Geosocial polar futures and the material geopolitics of frozen soils

In the last 150 years, the world has lost half of its topsoil due to erosion, intensive agriculture, and the industrialization and urbanization of the planet (Pimentel 2006). The scale of this impact becomes even more significant when considering that topsoil acts as an interface in the regulation of the flows and transfer of key elements between the atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere. As Maria Puig de la Bellacasa has made clear, historically, “the predominant drive underlying human–soil relations has been to pace their fertility with demands for food production and other needs, such as fiber or construction grounds” (2017: 169). In this chapter, we look at soils that are often considered marginal to conversations about topsoil and soil erosion, namely polar soils, as opposed to temperate and tropical soils or urban soils. Puig de la Bellacasa notes: “[A]t the turn of the twenty-first century, Earth soils regained consideration in public perception and culture due to global antiecological disturbances”, and “[h]uman–soil relations are a captivating terrain to engage with the intricate entanglements of material necessities, affective intensities, and ethico-political troubles of caring obligations in the more than human worlds marked by technoscience” (2017: 169). These are precisely some of the questions that animate this chapter, which we use to develop a different approach from the perspective of geological politics and geosocial futures.