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 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 (and even one in fashion, studying the environmental impact of companies like Nike). I have been deeply inspired by friends from this program, for instance Dr. Daphne du Cros who did a PhD in Food Security and concurrently started a farm to live out her PhD around dinner tables and in local town policy decisions. Her academic conclusion described the benefit of localising food production, so she simply did so. This type of research is the gold standard I aspire to.
The particular benefit of this program, that became clear in hindsight, was the opportunity to engage with these new fields, and that was further explored in a short foray working for the Social Justice Research Chair at Stellenbosch University, exploring the impact of COVID on social justice, via community surveys. Similarly, much of my current local work in Stellenbosch and surrounds bridges science and governance, particularly in circular waste economy (matching wastes to soils, for remediation).
A Philosophy of Care
Although I remain committed to a number of research trajectories, the research field that is most interesting to me 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: 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 this same concept as a clear 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 nutrients and wastes, to rebuild the soil conditions that allow microbes, plants and the higher trophic levels feeding on them to thrive. I am excited by the potential of the philosophy of care, which draws on the aesthetics, emotions and desire of the relationship between living beings, rather than the ethics of management that science often relies on. With more and more resolved chemical, physical and geological data telling us that we "should" worry about soil health (or water health, or any environmental health) in a disjointed and overwhelming technical narrative, we sense what many have been saying: the ethics of management (a balance of equations) 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 and governance communities, to design strategies that promote soil health with the university, local agricultural establishments and the government. I have extensive experience in project management around this vision, and many similar water related projects.
Relational Communication in Science
In both the embrace of waste for land amendment (shift towards utilising waste), and the embrace of the surface microbiota for competitive microbial health (shift away from unhealthy reliance on disinfectants), a primary hurdle I have noticed in my career is public risk perception, fuelled by current strategies in scientific communication. One of my biggest goals is to alleviate drop-and-go project design and scientific communication, a limitation that has defined my career. One of my targets in the next five years of my career is building long-term relationships with select scientific journalists, so that the nuances of risk communication between science and media can be explored with the longevity that I suspect is necessary for more accurate and valuable communication.