Learning Journal















Our first open meeting




On 14th September 2022 we held our first open meeting at House of Annetta (HoA), a social centre in East London focussed on Land Justice. A small group of us had already been plotting and planning for over a year to get to this point, researching what was out there already and putting together a draft proposal to share at the meeting.





About 16 people showed up, from gardens and growing projects all over London. We started off by sitting in a big circle, filling HoA’s leafy courtyard and sharing our excitement, curiosities, interests and skills around the topic of soil health. 




We invited everyone inside to review the proposal so far, which we had chopped up into bits and stuck around the room on flipcharts. We wanted people to pull it apart and add their own ideas, which they did - producing an improved brief.


Whilst post-it notes flew around the room we discussed loads of different ideas and it felt like the project was starting to come alive….


We talked about the values that underlie the project and how to ensure they are practiced in what we do, how we produce knowledge, get funding and work with institutions. How would this project which stands for environmental and social justice itself be accountable, and hold those responsible for polluting our soils to account?


We talked about the importance of centering Traditional Ecological Knowledges (TEK) in what we do, as western science is just one way of ‘knowing’ soil. How could we make different knowledge practices speak to each other? For example  using microbiology to open up our imaginations and help us relate to soil in new ways, reimagining and reframing dominant narratives.
 


There were ideas around mapping soil pollution, making soil data readily available so that people could find out about their area without having to carry out testing themselves. We discussed the predicament of most gardens who often don’t know the full story of their soil, and so build raised beds or put down membranes to manage the potential risk. Having readily available soil data and testing could change the ways that gardens grow and the kinds of infrastructures needed. At the same time, it was pointed out that for established gardens, finding out their soil is not safe to grow in - could have a detrimental effect on access to land and food production on a local level…

We discussed running a pilot project to demonstrate how the clinic might work and figure things out ourselves, and there seemed to be interest and agreement that this was a good idea.




We finished up with a skill and resource sharing exercise, asking people to share things they needed or wanted to offer the project. This involved a complicated colour coded post-it system, which Elena collated below >>








Organising our team





After our first open meeting we started to form more of a coherent team, meeting online and in person to talk about how we wanted to work together. Kim drafted a decision making process to help get us started.





One of the first decisions we made together was to divide our work into 2 “circles”: an Organising Circle and a Learning Circle. This emerged out of a recognition that a smaller number of us had energy and interest in organising the how, where, what, who, and why of the project, whilst a wider pool of people wanted to learn together and explore methods, resources and tools for soil testing. Some of us were in both camps, but still, it felt useful to define these two kinds of activity that would be fundamental to the clinic. 





Those of us who were in the organising circle agreed to meet on the first Wednesday of the month, and were offered a free space to do this at Hackney Herbal gardens and studio. Having this space and regular meeting time enabled us to embark on a deep process together and bring this project into being.


An important starting point for the organising circle was to discuss Why, What and How to create a community soil clinic. ‘Why’ is our values, ‘how’ is our methods and ‘what’ is practices and activities. When discussing ‘why’ we noticed three general themes: justice (addressing oppression/ inequality/ marginalisation, a desire to change / transform these conditions), access (to land/ soil/ knowledge) and love (of soil, land, earthlings etc.). We also talked about the importance of nourishment, and the different ways in which this project might be able to address this question: resourcing communities and ourselves, investigating nutrients in soil and plant matter [nutrient justice], increasing access to land / green space etc.









In the ‘how’ we talked about how the project could be resourced, asking how aligned we would need to be with funders in order to accept money from them? Do they need to ‘share’ our values or ‘respect’ them? Is it transformative? Is it worth compromising sometimes to build something resilient and long term? We knew that this project would rely on partnerships and collaborations with other groups, and that these questions would always be alive. We asked ourselves how we could collaborate and work with others in ways that honour our values, get things done and help to make the wider change we want to see? Thinking about our methods took us back to our values (the ‘why’) and the importance of these values for guiding us through tough decisions. Naomi reflected that, as a small grass-roots group, our ‘values’ were all that we had, our main “asset”. We also acknowledged that, as part of holding shared values as a collective that is made up of individuals, coming and going from the project, we need to make space for disagreement, conflict and difference.


The desire to learn together and develop sound organisational systems emerged as a way we wanted to be able to work together, and which felt in alignment with our values (more on this later!). Though we recognised that this focus on systems and processes isn’t how everyone likes to work.


When we discussed the kinds of activities and practices we’d like to do, some possible roles we’d each like to play started to emerge. There seemed to be a good spread of people wanting to organise, do admin, facilitate, deliver soil testing, do research and fundraise etc. but we needed to return to the nuts and bolts of our organising before we could start planning our activities.


Quite early on we discussed the need to resource ourselves to be able to show up and participate within our varying capacities, this was also connected to our values around justice and equity. Hari, Tito and Kim worked together on an application to the Landscape Research Group, who agreed to fund us for £5k, bringing our overall budget up to £11k, as we already had some funding in place from London National Park City and Necessity. 


“People will need different things in order to be able to show up, how do we make the resources we have respond to different needs in a more dynamic way?” (notes from meeting minutes 1st March 2023)


As the resources available to us were finite and limited in various ways, we agreed to create a ‘needs matrix’ to help us understand and map the different financial needs/ desires, capacities, access or support needs of the team. Hari created a questionnaire, based on needs assessments they had done as part of other collectives. We gave ourselves a couple of months to fill it in, and shared our needs as part of an organising circle where we listened to each member’s needs and discussed ways that these could be met collectively. Hari and Naomi took the implementation of this on as an action point, and developed two proposals: For how we could share our financial resources, and how to capture and respond to each other’s access and support needs. The group helped us to refine the proposals, and we developed some new systems as a result that felt supportive, sustainable and nourishing. 


Learning Circle #1 reflections




Our first learning circle took place on Sunday 14th May 2pm, at Hackney Herbal’s studios. We chose a Sunday because we wanted this gathering to offer something meaningful and nourishing beyond the scope of an ordinary organising meeting. As a newly forming group, we were seeking community, something more, and wanting to ask big questions together. We decided to focus this circle around the introduction to Pollution is Colonialism by Indigenous scientist Max Liboiron (Métis/Mischif). The text shares methods from the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) which is an anti-colonial lab in Newfoundland, Canada testing pollution in marine environments. This was a book that some of us had come across in our lives already, and which felt very relevant and aligned with the vision and aims of the soil clinic. We found a free pdf available here, but have since decided to buy the book as a collective and pass it between us, so that we can share our notes, underlinings and annotations, adding a new layer of text to this already very multi-layered work. 

