unspecifiedsoilings-blog

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Umbrella effect of earthing

A ‘grounded’ human being is someone who is connected to and receives direct benefit from the infinite free electron source generated directly from our planet. We’re grounded when we hold the same electrical potential as the Earth’s surface. Electrons are absorbed or discharged via the skin, mainly through our feet in contact with the ground. This is an ancient and profound yet hugely common sense principle of well-being that’s currently resurging amidst enthusiastic stories of its success.

http://discoveryouraura.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/umbrella-effect-of-earthing.html

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The role of soil biodiversity in promoting human health

The ten reasons healthy soils are crucial in human health and wellbeing:

Biodiverse soils can help to control populations of disease-causing organisms – in healthy soil communities, disease-causing organisms such as listeria, salmonella and toxoplasmosis that infect humans are naturally controlled by soil-dwelling organisms.

Healthy, well-covered soils can reduce disease outbreaks – keeping the soil covered with litter and vegetation is a well-known principle for maintaining soil health. This is also an effective approach for reducing the impact of diseases such as anthrax that can infect livestock and humans.

Carbon-rich soils may reduce outbreaks of human and animal parasites – research from rural Cambodia found a higher risk of infection by roundworms in areas that had been cleared for crops where the soil carbon content had declined.

Exposure to soil microbes can reduce allergies – inhabitants of urban areas have generally lower diversity of bacteria on their skin and lower immunity expression, meaning that exposure to soil microbes can promote immune health.

Soils have provided many of our current antibiotics and pest-control agents – losses of soil biodiversity may reduce sources of future agents. Already, researchers have found promising soil bacteria that act against tuberculosis bacteria.

Soil organisms can provide biological control agents – researchers are turning to soil-dwelling organisms such as nematodes, bacteria and fungi to safely control other pests and diseases in crops, a better approach than relying on synthetic pesticides.

Healthy soils mean healthier foods and more of it – biodiverse soils can promote better nutrient and water uptake by plants, which means that food is richer in nutrients essential to human well-being.

Soil microbes can enhance crop plant resilience – in difficult seasons, the health of the soil can dictate whether or not the crop can survive to produce a good yield. New research demonstrates how reliant many crop plants are on soil fungi and bacteria.

Healthy soils promote good clean air quality – we all remember the incredible red dust storm of 2009 in Australia. But healthy soils are also more stable soils that produce more plant cover and are less prone to wind and water erosion.

Healthy soils provide clean and safe water – soils provide many benefits in delivering clean water to our populations, through filtration, decontamination by microbes and removal of pollutants. Our water cycle is very dependent on the ability of soils to support clean water collection.

https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/newscentre/news_centre/story_archive/2015/nature_paper_shows_crucial_role_of_soil_biodiversity_in_safeguarding_human_health

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Rudolf Steiner’s list of twelve senses

Chart made available by Bobby Matherne

The twelve regions of the twelve senses are to  be pictured as being static, at rest within the organism. But life pulsates  through the whole organism, and this life is manifested in various ways.

First  of all there is breathing, a manifestation of life necessary to all living things. Every living organism must enter into a breathing relationship with the external world. We  breathe — that is one process — but the benefits of that process of breathing  flow to all the senses.

Warming, the inner process of warming something through, is the second  of the life-sustaining processes.

The third process that sustains life is  nourishment. So here we have three ways in which life comes to us from without:  breathing, warming, nourishing. The outer world is part of each of these.  

Something must be there to be breathed — in the case of humans, and also animals, that substance is air. Warming requires a certain amount of warmth in the surroundings; we interact with it. Similarly, we need food to nourish us as long  as we are considering the life processes in their earthly aspects.

The purely inner process that is the basis of the re-forming of what we take in from outside us can be seen to be fourfold. Following the process of nourishing, the first internal process is the process of secretion, of elimination. When the nourishment we have taken in is distributed to our body,  this is already the process of secretion; through the process of secretion it becomes part of our organism. The process of elimination does not just work outward, it also separates out that part of our nourishment that is to be  absorbed into us. Excretion and absorption are two sides of the processes by which organs of secretion deal with our nourishment. One part of the secretion  performed by organs of digestion separates out nutriments by sending them into  the organism. Whatever is thus secreted into the organism must remain connected with the life processes, and this involves a further process which we will call maintaining. But for there to be life, it is not enough for what is taken in to be maintained, there also must be growth. Every living thing depends on a process of inner growth: a process of growth, taken in the widest sense. Growth   processes are part of life; both nourishment and growth are part of life.And, finally, life on earth  includes reproducing the whole being; the process of growth only requires that one part produce another part. Reproduction produces the whole individual being and is a higher process than mere growth.

http://martyrion.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/twelve-human-senses-and-seven-life.html

refer to seven learning processes on p.48 https://books.google.com.au/books?id=bmLyIMJF_K0C&pg=PA44&lpg=PA44&dq=rudolf+steiner+life+pulsates+through+the+organism&source=bl&ots=_iRAcF_vTn&sig=wiHDv6Vp0UJtpt6zoPPDaqywjuY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjU9O_x0uLXAhWKErwKHbuOCQQQ6AEIKzAA#v=onepage&q=rudolf%20steiner%20life%20pulsates%20through%20the%20organism&f=false

