Never Mind COP21, Here Came and Went the International Year of the Soil: Requiems, Symphonies, Rhapsodies

As mostly stiff, suit-clad state officials once again assemble, for the 21st time, to decide as the Conference of the Parties (COPs) on a legally binding but capital-friendly agreement over mainly greenhouse emissions reduction, the largely unnoticed International Year of the Soil is coming to a largely underwhelming end. Somewhat ignominiously for soil enthusiasts, there is very little sign that the latter will be linked to the former, just as there was no mention, in the Lima COP20 discussions (held 1–12 December, 2015), of soils or any other environmental process involved in global warming. A more general disgrace, these institutional efforts offer nothing by way of the substantive social changes necessary to address the principal causes of current environmental degradation. Enchanted by or actively engaged in making promises of environmentally friendly free-market democracy, or, to an increasingly lesser extent (or dormant), Party-directed planning for glory and bliss, all these institutional initiatives succeed very well in calling attention to and legitimising (and often co-opting) genuine concerns over increasingly more severe health-threatening and fatal environmental problems. But they also reinforce the very social processes—disenfranchising politics (including militarism) and structural economic maldistribution—underlying the destructive environmental impacts they seek to address.

Environmental devastation comes in many forms and they are often interconnected. Deforestation, for example, affects local and even regional rainfall patterns (often reducing rainfall). When exposed soil is eroded by wind and water, deforested landscapes can lead to air and water quality problems, with more dust getting into people's lungs and lakes and streams getting overloaded with eroded material (sediment). Eventually, lakes and streams get choked by algae and even more trapped sediment so that their water quality and most species populations precipitously decline, along with the livelihoods of people relying on those aquatic environments. Ecological understanding is much impoverished when the multiple inter-relations of organism and physical processes are forcefully funnelled into a single over-riding concern over global warming (ambiguously referred to as climate change). This is by no means to suggest even remotely that global warming should be taken less seriously. Such globally reaching environmental change has spelled horrendous calamities for millions of people already, historically and currently, and promises even worse outcomes in future. However, to comprehend the full impact of such environmental change and to devise socially just strategies to mitigate and cope with it, the interlinkages of biophysical environmental processes must be carefully studied as well.

This cannot be accomplished with topic-delimited summits like the COPs, where, say, interactions between soils and the atmosphere are entirely ignored. To describe briefly just one such major interaction, atmospheric nitrogen and carbon are eventually stored for years to centuries in soil organic matter through the work and death of mainly microbes, plants, and fungi.¹ When especially industrial scale ploughing or deeper and wider forms of digging expose and accelerate the breakdown of soil organic matter, internal structural failure occurs (mineral particle disaggregation) and accelerated soil erosion often ensues. Large quantities of greenhouse gas by-products of organic matter breakdown (mainly nitrous oxides, carbon dioxide, and methane) are thereby released into the atmosphere. This transfer and a typically related increase in soil erodibility are exacerbated by crop harvesting where little to no organic material is reincorporated into the soil (see, e.g., Lal 2003; Ussiri and Lal 2012). Soils are involved in at least 24 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions by way of farming and land-use change such as re/deforestation (IPCC 2014). The fraction should be higher when including soils in urban areas (Lal and Augustin 2012) and degassing from soils in now increasingly melting permafrost regions (Schuur et al. 2015).

In other words, soil plays a crucial role in the storage and flow of major greenhouse gases, and its fate is tied to that of atmospheric chemistry in ways that do not directly involve the combustion of fossil fuels and so evade the purview of COPs and likely most environmentalists. That these two environmental concerns, global warming and soil degradation, as well as others, continue to be treated as if unrelated shows just how far off formal institutions (and many activist organisations) are from any ecological understanding (I am still working on mine, but at least I am). The repercussions of compartmentalisation are measures that, if actually applied and at all effective, manage to sink a moored ship by obsessing over only the more obvious or seemingly larger infrastructural failures.

