what they offer to humans beyond purely economic value and tries to calculate other sources of value \u2013 not necessarily to \u00bbprice\u00ab them, a distinction important to many advocates of this approach. This is a significant move for human\u2013soil relations with a transformative potential that shouldn\u2019t be underestimated. Yet this notion has its limitations to transform the dominant affective ecologies of human\u2013soil relations and not merely because it is restricted to a calculative vision of relationalities. Even if we accepted staying within a logic of valuation and service provision, at the very least a notion of ecosystem services should also calculate those provided by humans to sustain a particular ecology and the nonhuman community. The notion of ecosystem services, while representing an important attempt from inside Capitalo-centered societies to shift the parameters of a purely economistic valuation of nature for production, is not enough to bring us closer to a relation of care that disrupts the notion of other than humans as \u00bbresources\u00ab and the sterile binary of utilitarian versus altruistic relations with other than humans. A notion of care, Sue Jackson and Lisa Palmer argue, could disrupt this logic and improve the way ecosystem services are conceptualized:\r\nIf we extend the concept of relatedness from humanity to all existence and foster an ethic of care which recognizes the agency of all \u00bbothers,\u00ab be it other people or other nature, and the specific cultivation of these relations by humans, we avert the broadening of a schism between nature and culture \u2013 the schism that in the ecosystem service framework construes nature as provider\/producer and human as consumer.20<\/sup><\/p>\r\nThinking with a feminist politics of care that remembers the contested exploitations involved in the type of service work that care is often made to be, we can also interrogate the connotations involved in the notion of \u00bbservice\u00ab itself. While service could seem to lead us beyond a logic of exchange \u2013 doesn\u2019t service also refer to what we do for altruistic purposes or sense of duty? \u2013 in strongly stratified societies it is marked by a history of serfdom. Struggles around the relegation of domestic care to women\u2019s work showed how the point is not only to make this \u00bbservice\u00ab more valuable or recognized but also to question the very division of labor that underpins it. A feminist approach to more than human care would at the very least open a speculative interrogation: Cui bono?<\/em>21<\/sup> service for whom?<\/em> as a question that reveals the limitations of a service approach to transform human\u2013soil relations while it remains based on conceiving naturecultural entities as resources for human consumption, thus interrogating an understanding of soils that posits them as either functions or services to \u00bbhuman well-being\u00ab22<\/sup>.\r\n
\u00bbThinking with care invites us to question unilateral relationalities and exclusionary bifurcations of living, doings, and agencies. It brings us to thinking from the perspective of the maintenance of a many-sided web of relations involved in the very possibility of ecosystem services rather than only of benefits to humans.\u00ab<\/blockquote>\r\nAn interrogation of both the productionist and service logic can learn from ecofeminist critiques about the intrumentalization, degradation, and evacuation of more than human agency23 <\/sup>and the connection of these ecologically oppressive logics to gender and racialized binaries with their classic segregation of life domains.24<\/sup> Thinking with care invites us to question unilateral relationalities and exclusionary bifurcations of living, doings, and agencies. It brings us to thinking from the perspective of the maintenance of a many-sided web of relations involved in the very possibility of ecosystem services rather than only of benefits to humans. Coming back to rearticulating relations of care and temporality, I engage below a conception of soil \u00bbas living\u00ab that can further question its persistent status as serving for input for crop production or other human needs. A more soil-attentive mode of care might also reveal other ways of experiencing time at the heart of productionist relations, while, as Haraway would put it, \u00bbstaying with the trouble\u00ab of humans\u2019 relation to soil as an essential resource for survival.