Mother Earth - 2021

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MOTHER EARTH 75th Anniversary Edition Summer 2021

Thinking and Doing with Soils

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- Jim Scown -

Looking forward to 75 more years of the Soil Association

soilassociation.org

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Jim Scown

Jim Scown is a writer, researcher, and educator. He recently completed a PhD at Cardiff University and the University of Bristol on the history, literature, and science of soils in the nineteenth century. He has since taken up a position with the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, an organisation focussed on the transition to socially and environmentally just food systems in the UK. Alongside his work with the Commission, Jim is also part of Cardiff University’s ScienceHumanities Initiative, where he works on the Covid Narratives project. This research asks how coronavirus and the pandemic it has generated is influencing the ways we imagine the future. Originally from North Cornwall, Jim lives in Bristol with his partner, Becky. Together they spend plenty of time with their hands in the soil at their allotment across the road.

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Introduction First published in 1946 – the year the Soil Association was founded – Mother Earth was the official journal of the Soil Association, established as a ‘collection of occasional papers of interest to members and intending members’. Mother Earth ran until the 1960s, becoming the Journal of the Soil Association, then replaced later

by Living Earth in 1985 (the member magazine you’ll be more familiar with today). It provided in-depth comment and analysis of the intellectual, political and practical issues, emerging from the organic movement, as well as celebrating the philosophy, history and successes of the organic pioneers. To celebrate our 75th year we have this thoughtful essay by Jim Scown.

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‘We see the magic of the thing before our eyes’ ‘We see the magic of the thing before our eyes’, Bill Grayson says as we talk, over video call, about soil formation.1 Bill farms sheep and cattle on the borders of the Lake District, and tells a remarkable story. ‘We have a cattle pen on one of our sites that was a new installation in the mid 2000s. I suddenly realised that it was no longer bare stone. It was actually a little meadow that had been made, of itself, just by virtue of the fact that we bring the cattle in to catch them. We store hay in the barn on the side of this, so we’re bringing in seed all the time and carrying it out again. There’s now nearly an inch of soil on what we know was bare ground.’ From stone to soil in fifteen years, the stuff of magic indeed.

William Bryant Logan tells a similar story in his book Dirt, though from a more surprising location. In the back of an old pickup truck, left for a year on a New York street, pigeon droppings, a pile of logs, fallen leaves, Chinese takeaway menus, and a book of church diocesan records conspire to create soil, from which sprout maples, seeded from the trees above. ‘Wherever there are decay and repose, there begins to be soil’, Logan writes. ‘How can I stand on the ground every day and not feel its power? How can I live my life stepping on this stuff and not wonder at it?’2 Listening to Bill, I’m reminded of these words.

Bill is one of a number of people – doctors, writers, musicians, scientists, farmers, growers, and gardeners – who in the last year have been willing to share with me their thoughts on soil, to explain what soil means to them. None did I meet in person. I hope that may one day

change, but for now we remain separated by the pandemic. The idea for this article, written to mark the Soil Association’s 75th anniversary, was conceived as Coronavirus surged across the country in Spring 2020. Our discussions have taken place over video call, these words have been written under lockdown, and the thoughts that follow must be shaped in some way by the experience of living in a pandemic.

But they are shaped, far more strongly I think, by the stories of people who live and work closely with soil, both today and in the past. Soils have long been seen as sites of wonder. They are also, I often think, realms of hope. As rock becomes earth, matter turns to humus, death comes to life, so soils make and remake the world. The stuff of decomposition, soils are the Earth’s great composers, whether from Cumbrian stone or the back of a New York pickup truck.

In this piece I highlight three crises – around our relationships with nature, our unsustainable economies, and our senses of belonging – to suggest that soils can help us to address them together. As soils compose the Earth, I am going to show, they can help us compose the world anew. They make us think again about how our societies function, rethink the ways we relate to each other and the world around us, even challenge our sense of who we are. Soil is one lens through which we can more practically understand our place within nature. Thinking with soils is instructive because within them lie worlds radically unlike that which we think we know, beginning with a vision of human life immersed in a microbial realm, the microbiome.

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Life in the Microbiome ‘We are the soil, and the soil are we’ Phil Morley. Group Director of Agronomy, APS Produce, Isle of Wight.

A revolution is sweeping agriculture and Joe Rolfe, farm manager of the organic estate at Houghton Hall in North Norfolk, is well placed to explain it. ‘I believe that soil is alive’, he says.

‘If you look back over the last 50-100 years, preand post-war, a lot of the issues that lay in food production come from chemical farming. A lot of the problems have been created by the way they farm.’ I ask Joe how his approach differs from chemical agriculture, where production is maintained by synthetic fertilisers and pests and weeds controlled with chemicals such as glyphosate, commonly known as Roundup.

‘We’re not putting fungicides on and killing all the bacteria and allowing the bad bacteria to come back with a vengeance. You could compare our human bodies very much like you could soil. If I’m ill because I’ve put things in my body, and my tummy bacteria can’t fight off infection, I’m more likely to become ill. But if I’m fit and healthy and not pumping stuff in my body, then I’m not going to get ill so frequently.

I view soil in the same way. If we turn it toxic, what do you expect? We’ll only get bad out of it.’

Joe describes the microbiome. As his words suggest, it’s a concept that can be applied to both soils and stomachs – anywhere, in fact, where microorganisms thrive. This is a great many places. As microbes in our guts help to break down certain foods, bacteria and fungi in soils form symbiotic associations with plants to access certain nutrients. In this way, like our bodies, soils provide habitats for countless microbial species. As different bacteria live in our mouths, on our skin, and in different portions of our intestines, so different microorganisms thrive as soil chemistry and composition change across a field. Some species may be

just as happy inside us as inside soil.3 ‘Soil is an extension of me’, Joe tells me, words that capture a truth we are barely beginning to comprehend.

Soil is an extension of me The latest knowledge of the microbiome can also be seen as a return to earlier understandings of soil. ‘Soil is a substance teeming with life,’ wrote Eve Balfour in The Living Soil, first published in 1943, ‘if this life is killed, the soil quite literally dies.’ The health of soil, plant, animal and human ‘is one indivisible whole’, she explained, and it was this message that sparked the Soil Association into being 75 years ago.4 Balfour was also building on earlier investigations of soil life. ‘The soil itself … is actually in great part a living layer’ wrote Grant Allen in 1897, ‘a perfect London of microscopic organisms’. Allen’s article, ‘The Living Earth’, described the latest research on soil for the general reader. ‘Nitrifying bacteria’, he explained, were ‘tiny friends of agriculture’ that made nutrients accessible to plants. ‘We think of soil as dead, as mere mineral matter, … [but] the soil as a whole, and especially that part of it which is of importance to agriculture and to plant life in general, consists of a vast complex of living organisms.’5 Two decades earlier, in 1881, Charles Darwin published his famous work on soil, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms. Earthworms were Darwin’s great agents of soil formation. As soil ‘passes through their bodies,’ he explained, ‘mould is in constant though slow movement.’6

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Earthworms, as the book became known, was the last Darwin published, the culmination of a lifetime’s fascination. He first wrote about worms as ‘a geological power’ in 1838, not far off two hundred years ago.7 Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s grandfather, was also fascinated by the relations of soil and life. His remarkable poetry offered a vision of life and matter joined in ‘the first specks of animated earth’.8 Published in 1791, The Botanic Garden described ‘organic cells’ filled ‘with virgin earth’, matter ‘combin[ing] with life and sense’ to ‘guide and guard the transmigrating Ens.’9 The language may be obscure today, but Darwin’s poetry was a vision of life’s emergence, an unending cycle of growth and decomposition, earthly matter and living spirit combining to form the world and life within it.

