Kristina Lyons: Soil as cultural, relational, historical (ep329)
What does it mean to "see" soil beyond their chemistry and biology—understanding also their cultural, relational, and historical embodiment? How have small and Indigenous Colombian farmers resisted—and thrived—even amidst decades of scientific colonization, epistemological and ontological violences, and armed conflicts, being caught within the closely-knit War on Terror and War on Drugs?
In this episode, we welcome Dr. Kristina Lyons, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her current research is situated at the interfaces of socio-ecological conflicts, transitional justice, community-based forms of reconciliation, militarized psychologies, and science and legal studies in Colombia.
Her book, Vital Decomposition, weaves together an intimate ethnography of two kinds of practitioners: state soil scientists and small farmers who attempt to cultivate alternatives to commercial coca crops and the military-led, growth-oriented development paradigms intended to substitute them.
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“It’s very clear to the farmers and rural commissions I met that they need to be more suspicious of anything packaged as ‘science’… because science was often hitched to neoliberal agendas or industrialization that were always negating the reality, economies, and family structures of small farmers and their ways of relating to place, soils, and other organisms and beings.”
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Transcript:
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Kristina Lyons: I started working in Colombia about 17 years ago. Originally, I was drawn to the issues around the socio-environmental impacts of the US-Colombia war on drugs. I had the opportunity to work as a voluntary consultant for an international human rights organization in Ecuador—meeting Colombian refugees who were now on the other side of the border and getting to know the cases of people who had been rejected refugee status in Ecuador and why that was the case.
Many of the individuals were people who had been affected by the US-Colombia war on drugs and had been aerially fumigated with glyphosate. So they were not eligible for humanitarian status as refugees, because it was assumed that they were engaged in illicit economic activity.
This aerial fumigation counternarcotics strategy was a legal policy and was geopolitically backed by the United States and funded by US foreign policy money.
So I had worked, volunteered, and studied in different Latin American countries, mainly around issues of US intervention, militarized intervention, foreign policy interventions, economic interventions in the Americas, and the impacts that these had on human rights, workers’ rights, and environmental justice issues. I came to Colombia through my concern and through solidarity work with several NGOs that were doing policy watch work and human rights work to support people who are affected by the aerial fumigation.
While working in the Colombian Amazon, I had the opportunity, through my work with these NGOs, to visit farms and rural communities—meeting inter-ethnic Indigenous Campesinos, small farmers, and other communities to learn of the ways that people were resisting not only the armed conflict in Colombia but the effects from that, and the ways they were living in the midst of that kind of destruction, violence, and contamination (literal poisoning from the war on drugs).
In response, they were transforming their relationships with soils, with Amazonian forests, with plants, with lunar and solar cycles, with all kinds of other-than-human materialities, beings, and entities.
That was part of a political strategy to not only survive but also to try to flourish and build alternatives amidst these repressive actions that were trying to root them out, literally, based on stigmatization and criminalization around illicit crop production—and in the presence of armed actors and extractive industry.
That really convinced me of the necessity to take these relationships, that are not only human-based modes of solidarity and alliance building but also thinking about how life works together: the shared possibilities of struggle, life, and death, across human and non-human existence, which has always been extremely important to rural communities in terms of their ancestral and traditional practices.
Kamea Chayne: There's so much in what you just said that I would love to dive into, but to start, we do have listeners all over the globe, many of whom may not be familiar with Colombia's current state and the struggles that their peoples are facing.
So to preface the rest of our conversation, can you give us an introductory background to the socio-ecological armed conflicts going on, the role of the US government and their interests, and the war on drugs within them?
Kristina Lyons: So what we have in Colombia is a multi-layered series of historically complex parts that have to do with the concentration of land and property, of a traditional political class that has not wanted to democratize labor rights and agrarian reform, that then overlays with the more contemporary bases of armed struggle that have to do with these historical, agrarian-based issues—but that was then coupled with narco-trafficking and the arrival, production and commercialization of illicit crops, that then got entangled with financing the war and the different armed actors.
