By Galina Kallio
Amidst Covid-19 death has become an everyday encounter. It appears in daily statistics; it shows in increasing numbers of empty beds and occupied coffins; it directs the politics of today, yesterday and tomorrow. Saving human lives has suddenly become the political top priority. But while protecting life and avoiding death seem to go hand in hand, the paradox between these two pursuits has never before appeared so gigantic to me.
This text is a raw draft about my thoughts and feelings on death and (un)natural treatment of dying in the context of what I call Western civilization. I use this space to write about my observations and to prompt a discussion on a topic that generally appears a taboo: how and why death of other-than-humans is a norm but dying of humans is institutionalized as unnatural and appalling?
As a continuation of my PhD on alternative forms of organising food production and exchange (Kallio 2018), I started my postdoctoral research on invisible work in regenerative agriculture (Kallio 2019a). During one year of field work - of literally working on fields of six different farms - that I have conducted so far, I have encountered death and dying of different beings and in diverse forms. Last Fall, I wrote about my initial thoughts in a blog (Kallio 2019b), but during the past Spring it has become clear to me that this topic requires more dedicated reflection.
Regenerating life through cycles of death
The core of the paradox in protecting life by avoiding death, to me, is in the failure to see how death and dying are intrinsically connected to and inseparable from life and living. Now, when I speak of “death” and “life” I refer not only to humans but equally to all life forms and life sustaining parts including microbes, soils, plants and animals, water, and geological elements. While Covid-19 has shown that despite their best efforts, humans can’t always control death (or life), hegemony over life and death of both humans and other-than-humans is still primarily the role that humans consider theirs to take.
To me, the interplay between death and life - dying and living - has become particularly visible through the practices of regenerative agriculture that I study. In trying to produce food by optimizing natural processes, by increasing biological complexity and by regenerating the local ecosystems farmers are dealing with multiple other-than-human beings that appear as friends or foes depending on the aims, abilities, and ethical guidelines of the farmer.
There’s a constant balancing between killing someone, or something, for saving something else. To kill a deer in order to save strawberries, or a fox in order to save the chicken. To kill chicks in order to have eggs; weeds in order to protect food crops. To kill trees in order to have more light. Human endeavours compete with plants and animals for food and habitat. Just like in the wild (nature), someone needs to die in order for someone else to live. But how should we decide who dies, who lives, and who kills?
The documentary Biggest little farm records the life of an American couple who buy an old farm, which they start regenerating. It reveals how difficult it is for farmers, despite their best efforts, to co-live, co-create and co-evolve with their local ecosystem while aiming at producing food and making a living out of it. Mourning the dying of an individual pig, a single fruit tree, or a nearby pond is normal as long as their death has a direct impact on income, or livelihoods of people. But to take death of living and non-living organisms as a point of reflection, a mirror for the life of humans, is extremely rare. (Can one say that a cliff has died if it’s blown away for, for instance, road construction? Or, can a single leaf die?).
In the documentary the farmer couple face multiple instances where their harvest becomes threatened and the farmers need to decide which measures to take. Snails occupy fruit trees, coyotes slaughter the chicken, moles eat the roots of the plants. Each scenery showing these losses at the farm seems horrible and extremely unfair - to the farmers. The logical way out appears to be eliminating the causes like building more powerful fences, placing traps, taking out the shot guns. But, the moment you start to think that there’s too much to bear and too many losses for the farmers to overcome, the documentary shows how the regenerative design together with the ecological succession that has taken place during the several years of consistent work for restoring the local ecosystem bring the solution: coyotes arrive and start eating the moles instead of chicken, birds arrive and start eating the snails, rains help the pond to recover its water circulation.
The aesthetics of death
I sit on the train and watch the landscape pass by: fields after fields after fields fenced by forests; trees after trees standing in straight lines; clearance screaming silently. I used to love fields. I would gaze endlessly from the window at the countryside surrounded by miles of monocrop fields. I used to love birch and pine rows that I, together with everyone else, call forests. I used to love bridges, scenery routes, rails.
It was only by learning to make connections to the soil through my research when I started to see death in agricultural landscapes, in manmade scenery routes, in tree plantations.
In her book The wild human Kaihovaara (2019) describes how natural parks are kept “natural” through removing unwanted plant species and animals in order to take care of the wild nature. She describes how holes are drilled in trees and filled with fungus in order to provoke the process of rotting (dying) to maintain the wilderness. Indeed, very little of the Earth’s surface remains “natural” and untouched by humans (IPCC 2019).
Alongside endless extraction required by economic growth (Raworth 2017), protecting the natural habitats is analogically extractive: conservation controls the processes of dying (and living). Humans decide what species are valuable, where and when; who gets to live and why. Meadows are created by placing animals to pasture. Sheep wipe out young tree seedlings and unwanted plants in order to protect and bring plants classified as valuable species to life. Animals get food, humans get traditional biotopes. Plants get killed and saved.
Forests are turned into national parks by building roads, camping areas, and toilets. Pebble roads enable us to connect to the forests, signs nailed to trees guide us on the right tracks, cars allow us to arrive to the wild nature.
While death is seemingly invisible, it remains in the center of what people find beautiful or ugly, natural or disgusting, desirable or dangerous.
(Un)naturalising death
Death accompanies life but it is wiped out from our everyday lives. Cleaning up death occupies a considerable role in our Western, progress-oriented societies. Slaughter houses don’t have open doors, forests are cleared from dying and dead trees, corpses are hidden in coffins.