\r\nThe Living Soil: Becoming in the Foodweb<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nAs part of the ecological turn, soil ecology research has become more important at the heart of the soil sciences, concentrating on relations between biophysical, organic, and animal entities and processes.25<\/sup> Moreover, a number of accounts of the discipline\u2019s development in the past ten years connect the growing significance of the ecological perspective with the moving of biology to the center of a field traditionally dominated by physics and chemistry. In this context, it is remarkable how a notion of \u00bbliving soil\u00ab \u2013 once mostly associated with organic and radical visions of agriculture26<\/sup> \u2013 is now mainstream. This does not mean that soil science traditionally conceived of soils as inert matter. Even conceptions of soil as reservoirs of crop nutrition focus on lively physicochemical processes and interactions. Also, soil microbiology has been a crucial part of soil science since its early beginnings as well as is important precursor work on soil biology (such as Charles Darwin\u2019s work on earthworms). This does not mean either that biology and ecology support environmentalism per se or that other disciplinary orientations in soil science must now be connected to biology. The noticeable changing trend is the increased significance of \u00bbbiota,\u00ab from microbial to invertebrate fauna and, of course, plants, roots, and fungi, in the very definition of soil. That this has not been an obvious move is attested by ecologists who claim for a change in soil\u2019s definitions:\r\n
Are living organisms part of soil? We would include the phrase \u00bbwith its living organisms\u00ab in the general definition of soil. Thus, from our viewpoint soil is alive and is composed of living and nonliving components having many interactions. . . . When we view the soil system as an environment for organisms, we must remember that the biota have been involved in its creation, as well as adapting to life within it<\/em>.27<\/sup><\/p>\r\nIn this conception, soil is not just a habitat or medium for plants and organisms; nor is it just decomposed material, the organic and mineral end product of organism activity. Organisms are soil. A lively soil can only exist with and through a multispecies community of biota that makes it, that contributes to its creation.\r\n\r\nOne of the most significant aspects of these changes in conceptions of soil is a growing interest in investigating biodiversity as a factor of soil fertility and system stability.28<\/sup> This goes beyond biological interest; for instance, the recognition of the importance of large pores in soil structures gives a central place to increased research on soil fauna such as earthworms, which some have named the \u00bbsoil engineers.\u00ab29<\/sup>\u00a0In the words of a soil physicist: \u00bbAs the appreciation of ecological relationships in soil science developed after the 1970s, studies on the role of soil animals in the decomposition process and in soil fertility have been more common.\u00ab30 <\/sup>More research focuses on the loss of soil biodiversity after alterations31<\/sup> and on the ecological significance of soil health for nonsoil species.32<\/sup> A number of soil scientists are now engaged in drawing attention to biodiversity in soils as part of educational campaigns and soil fertility projects worldwide.33<\/sup> Soils have become a matter of concern and care not just for what they provide for humans but for ensuring the subsistence of soil communities more broadly.\r\n\r\nThese developments are not disconnected from worries about the capacities of soil to continue to provide services (a range of calculations are deployed to value the services of biota) or from a notion that accounts for soil fertility according to its ability to provide yield. Production continues to be a concern as the \u00bbloss of organic matter\u201a diminishment or disappearance of groups of the soil biota and the accompanying decline in soil physical and chemical properties\u00ab are identified as important causes of \u00bbyield declines under long-term cultivation.\u00ab34<\/sup>\u00a0However, these approaches bring significant hesitations at the heart of a conception of soils as physicochemical input compounds. Soils as living, for instance, create other questions about effects of human interventions to technologically enhance impoverished soils, however well intentioned. For example, agrochemical inputs can benefit crop yield, but soil communities can face long-term destabilization or destruction, making soils and growers dependent on fertilizers. Also, the protection of soil structures connects to a generalized reevaluation of tillage in agriculture and other technologies that alter and destroy fragile and complex soil structures.35<\/sup> In sum, exploiting soil species for production threatens to destroy the living agents of this very productivity.36<\/sup> Once again, reconceptualizations of soil as living emphasize how productionist practices ignore the complex diversity of soil-renewal processes in favor of linear temporalities aimed at speeding up abundant output.\r\n
