The world is a big place – but we are rapidly running out of room to grow our food, and we are using it in the wrong way.

For thousands of years, humans have shaped the earth on which we live. Land is where we grow food and graze animals. It is where we build our cities and roads, dig up minerals or chop down trees. It reflects our spiritual values; it is where we go to relax.

(Click to zoom) A selection of man-made problems: land scarcity and environmental damage endanger our food production. cc. Soil Atlas 2015

Land and how we use it has moulded history, politics and culture. In many Western countries, individual land ownership is associated with traditional values and social status. Lands were passed down by families from generation to generation. In socialist regimes, the nationalization of land was an expression of political power that reached a gruesome climax in the Soviet Union under Stalin, when millions were dispossessed and expelled from their farms. The structures that resulted from forced collectivization still shape the agricultural systems of much of Central and Eastern Europe.

The world has only so much land. Well into the 20th century, countries expanded their boundaries through war and colonial suppression. However, increasing liberalization and globalization of agricultural trade since the 1980s, have blurred the importance of a limited national territory. The era of the agricultural multinational firm has arrived. With branches around the globe and logistics that can handle millions of tonnes, the Big Four – Bunge, Cargill, Louis Dreyfus and ADM – shift bulk commodities from where they are grown to where they are processed and consumed. Land shortages can now be outsourced: land, the ultimate immobile resource, is now just another flexible factor of production.

The Green Revolution launched in the 1960s, ushered in the more intensive use of land in the tropics; high-yielding varieties, fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation pushed up crop yields. Fossil fuels compensated for a shortage of land. However, the limits reached by this type of non-sustainable agriculture were ignored. They came to light by the turn of the millennium, when the global ecological damage caused by industrial agriculture became evident. Now the limitation of land reveals itself again – this time from a global perspective. Demand is growing everywhere – for food, fodder and biofuels. Consumers are competing with each other. Cities and towns currently occupy only 1–2 percent of the world’s land. By 2050, they will cover 4–5 percent – an increase from 250 to 420 million hectares. Cropland has to give way; forests are being felled and grasslands ploughed up to compensate. Between 1961 and 2007, the arable surface of the world expanded by around 11 percent, or 150 million hectares. If demand for agricultural products continues to grow at the current rate, by 2050, we will need approximately an extra 320 to 850 million hectares. The lower figure corresponds to the size of India; the higher one, to the size of Brazil.

Growing demand for land heightens tensions among different groups of users. Land is an attractive investment: an increasingly scarce commodity that yields good returns. Worldwide it is the source of livelihood for more than 500 million smallholders, pastoralists and indigenous peoples. People identify with the land; for them it embodies cultural and even spiritual values. Especially in countries without social security systems, access to land is fundamental to survival. But individual and communal rights to land are increasingly under threat.

(Click to zoom) Football pitches reflect the gap between rich and poor. In a just and sustainable world, each of us would have to make do with 2,000 square metres. cc. Soil Atlas 2015

Rising demand also harms the ecosystem. A humane form of use – one that maintains the quality, diversity and fertility of a landscape – is all too rare. The more intensive the farming, the more damage it does to the environment. This is the main reason for the decline in biological diversity, above and below the ground. Every year, around 13 million hectares of forest are cleared; of the world’s primary forests, around 40 million hectares have disappeared since 2000. Fertile soils are ruined, deserts expand, and carbon that has been stored in the soil for millennia is released into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases.

Despite all these developments, the governments of developed countries still call for “green growth” – meaning replacing fossil fuels with biofuels. That is the inverse of the Green Revolution; now, intensive farming is supposed to replace petroleum. Such an intensive path towards growth disregards the goals of social justice, biodiversity and climate.

According to the United Nations Development Programme, if land use continues to increase, the world will already have reached the limits of ecologically sustainable land use by 2020. Global land use, mainly to benefit the European Union and the United States, cannot increase much more. With only 1.4 billion hectares of arable land at our disposal, each person will have to make do with just 2,000 square metres – less than one-third the size of a football pitch.