The Circle was in person and online, with 9 of us joining altogether. Naomi facilitated, with support from Tito whose role it was to gather information and reflections for our ongoing research funded by the Landscape Research Group.


Taking a cue from Liboiron who writes about the importance of introductions to show where our knowledge comes from, who we are accountable to, and how we are built (p.vii), Naomi invited us to each introduce ourselves by sharing our names, pronouns, a river/s that we have a relationship with, and anything we knew about our ancestry.



“Introducing yourself is part of ethics and obligation, not punishment” p.4


I am a white British & Irish person from a family that is mixed in terms of race and class. I was born near to the river Avon, and have lived along the Thames for 13 years, I have recently moved to the (now lost) Pent River[1]. As a group we represented many different genders, rivers, nations, connections to Land and ethnicities. We were: Naomi, Hattie, Tito, Alani, David, Shumaisa, Meghan, Hari, and Michelle. 


After we had grounded, and given our consent to take part in the soil clinic’s research, Naomi read the following excerpt, to bring us back to the text:





After this Naomi invited us to form small discussion groups and share our questions with each other. We scribbled them on post-it notes, now hard to make sense of 8 months later as I write this… 






When we re-grouped our conversation landed on the question of ‘extractive reading’, and what we each understood from this. It brought up various memories and reflections of previous learning and conditioning from more institutionalised settings, and the ways some of us may have been taught to approach knowledge, as a quest for answers, solutions, and ‘fixes’, rather than the careful formation and holding of questions. We reflected on how the style/s and tone/s of the text encouraged us as readers to ask questions of ourselves, our positions and our methods.



“Methodology is a way of being in the world” (p.1)


Naomi shared this interview with Max Liboiron, in which they talk about how their decision to address different readers coming from different positions (indigenous, non-white, non-settler audiences as well as settler, non-indigenous and “general” academic audiences) made it possible for them to adopt multiple tones and styles and have different conversations with different readers, calling some readers aside to share jokes and struggles, whilst warning others not to steal and appropriate their work. This resulted in the final text moving away from being written in a defensive style, to one that felt more “generous”. As a newly forming community soil clinic we also have to grapple with our relationships with academic institutions, which we know from experience, operate through extractive and colonial logics. These institutions hold power, and some resources that could support what we are trying to do, but we also know that the existence of such institutions ultimately prevents communities from building power and knowledge to act within our environments. The decision around whether to collaborate with or reject academic institutions entirely has been an ongoing conversation. We too adopt different tones and approaches when speaking with different people about this project. We are wary of the ways in which some academics might both fetishise and appropriate the “out-in-the-real-world”-ness of what we are doing, and then tell us that we are wrong/ mistaken and don’t know enough. Not to mention the ways in which institutions swallow up research funding, taking months/years to pay invoices, whilst assuming entitlement to the wisdom, good ideas and intellectual labour of their non-academic collaborators and participants. Liboiron’s text is a helpful guide for navigating these compromised relationships (“using science against science”? p.20) with nuance and specificity. 


Liboiron’s attention to detail and emphasis on specificity also felt like a real gift from the text, and method that we have tried to adopt when testing soils in different gardens with different histories and different questions.


“To change colonial land relations requires specificity. This is so we don’t accidentally think that the opposite of colonialism is environmentalism or, similarly, that we don’t conflate colonialism with other forms of extraction, such as capitalism. Colonialism and capitalism might be happy bed fellows and indeed longtime lovers, but they are not the same thing.” (p.13)


It is important to pull these things apart, understand how they operate, and how they relate to each other in complex ways at different times and places. This enables us to recognise and respond to different forms of oppression with precision, and to name the different types of justice we are fighting for. In the case of the soil clinic:


Our values are rooted in social justice, land justice, soil justice, food justice, racial justice, disability justice, and a desire to transform conditions which create oppression and inequity 

Liboiron urges us to centre anti-colonialism in our analyses, methods and actions. Their text focuses on colonial land relations and teaches us to recognise them in “familiar and comfortable places” (p.6) like community gardens for instance??  Which is where we turned our attention next asking, how do these spaces that we care about and are connected to enact or resist colonial land relations? 


There is probably an essay or book to write about this, as such spaces are often described as ‘good’, ‘ecological’, ‘community-led’, ‘sustainable’, ‘commons’ etc. whilst at the same time supporting processes of gentrification, upholding white supremacy, power hierachies, ableism, enclosing land, excluding and exploiting people. These spaces can be politically messy, and hard to make sense of, there is also a lot of hope to be found in them, and opportunities to connect with each other and with the Land, in radical and transformative ways. We thought about the sites and spaces we knew or might work with, asking: 


Who owns the land?

Who feels ownership of the land? (acknowledging the difference between legal and experiential relationships to Land)

Who has access to it? 

How is it managed and by whom? 


We developed these questions further when devising our call out for pilot projects, in an attempt to start out by working with gardens and growing spaces that were aligned with our values. It is still hard to know for sure though, if a project that says it is committed to social justice is actually committed to social justice, or just saying it, or has a different definition of what this means, or struggles to be consistent with its values under the oppressive intersecting forces of capitalism and colonialism which dominate our city and the world… we also need to ask this question of ourselves ongoingly, checking our motivations, directions, internal dynamics and decisions as a collective. As Liboiron says “our work is always compromised” (p.21) and the idea that it isn’t, or that we can start from scratch with a clean slate, is also a colonial fantasy / “terra nullius” (no man’s land).




“We are unable to step outside of the system we are in” (post-it notes from Learning Circle #1)


David shared this diagram with us, which illustrates these different methodological positions. (A) a lifeworld, which is part of us and that we are part of, there is no such thing as ‘objectivity’, we speak from a position, we are responsible for our positions, bodies and Lands are inseparable. (B) a globe which is also an object, something we can look at from a distance, objective truth is attainable from this unmarked “position” outside of things, from no man’s land.


This imagined space of objectivity is also the “away” that is relied upon by colonial land relations to receive and hold the waste and pollution generated by settler societies and capitalist production. Terra nulius = stolen land, genocide, conquest, disappearances; pollution is colonialism, not a byproduct of it. Liboiron writes about the ‘threshold theory of pollution’ developed by sanitation engineers Streeter and Phelps (both unmarked). This theory, which informs much environmental policy today, asserts that there is a measurable theshold at which waste products can no longer be assimilated into a landscape/ body of water/ ‘sink’, and that this threshold is where “contamination” becomes “pollution”. Deciding on how much is too much, can be quite a subjective and political endeavour, influenced by all sorts of factors, and changing knowledge and technologies over time (it is A) yet it is made to seem like an incontrovertible, objective truth (B), which is the problem with western dominant science. 