In a longer piece, we could go back much further, to how European cultures understood soils before the advent of rational science. We might also look to the extraordinary array of soil knowledges from cultures across the world. As French anthropologist Phillipe Descola explains, in the understandings and cosmologies of the world’s indigenous peoples, soils offer ‘a bewildering array of variations, of points of view, of interpretations’.10 It was in the hope of putting such ideas on a firmer scientific footing that led German agronomist Albrecht Thaer to suggest a humus theory for plant nutrition in 1809.11 Plants fed on the decaying organic matter of dead plants and animals, Thaer explained. But this theory was, for some at least, barely more scientific than Erasmus Darwin’s poetry. With death in soil seen to stimulate the growth of plant and animal through an incomprehensible ‘life force’, humus remained, as one contemporary put it, ‘the limit of natural science, beyond which Isis covers all with the veil of mystery.’12

It was a common motif in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science writing to refer to the Ancient Egyptian Goddess Isis hiding the secrets of nature behind her veil. Remarkable though it may seem, the living web of humus retains much of this unknowability today.

Bringing Isis’s veil into the twenty-first century, soil biologists often refer to the ‘soil organic matter black box’ in which the ‘secrets’ of soil life lie hidden.13 It’s a sentiment shared by farmers and growers too. ‘The fundamental issue is that we are farming the ground and we don’t really know what we’re doing’, Charles Shropshire tells me. Charles grows salads and vegetables on the edge of the Fens using both organic and chemical methods, and though insights are coming ‘bit by bit’, he admits that ‘we don’t really understand soil. Soil is a very, very complex living organism that we don’t understand.’

Phil Morley, who completed his PhD in plant nutrition at the end of the 1980s, describes the challenges of trying to understand soil life: ‘What we have now is a table full of organisms and nobody quite knows yet how those all fit together. How they talk to each other and what chemical signals they give to each other, and when a pathogen is not a pathogen, and when a pathogen becomes a pathogen, and the triggers that make that happen, and how beneficial microbes can also have a beneficial effect on the plant. We’re right at the beginning, as we are with the human biome.’

I ask Phil for his thoughts on the relationship between the human microbiome and the soil microbiome. How does research on microbial communities in our guts or on our skin link to the latest research on soil? ‘A lot of stuff will come out of that which is applicable to the technologies for understanding soils and understanding how to propagate the best in soils, which we’ve never had. I know some people look at soils, even now, and their measure of what is a good soil is how many worms are in it. That’s one metric, but there’s

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so much more we’ve got to find out. This understanding of the microbiome of soils will revolutionise crop production, as it will human health.’

It’s here where the ‘One Health’ message, put forward by Balfour and many others since, is undergoing a microbial revolution.14 As the authors of one recent study suggest,

‘the health conditions of all organisms in an ecosystem are interconnected through the cycling of … microbial communities from the environment (in particular the soil) to plants, animals and humans, and back into the environment.’15 Seen in this light, health depends on a continuum of lives stretching from soils to stomachs and back again. Rather than a fixed state, health is then perhaps best thought of as a process emerging from microbial relations.

‘I am multitudes’, writes Ed Yong in his book on the latest microbiome research. It’s an idea with profound implications. Yong estimates that each of us is made up of around 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion microbial cells, but the numbers are less important than the view of life they suggest. ‘When we look at beetles and elephants, sea urchins and earthworms, parents and friends, we see individuals, working their way through life as a bunch of cells in a single body, driven by a single brain … In fact, we are legion, each and every one us.’16 Each of us is assembled from countless microbial lives. ‘We are the soil, and the soil are we’, as Phil Morley puts it, ‘always a “we”

and never a “me”,’ Yong writes.17 Humans are holobionts, a term coined by biologist Lynn Margulis to describe many different organisms living together in symbiosis. As mycologist Merlin Sheldrake explains in his recent book, Entangled Life, we have more in common with the symbiotic lives of fungi and lichen that many might care to admit: ‘Like “symbiosis” and “ecology”, “holobiont” is a word that does useful work’, he writes. ‘If we only have words that describe neatly bounded autonomous individuals, it is easy to think that they actually exist.’18 To try and describe the microbial relations that make up human lives is to come up against the limits of the English language. As is the way with many Western languages, English is good at naming things, but perhaps less adept at describing the relations between them. When compared to languages spoken by the world’s indigenous peoples, for example, English seems disproportionately full of nouns, scantily stocked with verbs.19 Rob MacFarlane, writing in Underland, highlights ‘the soil of grammar and syntax, where habits of speech and therefore also habits of thought settle and interact over long periods of time. Grammar and syntax exert powerful influence on the proceedings of language and its users’, he explains. ‘They shape the ways we relate to each other and to the living world.’20 English seems to be a language that struggles to capture our relational being, that partitions individuals as separate selves, ‘you’ and ‘me’ rather than ‘us’ and ‘we’.

But our lives take place where microbial lives meet. It’s a realisation that goes beyond interdependence to a vision of intradependence with the living world in and around us. The prefix inter means between, but we are not uncovering an inter-relation between two separate groups, life that is either human or non-human. Instead, we are coming to know the intra-relations that in fact bind and shape these lives, relations that are emergent, as the

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prefix intra suggests, from within ecologies, be they cells, bodies, or soils.21 As with Darwin’s worms, MacFarlane points to words as ‘one of the great geological forces of the Anthropocene’.22 The Anthropocene marks the end of the Holocene epoch and the onset of an industrial human culture that, from three hundred or so years ago, has been defined by the extraction of Earth’s resources. I remember hearing philosopher Maria Puig de la Bellacasa once say ‘the word for world is soil’.23 She was paraphrasing Ursula Le Guin’s science-fiction novel, The Word for World is Forest, in which the forest planet of Athshe is logged by colonists from Earth.24 As the native Athsheans refer to their world as forest, sharing a consciousness with the trees they live among, so on Earth our treatment of soil is a vital indicator of our relationship with all nature.

For many people, in a great many places, soil is synonym for world in both word and deed.

