"The story of our relationship to the earth is written more truthfully on the land than on the page. It lasts there. The land remembers what we said and what we did." - Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2013 I recently published a chapter titled, 'Our Soils in Peril' in Promoting Biodiversity in Food Systems, a textbook for graduate students on 'biodiversity’s crucial role in food systems, health and well-being, and fate of the natural environment.' Doing research on the state of soils all over the world, made me realize how much I truly love soil and why soil regeneration seems like a cause worth pursuing in my life. I think one of the main point that I make in this short chapter is that soil is the foundation of civilizations and abuse of soil leads to horrific destruction of structures of all kinds - agricultural, economic, social, and political. This conclusion is actually David Montgomery's whose work I researched to write this chapter. I am amazed at how much we have destroyed the ground beneath our feet. And just like with greenhouse gas emissions, agriculture is one of the main reason for the killing of the soil. Paying attention to soil is yet another way we can re-examine our relationship with nature. Re-examine our relationship with the small, the unseen, those that we take for granted but make the world go around.
What makes me so passionate about speaking for the soil is the fact that in the grand hierarchy of human making, soil is probably at the absolute bottom. The hierarchies of man go something like this: White men White women Men of colour Women of colour LGBTQ (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer) QTPOC (Queer and Transgender People of Colour) Indigenous people Animals Plants Soil I know this is a simplistic version of the grand hierarchies and that there are so many complexities and nestling of hierarchies within every single one of those on the list. But I think we might all agree that soil is at the bottom of people's list of priorities. If you don't feel that way, maybe you will change your mind after you read the chapter ;) Soil is the most oppressed and is easily forgotten as being a living system containing 1/3rd of all the biodiversity on earth. Humans with our supremacist ways of thinking, are not good at giving anything non-human and invisible any respect. But I have come to love soil in a deep and sorrowful way. Once we truly acknowledge how little we know about the vastness of life in the soil and all that this web of tiny life does to make our life possible, and once we understand how we are destroying what we don't even know in an irreparable way, it is humbling. And just like so many other communities of the natural world that we are losing everyday, it calls for us to grieve the loss and try our best to know soil through deep connection, Deep connection brings me to how we relate with soil and how even environmentalists are approaching soil conservation in an irreverent way. One example of this is referring to the soil as a 'carbon sink' as if the earth were just here to fix all the mess that we have made. A sink where we throw all our crap and forget about it. Is this how we want to relate to the most basic elements of life that keep us alive - earth, water, air, fire? Our human supremacist attitude of course extends to soil as well which becomes just another thing we can use and abuse however we want without even once questioning our own attitudes and lifestyles. Tom B.K. Goldtooth is an elder from the Navajo tribe in the US. He spoke as the opening keynote speaker at the 'Soil Not Oil' conference this year in San Francisco where there were many proponents of soil carbon sequestering as a solution to reversing climate change. Most environmentalists will propose soil carbon sequestering, a process of using vegetation to pull carbon out of the air and put it into the soil. But this is not what Goldtooth promoted when he came on to speak. In fact he reminded us of how any such programs - soil carbon sequestering, carbon trading and offsetting are all part of the same paradigm of capitalism. He called it 'green capitalism' that usually directly affects poor and disenfranchised people and benefits corporations and big agriculture. His sentence, "the soil, air (carbon), and water are not for sale" really struck a chord in me. Many Native-American worldviews regard everything in nature as being our relatives - sky father, water mother. When your foundational worldview is one where nature is your family, it goes against that value system to say something like soil is a 'carbon sink'. You cannot rape the earth with a plough and call it humankind's greatest invention. I hope that the chapter I wrote helps us acknowledge that before we can even start talking about any kind of solutions to climate change, or soil degradation, or the sixth extinction, we need to grieve for what we have done and continue to do on earth and learn to respect and connect with all that lives beneath the ground and above it in a kind, humble, and joyful way. Most of us don't even know how to quite do that, including myself. But I know there are teachers out there who I can learn from. I seek them out and learn from them at every opportunity that I can get.
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Principles and Practices of Organic and Natural Farming Archives
November 2018
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