This page is a form of compost heap. I am at the moment in the process of breaking down and reconfiguring experiences from my work with soil and composting for the past couple of years. We are in the warm composting phase, where things change quite fast, right now. So no text is fixed. No layout is final. I hope you will enjoy the process with me.
Making soil in your home, workplace or neighbourhood, is a very practical way of doing something to repair a tired planet, nurturing plants and millions of microbes you can’t even see, as well as nurturing yourself and the people around you. There are more organisms in a handful of soil than there are people on earth. You are working closely with these communities of microbes to create new soil. You will get to know them even if you can’t see them. They may warm you, break the organic matter down slowly or fast, depending on who is in charge. You will smell them, you may learn which enzymatic activity creates which smell, feel the changing textures, from liquid to dry, crumbly parts, depending on what is being broken down, how much oxygen there is, how humid it is.
The world is running out of topsoil very fast, the top layer of soil containing large amounts of organic matter that plants need to grow, that is needed to hold water, to counteract leeching of nutrients. By bringing left over organic matter back into the soil, you are helping restore some soil right there where you are. Even if you live in an apartment. In a city. By a small communal garden.
In the cities, most land is in some way lightly polluted, with remains of stuff made from fossil fuels, other heavy metals like lead and “forever”-chemicals like pfas, used in industrial products. Today urban soil is therefore seen as waste to be disposed of in huge volumes, rather than as life to be taken care of, in need of repair, in need of care. In Europe, urban soil is the largest waste product there is, according to the EU. As soon as it crosses the plot boundary, urban soil is defined as waste, and is normally deposited in a facility specifically for receiving polluted soil. Truckloads upon truckloads of urban soil is being moved around our countries every day. Now in Denmark, most of it deposited in a new island off central Copenhagen, doing the magic trick of literally turning waste into gold in the form of financial gain from selling building sites to developers. Soil as waste becomes soil as the basis for cadastral units of highly attractive urban development land.
But what if soil was seen as life, instead of waste or financial resource? What if soil was something to care for, repair, learn with, live with and appreciate for all it can already do – even with light pollution as part of it? Like a disabled ecology. Like crip more-than-human entanglements. “Today’s return to soil is no return to Nature,” Maria Puig de Bellacasa writes in the introduction to a wonderful book on soil thinking. “It is vital to encourage more than human ethico-political involvement in healing the troubled grounds of a naturecultural earth in disarray,” she continues.
But despite all this, researchers at Copenhagen University have found that growing food in urban soil much more often than you think, doesn’t cause the plants to absorb pollutants from the ground. The regulations for environmental control are very strict. Maybe we need to learn living with the urban soil instead of just defining it as waste as soon as it is dug up and move it around on big trucks? There are ways of remediating soils in situ. There are ways of generating new, rich soil full of organic matter. By learning to know soil communities and becoming their kin, their friend, their reciprocal caretakers, we can build another world from the ground up, together with our disabled kin.
Soil is our living kin. Even urban soils. Let’s exoplore ways of caring with it.