The CLEAR lab adopt anti-colonial ways of understanding and monitoring pollution. They don’t make a distinction between contamination and pollution, and reject the threshold theory of pollution as one rooted in “a colonial system of land relations where the land is a Resource” (p.39). For these reasons, they don’t use methods or tests that rely on toxic chemicals (anymore), and they practice ‘judgemental’ sampling rather than ‘random’ sampling, to foreground food sovereignty. The use of toxic chemicals to test for more toxic chemicals is something we’ve also been grappling with during the soil clinic pilot. Whilst in theory, the idea of using reagents to test for heavy metals, sounded ok, and was something we fundraised for… in practice, when carrying out these tests collectively with big community groups, in gardens and community spaces - it feels wrong, incongruous and compromising… When practicing and skillsharing with each other we sometimes feel weird in our bodies in the presence these chemicals. We go to great lengths to label and contain the test remnants in plastic bottles, which we keep, along with our growing collection of apparatus and soil samples - we are undecided about what to do with them…


Some of the bigger questions underlying the work we are doing as a clinic are about harm and toxicity and how we relate to these things in community, and on the Land. In our research proposal to the Landscape Research Group (LRG) we wrote: 


What resources and knowledges are needed to care for our soils and each other in just and transformative ways? And what does ‘care’ mean to us in the contexts in which we live, work and grow?  

I happened to read the introduction to Pollution is Colonialism at the same time as putting together our ethics statement for the LRG. This made me reflect upon harm in relation to research, but also in organising and activist groups, which seek to make spaces “safe” or “safer”. Our ethics statement is a blend of the two, proposing ways in which we could ‘mitigate’ and ‘minimise’ potential harm to anyone participating in the project. Often academic ethics statements will try to claim that they will be able to do no harm, which seems unlikely. There is understandably a huge amount of suspicion that comes with the word ‘research’...


“‘Research’ is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary… it stirs up silence, it conjures bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful… the ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world’s colonised peoples. It is a history that still offends the deepest sense of our humanity.” (Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 1999, 1)


As humans operating within existing colonial and oppressive systems, we have to acknowledge and take responsibility for the fact that we are implicated in harm. Sealing and labeling our toxic leftovers in plastic bottles won’t get us off the hook! (lol) Talking about how there might be arsenic and lead in our soil, plants, food and bodies stirs up emotions and feelings that we can’t get away from. In many of the groups I am part of we have been reckoning with this over the last year, doing training, reading together and co-authoring various frameworks, policies, spells and systems for responding to interpersonal harm. The soil clinic has also developed its own Safer spaces agreement, but part of me feels like all of these efforts are a bit like creating an arbitrary threshold of “acceptable harm”, that in reality won’t make people any safer. We/ I need space and time to grieve that. A recent training course that a couple of members of the soil clinic attended proposed an alternative framework for “caring and courageous spaces” (courtesy of Crossroads Anti-racism Organising and Training in the US). This framework does not seek to stop or minimise harm, but instead offers principles for how we can care for each other, and challenge each other in order to transform harm and the conditions which produce it. There is something hopeful that resonates here, about our capacity and collective power to alchemise all this shit.I don’t yet know how these ideas, principles, methods and ethics will weave their way into the soil clinic - this will take time and practice to figure out… but we are just at the beginning, and also maybe we should read the rest of the book!?


The introduction ends on an incredibly exhilarating, hopeful and empowering note (for the radical gardeners and microscope nerds among us)


“I’m always glad when people raise a fist against the injustices of systems, including pollution and its sciences. But I’d much prefer people to pick up a shovel - or a microscope - with the other hand a get to work” (p.37)








P.s 

Here’s an excerpt from another book I’m reading at the moment, set in the future after a series of massive global revolutions. This vision in the footnotes from ~2072, made me think of CLEAR and the Soil Clinic’s work, and the very different worlds we are trying to make:


“Even the word ‘academia’ may be foreign as it refers to a distinct institutional and social life that thankfully no longer exists… Present conditions have effectively abolished academia, incorporating knowledge production throughout society” (Everything for everyone, An oral history of the New York commune 2052 - 2072, M.E O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi)


Resources shared 

https://www.are.na/haile-thomas/a-window-for-looking

https://dukeupress.wordpress.com/2021/05/14/qa-with-max-liboiron-author-of-pollution-is-colonialism/

https://phys.org/visualstories/2023-04-fungi-meal-hard-to-recycle-plastic.amp

https://advaya.life/courses/sensing-harm-by-design

[1]  When introducing myself I noticed an inner struggle to name my whiteness, and my Britishness, which I acknowledge as a response to a colonial inheritance which seeks to ‘centre… whiteness as an unexceptional norm’ (p.4), the discomfort that occurs when asked not to do this, is also related to responsibility, and complicity in harm. As we embark on this project which is about understanding and transforming historic and current harms in our soils, these sticky feelings in the body seem relevant.

by Hari



 


Learning Circle #2 reflections


A full write up from this learning circle is coming! in the meantime, you can read our report here.

Soil Portraits 



 
Results table 
 


Learning Circle #3 reflections




A dark and rainy evening: the transition into autumn is in the air. We gather from across the city, out of the cold anonymous streets and into the cocoon of that nighttime garden, for a learning circle and community feast. We have come together to look at soil health from a plethora of approaches. Compaction, microbiology, contaminants, food sharing, and collective dreaming; the combination of these things, their relative strengths and weaknesses and how they interact as a whole, tell us about the health of the soil and its communities.


Soil samples were gathered and dried ahead of the workshop


The activities are organized so that we can explore the properties of soil and achieve a richer understanding through looking at it in different ways. In terms of the structure of soil, we carry out compaction tests by measuring the depth at which soil resists our homemade pentrometer, indicating how air, water and roots can move through its layers. In terms of Biology, we take some fresh samples and analyze them under the microscope, looking at bacterial and fungal activity, as well as visually identifying the components of soil (water, air, organic matter, hyphae, minerals, nematodes, protozoa, bacteria). In terms of Chemistry we use prepared dry soil samples to test both its pH and the presence of lead - which might potentially have settled there from the nearby road above and also as a result of historic construction. (You can find our preliminary report and video links here)



We feel engaged, empowered, and stimulated by these learnings and methodologies. The room is filled with questions, perspectives, theories, and gratitude. Even though the activities are facilitated by a few, the group works as a harmonious organism experimenting with its surroundings. Food is eaten as a potluck; tomatoes from the garden and recipes from different participants connect us on a deeper level, as we exchange stories and laughter. 