When a greater ecological grasp is demonstrated within mainstream institutions (e.g., climate change and soil degradation are viewed as inter-related), it is often within less empowered outfits and the result is still typically dismal. Though doubtless well intentioned, the pronouncements and policies recommended are, much like their less ecologically sound counterparts, devoid of any critical sensitivity to the predominance of highly unequal and violent social arrangements worldwide. Statements are thereby peppered with unsupported assumptions, conclusions that hardly follow from postulated premises, and confusions of outcomes for causes. In fact, it is the absence of critical sensitivity and a persisting society-nature dichotomy that, among other processes, makes of the International Year of the Soil a great propaganda piece for the capitalist system as a whole (just as the COPs generally) and thereby a contributor to the further destruction of the celebrated.

It is by far not a case of lack of effort in convening issues of, for example, soil degradation to global warming, as much as the exclusion or marginalisation of such work in the discussion halls of the powerful. Many activists, especially ecofeminists, and also soil scientists, among other technical experts, have for decades called attention to such linkages, though for differing reasons. The matter is approached more holistically by ecofeminists (e.g., Isla 2015; Salleh 2009) and more or less like-minded political ecologists (e.g., Blaikie 1985; Jarosz 2009; Peluso and Watts 2001), for example. But such holism tends to be too often hobbled by the absence of analyses and understandings of non-human dynamics.

The pinnacle of the technical variation on interlinkage (not holism) is instead represented by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, one of the few official documents sponsored by major supra-state institutions that have come closest to an integrated view of environmental degradation. It is a great pity that the outcome ultimately degenerates into an attempt at making the environment legible for capital accumulation (or profit-making, if one prefers, see also Smith 2006). By reformulating problems as a matter of safeguarding or improving ecosystem services, the scientists involved have managed to reinforce the divide between people and the rest of nature (which is to serve a separated, generic humanity), dividing non-human worlds as well into distinct bundles of ecosystem services reduced to the needs of a single species or, rather, if one probes the document a bit more critically, to the prerogatives of business by way of a renewed commodity fetishism (Kosoy and Corbera 2010). The ecosystem services approach has the merit of questioning somewhat the disconnection, but it does so at the expense of ignoring the vast universe of processes that do not service humans, like the work of organisms and the provision of habitat and resources for millions of other species with different needs (Peterson et al. 2010).

Requiems

Bourgeois dualism and reductionism regarding the environment and statist and individualist notions of society may pervade the International Year of the Soil, but the related celebrations are useful in trying to awaken more people to the importance of what is appreciated already by millions of small-holding farmers, mainly women, and Aboriginal and Indigenous Peoples worldwide. The 5th of December has also been etched in institutional stone as the yearly recurrence of World Soil Day; so declared the United Nations (UN) General Assembly during its 68th gathering on the 20 December, 2013. Henceforth, one can avail oneself, every year, for one day, of official international recognition for concerns over soils as “key to sustaining life on Earth” (UN General Assembly 2014). Let yearly celebrations then begin in earnest, but without exaggeration. Devoting even one day to recognising soils, not markets, as key to life, might already test the patience of our most magnanimous rulers.

Unlike the case of “climate change” (i.e., global warming), there is no COP for soil degradation. However, there is, since 2012, a soils-focused corollary to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: the Intergovernmental Technical Panel on Soils (ITPS). There is yet no “Framework Convention on Soil Conservation” (or should it be “Soil Change”?), but there is instead a Global Soil Partnership (GSP)² made up largely of associations (like the US Catholic Relief Services and IFOAM), firms (often of the consulting variety), universities, foundations, research institutes, and professional societies. The initiative for a World Soil Day actually originated from a 2002 resolution of the International Union of Soil Sciences (IUSS), a GSP member no less. It was picked up and endorsed by the FAO in 2013. In turn, the resolution to establish World Soil Day was presented through the FAO to the UN General Assembly, where it was decided that an entire year should be dedicated to efforts at raising awareness about the importance of soils (UN General Assembly 2014).

