Thinking Through Soil: A Conversation with Seth Denizen and Brooke Singer, 2025
Video
Thinking Through Soil – Transcript (PDF)
About the Program
When: September 25, 2025, 12 PM EST / 10 AM MST
As part of Climate Week NYC, the Wright-Ingraham Institute hosted a 60-minute lunchtime webinar exploring the challenges and possibilities of interdisciplinary environmental work through the lens of soil.
Researcher and Institute collaborator Seth Denizen shared insights from his new book, Thinking Through Soil (Harvard University Press, 2025), co-authored with Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich. Their case study of the wastewater-based agricultural system in Mexico’s Mezquital Valley illustrated how soil functions not only as a critical material for agriculture and climate resilience, but also as a site of political possibility. Denizen’s talk sparked reflection on how interdisciplinary research can reshape environmental thinking and practice.
Artist and researcher Brooke Singer followed with a response that drew on her own work with soil-based carbon farming and collaborative environmental science, further opening the conversation across disciplines.
The event concluded with a lively moderated discussion and audience Q&A, highlighting the richness of soil as both a scientific and cultural subject.
About the Speakers
Seth Denizen is a researcher and design practitioner trained in landscape architecture, evolutionary biology, and human geography. His published work is multidisciplinary, addressing design, soil science, urban geography, and agriculture. He holds a doctorate in geography from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied the political ecology of soil in the Mexican Altiplano. In 2019 he was a recipient of the SOM Foundation Research Prize and has previously taught at Harvard, Berkeley, the University of Hong Kong, and Princeton, where he was a Princeton-Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities. He is currently an assistant professor at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. Website.
Brooke Singer’s background is in the visual arts. She is Professor of New Media at SUNY Purchase. As an artist, she began her work with soil and food in 2011 when she joined a collaboration to build a system diverting edible food from the garbage, a commission by Matadero Contemporary Art Center in Madrid. The following year, she co-founded a community garden and living lab in Brooklyn called La Casita Verde. In 2018, she initiated Carbon Sponge at the New York Hall of Science as a Designer in Residence in collaboration with soil scientists from CUNY Graduate Center, with whom she still works. Website.