After bellies are full and senses comfortable, the lights are dimmed for us to enter a state of dreaming. Some of the areas that we tested will become a commemorative garden for The Black Mary Project which intends to revive an imaginative healing sanctuary in Kings Cross, memorialising the history of Mary Woolaston, a 17th-century Black woman who tended and managed a healing well here. Through acknowledging previously untold local histories and Calthorpe’s caring present, we spiralled together into the future in an exercise to envision healed soil supporting abundant life. So we can see the city as a permaculture garden or as a new landscape of emotions, and imagine how those histories of the future may one day intertwine.


We finish with a reflective circle which emphasizes the importance of relationship building and community as a method, particularly the importance of intergenerational spaces and the ways in which elders hold and create community here. There was a celebration of diverse cultures that come here through flows of migration; and how spaces like this enable us to notice and experience natural cycles as the seasons pass. Calthorpe is quite an undervalued, overlooked and rare space int he midle of London, where community, connection, conversation and eating together is central. Garden members reflected on how its importance became clearer during the pandemic, sharing their belief that the skills and knowledge of being in community are essential tools for future healing and transformation. This resonates a lot with what we are trying to achieve with the community soil clinic, where organising collectively has become one of our key, and most valued methods for understanding and relating to soil.

What is ‘community’? Etymologically ‘com’ and ‘munis’ mean performing services together, but what does that mean in a community of practice and who is involved in that togetherness? Perhaps if we break the connections that exist in healthy soil, we build gaps between us humans...

“We are all going to be soil at the end of the day, so let’s look after each other”  (Mila, Calthorpe Community Garden)


Findings, learnings and questions:

  • We need more equipment for certain tests and more tools to interpret results
  • Activities in small groups at the beginning help the group to engage with each other and the environment
  • Need of a glossary of terms like ‘anaerobic’, ‘pollution’, ‘community’
  • Need for archiving and sharing information with participants
  • Participants are pushing the clinic to achieve its vision, community being the purpose, method and driver of the project
  • How do we consolidate all the different types of learning that happen during these circles?
  • What are we learning about “community” from doing this work?

by Tito

 


Learning Circle #4 reflections



In our conversations with Coco Collective ahead of this session, loads of interesting questions were emerging, like: How do we care for and manage our soils so that we can grow vegetables from the Caribbean in Bellingham? How does plastic (in the form of rubbish, weed suppressing fabric and horticultural plastics) affect soil health and soil chemistry? How do we improve our composting processes? How can we safely use pee and maybe humanure from our compost toilet on our sites? (though as an Ital garden, there were also questions about if this would be in alignment with their principles). We tried to design a set of methods that would go about answering some of these questions… and intended for our first workshop to be a way of gathering some baseline measures of soil health from Coco Collective’s Catford site, and to get to know the gardeners there. As there was no electricity on site, we agreed to run two shorter workshops; one in the garden and one indoors  where we could use the microscope and carry out further testing (we are still in the process of finding a time for part two)


Travelling towards the garden on a rainy Sunday afternoon in March, we weren’t sure if anyone would come, as we’d sent the invite out quite last minute, and workshops can be so unpredictable. The Soil Clinic collective has also lost some energy over the last 6 months, as a couple of our members needed to step back to be able to focus on other work and life stuff. This session was organised and facilitated by Naomi and Hari, in collaboration with Valerie from Coco Collective. When we arrived at the garden, Chauntelle greeted us and gave us a tour around. She showed us the samples she’d collected earlier in the week, all labelled and bagged up, but still wet (it had been raining a lot!) - and shared that she had enjoyed gathering and organising the samples. We sat together chatting about how we each came to working with the soil, and all the different entry points for getting excited about growing. Gradually more and more people started to join us round the table, sharing their relationships with the garden, their interests and adding more questions to the pile like: 

  • What kind of low cost accessible methods can we use to test our soils ongoingly? 
  • How do you understand decolonisation and how do we decolonise the soil? 
  • What do you think is the future of soil? 
  • Is your focus on UK soils only? 
  • How can we improve our composting game?
  • How can we replenish our soils between growing seasons?


Members of the garden shared the importance of collectivity and emotional support. Their motto, shared by Valerie’s mum is: “Work in a collective to achieve your objective” (? - I took terrible notes on the day, so am writing these reflections from memory the next day…). Folks had come with lots of curiosity, and a desire to connect with others, feel different, learn about soil in a more intentional way, and deepen their knowledge. I really felt the appetite and excitement about being in a learning space, and having lots of time to go deep, and share learning with one another, as well as joy in getting to do practical stuff like digging holes and counting worms. Some of the feedback we got at the end asked for more time to engage with the books and diagrams that we’d brought. On reflection, a more formal reading circle like we’d done at Hackney Herbal and Abbey Gardens, would have gone down well in this context, but would have needed more time.


“It has been a pleasure, giving us an opportunity to answer all questions during the Q&A openly. I liked the books on the table to learn from / read.” (Participant feedback)


We ended up adapting our session plan to allow more time for conversation and knowledge sharing in the beginning. We then offered a few different options for testing the soil and attempted to decide together which to prioritise. Even though I’d spent loads of time prepping our chemistry set to test for NPK (Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium) and pH, there seemed to be much more appetite for low-tech testing methods, using everyday kitchen and garden tools like apple corers, trowls, shovels, jars, tape measures, garlic crushers, kitchen knives etc. I felt relieved by this, as I am still unsure about how well the chemistry tests we have, work as a group activity in a garden setting. As the pre-collected soil samples weren’t totally dry yet, we were also limited in what ‘fancy’ tests we could do. We decided to test compaction, texture, water retention and do a worm count. There was also interest in focussing on their composting system, so we offered a compost Q&A at the end.





Something I noticed is that our methods are messy! it’s hard to be super “scientific” (whatever that means) and precise when doing things in a big group… however, there is another quality that emerges, which feels equally, if not more valuable; where we start figuring stuff out and directing things collectively; “let’s go over here, and try this”, “dig here”, “what if we do that…” For example, deciding to rename the worm count the “wiggle test”, and then including other creatures in the count like woodlice and centipedes, also combining it with a collection of soil plastics, which we arranged on our results table >>>> It was powerful to see the range and volume of plastics gathered from a small area, and to speculate about how the worms and woodlice, and smaller members of the soil food web might be cohabiting alongside so much plastic. 

