A cultural ecological dynamic in care and management of soil

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Patrick Dillon
A cultural ecological dynamic in the care and management of soil,
Soil Culture Forum, Falmouth University in conjunction with The Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, Falmouth, UK, 2014.
Published online as a ResearchGate working paper, 2017
1
A cultural ecological dynamic in care and management of soil
Patrick Dillon
Universities of Eastern Finland and Exeter
p.j.dillon@exeter.ac.uk
Abstract
Cultural ecology recognises two approaches to the way people engage with soil: co-
constitutional and relational. Co-constitutional engagement reflects the particularity,
subtlety, idiosyncrasy, and patina of human interaction with soil in a given locality at scales,
in time frames, and through modes of organisation which are complimentary to those places
and the enterprises within them. We might call this ‘traditional’ care and management of
soil. Relational behaviours towards soil reflect generalised, intensive, externally derived
ways of working the soil that are typical of modern agricultural practices. From the moment
people started to farm the landscape there has been an inexorable move from co-
constitutional towards relational ways of working the soil. In this paper, I argue that it is
time to reconsider the relationship, to look at ways in which people can recover a co-
constitutional engagement that is ‘nurturing’ to the soil and the ecosystems and human
societies associated with it. This is a tall order. The pressure is towards more intensive use of
the landscape and the soil. At its most basic cultural ecology reflects relationships between
the way we think and the way we act, the way we conceptualise the environment and the
way we behave in it. These are educational matters in the broadest sense. My argument
hinges on developing relationships with soils that are connected with the 'lived experiences'
of individuals and communities, their improvisations and customary ways of being in the
environment.
Preamble
I am a child of the 1950s and 60s, a so called ‘golden age’ of science. Science certainly excited me. It
was the subject in which I excelled at school. I left school at 16, as was common in those days, and
got a job as a laboratory technician in the soil science department of a British university. There I
acquired the ‘laboratory craft’ of the practising scientist. A few years later I made my first scientific
‘discovery’. When carrying out some routine analysis I noticed how the physical and chemical
properties of certain constituents of soil changed when subjected to freezing and thawing. The
University academic to whom I worked said it was an important observation. He was a generous
man and wrote a paper describing the research and explaining its significance. My name appeared
on the paper next to his. On the strength of the experience I gained in the soil science department,
and the qualifications I picked up on the way, I got a job as a trainee analytical chemist in the
research centre of a petroleum company. Much of my work involved pollution monitoring, and this
marked the beginning of a serious interest in human impact on the environment, an interest that has
taken me into academic work in the humanities and the social sciences where I have been working
with cultural ecology as a framework for addressing the way we interact with the environment and
our responsibilities towards it.

Patrick Dillon
A cultural ecological dynamic in the care and management of soil,
Soil Culture Forum, Falmouth University in conjunction with The Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, Falmouth, UK, 2014.
Published online as a ResearchGate working paper, 2017
2
Introduction
This paper is based on the presentation I gave at the Soil Culture Forum in Falmouth, June 2014, held
under the auspices of the Research in Art, Nature and the Environment Group at Falmouth
University in conjunction with The Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World. The paper
draws heavily on the visual elements of the presentation I made in Falmouth. Much of the
theoretical framing of cultural ecology is discussed in detail in earlier papers. These papers are
referenced so that anyone who wishes to do so can follow the development of ideas.
What is cultural ecology?
Cultural ecology is concerned with reciprocal interactions between the behaviour of people and the
environments they inhabit: behaviour, environment and context co-construct each other. Consider
figures 1 and 2.
Figure 1. Text adapted from Abram (1997)
Figure 2. Adapted from (Kivikäs, 2005)