I have noticed that despite it being everywhere in nature, decomposing is not a natural part of human life. Plants are rarely allowed to decompose and fertilize fields. The processes of decomposing are oftentimes considered disgusting. Sharing one’s excitement about watching organic matter break up and turn into compost, soil, or worm poo is not a topic for a small talk, or a for family dinner conversation.
I have realized that the moment the connection to soil is lost death becomes unnatural. The most symbolic and yet concrete evidence of unnaturalizing death comes from our funeral ceremony. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust – but let the soil never touch the body. The coffin, or the urn separates corpses from the earth disabling the human body to decompose organically. The idea of human body composting by allowing millions of bacteria and organisms eat it and turn it into soil is not only disgusting, but also disturbing for most people.
But I find the image of a tree growing from one’s composted body intriguing.
In his work, Eisenstein (2013) builds on the concept of separation, which he argues lies at the core of our (progressed) civilizations. He speaks of separation from other human beings, from other-than-human beings, and ultimately of separating oneself from death by denying and avoiding it. It is this detachment of death from life which reproduces the separation. “Decomposing corpses are part of the natural cycles. Death draws life to it. In a human environment, decomposing is not allowed, not to nature, nor humans”, writes Kaihovaara (2019, p. 191). This all seems to make sense, but only when I stay in my small bubble.
I have started to wonder why, despite death being everywhere around us, it only touches us when our close ones die. Losing a family member is a tragedy. Losing a relative can be very sad and upsetting. Losing a pet hurts. Death of production animals is normal, but affects some of us. Hunting might seem unfair and unpleasant, but yet, there’s something primitive, something wild about it, that kind of demystifies and justifies death. But what about death of a plant? Or a microbe? Do we need to mourn them? Do they even feel anything?
Where to draw the line of caring?
Daring to care
The more I have started to connect with soil, local landscapes, and people taking care of these landscapes the more I have been touched. The more I have read about plant life (Gagliano 2018, Tomkins & Bird 1973) and familiarized myself with ecological principles and ethics (Curry 2011, Leopold 1989, Sessions 1995) the more I have realized that understanding and connecting to the processes of dying enables caring. Caring doesn't happen in isolation; it happens through relationships (de la Bellacasa 2012). And in every living relationship, death is always present.
However, speaking of death (and life) in general terms, without specifying who’s life and who’s death is in question is easily, though not necessarily justifiably, held as problematic. This is because comparing a life of a human being to a worm’s life is not only inappropriate, but also absurd. It is absurd not because the answer is obvious (it isn’t), but because one shouldn’t compare individual beings, but rather start thinking in terms of populations, ecosystems and habitats. It is to enforce the separation by treating humans as individuals rather than as a collective form of an evolution seeking (desperately!) its place on the planet Earth and beyond.
Studying regenerative agriculture has made me realize how deeply embedded our Western civilization is in symbolic reproduction, and not in reproduction of life. I have, with horror and embarrassment, realized that I can name numerous brands but barely know the names of the birds and plants in my backyard. With suspicion and despair, I have realized that in our Western civilization plants have consciousness only if the science has been able to prove it.
We think we know. But what do we know?
***
In the blue night
frost haze, the sky glows
with the moon
pine tree tops
bend snow-blue, fade
into sky, frost, starlight.
The creak of boots.
Rabbit tracks, deer tracks,
what do we know.
(Pine tree tops, by Gary Snyder)
***
References
de la Bellacasa, M. P. (2012). ‘Nothing comes without its world’: thinking with care. The Sociological Review, 60(2), 197-216.
Curry, P. 2011. Ecological ethics: An introduction. Polity press.
Eisenstein, C. (2013). The more beautiful world our hearts know is possible (Vol. 2). North atlantic books.
Gagliano, M. (2018). Thus spoke the plant: a remarkable journey of groundbreaking scientific discoveries and personal encounters with plants. North Atlantic Books.
IPCC 2019 Climate change and land. https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/
Kaihovaara, R. 2019. Villi ihminen.
Kallio, G. 2018. The visible hands – An ethnographic inquiry into the emergence of food collectives as a social practice for exchange. Doctoral Dissertation Series. Helsinki: Aalto University Publications, Unigrafia Oy. https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/handle/123456789/34034
Kallio, G. 2019a. Katse maassa - tutkijatohtorin työorientaatiota etsimässä. Teoksessa Räsänen, K. (toim) Tutkija toimii toisin - Esseitä akateemisesta työstä ja sen vaihtoehdoista. https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/41495/isbn9789526088792.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Kallio, G. 2019b Uudistava maatalous avaa näkymän elämään – ja kuolemaan, Nessling-blogi https://www.nessling.fi/apurahatutkijalta/uudistava-maatalous-avaa-nakyman-elamaan-ja-kuolemaan/
Leopold, A. (1989). A Sand County almanac, and sketches here and there. Oxford University Press, USA.
Raworth, K. (2017). Doughnut economics: seven ways to think like a 21st-century economist. Chelsea Green Publishing.
Tompkins, P., & Bird, C. (1973). The secret life of plants (No. QK50. T65I 1973.). New York: Harper & Row.
Alkuperäinen lainaus Kaihovaaralta: Maatuvat raadot osa luonnon kiertokulkua. Kuolema vetää elämää puoleensa. Kuoleva ja kuollut puu vetää puoleensa useita eliöitä ja eläimiä. Ihmisympäristössä maatumista ei kuitenkaan mahdollisteta, ei luonnolle saati ihmisille.