The issue of plastics in soil is relatively under-researched, compared to plastic pollution in marine environments, even though there is a much higher incidence of microplastics on land than in the sea. According to the research we looked at (Lin et al. 2020), microplastics can affect the biodiversity, health and functioning of soil fauna, for example impacting the ways that earthworms make their burrows, affecting their fitness, also impeding the movement and population of oribatid mites and other microarthropods. When ingested, microplastics produce toxic effects in worms, snails, nematodes etc. although interestingly (according to this study) they have less impact on bacterial and fungal feeding nematodes.

Chlorinated plastics can leach chemicals into groundwater, which affects all creatures ingesting this water. This can affect their hormonal systems, cause inflammation, trigger changes in gene expression! (when entering cells), and cause biochemical reactions… Would chlorine leaching also kill bacteria and fungi?

Interestingly, Lin et al found that microplastics have little effect on bacterial and fungal communities, increasing certain enzymes used for carbon and nutrient cycling, (particularly nitrogen and phosphorus). This results in nutrients becoming more available in the soil - which may be positive for certain plants, but could also throw an ecosystem off balance.

Their research suggests that the abundance and structure of soil biota may serve as useful bioindicators to monitor microplastic pollution in soils. So combining the wiggle test with observations of soil plastics, could be a really great DIY method, that we figured out intuitively by just being and connecting with the land!* This could be something we explore further through microscope analysis, particularly looking closely at samples gathered close to areas of high plastic pollution.

As Lead is frequently used in producing PVC (Darwish 2013: 282), testing for lead concentrations near areas of plastic pollution could be another way to monitor the impact of plastic on soil chemistry.

Despite our messy methods (or maybe because of them?) during each pilot workshop our data gathering system slightly evolved. From post-its scattered on a table top, to hand drawn “battleship-type” maps, scattered and then more linear grids on various scraps of paper, we have finally arrived at a roll of brown paper, where we list the sample areas down the left hand side, and the different tests along the top. Using a roll of paper means that we are not limited by the size of the scrap, and can keep adding new tests and experiments as we go. Without this shared location where we can write up results, data tends to float off into the ether…. Despite this semblance of order, there is still a feeling that we are not really scratching the surface, as more and more questions and complexities surface, and slip away. There is also a practical issue when doing this work in a garden / landscape, of where to put the spreadsheet? As people tend to disperse across the garden to carry out various tests, what is the mechanism for recording the findings in the field and bringing them back to the results table? Some things get forgotten/ misremembered, some things get carried in people’s heads, phones, scribbled on the backs of hands etc.…. The data feels kind of wild and alive, which I like, but we all also want to have something to show and make sense of at the end. Reflecting on this, I have wondered about developing a workbook or results sheet for people to carry with them to record stuff on? Or, to think about more creative ways to capture and collate learning, like a zine. The Soil Mentor app has worked out a good solution for this (for those with smartphones), toolkits like Bioindicators Field Guide also offer more low-tech examples for gathering field data. 

Documentation is so hard to do whilst facilitating a workshop, especially for those of us who are neurodiverse/ Mad/ disabled / sick - there is already a lot going on! We intended to take pictures, record voices etc. but we didn’t, so some stuff got lost… But maybe that’s ok? maybe it’s part of our methodology? Maybe we are getting at something else instead?... Rather than extracting data to take home, own and extrapolate, our practice prioritises the social / qualitative dimension of performing an experiment; putting your hands in the soil, meeting a worm, examining their markings, and being in conversation with each other… There is always so much that escapes us and wiggles away. Maybe this is an important part of ‘knowing’ and decolonising the soil?


What did you enjoy most about the space?


“The hands on element of the testing

and getting our hands dirty”



“I learnt lots of things I didn’t expect to 

learn and don’t always get the chance 

to look at these things so closely. Thanks!”



“Really lovely and welcoming group and 

space felt so nice to be outside” 



“I enjoyed the practical tests and learning

about the complexity of soil”



Appreciating, and getting a feel for the complexity of soil, and all that we don’t know is something that participants have given us feedback on in past Learning Circles, and reflects an important part of our pedagogy:

“It looks more concrete. A lot of work, getting to grasp the fact that it is complex work. Enjoyed the discussion at the beginning, very important points about wellbeing, grief and engaging with wider community”


(Abbey Gardens participant feedback)


This was something I discussed with Alice at an early organising meeting, thinking together about how to interrupt the desire (in ourselves / from others) for singular experts with all the answers, and instead facilitate spaces of collective enquiry and questioning. These can be spaces where a different kind of expertise can emerge, and be held in common. Communalising our knowledge, acknowledging what we don’t know and marvelling at complexity, is therefore a key intention which drives our learning and organising. It has been reassuring to hear that this is starting to be felt by our collaborators and workshop participants. 

In the first part of the workshop, I offered up some of the knowledge I have gathered over the years, about soil ecology through training with Elaine Ingham, Dave Beecher, Rob Littlepage, and Growing Communities, sharing diagrams of the soil food web, and ecological succession. Emi-Belle asked an important question about how to care for cultivated soil in the long term if, what it wants to do is grow into a forest? This is making me think now about the “will” of soil. I have often wondered about how we can enter into consent based relationships with soil; how do we communicate? And get to know what soil wants, needs and desires? How do we then respond? Naomi pointed out that the succession model I had presented, is based on temperate climates, and I have since been reflecting on how much this particular model (positioning northern hemisphere climates as the norm for attributing health and value to different soils) informs the regenerative soil sciences that I have been learning from.  The story goes that: 

Soil ecosystems are on a linear trajectory from rocky terrain to old growth forest. As lichens and mosses begin to form on the rocks, digesting minerals, living, dying and decomposing, a small thin dusting of soil is produced which becomes home to bacteria and annual wild plants (sometimes called “weeds”) like chickweed, which extract nitrogen in the form of nitrates (NO3), released by the bacterial populations around their roots. The bacteria create alkaline slimes which bind microaggregates and hold soluble nutrients for plant roots to absorb, in exchange the plant offers simple sugars (exudates) which are a product of photosynthesis. This relationship results in a more alkaline / neutral soil which also suits the pioneering species better. Over time, as the annual plants die and decompose on the soil surface, fungi enter the scene, attracted to the fungal foods released by the annual weeds, and higher carbon concentrations in the stalks and dead plant matter. As fungi produce slimes and glues that are more acidic by nature, the pH of the soil gradually shifts to become slightly more neutral or slightly acidic, which creates the right conditions for perennial grasses, herbs, and shrubs. This shift in succession is marked by a shift in the ratio of bacteria to fungi, and the impact this has on soil pH, and also nitrogen. When more fungi are present in the soil, as well as larger organisms like nematodes and amoebae - Nitrogen is released in ammonium form - which suits larger and larger plant species - until we have small bushes and trees starting to take root and thrive. Small trees give way to larger trees, increasing the carbon content in the soil, and attracting more and more fungi, and less and less bacteria. This process eventually results in the growth of deciduous forests, which eventually give way to coniferous and old growth forests. When we cultivate the soil in various ways, we are interrupting this process, and trying to replicate a mid-succession ecosystem like a meadow, where the bacteria: fungi ratio is around 1:1 or slightly more bacterially dominated, for growing non-mycrhizzal crops like brassicas. 



