Deep Listening

The ground is the surface we call home. Inscribed in it is a record of geologic and social life. It is a site of earthly memory. The soil is marked by the now 400-year-long social and ecological crisis of colonial capitalism. Land dispossession, the plantation model of agriculture, chattel slavery, and the imposition of these modes of extraction and unfreedom worldwide leave the planets soils severely degraded. If current rates of degradation continue, the world’s topsoil will be gone in sixty years, according to a UN official (Arsenault, 2014). [...]