Soils, Symbiosis, and Succession: Eco-centric Care in Eastern Ontario

Abstract

This thesis explores human relationships to soil in Eastern Ontario, Canada. Through 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork with biologists, ecologists, gardeners, farmers, and natural historians, this thesis is an inquiry into the entanglements between soil and human life. My interlocutors, who I classify as “eco-centric,” are people who take soil as a living entity — or as a community of living beings — which opens into a wider domain of ecological concern. Coupling ethnographic concepts, rooted in ecology, with the anthropologies of kinship and ethics, this thesis contributes to conceptualizations of care, living well together, and succession. The ethnographic category of “eco-centric” is used to sketch out modes and ethics of relation in which the well-being of the soil crucially involves the well-being of human and more-than human ecosystems. Eco-centrism as an ethical mode centers ecological relations rather than bounded individual human subjects. In other words, eco-centrism involves care for the quality of relationships across species lines, by understanding the mode of interspecies living together as mutually constitutive. The thesis develops the entanglements of interspecies living together as symbiosis. Symbiosis involves relatedness through living together in which each entity is shaped in interaction with each other. In such a view on relatedness, eco-centrics read Ontario’s colonial history, conventional farming and gardening practices, and (sub)urban development as ecological disturbances with profound impacts on soil communities. My interlocutors critique and make efforts to mitigate these disturbances through various practices of repair, among those I focus upon are composting, alternative farming methods, and habitat gardening. What emerges through such a view on symbiosis is a constant interplay between the given and the made: soil and land, as both material substance and concept, are inherited while simultaneously remaining open to being changed through the modes in which humans and other living beings interact with it. This is developed as succession. Succession in ecology has emphasized the replacement of one community of organisms by another, while succession in kinship has emphasized human institutions for handling generational replacement and inheritance. Succession, as advanced in this thesis, is best conceptualized by emphasizing contingencies and process. That which is passed down is refigured or reincorporated through emergent symbiotic relationships. Further, this process involves not only intergenerational transmission but also interspecies transmission. When soil is changeable and deeply interconnected with human life, how to live well with soil becomes the object of ethical practices that are oriented toward relating differently or living well together. Centering ecological relatedness enacts alternatives to dominant modes of relating to land, soil, non-human and human beings. While living together well is not always achieved, striving for it produces important changes in conceptualizing and enacting relations as emplaced, intergenerational, and across species lines.