For more information please visit www.globalsoilweek.org/soilatlas-2015.

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Soil fertility depends on several factors: the soil age, its parent material, its organic matter content, the climate – and people.

It takes centuries – more likely thousands or even millions of years – to create soil. That is how long it takes for the surface rock to be weathered down to a depth of several metres. Only half of what we call soil consists of mineral particles such as sand and clay. Roughly 20 percent is water, and another 20 percent is air. The remaining five to ten percent are plant roots and soil organic matter such as living organisms and humus.

Soil organic matter gives the surface soil a dark, brownish black colour. This topsoil teems with life: in addition to earthworms, lice, spiders, mites, springtails and others, a handful of soil contains more microorganisms – bacteria, fungi and archaea – than there are humans on earth. These organisms decompose plant residues, turn them into humus, and distribute this fertility-giving substance throughout the soil.

(Click to zoom) Humus harbours many secrets. Only a fraction of the many species that live in it have been identified. cc. Soil Atlas 2015

Humus stores nutrients and water, and gives the soil a stable structure with many pores. It also contains carbon that plants originally absorbed from the air in the form of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. This makes soil one of the most important active carbon pools. The soil organic matter stores 1,500 billion tonnes of carbon, globally – this is almost three times more carbon than in all above ground biomass including trees, shrubs and grasses.

Soil is like cheese; the holes are just as important as the mass. The pores, or the voids between the solid mineral and organic particles, ensure that the soil is aerated, allowing roots and soil organisms to respire. Besides air, the pores may contain water, held there by adhesion and capillary forces. A cubic metre of soil may contain up to 200 litres of water, supplying the precious liquid to plants even though it may not have rained for a long time. The volume of pores in a soil depends on the size of the soil particles, the soil organic matter content, the presence of roots and the activity of soil organisms.

Earthworms are especially important; some of them burrow vertically down into the soil, allowing water to drain into the subsoil quickly during heavy rain. The subsoil contains less humus and fewer living organisms than the topsoil. It is lighter in colour, often yellow-ochre or reddish because of various iron compounds. A deep subsoil, that allows roots to penetrate and extract water even when the topsoil has run dry, is important for soil fertility.

Location often determines how much time was available for soil to form. In Central Europe during the Ice Ages, advancing and retreating glaciers wiped the slate clean by scraping off and churning up existing soils and depositing new sediments. The brown soils typical of the region are only about 10,000 years old – very young and little-weathered compared to most other soils. They often contain minerals that slowly release nutrients such as phosphorus and potassium into the soil. The red soils typical of the tropics, on the other hand, have undergone millions of years of weathering; many of their original minerals have been dissolved, transformed or washed out. Much of the phosphorus that has been mobilized is now firmly sorbed by iron and aluminum oxides and is thus unavailable to plants.

Soil properties depend in large part on its parent material. A rock that is rich in quartz will result in a light, coarse-grained and sandy soil that is well-aerated but stores relatively little water and nutrients. If the parent rock is rich in feldspar, the resulting fine particles will finally form a heavy soil, rich in clay. Such soils can store more nutrients and water, but are poorly aerated. They partially hold onto water so tightly that plant roots cannot absorb much of it. The best soils are neither sandy and light, nor heavy and rich in clay. Instead, they mostly contain medium sized particles called silt. Silt combines the advantages of both sand and clay: good aeration, along with the ability to store lots of water and nutrients.

Soils that are especially fertile are good for growing crops, while less-fertile soils are more suited for meadows, pastures and forest. For ecological reasons, even less fertile soils can be valuable. Peat soils are too wet for intensive farming, but store huge amounts of carbon. If the soil is used too intensively or in an inappropriate way, its functions decline and it starts to degrade. An estimated 20 to 25 percent of soils worldwide are already affected, and another 5 to 10 million hectares – about the size of Austria (8.4 million hectares) degrade each year. Arable land is particularly affected. But cultivation does not necessarily damage the soil: the floodplains of the Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq, and the highlands of New Guinea, have soils that are still fertile despite being farmed for 7,000 years.