‘What is complex, life-giving, and sacred to some, is ordinary, even ugly, to others’, write soil scientists Edward Landa and Christian Fella.25 Without smoothing away differences between highly distinctive cultures, where indigenous peoples often prioritise forms of long-term care, a learned coexistence with nature and the land, Western society’s relationship with the soil is defined by exploitation.26 We have thought ourselves apart from the rest of nature in a language that struggles to frame our existence any other way, which is perhaps why our entangled microbial lives present such a challenge to our sense of self.

It’s certainly why the poet W.H. Auden once described fungi, not without a hint of irony, as ‘the monstrous forms and lives / With which we have nothing, we like to think, in common’.27 For philosopher Glenn Albrecht, we need to exit the Anthropocene as swiftly as possible so we can enter a new geological epoch, an era defined by care and cooperation that he names the Symbiocene.28 To do so means learning the language of the microbiome, learning from fungi and bacteria how to live in symbiosis with the natural world of which we are part.

Eve Balfour’s words ring truer than ever: ‘Society, like a house, does not start at ground level, but begins quite literally beneath the surface of our planet, within the soil itself.’29 It comes as no surprise, then, to learn that ecology and economics share a common linguistic route, eco coming from the Ancient Greek oikos, meaning household, with logy denoting its study and nomos its rules. But as with our neatly bounded selves, partitioned from the microbial world that gives us life, the course of the Western world has detached one from the other. We have made economic rules for the household without considering the microbial ecology on which it depends.

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More-than-human Economies ‘The soil is something that holds things.’

Jude Allen. Academic, researcher and tutor, South Devon.

‘Suddenly, the chemistry is not working.’ This is how Helen Browning describes the current state of UK farming to me. ‘What’s happened in the last few years, literally seven or eight years, is that all the chickens have come home to roost.

There has been a massive shift, and it’s probably most notable in the east. Ten, fifteen years ago, they were very much in that conventional mindset. Even though it was well documented that soil organic matter levels were dropping very, very fast in that world, that these very simple rotations – wheat/oilseed rape rotations – were just crippling soils and leading to this loss of potential productivity, they were really in denial about it and thought of soil simply as something to prop up the crop.’

This ‘conventional mindset’, which sees soil as ‘something to prop up the crop’ rather than a living world, can be traced back to the nineteenth century. Long before Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch laid the foundations for the artificial fertilisers of the twentieth century by fixing nitrogen in 1912, another German chemist was arguing that farming could be revolutionised with factory-produced fertilisers. In Organic Chemistry in its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology, first published in 1840, Justus von Liebig argued that it was the inorganic minerals in soils that plants needed to grow. He rejected Albrecht Thaer’s ideas of humus as having no bearing on plant growth whatsoever. ‘The object in view was a complete revolution in agriculture’, Liebig explained in later life. ‘Farmyard-manure was to be totally excluded, and all the mineral constituents removed in the crops were to be restored in the mineral manure. The usual rotations were to cease.’30 They would be

replaced by artificial fertilisers: ‘A time will come when fields will be manured with a solution of glass … and with the salts of phosphoric acid, prepared in chemical manufactories.’31 It’s hard to comprehend how Liebig’s message, going so against practical experience, ever gained a footing. His inorganic mineral theory had the advantage over earlier ideas of humus, however, because it could quantify what he called the ‘incomprehensible something’ that made soils fertile in terms of potential production.32 Able to calculate ‘the sum of all the ingredients we withdraw from the soil in different crops, the farmer will be able to keep an exact record, of the produce of his fields in harvest, like the account-book of a wellregulated manufactory,’ Liebig explained. ‘By a simple calculation he can determine precisely the substances he must supply to each field, according to the crops he has reaped ... in order to restore their original fertility.’ This school of thought continues today, underwriting what one conventional farmer from South Wiltshire describes to me as the ‘bottom-line’ approach of chemical agriculture.33 In Liebig’s argument, and in chemical farming since, production is confused with fertility.

‘Increased production for human use can be, and usually is, secured by cashing in on existing fertility and using it up’, Eve Balfour explained.34 Helen Browning describes this to me as ‘the economics driving short-term bad practice’, increased production bought at the expense of long-term fertility: ‘The arable phase of the rotation is where you make your money, and that’s the extractive phase as far as soils are

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‘arable land’ is one of the ‘ultimate determinants of the limits to growth on this earth.’ concerned. It’s too tempting when you’re trying to make the books balance to grow more of the crops that are going to make money than the crops that are going to give back to the soil.’

growth’s ‘ecological ceiling’, of which soil fertility is a vital indicator.38 Viewing soil as a bank account, to be depleted and replenished at will, fails to recognise any of this.

Chemistry quantifies soil and, in doing so, can provide valuable insights. But when it becomes the defining measure of a soil’s growth potential, fertility is reduced to a calculable set of nutrients.

These nutrients, the argument runs, can always be renewed to maintain fertility, which is to say production. But if fertility instead depends on humus, ‘the accelerated growth induced by chemical fertilisers has the effect’, as Balfour explained, ‘of speeding up the rate at which humus is exhausted.’35 Taking a bank account approach to soils is more than a metaphor; it’s the defining feature of how capitalism directs farmers towards an intensive chemical agriculture aimed at extracting as much profit from soils as possible, exhausting them in the process.

Like all metaphors, the soil bank account is a figure of speech with material force. ‘What soil is thought to be affects the ways in which we care for it, and vice versa’ writes Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and how soil is cared for in turn affects soil structure and biology, what soil is and can become.39 In this way, words make worlds.

Liebig’s conceptual simplification, rethinking soil as an inorganic system, precedes ecological simplification, the destruction of life in the soil.

As one contemporary reviewer put it, Liebig’s theory explained ‘the connection which subsists between the living plant, and the dead earth in which it grows.’40 Not that soil was dead in 1843, when these words were written, but that seeing soil as inorganic has made and remade soils as dead and dying spaces in the generations since.

Words, then, can also unmake worlds.

In his foundational critique of capitalism, The Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776, Adam Smith explained that ‘a country which has acquired that full complement of riches which the nature of its soil and climate … allowed it to acquire … could, therefore, advance no further.’36 If the ecological tone of these words ring clear today, for Smith they were part of an argument for free trade that could transcend the limits of a nation’s land. Two-hundred years later, the authors of Limits to Growth, taking a very different view on a globalised economy, explained that ‘arable land’ is one of the ‘ultimate determinants of the limits to growth on this earth.’ They also noted that feeding a growing population through an ‘emphasis on highly capitalised agriculture … would lead to rapid soil erosion and depletion of soil fertility.’37 More recently, Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics has drawn renewed attention to economic

A dead soil isn’t just bereft of life, it’s bereft of stories.

This is how Jude Allen describes coming across a soil harmed by chemicals. ‘I realised the land was really awful,’ she tells me, on having acquired a small patch of field to grow vegetables near her home in South Devon. ‘It had been sprayed for twenty years. It was really disappointing. My hands bled it was so hard to hack into.’ Not long before, Jude had completed her doctorate in English literature. ‘I was thinking away with my hands bleeding and thinking about stories … that soil seemed to lack any story, all the story had been taken away from it. There were no worms, no history, it was just something to hold plants up in.’

