Soil Stories, Land Healers, and Dwelling in Damaged Worlds

Theodore Siegmund Teichman, Fellow with the Leifur Eiriksson Foundation,  gives the lecture Soil Stories, Land Healers, and Dwelling in Damaged Worlds: Conversations between restoration and landscape.

Abstract
Iceland has one of the most extreme examples of environmental degradation in the world. Yet, it also has one of the longest histories of ecological (and specifically soil) restoration. It is not possible to get back a lost ecology. Soil loss makes this exceptionally apparent. Yet, it is perhaps advantageous to look to the past to be inspired by remembering other worlds are possible. In this way, restoration constitutes a unique cultural endeavor in reifying the past, with present practices, to lay the groundwork for future, novel ecologies. I am studying landscapes of degradation and restoration in Iceland to understand how people frame and relate to the landscape as they are creating new natures. Coming from a perspective of landscape architecture, I am investigating the ways restoration is culturally inscribed by people, place, and practices. How do people cope with living and/or working in/with a restored landscape or degraded landscape? How do ecologists, volunteers, designers, engineers, farmers and
artists each narrate nature? How does place shape these stories? How do these stories shape place? This study focuses largely on participants and places the three major zones of major soil erosion, Rangárvallasýsla, The Highlands, and Þingeyjarsýsla. I have centered my study around site-based interviews with restoration-related practitioners and volunteers coming from different disciplines. From these interviews I have extrapolated the central field study sites–Gunnarsholt, Þórsmörk, Hólasandur, Hekluskógar, Hallormsstaðaskógur, the Pine Stand in Thingvellir, and Biskupstungur. Following farmers, forestry volunteers, and Landgræðslan technicians, I focus on several restoration practices, such as tree planting, greenhouse growing, fence building, fertilizing, and sheep gathering. To investigate the relationship between the practices and places, I have employed a multimedia reading/listening and storytelling approach, working with interviews, site sketching, video, photography, soundscape recording, and animation. The final artifact of this research takes several forms allowing for presentation of a film, book, exhibition, or participatory piece.