For more information please visit www.globalsoilweek.org/soilatlas-2015.

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Zoom in by clicking on the picture.

But this resource upon which our lives depend is being stretched more and more to its limits. As the world population continues to grow, the amount of arable land available per person drops. Since 1960 this has more than halved. At present it is slightly more than 2 000 m², or about a third the size of a football field. At the same time, the heavy usage of the available land is leading to soil degradation. This means that the soil is losing its ability to support food production and to fulfill important ecological and climate functions. Once soil has been lost, it is essentially lost for good: it takes 1 000 years for a mere five cm of soil to form.

But we use the land not just for crops, but also for pasture and forests. Thus, when we eat meat or use paper, we are also always indirectly consuming land. We Europeans especially are using more land than we have a right to statistically—1.2 hectares per person annually. This is a global problem. And a very concrete problem that we must face in Germany as well.
The installation ONE HECTARE provides a glimpse into functions of the soil and how it is used worldwide. It sheds light on the dilemma of how to avoid overusing a limited resource, and it shows how we are nevertheless squandering large amounts of this resource. In addition, it asks how land may be distributed more equally and sketches some ways that this precious resource may be used more sustainably.

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A high security crop of 17 mobile telephones with Esperantic wisdom

Futuristic sounds and mottos in Esperanto emanate from the high security crop before you when the telephone numbers of their corresponding Rare Earth Element are dialed. Esperanto (“one who hopes”) was created to be a universal language motivating harmony between people and is allegedly the most widely spoken language in the world. Like Esperanto, the heavy reliance on technology to solve our current sustainability dilemma is also a utopian ideal.

Rare Earth Elements are a group of 17 elements, whose special magnetic, phosphorescent, and catalytic properties are central to technological advances in x-ray devices, aircrafts, and lasers to green technologies such as wind turbines and electric cars.  Nine different rare elements can be found in a smartphone alone, used for the color screen, the phone’s circuitry, the speakers, and the vibration unit.

Technically speaking, rare earth elements are not rare at all, but rather they are diffuse and not easily extracted from the earth. The environmental impacts of the extraction process are high, due to large amounts of toxic  waste products including radioactivity.

China is currently the world’s leading producer and consumer of Rare Earth Elements, responsible for 95% of production in 2010.  A monopoly on precious resources generates geo-political power.

• Scandium  – Prenu biciclon (Take a bicycle)
• Yttrium – Visitu Resarö- (Visit Resarö /an island in Sweden where a rare earth element was first discovered)
• Lanta – Ho, Sir John
• Cer- Estu lumo-  (Behold! Light!)
• Praeesodym- Verdo povas esti problemo- (Green can be a problem)
• Neodym- Cu vi ankan estis amiko de vento?- ( Are you a friend of the wind?)
• Samarium – Cu vi pivas auskulti min
• Prometium- Papa, Mike Sesdekuno (PM 61)
• Euopium- Mondo, mankas monon  (The world is losing money)
• Gadolinium- Trinku, deamikoj, trinku (Drink, friends, drink!)
• Terbium- Acetu en svislando (Buy it in Switzerland)
• Dysprosium- Estas malalirebla (It is unreachable)
• Holmium- Kiel forta! (How stong!)
• Erbium – Kontrau kataraktan (A cure for cataracts)
• Thulium – Vere, estas rara tero (truly a rare earth element)
• Ytterbium – Protektu la prezidenton! (Save the president!)
• Lutium – Ne fogesu min! (Forget me not!)

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• Medium: video, single channel video projection; to be shown in the Container
• Duration 5‘
• Video camera & editing: Erik Dettwiler

The video Matsogo shows a pair of hands crumbling a piece of cake and reshaping it into the same triangle shape that references the beginning slice.

