I feel so privileged to have the spent the last few hours listening to moderator, Aroussiak Gabrielian, and the four panelists, Ryan Dewey, Emily Eliza Scott, Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, and Jane Hutton in the first webinar of the MLA+U ‘GROUND’ Conversation Series. As I search for my own path as a new landscape architecture student, I am curious how they each found theirs— so specialized, so unique, so absolutely necessary for our extended, but still short time engaging in the Anthropocene, a highly debated term of the evening. The theme for the night was material grounds, and various topics ranged from mined-no-longer-150-foot-tall guano mounds in Peru to the left-lifeless-and-lab-like atomic testing sites in Puerto Rico to just-how-long-it-would-take to cover all of Cleveland with cat litter. The night was lively to say the least.
Aroussiak Gabrielian, Ph.D., FAAR, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism, USC School of Architecture, moderated the webinar and began the conversation with an acknowledgment for the ground upon which we all live and the current and past caretakers of the land. She mentions her goals for the night: “to stir, to connect, to remember, as well as to expose and to destabilize” and asks the attendees and panelists to think of ‘ground’ as a noun, verb and adjective. She then framed the evening’s conversation through five material instances and their material entanglements that gather together vastly different landscapes, beginning with zircon. Zircon can withstand geological processes like erosion, transport, even high grade metamorphism and thus carries records of our deepest planetary history to some four billion years ago. Gabrielian ended with plastiglomerate, a rock-plastic conglomerate as the name suggests, one of earth’s newest fragments. Plastiglomerate demonstrates human’s alteration of the earth’s geologic makeup and supports some bacteria and algae as habitat and an energy source. Gabrielian closed her intro with two open-ended questions influenced by Anna Tsing: “How to better live and die in this world we have created” and “How and what will our toxic legacies leave behind?”. These questions definitely set the tone for the evening as all four panelists grappled with them in some form in each of their ten minute presentations.
Ryan Dewey, an artist, presented first out of the four. Much of his work addresses issues in land use, material sources and flows through the supply chain. Immediately Dewey began with a set of questions considering what constitutes as dirt, soil, ground and land and what does not in American English. The simple yet evidently magical act of picking up ground and holding it in your hands transforms it instantly; “Call it ground,” he sped through his slides quickly, first showing a picture of the earth surface, and then the earth surfaces held in human hands. “Can’t call it ground.” He asked questions: “Is place the container or the substance? Is this system treating place like a container or is this system treating place like a substance? Is value created by emptying the container or by keeping the container full?” His work considered a wide array of subjects— most notably Walmart’s Kitty Diggin’ cat litter from Mississippi sold for just over a dollar, a glacial erratic that just wants to go home, and green tea from Japan he composted, turned into soil and then planted in Switzerland. For me, with each presented project, he turned the concept of land and ground upside down again and again. At the end of the night Alison Hirsch, Ph. D., Associate Professor and Director of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism at the USC School of Architecture and co-creator of the series, asked him how and if Dewey considers humor as part of his work, if he thought his work was at all humorous. He responded, “people seem to think so”.
Emily Eliza Scott, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Art History and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon, opened with a picture of people walking barefoot on a beach in Malibu, part of a beach safari led by the Los Angeles Urban Rangers, which she co-founded in 2004. If you have not heard of the Los Angeles Urban Rangers or even if you have, I highly encourage you to look them up and watch the 2006 three-minute urban tour video of “banker’s canyon” and the Los Angeles river backcountry. On this particular safari deep in Malibu, the group trailblazed along the public private boundary. They sought to visualize and embody the complex patchwork geography of public and private land to make space more legible. In Malibu, with its defensive architecture, hired security guards and rising sea levels, these lines are seemingly intensified. Scott spoke of her search for ground truths through some of these processes, specifically looking at ground as a medium “that captures traces, indexing events of human and non-human alike”. “The ground”, she mentions, “is a holder of truths and secrets, even if at the same time it tends to swallow those very marks allowing “history to decompose”” (the last three words are borrowed from geographer Jessica Dubow). We also learned about the resounding scars left behind from atomic bombs, and how only later humans would come to understand radiation as they watched and still watch the scarred ground grow lifeless and sterile. Lastly, she showed pictures of shoe prints, each with its own grievance, opinion or demand to reclaim disputed territory, highlighting the way in which the ground is anything but mute.
Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, Ph.D., Professor of Soil Biogeochemistry and Falasco Chair in Earth Sciences in the Department of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of California, Merced, presentation was titled “The Ground Beneath Our Feet: (dirt is crossed out and replaced with) Soil. As a classically trained scientist, Berhe insists on the important distinctions between soil and dirt. “Dirt,” she states, “is not important and unsightly. But soil represents the difference between life and lifelessness. Soil should not be treated like dirt. Soil is precious.” The rest of her presentation spoke to exactly that: “soil is precious” from a climate perspective, a national security perspective, an economic perspective and an agricultural perspective, underlying so much of our needs as a human community. We learned that a third of our soils are already degraded from deforestation, water erosion and intensive cultivation systems, and that the people most affected by this degradation are at the bottom or near the bottom of the economic ladder and had no hand in creating such systems. Still, Berhe maintained a level of hopefulness throughout her ten minute presentation. She states, “The not-so-bad part of the story… is that we know what we need to do to get out of this situation. We know how to address soil degradation.” She concluded asking the audience if she convinced us. She definitely convinced me. I am fixated on Francis Hole’s idea that Berhe spoke briefly of– of humans existing as “Temporarily Not Soil”. How humbling.
Jane Hutton, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo, was the last speaker of the night, and immediately mentioned feeling charged up from the other three presentations. Hutton stayed true to the topic of material grounds as she spoke about ground as a place, focusing primarily on imported fertilizers. In her book, Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements, she traces different materials from their sites of extraction to their groundings in major park projects in New York. Out of all the materials discussed in her book, guano, a nitrogen rich powdery substance made from bird excrement, travelled the furthest and was one of the most complicated, contributing heavily to pro-slavery environments. Hutton explained that at the time of the creation of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park, using guano as fertilizer was cutting edge and made for a very powerful manure. Fifteen hundred years of accumulation of guano in the Chincha Islands was mined in just a number of decades, and the industrial world moved on to Chilean nitrates. Hutton asked the audience to think about beautiful green spaces and the impacts of chemically produced and altered landscapes. The Chincha Islands, now part of a national reserve, and the people that live there hope to grow their tourism industry, but are nervous about potential damage. They are currently engaging in a major paradigm shift while still experiencing the effects from the Guano Islands Act, which enabled US citizens to take possession of any ‘unclaimed’ islands with guano deposits. I will definitely be buying Hutton’s book.
For the rest of the time, the four panelists, and Gabrielian engaged in a Q&A. Here, we find the debate on the Anthropocene. Scott mentioned she finds the term territorializing but still appreciates it as a catalyst for a lot of interesting work and counter debates. Berhe finds the term interesting and necessary to describe a rapid whole scale change on the earth’s surface that humans have caused and are actively experiencing. While dealing with such literally heavy material, there was an air of lightness throughout the webinar I do not always find in zoom-land. The panelists were eager to ask each other questions, to pay compliments and to learn more about one another’s research. Somehow it felt like they all knew each other before tonight, both separately and now collectively enamored by this idea of ‘GROUND’. To sum it up, if you missed the first beautifully curated webinar in the ‘GROUND’ conversation series, it is very much worthy of a listen. And I also encourage you to attend the 2nd conversation of the series taking place on March 11th: Working GROUNDS.
Leslie Dinkin, MLA+U ’23