GS

Unit 3 Soil as Health

By Tamar Novick, Lulu Tessua, and Emily Brownell
Unit Outline
  1. Dust
  2. Forms of care for the soil (interventions)
  3. Intimacies of the soil and the body
  4. The labors of the body (politic)

What is a healthy soil? Across time and cultures, soil health has often been used as a barometer for societal health. The now predictable argument is that if civilizations do not tend to the health and fertility of their own soil, they will eventually fall. The geologist David Montgomery’s book, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations tracks this argument from Mesopotamia to the present while also providing a history of how scientists have come to understand the importance of soil as the “skin of the earth”. And yet, the question remains: what is a healthy soil, who gets to decide such things in any given place and time and what measures of coercion or freedom are taken to cultivate “healthy” soil? We might look back and in retrospect see what was considered healthy was actually harming. Thus, health is a historically and culturally constructed judgement of soil that is never without debate. This unit aims to construct a more nuanced conversation about how human health and soil health have been intertwined at different historical moments. We argue that societies have defined and intervened in soil health in a variety of ways and that we are now living out the legacies of these various definitions. The unit starts by considering how we evaluate soil, building on some of the readings and exercises from Unit 1. We then look at how humans intervene to change soil health, and how soil health changes human health. The final day considers how soil is often seen as a reflection not just of individual bodies, but of the body politic, mirroring some of the topics discussed in the fourth and final unit on soil and belonging.

Day 1: Dust

People in a variety of historical and social contexts have developed different judgments and methods to understand what a healthy or good soil might be. Often, it is only after soil becomes infertile that communities are left to grapple with how the value of the soil relates to one’s own well being as well as the quality of other life forms or products. Today’s activities and readings will consider how people determine and intervene in soil when it mostly shows up as dust, revealing histories of erosion or pollution. How do people and communities deal with dust when they deem it unhealthy and unruly, and how have these assessments changed over time?

Opening Activity

Interview a friend/family member (gardner, wine lover, compost producer, etc.) about how they evaluate a good soil.

Questions

  • What senses and means do they use to understand their soil?
  • Where do judgments of soil come from? Or have they developed over time?
  • If they don’t think they know the difference between good or bad soil, what information do they feel they lack to make that judgment?

Activity: Experiencing the Dust Bowl, USA

The Dust Bowl was a series of dust storms, which destroyed farmlands in the Great Plains throughout the 1930s. It is often considered the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history.

Read the excerpt from the letter of Caroline A. Henderson, a farmer in Oklahoma, to her friend in Maryland during the dust bowl, from 30 June 1935. Consider the following questions:

Questions

  • How did Henderson understand the state of her soil?
  • How did these environmental circumstances affect people’s lives, well-being, and choices?
  • Does Henderson seem to wrestle with what caused these problems?

Activity 2: Soil Erosion, Soil Conservation, and Settler Colonialism

Soil conservationists of the 1930s and 1940s were deeply concerned with the problem of soil erosion, particularly in colonial contexts. Much of their research was dedicated to historicizing global processes of desertification during periods in which European powers were attempting to strengthen their hold onto arid and semi-arid territories.

Read the following excerpts from soil conservationists and the suggested readings below. Consider the following questions:

Questions

  • How did soil experts understand the state of the soil?
  • How did soil erosion relate to people’s lives, behavior, and choices?
  • Who is considered responsible for the state of the soil, and what are the solutions to environmental problems?
  • What sort of relationship between states and citizens (or colonial subjects) emerge around soil interventions?

1. G. V. Jacks and R. O. Whyte, The Rape of the Earth: A World Survey of Soil Erosion (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1939), p. 26:

“Erosion is a modern symptom of maladjustment between human society and its environment. It is a warning that Nature is in full revolt against the sudden incursion of an exotic civilization into her ordered domains. Men are permitted to dominate Nature on precisely the same condition as trees and plants, namely on conditions that they improve the soil and leave it a little better for their posterity than they found it.”

2. G. N. Sale, the Conservator of Forests of the British Government in Palestine, “Afforestation and Soil Conservation,” lecture at the Palestine Economic Society, 28 December 1942, Israel State Archives/M-3/4188, 3-10:

“In our conservation work we have to ally ourselves with nature…nature herself is anxious to avoid such phenomenon, and we can count on her assistance in our effort…we must not only prevent further damage to land still capable of production, but we must take steps to repair the ravages of past neglect, and to restore the fertility of land which has been ruined by erosion.”

Readings / Other Media

Activity 3: Seeing Contaminated Soil - Mining Waste, South-Africa

South-Africa’s long-lasting gold and uranium mining industries left a wide-scale disastrous mark on the soil and on people’s bodies.

Questions

  • How is the contaminated soil experienced and evaluated?
  • How is unhealthy soil related to human life trajectories?
  • Who is considered responsible for the state of the soil and for mine workers’ health?

Day 2: Forms of care for the soil (interventions)

Caring for soil is a practice contingent on the diverse ways in which people relate to land. Care for soil is related to care for bodies, about practices that variously connect humans to “tradition” or “modernity”. These interventions can draw on or erase historical relations to the soil as well as determine futures. When things fail – financially, ecologically – this can provoke changing regimes of care. In some cases this leads to quick fix solutions such as the use of agrochemicals to revitalize the dying land. In other cases, this has been a call to abandon agrochemicals and “return” to older traditions of stewarding soil. Caring for soil therefore ranges from composting to applying toxins, all forms being the reflection of a relationship an individual or community has with soil as well as the capitalist pressures facing these actors.