\u00bbIt is the emphasis on the interdependency of soil communities that is appealing for exploring more than human care as an immanent obligation that passes through doings and agencies involved in the necessary maintaining, continuing, and repairing of flourishing living webs.\u00ab<\/blockquote>\r\nIt is the nature of soil itself and ways to care for it that are at stake in these moves. Attention to soils as a living multispecies world involve changes in the ways humans maintain, care, and foster this liveliness.37<\/sup> So how does this affect temporal involvements in caring for the soil as a multispecies world? I approach these through the example of the \u00bbfoodweb,\u00ab an ecological model of soil life that, having become popular in alternative growers\u2019 movements, thrives at the boundaries of soil science.\r\n\r\nFoodweb models are not new, but they became increasingly prominent in soil ecology after the 1990s.38<\/sup> Foodweb models are valuable for scientists to describe the incredibly complex interactions between species that allow the circulation of nutrients and energy. They follow predation and eating patterns as well as energy use and processing. Soil foodweb species can include algae, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, arthropods, earthworms, larger animals such as rabbits, and, of course, plants. They describe not only how species feed on each other but how one species\u2019 waste becomes another one\u2019s food.39<\/sup> Foodweb conceptions of soil question the use of artificial fertilizers, pesticides, and intensified agricultural models more generally. This is because their weblike, interdependent configuration means that altering or removing any one element can destroy them. Often conceptualized as soil \u00bbcommunities\u00ab even as they are based on \u00bbtrophic\u00ab relations \u2013 who eats whom \u2013 foodweb models emphasize a living world below, teeming with life and yet always fragile. Soil ecology is, of course, not a unified domain and, while rich in holistic models of life cycles, it is also rich in reductionisms. If I am lured by moves that see soil as a multispecies world, it is for how they could affect not only the nature of soil itself but also the ways humans maintain, repair, and foster soil\u2019s liveliness \u2013 that is, the agencies involved in more than human webs of care.\r\n\r\nInterdependent models such as the foodweb disturb the unidirectionality of care conceived within the linear timescapes of productionist time traditionally centered in human-crop care relations. Relational approaches to the cycles of soil life in themselves can be read as disruptions to productionist linear time, simply because ecological relations require taking a diversity of timescales into account.40<\/sup> Yet foodweb models also affect relations to soil for how they turn humans into full participant \u00bbmembers\u00ab of the soil community rather than merely consumers of its produce or beneficiaries of its services. It is the emphasis on the interdependency of soil communities that is appealing for exploring more than human care as an immanent obligation that passes through doings and agencies involved in the necessary maintaining, continuing, and repairing of flourishing living webs. Remembering discussions in previous chapters around the nonreciprocal qualities of care, we see that while care often is represented as one-to-one practice between \u00bba carer\u00ab and \u00bba cared for,\u00ab it is rare that a carer gets back the care that she gives from the same person who she cares for. Carers are themselves often cared for by someone else. Reciprocity of care is asymmetric and multilateral, collectively shared. A caring conception of soil emphasizes this embeddedness in relations of interdependency. Caring for soil communities involves making a speculative effort toward the acknowledgment that the (human) carer also depends on soil\u2019s capacity to \u00bbtake care\u00ab of a number of processes that are vital to more than her existence. Thinking multispecies models such as foodwebs through care involves looking at the dependency of the (human) carer not so much from soil\u2019s produce or \u00bbservice\u00ab but from an inherent relationality. This is emphasized by how the capacities of soil in foodwebs refer to a multilateral relational arrangement in which food, energy, and waste circulate in nonreciprocal exchanges. Foodwebs are therefore a good example to think about the vibrant ethicality in webs of interdependency, the a-subjective but necessary ethos of care circulating through these agencies that are taking care of one another\u2019s needs in more than human relations.