There are a series of armed actors in the historical armed conflict in Colombia: leftist guerrilla movements, right-wing paramilitary organizations and groups, and the public forces of state military and police and anti-narcotics police.
As the armed conflict dragged on in Colombia, narco-trafficking became an aspect of financing this conflict for all actors involved—in their territorial struggles to control the cocaine trade and to control populations in different territories and regions of the country.
The US-Colombia War on Drugs also begins in the 1970s with a focus on Bolivia and Peru, because these were originally where the majority of the coca production was happening. At that time, Colombia was transforming and commercializing cocaine, but not producing it. But eventually, all of the production chains move into Colombia. By the late 80s and in the 1990s, Colombia consolidates the entire production and commercialization of cocaine, which is mostly for consumers in Europe and the US.
The original counter-insurgency strategy of the Colombian state is entangled with the war on drugs and especially the US backing of that, which began in the 1970s but particularly becomes clearer when Plan Colombia, in 2000—the primary US war on drugs foreign policy—gets signed between Clinton and Pastrana, the Colombian president at the time. Plan Colombia turns into a way to combine counter-insurgency with counter-narcotics strategy. This really comes to the fore after 9/11 with then-President Bush and President Uribe in Colombia.
These conflations of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror become very closely knit.
Eighty percent of the US money funding Plan Colombia was going to military and police building and the anti-narcotics strategy, which was a combination of aerial fumigation with glyphosate beginning in 1997 in Colombia and manual eradication and spraying of illicit crops. So what we have from 1997 until 2015 was the continuation of these policies—until it finally ended and was formally banned in Colombia.
What was being aerial sprayed was entire landscapes—not only of the supposed illicit crops but of entire ecologies, watersheds, people's food sustenance, forest, soils, and their microbial communities, and of course, human bodies.
The impacts, as you can imagine, in terms of public health and environmental consequences for the long-term, are quite dramatic. The policy was very inefficient in eliminating illicit crops. It was really just displacing them around the country, and it was an exorbitant amount of money to engage in this chemical warfare.
In 2016, the FARC–EP, the largest and longest-running rebel organization in Colombia, signed a peace agreement with the national government to formally end the armed conflict between the two groups. The Colombian armed conflict continues with the ELN, the second-largest rebel organization.
What we've seen in this post-peace accord transition, unfortunately, in Colombia, is the perpetuation of violence and conflict and the reconfiguration of narco-trafficking, criminal actors, and demobilized actors—in many of the territories that were previously the epicenters of the war.
Kamea Chayne: I really appreciate this succinct overview. There's so much more that we could cover and unravel, so I hope to be able to dedicate a future episode just to the War on Drugs itself.
But to move forward, there was an animal husbandry technician and a small farmer known as The Amazonian Man, whom I know was hugely influential in guiding your inquiries. And he noted to you: "The problem in Putumayo is that we do not know where we are standing..." And this is a common saying that shows how they conceptualize the ground, soil, and place differently from just more literal and physical understandings of soil that techno-scientific research might define them as.
So can you share what exactly he and his people mean when they say, "We do not know where we are standing", as a crisis?
Kristina Lyons: Meeting Heraldo Vallejo, this animal husbandry, and Campesinos and other families and agrarian and alternative agricultural networks in and around Putumayo over the last 17 years really shifted the focus of not only my academic research but my activist policy-oriented work—away from denouncing violence,, simply, which is very important work, and towards thinking about not only what was raining down on people, but also about what wasn't germinating up from the ground.
People were in a frontier region of the country. There has been a series of colonizations, and families and individuals are arriving here through different violent processes of being expelled or displaced from the interior of the country—through the war, because of poverty, and looking for economic opportunity, because of land concentration and looking for land, or becoming attached to these boom-and-bust extractive economies that have characterized the Amazon since its colonial period.
And these people, who were not born here, and even if they were born here are from families that are from elsewhere in the country—they did not know where they were standing.