Patrick Dillon
A cultural ecological dynamic in the care and management of soil,
Soil Culture Forum, Falmouth University in conjunction with The Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, Falmouth, UK, 2014.
Published online as a ResearchGate working paper, 2017
3
In figure 1, David Abram is inviting us to recognise that the environment is responding to our
engagement with it, implying that the reciprocity of the relationship is something we seldom take
account of. In figure 2, Pekka Kivikäs develops the argument a stage further, demonstrating how the
relationships are context dependent. His two images are of the same rock paintings in eastern
Finland, photographed from a fixed point with similar camera settings but in different environmental
conditions. He explains:
“The paintings live in symbiosis with the surrounding environment and are continuously
changing. Rock art and rock carvings are environmental art at its most authentic. Works of
rock art look different in different kinds of lighting and weather. Before they will ‘speak’ to
you, however, you must have encountered them several times, have certain basic
knowledge, and be prepared to approach them without preconceptions and learned ideas
about figurative art. Once a painting site and the paintings themselves touch your soul, you
may form a lifelong tie and friendship with rock paintings and with the natural environment
that surrounds them.” (Kivikäs, 2005, p.8)
The interactions between the behaviour of people and their environments and the contexts in which
the interactions take place can be modelled cultural ecologically as show in figure 3.
Figure 3. The cultural ecological dynamic
The left-hand circle symbolises how people engage with their environment ‘in the moment’, literally
through their daily actions, routines and practices. In these moments, behaviour, the environment in
which the behaviour takes places, and the context of that engagement (each signified by a double
ended arrow making up the triangle) are co-constructing each other, in much the same way as
depicted in the analogy of touching and being touched by the leaves of a birch tree. There is human
responsiveness in this engagement: sometimes it is consciously recognised, acknowledged, and
acted upon, but more typically the engagement is unconscious, we are aware of our environment
but are not actively acknowledging our responses to it. The right-hand circle symbolises how people
engage with their environment in a more structured way. It is based on expectations of what people
typically do in the light of previous experiences and accumulated knowledge. In other words, there
are ‘rules of engagement’, not necessarily formalised, but we know that in a given situation we do
such and such and that this is different from what we do in other situations. Environmental
behaviour of this type is known as ‘context dependent’ and the situations so formed are ‘relational’,

Patrick Dillon
A cultural ecological dynamic in the care and management of soil,
Soil Culture Forum, Falmouth University in conjunction with The Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, Falmouth, UK, 2014.
Published online as a ResearchGate working paper, 2017
4
i.e. they are ‘relative’ to the context in which they take place (the circle represents the context,
enclosing the arrows depicting people’s engagement with the environment). In contrast, the left-
hand circle represents situations that are co-constitutional; they arise in the moment and reflect the
unique interactions that take place between individuals and their surroundings in that place at that
time.
Although we can model these two forms of engagement as separate entities, in reality they do not
happen in isolation of each other. How we act ‘in the moment’ is always to some extent influenced
by previous experiences even though we may not be consciously drawing on those experiences, and
what we do at given moments contributes to our accumulated knowledge and skill. In other words,
the co-constitutional and the relational constantly re-form each other in ways that are themselves
co-constitutional and relational, or as Marton (1993) puts it: “systematic understanding of the world
is derived through cumulative organisation and rearrangement of experientially acquired
understandings of the world.” Such is the beauty of the cultural ecological dynamic.
A cultural ecology of soil management
The management of soil can be modelled as a cultural ecology at different spatial and temporal
scales and in different organisational contexts. The discussion that follows looks at soil management
relative to farming practices and patterns of land-use. Figure 4 models the cultural ecology of what
might be termed ‘traditional’ farming, in other words, the type of farming that characterised
agricultural production across the world for millennia until comparatively recently. Typically,
traditional farming was labour intensive. Inputs to the system were sourced locally. Farming
incorporated both crops and livestock, often in integrated systems, for example in the UK and some
temperate regions of Europe the systems were ‘three and four course’, which means that cereals
were rotated with root crops and fodder crops. Soil fertility was maintained by applying animal
manure. Agricultural production was tailored to and constrained by local ecological conditions and
thus coexisted with an associated and adapted wildlife. Figure 4 shows that there was a high level of
day-to-day engagement with the processes of cultivation as practices were continually adjusted to
take account of changing local conditions. (See also Dillon, Gross, Irvine, Price & Staddon, 2012 for
how water meadows were once managed as locally adaptive cultural ecologies).
Figure 4. A cultural ecological model of ‘traditional’ farming

Patrick Dillon
A cultural ecological dynamic in the care and management of soil,
Soil Culture Forum, Falmouth University in conjunction with The Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, Falmouth, UK, 2014.
Published online as a ResearchGate working paper, 2017
5
Contrast traditional farming with the industrialised agriculture which now dominates global
production (figure 5). Inputs are external to the system, e.g. the system requires large quantities of
fossil fuel derived energy, fertilisers and pesticides. Labour is largely mechanised. Farming
enterprises tend to be monocultural both for economies of scale and to control competing
organisms. Practices are pre-specified and applied with the aid of control technology rather than
being adapted ‘on the ground’ and ‘in the moment’ by a labour force. Soil in the industrial system is
a largely sterile production medium.
Figure 5. A cultural ecological model of ‘industrial’ farming
A cultural ecological dynamic for the future?
Here the discussion turns to general principles, but principles nevertheless that have a bearing on
the broader context of our engagement with soils. A paradox of the industrialised world is that
people want cheap food but at the same time lament the passing of a pastoral countryside and the
plants and animals associated with traditional farming. They are concerned about genetically
modified crops, excessive use of chemicals, factory production of livestock and the ‘mining’ of soil.
All of these things are exacerbated by a continually growing global population whose membership
increasingly wants to buy into the consumer lifestyle. These are some of the greatest challenges
facing humankind, so called ‘wicked problems’, where attempts to solve one part of the problem
causes new difficulties elsewhere in the system. The best we can do is to look for least
cost/maximum benefit approaches where the costs of externalities like environmental degradation
are meaningfully included in the reasoning.
It is known that when people have greater control over the resources of their environment they are
more likely to undertake practices that are sustainable. Indigenous peoples for example, with their
deep understanding of local ecology, are likely to manage their resources sustainably, even though
many of their enterprises are at subsistence levels supporting small populations. The trick is to find
what is generalisable from sustainable practice at different scales and levels and look for practices
that may be adapted and applied to new situations. The cultural ecological framework suggests that
there is a delicate relationship between locally adapted responsibility and action and externally
imposed regulation. In the industrialised world we have moved further and further towards
centralised decision making and external regulation. This approach is now widely challenged, with
more calls for devolution and localisation. Cultural ecological modelling offers a number of routes