Why it has taken a decade for the FAO to respond to the IUSS' resolution beckons guesswork by outsiders to such organisations, but the UN declaration has not exactly taken the world's attention by storm. As is likely the fate of most such declarations, it has largely been drowned by the sheer volume of daily information flow (including UN declarations) or fallen on indifferent ears, at least when it comes to movements, policies, and everyday action. Soils are deeply buried by an overburden of other matters considered much more pressing. COP21 will decidedly mute much of any talk of soils or their close relationship to global warming with a cacophony of contrasting yet nearly all planet-compartmentalising voices—some alarmist, some denialist, some desultory, but mostly complacent—from the more influential sectors of world politics representing a small, largely hetero-masculinist and white moneyed human minority. As before, chances to link global warming to soil degradation will have been scuppered.

The more influential media have anyway shown the usual disinterest in soils. Virtually no headlines or well-publicised investigative reports have appeared featuring the status of soils around the planet. And who can blame them, given the low priority demonstrated by the most influential institutions of the world, including allegedly environmental ones. Coverage in some of the popular press, on the other hand, may make media disinterest preferable. National Geographic magazine, for instance, devoted a little of its Internet presence to raising awareness of soils in preparation for the celebratory year (Qiu 2014). There, one learns of five essential things about soils: (1) finiteness (the problem of soil erosion), (2) misuse can lead to civilisation collapse, (3) good use prevents drought, (4) high-tech approaches helps conserve soil, and (5) soils are alive with organisms. In other words, one learns nothing about soils except that they contain plant nutrients (lost with soil erosion, but apparently not by leaching) and organisms live in them. The rest is a reinforcement of bourgeois notions about soil use and its consequences (see, e.g., Engel-Di Mauro 2014, 80–90). Leave it to National Geographic to ensure readers learn next to nothing on anything.

More prominent environmental organisations like Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists rarely concentrate their efforts on soil protection issues. Their own lacklustre performance in promoting greater public awareness of soil degradation (or the International Year of the Soil) is therefore unsurprising. When they do pay attention, they tend to divulge apocalyptic visions of massive soil destruction by some generic human impact or misleading, decontextualised depictions of successful soil conservation, much in the same way as academics do, whether specialised or not in the soil sciences. The same goes for attention by scholars to initiatives coming from the FAO or the UN General Assembly on such matters. Sustained academic attention to soil degradation or conservation is otherwise very much confined to the realm of technical experts, who tend to be ideologically capital-friendly while claiming objectivity and/or neutrality.

It may arguably be just as well that destructive impacts on soils have garnered relatively little institutional and activist concern, seeing how under intense scrutiny and concern global greenhouse gas emissions, for example, have actually increased. Soil degradation might actually spread further and intensify were there to be a series of COPs dedicated to finding legally binding agreements on soil conservation. If one follows the trends so far, there appears to be a direct relationship between the level of institutional attention and the degree of aggregate destructive impact. The more that businesses and states devote to finding solutions over environmental degradation problems, the more the problems are exacerbated. And when a problem is deemed resolved, it is by displacement, creating or worsening other problems. This is a charitable assessment, since it excludes the irreversible changes and long-term deleterious consequences brought on by destructive practices in the recent past.

