Have you ever been inside a cave? Have you ever been in cave darkness? Cave darkness is special. It’s different. It’s darker than any other darkness. It breathes.
Earth is often talked about as a gentle, generative element, which is funny because we talk about “Getting our hands dirty” when we talk about violence, and I think there’s something to that, the dark majesty of the chthonic realm is almost unfathomable.
Soil is vital to us in ways I think we often fail to think about, soil is our ability to feed and clothe ourselves. It is alive with microorganisms. Which is one of the reasons you don’t use just any soil for a mud mask, because some of the stuff in soil can actually really fuck you up if you’re not careful, also we can really fuck up soil if we’re not careful.
Soil is largely composed of several classes of mineral matter (Sand, silt, and clay) mixed with decaying organic material. This is the nutrient rich medium in which plants grow, microorganisms which help plants break down the nutrients in the soil. The organic material is incredibly important to this process. The microorganisms that are vital to the healthy growth of plants starve without it, and may even evolve into pathogens as they attack the plants they used to feed in desperation.
Think about how a landscape might tend to function without human intervention. Plants grow, leafs fall, animals eat plant parts, they shit and die, things rot, and the soil is fed, however on cultivated land, when compost isn’t used the organic material in the soil becomes depleted and shit goes real haywire and you can basically make huge swaths of land incapable of growing anything this way, incidentally that’s what farmers are doing (along with depleting the water table which is literally causing land to sink) in California… a region which produces like a lot of our food. Incidentally healthy soil is a wonderful carbon sink… whereas depleted soil… well yeah.
Getting food waste composted and back onto farmland is vital to us not ending up in a really uncool version of Mad Max. Unfortunately, due to suburban sprawl replacing farmland surrounding cities where much of the population is concentrated returning said waste to farmland is energy intensive and a pain in the ass. This is something that needs to be done not on an individual level but on an industrial scale. We need to organize society to be able to sustainably feed our whole population, and I believe we could do that under a communist economic order.
I think it’s really funny how “sustainable” has turned into this word for like crunchy-organic expensive Gwenyth Paltrow bullshit when in fact sustainability contains its concern in the word itself. We have sustainability as a concern, as a concept because people have understood for quite awhile that our current way of managing things is unsustainable, as in we literally cannot keep doing this. The use of “sustainable” as a marketing buzzword is disgusting. The most sustainable anything is the one you already have.
Unsustainable practices are not the result of human laziness or malice, they are the result of the economic order that forces people always to be pushing for maximum profit, and damn any non-monetary cost that doesn’t effect the bottom line.
And so what the fuck does this have to do with religion? I mean I could simply say the earth and all that lives on it is sacred, but I find saying that profoundly trite and unsatisfying.
Partially to me, every human being is divine and thus the maintenance of conditions for continued human existence is important and we must remember that we thrive with nature not against it. The illusion of a zero sum game will kill us all. We thrive on cooperation, we die in competition. But additionally, I do think the earth is sacred.
Not just the planet but the dirt itself. I think a large part of every genius loci lives in the soil. So much about a place is defined by the character of its soil. Manhattan can have skyscrapers the way it does because of how close the bedrock is to the surface, allowing the land to support massive structures that would sink and tilt in softer soil. The rocky but fertile soil of New England is why we have the ubiquitous stone walls, why the crops that grow here are what they are, why indigenous people shaped the landscape as they did. West Texas’s limestone rich sandy loam dotted with desert grasses creating the grey and gold palette that define the region as a place best suited to nomadic herders rather than settled agrarianism, and so on and so forth.
Dirt defines place, the character of the dirt both creates and is the product of the landscape, it tells of the movement of glaciers, and of peoples, the paths of rivers and so many other things.
I am not a person with any belief in blood and soil. I do not have any patience for ethno-states. I believe that an immigrant can become a part of a place, but I do think that an immigrant is very different from a colonist. For one, immigrants do not start a systematic project of genocide and/or subjugation of the people already living there, and perhaps that’s part of it, perhaps you can’t really belong to a place if you water its soil with blood and tears of the people who were already part of it, and perhaps you can’t really belong to a place if you turn people fleeing there in desperation away, especially if you have already done the former.