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It’s a powerful idea. As Jude says, ‘those stories had been lost, the soil didn’t have a voice, it had no stories to tell, wasn’t holding anything.’

I am reminded of Elizabeth Jane Burnett’s The Grassling: ‘[Words] are there … buried deep in the soil … waiting for someone to catch them’.41 Jude’s experience and Burnett’s words makes me wonder about the stories those beings who live in soils might have to tell us, if we care to listen. How different these stories are likely to be from the bank-balance account that chemical agriculture has for so long given of soil.

Could we learn to speak the languages of the soil microbiome? ‘Bacteria and fungi abound to give us metaphors’, writes Donna Haraway, ‘It matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts.’42 Perhaps, in their wild tales and intra-dependencies, lie the languages by which we might build a world where we recognise ourselves and our societies within nature, rather than apart.

It’s an urgent hope, for on the flourishing of microbial life hinges our health and our wealth.

Life begins in soil, and the latest science is here confirming what farmers and growers throughout the world have long known. Long-term agricultural fertility depends on life active in soils, the same microbes that are killed by inputting chemicals in the unending chase for production.

able to comprehend. It is striking that Western science likes to fit the relations of nature into two models that apply to the world of finance – the competitive free market and the cooperative bank. It’s for this reason that terms like ‘natural capital’, though a welcome attempt to preserve natural systems by highlighting their economic worth, are so misguided. When we speak of nature in the languages of capitalism, we risk enshrining one form of value, that of money, over those of health, care, diversity, and fairness.

Thinking with soils is instructive because to do so introduces us to radically unfamiliar worlds. Understanding economies as grounded, at the very least, embeds soil as one of the material limits to wealth. But more than this, it’s a metaphor that might acknowledge the more-than-human lives in soil that make economic wealth possible, highlighting their vital importance if humans-as-holobionts are to flourish into the future. Perhaps Haraway’s ‘human-as-humus’ is an even better model.44 From the Latin humus comes humilis, meaning ‘lowly’ and ‘humble’ – literally ‘on the ground’ and the etymological root of humility. Finding humility by cherishing humus means seeing our Western selves and societies, not as masters of nature, but as emerging from countless lives and processes, and charged with their care.

As Helen puts it,

We need to build economies founded on cooperation and care, rather than extraction and exploitation. In which case, what if we flip the soil bank account metaphor? What if, instead of saying that soil is like a bank account, we think of human economies as more like soils?

It’s misleading to make this analogy through rose-tinted glasses because soil life, as with all life, can be seen as both competitive and cooperative. Not all mycorrhizal fungi benefit plants, for example, and soils are not fair-trading utopias.43 Life seems likely, in fact, to take far more types of relationship than we are as yet

‘if we could only internalise the externalities properly of our systems, we would make very different decisions.’

Caring for soil life remains one such externality in current economic thinking. Ben Raskin, who has been in charge of agroforestry at Helen’s Eastbrook farm since 2017, explains how the same short-termism affects farming in other

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ways. ‘There’s a real issue with short-term tenancies and that lack of permanence with people who don’t own their own farms, the sense that you can just find another farmer to do it’, he tells me.

‘After three years, you’re only just beginning to understand the basics of your soil.’

Like many, Ben has never had the chance to own a farm himself. ‘Regret is the wrong word, but one of the things I realise I don’t have, and that farmers and growers who’ve been in one place for a long time do have, is that very deep and intimate relationship with the soil on their farm.’ As Ben describes how the economics of farming are prohibitive for new entrants working at smaller scales, his words also speak to a wider truth. The modern world keeps us distant from soil. Alastair McIntosh explains this in Soil and Soul – how with the emergence of capitalism, ‘competition subsumes the co-operative relationship’, and so comes the weakening of ties to place and community.45 Learning to cherish humus means helping people have access to soil. From there, as I am always reminded, soils invite their own connections. ‘I am definitely one of these people,’ says Ben. ‘When we do these farm walks, I’ve got to pick up some soil and feel it and smell it.’ It’s a sensory connection, a need to feel with the soil, that recurs again and again when talking to those who live and work closely with soil: ‘you can touch the soil, you can smell the soil,’ and through this ‘extraordinary aroma’ a soil communicates a sense of its health and well-being.

‘Healthy soil has this amazing smell.’

Is savouring the smell of a healthy soil speaking the language of the microbiome? After all, fungi and bacteria make soil healthy, and an unhealthy soil, a dead soil, communicates its lost life in the same way. John Pawsey, who has farmed organically in Suffolk since the end of the 1980s, describes smelling a soil treated with chemicals: ‘We took on a farm the year before last. I remember picking up a lump of this soil and smelling it. It was just, you almost had to turn your nose away from it, there was a lot of chemical smell in there. Compared to the nextdoor field where we’d been farming organically it was unbelievable.’

John’s words remind me of American poet Robert Frost: ‘For what is more accursed / Than an impoverished soil, pale and metallic? / What cries more to our kind for sympathy?’46 With an appreciation for the feel and smell of a healthy soil comes an awareness that soil is ‘vulnerable’ and can be ‘abused.’ Sensory connections create an emotional response. Feelings of ‘horror’, ‘guilt’, ‘sadness’ and ‘hurt’ recur over and over when I speak to those who have experienced the damage chemicals have done to soils first-hand. But to see industrial agriculture in such terms, and to feel sympathy for soils as living things that might be abused, requires a change in perspective that comes with time and opportunity. Even for farmers and growers, it can be hard to feel with soil, to speak the languages of the microbiome, if you are chained in an unending chase for production, a mindset that denies so many the chance to connect with soil as a living world.

How to help others appreciate the damage done by conventional farming? How to help people build their own connections with soil and the land, some of whom may have never thought about soil before? These are questions where the economics of soil, how land is farmed, meets up with the politics of soil, who has access to it, an issue with a long and at times troubling history.

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Soil and Belonging ‘There is an interesting discussion to be had about permanence, and sense of place, and long-term relationships with soil.’

Ben Raskin. Author and Head of Agroforestry, Eastbrook Farm, Swindon.

For Dr Anna Krzywoszynska, an academic at the University of Sheffield, the relationships between soil and land have been desperately under studied. ‘I found it really fascinating that while social sciences have dedicated hundreds of years, really, into the study of land, and our relationship with land, and land ownership and land politics, we have not in the social sciences extended this to consider the material make-up of the land, which is the soil. These two have become really separated.’

‘I’m trying to approach soils as this space of openness, and of uncertainty, and of exploration, rather than as things.

Anna’s work bridges this divide. ‘Thinking and doing with soils’, she calls it. ‘I’m trying to approach soils as this space of openness, and of uncertainty, and of exploration, rather than as things. I’m constantly trying to unpick, and starting with questions of, where do soils end and other things start? How do soils connect? …

What forms of knowledge, and also what forms of experience and belonging, come to matter?’

