The Anthropocene begins where the ability to preserve even the tiniest piece of untainted nature ended. The Anthropocene connotes the period in which we accept the reality that we have no choice but to decide what form nature takes, what home we make for ourselves.

We greet this reality, and its transformed nature with shame, fear, and repulsion at the consequences of our own actions while we continue to fail to change. At the same time, we cannot deny our adoration of nature, our innate biophilic impulse, as we listen to the oceans rhythms or watch broken shadows glance across the bodies of ferns on the forest’s floor. We know all too well what we have to lose.

As a child of nine or ten I would go deep into the woods around my midwestern childhood home and work for weeks on elaborate forest homes. I had fallen in love with the idea of a monastic and insular existence of reading, writing, and drawing in a place of my own making. I dug into the clay dirt, piling the soil around the edges of the deepening hole and layering the soil with water hauled from the nearby creek. I was both building up and down, of, in, and with the earth. I then layered branches, still clad in leaves, forming a roof of green (see Figure 2 after Figure 1). The cool of this shelter in the summers’ heat made its efforts worthwhile. The time invested in these constructions was my escape from politic and was rooted in a need to protect myself from my peers and from the climate, the sun and heat of middle American summers.

Figure 1 Figure 2
Dig and Dump Building Up and Down, after Hélène Frichot

Note: by Hélène Frichot, 2019, Drawing. Note: by Carrie Bobo, 2025, Drawing.
from Dirty Theory, Troubling Architecture.

Now I know that my love of construction that was one with the earth is seen culturally as primitive. We see dirt as dirty. The connotations and implications are obvious. We ascribe dirt floors to the realm of poverty or primitive humanity, but recently these same constructions have been re-conceptualized as toward a future of regenerative (restorative) construction through design.

Just as we exclude the perspectives of those we see as (inferior) others, we exclude material selections that are seen as primitive, natural, requiring maintenance. We coat our walls in liquid plastics, filling our seas with toxins, to make our interior environments 'cleanable'. We see a dualism of reason over nature, placing women, indigenous people, and non-humans as subordinate. We fail to choose a worldview where we honor nature, the non-human, care, and connection with the earth.

We act as if we need to research, to create technological solutions – foam insulations, more efficient boilers, better plastic membranes for plastic wrapped homes, while increasingly immersing ourselves in digital worlds. We spend too many hours of each day, not in the real world, but in the over airconditioned interior digital world of entertainment, literally amusing ourselves to death. And, yet, we don't dare recenter, remove ourselves from the spotlight, and, integrating our knowledge, skills, and tools, reconsider our relationship with the structures we live within, our relationship with dirt, with earth, with climate because “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than changes in the eco-capitalist order and its inequities” (Jameson, 2003, 76).

Because dirt has been largely excluded from the Architecture with a capital A western (colonizing) world as well as the contemporary colonized world, we see much written about dirt as concept, dirt as frame, dirt as exclusion, the other, "matter out of place," with less focus on dirt as matter, physicality, materiality.

The perception of dirt as associated with the past, the primitive, and poverty in the western world is a hindrance to its use as solution to the climate crisis. The aim of this research is to consider how we, as a culture, have contextualized dirt in such a way that it sits outside the realm of solutions. How can the cultural heritage values associated with dirt and earth shift from connotations of poverty and the primitive toward technological, ecological, and of value in the present? And, perhaps most importantly, how can rejecting the masculine Anthropocene and embracing the dirt of mother earth as feminist ontology allow for a regenerative present?

Approach and Method

This paper takes dirt as an epistemology. It sees dirt as a terrain of alternative perceptions, as a resistance, a counter point to modernity and its impulses, a throughway to indigenous, autochthonous, geogenic, anticolonial, feminist, inclusive, intersectional, relationist, experiential, restorative, regenerative practices. This pathway, a dirt road, if you will, wanders through prior formulations, viewpoints, and frameworks of many, toward a centering of subjugated knowledge, toward new ways of making home. Here we look deeply into what we have culturally devalued, to our cultural discards.

