Social Soils and Chimerical Metabolisms - Somatosphere
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Science, Medicine, and Anthropology
http://somatosphere.net
http://somatosphere.net/?p=16896
Social Soils and Chimerical Metabolisms
2020-03-10 06:00:11
By David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale and Catherine Phillips
The metabolic rift
“All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of
robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil,” Marx (1976: 637-38) wrote in
Volume I of Capital. For Marx, not only was the capitalist mode of
production incapable of valuing nature in its own right, but its central
contradictions also left it incapable of articulating the links between
ecological and social worlds. “[I]n this way,” he wrote in Volume III,
capitalism “produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the
interdependent process of the social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed
by the natural laws of life itself” (Marx, 1981: 949-50). As Foster (1999)
demonstrates, Marx’s notion of social metabolism described the
inextricable relationship between humanity’s social reproduction, on one
hand, and our material ecological entanglements, on the other. In this
view, capitalism’s metabolic rift is the foundation for the exploitation by
town of country, by capital of labour, and by humanity of nature; the
compound accumulation of wealth from its sources – “the soil and the
worker” – leaves both depleted.
To call metabolism “social” is more than to apply a metaphor. If
metabolism is the multiscalar process by which matter and energy are
accumulated, expended, and exchanged in such a way as to (re)produce
order at a new scale, then the social, political, and economic are each
sites where the distillates of metabolism at other scales are appropriated,
consumed, and transformed in ways at once semiotic and material.
Marx’s concept anticipated, in its way, planet-wide rifts of resource and
energy use that have had catastrophic implications for both economy and
ecology. If we are to escape the worst of the looming catastrophes to
come, social metabolism must therefore be one of our foremost concerns.
Here, we explore the concept’s implications for an urban environmental
project that works to disrupt capitalism’s metabolic rift, and the chimerical
social metabolisms that arise in the course of working with, within, and
against the rhythms of urban capitalism.
In his day, Marx was particularly moved by crises of soil degradation
brought on by forms of rampant agrarian capitalism that are still with us.
His point that the soil was no mere fact of nature, but rather a product of
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human social and ecological metabolism, has become even more timely.
According to a UNFAO spokesperson, at existing rates of population
growth and nutrient depletion, the Earth had about sixty global harvests
left before its topsoils were expended in 2015. Now it’s down to fifty-six.
Regardless, while we undertook this research on soil with this crisis in
mind, we are also interested in soil as a curious kind of social-ecological
product – one which metabolises energy, matter, and meaning. Today,
even in the face of a dawning inhuman age, the rich legacy of soil as a site
for the accrual of promissory potential continues. In 2017, the United
Nations launched the 4 pour 1000 initiative, based on the speculation that
a 4% annual growth in global soil carbon could stabilise global mean
temperatures to 2°C above pre-industrial levels.[1] Soil, as one of us has
argued elsewhere, is ever a frontier of promise (Granjou and Phillips,
2019).
CERES and the circular economy
We concern ourselves here with a particular urban environmental project:
CERES (Centre for Education and Research in Environmental Strategies).
CERES occupies almost 5 hectares of urban land bordered by residential
areas and a creek (to the east) in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick.
CERES began to take shape in the late 1970s as a workers’ cooperative,
and now acts as an organic market garden and a demonstration site for
urban sustainability and permaculture. Part of the mandate has been
restoration of the site – mined for bluestone and later used as a
non-organic landfill, in earlier expressions of Melbourne’s metabolic rift
(see Hayes, this collection), before CERES took over. Our interest was
precisely in how this place might be read to reveal soil as a product and
producer of social activity and cultivation, not a bland “natural”
background. Through education and example, CERES aims to model and
promote a vision of sustainable, organic urban agriculture that is, in
principle, the antithesis to Marx’s metabolic rift. Labour and landscape
alike enter the food, without being expended in the usual capitalist model
(see Stead, this collection). Through the restoration of a previous dump
site, job creation, the recycling of organic wastes into compost for onsite
food production, the diversion of other solid wastes from the waste stream,
the development of economic relationships with a local food web, and a
network of grassroots relationships both within the organisation and
between CERES and the local community, the organisation seems to
articulate a more maintainable form of social metabolism. During our visits
to CERES, we found its employees and volunteers were passionate about
valuing both people and things, matter and relationships, as something
greater than a commodity. The work of waste-saving was a shared effort
to imagine a conviviality that did not pit town against country, economy
against ecology, and people against profits.