These questions speak to the heart of organicist philosophy, the ethos on which the organic movement is built. Organicism sees a world made up of interconnecting parts that join together to form a larger whole. The cells of an organism, the organisms of an ecosystem,

the ecosystems of the planet, all can be understood through an organicist frame. Parts join together, the thinking runs, to form a closed and harmonious system. It’s a philosophy that holds valuable messages when it comes to soil.

Seeing all life as part of a larger whole underlines the importance of respecting nutrient cycles, for example, by husbanding organic matter, hinting too at the dangers of adding materials such as pesticides to a closed loop system.

The concept of order is of supreme importance in organicist philosophy. Eve Balfour explained this in the first edition of Mother Earth: ‘Disorder and chaos are not natural phenomena. Left to herself, Nature always produces order. It is man who causes chaos by his persistent attempts to resist or ignore natural laws.’47 While these words seem to underplay the queerness and riotous diversity of the biological world as understood today, if prominent members in the early organic movement, including Rolf Gardiner, Richard St. Barbe Baker, and Jorian Jenks, shared a common ethos, it was in celebrating this vision of order.48 But it was also a view, in the writing of some, that could tilt troublingly from nature to society, where belief in order could become an argument for authoritarianism.

Organicism has long been used to think about the complex worlds of human society. In the novels of Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot, organicist philosophy forms the basis of what Eliot scholar Sally Shuttleworth calls ‘organic community’.49 Many of Eliot’s stories are set in the fictional county of

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‘Loamshire’. The name links landscape and society, ‘shire’ being a division of land and ‘loam’ a soil of roughly equal parts sand, silt and clay.

In her novel Adam Bede, for example, soil and people meet in an eternal order embodied by Loamshire farmhand, Kester Bale. ‘You and I are indebted to the hard hands of such men,’ Eliot writes, ‘hands that have long ago mingled with the soil they tilled so faithfully, thriftily making the best of the earth’s fruits.’50 Organic connection links society to soil.

Eliot’s vision is a harmonious one, as Kester is celebrated for dutifully performing a vital role for the community. Like a body, where each cell functions as part of a larger whole, Kester’s value comes from the role he performs within the social organism. The result is a world that seems homely and holistic, human and nature working together. But it’s also a rigidly hierarchical society. Published in 1859, Adam Bede is set at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it’s here where Eliot finds organic links between a romanticised peasantry and the soil. Seen in this way, the novel presents a conservative vision, where Kester is locked at the bottom of an eternal order, a hierarchical class structure supported by nature’s timeless cycles.

Adam Bede was partly inspired by German writer, Wilhelm Riehl. As Eliot wrote in a review of Riehl’s work, society can be divided into ‘natural ranks’, ‘the hereditary landed aristocracy, the citizens or commercial class, and the peasantry or agricultural class’, each with ‘their roots deep in the historical structure of society’, which is to say an agrarian past. This rootedness was more than a metaphor, Eliot explained.

Riehl showed ‘the causal relation … between the physical geography … and the development of the population’.51 The vision was of an organic society built upon the land, an organic order where people and soil became one.

These ideas influenced Eliot, but they also influenced the ‘Blood and Soil’ ideology of Nazi Germany.52 By linking land and national

character, Nazism joined the soil of a racially bounded nation to the blood of a racially defined population. The result, Nazi thinking ran, was an Aryan race destined to conquer the lands and peoples of Europe. The same extreme organicist views supported the inverse of this idea. Jewish people, ‘it was argued, had no commitment to the countries they lived in’, writes historian Philip Conford, ‘and particularly not to any national soil’.53 Being cast out from the organic society, history shows, can lead to terrible violence.

Of course, organicism does not have to imply atrocities such as the holocaust. Nor must it come with extreme political views. As Conford notes, ‘organic husbandry has co-existed, and still co-exists, with a variety of social and political beliefs’.54 George Eliot’s novels and the Blood and Soil ideology of Nazism instead speak to two poles of thought to which organicist thinking may lead when applied to society.

These poles of thinking can be seen in the early years of the Soil Association. Several historians have found ‘a close connection between the emerging organic movement and right-wing politics during the 1930s and 1940s’.55 Jorian Jenks, the first editor of Mother Earth, was a prominent member of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF). Jenks’s vision for agricultural self-sufficiency through ‘the cultivation … of more organic links with the earth’ seems akin to Adam Bede’s harmonious peasant society. The reality was uncomfortably close to the Blood and Soil of Nazi Germany – ‘Home first, Empire second, Foreigners third’, as BUF policy put it.56 Following a summer when the Black Lives Matter movement took centre stage, and in the year of the Soil Association’s 75th anniversary, there has never been a better time to confront the ways organicist thinking raises uncomfortable questions of race and belonging. Author and rap artist Akala writes about being told to ‘go back where you came from’ in his book Natives,

16 Mother Earth

a modern-day incarnation of earlier organicist thinking: ‘Their assumption is that anyone who is not racialised as white is not really a citizen, echoing the old white-supremacist adage “Race and Nation are one” and the “blood and soil” logic of the Nazis.’57 As VV Brown explains, reflecting in the Guardian on her experience of being the only woman of colour living in a rural English village, ‘the countryside is a territorial place, full of imperial nostalgia, that harks back to a time when black people were not welcome.

The very concept of Britishness is wrapped up in images of the fields of England – and I do not represent that concept.’58 The racism that both Akala and Brown highlight, be it overt or structural, comes from only some people being seen as part of the organic society, in this case the nation. This idea links certain groups to the soil, to ‘the fields of England’, creating a national identity from which others, in the same way, are excluded. This works at the level of everyday experience as well as national self-image, for as Brown notes, only 2% of black Britons live in the countryside. The historical legacies of land ownership, long the preserve of those who are wealthy and white, continues to shape the demography of the British countryside today.

Which returns us to Ben Raskin’s discussion ‘about permanence, and sense of place, and long-term relationships with soil.’ To think about the links between soil and people is always a political act. To help people connect with soil must then also be to resist an idea of soil as nation, to oppose a vision of any one group, whether defined by their beliefs or the colour of their skin, as any more or less linked to the land.

We need to reinvent ecological belonging.59 As I speak about this challenge to Anna Krzywoszynska, she thinks of it in terms of finding a middle ground between belonging to a place and being able to move to other places. It’s a thought sparked by the ‘stuckness’

The very concept of Britishness is wrapped up in images of the fields of England – and I do not represent that concept.’ that living under lockdown has brought. ‘This experience has made me reflect on my perhaps previously naïve romanticisation of belonging, and demonisation of globalisation and mobility and connectivity. This very personal experience has made me feel that there has to be a middle way of really valuing the local belonging while really appreciating the need, the great pleasure and creativity, that comes from being able to go somewhere else and be able to experience something else.’

Comparing today’s organic movement to the ideas put forward by Jenks and others in the 1940s, one of the clearest differences is in this recognition of a global perspective.

