February 2026

Soil Publications

From soil to the underground - the underground will be central in meeting our long-term energy and climate goals. Drawing on insights from the Underground Futures scoping study, a collaboration between Lancaster University and the British Geological Survey, the viewpoint explores how subsurface spaces, once associated with extraction, are now central to energy storage, carbon sequestration, and geothermal heat generation, and the governance and regulatory challenges this presents. Through interviews and focus groups with UK stakeholders, it identifies governance, limited data, and a lack of integrated planning as major barriers to sustainable underground use.

What can community-engaged research tell us about the global soil crisis? In Relational Soil Care: A Community-Engaged Response to the Global Soil Crisis, the authors show why soil degradation cannot be understood solely as a technical or biophysical problem. Drawing on collaborative research with soil scientists, farmers, artists, and community partners, this chapter reframes the soil crisis as a crisis of relations—among social, economic, political, and ecological forms of soil care across scales. Rather than offering universal solutions, it demonstrates how community-engaged research disrupts securitized definitions of soil crisis, revealing soil health as a socio-ethical problem shaped by power, history, and relations of care.

Like other forms of art, poetry has the capacity to make soils more meaningful for people. Looking at Persian poetry across a 1200-year period from the perspective of pedology, this study by Shahriari et al. found that soils as tangible and symbolic entities have received significant attention, especially in connection to soil erosion and soil-water-plant relationships.

In this ethnographic study of soil conservation in Fiji, Griswold shows how ordinary bureaucratic practices can perpetuate colonial divisions related to land and livelihoods. The seemingly technical task of mapping and classifying soils reinforced hierarchies between different ways of knowing and relating to land, with disproportionate effects on Indo-Fijian farmers.

This close look at this history of soil mapping in East Africa shows how locally produced knowledge about African soils travelled to international fora, and how the production of influential soil expertise was underpinned by under-recognised indigenous soil expertise.

Soil Exhibitions and Arts

At County Hall, UK, Undergrowth reflects on the hidden often overlooked layers of existence – narrative spaces that hold complexity and vitality, undergrowth as what persists beneath the visible structures of society.

Plants & Poetry Journal publishes art, poetry, and non-fiction in Rituals & Remedies Vol. 2 created by artists and writers from around the world.

(Re)mediating Soils: Field Notes is a new exhibition at the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery’s Hess Gallery (Jan. 30–Apr. 4, 2026) and the first in a Canada-wide, cumulative exhibition series growing out of the (Re)mediating Soils research and residencies. Two residencies held in southern Alberta and central Yukon in 2025 brought artists into grounded research alongside scientists, gardeners and farmers, conservation workers, and Indigenous knowledge holders to think with soil as a relational medium—and to ask: What kind of crisis is the soil crisis? How can art and science work with community in response? What must change—socially, politically, culturally, economically—for soils to thrive? Watch a short video from the Yukon residency or visit www.remediatingsoils.ca

Call for Papers

Architecture has a Soil Problem. In this call for contributions for the journal Clara, we identify four and use them as analytical frameworks to renew the way we think about soil, inviting submissions that may (A) deepen our understanding of these problems through scholarly or visual interventions, or (B) present case studies of built projects that suggest ways of confronting or transforming them.