Thinking with soils: searching for rooted legalities with regenerative farmers

Climate change represents one of the most significant global challenges of our time, with far-reaching implications for environmental sustainability, economic development, public health, and social justice. As the impacts of climate change become increasingly evident, legal systems at the national, regional, and international levels are being called upon to develop effective frameworks for mitigation, adaptation, accountability, and resilience. Given the pivotal role that law can play in shaping climate governance, this blog series, edited by Dr Azadeh Chalabi, brings together academics, legal practitioners, and policymakers to contribute blog posts on the theme “Law and the Climate Crisis". Contributions to the series seek to foster critical engagement with the evolving relationship between law and climate change while exploring innovative legal responses to contemporary environmental challenges.

Ivo Van Puyvelde, University of Strathclyde

Keywords: rooted legalities; attentionality; world-making; habitability; response-ability.

Our modern laws have no roots.[1] The dominant ways of living and knowing of our Western societies, including a disembodied legal epistemology grown from them, have no eye or ear for the ways of being alive of Earth – attributing no import to skills of sensory and bodily perception of the diverse ecological processes shaping our environments – , and do not allow these to set the terms for interaction with her.[2] As a result, abstract concepts at the foundation of environmental laws (biodiversity, natural resources, and ‘the human environment’) reaffirm the ontological severing of humans from the living lands from which we emerge.[3]

Yet, in the face of the erosion of life on Earth – enacted as a ‘climate crisis’ with its auxiliary ‘biodiversity crisis’ – it is only an intimate knowledge of, or rather a knowledge-with, the situated environments with which we co-arise that can enable meaningful legal response to this existential threat. For to preserve one’s life, first one has to know what enables it. What gives it.

In this short post, I argue that those working most intimately with-in our environments, for example regenerative farmers, can assist our search for roots. By re-encountering our environments in their presence[4], we perceive our lands and human lives anew. Their ways of working, shaped by a porous epistemology grounded in a humble attentionality[5], invite us into a lifeworld[6] perceptive of how health is a commons and sustainability, like resilience, is a "multispecies affair”[7].

A law deaf to the land

The lifeworld underlying contemporary environmental law and policy – and persistently enforced by it[8] – can be described with anthropologist Tim Ingold’s conceptualisations of the modern global outlook of the environment.[9] The central categories structuring environmental (legal) thought today – sustainability, natural resources, biodiversity, but especially the ‘environment’ at its foundation – illustrate its main features.

The environment we encounter with conventional environmental law – construed in the singular – is one severed from the generative fluxes of its formation. The organisms and objects composing it are, literally, its component parts: they can be reduced to their material dimensions and are nothing more than its building blocks. In such perspective, sustainability is a matter of management of our environment’s component parts, not of ways of relating to them or of attuning to their processes of generation.

The preoccupation at the heart of environmental law, then, is one of keeping things in their ‘right’ place: polluting waste out of rivers, threatened species in their protected habitat, and GHGs out of the atmosphere. The discourse of offsets, net zero goals – but even certain forms of ‘reparations’ – epitomises the mechanistic thinking which these concepts, as products of modernity’s ‘logic of inversion’, invite.[10]

This lifeworld’s environment, then, is not one we inhabit, but rather one we occupy. As Ingold has put it, whereas an occupied environment is one “furnished with already-existing things (...) one that is inhabited is woven from the strands of their continual coming-into-being”[11].  Crucially then, because we are neither “partaking of its essence nor resonating to its cycles and rhythms” [12], our environment is not one we belong to. But if we do not belong to our environment, how could our living well with it – our sustainable living – be anything else than a matter of management? How could it be a matter of caring?

 

Receiving teachings of the land

Working with regenerative farmers in India, Belgium, and the UK has introduced me to a lifeworld in which care is central.[13] A lifeworld grown from attentive observation with the land, it is one profoundly alive and shaped by many living beings. I focus here on two embodied skills that are central to regenerative farmers’ practices[14] to illustrate how it is a deep attentionality (expressed in these skills) which enables them to perceive the breathing of their lands.

First, to make their growing least effortful, most regenerative farmers align their practices with the pulses of the land. To do this, they have to learn a form of ‘agro-ethology’[15]: an expertise in tracking the ways of living, and of making worlds[16], of diverse organisms populating their land (Earthworms, Bumblebees, Hawthorns).

