Humuspunk: How Does Soil Prototype?
This spring, Makery co-produced issue 6 of the occasional newspaper The Laboratory Planet. This issue imagines a peasant and neo-peasant future, invented by global peasants, organised in diverse territories, cultivating biotopes that are more heterogeneous, more democratic and therefore more habitable. The central section is devoted to the recent Soil Assembly initiative, and develops some of the experiences, reflections and surveys gathered within this emerging network. In this text Regenerative Energy Communities imagine infrastructures otherwise and design practices that can flip paradigms, embrace grimy creativity and ferment revolt.
Notes from the Regenerative Energy Communities artistic research project in Växjö, Sweden
“Earth is not created by human hands—but human hands have forced themselves into the earth. And yet the earth does not allow itself to be owned” (Elin Wägner and Elisabeth Tamm 2021 [1940], authors’ own translation).
What can centering soil health entail for different fields and communities? What does it mean to ground (practically, critically, ecologically) creative engagements and experimentations, whatever these might be, within propositions aimed at not merely sustaining, but actively reviving and enhancing the health and resilience of local soil-supported ecosystems and their interdependent communities of materials, beings and relations? What commitments and closures would doing so entail? What are the pressures and possibilities of soil-centred thinking and practice?
We share initial responses to these questions as they have arisen during the work in our Regenerative Energy Communities research project[1], where we have prototyped small-scale forms of sustainable energy provision inspired by the practices of local experimental farming communities in Växjö, Sweden. A core aim of the project has been to explore what possibilities lie in practices that aim to be regenerative. Inspired by both recent and longer-standing traditions around regenerative agriculture and agroecology more generally, the project situates its research across the overlapping fields of energy and agriculture, with a view to reimagining current approaches to the climate crisis, renewables and the so-called green transition.
Engaging as artists, designers, growers and technology geeks with energy and agriculture issues has involved implicit challenges. Among them is the ongoing question of how to collectively build regenerative imaginaries that support ties across soils and damage narratives of the smooth continuity of energy. To date, this has involved developing and experimenting with a range of different regenerative prototypes together with others. Looking back on various moments from the workshops, exhibitions and experiments during the project’s three-year span, we found it helpful to reflect on the question: “How does soil prototype …?” For us, this prompt has a cascading quality in how it unearths challenging follow-up questions. Questions such as: How does soil prototype communities? How does soil prototype (regenerative) imaginaries? Critiques of technology? Creative and sustainable uses of technology? Stories of damage, (overwhelming) refusal and unknowing? In the question’s ability to loiter and remake itself, it has a quality similar to how the anthropologist Kristina M. Lyons, writing in 2020 on human-soil relations in rural farming communities in Columbia, describes the ability of decomposing layers of composting piles (hojarasca) to “force thought” via the many different and vital “propositional life-making processes” that gather around and emerge out of them.
Prototyping with regenerative commitments
The project began from wanting to support a local university-adjacent farm site with a sustainable energy infrastructure during a time of increasing fossil fuel use, critical mineral extraction and the largely limited imaginaries of the current “energy crisis”. The project is situated around a small-scale experimental communal farm. On this site, farming collectives such as the Feminist Farmers and The Dirt (themselves artists and designers), as well as local individuals and families, experiment with growing methods inspired by regenerative farming, permaculture and other forms of creative soil-based practices for sustainable and community-minded approaches through hands-on/feet-in contact with the earth.
Our proposal to work in ways that nurture soil-supported ecosystems draws on regenerative farming’s central commitment of actively improving soil health. This proposal gives not only a concrete and practical directive for ways of working, but also carries within it an implicit critique of approaches aimed merely at sustaining things as they are. This feels particularly necessary at a time of multiple destructive overlaps within practices of energy and agriculture, with their modes of extraction, capitalist expansion over land and ongoing depletion of ecological health. With such interlinked questions in mind, our project explores how current energy metabolisms and paradigms can be challenged by regenerative agriculture and longer-standing practices of agroecology, with their central aim of not only maintaining, but reviving and enhancing the health, resilience and adaptability of local ecosystems and their interdependent communities of beings and materials.
Throughout the project, we seriously considered what it might mean to take principles and commitments for soil and ecosystem health as a model for exploring what alternative forms of energy research and prototyping could emerge. We found regeneration to be a rich and also complicated concept to work with –ne that, in addition to its merits, is in need of critical attention for the ways in which it can be appropriated and/or shed of its community and political commitments[2].
An important moment early on in our collaboration with the Brände Udde farming site was receiving the leasing agreement from the VXO Farm Lab stewards of the plot. The text opened with “Welcome Future Urban Farmer!” and a description of how the farm was intended as a space for “Exploring, applying and sharing ideas for regeneration, sustainability and methods of resilient community development”. The agreement was both a contract and a vision statement. One particular item in the “A few more things to consider” section grabbed our attention: “Only Biodegradables: We aim to abolish all use of petrochemicals at our sites. That means: no use of plastics or synthetic materials (if reasonably possible). If it can’t become food to your plants it shouldn’t be at the site!”
