In the era many call the Anthropocene, Latour argued, politics must be transformed from a ‘purely human’ preoccupation into a negotiation with “all the intermingled and unpredictable consequences of the agents, each of which is pursuing its own interest by manipulating its own environment” (2017: 142): a collective entity he termed “Gaia.” Many have argued that the culturally pervasive bifurcation between ‘passive’ nature and ‘active’ humanity,is the principal stumbling block in the needed transformation of collective action. If that is the case, how may we cultivate relational ontologies, and what may collective action on the basis of such an ontology look like?
Human relations with soil, both in the patterns of break down and in the emerging patterns of reconnection, offer a concrete terrain in which to investigate the emergence of relational ontologies. In this talk, I discuss the forms of the current disconnect from and desensitization to soils, and work with the thought of Bruno Latour and Mario Blaser to consider pathways towards reconnection. I propose that alternative agriculture movements, such as regenerative agriculture, are an important site for research on collective action as a negotiation from within relations with the more than human world.
