The survival of all terrestrial life, including human life, depends on the availability of healthy living soils. In the Anthropocene, soils are among the ecosystems critically affected by industrial and agricultural land uses. While the thin layer of planetary topsoil has formed over millennia, our soils are increasingly shaped and affected by human (anthropogenic) activity:
These include multiple forms of soil degradation and erosion through chemical contamination, radioactivity, and the loss of nutrients, but also practices of soil care. Working with soil for millennia, human communities have developed a great diversity of technologies for enhancing, cleaning up, and restoring soils for food production, and after natural and technological disasters.
A multidisciplinary project
Our multidisciplinary project “Anthropogenic Soils” studies the ways people in different parts of the world have invented, practiced, and imagined ways of recuperating soil health. We conceptualize soils not as natural resources to be exploited, but as “anthropogenic”, as lively and dynamic natural-cultural composition responsive to human recuperation and healing.
The project’s five work packages include studies of repairing contaminated, toxic, and depleted soils in different parts of the globe – from South Asia to Norway and the Arctic – as well as artistic and multimedia research into the ways in which Indigenous writers and artists offer alternative modes of relating to soils, and for building possible future of earthly survival.