Report 01. Calling from a not-too-distant afar
on decolonialism in food&ag, regenerative agriculture, and getting down to earth
I promised a friend I would begin documenting the PhD, so here I am, beginning again. Aside from personal promises, I feel a stronger responsibility to do so now, because I now have the opportunity to work and focus on contributing to a knowledge community. I have the funds that allow me to focus without having the stress of having to work. And I would like to move my project team to do more, with our time.
Why don’t more funded researchers do more public research, or work publicly showing the results of their fundings?
So I’m intending to continue these letters, sharing my thoughts and concerns as I start up what feels like it’ll be the next 9 years of my work.
I foresee the letters will continue to have a personal tone to them - they might sometimes be topic-focused, but generally, I want to show the passage of time as ideas progress, and the way ideas do not begin in one place or time.
I’m now at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. Since getting to Munich I’ve done various things - visited Berlin for the HKW’s The Shape of a Practice, which has kept the case studies from its programme online for the time being, run a planning workshop with the team for a workshop we’ll do in Spring, on More-than-human Archives, and the team has put up our project site. I also received mail from the GAMeC (Bergamo, Italy) from their latest show In the Forest, Even the Air Breathes <3
What’s most on my mind though, is what regenerative agriculture in post-colonial but still colonised settings looks like. The term has gotten far more exposure in recent years, but as it does, it continues to drive capital towards the same communities that have already been at the centre of work, rather than communities whose bodies, waters, soils, and lives have been successively exploited in order to feed the agriculture that people are now moving away from.
This piece by Samantha Suppiah is a good place to begin reading about this.
Notes, links, and opinions about news/events
October 2020 - Feb 2021: The GAMeC exhibition on till Feb, sadly not open to the public
November 2020: Attending the Temasek APAC Agri-food summit. To sum it up in one line: shiny good intentions live strong but companies need to do better than add a wash of green coating. One really interesting and fruitful breakout session, where I met a group of other interesting folk was on Regen Ag, run by Sarah Nolet who produces the podcast Agtech: So What? I also appreciated the technical discussions in the vertical farming panel - which highlights the precision of understanding we could have, if we indeed understood our soils better. For technology to do its job well, we need the science, too.
August 2020: I and the group Rewild (SG) wrote an op-ed on seeds and the new company, Unfold, that Temasek and Bayer have jointly funded (more on that below)
Getting Down to Earth
It’s useful to keep in mind how hubs of circulation bear the centres—political centres—of extractive practices. In a region where capacities to push back adequately do not yet exist or are fledgling, business practices will guard themselves with the look of measures, but with no watchdog or accountability NGO to ask them to validate their claims.
I’ve been reading loads of environmental humanities work, so I’ll summarise some favourite learnings from the past months.
Jamie Lorimer has a good read of unevenness in his new book, Probiotic Planet,
“The possibility of going probiotic is thus largely an elite experience, and one that reflects and is maintained by longer histories of global exchange and exploitation. The probiotic turn cannot be read as a linear universal trend in a progressivist history of world development.”
If anything is to be done, at all, perhaps it is to expand recognition of the patchiness with which flashy news actually gets to people. It is to turn attentions from the Global, Modern-dreaming absolute shining pinnacle of Mars-bound flight, to hold a different approach: viewing the planet and the bodies of work we are yet to do, together, with non-humans—with the keystone species (wolves, earthworms, whales, beavers) that will do the important work of reactivating cascades across trophic levels.
Bruno Latour puts this convincingly in his book Down to Earth, or in French Où atterir?:
Terrestrials in fact have the very delicate problem of discovering how many other beings they need in order to subsist. It is by making this list that they sketch out their dwelling places (the expression allows us to shift away from the word “territory,” a word too often limited to the simple administrative grid of a state).
To track the terrestrials is to add conflicts of interpretation regarding what a given actor is, wants, desires, or can do, to conflicts about what other actors are, want, desire, or can do – and this applies to workers as well as to birds in the sky, to Wall Street executives as well as to bacteria in the soil, to forests as well as to animals. What do you want? What are you capable of? With whom are you prepared to cohabit? Who can threaten you?
Latour, Bruno. Down to Earth (p. 87). Wiley. Kindle Edition.
For myself, on the cusp of making a decision about which apartment to move into next, and deciding what housemates to live with, what microaggressions or possible senses of threat I can live with from stronger, male housemates, it’s not hard to see that so-called “planetary” or “global” change — our literal house-warming — demands that we place small p politics right next to big P Politics. To respond well, all of us have to step beyond our comfort zones of relative individual power: learning to take space and place where we’ve held on to too little of it, and learning to give space and place where we’ve held on to too much.
Announcements and reads
Orders for Foodscape Pages: new reads for a different kind of security
Pages is taking orders for its inaugural journa-zine on SOIL, and shipping internationally. Online payment for the 92-page journa-zine brings you a world of soil (and interviews, essays and letters on soil-based practices collected from writers in Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore)
Ethicists critique Google and AI for their large language models
Gebru’s draft paper points out that the sheer resources required to build and sustain such large AI models means they tend to benefit wealthy organizations, while climate change hits marginalized communities hardest. “It is past time for researchers to prioritize energy efficiency and cost to reduce negative environmental impact and inequitable access to resources,” they write.
Forensic Architecture releases their latest research piece - on forest fires in Papua
Worldward says it’s time we, taking a leaf from a friend, aim straight for Z (climate restoration) rather than B (net-zero). Nonetheless we have to prepare for a vastly different world.
Finally, some fire… and tinder~
I feel grief, when I sit in a discussion of Germany’s forests and the successful conservation of its carbon in its wood stocks, while in the front of my mind forest fires burn in Australia, Thailand, and the Philippines. And, as seed investors draw from Bayer’s libraries and oil money to create new terra-formations.
John Purcell, CEO of Unfold, speaking at the Asia-Pacific Agri-Food Innovation Summit in partnership with Temasek.
His “fortunate access” to Bayer's seed library spells "Resilience" as: complete biological colonization of the world's food supply and increased dependence on a few conglomerates - until it runs out. We can really do better than this.
When the Left discusses cases of alleged sexual harrassment, how it is that businesses continue robbing the rest of the world and still aren’t cancelled, is astounding. The Left needs to stop fighting and see the real conquest and daylight robbery that's happening.
One thing it does show, is how much we need to move at the speed of trust.
We need to share information and strategies about agriculture and food, faster. But we go only as fast as the slowest person - or perhaps put another way, the most damaged connection.
So I’ll wrap for now, with the thought:
Hello Huiying, thank you for sharing your really interesting, insightful, and provocative thoughts. They really do make me think and question the status quo, and learn to consider all of the perspectives on the matter being discussed. I found great resonance in the phrase, "we need to move at the speed of trust", and linking that with "we need to fix the system, not the women," from Shima's WE Lead courses, suggests to me a powerful coefficient: enabling women to gain positions of trust (and hence "power") is crucial to turning the system into a survivable mode for everyone and everything. Wishing you peaceful holidays and look forward to hearing your next thoughts. Anna Traylor