The question of humanity’s relationship to earth cannot be reduced to the tired opposition between technological progress and romantic return. This false dichotomy—between postmodernist auto-annihilation and nostalgic authenticism—obscures the real complexity of how human systems interact with ecological processes. We need a critical framework that can navigate between extractive capitalism and primitivist fantasy.
Industrial agriculture operates through extraction—feedback loops optimized for short-term accumulation that systematically ignore the temporal scales on which ecological systems reproduce themselves. This isn’t simply about greed or moral failure. Capital’s structural logic demands the conversion of use value into exchange value at speeds that exceed the regenerative capacities of living systems. The problem is that capital’s feedback mechanisms are calibrated to quarterly profits, not the decades or centuries required for soil regeneration.
Gregory Bateson’s understanding of information as “a difference that makes a difference” helps us understand why capital’s information systems mainly register differences that translate into immediate market advantage, practically filtering out ecological information that operates on longer temporal scales.1 Because what makes a difference is contingent upon the social system’s value hierarchy. The result is pathological learning—the system optimizes for tactical adjustments while remaining incapable of the deeper learning that would allow it to adapt to ecological constraints.
Soil represents the paradigmatic case of this temporal mismatch. As a complex ecosystem containing more biodiversity than above-ground systems, soil operates through intricate feedback loops between microbial communities, mineral processes, and organic decomposition. These processes unfold over geological time scales, yet capital treats soil as a simple input to be maximized through industrial techniques that optimize for immediate yield. What emerges is a systemic breakdown: the system’s feedback mechanisms become increasingly disconnected from the actual conditions necessary for its own reproduction. Capital extracts fertility from soil faster than soil can regenerate that fertility, creating what appears to be productivity in the short term while systematically undermining the conditions for long-term viability.
Against this backdrop, we must carefully parse the relationship between local practices and larger structures without falling into romantic valorization. Indigenous and traditional agricultural practices often represent sophisticated feedback systems—complex loops between human activity and ecological processes that have been refined over centuries or millennia. These practices embody systemic memory: accumulated knowledge about the specific contingencies and temporal rhythms of particular ecological systems. They integrate use value with exchange value not through moral superiority but through practical necessity—communities that failed to develop sustainable practices simply didn’t survive long enough to pass their knowledge on.
These traditional practices represent successful higher-order learning—they developed the capacity to observe ecological feedback, creating wisdom through understanding the recursive nature of relationships within larger systems. Actions within a system inevitably circle back to affect the actor. Such practices develop mechanisms that maintain or enhance systemic capacity over time, in contrast to extractive approaches that optimize for immediate gains while ignoring or actively degrading long-term systemic capacity.
This distinction cuts across political categories. Both capitalist and communist systems have proven capable of ecological devastation when their planning mechanisms become disconnected from ecosystems’ feedback loops. The Soviet Union’s environmental record demonstrates that state ownership of means of production provides no guarantee against extractive logic when planning systems operate according to industrial imperatives that ignore ecological temporalities. Neither communism nor capitalism can impose a proper structure onto what were often local practices resisting these rigid bureaucratic or technocratic ideological systems. Both miss the point in their respective linear and totalizing paradigms, as James C. Scott observed.2
Capital’s deterritorializing flows encounter their absolute limit in soil degradation. Unlike other forms of capital, soil cannot be infinitely substituted or technologically replaced. While vertical farming and hydroponic systems can produce food, they cannot produce the complex ecosystemic relationships that soil represents. Soil is simultaneously biological, chemical, physical, and temporal—a system that exceeds any technological simulation.
This creates capital’s ecological contradiction. Capital requires the deterritorialization of local structures to create the standardized conditions necessary for global exchange. Yet the very processes that enable this deterritorialization—industrial agriculture, chemical inputs, mechanization—systematically degrade the ecological infrastructure on which all human systems depend. The contradiction manifests as a multivariate crisis: capital’s information systems systematically exclude data about ecological degradation because incorporating this information would slow accumulation to rates incompatible with competitive dynamics. The system becomes increasingly unstable as it optimizes for metrics that have less and less relationship to actual systemic health.
This represents a fundamental error in thought—the confusion of map and territory, where abstract representations (financial metrics, GDP growth etc.) become more real than the living systems they supposedly represent. Capital’s relentless focus on growth represents pathological purposiveness—it achieves its immediate aims while destroying the larger system that makes those aims possible. As a dynamo of production and consumption, capital demands a reintegration of dissolved local structures in order to create the relations it needs for exchange. However, its accelerated flows over global scapes cannot be reterritorialized because its management of natural processes is per definition limited. Therefore, it encounters futile resistance when meeting its absolute outer limits.
A critical cybernetics approach to soil must navigate between several false alternatives. We cannot return to pre-industrial practices, nor can we assume that technological solutions will emerge to substitute for degraded ecological systems. We need what strategic harnessing and countering of nature—working with natural tendencies rather than against them, but doing so with full awareness of our technological capabilities and social complexity.