Agroecological techniques are being shared to great benefit across continents.60 Recent studies suggest it will be possible to feed an increasing global population with food grown using regenerative methods, but that doing so will need international trade to meet regional shortfalls.61 Unlike the self-sufficiency Jenks argued for, the food security of today will require more, not less, cooperation across borders.

This comes with its own challenges, however.

We might here trace the polarised discussions around British and US politics to a schism, or at least a perceived schism, between the priorities of those living in rural and metropolitan areas.

Such divisions should not be reduced to, but also clearly overlap with, questions of race and belonging.62 How to craft a world that is fair and works for rural communities while giving others the chance to understand and connect with the lands that surround their towns and cities? This is asking the question in somewhat extreme

Mother Earth 17

terms, but points to challenges that form two sides of the same coin.

Parallel challenges of belonging, of making a fair and equitable living while preserving cultural and ecological diversity, are being met by many people across the world. At Ka’ala farm in Hawaii, restoring the traditional cultivation of taro has allowed young people to reconnect with their culture and gain economic opportunities.63 For the Shashe community of central Zimbabwe, eliminating the use of chemical fertilisers is about addressing the cultural and environmental violence of colonial rule.64 And not far from the Soil Association’s office in Bristol, St Werburghs City Farm is working to build and celebrate multi-ethnic communities through urban growing.65 While these projects are each different in scope and scale, together they hold the same hope for a fairer, healthier, more just world, and a shared belief that such a world might be built through soil.

Perhaps thinking and doing with soils can help Western societies learn to see racial and cultural difference anew. No two soils are exactly alike in their biology, chemistry, and structure. While ‘the word for world is soil’, in giving a sense of the whole, soils are also always particular. Like snowflakes, no two molecules of humus may ever be quite the same. And while the smell and feel of soil is one of the common human experiences of living on a shared planet, no two soils are experienced in quite the same way. As the American farmer and writer Wendell Berry once put it,

‘the soil of any one place makes its own peculiar and inevitable sense’.67 In this wealth of diversity, the stories people tell of soils reflect the soils they speak of. If we need to learn to think afresh about difference,

to craft a politics that celebrates difference in unity, then perhaps soil is a place to start. Soils are spaces that cater for difference, languages that offer a whole. Understanding soil means recognising the differences between soils, just as understanding the cultural histories of soils is to acknowledge how they have long been used as spaces for building identity, and also as spaces of exclusion. This is why we must resist the idea that soil equates to national or racial identity. It is not the sole answer to the polarised discussions of today, but in giving people the chance to think and do with soils we might begin to reimagine ecological belonging, and our relationships with each other, through the earth under our feet.

Which returns us to philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s idea of the Symbiocene, a time of living together. As a mutual flourishing for all living beings depends on the flourishing of soils, so finding kin with other species means also recognising the experiences that unite our own. Giving people the chance to build and share their own connections to soil may be one way to create these shared perspectives. This is why access to soil is such an important issue.

It’s impossible to ask people to cherish humus, to find humility in soil, to speak the languages of the microbiome, without giving them the chance to feel with soil for themselves.

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Conclusion ‘Soils sit at the nexus of what it means to be a human being in the modern world.’

Dr Anna Krzywoszynska. Research Fellow, University of Sheffield.

‘Today, the idea that all things are interconnected has been so well used that it has collapsed into a cliché’, writes Merlin Sheldrake.

The idea that we have lost our connections – to soil, to nature, and to each other – has I think become something of a cliché as well. Both these ideas are, on some levels, undoubtedly true. But if soils teach us anything, it’s that our ideas of connection are part of a world more complex than Western society has been in the habit of imagining. We must take care when speaking about connections to soil, for in doing so it is easy to make assumptions about what soil is, how it should be cared for, and where we and others sit in relation to it.

Iain Tolhurst, perhaps the doyen of organic farming in the UK, explains this from the perspective of sustainable agriculture. ‘If we were bringing in manure from a non-organic neighbour, he’s probably buying cereals from the other side of the world’, he tells me. ‘We’re actually importing fertility from, not just his farm, but also China or Australia or somewhere else, and they’re heavily dependent on chemical fertilisers to provide that material. There’s a much wider global issue around farm fertility. It’s not just about fertility within your farm. Whatever you do within your farm, as is the case in many aspects of life, affects somebody somewhere else.’

What may seem like closed-loop cycles have an uncanny habit, in the modern world, of forming unseen and damaging connections to soils and peoples who live elsewhere. ‘Farming brings together the local and global’, writes Elizabeth Jane Burnett. ‘Customer demand in distant lands

can dictate the growth of each tiny life within a local field.’68 In the same way, the coronavirus pandemic and the climate emergency are together bound up with the story of industrial agriculture. Both are expressions of the same crisis of thought, an extractive and exploitative mindset towards other beings and natural systems. As Laura Spinney writes of Western society, ‘it’s our rapacious consumption that is the problem’ – a problem that is not far away, but close to home.69

‘Today, the idea that all things are interconnected has been so well used that it has collapsed into a cliché’ Our actions are connected to issues of planetary significance. As Iain notes, this realisation extends to many areas of our lives. But this can also be cause for hope. ‘As the name implies, regenerative agriculture rehabilitates soil’, Robin Stott tells me. Robin was medical director of Lewisham hospital and now sits on the advisory board of the Ecological Sequestration Trust.

He explains how regenerative agricultural techniques such as minimum tillage allow organic matter to collect as humus, restoring carbon to soil and holding the potential to tackle the climate crisis: ‘The UK has 23 million acres of agricultural land. If we converted around a third of land to regenerative agriculture, we would achieve carbon net zero.’70 Supporting regenerative farming by paying a little more at the checkout, our choices help address the

Mother Earth 19

‘The UK has 23 million acres of agricultural land. If we converted around a third of land to regenerative agriculture, we would achieve carbon net zero.’ climate emergency while restoring soils as living worlds. In the same way, gardening without pesticides and using cultivation techniques such as ‘no-dig’ can capture carbon by building soil on even the smallest of scales.71 Which brings us back to Bill Grayson, talking about soil formation.‘The ironic thing is’, says Bill, ‘I wasn’t much bothered by soils. … I was always much more interested in the things that were above ground.’ I ask Bill the obvious question, how did he come to be interested in soils? ‘I suppose the increasing realisation that the world was just not going to carry on in that same way unless somebody started to pay more attention, particularly to soils, began to dawn on me, probably associated … with climate change.’

As Hollywood actors and Netflix documentaries have recently reminded us,

‘soil … is a way to heal our planet’.72 But as I think the stories shared here illustrate, this message goes far deeper than carbon sequestration alone, vitally important though that is. Earth is not, it turns out, ‘our’ world at all. Humans live at the pleasure of microbial life, at the meeting points where the lives of other beings play out. Soils teach us this, and a great many other things. We share this planet with countless trillions of beings, many unknown to science, the vast majority smaller than a grain of sand, beings who point the way towards a mutual flourishing, a world in symbiosis, that might also include human beings. To build such a world must be to resist an economic model of exploitation and extraction, a vision of nature as ‘ours’ to do with what we will. This Western mindset is surely the root cause of all the social

and environmental problems we face. Earth is finite. Understanding this means helping people appreciate the wonders of nature by giving everyone the chance to build their identities and relationships through access to soil. Soils here teach us that social justice goes hand in hand with ecological justice. One cannot exist without the other if we are to create a fair and just world for all.

