Soil guardianship: Reckoning with human dominance and interdependency in codesign

Authors: Markus Wernli & Ilpo Koskinen

Contribution for 'Reworlding'

We followed with keen interest the ensuing conversations ensuing during the Giving Voice To Nature workshop of PDC2024 on 15 August 2024. We find these discussions encouraging since they mark a turn for more introspection in the design discipline. We also noted how many perspectives in more-than-human design tend to be theoretical, philosophical, and rather intangible. If our goal is to re-embed human activities within the constraint of our biophysical foundation, we believe more is needed than just giving voice to nature. Thus, any talk about nature needs specification. In response our contribution seeks to contribute to a consistent, self-implicating approach for designing with or from nature, or else it may fall prey to conceptual difficulties or self-removal.

Many posthumanist designers grapple with humility, generosity, entanglements, and ‘design partnerships’ with nonhumans. Such reckoning is hoped to displace humans’ privileged position and present an equal standing from which to face pressing socio-environmental challenge. For example, Clarke et al. (2018) argued for a increasing appreciation of life in urban environments through walks and simple prototypes. Orrù (2018) for collectively enacting animal movements as bodily engaging urban-making, St. Pierre (2019) for learning to appreciate nature through indigenous animism, Wakkary (2021) for building prototypes that are left to acquire a meaning in human environment, and Tironi et al. (2024) for citing critiques of an anthromorphic worldview in the social sciences. 

Many cases of posthuman design are located in speculative interactive technologies whereby human designers become conveners speaking on behalf of nonhumans (Secomandi, 2022). The egalitarian narrative is based on the idea that we are connected to all nonhuman life while being science-based, secular, and ethically responsible. Yet, this egalitarian design ignores the inevitability of conflicts and competing interests that arise since human existence depends on taking the lives and habitats of nonhuman others. However, egalitarian design frameworks can come with negative connotations. Such framings often result in guilt, shame, and discouragement, which do little to inspire profound and widespread changes in behavior (Desmond 2024; Ramsey 2023). 

We need to acknowledge human dominance while also prioritizing the flourishing of nonhuman life. A generative framing requires more than critique or appeals to posthumanist or care theory. Living up to such conflicted interdependency with nonhumans would scrutinize whether design is extracting from them beyond resonating with environments and people. As Bardzell and colleagues (2021) describe, “this requires us [designers] to consider how we regard place and nonhumans, not just as a backdrop for our work, nor merely as a rich socio-semantic context but as providing sites of production, consumption, and disposal in designing—not ‘a place to live’ but ‘a living place.’” The question then is how participatory design remains honest both about human dominance over and fateful interrelation with nonhuman life.

To explore this conflicted interdependency with nonhumans in participatory design, we discuss an eco-social farming pilot named Soil Trust in rural Hong Kong (2020-2023). Soil Trust reckoned with the fact that modern humans, through continuous burning and leaking of lithospheric carbon to run their industries, have overwhelmed the atmospheric carbon pool, causing climate chaos. Its premise is that since plants and oceans alone can no longer balance this carbon effluence, carbon-storing soils need to make up the difference. Yet, for soils to be veritable natural carbon storage, humans need to be guardians of nonhuman life above and below the ground, especially the soil microbiome, through ecological land care and regenerative food or fibre production. 

Assuming responsibility over human dominance for Soil Trust meant help to discontinue the accumulation of carbon emissions by divesting heavily from fossil carbon sources underpinning food production: petrochemical fertilizers, pesticides, methane emissions from rotting landfills, as well as the transport footprint and disposable plastics associated to our globalized supply chains. Soil Trust built on the idea that once we regain our focus on localized food habitats of cross-feeding humans and nonhumans—nourishment that is sensibly farmed, fished, ranched, or foraged within our given bioregions—the opportunity to restore carbon to our soils becomes viable (Burgess and White, 2021).

