Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Tam, Mankei

Titel

Skin of the Earth: On Soil, Collaboration, and Temporality after Fukushima

Ist Teil von

• Environmental humanities, 2023-07, Vol.15 (2), p.39-61

Ort / Verlag

Durham: Duke University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This article explores soil and the multiple pathways it has provided for the coconstitution of forms of life that might be possible following the Fukushima nuclear fallout. In Iitate, a former evacuation zone where radiation still lingers, farmers and concerned citizens deploy a coproduction framework that involves experts in making their own science. Incorporating tactile knowledge of the environment, they make life-strengthening claims on the future amid state promises of revival and progress. Soil becomes alive in , which emerges from the processes of separating radiocesium from topsoil, growing rice, and other improvisations for relating to soils that cascade to regenerate a livable world. This article discusses how the Japanese state utilizes temporal scales that orient its citizenry to a future associated with accelerated and intensified productivity as a sign of progress, incorporating decontamination technologies to assert control over organic lives and inorganic matter to make them productive for humans. Through , this article addresses how soil guides human attention to the rediscovery of interspecies temporalities, paces, and rhythms, reconfiguring radioactivity to create what I conceptualize as a regenerative time to underscore how actors reanimate the future(s) in the here and now.