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So far, so optimistic. But, as Gregson et al. (2015: 218) put it, the circular
economy is “more often celebrated than critically interrogated”. Aware of
the almost inescapable contradictions in the phrase “urban sustainability”
in industrialised cities, and the need to consider sustainability as a process
rather than a finished project, we began our research suspecting that
discourses of sustainability and “closed loop environmental solutions”
would likely be accompanied by untracked material and immaterial flows
and unreconciled externalities. We were therefore not surprised to find a
deep, complex eco-social stratigraphy where visions of a zero-waste
endeavour were compromised by the site’s entanglements in the city’s
larger urban food systems, ecologies, and communities. Volunteers
described a “front-of-the-house/back-of-the-house” nexus, for example, in
which commitment to a circular metabolism was articulated simultaneously
with the need to remain financially viable as a social enterprise including a
commercial café, nursery, grocery retailer, and events venue. The venture
relies upon an imperfectly sustainable web of producers, embedded in the
economies of scale and distance that constitute Melbourne’s own
eco-social metabolism and capitalist contradictions.
Organisational rifts
To make sense of these tensions, we paid attention not solely to the
production of soil and site via landscaping, agriculture, and composting but
also to the site’s social metabolism in terms of organisational memory,
turnover, and structural differentiation. Organisations such as CERES
have a throughput not only of organic matter, but of staff, volunteers,
documents, funding, and even orthodoxies and organisational models,
with each species of flow cycling at different rates. Like all metabolisms,
therefore, CERES’ social metabolism is a multiscalar process whereby
more gradual transformations in organisational identity and structure are
affected by more rapid cycles of volunteer and staff turnover, which in turn
are fed by the engine of CERES’ everyday cycles of materials. At each
scale, with each element, we might identify disjunctures or rifts in that
metabolism. What became apparent, though, is that in the roiling activity of
the CERES site, there were few markers of the social histories that
condition it.
We found, for example, that the metabolic stratigraphy (for example, its
front-of-house—back-of-house articulations) was sustained by ephemeral
and distinct organs of knowledge and leadership. This became apparent
as we sifted through over fifty boxes holding an informal paper archive of
the organisation’s past: funding applications, annual reports, photo
albums, newsletters, budgets. These documents revealed not only details
about the activity of the site as a continual material renovation but also as
a reforming of organisational arrangements and values.
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Consider, for example, the transformation of CERES’s guiding mission
statement over time. CERES began as an anarchistic workers’
cooperative that sought out its current site as, to quote a 1984 report, “a
means rather than an end”. The intent was to provide training and
direction to the unemployed young people of Brunswick, whose numbers
were then rising, and the site was simply a convenient wasteland with a
no-rent lease where it could ground these efforts. With time, the
cooperative and unstructured character experienced periodic crises; crises
sometimes precipitated by changes in government, leading to changes in
funding options, and sometimes precipitated by what a 1985 report called
the “certain distrust and lack of communication” between the cells or
nodes of the collective. Through these crises, compostings, and renewals,
these cells jostled for resources, organizational and spatial power, often
trying to maintain aspects of the prior arrangement.
Reading the archive, we pieced together how the site and organization
went through major change in the late 1990s, much of it focused around
turning CERES into a financially independent entity unchained from the
donations of local and state governments. Several years later, as the
redevelopment came to completion with the opening of its nursery and two
cafes, a master planning document pressed for the importance of CERES
maintaining its “anarchistic flavor”, while also ensuring it does not become
“too disconnected”, as some zones and projects continued to be
cultivated more intensively that others.
Site re/formation
Beyond the questions of organisation and division of material and cultural
labour, we also found the site embedded in a set of ecological histories
that pointed to larger and older metabolic exchanges with the surrounding
urban ecology and economy that produced the soil in which CERES laid
its roots, and that continues to undergird it. One challenge in our attempts
to study CERES has been the inhuman-ness of soil itself; as Nigel Clark
(2011) suggests of other natures, soil’s capacities both stretch beyond
and are more limited than human expectations and understandings. When
we first approached people within the organisation, many were very
interested in knowing more about the soil, perhaps, in hindsight, because
they lacked much of a textual or institutional record of its historical
composition.
If CERES is discursively plastic, it is also physically tenacious. In an
interview, one of the founders recalled the reluctance of the site to
transform as planned, its resistance to human devices and desires.
Cross-referencing stories of the site with the paper archive, it seems that
after having served as a bluestone quarry for much of the period between
1871 and the 1940s, the property then became host to a ‘hot mix plant’
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for making bitumen before, between 1972 and 1975, providing Brunswick
Council with a convenient dump for cars, washing machines, and other
redundant ephemera from the rapidly gentrifying inner northern suburbs.
In the intervening seven years, before the CERES collective signed its
lease, the site continued to be colonised by fennel and African boxthorn
(Lycium ferocissimum). What followed in the early 1980s was a
re-processing of the site by a multispecies ensemble, one node of which
was made up of a donkey, a handful of sheep, and a goat who
progressively grazed down the weedy overgrowth and transformed it into
manure.