Soil degradation proceeds apace and, unlike what is being popularised, soil erosion is arguably the least of the problem (try soil heavy metal and radionuclide contamination, acidification, compaction, urbanisation-related sealing, and such other long-term disasters). There are thousands of known cases of soil degradation, many of them involving decades of remediation efforts, if not longer, or leading to abandonment. However, one must be very careful when talking about soil degradation because one's degradation is sometimes another's boon or it is not always as consequential as represented by technocrats. In any case, too often, soil conservation has been a pretext for land dispossession (Blaikie 1985) and talk of soil horrors, a discourse (often about desertification) especially meted out on Africa, may be thinly veiled white supremacist allegations of African farmer mismanagement. What is more, data available on soil degradation globally is of highly uneven quality. The most reliable data are from countries that possess the proper infrastructure to study and monitor soils effectively. So there are highly detailed and long-term soil surveys and soil quality reports and studies in places like Russia (where institutional soil science was born), the US, Canada, China, the UK, France, Japan, and other such countries. For the vast majority of countries, survey and sampling frequency and extent are severely limited if not entirely absent for some regions, laboratories are few and often ill-equipped, and field experimentation tends to be of short duration (unlike, for instance, the more-than-century-long Rothamsted and Calhoun experimental stations in the UK and USA, respectively), among other challenges that make for almost as uneven a knowledge of soil status across the world as the degree of world economic inequalities (the two aspects are not exactly unrelated). Disconcertingly, since the 1980s, funding for soil surveys and monitoring has been steadily declining to the point where most global studies of soils involve largely indirect indicators or measurements and modelling outcomes through the use of limited data. Even within the European Union, with the largest Gross Domestic Product in the world, scientists are resorting to such impoverished methodology, given the lack of serious investment in soils research (see, e.g., Panagos et al. 2015). There is no basis, except by extrapolation from data meta-analyses over a relatively limited array of data worldwide, to speak with due certitude about soil degradation at the planetary scale as one can about global warming or ozone-layer depletion (for a more detailed overview, see Engel-Di Mauro 2014). The known and recurring degradation, the lack of institutional allowance for a socially specific view of what constitutes degradation, and the woefully inadequate extent and quality of soils data testify to a structural inability in prevailing social institutions to develop and coordinate preventive mechanisms or even effective monitoring and remediation measures for damage (being) done.

One could claim that international agreements over acid deposition and ozone-layer depletion provide beacons of practicable possibilities, but those agreements, policies, and actions have been palliatives if not contributors to greater harm, even on their own terms. Acid deposition remains a problem with continuing nitrous oxide and sulphur dioxide emissions from, for example, vehicles unequipped with catalytic converters. There is no worldwide treaty on diffusing catalytic converter technologies and manufacturing infrastructure, nor any policy on the redistribution of the rare metals required for catalytic converter manufacture. In fact, one could claim that the problem of acid deposition has not only been largely unresolved, but solutions offered have contributed to the expansion of destructive social and environmental practices through mining operations for rare metals and the increasing amount of airborne platinum, palladium, and rhodium released through automobile use (Wang and Li 2012). Then, there are the lasting impacts of acidification on surface waters and soils from years to centuries, which can be overcome by using lime at the expense of the ecosystems where it is quarried.

Actions over ozone-layer depletion offer even more of an example not worth following. Capitalist resistance to policy implementation of the Montréal Protocol, led by fractions of the USA capitalist class in agriculture, has resulted in delaying the phasing out of methyl bromide (Gareau 2013). More sobering still is the omission of nitrous oxide emissions from the Protocol, even though its ozone-depleting qualities were known well before negotiations took place (Ravishankara, Daniel, and Portmann 2009). Meanwhile, ozone-depleting substances (e.g., chlorofluorocarbons) have been steadily replaced with hydrofluorocarbons, which have very high heat trapping capacity compared to other greenhouse gases and can last in the atmosphere for up to thousands of years (EPA, n.d.). If it is this difficult to reduce or halt the use of environmentally degrading substances that are arguably not crucial, as fossil fuels are, to current world economy, it should be clear that the chances for any effective action over such impacts as global warming are extremely slim without radical social change. Even less of a chance exists for addressing soil degradation under current social conditions.