\r\n\r\nA care approach needs to look not only at how soils and other resources produce output or provide services to humans but also at how humans are specifically obliged, how they are providing. The capacity of exhausted global soils to sustain these webs of relations has become more dependent on the care humans put in them. In resonance with Anthropocenic narratives that acknowledge the impact of situated human actions on the making of earth, what the above conception might require is not only for organisms but also for humans to be included more decisively in the concept of soil. Here, in turn, changing ways in soil care would affect soil ontology. Coming back to the redefinition of soil as living41<\/sup>, we could include a rephrasing such as: \u00bbWhen we view the soil system as an environment for humans, we must remember that humans have been involved in its creation, as well as adapting to life within it<\/em>.\u00ab\r\n\r\nThough scientists have long spoken of \u00bbsoil communities\u00ab to refer to the organisms involved in soil\u2019s ecology, the idea that humans are part of soil communities is not a prevailing one in the scientific literature. Scientific illustrations of the soil foodweb rarely represent humans as part of this relational web \u2013 for example, as producers of \u00bborganic waste\u00ab and beneficiaries of the output of plants. This could be connected to the traditional role given to the anthropogenic element in soil scientific literature, where it is generally considered as one \u00bbelement\u00ab of soil ecosystems and formation processes that \u00bblies apart\u00ab because of the higher impact of its activities in a shorter amount of time than other organisms. The \u00bbhuman\u00ab mostly features as an unbalanced irruption in soil\u2019s ecological cycles \u2013 or a victim in the case of soil pollution \u2013 rather than as a \u00bbmember\u00ab of a soil community.42<\/sup> Notions of humans as members, or even of humans being soil, thrive outside science, however \u2013 including in how scientists speak of soil (and land) beyond their \u00bbofficial\u00ab institutional work.43<\/sup> It could be argued that alternative affective ecologies with soil become obscured within science. But in the spirit of staging matters of fact, scientific things, as matters of care, it seems to be a more fertile option to attempt an articulation of different horizons of practice and modes of relating to soil through their potential to transform human\u2013soil relations. Connections with \u00bbnonscientific\u00ab ways of knowing soil, whose relevance is sometimes also mentioned by scientists44<\/sup>, could become even more important in the light of an argument for a shift in soil models from considering soil as a \u00bbnatural body\u00ab to soil as a \u00bbhuman-natural\u00bb body45<\/sup> and for the introduction of new approaches such as \u00bbanthropedology\u00ab that broaden soil science\u2019s approach to human\u2013soil relations.46<\/sup>\r\n\u00bbFoodweb conceptions of soil question the use of artificial fertilizers, pesticides, and intensified agricultural models more generally. This is because their weblike, interdependent configuration means that altering or removing any one element can destroy them.\u00ab<\/blockquote>\r\nNow, like all Anthropocenic narratives, these ideas would require nuancing which Anthropos is being spoken for, asking questions such as: If the marks on Earth that are to be accounted for are those that dramatically altered the geological makeup of the planet since the industrial age or atomic essays, shouldn\u2019t we, as Jason Moore argues, rather declare a Capitalocene? Or, should we, as Chris Cuomo has called for, reject this recentering of the notion of Anthropos altogether for its masking of capitalist and colonial dominations.47 <\/sup>Or, couldn\u2019t we propose questioning the tendency of Anthropocenic thinking to further evacuate agency from the other than human world and to reinstate Man as the center of creation \u2013 populate our speculative imagination with visions of more than human coexistent epochs that amplify the proliferation of symbiotic processes with multifarious nonhuman agencies such as Haraway invites us to do with a Chthulucene<\/em>.48<\/sup> All these doubts contribute to complicate the narratives of the agential ethicalities at stake in reinstating humans in the concept of soil. Desituated storylines of Anthropos-centered relations need to be challenged if are we to offer situated humans a place within, rather than above, other earth creatures, in acknowledgment of specific modes of agency: a vital task for environmental thought and practice, across the social sciences and humanities, but also for exceeding collective imaginations.