1st Edition

Perma/Culture: Imagining Alternatives in an Age of Crisis

Edited By Molly Wallace, David Carruthers Copyright 2018
    252 Pages
    by Routledge

    252 Pages
    by Routledge

    In the face of what seems like a concerted effort to destroy the only planet that can sustain us, critique is an important tool. It is in this vein that most scholars have approached environmental crisis. While there are numerous texts that chronicle contemporary issues in environmental ills, there are relatively few that explore the possibilities and practices which work to avoid collapse and build alternatives.

    The keyword of this book’s full title, 'Perma/Culture,' alludes to and plays on 'permaculture', an international movement that can provide a framework for navigating the multiple 'other worlds' within a broader environmental ethic. This edited collection brings together essays from an international team of scholars, activists and artists in order to provide a critical introduction to the ethico-political and cultural elements around the concept of ‘Perma/Culture’. These multidisciplinary essays include a varied landscape of sites and practices, from readings from ecotopian literature to an analysis of the intersection of agriculture and art; from an account of the rewards and difficulties of building community in Transition Towns to a description of the ad hoc infrastructure of a fracking protest camp.

    Offering a number of constructive models in response to current global environmental challenges, this book makes a significant contribution to current eco-literature and will be of great interest to students and researchers in Environmental Humanities, Environmental Studies, Sociology and Communication Studies.

    Poem "Seeds of Aleppo"

    Tiffany Higgins

    Introduction Perma/Culture

    Molly Wallace and David Carruthers

    PART I: Pattern Languages

    Ch 1. A Pain in the Neck and Permacultural Subjectivity

    Andrea Most

    Ch 2. Bringing Forth an Ecotopian Future: The Production of Imagined Futures through Contemporary Cultural Practices

    Stephen Zavestoski and Andrew Weigert

    Ch 3. Reclaiming Accountability from Hypertechnocivility, to Grow Again the Flowering Earth

    Patrick Jones

    Ch 4. Murray River Country: Challenging Water Management Practices to (Re)invent Place

    Camille Rouliere

    Ch 5. Wild Urban Green Spaces as Seen through Montreal’s "Wild City Mapping" Project

    Dominique Ferraton

    PART II: Transitions in Practice

    Ch 6. The Art of Permatravel

    Nina Gartrell

    Ch 7. Momentum in the Age of Sustainability: Building Up and Burning Out in a Transition Town

    Emily Polk

    Ch 8. "Fracking Is Stoppable, Another World is Possible"

    Claire Males

    Ch 9. The Problem with Money: Possibilities for Alternative, Sustainable, Non-monetary Economies

    George Price

    PART III: REVOLUTION DISGUISED AS GARDENING

    Ch 10: A War Against Weeds: Combating Climate Change with Polycultural Pacifism

    David Carruthers

    Ch 11. Regeneration: Loss and Reclamation in African American Agrarianism

    Leah Penniman

    Ch 12. Defining the Process of Re-indigenization through Soil Communities

    Ruth Lapp and Robert Lovelace

    Ch 13. Sharing Food, Sharing Knowledge: Food and Agriculture in Contemporary Art Practices

    Amanda White

    Ch 14. The End(s) of Freeganism and the Cultural Production of Food Waste

    Leda Cooks

    Poem The gleaner difference

    Natalie Joelle

    Afterword Gleanings

    Molly Wallace

    Biography

    Molly Wallace is Associate Professor of English at Queen’s University, Canada. She writes about and teaches contemporary literature and ecocultural studies.

    David Carruthers is a PhD candidate in English at Queen’s University, Canada. His recent work appears in Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature.