Relatively recent scholarship involving patterns of human settlement in the pre-Columbian Amazon basin, and the deliberate engineering of terra preta there — the latter strikingly similar to the production of chernozem at the Ukrainian “megasites” — has opened up a really fruitful vein of thinking about the human future for me.
It’s a way of imagining long-term, relatively dense human settlement upon the land that looks *nothing* like the post-cyberpunk urban futures we now tend to envision, or even the cozy solarpunk visions that amount to cottagecore with a few airships and wind turbines tacked on. That treats soil as not merely a technology, but the keystone technology on which everything else literally depends. That consciously modulates its throughput rather than suspending itself between violent extraction and the equally violent expulsion of denied waste.
I have to find some way of writing about it that isn’t science fiction.
