Back to the ground. Knowledge, Politics and Practices of remaking Earth Strata

Abstract

International audienceSoils and the underground have long been viewed, and tapped into, as mere reservoirs of organic and mineral resources, or a taken-for-granted site where societies could permanently bury a range of unwanted waste and residues – ranging from domestic and nuclear wastes to CO2 surplus (Kearnes and Rickards, 2017). Contrasting with this focus on soil and the underground, this book aims to produce empirical, critical, and speculative insights into the rise of alternative experimentations, projects and initiatives aiming to reconstitute, replenish, regenerate and care for Earth strata at various levels. While experts are warning that soil degradation rates are accelerating and threatening to bypass several of the Earth boundaries (Steffen, 2015), soils and the underground are also increasingly being reinvested in a number of collective projects and speculative initiatives aiming to foster ways out of the current fossil fuel economy and the associated ecological and climate crisis. This volume thus addresses the joint becoming of soils and the underground by considering how a range of contemporary initiatives and experimentations are fostering new collectives, practices and sensitivities that bring a fresh look on soil, land and underground-based promises of sustainability and transition. This book takes its inspiration from social sciences and humanities scholarship that develop critical and political accounts of the unacknowledged presence of soils and the underground in social existence (Puig de la Bellacasa; Donovan and Bobette; Krzywoszynska ; Clark). Scholarship in the social sciences and humanities therefore increasingly pays attention to soils not only as a surface and background for human existence but also as a tridimensional ecosystem and volume with its own biogeochemical animacy and physical liveliness (Elden,2013; Adey, 2013; Clark, 2013, 2016 ; Bridge, 2013; Kama and Kuchler, 2019; Billé, 2020). This reframing of the ground’s relations to social life has led to the emergence of two distinct sets of literature. On the one hand, the underground and deeper layers of subsoi have fostered a quite abundant literature, inspired by Foucauldian approaches and political ecology (Kinchy et al., 2018; Bobbette and Donovan, 2019), that unpacked the role of knowledge discourses and instruments in assembling underground resources and materialities; on the other hand, recent writing in the environmental humanities started focusing on the living soils – i.e. the fertile layers of soils where plants grow – in an attempt to enrich social sciences understanding of our interconnectedness with belowground living beings and ecologies (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2019 ; Salazar et al., 2020). However these two bodies of literature have seldom encountered and discussed each other. This book aims to open up a space for a dialog and cross-fertilisation between both strands of literature. More than an addition of perspectives, the book invites to elaborate new transversal lines of research that bring altogether hybrid processes and entities usually kept separated. The introduction sets the stage for a collective inquiry in which interdisciplinary and creative research plays a lead role.This book builds on this scholarship but also takes a different path and develops a different story. We aim instead to experiment with thinking in terms of de-stratification issues and processes, and re-stratification efforts and initiatives aiming to regenerate, reshape and replenish the Earth strata, as various communities and groups attempt to put carbon back into the ground, to remediate pollution by various means, or to re-fertilise soils. Following Deleuze and Guattari (1980), and Nigel Clark’s recent writings, we start from the observation of a deeply ‘de-stratified’ Earth as soils and subsoil have been disturbed and ‘turned inside out for centuries and millennia’ (Clark and Szerzynski, 2021). If a ‘stratum’ is a political articulation between a state of nature and a state of the social and the economy, emerging strata pave the way for studying a diversity of processes of rearticulating Earth. If followed attentively, these processes of stratification and de-stratification may open up new ecological loops from which new collectives, practices and sensitivities emerge. New questions emerge from these transitory ways of living on and with a de-stratified Earth: What does it mean to live on a de-stratified Earth? How do people negotiate their ordinary attachments to a turbulent Earth? How can we deal with what melts, flows, breaks away, accumulates, contaminates? These questions will be tackled through a various set of methodologies from ethnographic case studies, the history of geology and the soil science, the sociology of expertise, but also the visual arts and science-fiction literature. Doing so, we aim to understand how soils and the underground come to be known, sensed, felt, assembled, managed and inhabited not only in terms of taken-for-granted reservoirs of mineral and organic resources, but also in terms of various emerging practices, collectives and sensitivities aiming to regenerate and reconstitute Earth strata in a time of climate and ecological crisis. These emerging socialities, practices and sensitivities contribute to the composition of new ‘Gaïan collectives’ (Krzywoszynska, 2021) and ‘Earthly multitudes’ (Clark and Szerszynski, 2020) whose analysis will constitute an original contribution of this book