This approach parallels that of Jack Halberstam in Wild Things (2020). He approaches the conception of wildness as an idea that encapsulates a rejection of colonialist cultures and normativity. Here I'll take license and coopt Halberstam, replacing wildness in his formulations, instead with dirt:

Amazed at how much has been lost, how little we have to show for it, and how quickly we have embraced a world largely cleansed of all connections to [dirt]. . . We must ﬁnd a way around the treacherous binary logics that set [dirt] in opposition to the modern, the civilized, the cultivated, and the real. . . [and look] to what the culture has discarded for clues to new wild logics of being and doing. (Halberstam, 2020, p. ix-x)

I have spent more than 100 hours reviewing the discourses of contemporary literature on dirt particularly focusing on connections to temporality, ecofeminism, gender structures, the vernacular, indigeneity, sustainability, regenerativity, urbanism, and the commons. I've consciously focused my sources on female and indigenous voices, not exclusively, as these histories have been written predominately by white male voices thanks to structural inequities. My main search terms included feminism and dirt, ecofeminism and dirt, architecture and dirt, regenerative architecture and dirt, urbanism and dirt, le Corbusier and dirt, temporality and materials, indigeneity and dirt. I also found a few key sources that provided helpful threads to build outward from, in no particular order: Jack Halberstam's Wild Things, Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble, Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, Donna Plumwood's Feminism and The Mastery of Nature, and Jane Caputi's Call your Mutha.

I also began by considering the language of dirt, it's meaning, and its associations. The spectrum of perceptions of dirt ranges from damnation and filth to purity and the ultimate source of life on this planet. I prepared a word association chart incorporating ideas from conversations with fellow dirt scholar, Linnea Johansson, along with my own personal equivalencies. This associative beginning helped to frame the paper's directions.

Figure 3
Word Association Tabulation on Dirt

Dirt

Earth

Nature

Purity / Life Source

Dirt

Soil

Resource

Value

Dirt

"Matter out of Place"

Foreignness

The Other

Dirt

Filth

Contamination

Corrupting

Dirt

Natural

Indigenous

Primitive

Dirt

Unuseful

Emotional

Female

Dirt

Sin

Evil

Damnation

Dirt

Decay

Degradation

Need for Maintenance

Note: by Carrie Bobo, 2025.

This pathway, hopefully, is a foundation. The construction of hyper local buildings, of regenerative biogenic (plant or fungi based) and geogenic (originating in the soil) materials and climate responsive building forms, has been the subject of fringe interest, waxing and waning, but never truly entering the mainstream despite its known promise for a contemporary carbon negative, climate positive architecture. Recontextualizing what literally lies underneath our feet could reshape our built environments. Geogenic constructions offer benefits not only through shaping a climate responsible architecture, but also by building humane, tactile [beautiful] built environments that generate a sense of identity and locality, if only we could understand why dirt sits outside our conceptions of acceptable cultural value. This foundation offers a pathway from the world of theories and ideas, to the world of the literal, the physical, dirt not as idea, but as object, subject, primary, essential, invaluable.

Temporality in Theory, Method, and Approach

Halberstem, in the words of Haraway (2016), encourages us to "stay with the trouble", as he "cautions against investments in a . . . distant past never to come again or in a future . . .that will be delivered through science and conservation" (Halberstem, 2020, p. x). We see clearly how our rejection of the past as primitive and focus on a promised future of salvation through human intervention brought us to our current climate precipice (Haraway, 2016).

We see this bend as well in the discourse of cultural heritage preservation, as we move away from the 'past as a foreign country' toward inter- and trans- temporality, the recognition that the future and the past only have value in the present, an alternative way of perceiving time, beyond the linear. Hammami points out that a linear approach to temporality is "reductionist [and] discriminates against the pluralism of the public" (2015, p. 296). Laura Jane Smith tells us that heritage is centered in the present, a discourse where the significance of the past is perpetually reimagined in the present in order to address the current realities of individual and society (Smith, 2006, p. 301-302). By deconstructing the linearity of time, we disentangle value from temporality acknowledging that past, present, and future knowledges should not be weighted artificially by historicism or futurism.

Temporality in Materiality

Materials themselves have their own temporalities.

Much of contemporary building materials have been designed based on a desire for a material that remains in a constant and unchanging state without any need for maintenance, cleaning, or repair. This has led to a move away from natural building materials and a toward more and more plastic surfaces – toxic vinyl siding, plastic paints laced with antimicrobial chemicals coating our walls inside and out; these materials are designed to eschew the existence of time (Material Cultures, 2024). "This approach, which seeks to remove materials from biological cycles, is unrealistic, and results in buildings which are hard to repair and whose remains endure in the environment almost indefinitely" (Material Cultures, 2024, p. 50).

