By Sigmar Groenveld, Lee Hoinacki, Ivan Illich, and Friends
Published June 1999
The ecological discourse on planet earth, global hunger, threats to life, urges us to look down at the soil, humbly. We stand on soil, not on earth. From soil we come, and to the soil we bequeath our excrements and remains. And yet soil— its cultivation and our bondage to it— is remarkably absent from those things clarified in our western tradition.
We search below our feet because our generation has lost its grounding in both soil and virtue. By virtue, we mean that shape, order and direction of action informed by tradition, bounded by place, and qualified by choices made within the habitual reach of the actor; we mean practice mutually recognized as being good within a shared mutual culture which enhances the memories of a place.
We note that such virtue is traditionally found in labor, craft, dwelling, and suffering supported, not by abstract earth, environment, or energy system, but by the particular soil these very actions have enriched with their traces. And yet, in spite of this ultimate bond between soil and being, soil and the good, philosophy has not brought forth the concepts which would allow us to relate virtue to common soil, something vastly different from managing behavior on a shared planet.
We were torn from the bonds to soil the connections which limited action, making practical virtue possible—when modernization insulated us from plain dirt, from toil, flesh, soil, and grave. The economy into which we have been absorbed— some, willy-nilly, some at great cost— transforms people into interchangeable morsels of population, ruled by the laws of scarcity.
Commons and homes are barely imaginable to persons hooked on public utilities and garaged in furnished cubicles. Bread is a mere foodstuff, if not calories or roughage. To speak of friendship, religion, and joint suffering as a style of conviviality after the soil has been poisoned and cemented over— appears like academic dreaming to people randomly scattered in vehicles, offices, prisons, and hotels.
We emphasize the duty to speak about soil. For Plato, Aristotle, and Galen it could be taken for granted; not so today. Soil on which culture can grow and corn be cultivated is lost from view when it is defined as a complex subsystem, sector, resource, problem, or “farm”— as agricultural science tends to do.
We offer resistance to those ecological experts who preach respect for science, but foster neglect for historical tradition, local flair, and the earthly virtue, self-limitation.
Sadly, but without nostalgia, we acknowledge the pastness of the past. With diffidence, then, we attempt to share what we see: some results of the earth’s having lost its soil. And we are irked by the neglect for soil in the discourse carried on among boardroom ecologists. But we are also critical of many among well-meaning romantics, Luddites, and mystics who exalt soil, making it the matrix, not the virtue, of life. Therefore, we issue a call for a philosophy of soil: a clear, disciplined analysis of that experience.