They were trying to relate to an Andean soil, or to the soils that inform soil taxonomy and land classification categories that are imported from the USDA... and not the tropical soils, or the Amazonian soils, and their diversity.
They were estranged from the cycles of life that produce the soil of the Amazon.
And there's a diversity of soils. But I was really focused on the hojarasca: this litter layer that's 5-10 cm of arable soil which sustains the entirely different biodiversity of the Amazonian forest, and millennially, Indigenous communities and their agricultural practices here.
So people were realizing that really they didn't understand how to become part of these relationships, of this nutrient-cycling, of what I call in the book, "selva" practices—the forest practices. And that was the problem—not the illicit crops.
It was about learning how to become, not to be from, and how to engage in different agricultural practices and livelihoods that wouldn't be extractive or just about felling the forests but to become part of those cycles.
This became the center of my research, following those practices, on life-making proposals versus focusing on just the denouncement of violence and crime.
Kamea Chayne: And the idea of displacement, where land-based or Indigenous communities are removed, often forcibly from their homelands, and have that place-based relationship severed—we often discuss this as a way that unique ecosystems have been deprived of the bio-cultural and ancestral knowledge that's needed to best care for them, to maintain that regenerative relationship and circularity. This seems like part of what is going on here.
And I wonder if we might recognize another form of displacement or disorientation, where even though some people are still in proximity to or living in their ancestral homelands, the lands have been transformed so heavily, pillaged, and extracted, serving the interests of outside forces, so much so that the communities and peoples can no longer recognize them as a home in which they can relate to and belong.
Kristina Lyons: Yes, exactly. And illicit crop production, as a type of capitalist extractive practice, precisely worked in that way, where so many people, because of the lack of other economic opportunities, became involved in this illicit commodity chain—and consequently, became eliminated from their own practices and ancestral and popular knowledges.
They end up producing a mono-crop for export to feed the desires of the consumers of illicit drugs in other parts of the world.
In a lot of my work, what I've focused on is not only that the armed conflict has been violent for local communities; it's all the other kinds of violences that are epistemic, ontological, about rendering worlds impossible, about negating people's knowledges and practices, and even imposing on them, through scientific taxonomy, agricultural extension packets, ideas about what a market is, what productive agriculture is, what "correct crops" are and the techniques to grow them.
These things are transforming landscapes, ecologies, and people's livelihoods in ways that are rendering them poorer and dependent, rather than more autonomous—not just in food autonomy but also in terms of their livelihoods, political autonomy, and cultural autonomy.
These are often overlooked because we focus on things like war—more brute kinds of violence. But there are these other mini-violences that are forms of colonial violence that keep happening and that continue to alienate, rupture, that really rip people away from their home and their lands, even as they're still occupying these places.
Kamea Chayne: It is really important to consider the different ways of conceptualizing violence, because oftentimes, communities are facing all of these different forms of more abstract, to the layperson, or more institutionalized forms of violence that are more systemic, chronic, and long-term.
So when these communities act out with physical violence—in defense of this violence and oppression that they've been facing—those behaviors are criminalized, and people fixate on those defensive forms of violence. So I think people should take a step back to look at the context in which violence takes place.
And I understand your intention not to simplistically pit one form of knowledge against another, but there is a historical context from the 1970s that you've named a "scientific colonization" of the Colombian Amazon that I think would be helpful to weave into this conversation.
What do you mean by "scientific colonization"? And specifically, what has been the impact of this way of privileging a set of tools and knowledge that have no relation to the place it's being used, to then guide ecological practices and other policies?
Kristina Lyons: In the particular context of the Colombian Amazon, I looked genealogically at when the state begins to explore and do an inventory of its Amazon basin.
We can think historically about when they begin to engage in soils studies, when they look at taxation based on land... In the 1970s, the Colombian government, with support from Holland, engages in its first inventory studies of the Amazon. They begin mapping, soil sampling and doing an inventory of the biodiversity, and understanding the communities that are inhabiting these territories.