And yet, we are drawn to places and things that tell their own story, that develop patina, that are earnest in what they've endured. We can see this in the places we work so hard to preserve – the white washed walls and thatched roofs, the moss covered stone walls (Material Cultures, 2024); the places and buildings that we see as nostalgic, primitive, and antiquated while mourning the homogeneity of our contemporary constructions. "Homogeneity overwhelms the differences originating from nature (the site), from peasant surroundings (territory and the soil), from history" (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 127). Returning to building materials that age, that change over time, and reasserting a culture of material maintenance could also mean restoring the value of "qualitative differences of places and moments" (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 127). Regenerative practices, regenerative materials, cycles of regeneration, shape meaningful place, and are also necessary. "Sustainability" as it has been implemented, is wholly insufficient (Swyngedouw, 2019).

This turn toward a regenerative architecture, a process of building using regenerative materials and methods, requires a "wholesale re-interrogation of the material palette that we use to make buildings" (Material Cultures, 2024, p. 20). Unfortunately, we associate the need for maintenance with degradation, decay, and dirt, a fault of an imperfect material, rather than a normal part of the process of regenerative cycles of care. We consider this work of material maintenance dirty work and ascribe it to marginalized groups – racial minorities, immigrants, or women. Shifting the culture of building to integrate regenerative materials will require conceiving of those that do the work of maintenance and repair as skilled and valued craftsmen. (Material Cultures, 2024, p. 49).

Vernacular technologies integrate cycles of regeneration and repair. Wooden exteriors in contemporary architecture are often sealed with thick layers of resin and/or plastics, these hard finishes have a life of 5-15 years and then need to be completely chemically or mechanically removed before resealing with similar toxic chemicals. Alternatively, a yearly coating of natural oils protects the wood, without the need for mechanical removals. These soft coatings require more regular maintenance but are of healthy materials and don't require the intensive work of periodic stripping. Understanding that impermeability might not be the best pathway, and accepting the dirty work of cyclical maintenance, allows for shifts toward regenerative materials.

We need a new materials culture, one that rejects the hidden systems of unnecessary production and obscene waste, a culture where traces of use, decay and repair are celebrated and the act of making good becomes the pivotal role between humans and their resources, where consumption is exchanged for symbiosis. Djernes & Bell (Hedeskov, 2024, p. 18)

Djernes & Bell are the architects for Hedeskov Center for Regenerative Practices just north of Aarhus, Denmark. The Living Lab, a renovated historic school building, and the centerpiece of the center, showcases geogenic and biogenic building materials sourced directly from the adjacent landscape with the goal of "a visibly evident harmony between the environment and the structures we inhabit." Intensive audits of the site were performed by Local Works Studio, a UK firm that mapped viable regenerative materials, identifying plants and dirts (minerals, sands, and clays) that could be used as part of the final structure – for clay plaster walls and clay floors (Hedeskov, 2024, p. 18).

Hedeskov prioritized locality, deeply investigating the place they were, and then constructed, through strategies of repair and reuse, digging down to build up, a facility of the place, an authentic cultural heritage artifact reflecting strategies of regenerative practice through construction of and with local dirt.

We want our things, like those of the civilizations we admire, to form an allegiance with the land so strong that our existence is seen as an act of adoration, not an act of ruin (Clark, 2000).

The Vernacular/ Indigineity

An approximation of the guidelines for the Honorable Harvest:

"Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.
Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life.
Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.
Never take the first. Never take the last.
Take only what you need.
Take only that which is given.
Never take more than half.
Leave some for others.
Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken.
Share.
Give thanks for what you have been given.
Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever."
(Kimmerer, 2013, p. 183)

In Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as “the younger brothers of Creation.” We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn— we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They’ve been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out. They live both above and below ground, joining Skyworld to the earth. Plants know how to make food and medicine from light and water, and then they give it away. (Kimmerer, 2015, p. 7)

A regenerative approach is not new, not revolutionary, not innovative, it is millennia old, it still exists in parts of the world today where indigenous people follow indigenous practices shaping indigenous architecture. While Indigenous peoples often follow a worldview of harmoniously living as a part of nature, one with the earth, rejecting the binary split between nature and human, western "progress" delineates. Western thought equates progress with establishing control (Caputi, 2020, ix). Rather than control, indigenous practices seek to cooperate, to compensate, to achieve balance. We see these indigenous, regenerative approaches in vernacular architecture, the architecture defined by Bell Hooks (1995) as the "language of cultural expression", the architecture that is truly, uniquely of a place, drawing both from local materials and local practices that respond to climate specifics, anchored in the groundings of their precise location on the globe (May, 2010).