Mental processes and ecological processes follow the same patterns—both operate through networks where information flows through interconnected pathways rather than hierarchical chains.⁴3 Soil exemplifies this: its intelligence emerges from the distributed interactions between countless organisms, each responding to local conditions while contributing to the system’s overall coherence. Energy is primary in every system—not just as fuel but as the organizing principle that creates differences and drives information flow. McKerracher’s concept of “timenergy” extends this insight to subjectivity: we exist within temporal-energetic flows that exceed our conscious planning while remaining essential to our existence. The soil system operates through timenergy—the accumulated energy of countless life cycles, stored and released through temporal rhythms that dwarf human timescales.4
To carry these deep roots to the ground is not to leave modern lifestyles behind. It’s to grapple with the seduction of being entirely removed from earth and at the same time the existential dread of that alienation. We are clearly in a tug and pull, and rather than offering a utopian vision of merciful nature or an unbounded deterritorialization from all earthly processes, I propose to treat soil as both a civilization starter and a potential civilization ender.
This means developing exchange mechanisms that can incorporate ecological temporalities into economic calculations. The challenge is creating sign value that corresponds to actual ecological relationships rather than simply making consumption appear more ethical. Green capitalism often represents the worst of both worlds—maintaining extractive practices while adding a layer of moral mythology that obscures the actual relationships involved. Simply put, the sign value of our ecological relationships should not be determined by how ethical our consumption is, but how the symbolic can come to mediate the real about our accordance with natural tendencies, without committing the naturalistic fallacy.
Soil functions as civilization infrastructure—a basal platform on which all human social organization depends. Unlike built infrastructure, which can be replaced or upgraded, soil represents an irreplaceable inheritance from evolutionary processes that cannot be reproduced through human agency alone. This creates a peculiar responsibility. We are simultaneously dependent on soil and capable of destroying it. Our technological power gives us the capacity to degrade ecological systems faster than they can recover, yet we remain biologically dependent on these same systems. This is neither a call for humility before nature nor a license for technological hubris, but a recognition of the complexity in which we’re embedded.
Without succumbing to the naturalistic fallacy or some esoteric cultist religion, soil is the thing we know of that can make new life from death. This is terrestrial autopoiesis—extending Maturana and Varela’s concept of autopoiesis beyond individual organisms to understand the earth’s capacity for regenerating living systems through soil processes.5 That is something magical to hold onto.
Our current condition increasingly appears life-denying, culturally without fruit and therefore without future. This represents yet another dimension of the liminality I explored previously—we exist suspended between a past we’ve commodified beyond recognition and a future we can no longer imagine as anything other than technological salvation or apocalyptic collapse. A culture that cannot reproduce itself through soil, through the basic processes of life regeneration, becomes trapped—endlessly recycling dead forms without the capacity to generate genuinely new life.
The solution is not to abandon markets or technological development. Wealth is desirable and markets are viable exchange platforms. A poignant critique must transcend one-dimensional vilification of capital. We must therefore find an exchange value that is rational in its orientation within a system and not instrumental in its valorization, only in terms of pure consumption. Such systems would necessarily be more complex than current market mechanisms because they would need to incorporate information about ecological processes that operate on multiple temporal scales simultaneously. They would need to value soil health, water cycling, biodiversity, and climate stability not as moral goods but as infrastructure necessary for any sustainable economic activity.
This presents both a technical and a political challenge. The technical challenge is developing information systems sophisticated enough to track ecological health in real time and incorporate this information into exchange decisions. The political challenge is creating institutions capable of implementing such systems despite resistance from interests that profit from current extractive arrangements or creating performative populist alternatives without substance.
Soil represents the foundation that enables human social complexity and the ecological limit that could collapse it. We cannot address this challenge through romantic retreat or technological transcendence, but only through the difficult work of developing social systems sophisticated enough to operate successfully within ecological constraints. This means taking seriously both our technological capabilities and our biological dependencies. We are neither purely natural beings who should submit to ecological processes nor pure subjects who can transcend natural limits through technology. We are complex beings whose social organization must achieve dynamic stability within ecological systems that exceed our control while remaining essential to our existence.
The task is developing forms of wealth and exchange that enhance rather than degrade the ecological infrastructure on which all wealth ultimately depends. This entire project is not to falsely preach a way back to some contrived past authenticism—it’s an attempt to get at something real now and for the future lest we entirely transcend our biological form. However, that bears with it an entirely new array of fallacies and ideologies. Ill-conceived nihilism and indifference won’t create large-scale structural change, but denying capital’s tendencies to extract with no care or clue for the creative limits of earth’s production causes existential calamity.
Without such developments, we face the prospect of soil degradation triggering cascading systemic failures that would make current political and economic arrangements irrelevant. The earth will continue; human civilization is optional. Soil reminds us that our social organization must ultimately prove itself capable of participating successfully in ecological processes that preceded us and will outlast us, or face the consequences of treating civilization as independent from the living systems that make it possible.
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, University of Chicago Press ed (University of Chicago Press, 2000). p. 315.
James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Veritas paperback edition, Yale Agrarian Studies (Yale University Press, 2020).
Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences (Hampton Press, Inc, 2002). p. 92-128.
David McKerracher, Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy, 2nd ed (Theory Underground Publishing, 2023).
Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, v. 42 (D. Reidel Pub. Co, 1980). p. 78-87.