The soil scientists that I was able to meet and interview were telling me about how they were shocked by the fact that they were, from an aerial view, looking at this exuberant Amazonian forest—only to find that these 5-10cm hojarasca layers weren't even “soil” to them, according to their scientific definitions. And it was a great disappointment, because it did not, for them, signal a potential for future economic development in terms of industrialized agriculture, extensive cattle ranching, or other forms of industrial production.
This is similar to what's happened in other parts of the world that have pieces of the Amazonian Basin, such as the Brazilian Amazon and Peruvian Amazon.
The first writings about the soils of the Amazon by these scientists were really stigmatizing. They were explaining that the soils were thin, poor, acidic, and senile.
And they weren't really sure what to do with them—which of course, negates the ancestral practices and knowledge in the civilizations of the Amazon that were successfully living, growing, being part of the selva.
Why this stigmatization of the soils happened was because the soils that they were looking for were based on scientific definitions that came from the USDA…
soil classification systems from temperate climates, not tropical ones, that were creating categories based on the productivity of soils... But the productivity was according to a certain standard of what is "productive", what kinds of commercial crops can be grown.
And the Amazon's strength is in its polyculture, not in its monoculture. It's in the biodiversity—the amount of medicinal plants, fruit, nuts, tree varieties, all the fauna that supports the diversity of birds, the water sources here, all these other things that cannot be understood through just commercial agricultural modes of analysis of defining priorities.
So originally, these stigmatized representations of the soils of the Amazon were published and really troubled any kind of economic model and continued to haunt the ways that development policies for the Amazon were formulated.
There were these racist representations of "poor soils made poor people, hence Indigenous people were so ‘impoverished.'"
But then later, through the war on drugs discourses of USAID, it became that the poor soils made criminal livelihoods and were proponents for criminality and illicit activities.
There's this continuation from a racializing discourse to a criminalizing discourse over decades, and unfortunately, this has really come to plague the Amazon in the sense that there has not been state-support for Amazonian-based development, like understanding the ecosystem services, eco-tourism, scientific tourism, Amazonian agriculture, and all the things that the Amazon provides, and the kinds of economies that could flourish here.
There's been, instead, extractive boom and bust economies that go back to the colonial period. And now, we see this in the form of oil drilling and industrial mining projects that are encroaching on the Amazon. On the other hand, it's a war zone, where illicit crops, illegal armed groups, and the supposed communities that were supporting them need to be eliminated, eradicated, and domesticated.
I'm talking about the particular areas of Colombia, but many of these issues traverse the whole Amazon basin and the ways that nations have tried to deal with their Amazons and the peoples of the Amazon.
Kamea Chayne: This illuminates how critical it is for people who have place-based relationships with their landscapes to be the ones to lead ecological and land care practices and to also define developments in their own ways, rather than have these few global powers dictate to the world what that should look like.
And this also brings up very foundational questions, like, how is soil even defined? How is soil health understood? And what is being measured to determine the health and fertility of the soil?
I know that various alternative agricultural practitioners that you've encountered see the soil in a more cultural and relational way, and are working to decolonize their farms. How have they grappled with these foundational questions and use them to guide their visions in terms of how they want to shift their relationship with their lands and soils?
Kristina Lyons: Soil science and soil scientists themselves lament this now—how they became very hitched to industrial agriculture at the expense of understanding soils and their relational, historical, and ecological roles, functions, and relations. This means that…
the sciences of chemistry and physics really dominate soil science because of the interest in chemical inputs and in the structure of soils for industrial agricultural purposes and not the biological—life of the soil, life in the soil that actually makes soil, soil.
Soil is a mix of minerals, air, water, and living organisms.
Unfortunately, these dominant sciences within soil science invisibilize the importance of understanding the biological and ecological life of soils. That is precisely what the farmers in the alternative agricultural practitioners and networks are focused on right now. Not "What's good soil? What's bad soil? What is the soil good for?" Because it depends. All soils are good soils. It depends on how we want to relate to them, whether we're trying to force them to do things that we want, or how we're trying to understand what relations these soils are part of and what kinds of life fostering capabilities they have.