\r\n\r\nThe exploration of decentered ethicalites of care via foodweb visions of human\u2013soil relations can be nourished by such collective imaginations to contribute a displacing of human agencies without diluting situated obligations. Eliciting articulations of the sciences with other domains of practices, even subtle, is important here. Obviously, my reading of foodweb models goes beyond its explanatory potential to alter scientific conceptions of soil. Speculative thinking is professedly excluded from scientific concerns maybe even more than political stances. But when understood as part of a naturecultural transformation in human\u2013soil relations of care, the foodweb is not just a scientific model. One could say that successful scientific models owe part of their power to their figurative potential. Beyond science, the foodweb is a charged figuration of soil relations, which I read here as going in the sense of restoring what Thompson calls the \u00bbspirit of the soil,\u00ab by which he points at an understanding of human activity as part of the life of the earth and \u00bbthe spirit of raising food and eating it as an act of communion with some larger whole.\u00ab49<\/sup>\u00a0The search for glimpses of a transformative ethos in human\u2013soil relations moves us beyond science and its applications to the articulations of alternative affective ecologies and technoscientific imaginaries to which science participates but not necessarily drives. The soil foodweb model is interesting in this regard because it has become, beyond science, a symbol of alternative ecological involvement \u2013 particularly in ecological movements where alternative visions of soil practice are being developed, such as agroecology, permaculture, and other radical approaches to agricultural practice. It is in these conceptions that transformative trends in soil relationalities can be read most visibly for how they foster a different relation of care, one susceptible to alter the linear nature of future-oriented technoscientific, productionist extraction in anthropocentric timescapes.\r\n\r\n[\u2026]\r\n\r\n<\/a>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"Mar\u00eda\u00a0Puig\u00a0de\u00a0la Bellacasa<\/strong> is associate professor of science, technology, and organization at the University of Leicester School of Management.\r\n\r\nMatters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds <\/em>by Mar\u00eda\u00a0Puig\u00a0de\u00a0la Bellacasa was published by University of Minnesota Press. We would like to thank the author and the editorial team from University of Minnesota Press for the generous permission to republish this text as part of the Solitude Journal Issue 1 \u2013 Collective Care and Response-ability.<\/em>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_footnotes","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Fu\u00dfnoten","bgcolor":"","footnotes_list_hide_numbers":false,"footnotes":[{"footnote":"FAO, \u00bbInternational Years Council Minutes . . . United Nations: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations,\u00ab 2013"},{"footnote":"D. A Robinson, I. Fraser, and E. J. Dominati et al, \u00bbOn the Value of Soil Resources in the Context of Natural Capital and Ecosystem Service Delivery,\u00ab in: Soil Science Society of America Journal<\/em> 78, no. 3, 2014: p. 685."},{"footnote":"George Monbiot, \u00bbWe\u2019re Treating Soil Like Dirt. It\u2019s a Fatal Mistake, as Our Lives Depend on It,\u00ab in: Guardian<\/em>, March 25, 2015."},{"footnote":"Nafeez Ahmed, \u00bbPeak Soil: Industrial Civilisation Is on the Verge of Eating Itself,\u00ab in: Guardian<\/em>, June 7, 2013."},{"footnote":"Stephen Nortcliff in: Hartemink, Alfred E (ed.), The Future of Soil Science, CIP\u2013Gegevens <\/em>Koninklijke, Bibliotheek<\/em>. Den Haag. Wageningen: IUSS Union of Soil Sciences \u00a02006: p. 106."},{"footnote":"P. McDonald, \u00bbCharacteristics of Soil Science Literature,\u00ab in; The Literature of Soil Science<\/em>, edited by P. McDonald, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013: pp. 43\u201372."},{"footnote":"A saying thought to be inspired by Jonathan\u2019s Swift\u2019s novel Gulliver\u2019s Travels: \u00bbWhoever makes two ears of corn, or two blades of grass to grow where only one grew before, deserves better of mankind, and does more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.\u00ab Paul B. Thompson, The Spirit of the Soil: Agriculture and Environmental Ethics<\/em>. New York: Routledge 1995: p. 61."},{"footnote":"Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsianos, Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the Twenty-First Century<\/em>. London: Pluto Press 2008; and Dimitris Papadopoulos, \u00bbPolitics of Matter: Justice and Organisation in Technoscience,\u00ab in: Social Epistemology<\/em> 28, no. 1, 2014: pp. 70\u201385."