It seems to me that this leaves us three big questions to address: How do we develop food and farming systems that are socially and ecologically diverse? How can we build societies where value is measured by more than money?

How do we learn to live with the beings that make our lives on Earth possible? I have barely scratched the surface in this piece, but the answers to these questions are to be found through soil, and in finding them lies work for the next 75 years of the Soil Association.

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References

1.

I would like to thank all the people who shared with me their thoughts on soil, as well as those who shared their thoughts anonymously: Jude Allen, Catherine Armstrong, Vittorio Bartoli, Helen Browning, Henrietta Courtauld, James Dixon, Sue Edney, Bridget Elworthy, Bill Grayson, Andrew Jones, Anna Krzywoszynska, Phil Morley, John Pawsey, David Pencheon, Louisa Pharoah, Ben Raskin, Joe Rolfe, Charles Shropshire, Richard Smith, Robin Stott, Matt Tarnowski, and Iain Tolhurst. Even where their thoughts don’t rise to the surface as quote or anecdote, their stories are always there in the soil of this piece.

I would also like to thank the following people: James Dixon, Sue Edney, Bill Grayson, Jane Scown, Tony Scown, Becky Stirk, David Pencheon, Ralph Pite, and Martin Willis for their thoughts on various drafts; Helen Browning for helping to arrange the interviews and for comments on the article; Gemma Heaysman-Burns and Louisa Pharoah for help and guidance throughout the interviewing, writing, and editing process.

William Bryant Logan, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth (1995; New York: Norton, 2007), p. 2.

2.

3 Winfried E.H. Blum, et al., ‘Does Soil Contribute to the Human Gut Microbiome?’, Microorganisms, 7.9 (2019) <doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms7090287>.

Eve Balfour, The Living Soil and The Haughley Experiment (New York: Universe Books, 1976), pp. 25, 29.

4

Grant Allen, ‘The Living Earth’, Longman’s Magazine, April 1897, pp. 554-566 (pp. 559, 564).

5

6 Charles Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits (London: John Murray, 1881), p. 305.

Charles Darwin, ‘On the Formation of Mould’, Proceedings of the Geological Society of London (1838), pp. 574-576 (p. 576).

7

8 Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature (London: J. Johnson, 1803), p. 22.

Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden (London: J. Johnson, 1791), pp. 106-107.

9

Phillipe Descola, ‘Preface’, in Soil and Culture, ed.

by Edward R. Landa and Christian Feller (New York: Springer 2008), pp. xiii-xv (p. xiv).

10

Albrecht D. Thaer, Principles of Agriculture, [1809-1812], trans. by William Shaw and Cuthbert W. Johnson (London: Ridgway, 1844)

11

12

Johann Schwerz, quoted in Justus von Liebig, ‘On

some points in Agricultural Chemistry’, Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, 17 (1856), pp.

284-326 (p. 291).

‘D.J. McCauley, ‘Soil Organic Matter Black Box: Examining Alkaline Extraction and Humic Substances Research’, CSA News, 65.1 (January 2020), pp. 3-6 (p. 3). See also Roeland Cortois and Gerline Barbara De Deyn, ‘The curse of the black box’, Plant and Soil, 350 (2012), pp. 27-33. <doi: 10.1007/s11104-011-0963-z>; Gavin Collins, et al., ‘Accessing the black box of microbial diversity and ecophysiology: recent advances through polyphasic experiments’, J Environ Sci Health A Tox Hazard Subst Environ Eng, 41.5, (2006), pp. 897-922. <doi: 10.1080/10934520600614546>.

13

14 ‘One Health’, World Health Organization, <www. who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/one-health> [Accessed 17 June 2021].

15 Ariena H.C. van Bruggen, et al., ‘One Health – Cycling of diverse microbial communities as a connecting force for soil, planet, animal, human and ecosystem health’, Science of the Total Environment, 664 (2019), pp. 927-937 (p. 927).

16 Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes within us and a Grander View of Life (London: Vintage, 2016), pp. 24, 16, 5.

17

Yong, Multitudes, p. 5.

Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures (London: The Bodley Head, 2020), p. 103.

18

19 Robert MacFarlane gives the comparison of Potawatomi, the language of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, whose lands lie on the Great Plains of North America: ‘Potawatomi is a language abundant with verbs: 70 per cent of its words are verbs, compared to 30 per cent in English’, he explains. ‘Wiikwegamaa, for instance, means “to be a bay”.’ Robert MacFarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019), p. 112.

20

MacFarlane, Underland, pp. 112-113.

Karen Barad has drawn attention to a similar distinction between interactions and intra-actions.

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007)

21

22

MacFarlane, Underland, p. 113.

23

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, ‘When the word for

Mother Earth 21

world is soil: Engaging with the troubles of ecological belonging’, RGS-IBG Annual International Conference Plenary Lecture, Royal Geographical Society, London (29 August 2019).

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest (1972; New York: Berkley Books, 1976).

24

38 Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (London: Random House Business Books, 2017), p. 10.

39 Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, ‘Making time for soil: Technoscientific futurity and the pace of care’, Social Studies of Science, 45.5 (2015), pp. 691-716 (p. 692).

25 Edward R. Landa and Christian Feller, eds., ‘Introduction’, in Soil and Culture, pp. xvii-xx (p. xvii).

40

For more on this see: Jenanne Ferguson and Marissa Weaselboy, ‘Indigenous sustainable relations: considering land in language and language in land’, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 43.17 (2020), pp. 1-7.

41 Elizabeth Jane Burnett, The Grassling: A Geological Memoir (London: Allen Lane, 2019), p. 120.

26

27 W.H. Auden, ‘In Praise of Limestone’, Nones (London: Faber and Faber, 1951).

Glenn Albrecht, Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019).

28

29 Eve Balfour, The Living Soil: evidence of the importance to human health of soil vitality, with special reference to national planning, foreword by Jonathan Dimbleby, intro. by Lawrence Woodward (1946; Bristol: Soil Association, 2006), n.p.

30

Liebig, ‘Agricultural Chemistry’, p. 314.

Justus von Liebig, Organic Chemistry in its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology (London: Taylor and Walton, 1840), pp. 187-8.

31

32

Liebig, Organic Chemistry, p. 139.

Justus von Liebig, Familiar Letters on Chemistry, in its Relations to Physiology, Dietetics, Agriculture, Commerce, and Political Economy (London: Taylor, Walton, & Maberly, 1851), p. 520.