Especially the farmers in the Amazon taught me that doing a chemical test of the soil is really useless because all of these chemical tests would just come back saying the soil was toxic, acidic, and bad.
And really, there were ways on the farm themselves through which they could recover degraded soils, foster more life, cultivate in a different way, that was following the logic of the selva, of the Amazon—versus trying to tame and domesticate the Amazon through felling, burning, clear-cutting, mono-cropping.
There were all kinds of different gardening practices, all kinds of different relationships—seed diversity, agrobiodiversity, trying to return to agricultural practices based on the lunar and solar cycles, etc.—that were, for them, about not only regaining their autonomy but freeing soils from extraction, exploitation, laboring in ways that were exploiting them.
And that's a political struggle across beings—not just for humans but for other lifeforms that have been trapped in the logic of capitalist, neoliberal, and privatizing logic.
For me, that was such inspirational, not only conceptual, work, but also material practices, and recovery of knowledge and practices.
Kamea Chayne: The way that you speak to the soil, as you learned from the peoples you've encountered actually goes beyond the biology of soil, too.
To lay the grounds for my next question, I want to read this powerful excerpt from you. You say: "Soils defy modern dualisms between nature and culture, and ‘living’ bios and the ‘nonliving’ matters of geos. As such, they also trouble modern temporal divides between past, present, and future. There's no final material erasure of the past in the sedimented and residual fabrics of their recycling bodies. When a horrible event occurs in a place, many rural communities in Colombia and elsewhere say the soils, plants, trees, and other elements and beings retain this violence..."
As we speak, what's been on my mind is this field of regenerative agriculture which is kind of trending as this "rediscovered" way of tending the farmland that can heal the soil, take into account the biology, help to draw down carbon, to serve as a solution to the climate crisis.
What stands out to me is that the dominant field of regenerative agriculture—even if they attribute the practices that they use to various Indigenous cultures—takes on that more techno-scientific way of seeing the soil, of defining and measuring soil health, which tends to exclude the memory of traumas and violence embedded in those layers of the land, therefore excluding the need to heal Indigenous communities and relationships as a part of the regeneration.
I'd just like to ask if you have any thoughts about the dominant discourses around what it means to regenerate and improve soil to reverse ecological breakdown—and if anything else comes to mind for you here.
Kristina Lyons: There's a lot of potential in conversations and dialogue between these different paradigms and ontologies: agro-ecology, permaculture, organic agriculture, and restorative agriculture, and these other processes, movements, and paradigms that you mentioned. And it's not to say that they're mutually exclusive. The farmers here in Putumayo taught me they're not agro-ecologists; they are Amazonian farmers. So how they have learned and unlearned practices is based on their relations with this place and with all that beings, organisms, entities, spiritual forces as well, that are part of this world. This is different from the science of ecology, but it can be in conversation with it.
It's important to look for the potential for dialogue, collaboration and solidarity, without erasing important differences that are important to the different histories in the genealogies behind how these practices carry on—and which ones have more power or circulate more than others do...
This also applies when we're thinking more globally, where we have practices emerging from the Global North or post-industrial landscapes versus practices from practitioners in ancestral, Indigenous, and popular processes in the Global South. There are different histories of colonization, and different histories of modernization, industrialization.
Scientists, local communities, lawyers, and community practitioners have to have these interdisciplinary and intercultural conversations, which can only make scientific and non-scientific practices stronger together, as opposed to pitting them against each other.
But it's very clear to the farmers and to the rural commissions I met that they need to be more suspicious of anything packaged up as "science"… because science was often hitched to neoliberal agendas or industrialization that were always negating the reality, economies, and family structures of small farmers and their ways of relating to place, soils, and other organisms and beings.
Kamea Chayne: I love the approach of not wanting to exclude, but also recognizing that there are different power dynamics between the different sets or forms of knowledges that are being pushed, and recognizing that oftentimes for those closest to the land, their lifeways, their place-based knowledges tend to be more marginalized, in comparison to the top-down solutions that are imposed onto these communities.
