Encountering bioinfrastructure : ecological struggles and the sciences of soil

What humans know about the soil has material implications for the future of life on Earth. This paper looks at how ‘soil’ is in the process of becoming visible as a living world at the heart of an epoch marked by technoscientific management of the environment. At this time scientific knowledge of the natural world encounters a range of collectives and individuals striving to renew humans’ relationships with non human and organic ways of life. Soil is an interesting case for the study of absence: all around yet hardly apparent for many of us. Drawing upon Susan Leigh Star’s approach to ‘residues’ and ‘infrastructures’ allows soil to appear in all its ecological significance, as the final home to all residues and the dismissed infrastructure of bios. The aim of this essay is not only to make soil visible, but to treat its passing into visibility as an event in its own right that reveals soil’s ambivalent material and cultural value. As ecological visions come to reclaim this mistreated living ecosystem it is not only the knowledge about soil that could be transformed but the soil itself.