},{"footnote":"Such trends are visible in the information made available to farmers on the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Services on YouTube. For instance, the clip \u00bbThe Science of Soil Health: Compaction\u00ab invites us to \u00bbimitate Mother Nature\u00ab and limit the use of plowing machinery. See: Benno P. Warkentin, \u00bbTrends and Developments in Soil Science,\u00ab in: The Literature of Soil Science<\/em>, edited by P. McDonald. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994: p. 9."},{"footnote":"Daniel Hillel, Out of the Earth: Civilization and the Life of the Soil<\/em>. Berkeley: University of California Press 1992."},{"footnote":"Idem."},{"footnote":"Dan H. Yaalon, \u00bbSoil Care Attitudes and Strategies of Land Use through Human History,\u00ab in. Sartoniana<\/em> 13, 2000: pp. 147\u201359."},{"footnote":"J. Bouma and Alfred. E. Hartemink, \u00bbSoil Science and Society in the Dutch Context,\u00ab in: Wageningen Journal of Life Sciences<\/em> 50, no. 2, 2002: pp. 133\u201340."},{"footnote":"Benno P. Warkentin, \u00bbTrends and Developments in Soil Science,\u00ab in: The Literature of Soil Science<\/em>, edited by P. McDonald. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994: pp. 3\u20134."},{"footnote":"Barbara Adam, Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards<\/em>. New York: Routledge 1998: p. 74."},{"footnote":"Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s<\/em>. New York: Oxford University Press 1979; Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in a Time of Climate Crisis<\/em>. Cambridge Mass.: South End Press 2008; Daniel M\u00fcnster, \u00a0\u00bb\u2018Ginger is a gamble\u2019: Crop Booms, Rural Uncertainty, and the Neoliberalization of Agriculture in South India,\u00ab in: Focaal<\/em> 71, 2015: pp. 100\u2013113."},{"footnote":"Joanna Latimer, The Conduct of Care: Understanding Nursing Practice<\/em>. London: Blackwell 2000."},{"footnote":"J. Bouma, \u00bbSoils Are Back on the Global Agenda: Now What?,\u00ab in: Geoderma <\/em>150, nos. 1\u20132, 2009: 224\u201325."},{"footnote":"D. A. Robinson, I. Fraser, and E. J. Dominati et al., \u00bbOn the Value of Soil Resources in the Context of Natural Capital and Ecosystem Service Delivery,\u00ab in: Soil Science Society of America Journal<\/em> 78, no. 3, 2014: p. 685."},{"footnote":"Sue Jackson and Lisa R. Palmer, \u00bbReconceptualizing Ecosystem Services: Possibilities for Cultivating and Valuing the Ethics and Practices of Care,\u00ab in: Progress in<\/em> Human Geography<\/em> 39, no. 2, 2015: pp. 122\u201345."},{"footnote":"Susan Leigh Star (ed.), Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and Politics in Science and Technology<\/em>. Albany: State University of New York Press 1995."},{"footnote":"Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Synthesis<\/em>. Washington, D.C.: Island Press 2005."},{"footnote":"See e.g. Val Plumwood, \u00bbNature as Agency and the Prospects for a Progressive Naturalism,\u00ab in: Capitalism Nature Socialism<\/em> 12, no. 4, 2001: pp. 3\u201332; Michelle Bastian, \u00bbInventing Nature: Re-writing Time and Agency in a More-Than- Human World,\u00ab in: Australian Humanities Review: Ecological Humanities Corner<\/em> 47, November 2009: pp. 99\u2013116."},{"footnote":"Mary Mellor, Feminism and Ecology<\/em>. Cambridge: Polity Press 1997."},{"footnote":"Patrick Lavelle, \u00bbEcological Challenges for Soil Science,\u00ab in: Soil Science<\/em> 165, no. 1, 2000: pp. 73\u201386; and Patrick Lavelle and Alister V. Spain, Soil Ecology<\/em>. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic 2003."},{"footnote":"Lady Eve Balfour, The Living Soil<\/em>. London: Faber and Faber 1943."},{"footnote":"David C. Coleman, D. A. Crossley, and Paul F. Hendrix, Fundamentals of Soil Ecology<\/em>. Amsterdam: Elsevier 2004, emphasis added."},{"footnote":"David A Wardle, Communities and Ecosystems: Linking the Aboveground and Belowground <\/em>Components<\/em>, vol. 34. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2002: p. 234 and p. 238."},{"footnote":"Patrick Lavelle, \u00bbEcological Challenges for Soil Science,\u00ab in: Soil Science<\/em> 165, no. 1, 2000: pp. 73\u201386."},{"footnote":"Warkentin, \u00bbTrends and Developments in Soil Science,\u00ab 1994: p. 8."},{"footnote":"Jeroen P. van Leeuwen, Lia Hemerik, Jaap Bloem, and Peter C. de Ruiter, \u00bbFood Webs and Ecosystem Services during Soil Transformations,\u00ab in: Applied Geochemistry<\/em> 26 (2011): p. 142."},{"footnote":"Wardle, Communities and Ecosystems: Linking the Aboveground and Belowground Components, 2002."},{"footnote":"See, for instance, the \u00bbSoil Biodiversity Initiative: A Scientific Effort,\u00ab http:\/\/globalsoilbiodiversity.org."},{"footnote":"Mike Swift, \u00bbForeword,\u00ab in: Soil Ecology<\/em>, edited by Patrick Lavelle and Alister V. Spain, xix\u2013xx. New York: Kluwer Academic 2001."