For example, when growing hedges of trees between their plots, they learn to see how trees protect the soils and crops against temperature extremes by moderating the micro-climate through leaves’ transpiration, and limit nutrient erosion and water evaporation by breaking winds. The same hedge might also host insects that feed on pests of a farmers’ cultures. Or, rotating cultures of different plants across patches, they learn both what type of nutrients diverse plants take from the soil (and hence which crops can follow on one-another easily), and what type of nutrients certain plants replenish the soil with, e.g. through the aid of fungal or bacterial partners.

Second, regenerative farmers develop a sensitivity to the cycles of minerals necessary for their crops’ healthy growth. This sensitivity – as skill – not only guides their decisions for rotating cultures or selecting companion crops (growing within the same bed) but also compels them to make specific interventions. They might for instance briefly place young seedlings’ roots in mineral-fed water containers prior to their transplantation. Or they might (apart from a lively compost to make all nutrients available) make compost teas from weeds to feed particular plants in need of N, P, K, or another mineral.

Seeing habitability: becoming response-able

The reason I propose to search for rooted legalities in company of such ‘soil practitioners’[17], is for their humble touch of Earth. This humility allows them to receive the teaching that our environments are not reducible to their material dimensions but are continuously created, and made inhabitable, by processes of many breathing beings’ world-making.

In the face of the dying and silencing of our lands, it is cardinal that we re-learn with whom our lives are woven into being. Thinking with soils is one way of doing this. Let us receive its insight that habitability is an incessant gift, and to preserve it, we have to protect the lands that generate it for us, we have to protect our “wider flesh”[18].

Author Bio

I am a phd student at Strathclyde Law School and associate researcher of the EcoLAWgy research centre at ULiège. My current research project seeks to make the teachings of regenerative farmers and foresters about the nature of our environments consequential for environmental law. After graduating in law and anthropology in Belgium, I pursued my studies at the Earth University in Dehradun, India.

Notes

[1] Aaron Mills, “The Lifeworlds of Law: On Revitalizing Indigenous Legal Orders Today” (2016) 61(4) McGill Law Journal 847.

[2] Anna Grear, ‘Foregrounding vulnerability: materiality’s porous affectability as a methodological platform’ in Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos and Victoria Brooks (eds), Research Methods in Environmental Law (Edward Elgar 2017).

[3] Emille Boulot & Joshua Sterlin, “Steps Towards a Legal Ontological Turn. Proposals for Law’s Place beyond the Human” (2021) 11(1) Transnational Environmental Law 13.

[4] I exclude modern recuperations of the label ‘regenerative’ – taking their most outrageous manifestation in the contemporary ‘regenerative’ practices of Monsanto-Bayer. The guides I propose to follow are those growing food by actively fostering a multispecies soil rejuvenating its own health. A soil from which you see earthworms creeping up when harvesting a strongly rooted bulb of garlic.

[5] Tim Ingold, “On Human Correspondence” (2017) 23(1) The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9.

[6] In using the term lifeworld, like ‘rooted legalities’, but also in my organic understanding of laws as grown, I situate my analysis and proposals in the prolongation of the path-opening work of Anishinaabe legal scholar Aaron Mills.

[7] Anna Tsing, "A Threat to Holocene Resurgence is a Threat to Livability” in Marc Brightman and Jerome Lewis (ed), The Anthropology of Sustainability. Beyond Development and Progress (Palgrave Macmillan 2017) 62.

[8] Joshua Sterlin and Emille Boulot beautifully uncover the operations of this work of ontological enforcement of our modern legal systems in their ‘Steps toward a Legal Ontological Turn’. See ibidem.

[9] This corresponds to the building perspective, or the ontology of occupation, both of which he has extensively conceptualised in his work between 2000 and 2011. See Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment. Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (Routledge 2000) and Being Alive. Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (Routledge 2011).

[10] On the logic of inversion see Tim Ingold, ‘Bindings against boundaries: entanglements of life in an open world’ (2008) 40 Environment and Planning A 1796.

[11] Ibidem, 1797.

[12] Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment. Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (Routledge 2000) 267.

[13] My teacher in seeing care present in regenerative growing practices have been Vandana Shiva and María Puig de la Bellacasa. See Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (University of Minnesota Press 2017)

[14] Encompassing forms of agriculture that are agroecological, organic, syntropic, biodynamic, successional, permaculture, but also other forms modelled in attunement to pre-existing processes.

[15] I use this term after Baptiste Morizot, Raviver les Braises du Vivant. Un Front Commun (Actes Sud 2020).

[16] An analytic proposed by Anna Tsing in The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. (Princeton 2015).

[17] Kristina Lyons, Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics (Duke University Press 2020).

[18] David Abram, ‘Creaturely Migrations on a Breathing Planet’ (2023) Emergence Magazine. https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/creaturely-migrations-breathing-planet/