So why is there the primacy of the Modern, the international, placeless western modes of construction despite the ways we idolize nature, and often mourn the loss of it to building (Clark, 2000)? The agenda of western progress was (and I would argue, still is) rationalized through hierarchical classifications of difference that justify and assert European and American ways of being and building as civilized, rational, and superior while labeling indigenous and vernacular practices as primitive, substandard, and backward (Cheng, Irene, et al., 2020, Plumwood 1993). Bambara takes this even further noting that those in privileged positions of power see themselves as rightfully positioned – she calls for a rescue of the planet from the egocentrics, the psychopaths (1990).

Robin Wall Kimmerer equates this difference in worldviews (collaborate vs control) to the women of the creation stories of indigenous vs western cultures – in indigenous tellings the woman was a cocreator of a natural world that would be the home to her descendants, in western tellings, she was a woman in exile, enduring a rough journey on the way to a more real home in heaven. Kimmerer highlights the process of indigeneity that comes from this idea of co-creation as a process of reciprocity, exchange with the land, the earth, the dirt. (2013)

In western literature we see this is in Thoreau's Walden (1854), a rejection of the delineation that posits enclosure, housing, as an insulation from nature, and instead offers an effort to build from and with it:

But gradually I see that the care with which he builds is not just a spare, conservative building, but one imbued with the most luxurious and deep images. He is not a dirt-dauber, locked only in the immutable pattern of his genes, but a sentient, worried, thoughtful being, determined to be at one with his place, and not knowing how; drawing profound analogies to nature, to the elements, and to his curious earthly existence with every act of building, looking finally not for a way out of the forest, but for a way to stay there with grace. (Clark, 2000)

It is precisely this spirit of reciprocity, of collaboration, the knowledge of these regenerative cycles, this science through experimentation that has been lost to the primacy of progress. Generations of builders, over many centuries, learned to interact with their climate and allowed their locality to shape their daily rhythms and building forms. Thick walls of local mud build diurnal temperature regulation through thermal mass, diaphanous woven reeds allow for cooling breezes. These technologies we label as primitive, folk. We found instead another way to use the earth, the dirt, pumping up dirt's ancestors from the depths in the form of fuels, innovating ever better performing heating and cooling systems, a progress that seemingly eliminated the need for us to shape our buildings around place, a progress that displaced indigenous knowledge, that displaced indigenous building methodologies that were one with the earth (Fathy, 1986).

Whether the words are those of Paula Gunn Allen or Gloria Steinem (both attributions are found), we can see that "The root of oppression is the loss of memory.” We've lost much to racism, by failing to see indigenous knowledge as valuable, by accepting "settled" thought structures, by prioritizing Western paradigms, and by failing to hear indigenous stories. (Hernandez, 2024, p. 858).

Mahasweta Devi creates new indigenous stories, weaving together the political, the historical, the mythological. Here the voice of a pterodactyl speaks:

We are extinct by the inevitable natural geological evolution. You too are endangered. You too will become extinct in nuclear explosions, or in war, or in the aggressive advance of the strong as it obliterates the weak, . . . think if you are going forward or back. . . . What will you ﬁnally grow in the soil, having murdered nature in the application of man-imposed substitutes (Devi, 1995, 156–157)?

When nature has been murdered, when we've replaced it with substitutions, what will you grow in the soil? In the dirt? Will there still be dirt?

Progress has triumphed over mother earth.

The Irrationality of Dirt: Feminism vs Masculinity

Mother Earth and the Anthropocene exist in direct contrast to one another, the Anthropocene is reason and conceives of Mother Earth as fantasy. The Anthropocene is male rather than female, is shaped by its dominance over, rather than coexistence with the earth, is fueled by destruction rather than regeneration and reciprocity, and "targets the earthy" in the "so called Age of Man" (Caputi, 2020, ix-x).

Western culture equates men with rationality, reason, technology, and strength and women with emotion, irrationality, materiality, nature, domesticity, and care. The realm of men is positioned as superior. Men control a world "where power is the game and power means domination of both nature and people" (Plumwood, 1993, p. 7). 'Rational' man is leading us to the most irrational of futures, an extinction of our own making. The forces leading us toward environmental destruction are controlled, almost exclusively, by white men (Plumwood, 1993).