33

Anon., A Kentish Farmer, ‘Works on Agriculture’, Manchester Guardian, 22 November 1843, p. 5.

Donna Haraway, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’, Environmental Humanities, 6 (2015), pp. 159-165 (pp.

160, 161).

42

43

Sheldrake, Entangled Life, pp. 161-163.

44

Haraway, ‘Anthropocene’, p. 160.

Alastair McIntosh, Soil and Soul: Peoples Versus Corporate Power (2001; London: Aurum Press, 2004), p. 31

45

46 Robert Frost, ‘Build Soil’, A Further Range (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1936).

Eve Balfour, ‘Why It Happened’, [1946], Mother Earth, 1 (2009), pp. 10-14 (p. 11).

47

48 See Richard Moore-Coyler, ‘Towards “Mother Earth”: Jorian Jenks, Organicism, the Right and the British Union of Fascists’, Journal of Contemporary History, 39.3 (2004), pp. 353-371 (p. 365).

Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and NineteenthCentury Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 43.

49

34

50 George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859; Wordsworth Classics, 2003), p. 445.

Balfour, Living Soil and The Haughley Experiment, p. 58.

51 George Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life’, The Westminster Review, July 1856, pp. 51-79 (pp. 75, 74).

Balfour, Living Soil and The Haughley Experiment, p. 56.

35

36 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), quoted in Paul Behrens, The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Futures from the Frontiers of Climate Science (London: The Indigo Press, 2020), p. 243. My thanks to David Pencheon for pointing this quote out to me.

37 Donella H. Meadows, et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1972), pp. 45, 164.

52 See Piers H. G. Stephens, ‘Blood, Not Soil: Anna Bramwell and the Myth of “Hitler’s Green Party”’, Organization & Environment, 14.2 (June 2001), pp.

173-187 (pp. 176-178).

53 Philip Conford, ‘Organic Society: Agriculture and Radical Politics in the Career of Gerard Wallop, Ninth Earl of Portsmouth (1898-1984)’, The Agricultural History Review, 53.1 (2005), pp. 78-96 (p. 81).

54

Conford, ‘Organic Society’, p. 80.

22 Mother Earth

55 Conford, ‘Organic Society’, p. 78. See also MooreCoyler, ‘Towards “Mother Earth”’; Stephens, ‘Blood, Not Soil’; Frank Trentmann, ‘Civilization and Its Discontents: English Neo-Romanticism and the Transformation of Anti-Modernism in TwentiethCentury Western Culture’, Journal of Contemporary History, 29.4 (October 1994), pp. 583-625.

Quoted in Moore-Coyler, ‘Towards “Mother Earth”’, pp. 364, 357.

56

Akala, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire (London: Two Roads, 2019), p. 26.

57

VV Brown, ‘To be black in the British countryside means being an outsider’, Guardian, 20 October 2020, <www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/ oct/20/black-woman-british-countryside-londonrural-village-stereotypes> [Accessed 17 June 2021].

58

59 Maria Puig de la Bellacasa made a similar point in a recent webinar. ‘Session 3: Earth, Wind, Fire, Water Zoom Sessions’, Norwegian Crafts, 21 August 2020. <http://www.norwegiancrafts.no/projects/earthwind-fire-water-zoom-sessions> [Accessed 17 June 2021].

See the ‘Agroecology Knowledge Hub’ of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). <http://www.fao.org/agroecology/overview/ en/> [Accessed 17 June 2021].

60

61 Xavier Poux, et al., An agroecological Europe in 2050: multifunctional agriculture for healthy eating: Findings from the Ten Years For Agroecology (TYFA) modelling exercise (IDDRI, 2018); Dieter Gertens, et al., ‘Feeding ten billion people is possible within four terrestrial planetary boundaries’, Nature Sustainability, 3 (January 2020), pp. 200-208 (p. 205). The IDDRI study focuses on Europe and argues it will be possible to feed a European population of 530 million people in 2050 with agroecological methods alone.

Gertens et al. focus on planetary boundaries as their measure for sustainability, rather than regenerative or agroecological methods. They make the case for trade on p. 205.

Any number of articles can be found discussing ‘the rural-urban divide’ in US politics. See for example: Emily Badger, ‘How the Rural-Urban Divide Became America’s Political Fault Line’, New York Times, 21 May 2019, <www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/upshot/ america-political-divide-urban-rural.html> [Accessed 17 June 2021]. For an analysis of how and where this perceived division intersects with questions of race

62

see: Hannah Love and Tracy Hadden Loh, ‘The ‘ruralurban divide’ furthers myths about race and poverty – concealing effective policy solutions’, The Brookings Institution, 8 December 2020, <www.brookings.edu/ blog/the-avenue/2020/12/08/the-rural-urban-dividefurthers-myths-about-race-and-poverty-concealingeffective-policy-solutions/> [Accessed 17 June 2021].

This discussion is less advanced in the UK, though as Akala notes of the EU referendum: ‘The regions of England that are multicultural skewed remain, those that are not skewed leave’. Natives, p. 297.

63 Ka’ala Farm, Waianae, Hawaii. <https://kaalafarm. org/about-us/> [Accessed 17 June 2021].

64 Farmers from the Shashe community explained their work at this year’s Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC): Brain Muvindi, Elizabeth Mpofu, Vongai Dube, and Nelson Mudzingwa, ‘The Agroecological Farming Practices of the Shashe Community of Zimbabwe’, ORFC, 12 January 2021. A recording of their talk is available online: < https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=uBspidWrcI4&list> [Accessed 17 June 2021].

St Werburghs City Farm, Bristol, UK. <https://www. swcityfarm.co.uk/about-us/equity/> [Accessed 17 June 2021].

65

66

Logan, Dirt, p. 16.

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (1977; San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996), p. 86.

67

68

Burnett, Grassling, p. 72.

Laura Spinney, ‘Time for some home truths about deforestation’, Guardian, 21 December 2020, <www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/21/ time-for-some-home-truths-about-deforestation> [Accessed 17 June 2021].

69

70 See Robin Stott, ‘Sequestering carbon by regenerating soil, planting trees, and changing land use (or “The answer lies in the soil”)’, Richard Smith’s non-medical blogs, 9 February 2020, <richardswsmith. wordpress.com/2020/02/09/sequestering-carbonby-regenerating-soil-planting-trees-and-changingland-use-or-the-answer-lies-in-the-soil/> [Accessed 17 June 2021].

71 Charles Dowding, Organic Gardening: The natural no-dig way (2007; Cambridge: Green Books, 2013).

72 Kiss the Ground, dir. by Joshua Tickell and Rebecca Harrell Tickell (Big Picture Ranch, 2020).

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king on Ben Raskin wor t forestry projec ro Eastbrooks ag The founders & first

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Lady Eve Balfour, founder of the Soil Association on her tractor

Turning compo st at Haughley with Thwaites-Wilde muck loader, 19 47

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24 Mother Earth

Soil Association, Spear House, Victoria Street, Bristol BS1 6AD

soilassociation.org