Symphonies (and Still More Requiems)

Despite extremely poor institutional records at any scale and the many barriers to reaching any spotlights, the soils party has been on, and what a party it has been. The International Year of the Soil has been seized as an opportunity, if one were needed, to organise a flurry of activities and even celebrations (more often of the constipated variety, given the largely academic tone). Agricultural and/or environmental organs of various national states, and of course also the FAO and some GSP members, have made informational material available online as well as introduced workshops to get more of the public to learn about soils, mainly through websites. Academic meetings and publications have appeared, directing attention to this special occasion, or have been made to coincide with it, such as the soil atlas supported by the Heinrich Böhl Foundation. Organisers of outreach programmes have assembled researchers, activists, and policy-makers from different parts of the world to discuss problems and solutions, both technical and social, like the Berlin Global Soils Week conference. Short training courses, summer schools, and even online quizzes and other contests with prizes have been set up to attract even more attention. For example, the International Soil Reference and Information Centre (ISRIC) introduced an online soil quiz.³ The soil monolith prize, however, may not exactly be the most effective means to attract most people.

Some environmentalist activists and organisations of usually less than national clout have diffused information on soils and have set up showings and discussions documentaries like Bodemboeren [Soil Farmers] (2015) and Symphony of the Soil (2012). These have added to the precedent set by Dirt (2009). Viewers of the latter two documentaries are treated to a magnificent survey of the many characteristics of soils and their liveliness, drawing special attention to how soils interweave a great variety of relations involving air, water, rocks, and minerals, and thousands of organisms, including people. Different aspects of soil use are confronted ranging from economic issues to cultural linkages. In Dirt, there is more reliance on scientific experts and in Symphony of the Soil interviews are more mixed, involving farmers as well. Different varieties of landscaping and farming are portrayed that are deemed appropriate to local environmental conditions, but the emphasis is on organic farming and practices like permaculture, as understood in mainstream North America and Western and Central Europe. Symphony of the Soil is accompanied by the Sonatas of the Soil, a series of interviews with various experts, produced between 2008 and 2011. They include discussions on such topics as wine making and transition towns. Almost inevitably, the irreducible Vandana Shiva appears in both, and this is not surprising, given her major contributions to the cause of socially just and environmentally sensible farming and her attentiveness to soil issues. While Symphony of the Soil and Dirt focus in different ways on examples of constructive and destructive impacts, both historically and recently, Bodemboeren zooms in on five farmers' experiences and soil knowledge and the ways they have devised to use soils without damaging them.

Among this tiny minority of cognisant and more discerning soil party people there has been a general embrace of the International Soil Year and World Soil Day. No critical assessment has been forthcoming of these UN General Assembly resolutions, nor any sign of awareness about an even more ambitious action by the FAO through its Global Soil Partnership: the revision of the first World Soil Charter, dated to 1981. The wording of the resolutions reveals already a technocratic approach subordinated to capitalist agendas. As a consequence of trying to suit soils and food production to capital accumulation prerogatives, the document succumbs to the making of facile assumptions and short-circuited, mechanistic arguments. Soils are regarded as “the foundation for … food security” and “the sustainability [sustainable use] of soils is key to addressing the pressures of a growing population” (UN General Assembly 2014, 1). Good soil management is recognised as important to “economic growth, … eradicating poverty, women's empowerment,” and “desertification, land degradation and drought … continue to pose serious challenges to the sustainable development of all countries, in particular developing countries” (2). In this conflation of politics with biophysical processes, people, who have an innate propensity to multiply, have automatic access to food once it is grown plentifully thanks to healthy soils. Women and the poor (there is apparently no overlap) get ahead by managing land correctly. The annihilation of soils through mining and the paving over of soils (soil sealing) via urbanised land speculation need not be considered as part of economic growth. And “developing countries” (and Africa, it is further stressed further in the document) are especially vulnerable to soil degradation because they simply are. It is as if the authors of the document truly believe they are living in a strife-free world devoid of negative relations of power at any level. In their view, the world is also composed of states and “international and regional organizations … civil society, non-governmental organizations and individuals … ” as well as “the private sector” and “the general public” (1). There are no collectives, communities, and peoples. The world is constructed in the image of capitalist institutions, where only rulers, property owners, and individuals in civil society or the general public have (and know) their place.

