Abstract
Soil loss, soil decarbonization, and soil degradation have been pernicious through time, including in industrialized modern and postmodern cultures. Our thesis is that deficiency in care and compassion for soil/land/nature/environment in individualized postmodern cultures has sabotaged soil health and soil security. We posit that the emergent cultural metamodernism—programmatically characterized by hope, harmony, authenticity, and affect—will give rise to new forms of ethics and morals of soil/land/nature/environment due to the ability to integrate objective and subjective, rational/logic, and affective approaches toward the environment through re-awakened care and compassion. In this chapter, we explore soil ethics in the context of cultural epochs (modernity and postmodernity) and socially constructed cultural identities (subjectivism, relativism, pluralism, and objectivism). We argue that cultural identities are associated with specific moral viewpoints toward soil/land/nature—certain environmental ethics. We discuss these ethical attitudes that manifest in the form of ecological (eco)-identities, which express relationships toward soil/land/nature/environment. Findings are critically discussed in the context of ecopsychology that links psychology, ecology, and ethics. Lastly, a vision for soil ethics of the future situated within the cultural context of metamodernity is presented. This soil ethics emphasizes soil care and integration of affects, transpersonal states of consciousness, and environmental knowledge as core elements.
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Notes
- 1.
[Footnotes 1 to 3 refer to Europe, the USA and the “Global West”]. Modernism is characterized by realism-naturalism, objectivism, autonomy of humans, individualism, and liberal capitalism during the time of the Enlightenment, “The Age of Reason” (about eighteenth to twentieth century) encapsulating sciences, economy, technical fields, arts, and philosophy. In contrast, pre-modernism is characterized by realism-supernaturalism, mysticism, and/or faith and religion, and humans are subject to Gods divine will, collective altruism, and feudalism during medieval times (about 400–1400 CE; Hicks (2011). Modernity brought about the loss of belief in religion, the expansion of markets, commodification of things through capitalism, rise of science and technology, growth of mass culture and its influence, most markedly the invasion of bureaucracy into private life, and changing beliefs about relationships between man and woman (Butler, 2010).
- 2.
Postmodernism is a broad movement that developed in the mid-to-late twentieth century across philosophy, the arts, literature, and the intellectual world in general (Hicks, 2011). Postmodernists aimed at liberating ethical and political doctrines, as exemplified by Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and others. Postmodernism is characterized by deconstruction of previously trusted political, philosophical, artistic, linguistic, or other views. Postmodernists have radically attacked the objectivist claims of science and theories that explain the world. The critical postmodern techniques were especially liberating in the realms of ethical and social problems, for example, deconstructing patriarchy, authority, and oppressive power structures freeing women and cultural minorities. Postmodern discourse also involved cultural identities and deconstruction of self and other (Butler, 2002).
- 3.
Metamodernism is a proposed reactive cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic response to postmodernism. Metamodernism blends aspects of both modernism and postmodernism, with the latter characterized by relativism, nihilism, deconstruction, and the rejection of grand narratives. In contrast, metamodernism is characterized by hope, romanticism, sincerity, authenticity, affect, feeling tones, and the potential for universal truths and grand narratives (Akker et al., 2017). According to Akker and Vermeulen (2017), metamodernism emerged in the 2000s. Freinacht (2017) pointed out that metamodern refers to a major developmental stage of society in response to capitalism and liberal democracy.
- 4.
Affect is emotion of subjectively experienced feelings, such as happiness, sadness, fear, or anger (Colman, 2015). According to Damasio (2000), feelings are inwardly directed and private, whereas emotions are outwardly directed and public. The full and lasting impact of feelings requires consciousness, because only along with the advent of a sense of self do feelings become known to the individual having them. There are three stages of affective processing: (1) a state of emotion (which can be triggered and executed unconsciously), (2) a state of feeling (which can be represented nonconsciously), and (3) a state of feeling made conscious.
- 5.
Self has been defined as a person’s distinctive individuality, identity, essential nature, or collection of personal characteristics. In Western psychology, the self plays a critical role in providing self-coherence, self-expression, and self-identification (Colman, 2015). In sociology, the self is considered a socially constructed mental image that arises through the process of socialization (Cooley, 2013).
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Grunwald, S., Kastner-Wilcox, K.R. (2023). Soil Care, Culture, and Eco-Identities. In: Patzel, N., Grunwald, S., Brevik, E.C., Feller, C. (eds) Cultural Understanding of Soils. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13169-1_20
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