A second node in this ensemble was an endeavour, run by a tireless
volunteer, who collected huge volumes of horse manure from Flemington
Race Course and vegetable wastes from markets to feed them to millions
of wormy companions. While the worm farming perished after a few years
– another project to flourish and fall in the organisational churn – it
produced the minerally-rich material substrate for the site’s vegetable
gardens. Meanwhile, later attempts to insert other mammalian digestive
tracts into the site’s metabolic loops were quashed; the state’s
Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, disallowed attempts to
process human waste through composting toilets. According to the
aforementioned co-founder, a third node in the physical assembly of the
site was formed with a building contractor. Through this relationship,
during the first decade earth-moving equipment was lent to CERES in
exchange for the ability to dump soil from development projects elsewhere
in the city. Thus, given these three nodes of early formation, the CERES
site bears material and immaterial markers of industrial life.
Conclusion
Our survey of CERES’s paper archive, itself decomposing in the ambient
humidity, offered a lot of interesting data regarding human labour on the
site but precious little detail about our ostensible research topic: the flows
into and out of the site that produce its soil. Some of these flows are
partially legible, thanks to the archive and the memories of founders who
have since cycled out of the organisation, but many others are lost. In one
sense, we can say that its past use as a dump for industrial rubbish and
waste soil actually makes CERES an exemplary urban sustainability
project, reprocessing the jetsam of industrial life into new organic life. In
another sense, while CERES works against the capitalistic separations
outlined by Marx, the lack of institutional memory amongst people at
CERES today is a kind of rift in its social metabolism. This rift reflects not
only the exigencies of such organisations, which often rely heavily on
individuals making do and getting by, but also a processing of energies
and materialities with externalities that are mostly unnoticed in the daily
turning of calendars and soils. In the regular reappraisals of soil as a
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frontier of promise – whether for storing carbon or feeding the nation – we
should remain alert to its sedimented meanings and social metabolisms.
Notes
[1] More recently, The Guardian reports that US Department of Agriculture
staff have been directed to avoid the phrase ‘reduce greenhouse gases’
and use the phrase ‘build soil organic matter’ instead.
Works Cited
Clark, N (2011) Inhuman Nature: Sociable life on a dynamic planet.
London: Sage.
Foster, J (1999) Marx and the Environment. In B. Jessop and R. Wheatley
(eds.), Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought Vol. 8 London: Routledge:
44-86.
Granjou, C and Phillips, C (2019) Living and labouring soils: metagenomic
ecology and a new agricultural revolution? BioSocieties 14.3: 393-415.
Gregson, N et al. (2015) Interrogating the circular economy: the moral
economy of resource recovery in the EU Economy and Society 44.2
(2015): 218-243.
Hayes, S (2019). Seeking Urban Metabolism through Archaeology. (This
collection).
Marx, K (1976). Capital, vol. 1. London: Penguin.
Marx, K (1981). Capital, vol. 3. New York: Vintage.
Stead, V (2019). Who feeds (on) whom? Labour and the porosity of
environments and bodies. (This collection).
Dr David Boarder Giles is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Deakin University.
His work investigates urban cultural economies of surplus, scarcity,
survival, and sustainability
Dr Timothy Neale is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Geography at
Deakin University. His primary research interests are environmental
hazards, settler-colonial politics, epistemological conflicts, and the sites
and contexts where those issues meet.
Dr Catherine Phillips is a Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of
Melbourne. She combines social theory with research on everyday
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practices and governance to better understand agrifood, biopolitics,
discard cultures, and urban natures.
AMA citation
Boarder Giles D, Neale T, Phillips C. Social Soils and Chimerical
Metabolisms. Somatosphere. 2020. Available at:
http://somatosphere.net/?p=16896. Accessed March 3, 2020.
APA citation
Boarder Giles, David, Neale, Timothy & Phillips, Catherine. (2020). Social
Soils and Chimerical Metabolisms. Retrieved March 3, 2020, from
Somatosphere Web site: http://somatosphere.net/?p=16896
Chicago citation
Boarder Giles, David, Timothy Neale and Catherine Phillips. 2020. Social
Soils and Chimerical Metabolisms. Somatosphere.
http://somatosphere.net/?p=16896 (accessed March 3, 2020).
Harvard citation
Boarder Giles, D, Neale, T & Phillips, C 2020, Social Soils and Chimerical
Metabolisms, Somatosphere. Retrieved March 3, 2020, from
MLA citation
Boarder Giles, David, Timothy Neale and Catherine Phillips. "Social Soils
and Chimerical Metabolisms." 10 Mar. 2020. Somatosphere. Accessed 3
Mar. 2020.
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