Despite urgent warnings about the ongoing worldwide degradation of soils – due to intensive farming practices, deforestation, pollution, and climate change – soil remains largely unthought outside industrial agriculture and certain subfields of the environmental sciences. While oceans, algae, microbes, and air have been reanimated by recent scholarship in the environmental humanities, soils have been only tangentially the focus. Still, work in environmental history has taken up critical soil studies in the past decade, building on early theorization by social scientists like Mary …