Nonhuman labor and the making of resources: making soils a resource through microbial labor

With soils increasingly seen as living ecosystems, the understanding of the relationship between soils and agricultural labor is changing. A shift from working the soil to working with the soil is hoped to deliver a true ecological modernization of capitalist agriculture, making the production of ever-growing yields and the maintenance of healthy ecosystems co-constitutive. Drawing on ethnographic data from English farming, this article argues that the current trends are in fact a continuation of the logic of capitalist soil improvement in which soils are made into economic resources. By proposing a new conceptualization of labor as a material process of transformation oriented toward the generation of capital value, the author establishes a dialogue between hitherto separate literatures on the making of economic resources and on nonhuman labor. This approach transforms the debates on the relationship between nature and capital by productively collapsing the distinction between labor and resources. The author argues that acknowledging the material co-constitution of (any form of) labor and resource making allows us to better analyze the processes through which natures are rolled into capital. Today’s enrollment of soil biota as labor thus opens up the whole biosphere to the logic of improvement, and to the operations of capital

Toward a relational materiality of soils: Introduction

As environmental matters, soils have been an object of inquiry primarily for the natural sciences, with social scientists and environmental humanities scholars occupied with the surface dramas of territory and its products. The invisibility of soils in much of public and intellectual life speaks not only to the literal invisibility of their subterranean elements but also to their taken-for-granted effectiveness as the material infrastructure of societies. Today’s crisis of soil ecosystems calls for an urgent examination and improvement of human-soil relations. This is both an intellectual and a practical project. The authors believe that a crucial first step toward more just and sustainable human-soil relations is a critical reflection around soil knowledge practices and their onto-political effects. In this introduction, they open the field for such reflection by denaturalizing the category soil, discussing its complex materialities, its multiple scales, and the diversity of existing soil ontologies and epistemologies. In so doing they argue for a relational materiality approach to the study of soils. The authors place this relational materiality approach within a practical, political, and ethical project of re-embedding societies in soils and lands. Finally, they indicate emerging arenas of inquiry where a relational materiality approach to soils is needed

Doing the ‘Dirty Work’ of the Green Economy: resource recovery and migrant labour in the EU

Europe has set out its plans to foster a ‘green economy’, focused around recycling, by 2020. This pan-European recycling economy, it is argued, will have the triple virtues of: first, stopping wastes being ‘dumped’ on poor countries; second, reusing them and thus decoupling economic prosperity from demands on global resources; and third, creating a wave of employment in recycling industries. European resource recovery is represented in academic and practitioner literatures as ‘clean and green’. Underpinned by a technical and physical materialism, it highlights the clean-up of Europe’s waste management and the high-tech character of resource recovery. Analysis shows this representation to mask the cultural and physical associations between recycling work and waste work, and thus to obscure that resource recovery is mostly ‘dirty’ work. Through an empirical analysis of three sectors of resource recovery (‘dry recyclables’, textiles and ships) in Northern member states, we show that resource recovery is a new form of dirty work, located in secondary labour markets and reliant on itinerant and migrant labour, often from accession states. We show therefore that, when wastes stay put within the EU, labour moves to process them. At the micro scale of localities and workplaces, the reluctance of local labour to work in this new sector is shown to connect with embodied knowledge of old manufacturing industries and a sense of spatial injustice. Alongside that, the positioning of migrant workers is shown to rely on stereotypical assumptions that create a hierarchy, connecting reputational qualities of labour with the stigmas of different dirty jobs – a hierarchy upon which those workers at the apex can play

Sustainable soil management in the United Kingdom: A survey of current practices and how they relate to the principles of regenerative agriculture

Sustainable soil management is essential to prevent agricultural soil degradation and maintain food production and core soil-based ecosystem services. Regenerative agriculture, one approach to sustainable soil management, is rapidly gaining traction in UK farming and policy. However, it is unclear what farmers themselves consider to be sustainable soil management practices, and how these relate to the principles of regenerative agriculture. Further, there is little insight into how sustainable soil management is currently promoted in agricultural knowledge and innovation services (AKIS). To address these knowledge gaps, we undertook the first national-scale survey of sustainable soil management practices in the United Kingdom and complemented it with targeted interviews. We found high levels of awareness (>60%) and uptake (>30%) of most sustainable soil management practices among mixed and arable farmers. Importantly, 92% of respondents considered themselves to be practising sustainable soil management. However, our analysis shows that farmers combine practices in different ways. Not all these combinations correspond to the full set of regenerative agriculture principles of reduced soil disturbance, soil cover and crop diversity. To better understand the relationship between existing sustainable soil management practices in the United Kingdom and regenerative agriculture principles, we derive a “regenerative agriculture score” by allocating individual practices among the principles of regenerative agriculture. Farmers who self-report that they are managing soil sustainably tend to score more highly across all five principles. We further find that sustainable soil management messaging is fragmented and that few AKIS networks have sustainable soil management as their primary concern. Overall, our study finds that there are multiple understandings of sustainable soil management among UK farmers and land managers and that they do not correspond to regenerative agriculture principles in a straightforward way. This diversity and variety in sustainable soil management needs to be taken into account in future policy and research

