Making time for soil: Technoscientific futurity and the pace of care

Abstract

The dominant drive for understanding soil has been to pace its fertility with human demand. But today warnings about soil's exhaustion and endangered ecology raise concerns that they have been mistreated throughout history. These worries are marked by fears of gloomy environmental futures, prompting us, and specially scientists and soil practitioners to urgently develop better ways of taking care of soils. Yet the pace required by ecological soil care could be at odds with the predominant temporal orientation of technoscientific intervention: driven by an inherently progressivist, productionist and restless mode of futurity. Through a conceptual and historical approach to the soil sciences and other domains of soil knowledge the paper looks for soil ontologies and approaches to human-soil relations that are obscured by this predominant timescape. Discussions about the future of the soil sciences already expose tensions between 'progress as usual' -by intensifying productivity -and the need to protect the pace of soil renewal. However it is in the interrogation of the intimate relation of soil science with productionism, and in the emergence of soil ecology conceptions that emphasise soil as a living community rather than a receptacle for crops, that we could see emerging alternative soil ontologies and human-soil relations paced by a temporality of care. The 'foodweb' model of soil ecology in particular has become a figure of alternative human-soil relations for environmental activists and practitioners, promoting soil care practices that intensify the involvement of practitioners with soil's temporality. Reading these ways of relating to soil ways of making time for 'care time', helps to reveal a diversity of more-than-human interdependent temporalities, disrupting the anthropocentric appeal of predominant timescales of technoscientific futurity and their reductive notion of innovation.

Land als Ressource, Boden und Landschaft: Materialität, Relationalität und neue Agrarfragen in der Politischen Ökologie

“…In der Perspektive auf Land als Boden zeigt sich also eine Konvergenz von alternativen Praktiken, der ontologischen Politik von agrarökologischen Bewegungen und neueren Forschungen in Biologie (Margulis, 1998) und Agrarökologie (Altieri, 2002;Vandermeer, 1996), wobei letztere von der feministischen Wissenschafts-und Technikforschung in fruchtbare Konzepte für eine postkapitalistische relationale Ontologie übertragen werden (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2015;Tsing, 2014;Haraway, 2008;Stengers, 2010). An der Schnittstelle von (teilweise marginalisierten) Lebenswissenschaften, STS und den Diskursen indigener und alternativer Praktiker entsteht eine neue Sprache, die wir für richtungsweisend für eine nicht-reduktionistische Politische Ökologie der Landwirtschaft halten.…”

Do We Care About Synbiodiversity? Questions Arising from an Investigation into Whether There are GM Crops in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault

“…This is usefully placing attention on responsibility in the processes and purposes of research and innovation, however it has said little to date on how to care for the products of innovation as living organisms. The notion of responsibility as care is receiving some discussion within RRI (Groves 2015;Davies and Horst 2015) and indeed, within Science and Technology Studies generally there has also been a call to direct our attention towards 'matters of care' (de la Bellacasa 2011) and an increasing exploration of the potential value and challenges associated with employing care ethics and politics in technoscience governance (Martin et al 2015;Viseu 2015;Bellacasa 2015;Mol et al 2010). However, this recent work has not yet specifically focused on biotechnologies and very little attention has been directed towards the question of how we care for the organisms and ecologies we are creating and what our moral responsibilities towards them are.…”

Estimates of Annual Soil Loss Rates in the State of São Paulo, Brazil

“…Therefore, current studies on erosion and soil conservation indicate an imminent demand for interdisciplinary applications on larger scales and kindle discussions in the systemic context of global sustainability beyond the original scope (Hartemink, 2008;Hartemink and McBratney, 2008;Camargo et al, 2010;Bouma, 2014;Díaz-Fierros, 2015;Bellacasa, 2015).…”