School of Sustainability

A soil school with no campus, three assemblies in

The first Soil Assembly happened in 2022 at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore. Its premise was that soil is not just a growing medium but a meeting point - for food and water cycles, for biodiversity, for the histories of the people who live on it - and that you learn it by working it, not by reading about it. Rather than another international conference, the organisers built a network of distributed gatherings tied together by an online community.

The third assembly took place at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. The guest lists are unusual: farmers and growers alongside artists and designers, scientists alongside seed keepers, gardeners, hackers and landscape practitioners - people who would not normally share a room inside a university or a cultural institution. What they do together is practical. Composting, fermenting food, collecting seed, mapping ecosystems, running basic soil tests and low-tech citizen-science experiments, and listening to people who carry generations of knowledge about a particular piece of ground.

The network calls its method 'living pedagogies', by which it means two things. First, that no hierarchy is imposed between expert and non-expert knowledge - scientific research, farming tradition, artistic experiment and local memory are put in situations where they can change each other. Second, that ecological literacy should not be a specialist subject bolted onto an art or design curriculum, but part of creative practice itself, taught through field laboratories, learning farms, residencies and workshops in actual territories.

Some of the vocabulary is homemade: 'permacircularities', 'social fermentation', borrowed from permaculture, circular economies and slow food to describe processes that refuse to resolve into a single project or a quick fix. The stated ambition is not a new institution or a model to be replicated, but a loose network of situated experiments, each one shaped by its own ground.

Makery · Read the source

The forest garden that would not call itself agroforestry

Ask Eriberto Guerra why he does not call his plot in the Peruvian Amazon an agroforestry system and he laughs. "That does not work here," he says. He farms near the Cordillera Azul National Park, in the town of Lamas in central Peru, and what he tends is better described as a forest garden: dozens of species grown together, among them traditional plants, on ground that government programmes once tried to improve.

Those programmes promoted coffee or cacao with one or two food crops and a few trees, and offered the sustainable-farming label to go with it. Guerra and other Indigenous farmers around Lamas found it did not perform. Some rejected the label outright. His reasoning is plain arithmetic: when one crop fails in the field, or fetches nothing in the local market, a plot holding dozens of species has others to carry the household through. A plot holding two does not.

Guerra's account was reported by Mongabay as part of a series of interviews with Indigenous leaders about environmental solutions in their communities. His alone is worth pausing over, because it names a recurring failure: an outside programme arrived with a simplified version of a practice the farmers already held in fuller form, attached a label to the smaller thing, and then wondered why it struggled. The farmers' objection was not to trees or to coffee. It was to being offered less diversity than they already planted, and being told it was more.

Mongabay · Regeneration International · Read the source