Frichot, through the work of Jennifer Bloomer, foregrounds the contrast between the masculine unattainable longing for the new and the feminine keeping ourselves close to the dirt. Society's focus on technology as salve for all our ills, and on the idea that the future will heal our contemporary sins, has positioned us to forever strive for the new, which arrives, and then becomes old, tarnished, no longer of value (Frichot, 2023). These cycles exist intellectually, metaphorically, and physically in cycles of capitalism. Inversely, close to the dirt, we see the feminine, tied to a respect for the material, for tradition, for place and culture and the value of care. While western society maligns this proximity to dirt, this valuing of care, indigenous cultures assign positive value to feminine connections to nature (Plumwood, 1993).

Dirt offers a means of paying attention to mundane worldly relations, including repair, maintenance and making do, and aims to foster an overarching ethics of care (Frichot, 2023 p. 996). . . . Orientation away from the new and toward the dirt foregrounds relations of care, and how we can share our material knowledge . . . (Frichot, p. 1016)

Carol Gilligan’s ethics of care reinforces this idea of an inversion of masculine ideals, positing women as emphasizing compassion and empathy over abstract duties, rationalism, and morality (Gilligan, 1982). Gender Feminism asks, have compassion and empathy been historically undervalued because a misogynist society devalues the priorities of women (Tong, 2009)? This devaluing of care has ramifications for women, for agriculture, for prospects for sustainable futures.

Regenerative farming practices focus on building soil, an idea that if the dirt is cared for, it will produce healthy, fertile crops. Just as in the story of the pterydactyl, we've turned away from these cycles of care, relying on manmade substances, fertilizers and pesticides as a quick fix, and have subverted regeneration. The dirt affords us life, and, having turned away from the restorative cycles that assured stability, we're slowly killing off those affordances, killing off ourselves (Gibson, 1977).

If we re-value the historically devalued priorities of women and conceive of the dirt and its products as sacred, invaluable, if we see them as the providers they are, providers of food, fuel, enclosure, home, then we create a new culture, not of exploitation, but of regeneration, respect, and care. If we conceive of ourselves, of humans, not as rational and in control, locked in a battle for power, but as subordinate, vulnerable, dependent, them what and how do we build? Climate instability shows us that despite society's masculine ideals, we were never the ones with the power.

Urbanity

In the face of rurality, and of peasant life gripped by nature and the sacralized earth full of obscure powers, urbanity asserted itself as reasonable (Lefebvre 1996, p. 127).

The history of urbanity has been one of eradicating the dirt. This strategy made sense in the Middle Ages when sewage flowed in open reservoirs through city centers sickening inhabitants. The dirt of human waste is a different dirt than the dirt of the earth, of Haraway's humus, of soil.

The history of urbanity is a history of man's relationship with Nature.

The Swiss-French architect, Le Corbusier is an interesting case study in this history, the history of the desire of man to build with nature, while failing to accept nature's chaos, organicness, and dirt, and instead working to rationalize, submit to reason, organize, and insulate from the environment.

Le Corbusier wrote:

A farm . . . is a thing that resembles the products of nature, a thing that is rather like a humanized aspect of the earth itself: a kind of geometrical plant that is as intimately linked to the landscape as a tree or a hill, yet as expressive of our human presence as a piece of furniture or a machine. / So deeply is the farm’s very being linked to the soil that even all on its own it can express and qualify the landscape it stands in. (Le Corbusier, 1933 p. 323)

In Corbusier's writings his respect for the primacy of nature, for the vernacular, for architecture in concert with nature is evident, while at the same time, he designs very different kinds of buildings. The pilotis he became famous for, as one of the five points of architecture, physically separate his buildings from the very soil he praises the farm for being linked to, and, while he is writing about his reverence for deep connection to nature, he suggests that the farm "qualifies" the landscape, as if, without the structures of man, the landscape is of less worth.

