The Tension: Depth vs Breadth
I am interested in the tension between going deep and going wide. I often find myself compromising one for the other, and have been challenged on this regularly. My career has been developing the capacity to hold both in balance.
My PhD was in the field of Environmental and Applied Science Management, and my privilege was working with students and friends in the fields of law, policy, engineering, and science — even one in fashion, studying the environmental impact of the production line in companies like Nike. I have been deeply inspired by friends from this program, for instance Dr. Daphne du Cros who subsequently did a PhD in Food Security in London and concurrently started a farm to live out her PhD around dinner tables and in local town and county policy decisions. Her academic conclusion described the benefit of localising food production, so she simply did so — in agriculture and governance. This type of research is the gold standard I aspire to.
That cross-disciplinary experience was further explored in a short 2020/2021 foray working for Prof Thuli Madonsela through the Social Justice Research Chair at Stellenbosch University, exploring the impact of COVID in vulnerable communities, via population surveys.
A Philosophy of Care
Although I remain committed to a number of research trajectories, the research field that has been most prominent is soil health. We recently submitted a review paper, led by our collaborator in Durham (UK), Karen Johnson. Within this paper, we delved deep into a problem that excites me, even more with the onset of AI: the paralysis of complexity. This issue is foundational to studying soil health. In this paper, we made the point that science produces so much data that it becomes almost impossible to transfer a useful narrative into society.
For three years I had the privilege of grappling with soil microbiology through the eyes of my colleague, Prof Cathy Clarke, who is a geochemist. However, throughout this study, despite the incredible importance of microbiology within soil, I could not settle on any framework for understanding the soil microbiota. Microbes make up as many as 10^9 cells per gram soil, with high diversity indices. And yet, the applied relevance is so complex within this diversity, it remains hard to quantify and articulate the importance of soil microbiology, unless studying specific species like pathogens or bioremediators. We are ruined by the overused maxim "Everything is everywhere, but the environment selects".
Yet, after three years of wrestling, I stumbled upon a helpful concept for a soil health narrative through our lead author on the Soil Health paper.
She wrote, "We do not ‘build’ our children: we feed them the right diet of carbon, nitrogen and minerals and allow their DNA to do the rest, although it does take time to grow a human — around 20 years." Within this framework of a philosophy of care for the soil as a living organism, there is scope to begin to articulate the complex research into a circular economy that matches local nutrient requirements and wastes, to rebuild the soil conditions that allow microbes, plants and the higher trophic levels feeding on them to thrive for the purpose of the soil: ecology, biodiversity, remediation, agricultural productivity. Within this framework I could begin to contextualise the science in terms of governance and land management (how are we collaborating with this soil?), in terms of stewardship (what does the soil need to thrive?), and in terms of ecology (how does it intersect with geology, water and biodiversity?).
I am excited by the potential of a philosophy of care, which also draws on the aesthetics, emotions and desires in the relationship between living beings, rather than purely the ethics of management that science so often relies on. Both are important. But, with more and more resolved chemical, physical and geological data telling us that we "should" worry about, alarmist reporting is rife.
We need librarians for the masses of soil, environmental and water data. In a disjointed and overwhelming technical narrative, we sense what many have been saying: the ethics of management (a balance of equations and utility) becomes a shouting in the wind without an ethics of care (relations between living organisms).
Within this framework, I experience a strong motivation to understand the local soils, local wastes, and local agricultural, industrial and governance communities. These are the only way to inform design strategies that promote environmental health with the local agricultural establishments, education platforms and the government. I have extensive experience in project management around this vision.
These relational approaches to leverage data more effectively is one of the core tenants of our company, Return on Ecology.