Blog / After Us

Erosion (Earth Primer #4)

September 15, 2023 - By Giacomo Sartori

(Countryside in Algeria, photo by Giacomo Sartori)

Cultivated soil is very fragile—just a bit of water running over the surface is capable of stripping away its thin upper layers, which are the most rich and fertile. The soil is then deposited at the base of the slopes, where the water slows, or poured into creeks or rivers that will carry it to the sea. In either case (and both often happen simultaneously), it is a permanent loss. And if the water streams down violently, it tears away all the best soil, opening up rivulets and deep ravines, eating up a stunning amount of earth, annihilating the labor of thousands of years through which the soil had been formed from stone. Steep slopes are not needed; water builds up energy from even minimal height differences,...

Life (Earth Primer #3)

September 8, 2023 - By Giacomo Sartori

(Mycorrhiza mushroom: Photo by Backpackerin, Pixabay)

(Earth Primer # 2)

Unconsciously, we associate soil with life, because we’ve had the experience of observing the critters that live there: insects, ants, glassy larvae, light little spiders, snails, worms. A swarm of life that somewhat repels us, it is very distant from the ideal nature that we favor, those vast spaces where our gaze gets lost—an immensity that awes us but also attracts us, and where, in fact, we feel at ease. Not in line with our tastes, the life of soil is too humid, too dark, it smells too much of corruption and decomposition, of death. The spaces of our lives have become ever more aerated and sterile, and soil looks more...

Film (Earth Primer #2)

September 1, 2023 - By Giacomo Sartori

(Photo courtesy of Giacomo Sartori)

(Earth Primer #1)

When I travel around, giving lectures on soil, I ask my listeners—who sometimes are children—how deep it is. In response, some people say a mile or two, others say hundreds of yards. They all imagine it limitless; you can tell by the seriousness in their hesitations, the sort that emerge whenever incommensurable entities are at stake. But it is also clear that no one has a precise measurement in mind. This is normal, because what we’re given to see is its face looking to the heavens, and only meager indices—not simple to suss out—encourage us to imagine how deep it goes.

In reality, almost everywhere the soil below us...

War (Earth Primer #1)

August 25, 2023 - By Giacomo Sartori

(Photo courtesy of Giacomo Sartori)

N.B. With this post, we inaugurate a weekly series penned by the brilliant Italian novelist and soil scientist Giacomo Sartori. We'll be posting a new column each Friday, so stay tuned!

Wars are as unfortunate for the earth as they are for people. The aerial footage from the battles in Ukraine showing fields studded with craters is sadly identical to that of the Adige Valley, in my region, due to a conflict more than one hundred years ago. The same visible pimples on the edges of farmed fields, perfectly round but differing in size, which depends on the force of the projectiles. The rockets and shells that don’t wound people—which, fortunately, are by far the majority—lascerate the earth, though this damage...

Climate Nihilism (and Charles Baudelaire)

July 18, 2022 - By Maurizio Ferraris

(Photo of Charles Baudelaire: Nadar, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
 

"A theory of true civilization.
It rests not in gas, nor in steam, nor in table-turning.
It rests in the diminution of the traces of original sin."

The table-turning ("tables tournantes") was that of spiritualist seances, and the apothegm is Charles Baudelaire’s, from My Heart Laid Bare (1897, translation by Rainer J. Hanshe, 2017). What Baudelaire intends here is a denunciation of tekhnē and the Promethean arrogance of his age,...