Patrick Dillon
A cultural ecological dynamic in the care and management of soil,
Soil Culture Forum, Falmouth University in conjunction with The Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, Falmouth, UK, 2014.
Published online as a ResearchGate working paper, 2017
6
through which ideas might be developed. I will explore briefly two interconnected themes:
governance and networks.
First, governance. Figure 6 shows that systems of governance that characterise liberal democracies
are strikingly similar to industrialised processes (compare with figure 5). Although the population
engage democratically with governance in the sense that they elect representatives, they have little
influence over legislative processes which are largely derived from national and transnational socio-
economic-political policies. The axis of power is through the relational structures of centralised
authority where policies are developed and applied (right hand circle). At the local level, the capacity
of people to adapt policies to local conditions is very limited (reduced co-constitutional engagement
in the left hand circle) (see also Dillon, Bayliss and Bayliss, 2013). Maximising profits in farming
depends on aligning it with externally applied policies which favour big farms, high levels of
mechanical labour and external inputs. The soil is just one part of the resource equation.
Figure 6. A cultural ecological model of centralised governance
In recent years, there has been a growing reaction against industrialised farming, not just on ethical
and environmental grounds, but also tied to arguments about quality of life. People increasingly
want locally produced food associated with production processes that combine concerns for the
environment and the welfare of animals with maintaining soil fertility through nutrient cycles that
are internal to the system and do not depend on applications of chemical fertilisers and pesticides.
In one sense, the so called ‘artisan’ food products that are now eagerly sought are a luxury of
affluence (see also Dillon, 2012 for similar arguments about how traditionally made craft objects are
now valued). However, the spin-off, in terms of the influence that such enterprises can exert on the
need to find ways of decentralising decision making, have more profound implications. For sure,
policy making in the foreseeable future will remain largely centralised, but the vision is of working
towards a system where certain of its elements are increasing under local control. We see the
beginnings of this in the UK through the transition town movement where communities develop
mechanisms to adapt national and regional policies to local conditions. Out of this emerges the
possibility of a modern form of ‘customary law’, un-written but widely agreed codes of behaviour
which coexist with statutory law – in other words finely tuned co-constitutional and relational forms
of engagement between people and the mechanisms that regulate the situations in which they live
and work (figure 7).

Patrick Dillon
A cultural ecological dynamic in the care and management of soil,
Soil Culture Forum, Falmouth University in conjunction with The Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, Falmouth, UK, 2014.
Published online as a ResearchGate working paper, 2017
7
Figure 7. A cultural ecological model of localised governance
It is the governance model, with its emphasis on taking account of quality of life factors as seen from
the perspective of the people directly involved in local enterprises, which is the transferable
element. For example, Tero Mustonen, Eija Syrjämäki and their colleagues in the Snowchange
Cooperative in Finland offer us an insight into how governance might be devolved and reformulated
to respect the oral histories and sacred landscapes of Sámi reindeer herders in northern Europe.
Mustonen and Syrjämäki (2014) make a passionately argued case for taking oral history as valid
spoken and then documented events through which the Sámi name and recount their world and its
issues. This can be seen as a means of recognising and refining good practices through life
experiences, validating them through collective understandings, and reasserting them as customary
ways of engaging with the environment.
This takes us to the second theme, networks. The world it networked as never before. Whereas it
can be argued that much of what passes through social media is superficial, there are plenty of
examples where the collective and coordinated efforts of many individuals have led to profound and
rapid change. The ‘environment and sustainability movement’ if it can be called such, is a disparate
spectrum of pressure groups, collectives, projects and enterprises ranging from a few people
working their home patch to national and transnational organisations with millions of members.
What they all have in common is a concern for locality, the quality of environments and their
responsibilities within those environments. As yet, they have not come together as a unified force on
any given issue. For them to do so would require a mechanism to facilitate an adaptive network of
networks (figure 8).
Figure 8. Adaptive networks

