Soiling

Un hombre soñó con un cementerio aéreo

Hombre del aire

Me entristece tu tragedia

Hombre
de aire

Tu tragedia
haber vivido
para ver debilitada
la gravedad
de la Tierra

De tanto
ensalzar
tan solo el vuelo

(¡Cómo no!
Ser pájaro
amigo
del viento)

No poder
ya
ni caerte
muerto
sobre la Tierra

Desprendido de ella
inexorablemente

Caerte
Muerto
para finalmente descansar
sobre su firmeza

Cadáveres suspendidos
como halo
turbio
de su esfera

Satélites
de cementerio polvoriento
volando
en descomposición
aérea

Necrópolis utópica
de la maquinización
Absoluta
de la Madre Tierra

In the preface to his book Cultural Forests of the Amazon: A Historical Ecology of People and their Landscapes, anthropologist William Balée references the work of soil scientists Tsai et al.,¹ who studied terra preta do indio (Indian dark earths) at a biomolecular level. The scientists realized that the colonies of bacteria and other microscopic beings that prosper in these anthropogenic and highly fertile soils of Amazonia display a higher degree of biodiversity than their counterparts in soil unaltered by human activity.² From the micro to the macro scale, Amazonians past and present offer an important lesson: human beings need not be predatory and destructive towards what non-Amazonians categorize as Nature. 

Humans, cohabitating in urban configurations, can be breeders of abundance, life, and biodiversity. Native Americans have been proponents of biodiverse urban ecologies for thousands of years (5,300–5,500) in the rain forests and other geographies of South America. The transects that are characteristic of the Pacific-Andean-Amazonian regional complexes are webs of exchange (cultural, genetic, commercial, epistemological) and multi-sited habitation. Anthropologist John Victor Murra (perhaps following Peruvian geographer Javier Pulgar Vidal) referred to this system as a “vertical archipelago” in describing the economic, political and territorial organization of the Inca. The roots of this regional system of in-HABITATion—of profound territorial transformation—runs deep into the history of the original nations in the Americas. 

The fertile dark earths, incrementally accumulated by generations of Amazonians, are the main index of human settlement in the region. These rich soils sustained the agrodiverse gardens of thousands of interconnected communes, forming the foundations of a regional system resting upon their domestic agroecological units or extended family-run microecologies. Archaeologists Heiko Prümers, Carla Jaimes Betancourt, José Iriarte, Mark Robinson and Martin Schaich have recently excavated, with Lidar (light detection and ranging), the “low-density urbanism” of the Casarabe cultural complex in Bolivian Amazonia. Thanks to their work and that of other Amazonian archaeologists/anthropologists (Baleé, Erickson, Denevan, Heckenberger, Hecht, Posey, Neves, Rostain, to name a few), we can now, finally, see the agroecological urban constellations of Amazonia in their full, clear, regional complexity. The dots of thousands of “geoglyphs” (agroecological hamlets, if you wish) release the breath of their human geometries (circles, rectangles, squares, mounds, straight lines). The dots of thousands of anthropogenic and highly productive forest islands, punctuate an immense urban constellation that condenses into primary, secondary, tertiary, and even fourth- or fifth-tier nodes of power. The architectural scale of these urban constellations is monumental, as monumental as the cultural landscapes that expand between nodes: raised fields, fish weirs, reservoirs, canals, mounds. Amazonians moved millions of metric tons of soil in order to build the geo-, bio- and eco-infrastructures that have contributed to enhance the linguistic, cultural and biological diversity of the continental biome. Like others, Amazonian civilization grew out of the soil and its transformations. Like others, to the soil, to their mineral and vegetal condition, they have returned.

Amazonian cities defy our ontology of the urban. They are fluid and beyond binaries in every single respect. They are open and closed, rural and urban, its citizen-peasants are also hunters, gatherers and fishermen. In these habitat-cities, communities are multi-sited and extremely dynamic, always shifting. The small, medium and large settlements, whose polycentric constellations are interwoven by water and land routes (some, monumental causeways), as well as irrigation and water management systems. These urban constellations imprint a mirror image of the heavens upon forested lands, whose rivers neatly reflect the skies above. The modern conditions of these settlements was described by Brazilian geographer Bertha Becker as making up an urban forest (foresta urbana). Godfrey and Browder chose Rainforest Cities as the title for their book on the diffuse and “disarticulated” urbanisms of post-WW2 Amazonia (the disarticulation belongs to the realm of systematic rupture of Amazonian tissues by modern, “rational,” extractivist and technocratic approaches to “development” and planning in the region). Scholars of Southeast Asian and African tropical forests describe this type of urbanism as “low-density,” even as galactic. I like to describe it as agroecological urban constellation. What is clear is that language fails those of us who grew up with a concept and an image of the city that stands in opposition to the countryside that feeds it, in opposition to the hinterlands that provide it with raw materials, in opposition to the embarrassment of soil and soiled hands. These cities are airborne, escapist visions of the global elite’s imagination that attempt to divorce humans from the soil and its toil. These cities are of Silicon Valley’s imagination—blasting off to become dystopian satellites rotating around Mother Earth, finally cut off from the limitations and perishability of an Earthly body. These cities are anti-gravitation cities, now doomed to face the foundation of their very existence: the soil. To spiral around this cycle, it is time to ground, to renew the galactic urban constellation.