...This model can be helpful for assessing soil health in temperate climates like the UK, but it needs to be situated in its context, not be presented as a universal framework, and thought about critically through a decolonial lens. I also have some more learning to do about what ‘succession’ looks like in tropical climates, and / or in climates and ecosystems that are rapidly changing as a result of climate colonialism, and industrialisation... if ‘succession’ is even a helpful term? Given the many complexities, cosmologies, variables, and unknowns when it comes to soil - models like this can feel reductive, deterministic and not always appropriate in the contexts in which we work. We are also finding that the results we are seeing on the ground, do not always fit the model described above. For example: the more fungally dominated soils in Calthorpe’s sunken garden, were more alkaline than the grassy soils, and the woody compost pile at Abbey gardens where we would expect to see more fungi dining out on the carbon foods in the brown material, was in fact bacterially dominated. As is often the case in gardening and growing, the “science” doesn’t always reflect our experience.

Applying European / North American/ colonial logics of soil health to other contexts has been used, and still is being used to displace indigenous people, extract resources, steal land and commit genocide. We see this happening in Palestine and southern Lebanon right now, in calls to ‘make the desert bloom’. Anthropologist Kristina Lyons writes and speaks about how soil science informs imperial and capitalist violence in the Amazon, on the Green Dreamer Podcast. She says:


“In the particular context of the Colombian Amazon, I looked genealogically at when the state begins to explore and do an inventory of its Amazon basin.

We can think historically about when they begin to engage in soils studies, when they look at taxation based on land... In the 1970s, the Colombian government, with support from Holland, engages in its first inventory studies of the Amazon. They begin mapping, soil sampling and doing an inventory of the biodiversity, and understanding the communities that are inhabiting these territories.

The soil scientists that I was able to meet and interview were telling me about how they were shocked by the fact that they were, from an aerial view, looking at this exuberant Amazonian forest—only to find that these 5-10cm hojarasca layers weren't even “soil” to them, according to their scientific definitions. And it was a great disappointment, because it did not, for them, signal a potential for future economic development in terms of industrialized agriculture, extensive cattle ranching, or other forms of industrial production.

This is similar to what's happened in other parts of the world that have pieces of the Amazonian Basin, such as the Brazilian Amazon and Peruvian Amazon.

The first writings about the soils of the Amazon by these scientists were really stigmatizing. They were explaining that the soils were thin, poor, acidic, and senile.

And they weren't really sure what to do with them—which of course, negates the ancestral practices and knowledge in the civilizations of the Amazon that were successfully living, growing, being part of the selva.

Why this stigmatization of the soils happened was because the soils that they were looking for were based on scientific definitions that came from the USDA…

soil classification systems from temperate climates, not tropical ones, that were creating categories based on the productivity of soils... But the productivity was according to a certain standard of what is "productive", what kinds of commercial crops can be grown.”

I would also like to do more digging around the history of Albert Howard, a British botanist in colonial India, who is credited with founding the organic farming movement, and providing the definition of compost that Dr Elaine Ingham uses in her online trainings. 

A summary of what we learnt so far about Coco Collective’s Soil during part 1 of this pilot can be found here


References


Lin et al. 2020 ‘Microplastics negatively affect soil fauna but stimulate microbial activity’,  Proceedings of the Royal Society B

Soil Mentor

Bioindicators Field Guide by Chris Maughan and Dominic Amos

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2020.1268

Earth Repair by Leyla Darwish 

Kristina Lyons - Soil as cultural, relational, historical, Green Dreamer




*inspired by this, and a question that came up at our previous learning circle about “where is the wiggle room” with regards to pollutant concentrations in water, air and soil… I have a proposal for a possible name for a future iteration of the soil clinic. Can you guess? The Wiggle Room…


by Hari

 


Learning Circles #5 & 6 reflections



This was perhaps our most complex pilot study, in terms of the concerns about pollution in the garden, which is situated near to the Edmonton incinerator and North Circular, and in terms of our relationships with garden members, their relationships with each other, and our shifting capacities over the course of the project, which delayed the delivery of this pilot. These layers of complexity impacted our ability to carry out the tests we had proposed, gather questions and get to know the soil and community here. However, it also pushed us to do lots of extra testing, research and thinking about what we are doing, learning and offering; drawing us into spaces of conflict, grief, self doubt and collective reflection.


We learnt earlier this year that Rebecca Maguire, who we had mostly been liaising with about Angel gardens, had unexpectedly and tragically died at the end of 2023. We were shocked and saddened to hear of her passing, as we’d been moved by her energy, passion and gentleness, and felt supported by her in the short time we’d known her. Rebecca’s friend and fellow community gardener Aurora was the one to reach out to ask if we could still deliver the pilot in honour of Rebecca and her commitment to this project. We agreed to run two workshops instead of one, and to try and put together a workshop outline that would allow us to go a bit deeper, to connect, and listen to sounds and stories from the garden, as well as explore a long list of potential pollutants from nearby and historic industries.


When we first met Rebecca and Sara online to discuss the key questions and aims of this pilot (see report), Sara asked if there were soil datasets available that she could look at, as she is a data analyst. We asked a soil ecologist about what data is already out there, and were told that generally there is not enough up to date knowledge or data on how soil contamination works, which is a major barrier to having a more strategic soil use strategy and monitoring framework like there is for water and air. More available soil data could lead to litigations over past use, and raise land use and ownership issues. Without data being available, it becomes very difficult to hold any individual or organisation to account, and to make policy on how to care for and monitor soil. Evidence tends to be regional, anecdotal or on a case by case basis. He told us that access to low cost testing is ‘the only way’ to challenge these blockages. It struck me how the lack of transparency and cost of soil testing and knowledge is tied up with private land ownership, corporate/ institutional power and enclosure - which assumes that soil pollution and contamination are private matters that do not concern the general public… Creating an open source soil pollution map of London, is one of the original and ongoing aspirations for this project.