Something else that all of these inquiries have led you to is to rethink the relationship between life and death and materiality and politics under everyday conditions. And, as you say, "struggles to live well are never separate from creating the conditions for dying well". What wisdoms have you personally gained from looking at all facets of decomposition and recomposition in this more holistic way? And what has that meant for you when processing our varied eco-social conflicts?
Kristina Lyons: It was very inspirational for me to learn, from the hojarasca, this recycling logic that cannot be ruptured—that there always needs to be processes of dying, of decomposing, in order for life to germinate, which is quite different from the stark binary between life and death.
Thinking very seriously about dignified ways of dying and death, versus violent ripping, massacring, genocidally taking of life, the stakes of that, and for whom—not just human lives, but other lives in the territories, too—was something important for me to learn, especially in a context of an ongoing war, with the armed conflicts, and this war on drugs. I also think about how people's struggles weren't just for "living well", but about how to regain the capacity or possibility to die well, to die in a dignified way, dying back into place, recycling back into your homeland.
For me, there is no separation in those struggles to live well and die well. And that's something very central to thinking about how life carries on in the midst of war and structural violence.
This was all due to the hojarasca, which inspired, both in a philosophical but also a very concrete, political sense, thinking about this continuum of life and death, versus the binaries that are often very dominant in not only scholarship and in theory but really in the way that policies are being devised.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much for passing what you've learned and your inspirations, onto us here as well. Before we go into our concluding fire round questions, what else do you feel called to share in this moment? And what are some of your calls to action or deeper inquiry that you'd like to invite our listeners to walk away with?
Kristina Lyons: For me, in the last few years, especially after the official signing of this peace accord, seeing the perpetuation of violence, and thinking about what peace is, how you construct peace in damaged landscapes, what justice means when violence continues, what restorative justice practices lead to... I think that the things that have been hopeful for me are thinking about bettering the manner of living conflicts, of inhabiting conflicts, rather than trying to imagine, in this fictitious way, that we can just eliminate them.
Eliminating conflict also is about depoliticizing, and often, it's quite violent when we think we're just going to build consensus—while forcibly imposing consensus on diversity, diverse ways of thinking and being.
So for me, I'm thinking about bettering conflict: How do we better the way we live our conflicts? There are so many of them—not only socio-ecological conflicts but also political, our strictly human-based conflicts.
And on the other hand, I'm also thinking about the potentiality of and need for all kinds of alliance-building that does not eradicate differences, and instead respects diversity. Unexpected alliances are really important now in especially the way that brings together transdisciplinary practices but also that's crucial for professional applications, community organizing, our political questions, climate change issues...
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an uplifting social media account or publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Kristina Lyons: A book that recently has been very profound for me is the novel The Overstory by Richard Powers. It's an amazing journey into the life and liveliness of trees, those humans who are allies in defending the worlds of trees, and those who want to turn them into resources.
Kamea Chayne: What are some personal mottos, mantras or practices that you engage with to stay grounded?
Kristina Lyons: I just keep trying to find ways to do public-engaged scholarship. That's how I inhabit the university, academia—through research, and learning how to be a practitioner in the world.
Kamea Chayne: And finally, what are some of your biggest inspirations right now?
Kristina Lyons: What I find inspiring amidst a lot of despair and mourning is the growth in support for transdisciplinary scholarship and practice.
Another inspiring situation right now for me is the decolonization of Western law that we're seeing, in rights of nature sentences, in intercultural legal frameworks that are emerging in many countries.
And lastly, I would say the role of youth in recent uprisings and social mobilization around the world and the linking of environmental justice and social and racial justice struggles in these movements—it's providing important lessons for us all.
Kamea Chayne: Kristina, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been an honor to be in conversation and to learn from you. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Kristina Lyons: We all need to keep dreaming. We need to be hopeful, and know that justice is not just for the sake of our lives or for human lives.
