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