And I do think especially for people who get food from the land, grow crops or herd animals or hunt and gather on it, there is an understanding that is hard to get any other way. People whose families have lived in a place for generations, or people who have moved in and gotten to know the people who have been there for generations… well essentially, it amounts to having access to generations upon generations of studiously observed research on a place and of course, there’s also the importance of home.
I am currently thinking particularly of Palestine. I am thinking of the villages where generations of a family had lived and died in the same house, and the emotional weight of losing such a place, of the affection one might feel for the beauty of the storied olive groves that Israel continually destroys, for the land that the people living there before the nakba but also even if it weren’t for the sentimental and aesthetic elements here, there’s also a simple “Absolutely no one wants to be forced out of their home and people are often in the place they are for reasons like connections, climate and so on that make that specific place important.”
And beyond that, there is also the fact that war has always had a tendency to have a bad effect on the soil, from burnt and salted fields to the mass killing of buffalo herds to starve out indigenous populations to agent orange, to the HUGE section of France that’s still uninhabitable and unable to be used for farmland due to the minefields, and high concentrations of lead and other pollutants from the first and second world war, attempting to remove people by force from their homes has a tendency to leave invaders with a land far less habitable than it was before.
It’s also important to say that this piece is being written and read out on occupied land, contested Wampanoag and Narragansett territory. Land acknowledgements like this are quite popular now. You’ve probably heard them before, seen them in email signatures and so on, but I must admit I find them sort of… glurgy and annoying.
They acknowledge a wrong, gesture towards white guilt while doing sweet fuck all about the realities of colonialism.
Which brings to me landback, a movement I’ve been researching and trying to my best to get a grasp on. It’s a decentralized movement and so demands vary, but overall it is about returning political and economic management of land to the people who held it before colonization, and basically governance and administration being arranged and organized in ways more in line with the cultures of those colonized people, which tends to involve far more responsible land management practices, and non-capitalist economic structures.
Both because these are peoples who successfully managed the ecosystems on this continent for millenia, rendering it fertile, habitable and healthy and because as a systemically impoverished demographic who often rely on the natural resources of what land they have left to survive, they are some of the people most directly affected by environmental devastation within the US. People indigenous to the Americas are the reason we have corn and potatoes, two of the crops with the best calorie to land use ratios out there (more calories per acre is better when you have a lot of people). The forest management practices of the peoples of the coasts and the animal management strategies of the plains peoples are technological marvels even today.
Indigenous peoples are a mere 5% of the world’s population but are stewards of 80% of the earth’s remaining biodiversity. I don’t say this out of sentiment or some belief in some inherent racial characteristic of “good land management skills,” I’m saying that if a culture overall focuses on being good at a thing, and that culture is structured around that thing, people immersed in that culture will often be good at it, and while colonial powers focused primarily on martial technologies and technologies of power, the polities who devoted their intellectual energy towards other stuff were the ones that tended to end up colonized, so of course colonial powers suck at land management. War machines like that are expensive in time, energy and intellectual ability.
And this is not to say that indigenous people are in any way monolithic. A Wampanoag person is not remotely interchangeable with a Lakota person or an Aleut person or a member of the Nʉmʉnʉʉ. Indigenous people are people and they’re people from a whole bunch of different places and cultures, and pre-European colonization there were colonial powers (like the Aztec empire) and wars and so on and so forth, because people are people, and none of that undermines the fact that A: That excuses nothing, the notion that Europeans were less brutal or “more civilized” is utter horse shit, and also again flattens the profound diversity of indigenous cultures. There are indigenous monarchies and indigenous democracies, centralized and decentralized, with greater and lesser personal liberty and vastly varied systems of property, a set of polities at least as varied as early modern Europe and probably more so because of the lack of Christianity as a vaguely unifying factor, B: Everyone was doing war crimes in the 19th century, and the settlers did more, C: None of that even matters because settler colonialism is inherently wrong and D: It’s not even about morality, it’s about letting the peoples who had systems that were working to keep large populations alive and fed replace the systems that are actively going to kill us all.
Also it does not mean that those of us without indigenous heritage have to leave or anything, we’d just have a different form of government and economic system and I’m pretty sure it’d be an overall far more sensible one. Much like a decolonized Israel wouldn’t mean Jewish people being forced to leave, it would just mean becoming Palestinian citizens rather than Israeli ones.
To respect the land is to respect what’s on it, including people. Things do not grow where we salt the earth.
Church of the Morningstar 