The now revised World Soil Charter is a much more powerful display of sagacity and erudition. The original 13 principles have been overhauled and compressed to 10, and language has been updated to keep up with the latest ideological constructs, such as ecosystem services, “sustainable soil management,” and “soil governance.” Soil governance is undefined but seems to suggest a wish to establish ways of controlling or ruling over people involved in using soils. The overall corrective also lops off lengthy forays into tenure, management, and planning issues, and refocuses the effort on soils per se. The new Preamble sets the tone admirably:

Soils are fundamental to life on Earth but human pressures on soil resources are reaching critical limits. Further loss of productive soils will amplify food-price volatility and send millions of people into poverty. (UN General Assembly 2014, 2)

Consistent with notions of social homogeneity (when convenient) expressed in the above-described resolutions, the causes of such pressures are imputed to the entire human species. Pressures on soils stretch over an unspecified historical period and lead to an equally unspecified criticality. Soils are also endowed with prodigious powers. They produce, affect food prices, and even cause poverty, thereby exonerating the powerful and pre-empting any awareness, let alone the questioning of capitalist ideologies or even relations.

In contrast, the ten principles that follow the Preamble depart (modestly) from the standard liquefaction of intellect prevailing in such hallowed international institutions. The principles underline the soils' importance to people and ecosystems, accounting for soil diversity, promoting “sustainable soil management,” attending to local conditions and local/indigenous knowledge, furthering knowledge of soil properties, safeguarding of soil biodiversity, the adoption of ecosystem services as a basis for evaluation, the prevention of soil degradation, a greater reliance on soil remediation to reduce land-use conversion, and the overcoming of obstacles to “sustainable soil management” (UN General Assembly 2014, 2–3). These principles more or less conform to the overarching quest “to increase the area under sustainable soil management and the area of soils rehabilitated or restored” (3). Unlike the resolutions, there is a more enlightened sensitivity to local conditions with promising openings to greater involvement from below. Lest one get carried away with interpretations, the range of social subjects is quickly narrowed in the subsequent section devoted to those recognised as worthy recipients for recommendations. It is then clear that the world consists only of individuals and the “Organized Private Sector,” governments, and international organisations, in other words, the usual bourgeois colonial settler imaginary.

Central to this entire undertaking is the notion of “sustainable soil management” as part of soil governance. So what, then, is meant by this term?

Soil management is sustainable if the supporting, provisioning, regulating, and cultural services provided by soil are maintained or enhanced without significantly impairing the soil functions that enable those services. (UN General Assembly 2014, 3)

In this rather convoluted conception, soils are supposed to service people (even ecosystem functions are to be subordinated to services). The capitulation to a thoroughly reductionist view of soils is thereby complete. One is supposed to pretend that what is needed by people is coextensive with the needs of all other species combined. Acidified soils useful to some fungi are just as good for us, just as loamy soils of near neutral pH and just as salt-affected soils that are suitable for halophytic plants. Moreover, phenomena such as tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes have no bearing on management because no human action is involved (at least not directly), even if they could irreversibly alter prospects of any sustainable management. Lastly, but not exhaustively, who are the people lucky enough to receive the good services of soils? Perhaps they are the above-cited individuals and the organised private sector, governments, and international organisations. Perhaps, as a result of making no mention of vastly unequal political power and of wealth maldistribution issues, the authors of the document see no problem in soils servicing largely those most benefiting from a capitalist mode of production.

The dearth or total lack of analysis relative to the institutional framework surrounding the International Year of the Soil seems to cohere with the mainstay of the alternative agriculture scene, where issues of colonialism, landless worker labour conditions, highly uneven or exclusionary land tenure arrangements, and land dispossession, or, in other words, the capitalist mode of production, are either mentioned in passing or ignored entirely. This do-gooder take on the world, often associated with petit-bourgeois and wealthy white cultural values, is well reflected in the largely superficial and sterile messages about social alternatives shown in the above-described films and in the narrow focus on instructing and advising about the most appropriate land-use methods. A wealth of information is produced and made available, at least online, about how to enhance soil organic matters and biodiversity, but hardly anything is stated about what it takes to get and secure land access in the first place. There are comparatively fewer books and documentaries focusing on the social devastation that can come out of conservation policies (e.g., Isla 2015) and the bitter struggles over land necessary even to enable constructive soil use for the many (e.g., Hernandez and Engels 2012). Juxtaposing such sources to the above-described mind-lulling symphonies would return to reality and jolt do-gooders and moralists outside the comfort zone of idyllic food-production landscapes, where harmony has been recuperated or is in the process of being so.