The lack of available data and expense of testing, was what brought the members of Angel Gardens to apply to be one of our pilot sites. Their focus had mostly been on air pollution, and they’d previously applied for a grant to buy an air pollution sensor for the garden, but had not been successful. Aurora shared her research with us on air and soil pollution near incinerators in Italy and the UK, which spoke about how “puzzling levels of dioxins” were found near to UK incinerators in a soil pollution study in 2007, but that no further testing had been done since. I got this feeling that community members were having to feel around in the dark, to piece together evidence from other places and times, in order to make sense of what might be happening in their context. The stakes for this project were therefore quite high! And we really wanted to do a good job.


A few days before the workshop, Aurora let Hari know that there had been some conflict between garden members, and that no one had been able to access the garden yet this year. We talked a bit about toxicity, and its material, social and relational manifestations in community spaces and projects, and how the skills to respond to and transform this are rare. How does the possibility of toxicity in the soil impact or get reflected in power dynamics and relationships between people on the land? 


“We are part of the soil food web: with our fellow earthlings we have the capacity to shred, turn, digest, build, make, break down, terraform and care for soil and organic matter. Together we are soil, we are matter passing through.” 

(Compost Mentis Manifesto)


Aurora reflected on how Rebecca had been one of those rare skillful people who could navigate complexity and messyness, making her absence ever more felt. We hoped that the workshop might be able to bring people together again in some small way.


“I felt a heaviness in the garden when I arrived there, after so many months of hearing about and imagining the space - I realised that I / we had no real connection to it, or the community here, in contrast to most of the other spaces we have worked with. The paths and beds were overgrown with weeds, reflecting the lack of community access as a result of the conflict #readtheweeds! Garden members started to arrive, but there was a tension and sadness that came with them. Sara had made a giant feast, which she laid out on the table, whilst others got to work setting up a gazebo, moving garden furniture and watering plants. A couple of beds had been cultivated by the key holder, and we selected 4 different areas to test: a sandy area near the road, a bed overgrown with Herb Robert, a raised bed growing corn, and soil under apple trees at the back of the garden.” (Hari)

We had been planning this workshop with Aurora, Michelle, Hari and Elena, - and we’d devised a multi-dimensional session which involved grounding, checking in, reading, deep listening, touching the soil, observing and reflecting together on a range of different soil testing methods. We’d done lots of research to prepare for the session about how different pollutants move into and through soil. The session didn’t quite go as we’d planned! For reasons we will try to capture below….

  • We started late, as people arrived at different times. Some participants were unclear about what the workshop was, so we had to keep explaining why we were there - which meant the introduction was drawn out and a bit clunky.
  • We invited everyone to check in and share their relationship with the garden/soil - there were lots of rich stories shared (summarised in our report), which really helped our understanding, but we got the sense that people became frustrated whilst listening to each other, maybe because of the tensions present?
  • Hari noticed (too late) that the challenge of facilitating a group they didn’t know who were in conflict, was beyond their skill level and capacity as a facilitator.
  • Grounding, listening and reading exercises were not possible to do because people struggled to engage
  • Workshop participants wanted answers and results, and were less willing to engage in the process of finding out. Perhaps there was a desire for a more professionalised / technical lab service than what we could offer. At the same time there was an understandable frustration when we used technical or scientific terms.
  • Hari lost the trust of participants, by not being able to facilitate the introduction clearly enough. We were asked many questions, including if we were from the council. 
  • Elena felt that we were being constantly tested, getting sudden requests that didn’t acknowledge the limited time to put together something meaningful. We presented what the clinic and the workshop were about, yet this was not acknowledged in the tone of the requests. There was a voracious appetite for results but little willingness to listen that brought a major dissonance in a process that had to be hurried, and with a lot of quick reactions.
  • Due to the low trust and impatience with our approach, it felt difficult to fully explain and enact our Caring and Courageous Spaces policy, and gather feedback at the end, even though it was probably needed here more than ever. We have since circulated an online feedback form and are awaiting responses.
  • The arrival of food was a lovely touch, but not part of the original workshop plan, so taking time to eat meant that our schedule went out the window, and we ran over time, creating further tension.
  • As some of the equipment we brought is a bit fragile (especially the pH monitor), it felt harder to fully involve the group in the testing in the ways we usually do.
  • A physical fight broke out outside the garden’s gates during the workshop, which unsettled people and interrupted the closing and summarising of findings.
  • Elena was not feeling well, and Hari and Elena  both felt overwhelmed by the complexities causing them to disassociate and struggle to keep track of time. Michele was able to remain cool, calm and reassuring to the end.
  • “I was dealing with inflammation and some weakness and dizziness after being on antibiotics treatment. The frustration of the garden dynamic was then brought into our workshop, there was little awareness of each other's time and needs, questions about highly technical concepts that would require extra time to dissect, interruptions of the group processes to clarify personal constraints. These questions often interrupted a group activity or discussion, which required an extra effort to cater the group momentum without being rude to the people interrupting. This drained a lot of energy and reduced my ability to react and adapt. There were people coming and going from the activities, making questions of parts of the process that we put together while they were away, some other members were just listening from afar doing some gardening without directly engaging. It was quite confusing, it seemed as if there was a need to reassure individual presences and needs.” (Elena)


Despite our plan going off kilter, it wasn’t a total disaster, and some of the things that worked were:

  • Garden members opting to be together (instead of participating in the activities), eat and chat, this is probably more what was needed.
  • Michelle's listening activity (using contact mics to listen to movements and sounds in the soil) was a nice way to engage younger participants individually. Some nice descriptions of sounds emerged, which we later made into a sound poem (below) 

  • We were intrigued by the different stories about the origins of the soil in the raised beds. One person told us authoritatively that it had been taken from the site. Whilst others were sure it was imported from somewhere else. The soil texture in the raised and ground level beds appears very similar from our testing.

  • The listening activity revealed the presence / history of some underground aqueduct or nearby watercourse? Participants reported the sounds of “dripping”, “waterfalls”, “gushing” etc… (see sound poem). It could have been the hose (!) but it could have also been the sounds of subterranean water flowing… a glance at googlemaps does show a nearby unnamed watercourse, and some cursory research into London’s Lost Rivers, suggests this could be a tributary of Pymmes Brook or Salmons Brook, which are both tributaries of the nearby River Lea.