},{"footnote":"Such trends are visible in the information made available to farmers on the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Services on YouTube. For instance, the clip \u201cThe Science of Soil Health: Compaction\u201d invites us to \u00bbimitate Mother Nature\u00ab and limit the use of plowing machinery."},{"footnote":"M. A. Tsiafouli, E. Thebault, and S. P. Sgardelis et al., \u00bbIntensive Agriculture Reduces Soil Biodiversity across Europe,\u00ab in: Glob. Chang. Biol.<\/em> 21, no. 2, 2014: pp. 973\u201385."},{"footnote":"Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, \u00bbEncountering Bioinfrastructure: Ecological Struggles and the Sciences of Soil,\u00ab in: Social Epistemology<\/em> 28, no. 1, 2014: pp. 26\u201340."},{"footnote":"Stuart L Pimm, John H. Lawton, and Joel E. Cohen, \u00bbFood Web Patterns and Their Consequences,\u00ab in: Nature <\/em>350 1991: pp. 669\u201374."},{"footnote":"David C. Coleman, E. P. Odum, and D. A. Crossley Jr. \u00bbSoil Biology, Soil Ecology, and Global Change,\u00ab Biol. Fert. Soils<\/em> 14, 1992: pp. 104\u201311; David A. Wardle, \u00bbHow Soil Food Webs Make Plants Grow,\u00ab in: Trends Ecol. <\/em>Evol.<\/em> 14 (1999): pp. 418\u201320; and Elaine Ingham, The Compost Tea Brewing Manual<\/em>, 5th ed. Bentley: Soil Foodweb Institute 2002."},{"footnote":"Deborah Bird Rose. \u00bbMultispecies Knots of Ethical Time,\u00ab in: Environmental Philosophy<\/em> 9, no. 1 (2012): pp.127\u201340."},{"footnote":"David C. Coleman, D. A. Crossley, and Paul F. Hendrix, Fundamentals of Soil Ecology<\/em>. Amsterdam: Elsevier 2004."},{"footnote":"Daniel Hillel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Soils in the Environment<\/em>, vol. 1. Amsterdam: Elsevier\/Academic Press 2004."},{"footnote":"Francis D. Hole, \u00bbThe Pleasures of Soil Watching,\u00ab in: Orion Nature Quarterly<\/em> (Spring), 1988: pp. 6\u201311."},{"footnote":"Thomas P. Tomich, Sonja Brodt, and Howard Ferris et al. 2011, \u00bbAgroecology: A Review from a Global-Change Perspective,\u00ab in: Annual Review of Environment and Resources<\/em> 36, no. 1, 2011: pp. 193\u2013222."},{"footnote":"Daniel deB Richter and Dan H. Yaalon.\u00bb\u2018The Changing Model of Soil\u2019 Revisited,\u00ab in: Soil Science Society of America Journal<\/em> 76, no. 3, 2012: p. 766."},{"footnote":"Daniel deB Richter, Allan R. Bacon, and L. Mobley Megan et al, \u00bbHuman\u2013Soil Relations Are Changing Rapidly: Proposals from SSSA\u2019s Cross-Divisional Soil Change Working Group,\u00ab in: Soil Science Society of America Journal<\/em> 75, no. 6, 2012: p. 2079."},{"footnote":"See the online petition \u00bbAgainst the \u2018official\u2019 Anthropocene.\u00ab"},{"footnote":"Donna Haraway, \u00bbAnthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,\u00ab in: Environmental Humanities<\/em> 6: (2015): pp. 159\u201365."},{"footnote":"Paul B. Thompson, The Spirit of the Soil: Agriculture and Environmental Ethics<\/em>. New York Routledge, 1995: p. 18."}]}],"intro_preview_headline":"Soil Times
The Pace of Ecological Care ","intro_preview_txt":"The book Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds<\/em> by Mar\u00eda\u00a0Puig\u00a0de\u00a0la Bellacasa contests the view that care is something only humans do. It emphasizes the nonhuman agencies and communities that comprise the living web of care by considering how care circulates in the natural world. The following excerpt highlights human-soil relations and soils as living organisms consisting of a multispecies community of biota. Bellacasa enhances the idea that humans are part of soil communities. It is in these conceptions that Anthropos-centered concepts are called into question and transformative trends in human-soil relations are fostered.","intro_preview_img":13677,"post_id_old":"","post_author":"","post_subtitle":"Mar\u00eda\u00a0Puig\u00a0de\u00a0la Bellacasa","post_preview_img_hide_on_single":false,"post_txt_old":"","post_pdf":21520,"post_copyright":"ccl_individual","translated_post":false,"translations":null,"post_copyright_individual":"\u00a9 2017 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota.\r\nAll rights reserved. No part of this essay may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, part or whole, without the prior permission of publisher.<\/em>","post_related_posts":[13636,13492,13717],"related_posts_post":[13206]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13673\/revisions"}],"acf:post":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/person\/13206"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13717"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13492"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"project","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project?post=13673"},{"taxonomy":"project_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project_type?post=13673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}