The concept of "cultural soil" and what it holds for living in a changed world

One of the most delusional beliefs, as our lives slowly change due to massive climate shifts, is that living in dissonance with the environmental, social, and ecological context is not only desirable but also objectively more civilized and advanced. We prioritize individual comfort over shared well-being. We romanticize nature as a source of inspiration rather than a guiding force for cultivating better relationships. This reduces aesthetics into stylistic attributes that can be transferred from one place to another. Culture is flattened into object fetishization, ritual is turned into routine, and identity is confused with ideology. The belief that we can re-create the environment makes colonizing another planet feel like a plausible and justifiable future.

In the world of Scavengers Reign, a story that begins with a spaceship crew shuttling between planets, they are trapped on a distant planet with no rescue, where they find themselves in a lively and wondrous ecosystem where things can either kill or save them. None of the creatures living on this planet is inherently evil, but they have the potential to be lethal if you don't understand them (like life on Earth). Scattered, each crew member developed their own strategies to cope. From forming unlikely alliances to becoming a parasite, the animated series presents a compelling account of what living under climate change feels like: no help is underway, those we feel are most responsible for the disasters will never be held accountable, and circumstances render a return to “normal” increasingly unlikely—if not impossible. Yet, how one chooses to respond changes the trajectory of survival. The audience is dropped into the middle of this unfurling story, with little explanation at first. We, as audiences, make sense of the beauty and cruelty of this world as the characters experience it. To some degree, I think living under uncertainty means being dropped into situations with which we have no prior experience. Unlike the comfort of knowing that we are watching fiction, in real life, we are ill-equipped to make sense of it. There's no practice ground, there's no rehearsal.

It wasn't always like this.

Cultures have always emerged from a relationship to place, constraints, and environmental contexts. Preserving culture by restoring it to a former, idealized state means suspending it from the present moment or its aliveness. If massive changes shape the future and there are no clear instructions on how to respond, a culture that prioritizes comfort, safety, and routine will struggle to adapt. Property insurance only works when a disaster remains a chance event. It is a product of believing in a future. With climate change, many properties in high-risk areas have quietly become uninsurable. Rich people can diversify their high-risk real estate assets with low-risk ones, but ordinary people will face a denied claim on top of losing their homes. Sitting and waiting for a chance event to happen and expecting it to be handled by an insurance company requires little effort, yet in this climate, it's too good to be true. Cultivating a safety net requires long-term and sustained efforts. Culture used to be this safety net—festivals and feasts not only served as celebrations and temporary releases from duties and production, but also as gatherings of the entire community. Rather than being mandated by arbitrary rules, the cosmological ties and otherworldly qualities of ritual spaces provide a contextual backdrop that is larger-than-life, where participation is bound to a place, a set of actions, and a shared meaning.

Culturally specific art forms emerge from this specificity. Tea ceremonies in Southern China differ significantly from those in Japan, not only due to their stylistic differences, but also because of the set of actions that reflects distinct cosmologies, thereby constructing different ritual spaces. This development of taste marks an attention to place. Tea grown in Southern China is destined to taste different from tea grown in Japan, despite being the same plant. The art of the tea ceremony emerges with the soil, or terroir, from which the tea was grown, even though many believe that the “art” part begins when you enter the tea room. The tea room is where everything comes together, a microcosm in itself, an appreciation of which requires an understanding of the countless asynchronous decisions that made this exact moment possible, as well as the myriad coincidences that contributed to its unfolding. The tea ceremony is a scaled-down version of a gathering, a festival in its smallest form. It is in direct contradiction with the narrative that artists are at the centre of their works. It is, however, coherent with the environmental, social, and ecological contexts raised previously. If this is true, then the way we experience tea ceremonies as exact replicas of what would have happened in Southern China or Japan is inconsistent with the cultural emergence of this art form. Cultural tradition is then reduced to nostalgia and mimicked through industrial uniformity—a performed culture that does not adapt to new contexts as it travels from place to place. Under climate change, perhaps this "travel" also means that the environmental context changes as if a rug is pulled from under our feet. We would stay standing still, and yet, the ground shifted.