Ground wars

Above the banana plantations of northern Martinique, drones and satellites read the surface of the land for the stress it endures and the yield it promises. Beneath them, in soil that a synthetic pesticide has saturated for centuries to come, the ground is quietly undoing what was done to it. This lecture gives that undoing two names. The first is terrestrial knowledge , or what the ground knows: the biological intelligence that plants, insects, and microbes produce as they adapt, at temporal scales no algorithm can apprehend. The second is vegetality , or how the ground knows, and how it lives, endures, and keeps time. Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork in Martinique, where the pesticide chlordécone lingers in the soil, the lecture follows the responses of organisms inhabiting toxic ground and argues that the plantation and the digital platform are genealogically continuous: inheritors of a single extractive grammar, both blind to what the ground does in response.