Soil Trust was a research project led by Author 1 for codesigning a soil-invigorating habitat through probiotic upcycling of local food scraps by creating a community that provided support for this activity. It established a soil guardianship involving a farm donating a fallow plot, a hotel collecting food scraps, a harvest-for-work volunteer program, and corporate sponsoring from an eco-hospitality foundation. It aimed at proliferating microbial life, instituting nutrient cycling, applying mulch, ensuring biodiversity above/below ground and cultivating renewable foods while naturally capturing carbon. Becoming a soil custodian meant to attune to the local ecologies of waste-fermenting enzymes, manure-donating buffaloes, compost-mobilizing bacteria, and plant-invigorating pollinators. Soil Trust constituted a social pilot that explored logistics and organizational arrangements to create soil-to-soil food value chains.

Soil Trust changed the way in which the participants saw nature and turned it from a human-centred view to a much more complex and appreciative frame of mind. The project took up the mandate for invigorating soil habitat through farming activities, composting, and a network between farmers and hospitality industry. Through these activities, it created a model for rebuilding soil and capturing carbon (Figure 1). Its scale was small, but it proved that it is possible to build a positive relationship to animals and plants that is not based on human dominance under the guise of efficiency and validation. 

The project built a knowledge alliance that helped to enrich this frame of mind. It relied on a combination of farmer-to-farmer soil testing methods (Singer et al. 2019), citizen science, and external assessment standards to account for carbon restoration, keep track of weather extremes, pest infestations, and soil regeneration to be encapsulated in an open-source practitioner handbook. It also engaged bio-scientists from a local university to conduct soil microbial monitoring, which, despite their best intentions, exceeded the available agronomic and computational expertise and only yielded inconclusive results.

The project, however, was vulnerable to human dominance and ‘development’ that made the change in the community vulnerable to human-led processes in two forms. First, when the initial direct waste-to-soil application came with a lot of mechanical disruption for the fragile topsoil and the farm team decided to add an extra six-month-long composting stage to the processing, the corporate sponsors deemed the operation inefficient and withdrew their funding. Second, Soil Trust was located in the ‘vegetable belt’ of Hong Kong’s New Territories. This belt has a highly fragmented and complicated land tenure, thus our host farmer leases his land from five different landlords on 2-year terms. When the owner of Soil Trust’s plot changed from a villager to an urban developer, the farmland was converted into a ‘brownfield,’ forcing the premature end of the pilot. Here imposed property rights prioritized industrial uses above soil life proliferation. In response, Soil Trust shifted its tactic to sustain its novel frame of mind. It is currently working with media organizations, schools, advocacy groups, policy influencers, and academic publications on social knowledge exchange to promote the adaptation of its model to other contexts and sites.

Finally, the Trust pooled carbon and enacted a place-based strategy that, in principle, any community can engage in without the need for complex technologies that come with hidden costs. The inclusion of diverse perspectives along the process, especially the conflicting ones, have provided a requisite variety that triggered joy, knowledge, creativity, social diversification, and a transformative relationship to nonhumans among the participants of Soil Trust.

Transitioning to regenerative agriculture practices and proliferating land-based biodiversity typically takes years or decades of experimentation to show tangible results. Thus, Soil Trust is part of an extended soil-to-soil strategy that researchers started before and continues beyond the pilot. By focussing on bringing living biodiversity into the soil with pre-existing local resources, the pilot has been navigating human dominion in relation to nonhuman interdependency. It has shaped responses, subjectivities, and a co-emergence with living eco-social habitats, which have become the ultimate measure of value. Thinking of humans as guardians of nonhuman wards thus begs the question how we can change course to a model of continued investment whereby inputs outpace the outputs to generate abundance and benefits for all. 

Figure: Soil life guardianship at the Soil Trust eco-social pilot applied regenerative principles including (1) no-till, (2) permanent soil cover and (3) polyculture of crops: here hoteliers collaborating on Soil Trust’s food scrap upcycling program are invited to a communal potato planting using a sheet-mulch technique with cardboards to protect soil live from UV and other disturbance.  

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