It is quite a shame that among leftists there continues to be little to no interest in such matters or in soils generally, much less in any celebrations about soils or the institutions primarily responsible for initiating the festivities. If anything, the emphasis is usually on bemoaning soil degradation (mostly equated with erosion), buying into mainstream distortions of the extent and severity of worldwide soil degradation. Conceptually, there is no departure from the approach taken on the matter by bourgeois technocratic institutions. Soils are supposed to be sets of harmonious, balanced metabolic relations (a fuller discussion on this will require a different manuscript, but see Engel-Di Mauro (2010) for a discussion on the political pitfalls of homoeostatic views about the environment). The main difference is over the subject of causation. The overwhelming majority of concerned scientists trace the problem to a generic human subject and leftists use a more precise aetiology in imputing the problem to capitalist society. Pointing out the social, capitalist causes is of fundamental importance and such leftists do well in doing so, but it is insufficient in analysing actually existing problems and thereby devising viable solutions.

Rhapsodies

But the party need not be entirely ruined. One could seize on the stated aims informing the International Year of the Soil, which were much loftier than simply raising awareness of the soils' importance. Actions were to include lending international legitimacy to policies, actions, and investments promoting “sustainable soil management and protection of soil resources,” contributing to related environmental initiatives, and, crucially, engaging in advocacy for improvements in soils data gathering and monitoring. These are, in the main, also part of the five overarching objectives of the GSP.⁴ With respect to such objectives, the impact of the International Year of the Soil has so far been as modest as that of the GSP generally. Arguably, the same sort of achievements and setbacks could have occurred with or without the year-long celebration.

However, it is not so much concrete steps as a semblance of movement that is of import. Were the FAO actually to succeed in realising the aforementioned aims, much real estate speculation (urban expansion), mining, and other soil-destructive activities would have to cease and capitalist farming would have to be transformed, with prospects of major financial losses to, for example, colossal firms monopolising the main means of industrial farming production and those involved in agriculturally related financial derivatives. Major state investments would also have to be redirected and infrastructure (e.g., labs, sampling equipment) would have to be provided so as to enable, finally, the proper study and monitoring of soils in most of the world. And if the balance of forces were no longer in favour of capital, principle 10 of the World Soil Charter could be turned to ecosocialist ends:

10. Ways and means should be pursued to overcome obstacles to the adoption of sustainable soil management associated with land tenure, the rights of users, access to financial services and educational programmes. (GSP 2015, 3)

It should be obvious that private property is a large obstacle to “sustainable soil management” because it is premised on the exclusion or expulsion of people from deciding over what is recognised, even in the mainstream, as a key resource for human survival. All such repercussions or reinterpretations constitute but the tip of the iceberg and still entail a mere reform—largely of farming—and not an overcoming of the capitalist mode of production. Perhaps the FAO themselves will catch on—probably before most of the left does—to the possibility that what they propose is inadvertently the hatching of a worldwide plot to wipe out capitalist relations altogether.

Such peremptory judgement and (admittedly fun) flight of fancy is, of course, easy. Concentrating on institutional inadequacy or malfeasance can also be argued to direct attention away from underlying causes. Perhaps the point of the COPs and International Soil Years is precisely as decoy, much like government elections, where people decide on the composition of exactly those institutional bodies that can least effect social change (for example, the vast majority of state officials is hired or appointed and national economic outcomes are decided by the interplay of capitalist forces, not government officials). Still, to envision such immense orchestrating power on the part of the powerful would be delusional. Some orchestration is plainly at hand and even in public, such as the various “G” meetings, involving officials from anywhere from a couple to 20 or more “great industrial” whatevers. Reckless competition, militarism, and indirect or direct warfare among the most powerful institutions on Earth, on the other hand, demonstrate the contrary.

