Considering Soil Philosophy within AgrarianismDelivered to the TESC Ecological Agriculture Program on 1-10-06 by SteveScheuerell. Indented paragraphs are quoted from the identified sourceChapter 1 Brady and Weil The Soil Around UsThe earth, our unique home in the vastness of the universe, is in crisis. Our planet is covered with life-sustaining air, water, and soil. However, great care will be required in preserving the quality of all three if our species is to continue to thrive. We need to understand, know, and appreciate soil. Often this is done from a strictly scientific viewpoint. We will certainly focus on soil science this quarter. I also hope to provide an opportunity for everyone to consider soils from a philosophical viewpoint and as a core consideration in the development of agrarian thinking and living. In this way we may tie togetherlectures, labs, field trips, seminar and writing assignments, making the whole greater than a sum of the parts. Consider the philosophy of soil as Ivan Illich, Sigmar Groeneveld, Lee Hoinacki, and Friends did on December 5, 1990 in Hebenshausen, Germany.The ecological discourse about planet earth, global hunger, threats to life, urges us to look down at the soil, humbly, as philosophers. We stand on soil, not the earth. From soil we come, and to the soil we bequeath our excrements and remains. And yet soil--its cultivation and our bondage to it--is remarkably absent from those things clarified by philosophy in our western tradition.As philosophers, we search below our feet because our generation has lost its grounding in both soil and virtue. By virtue we meanthat shape, order and direction of action informed by tradition, bounded by place, and qualified by choices made within the habitual reach of the actor; we mean practice mutually recognized as being good within a shared local culture which enhances the memories of a place.We note that such virtue is traditionally found in labor, craft, dwelling and suffering supported, not by an abstract earth, environment or energy system, but by the particular soil these very actions have enriched with their traces. And yet, in spite of this ultimate bond between soil and being, soil and good, philosophy has not brought forth the concepts whichwould allow us to relate virtue to common soil, something vastly different from managing behavior on a shared planet.We were torn from the bonds to soil--the connections which limited action, making practical virtue possible--when modernization insulated us from plain dirt, from toil, flesh, soil and grave. The economy into which we have been absorbed--some willy-nilly, some at great cost--transforms people into interchangeable morsels of population, ruled by the laws of scarcity.Commons and homes are barely imaginable to persons hooked on public utilities and garaged in furnished cubicles. Bread is mere foodstuff, if not calories or roughage. To speak of friendship, religion and joint suffering as a style of conviviality--after the soil has been poisoned and cemented over--appears like academic dreaming to people randomly scattered in vehicles, offices, prisons and hotels.As philosophers, we emphasize the duty to speak about soil. For Plato, Aristotle and Galen it could be taken for granted; not so today. Soil on which culture can grown and corn be cultivated is lost from view when it is defined as a complex subsystem, sector, resource, problem or "farm"--asagricultural science tends to do.As philosophers, we offer resistance to those ecological experts who preach respect for science, but foster neglect for historical tradition, local flair and the earthy virtue, self-limitation.Sadly, but without nostalgia, we acknowledge the pastness of the past. With diffidence, then, we attempt to share what we see: some of the results of the earth having lost its soil. And we are irked by the neglect for soil in the discourse carried on among boardroom ecologists. But Therefore, we issue a call for a philosophy of soil: a clear, disciplined analysis of that experience and memory of soil without which neither virtue nor some new kind of subsistence can be.(Written after a meeting on agriculture in Oldenburg, Germany, held in honor of Robert Rodale and sponsored by the Niedersachen Foundation) Ifpublished, the text must be printed in its entirety, without any changes.How do we reconcile the needs of teaching about soils, and the evolutionary reality that soil is the base matrix of terrestrial life, yet respect the statement by Illich et al that “we are also critical of many well-meaning romantics, Luddites and mystics who exalt soil, making it the matrix, not ofvirtue, but of life.” Can we turn to the practice and philosophy of agrarianism to reconcile these needs? The following from Norman Wirzba is an initial answer. “If we take care of the land and preserve the integrity of the soil base and watershed, we will at the same time insure the life contexts that are indispensable for cultural flourishing.”Considering AGRARIANISMIntroduction to The Essential Agrarian ReaderWhy agrarianism matters—even to urbanites by Norman WirzbaAll sentences copied from text, but not in order.A growing number of farmers, ecologists, economists, and policy analysts are beginning to see that the complete costs associated with current food abundance are extremely high and that current pricing hides these costs from consumers. Food, for the most part, is now an industrial product. As such its character and quality, as well as the conditions under which it is produced, are determined by the demands of industrial and market efficiency. While this might make good economic sense, the effect of treating food as an industrial rather than as a natural and cultural producthas been the abuse of land, animals, and human communities. However much we might think of ourselves as post-agricultural beings or disembodied minds, the fact of the matter is that we are inextricably tied to the land through our bodies-we have to eat, drink, and breathe-and so our culture must always be sympathetic to the responsibilities of agriculture.Agrarianism is the compelling and coherent alternative to the modern industrial/technological/economic paradigm.To be an agrarian is to believe that we do not need the hypothetical (often false, and perpetually deferred) promises of a bright economic future to be happy and well. What we need - fertile land, drinkable water, solar energy, communal support and