Earth care practices and the limits of performativity: towards an indigenous soil futurism

A hand-written sign at the entrance of the Rhiannon ecovillage, located deep in the valley of Malchingui (Ecuador), reads: “Another World is Possible”. This paper begins in media res—between decay and flourishing, digestion, and ingestion –with the care-full act of folding human and non-human excrement into a compost cake. Earth care practices reconfigure and revalue compost through trans-corporeal (Alaimo, 2010) webs of soil kinship. Caring here is a sensual performative matter which invites an awareness of often discounted materialities such as excrement and soil. Rather than declensionist stories of ecological collapse, composting activates a sense of contingency where building other worlds becomes possible. How do these speculative embodied practices reconfigure relationships of mutuality with a bioregion, with bodies, and with selves? What are the limits of these performative speculative practices?

This paper explores the promises, challenges, and limits of the kind of ethos upon which these multispecies utopias are built. While mundane, recursive, and affective earth care practices can offer a multispecies sensual immediacy and entanglement, there are limits to the sense of situatedness it offers. While aspirational, performative earth care practices do not necessarily reckon with the epistemic and physical violence perpetuated by colonialism on human and more-than-human bodies. Does earth care open space for, or does it merely co-opt, often discounted indigenous ontologies and epistemologies while omitting the communities from which these emerge? Finally, we explore how an indigenous soil futurism could rewire multispecies utopias through situated story-telling and knowledge sharing practices.