Patrick Dillon
A cultural ecological dynamic in the care and management of soil,
Soil Culture Forum, Falmouth University in conjunction with The Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, Falmouth, UK, 2014.
Published online as a ResearchGate working paper, 2017
8
Here the cultural ecology dynamic places emphasis on adaptability, the tailoring of the network of
networks for different issues, some organisations taking the lead in one situation, other
organisations in a different situation. Good practice for environmental organisations revolves around
making things work within their ‘local’ framework, i.e. within their professed terms of reference or
their life-work practices. Although these organisations may have common values at a general level,
they often differ in the way they express and apply those values. Coordinated action is often
compromised by local variation and ideological difference. But wicked problems need astute,
sometimes counter-intuitive approaches. Cultural ecologies of the future may be shaped by
networks of networks, constantly adapting in response to new challenges. Here collective effort may
be marshalled and focussed on one issue and then re-formed to address another, in each case
allowing different expertise to come to the fore, with different patterns of engagement with the
situations and the actors to generate outcomes that are amenable to modification once they are
transferred back to the local situation (see also Dillon, 2014).
Soils are important because, along with the atmosphere and the oceans, they constitute a global
exchange medium, where life maintaining cycles are played out. It is therefore important to explore
mechanisms through which people can engage with soils in ways that do not compromise the long
term integrity of either partner. This review of the framework for cultural ecology and its application
to the care and management of soils is necessarily brief. The ideas are developmental; they are
being refined both theoretically and practically in a number of situations internationally, but
especially in the United Kingdom and Finland. The author invites comment and critique and can be
contacted through the email address given above.
Postscript
Despite my early fascination with science, and taking a joint honours degree in biology and
education when I eventually went to university, my interest and allegiances shifted. My doctoral
research was in landscape history where I sought to understand the interplay between economy and
ecology is shaping land-use practices. My current work in cultural ecology draws heavily on studies
of human behaviour, embodied learning, and other perspectives from the social sciences. The 1960s
were dominated by ‘green revolution’ ideas about managing soil, heavily predicated on adjustments
to its chemistry. In retrospect, I can see that the application of some of the science to farming
practices was flawed because it failed to recognise that soil as a biophysical medium cannot be
considered in isolation of a complex of sociocultural and interconnected biosystems processes. We
have returned to thinking holistically about the soil, but decades of reductive practices are so
embedded that this now an uphill task.
References
Abram, D. 1997. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York, Vintage Books.
Dillon, P. 2014. Education for sustainable development in a cultural ecological frame, in R. Jucker &
R. Mathar, Schooling for sustainable development. A focus on Europe, Dordrecht, The Netherlands,
Springer, forthcoming.
Dillon, P., Bayliss, P. & Bayliss, L. 2013. Turn left for Murmansk: ‘Fourth World’ transculturalism and
its cultural ecological framing, Barents Studies, 1, 97-110.

Patrick Dillon
A cultural ecological dynamic in the care and management of soil,
Soil Culture Forum, Falmouth University in conjunction with The Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, Falmouth, UK, 2014.
Published online as a ResearchGate working paper, 2017
9
Dillon, P. 2012. Framing craft practice cultural ecologically: tradition, change and emerging agendas,
pp. 72-78 in M. Ferris, (Ed), Making Futures: The Crafts as Change-maker in Sustainably Aware
Cultures, Plymouth, UK, Plymouth College of Arts.
Dillon, P., Gross, P., Irvine, R., Price, P. & Staddon, C. 2012. Thinking like a wetland, Journal of Arts
and Communities, 4 (1&2), 100-126.
Kivikäs, P. 2005. Kallio, maisema ja kalliomaalaus [Rocks, Landscapes and Rock paintings]. Jyväskylä,
Minerva.
Marton, F. 1993. Our experience of the physical world, Cognition and Instruction, 10, 227-237.
Mustonen, T. & Syrjämäki, E. (Eds.) 2014. It is the Sámi who own this land – Sacred Landscapes and
Oral Histories of the Jokkmokk Sámi. North Karelia, Snowchange Cooperative.
Rowell, D.L. & Dillon, P.J. 1972. Migration and aggregation of Na and Ca clays by the freezing of
dispersed and flocculated suspensions, Journal of Soil Science 23, 442-447.
Patrick Dillon is cultural ecologist. His is Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the
University of Eastern Finland and Emeritus Professor at the University of Exeter.