Corbusier, as philosopher of the city he describes the relationship between the urban dweller and dwelling with nature, air, sun, and trees, with cyclical time and the rhythms of the cosmos. To this metaphysical vision, he adds an unquestionable knowledge of the real problems of the modern city, a knowledge which gives rise to a planning practice and an ideology, a functionalism which reduces urban society to the achievement of a few predictable and prescribed functions laid out on the ground by the architecture. (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 98)

While the world has, in some ways, moved on from the anti-urbanist, reductionist modernism of Le Corbusier, the specter of his obsolete ideas defines the shape of today’s cities. Le Corbusier assumed he knew better than what came before and proposed a radical break with the history of urban development including the demolition of vast swaths of cities. Despite his reverence for the vernacular, for indigenous architecture, for architecture in concert with nature, his 1920s-30s urban designs segregated use, a functionalist, hyper rationalism that underestimated the affordances of urban complexity and true entanglement with nature. Yet, many were (and still are) misled by the allure of his drawings and writing, missing their negative impacts and the ways his built forms failed to live up to his lofty ideals (for more on this, Dunnett, 2011). Le Corbusier's views on deep connection to the soil was overshadowed by his functionalist desire to rationalize and control, influencing the doomed, albeit for more complex reasons, modernist housing projects of the 60s and 70s (Jacobs, 1961, p. 23; Jacobs, Hirt, Zahm, 2012, p. 248), and presaging the elevated superhighway systems of America along with their environmentally unsustainable cause, automobile-dependent commuting.

In the United States, Le Corbusier’s compartmentalization enabled structural racism, urban/suburban segregation as a response to forced integration. Financial districts became places of work activated during daytime hours largely by white men and left desolate in the evening. Their surrounds became aggregators of poverty and otherness, while suburbs became isolating domain for white women and children (Massey, Denton 1989; Rothstein, 2018). Racism, together with Le Corbusier’s functionalism, begat misogynist built-environments (Hayden, 1980; Saegert, 1980).

Again, we see masculinity, "rationality," triumph over recognition of, and affordance for, the complexities, the organic qualities, of a regenerative approach. We see a problematic nature / reason dichotomy where "reason" prevails. Despite Corbusier's values, his desire for order, for control, meant that he failed to implement a way of building in concert with nature. And, his way of conceiving of built environments, as compartmentalized, controlled designs became the standard (Dummett 2008).

Now, our built environments are rationalized, international. Having forgotten and devalued indigenous traditions we no longer see examples of positive interactions between human beings and the landscape (Kimmerer, 2015, p. 6). Thus, rather than a source of regenerative relationship, nature becomes a commodity, a place to be occupied, an attraction only when contained, cultivated, domesticated, cleansed.

Nature enters into exchange value and commodities, to be bought and sold. This 'naturality' which is counterfeited and traded in, is destroyed by commercialized, industrialized and institutionally organized leisure pursuits. 'Nature', or what passes for it, and survives of it, becomes the ghetto of leisure pursuits, the separate place of pleasure and the retreat of 'creativity'. Urban dwellers carry the urban with them, even if they do not bring planning with them! Colonized by them, the countryside has lost the qualities, features and charms of peasant life (Lefebvre, 1996, pg. 158).

Nature, in contemporary built environments, has lost the pleasure that comes from entwinement; the features and charms that we long for, that create environments that we associate with cultural heritage, come with an acceptance of dirt – real materials that are of a place, wall surfaces not coated in plastics, patina, a human life that feels nature's cycles. The lack of this entanglement is why contemporary "buildings so often fail to meet our fundamental human needs" (May, 2010, p. 6). Our efforts to insulate ourselves from the physicalities of our environment has led us to their intensification, again, we see clearly that we were never in control.

It's not surprising that, when we're unwilling to allow the dirt of nature to sully our sanitized contemporary lives, we fail to reap nature's benefits "nor is it surprising that a culture which has traditionally thought of the rural as good and the urban as bad would insist on populating the former until it is no longer there" (Clark, 2000).

"In nature, nothing exists alone." Carson's statement from 1962 reminds us how everything is connected – the dirt beneath our feet, the way we build upon it, and the ways we chose to tend (or exploit it), as well as the many divergent complex and interwoven systems that it supports. It reminds us that when nature is seen as something apart from ourselves, a bonus, an amenity, its destruction is inevitable. Nature requires entanglement, interconnection, a common interest.

A New Commons

Whose side are you on, whose common interests do you seek to protect, and by what means? (Ranciere 1999, p. 14)

We've seen how indigenous cultures provide examples of how to live with the dirt materially. Indigenous cultures live with the dirt of the earth and with the dirt of the commons, of the collective. The vast swaths of American landscape overtaken by suburbs allow for an individuality, an isolation, very different from the social constructions of indigenous societies. Deborah Hayden so brilliantly (and futilely) designed ways to common these bastions of individuality adding amenities designed to collectivize and thus reduce reproductive labor and the burden these built environments place on the women that inhabit them (Hayden, 1980).

