Lyons, Kristina. Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020, 232 pages

Kristina Lyons is an American anthropologist whose ethnographic work was carried out at different times over more than a decade in Colombia. Her work moves between worlds and narratives, as she shows the tensions and ontological differences between scientific, bureaucratic, and communitarian relationships of and with the soil. The author guides us on a journey through the laboratories of the Biotechnology Institute of the National University of Columbia and the offices and public events of the country’s agrarian entities, to answer questions about the ways in which scientific and political notions have been built around the productivity and use of soils, which contrast with the knowledge and practices of peasant communities living in the southern Colombian department of Putumayo. The text starts with an extensive overview of the political ecology of the antidrug policy in Colombia and its local impacts in the Putumayo region. Illicit crop eradication strategies in the country began in 1970, with the direct application of a host of chemicals including Paraquat, Garlon 4, Imazapyr, and Tebuthiuron to marijuana, coca, and poppy crops. However, starting in 2000, with the implementation of Plan Colombia, the policy shifted to a massive eradication program through the aerial spraying of a concentrated formula of glyphosate herbicide manufactured by Monsanto. Lyons describes how aerial spraying of glyphosate was a tactic that, together with militarization, was conducted over a fifteen-year period on Colombian territory. Yet, due to the volatile nature of glyphosate, this implied the dispersion of pollutants over forests, soils, cattle, water sources, rivers, wild animals, crops, pastures, and humans. The indiscriminate use of chemicals over five decades reshaped soils and reconfigured life and death. Lyons shows how the negative material effects of the antidrug policy in Putumayo are intimately connected with the bureaucratic and dominant conception of soil. In particular, the soils of the Amazon have been conceived from the institutional framework as sacrifice zones, that is, as poor and without agro-productive possibilities. This makes the region a strategic space for geopolitical control in the counterinsurgency war. Thus, state presence in this region has been marked by militarization, poisoning, deforestation, and extraction of subsoil resources. In Amazonia, the traditional scientific categories around soils have been marked by two limiting factors. On the one hand, for many years a geological perspective dominates understandings of soil. That is, because of its proximity to rock layers, soil has been considered as an inert and non-living layer, which can be removed, exploited, and extracted without major consequences. On the other hand, once taxonomic classification studies progressed, the productivity of soil was analyzed in terms of its potential to host large-scale harvests of certain foods and products. In this context, equatorial soils and particularly Amazonian soils have been classified as unproductive, and incompatible with agriculture, in particular with large-scale monocultures. Lyons traces how soil scientists at the institutional level have distant research practices that tend to take place in laboratories located in a safe, urban setting, and depend on financial and political support from the state and from industry. Indeed, critical soil scientists have had tremendously difficulty influencing national policies to ensure the adequate comprehension of soil complexity and face big challenges and gaps in incorporating in this classification into the knowledge and wisdom of the communities inhabiting the territories. Lyons reveals how the science has now been influenced by concepts derived from systems theory and ecology, which have radically changed the vision of soil, considering it as a natural body and complex life system that defies modern dualisms between nature and culture, and the bio (living) and the geo (non-living). However, such perspective has had …