Co-producing energy futures: impacts of participatory modelling

This transdisciplinary research case study sought to disrupt the usual ways public participation shapes future energy systems. An interdisciplinary group of academics and a self-assembling public of a North English town co-produced ‘bottom-up’ visions for a future local energy system by emphasizing local values, aspirations and desires around energy futures. The effects of participatory modelling are considered as part of a community visioning process on participants’ social learning and social capital. This paper examines both the within-process dynamics related to models and the impact of the outside process, political use of the models by the participants. Both a numerical model (to explore local electricity generation and demand) and a physical scale model of the town were developed to explore various aspects of participants’ visions. The case study shows that collaborative visioning of local energy systems can enhance social learning and social capital of communities. However, the effect of participatory modelling on these benefits is less clear. Tensions arise between ‘inspiring’ and ‘empowering’ role of visions. It is argued that the situatedness of the visioning processes needs to be recognized and integrated within broader aspects of governance and power relations

Setting the agenda for social science research on the human microbiome

The human microbiome is an important emergent area of cross, multi and transdisciplinary study. The complexity of this topic leads to conflicting narratives and regulatory challenges. It raises questions about the benefits of its commercialisation and drives debates about alternative models for engaging with its publics, patients and other potential beneficiaries. The social sciences and the humanities have begun to explore the microbiome as an object of empirical study and as an opportunity for theoretical innovation. They can play an important role in facilitating the development of research that is socially relevant, that incorporates cultural norms and expectations around microbes and that investigates how social and biological lives intersect. This is a propitious moment to establish lines of collaboration in the study of the microbiome that incorporate the concerns and capabilities of the social sciences and the humanities together with those of the natural sciences and relevant stakeholders outside academia. This paper presents an agenda for the engagement of the social sciences with microbiome research and its implications for public policy and social change. Our methods were informed by existing multidisciplinary science-policy agenda-setting exercises. We recruited 36 academics and stakeholders and asked them to produce a list of important questions about the microbiome that were in need of further social science research. We refined this initial list into an agenda of 32 questions and organised them into eight themes that both complement and extend existing research trajectories. This agenda was further developed through a structured workshop where 21 of our participants refined the agenda and reflected on the challenges and the limitations of the exercise itself. The agenda identifies the need for research that addresses the implications of the human microbiome for human health, public health, public and private sector research and notions of self and identity. It also suggests new lines of research sensitive to the complexity and heterogeneity of human–microbiome relations, and how these intersect with questions of environmental governance, social and spatial inequality and public engagement with science

Doing the 'dirty work of the green economy: Resource recovery and migrant labour in the EU

Europe has set out its plans to foster a ‘green economy’, focused around recycling, by 2020. This pan-European recycling economy, it is argued, will have the triple virtues of: first, stopping wastes being ‘dumped’ on poor countries; second, reusing them and thus decoupling economic prosperity from demands on global resources; and third, creating a wave of employment in recycling industries. European resource recovery is represented in academic and practitioner literatures as ‘clean and green’. Underpinned by a technical and physical materialism, it highlights the clean-up of Europe’s waste management and the high-tech character of resource recovery. Analysis shows this representation to mask the cultural and physical associations between recycling work and waste work, and thus to obscure that resource recovery is mostly ‘dirty’ work. Through an empirical analysis of three sectors of resource recovery (‘dry recyclables’, textiles and ships) in Northern member states, we show that resource recovery is a new form of dirty work, located in secondary labour markets and reliant on itinerant and migrant labour, often from accession states. We show therefore that, when wastes stay put within the EU, labour moves to process them. At the micro scale of localities and workplaces, the reluctance of local labour to work in this new sector is shown to connect with embodied knowledge of old manufacturing industries and a sense of spatial injustice. Alongside that, the positioning of migrant workers is shown to rely on stereotypical assumptions that create a hierarchy, connecting reputational qualities of labour with the stigmas of different dirty jobs – a hierarchy upon which those workers at the apex can play

Caring for soil life in the Anthropocene: the role of attentiveness in more-than-human ethics

This paper considers the work that attentiveness can and can’t do in generating more ethical relations with non-humans. How to build better relations with non-humans has been a central debate in geography and cognate disciplines. These concerns include ethical relations with non-humans who both pervade and create liveable environments, such as soil biota. Scholars have specifically identified attentiveness as key in generating more-than-human ethics. However, how attentiveness may arise, and what work attentiveness may be able to do in generating ethical relations has not been sufficiently explored. Additionally, soils as relational materialities remain underexplored in social sciences. In this paper, I address these two important gaps in scholarship. Investigating the rising concern with soil biota in conventional English farming, I propose the care network as a way of conceptualising and investigating the ethical potential of attentiveness. As concerns grow about soil degradation, and the dangers this is posing to food production and to human survival, land managers are attending to soil ecosystems as part of caring for their farm businesses. While this attentiveness is producing some transformative effects, its potential is limited by the configuration of the soil care network. As long as soil care is configured primarily as a farmers’ concern, the potential of attentiveness in generating ethical regard to the needs of soil biota will be limited. In the conclusions, I suggest ways of expanding attentiveness to soils, and building a wider and practical relational ethic of soil care. I also argue we need more attention in geographic research to attentiveness and care as systemic, unequally distributed, and operating at multiple scales

Resilience and transformation : lessons from the UK local food sector in the COVID‐19 pandemic

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic there is a renewed interest in the role of local food systems from policy, academic, and third sector actors, who see those systems as a source of “bounce-back” resilience, supporting existing structures, but also as sources of “bounce forward” transformative resilience. The capacity of the local food sector to provide either form of resilience depends on the resilience of the local food actors themselves, which has been little investigated to date. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews and analysis of 26 key policy and third sector reports, this article concluded that while strong bonding and bridging capitals support the local food sector's persistence and adaptability, a lack of linking social capital, most visible as a “middle class image problem”, is preventing it from achieving a transformative role