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Eco-queer movements

By taking a more fluid and spatial approach to understanding the makeup of the eco-queer movement, I have found that ideas, symbols, and discourse matter as much as the materiality of space.  It is the ideology/worldview grounded in solidarity and affinity, and grounded in deconstructing binary identity categories that links various threads of the lgbtq and environmental movements together. In many respects the eco-queer movement is not only interested in confronting mainstream eco-normal, white, straight, wealthy privilege, but also those segments of the lgbtq community assimilating into mainstream institutions and organizations that perpetuate practices and ideologies separating out humans and nature. In short, eco-queer  activist’s embodiment is embedded in the built and naturalenvironments, which provides the space from which to work towards radical ecological, social, and cognitive change

https://jsbicca.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/eco-queer-movements.pdf

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Ecofeminism

Ecofeminism uses the basic feminist tenets of equality between genders, a revaluing of non-patriarchal or nonlinear structures, and a view of the world that respects organic processes, holistic connections, and the merits of intuition and collaboration.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/ecofeminism

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Joseph Beuys foot washing ritual in “Celtic +~~~~”, 1971

Walters. V, 2012, Joseph Beuys and the Celtic Wor(l)d: A Language of Healing, LIT Verlag Munster.

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Bare Feet and Bare Soil

“Environmental medicine focuses on interactions between human health and the environment,” researchers report in the Journal of Environmental and Public Health. “Omnipresent throughout the environment is a surprisingly beneficial, yet overlooked global resource for health maintenance, disease prevention, and clinical therapy: the surface of the earth itself.”

If the earth’s energy is linked to our health and wellness, scientists are worried that we may have become too disconnected from these planetary forces. Paved streets, high-rise condos, office jobs, and other elements of our insulated modern lifestyles might be blocking our access to the power of nature, throwing our own bodies’ electrical cycles out of sync. Getting grounded—coming back into contact with the surface of the earth and reconnecting with its energy—may be the answer. This theory is known as earthing.

https://www.alive.com/lifestyle/bare-feet-bare-soil/

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'Limits to Growth' by Pedro Neves Marques

"1972 was the year The Limits to Growth, an MIT led, Club of Rome funded "Report on the Human Environment" was published, coding the world into a systems-dynamic model of life past, present and future, and projecting the economy far into the 21st century. The report tied future environmental shocks to capitalism's exponential growth. Unwittingly though, it signaled the mutation of the political ecology of the time into the economico-bureaucratic form of policy making between States or corporations.

From then on ecology is allowed only in the technocratic language of international policymaking tribunals. It must either go "deep" or apolitical. In contrast, neoliberalism, financial markets, and the economy itself would become ever more naturalized. There are even rumors that neoliberalism accomplished ecology."

- excerpt from "Environments", text, by Mariana Silva and Pedro Neves Marques. This video was first presented within the exhibition-installation "Environments", with Mariana Silva, at e-flux, New York, Fall 2013.

https://vimeo.com/channels/pedronevesmarques/81032600

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Slow institutions.

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/85/155520/for-slow-institutions/

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Mind/Mud Map, 2017, Kate Woodcroft & Caitlin Franzmann

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The main theme for November is “Turning the Soil”

“When one has focused only on what is seen and shows up on the surface, what is beneath that surface becomes less and less fertile as time goes on. This month is it time to dig down deep and turn up what is underneath, bring it to the surface, inspect it, break it up, feed it, aerate it and fertilize it in preparation for new seeds.”

https://thepowerpath.com/?wpam_id=1

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Cuba's emissions standard

Consumerism is the biggest obstacle to sustainability and the pressure to consume is stoked by greater inequality.  // Wellbeing and the quality of life in modern societies is now better served by reducing inequality rather than by promoting growth. Data shows that more unequal societies suffer worse health, more violence, worse mental health, more drug problems. They have higher obesity and teenage birth rates and they imprison more people. Inequality is also socially divisive: greater inequality goes with lower levels of trust and weaker community life.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/30/carbonemissions-cuba

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Compost Politics: Experimenting with Togetherness in Vermicomposting

http://environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol4/4.7.pdf

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Camp as a Politics of Waste

https://www.academia.edu/8586029/Camp_as_a_Politics_of_Waste

Like queer theory, discard studies is interested in uneven remainders, things that don’t fit nicely into categories. Both concern themselves with the strange and imperfect construction of divisions (in discard studies, that between waste and not-waste; in queer theory, those between hetero/homosexual, between male and female) that do violence to humans, cultures, and environments, while still attending to the fact that these divisions have meaning for people, that they are strategic, and that they structure our thought in ways that are almost impossible to escape.

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Barry Thomas, Vacant Lot of Cabbages, 1978

Art as living garden, illegal occupation and vox populi. With the help of friends, Barry Thomas trucked topsoil and cut fence onto a private vacant site without permission, and planted 180 cabbage seedlings. The artwork lasted for 6 months and contributed to the psyche of the city.

http://eco-publicart.org/vacant-lot-of-cabbages/

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The soils beneath our feet comprise a complex ecosystem in and of themselves. Soils support literally every major ecosystem on this planet. Despite all of this, they are largely ignored. Even worse, we continually degrade them without a care in the world. Their degradation is what inspired author Paul Bogard (The End of Night) to write his latest contribution to the world of science communication. Join us for a fascinating discussion about his new book The Ground Beneath Us.

http://www.indefenseofplants.com/podcast/2017/4/23/ep-105-talking-soil-with-author-paul-bogard

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"we are all compost” Donna Haraway

http://environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol6/6.7.pdf