Introduction: The Dirt on Dirt Today

Dirt is the literal ground without which there would be no terrestrial life, and which is always shifting and on the move. On the darker side, dirt and dust can be highly toxic or radioactive, and thus can impose a destructively agentic influence onto most of the living things they contact. Dirt theory must encompass the full range of life-sustaining and toxic agencies in the soil without flinching. Thinking dirt is therefore challenging.

Heather I. Sullivan

Well grubbed, old mole!

Karl Marx

In 2013, the rockefeller university (founded in 1901 by its industrialist namesake to foster cutting-edge biomedical research) launched drugsfromdirt.org, an online “citizen science project” that asks “What chemical language does your soil’s microbiome speak?” The question guides a compound venture: to conduct an initial “profile” of dirt from all fifty U.S. states (the priority), as well as globally, and then to deepen the profile of dirt from especially “biodiverse regions”—a venture feasible only to the extent that citizen scientists buy in by harvesting soil samples and sending them to Rockefeller University. At stake in the project is an attempt to use the genetic matter from soils in the U.S. and worldwide to identify and produce new kinds of antibiotics, to harness dirt in the service of human health. Drugs From Dirt invites us—or at least prospective citizen scientists, a category that, in the website’s nomenclature, includes school groups, naturalists, soil junkies, and awesome individuals—to reach down and grasp the microbial pharmacy beneath our feet: to assist in finding, in mere dirt, the great key to universal wellness. As with any pharmakon, what we might ordinarily take to be poison—grubby, scummy, defiling dirt—proves likewise capable of realizing its own cure. In counterpoint to the four-decades-long War on Drugs (in which the resonance between drugs and dirt remains altogether dire) these emergent dirty drugs hold alchemical promise: the alluring capacity to transubstantiate alluvial dross into pharmaceutical gold. Whether aspiring citizen scientists, the unpaid ras in the Drugs From Dirt online lab, will by labouring in the dirt actually manage to combat global illness or only line the pockets of the shareholders of Big Pharma is a topic on which drugsfromdirt.org proves unsurprisingly silent.

The biopolitical enterprise of the Drugs From Dirt project serves to underscore, among many aspects of contemporary global life, the profoundly ambivalent status—the promise and menace—of dirt in the world today.¹ For our relation at present to dirt and its digging is vexed, ambivalent, even paradoxical. We reach anxiously for the hand sanitizer after every foray into public even as we explore the immunological benefits of a paleo lifestyle. We contemplate questionable bits on the menu at the hip new locavore charcuterie spot, yet we still close our eyes and purchase the factory-farmed poultry bargains at the co-op megastore. We cannot say no to garbage bags infused with air freshener, just as we cannot say no to every sordid disclosure in Rob Ford’s interminable descent. Drugs From Dirt trades on such ambivalence when it seeks to hail citizen scientists (at least in the global north) with its redemptive dirt narrative, to enlist them in the effort to use dirt to transcend itself toward some perpetual future of hygiene. In what ways and to what ends could such interpellation speak to the millions, cast off by the contemporary world, who dwell in dirt altogether differently: those who struggle to get by living on the streets of cities worldwide or those who populate, more precariously still, what Mike Davis calls the “planet of slums,” scavenging a desperate subsistence, in shantytowns and landfills, on the refuse left by late capitalism? If, as Cheryl Lousley observes so provocatively in her contribution to this forum, dirt is a social relation, then the connections it can forge, the lines of power it can draw, are nothing if not asymmetrical.

Such antinomies of dirt do confirm Heather Sullivan’s point in the first epigraph above: thinking dirt is indeed challenging. The authors of the provocative thought-experiments...