In contrast to these American single-family homes, we see the often-matriarchal constructions, the physical and societal formations, the migratory structures, that sit lightly on the earth, the communal longhouses and wigwams arranged into collective formations, of the Mohican, the Mohheconneok, the Iroquis, of many indigenous cultures. These common ways of living allow(ed) for a recognition of common interests.

We know that nature works collectively. We know it intuitively, but we also see it in beehives, in ant colonies, in the ocean's waves, we even see it in plants. Mast fruiting of pecan trees shows us that even trees can communicate with each other across great expanses, "acting not as individuals, but somehow as a collective." (Kimmerer, 2013, p 15).

We also see a contemporary move to return to a commons. Today, the commons is conceived of in many different ways. Kolioulis tells us the commons conceptually represents a call to “rethink how public and private assets can be delivered for the common good”, emphasizing de-colonialization, de-carbonization, co-production, and equity (2022, page 3). Olwig says we should look at the commons as chora, a Greek word meaning roughly "the political landscape as a heritage, in the aesthetic, social and ecological imagination, of place and polity" (2015, p. 89-90). Harvey says the commons is "an unstable and malleable social relation between a particular self-defined social group and those aspects of its actually existing or yet- to-be-created social and/or physical environment deemed crucial to its life and livelihood" (2012, p 73).

Harvey's interpretation establishes the commons as a collective relationship that shapes an essential physical environment. In this expression, Harvey's definition of the commons starts to sound very similar to Laura Jane Smith's definition of heritage as "an active, vibrant cultural process of creating bonds through shared experiences and acts of creation" (Smith, 2006). A co-created present - together we have made the environment we live within, whether we call this the commons or a cultural heritage process, here we return full circle to the Anthropocene and the reality of a world shaped by man.

Smith's definition touches on, but doesn't 100% get to the core of, heritage as a process that cements our values and value systems, determining what is preserved and what is discarded. We can see in the work of Elinor Ostrom that values, traditions, and knowledges that could address our current climate crises, have been weeded from mainstream cultural heritage value and now predominantly reside with those groups most impacted by the way we manage our common built environments (Ostrom, 1990). So, we ask, what happens when we look beyond heritage's givens?

Under Industrialism - land to live. If you dive deep into time reversing an image of the industrial landscape, stratigraphically speaking as the floor of history, and instead as an archaeologist tear off industrialism's production landscape, there will be traces, markings of another land use, defined by other connectabilities. (Hammami, 2015)

Collectively society has chosen to reject cultural heritage traditions imbedded in the dirt in favor of a plastic contemporaneity. The realization of petroleum's promise provided a cultural valuation of the manmade as superior, the earthy, the natural as ephemeral, needing repair. Ironically this pursuit of products and environment that do not change has made humanity's very existence vulnerable, threatened. We don't need to create new knowledge, we need to shift our cultural heritage valuations; to see that the reality of a plastic heritage past is of little value.

Hammami's text urges us to peel away the Anthropocene, to dig beneath industrialism, and to critically examine the tracings of a common, connected, willfully forgotten, heritage grounded in a relationship to the dirt. It asks us to reconceptualize heritage as inclusive in order "to take on the key moral-ethical issues of our times" and to engage and define "emergent global heritage futures." (Butler, 2006, p. 476).

Ranciere asked, who's common interest is being protected? This question is ultimately a political one, and contemporary politics "pits those who are bent on maintaining the current trajectory that produces a combined and uneven socio-ecological apocalypse radically against those who prefigure an inclusive and egalitarian production of socio-ecological urban commons" (Swyngedow, 2019, p. 123). Heritage does indeed have "material consequences." (Smith 2006).

Discussion and Conclusions

As a society, our confusion is evident, we see the essential value of soil, as giver of life, as bearer of fruit, as the only source of food to sustain us, yet we describe that which must be cleansed as soiled. This paper argues that a reconceptualization of the dirt, nature, the fray, the other, would allow for a regenerative future, and that without that reconceptualization, we will continue our trajectory toward climate apocalypse.

We see the figure of woman as responsible, in western society, for keeping the dirt out, for ensuring a cleansed and ordered existence, yet, it is this pursuit of cleanliness, order, rationality, the new, the sanitized, that moves us further from a regenerative existence. If we look toward indigenous values, toward a respect for earth, for care-taking, for entanglement with nature, a life close to the dirt, we just might find a way forward.