For example, farmers in Pare, Tanzania use pesticides and agrochemicals to treat infertile soil in the rice farms while natural manure is used outside the project for ginger farming. The demands of the crops and the history of those crops command different ways of caring for the soil as well as for the crops, and thus different relationships between different farmers and soil emerge. For more on farmers in Pare and their chemical regimes, read Lulu Tessua’s essay.

Questions

  • What can be done to take care of (un) healthy soil?
  • What makes the methods of caring for soil so diverse?

Lesson Plan

“In response to an agrarian crisis, small-scale farmers in South India are experimenting with the application of agricultural ferments to their degraded soils” (Munster, 2021)

Think of any plant of your choice and find out what type of soil it grows in. Research information about how it grows best and determine how you would take care of the plant and the surrounding soil.

Readings / other media

  • Watch Daniel Munster’s lecture on agrarian crisis in India and different forms of care for the soil employed by farmers (there’s transcript as well). Start video around 6 minute mark.
  • Further Information: GV Ramanjaneyulu, “The Imminent Crisis of Indian Agriculture“
    • How does the way we choose to use land and soil lead to a series of other events and effects? How we choose to use and care for land and soil can lead to a series of other events and effects e.g. Hyderabad India chooses to grow paddy In a once dry and useless land. They built a dam and investment in rice, greenhouse emissions from rice and pesticide dependency have triggered many other environmental, political and social issues in India.

Read also The Government of Beans (2020) by Kregg Hetherington to consider how the imposition of capitalist agricultural systems (monocrops) particularly since the “Green Revolution” have equated soil care with pesticide use and fertilizer inputs. These have,paradoxically, often destroyed soil health as well as imperiled human health and then sought solutions to the problems they have created rather than avoided the problems in the first place:

Further reading:

Assignment 2

Browse through this collection of pesticide containers and take notes on the following for discussion:

Questions

  • What are some of the design and language choices used for marketing pesticides?
  • Take note of dates: are there differences across time in how pesticides have been labeled and marketed?
  • Who are the companies making these products?
  • What else do you notice that surprises or intrigues you?

In addition, read “Chapter 11: Beyond the Dreams of the Borgias” in Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. (Boston; Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962). There are many places to find this online but here’s one.

Day 3: Intimacies of the soil and the body

This week we continue to look at how human health and soil health are intertwined, particularly through the laboring body. Moving away from soil as a medium for agriculture (and its inputs), we look instead at how soil also serves as a medium for parasitic life as well as a site of an immense amount of human (and animal) manual labor. Indeed, microbial life constitutes soil inasmuch as soil is also a reservoir for such life. Thus, working with soil is also exposing oneself – for better or worse – to the living things it harbors. First, we will look at how hookworm epidemics have historically traced the contours of capitalism’s expansion and in the process helped establish major institutions of public health. Such campaigns against soil-based parasites also fit into a longer narrative of soil as unclean and regimes of bodily hygiene. Proximity to soil (or dirt) and not being able to escape the toil of such labor has often been a marker of class, race, and gender, marking such bodies as dirty and diseased. Shifting our terms from soil to dirt in this section, dirt nearly always marks something or someone suspect and malign, suggesting those who labor in it are also dirty or “soiled”.

Lesson Plan: Soil, labor, and hookworm

Watch

Questions

  • If we understand each video as a public health message shown to a population vulnerable to hookworm, how do they address each of these audiences?
  • How does each video explain or otherwise show the cause of hookworm infection?
  • If you were to critically respond to these videos, what is left out of the story here?

Read:

Scientists in the late 19th century had seen the hookworm under a microscope and understood its lifecycle passing from soil to humans. As you can see from the Rockefeller archive and Norman Stoll, by the early 20th century, the hookworm was seen as a major obstacle to development and progress at the same time that we can see that it is precisely the spaces of capitalist agricultural expansion (such as tea plantations) where hookworm most quickly reaches epidemic levels. Indeed, many people have and continue to suffer from the effects of hookworm infections.

Questions

  • How does hookworm and soil help us put labor and health in the same analytical frame?
  • Outside of a developmentalist framework, how do other cultures understand and live with worms?
  • How might western biomedicine also be coming around to hookworm as an essential companion species for humans? And does this challenge the normative assessment of soil as dirty and even dangerous to our health?

Day 4: The labors of the body (politic)

In the aftermath of slavery and Jim Crow in the United States and at the end of colonial rule in Africa, African and African American communities often sought healing through restoring a relationship with land and soil on their own terms. You can find this articulated at the level of the small rural community up to the scale of the new nation state. To do so, became a claim to sovereignty and a way to honor an ancestry and who had shaped the modern world through their knowledge and skills often only to be meted out violence and historic erasure in return. The soil and the field then became a site of both communal anguish and renewal, burial and rebirth. Today we will take a look at some of the ways that the ambitions for a healthy body politic were often enunciated as care for the soil.

Assignment

Find and watch some videos about black farmers in the US. How do they situate themselves and their practice of gardening or farming? How does history figure in their relationship with the land? Do they articulate a connection between land and health? How do they articulate the benefits of farming beyond a food harvest?

Here are some videos to start you off:

And a supplemental reading:

Or, to listen:

Reading and Discussion

Finally, soil is also a place where the violence of the past can linger on. Here are a few examples where artists and communities are working with soil as a medium for healing from racial violence and dispossession. Why do you think soil has emerged as such a popular medium for such work.

4. Soil as Belonging