Through the process of deconstruction to reconstruction, the essence and consumability of the piece of cake is undermined and lost. Although it is reformed into an object that resembles and has the same elements, as the cake it has lost its original function.

The sound track combines two songs from two different popular Setswana folktales. The songs are mixed together, thereby confusing and convoluting the narratives of the folktales in such a way, that there are three to five characters in an ongoing polylogue, that revolves around belief and disbelief, trust and betrayal.

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In recent years, countless extreme weather events clearly indicate that climate change is not only a future phenomenon but is already taking place. Some effects of global warming—desertification, more frequent droughts, less frequent but more intense precipitation, lower crop yields—inflame existing social conflicts. In the Global South, climate change aggravates the crises of poverty, violence, and unrest that result from the legacies of colonialism and neoliberal capitalism. This vicious circle fuels humanitarian crises and civil wars that amplify political, economic and environmental disasters.

Despite clear warnings, the ruling powers do not have a political agenda with a serious strategy to reduce use of fossil fuels, the main cause of global warming. A fossil-fuel fundamentalism seems to dominate throughout the globe.

Recently, some of Norway’s politicians have advocated extracting petroleum in one of the largest fish and aquatic life spawning grounds on the planet, the sea encircling the Lofoten archipelago. The deepwater drilling would have unpredictable effects on the fish populations and some of the world’s cleanest waters. With the idyllic landscapes of the Lofoten archipelago as its background, Leave It in the Ground describes the climate crisis not as a technical and scientific problem, but as a political problem. The film discusses how ecological and humanitarian disasters caused through global warming might topple old orders and open up possibilities that could lead to long-term social and political transformations, both positive and negative.

The film is accompanied by three photographic works evoking scenarios of a post-oil world.

Director and producer: Oliver Ressler
Narration text: Oliver Ressler & John Barker
The text is partly inspired by Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (2011); Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell (2009); Naomi Klein, Capitalism vs. the Climate (2011).
Narrator: Andrew Golder
Camera, film editing: Oliver Ressler
Sound design, mix and color correction: Rudolf Gottsberger
Music from the album: Kate Carr, Songs from a Cold Place (2013)
Footage: Mosireen; Anonymous video makers
Special thanks to: Bassam el Baroni, Dorian Batycka, Derek Jarman, Tadzio Müller, Maren Richter, Odd Arne Sandberg, Berte Tungodden Ynnesdal

The film was commissioned by LIAF – Lofoten International Art Festival 2013, supported by BMUKK.

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Although the quantity of fertile soil is in fact quite limited, we generally pay little attention to this resource. And yet it is the basis for producing 90 per cent of our food, it cleans and stores water, and helps to reduce the effects of climate change.

But this resource upon which our lives depend is being stretched more and more to its limits. As the world population continues to grow, the amount of arable land available per person drops. Since 1960 this has more than halved. At present it is slightly more than 2 000 m², or about a third the size of a football field. At the same time, the heavy usage of the available land is leading to soil degradation. This means that the soil is losing its ability to support food production and to fulfill important ecological and climate functions. Once soil has been lost, it is essentially lost for good: it takes 1 000 years for a mere five cm of soil to form.

But we use the land not just for crops, but also for pasture and forests. Thus, when we eat meat or use paper, we are also always indirectly consuming land. Germans for example are using more land than we have a right to statistically—1.2 hectares per person annually. This is a global problem. And a very concrete problem that we must face in Germany as well.

The installation ONE HECTARE provides a glimpse into functions of the soil and how it is used worldwide. It sheds light on the dilemma of overuse and scarcity, and it shows how we are nevertheless squandering large amounts of this resource. In addition, it asks how land may be distributed more equally and sketches some ways that this precious resource may be used more sustainably.

Photo credit: CC IOM Haiti@Flickr.com

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