So many have written conceptually and theoretically on dirt. Hélène Frichot and Jane Caputi have produced beautiful treatises on dirty theory and the dirty mind. These explorations move us somewhere, but they alone are not enough. We see in Plumwood's writing the idea of an ecofeminism.

The story of a land where women live at peace with themselves and with the natural world is a recurrent theme of feminist utopias. This is a land where there is no hierarchy, among humans or between humans and animals, where people care for one another and for nature, where the earth and the forest retain their mystery, power and wholeness, where the power of technology and of military and economic force does not rule the earth. . . For usually this state is seen as a beleaguered one, surviving against the hostile intent of men, who control a world of power and inequality, of military and technological might and screaming poverty, where power is the game and power means domination of both nature and people. (Plumwood, 1993, p. 7)

But how do we get there? How do we get closer to collective care and farther from military and economic control?

Haraway tells us that "our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places (2016, p. 1), and Hooks says that we must engage in subversive historiography. "Subversive historiography connects oppositional practices from the past with forms of resistance in the present, thus creating spaces of possibility where the future can be imagined differently-imagined in such a way that we can witness ourselves dreaming, moving forward and beyond the limits and confines of fixed locations." (Hooks, 1995, p 151)

These are both lovely poetic ideas. Unfortunately, we don’t have time left. We sit at the literal precipice of climate destruction (Plumer, 2023) on a foundation of racialized Modernism (Cheng, 2020). Co-opting the words of CharlotteMalterre-Barthes from MoMA's 2024 exhibition Emerging Ecologies, it is time to showcase harm and extraction in order to advocate for decarbonization, depatriarchalization and decolonization, a work, not of words and nostalgia, but of open protest.

It’s useless to wait—for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides. (The Invisible Committee, 2010)

Critical Reflections: Failure

This paper has been a personal success in that it has been an intense exploration and investigation of ideas that I've long wanted to dig deeper into. At the same time, in many ways, it feels like a futile manifesto as it points, in many ways, to the inevitability of our failure as a society to meet our current challenge. We all know the problem, we all know the solution, we don't want to walk the road paved in dirt through the forest that will save us all.

Mythologized nature is now architecture's most precious commodity, canonized and invested with messianic powers. As a code of conduct, allegiance to the myth of nature has permeated every crevice of media culture, overtaken the sanctions of practice, and addressed itself to the alleviation of our collective guilt. At the same time, the illusion that emerging technologies will recalibrate our relationship with nature, and that architecture can be their handmaiden, holds us in thrall. Yet . . . these current guises of nature mask a set of practices and products that defer to the hegemony of capital, and continue to support our highly stratified, postindustrial economy" (Stoner 2012, p. 93).

Jill Stoner wrote these words in Toward a Minor Architecture more than ten years ago. Val Plumwood wrote Feminism and the Mastery of Nature more than thirty years ago. Toni Cade Bambara wrote What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow thirty-five years ago. James Gibson wrote the Theory of Affordances forty-eight years ago. Thoreau wrote Walden one hundred and sixty-one years ago.

MoMA’s own groundbreaking exhibition from 61 years ago, Architecture without Architects, reviewed by Ada Louise Huxtable (1964): “These are examples of indigenous, regional architecture before ‘progress’ has brought the materials salesman and his plastic substitutes. This is the self‐contained community as it was until the automobile cracked it open and desolated the tightly knit architectural entity of another era. . . this is a protest—a pointed, bitter, desperate broadside from a cultivated, rebellious heart and mind against the sacrifice of the well‐built landscape to the urgencies of the industrial, nuclear age.”

More than 60 years later we’re all still playing around with the same problems.

We know that "there is an infinite supply of energy and raw materials, we just need to understand and respect the ecosystems that bring us the infinite supply" (Hedeskov, 2024). So, why do we find that so hard? This paper worked to understand the answers to that question, but I'm not sure I'm any closer to understanding.

As I watched this year's Julkalender I was again reminded as I have been many times before (as in Wall-e and the Lorax) how mainstream media provides a message aligned with that of this paper, the message that the dirt (imagine in your mind Wall-e holding up that dirt filled shoe with tiny sprout), the earth, the complexities of nature have value, and that technology is not the solution and is not worth the loss of what nature affords us. Yet, we continue down the same path.