No abstract

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.

This paper explores the development of Mexican Revolutionary land epistemologies in the years following the global Great Depression. Demonstrating how ideas about agrarian life informed national development efforts across multiple spheres, including public education, state-sponsored media, and governmental conservation projects, it argues that human-nature relations were constitutive of state visions of Revolutionary citizenship. Scholarly work interrogating the role of scientific knowledge in land politics has focused on the ways that territorial dispossessions are routed through expert truth claims; this study deviates from that work by asking how resource conflicts can also produce new knowledge to support progressive platforms for change.

Just as capitalism’s exchange of commodities between disparate locations requires a singular referent of value, so does the movement of ideas and practices necessitate consolidations of meaning through complex fields of people, landscapes, and things. Introducing key innovations in agricultural and chemical science, Justus von Liebig’s chemical model of soil fertility involved a profound reenvisioning of organic development, distilling complex processes to a series of chemical relationships easily recognized in any geographic context. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s (1984) arguments about the production of abstract space, this article argues that Liebig’s assessment of nutrient extraction was essential to a broader midcentury reconsideration and reorganization of capitalist agricultural production, an example of what world ecologist Jason Moore calls an “organizational revolution,” allowing global capitalism to overcome past limits and thus move through systemic crises.

No abstract