Following the commitments of the farm community led us to rule out off-the-shelf energy systems such as solar and wind, given the damaging practices around mineral extraction in the making of panels, and the environmentally hazardous end-of-life issues for these technologies. Our soil-centered commitments deposited us in new and unexpected directions with our prototyping and infrastructuring work. They oriented us toward cultivating regenerative materials and biodiverse relations that we could prototype with. They informed ways of working that opened up to intermittency, seasonality and slow engineering. They grounded, for example, our prototyping work on a mycelium-based wind turbine that aims to sustain and support collective growing cultures across energy, agriculture and soil health. This prototype explores processes such as the mycoremediation of heavy metals and other soil contaminants from the farm’s adjacent highway. It centers our work on the stimulation of mycorrhizal networks for plant health via topsoil nutrient highways (further excluding the need for synthetic fertilizers), diverse communities of microorganisms and biotic life, and micro energy experimentations within techno-ecological limits. These commitments also led to us make charge controllers from scavenged electronic waste that can regenerate depleted lithium batteries, in an effort to interrupt local waste streams whose contamination is outsourced to Majority World soils.
Humuspunk
Modes of prototyping that center soil health might be characterized by what we have dubbed as humuspunk[3]. Humuspunk acknowledges its rootedness in the soil and stands in contrast to more clear and systematized (“smart”) ecomodernist futures, embracing instead fermented and grimy modes of creativity and making, as they can emerge in a plurality of forms and spaces. As artist and researcher Filipa César notes when writing in 2016 about the revolutionary agronomist Amílcar Cabral, “Soil tells narratives of both the wretchedness and the liberatory potency of its humus.” And regenerative prototypes ground any imagined futures in the living, breathing, drinking, eating, farting, composting matter we call soil (humus: Latin for earth, ground).
Staying close to regenerative propositions and their attachments has had an important effect on our work, especially in the context of energy communities, which have most commonly been focused on renewables, modes of individual and collective ownership and forms of measurement and efficiency. Starting instead from a position of soil and ecosystem health has brought to the fore different solidarities and sets of reciprocal, regenerative relations as openings for discussion and experimentation. Soil has prototyped ways for us to shift how we imagine energy (but also art and design) communities based on soil and ecosystem health rather than on modes of control and monitoring energy use. The principles and propositions of these soil-centered local farming communities help us to feel out and explore different paradigms around energy, breaking through standard or normative technoscience approaches to energy and renewables. They make space for other types of transition, doing so through what have ended up being generative acts of closure (e.g., no plastics, nothing the plants can’t eat) and commitments that keep other awakenings alive and guide these collective explorations in unexpected and regenerative directions.
In Regenerative Energy Communities we have found that principles and commitments for supporting soil communities can act as grounding[4] points for accountable collective action and decision-making. In their capacity to frame and address both urgent and longer-term issues of solidarity and transformational ecological practices, they can serve as practical guidelines, vision statements and/or open-ended invocations for other ways of being and making together. Soil prototypes practices to promote soil health, biodiversity and technological pluralities. Our prototypes and workshops interweave soil and ecosystem health with technology, art, design and citizen science – soiling each of these fields along the way, while carefully considering what kind of relations we want to sustain and support in such prototyping.
In the same way that the “more-than-human” answer and paradigm has stimulated many areas of practice over the last decade, we would encourage further explorations on how crucial issues such as farming, soil and community-centered ecosystem health could inspire regenerative modes of operating within a range of practices, including technology and sustainable energy provision, but also further afield. Crossing knowledge and experiences toward a collective focus on soil, carbon, biodiversity and living in the ruins of big tech fossil capitalism together. How do we regenerate soil contaminated by polluting fossil fuel capitalism? How do we think through regeneration for rich, full flourishing lives? What are the governance and community foundations needed for these spaces? To regenerate with micro ecosystems of deep-time bacteria, nematode crushes and collective tendings to soil and its generative modes of prototyping?
Notes
(1) https://regenerative-energy-communities.org
(2) For instance, see the recent IPES-Food report “Smoke & Mirrors” for an overview of some such risks (http://www.ipes-food.org/pages/smokeandmirrors), and also Tittonell et al.’s 2022 piece “Regenerative agriculture—agroecology without politics?”
(3) https://regenerative-energy-communities.org/lingo/humuspunk
(4) See the the jointly written (with Cassandra Troyan and Fred Carter) call for the Groundings conference for more on how we understand acts of collective grounding: https://regenerative-energy-communities.org/groundings
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