One could instead consider the capitalist relations in which all these “Parties” or “Gs” are enmeshed and that prevent, structurally, any possibility for a less than laughable global reduction in soil devastation or fossil fuel use, to keep to this editorial's theme. When profitability is the ultimate objective and such an objective is internalised by an increasing many, switching to a saner way of relating to soils and a saner set of energy sources is a subsidiary goal contingent on guarantees of profit and monetary remuneration (jobs). These guarantees may yet come about, but in a capitalist mode of production it is fanciful even to think that efforts could be coordinated among all countries to arrive at anything other than guaranteeing profits and jobs for the beneficiaries of ongoing pillage and mass murder. In any case, it is already much too late for capitalist institutions. Extinct species, for instance, cannot be reintroduced. However, in areas that could be redressed capitalist institutions continue to impede the necessary development, diffusion, and application of technologies and techniques to mitigate if not neutralise environmental degradation, such as a global stepwise complete removal of fossil fuel use, regenerative farming and other land-use methods that lead to net, long-term greenhouse gas sequestration and storage and reconstituted soil organic matter (thereby also raising levels of biodiversity), and extractive remediation processes (e.g., phyto-extraction) to remove accumulated contaminants in soils (Meuser 2013; Schwartzman 2013; Schwartzman and Saul 2015). The feasibility of such technical overhaul demands at the very least the political neutralisation of institutions thriving on socially and environmentally destructive practices (the military, agribusinesses, mining concerns, marketing firms, and the like). But to develop lasting solutions, alternative egalitarian social orders and ways of relating to the rest of nature must emerge that help redistribute material well-being to all without compromising the non-human conditions of human existence.

Advocacy, intergovernmental negotiations, policy formulation, and agreements continue to unfold as if the planet could be neatly separated into relatively disconnected units and as if time-tested failures could miraculously provide solutions. Remiss relative to interlinkages among ecological dynamics and social injustices, current institutionalised dialogues and negotiations over environmental issues (and our collective fates) will necessarily be, for the most part, repetitive failed starts. At the same time, politically uninformed exaltations of soils are implicated in reproducing the problems by failing to recognise specifically capitalist causes. Getting out of this mess requires struggles over two fronts, ecological and social, to overcome capitalist relations. Appreciation for soils can be a first step, but only if commensurate with social concern. So it is that the International Year of the Soil, while it has softened ears with symphonies and to some extent contributed to further soil requiems, may yet form the carcass out of which promising rhapsodies will emerge.

Notes

¹A more comprehensive approach would view the relationship as interconnected and mutually constitutive (overlapping with other relationships in time and space, depending on the scale of analysis), whereby soil organisms, for example, contribute to changing atmospheric chemistry and, in turn, climate change, induced in part by atmospheric chemical composition change, affects the soil environments in which the organisms live and eventuate in changes to biological community structure (for instance, by way of less precipitation or greater influx of alkaline dust, leading to pH changes that can, for example, suppress fungal populations). Such an approach is rare, or rarely rendered explicit, and it should be taken up in the near future in another work.

²A product of a 2011 meeting between the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and European Commission (Joint Research Group), the GSP functions as an international coordinating organisation advised by the ITPS (technical experts nominated by the “partners” present in the GSP Plenary Assembly). It is composed of any organisation that abides by, among other things, World Soil Charter principles (see below), but involvement is entirely voluntary and agreements are not legally binding (GSP Technical Working Group 2012).

³See http://www.isric.org/content/start-isric-soil-quiz

⁴See http://www.fao.org/soils-2015/about/ and http://www.fao.org/globalsoilpartnership/the-5-pillars-of-action