About Interrupted Waterfall (a sound poem)



  • pH testing is simple but gives very reliable readings, and useful indications about the presence / mobility of lead, aluminium and zinc, amongst other heavy metals.
  • The nutrient tests in combination with contaminant tests gave us some interesting results due to the relationship between phosphorus, lead and aluminium.
  • Understanding the soil type and structure was helpful for analysing how moisture, oxygen, nutrients and contaminants may be moving through the soil
  • The testing we did carry out suggested that there were no significant concentrations of Lead, Aluminium, copper, zinc, or arsenic - which surprised and pleased garden members.
  • Through continuing the testing at home, we generated a lot of different results (for texture, structure and biology), and a comprehensive list of recommendations (see report), which Aurora felt could be of use to the garden.



Analysis and Learnings…


The garden’s proximity to polluting infrastructures such as the Edmonton incinerator and North Circular has resulted in varying levels of anxiety about the likely presence of pollutants. This, coupled with reports from garden members of feeling deprioritised by the council, and like they ‘don’t matter’, created an emotional landscape that was quite palpable, and may well feed into the conflict that is playing out between community members. A couple of participants spoke about the high levels of deprivation in the neighbourhood, the inequality, poverty and street violence. This contributed to a feeling of scarcity amongst garden members, who are fighting over who gets to have access to this space, when and how. It felt very unfair, that this small triangle of land must be shared between all these people, who have different needs, interests and values. Hari later reflected on the giant allotment site that they have access to in neighbouring Barnet (where mostly very privileged community members are also engaged in bitter conflicts and power struggles), and the huge unjust inequality between these sites. Conflict is sadly, more and more common across London’s growing projects, as growers, organisers and workers in this sector, we meet this a lot, and see it as a symptom of colonial inheritances, unjust distributions of land, wealth and power, and the loss of skills and knowledge of effective community organising. These systemic oppressions screw us all over, and massively impede our ability to care for the land and each other. We found out after the workshop that the key holder had been angry about us using the space, and wanted us to pay. This suggests that, within contexts where there is scarcity, and the stakes are high - our offering may be of less value.  We reflected later in our organising circle that we had felt like what we had brought was “not enough” - pushing us to spend many extra hours working on a detailed report and preparing for our online follow up session (Learning Circle #6), which only one person showed up to…

The question about values feels important to reflect upon, and takes us back to the decision we made before embarking on this pilot project, to work with spaces that were most aligned with, and practicing our values. In the pilot call out we asked: 

“In what ways has your group acted in alignment with our values? (Please demonstrate with policies, examples, etc.)”

Though, at the time of completing the form in May 2023, with Rebecca’s involvement, Angel gardens may have been more aligned with our values; and had volunteered their space to be part of the pilot. By the time we got there, regrettably one year later, it no longer was. Power and access had become concentrated, inequalities weren’t being addressed and the community was fragmented. Hari and Naomi reflected on this later, and in some ways felt affirmed, that our policy of only working with groups who shared our values with, was correct (for the pilot stage of this project at least) enabling us to focus our limited energies on methods and learning, rather than navigating differences and organisational rifts - perhaps this was why the previous pilots went comparably well?… On the other hand, we see the flaws in this approach. It reduces the potential of this project to resource and collaborate with groups facing multiple intersecting oppressions, who may not have had access to the same political education as us, or express their values in the same ways. Perhaps we need to get better at working with people who don’t agree with us, for the revolution? This will be something to reflect on further when we reach the end of the project, in relation to our core values of social justice, land justice, soil justice, food justice, racial justice, disability justice and tackling the root causes of oppression. 

In previous entries we have celebrated and acknowledged complexity as part of our pedagogy. However - what happens when things become too complicated? And our capacities to respond and hold space are reduced? How do we continue to build our collective skills to hold more and more challenging complexities? And what do we do when/ if we reach our limits?

In many ways, the workshop plan we developed for Angel Gardens, attempted to integrate the learning from previous pilots, but to little avail. This leads us to conclude that, what works in one garden, won’t necessarily work in another, so perhaps our hope of developing a singular approach / set of methods is naive. Rather than seeking to develop a “one size fits all” methodology (as many professional labs would do), we need to understand how the different methods available to us work, when and how to use them in different contexts. We need to be able to make boundaries around what we can and can’t offer, and to manage expectations responsibly. At the same time, we need to leave space for emergence and adaptation - to be able to meet communities where they are at, and not be too rigid with our plans, echoing adrienne maree brown’s call for “less prep, more presence”.







“For the workshop, Hari prepared a reading from the book Inflamed. While I was dealing with physical inflammation myself during the workshop, I understood the inflammation of the garden members, their need to be heard before being able to listen and engage. In my case, the inflammation ceased after a few weeks, could there be forms of engaging that gives room to inflammation? How can care and time take place in these processes? and what is our role as facilitators of the pilots? Angel Gardens pilot showed what is needed rather than showing us what works.” (Elena)


In our final online session, Aurora shared her worry and sadness that “the garden is dying”. The conflict had impacted people’s ability to be able to respond to each other and show up. Aurora likened the community’s exhaustion to the slow moving nematodes we had watched under the microscope >>>





A final question we are left with is around how this project can better resource communities who are doing important things to challenge and disrupt the land and wealth inequalities which oppress us all in different ways? Offering free or low cost testing does feel like one valuable offering, but as we learnt at Angel, it is perhaps not always enough for communities facing wider challenges. The question of repair, remediation and healing has been put forward at previous learning circles as something that the soil clinic could/should also offer - taking a holistic approach to soil pollution and recognising the ways it may show up in our food, bodies, emotions, relationships and communities. The text we had planned to read as an opening to the workshop from Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice (see excerpt below), offers a powerful analysis of the connections between inflamed ecologies, economies, bodies and societies, along with a prescription for what we must do to heal on a systemic level.

“For every example of colonial inflammation, we offer deep medicine, ways of thinking through how we might find one another through the work of decolonising and through building communities of care”.

(Marya & Patel 2022: 27)




References


https://www.thameswater.co.uk/media-library/home/about-us/responsibility/thames-days-out/sites/heritage/new-river-path-leaflet.pdf


A New Life for London’s Lost Rivers


Inflamed: Deep medicine and the anatomy of Injustice by Raj Patel and Rupa Marya


Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown 


UK soil & herbage pollutant survey



by Hari and Elena