Paper short abstract:

Campus community gardens are becoming increasingly popular, providing students with places to learn about gardening, grow fresh fruit and vegetables to share and make new friends. In this paper I focus on the tensions that arise between activist projects and institutional plans to transition to net zero.

Paper long abstract:

Campus community gardens are becoming increasingly popular. They provide students with places to learn about gardening, grow fresh fruit and vegetables to share and make new friends. At an institutional level, they create opportunities for hands-on teaching and learning as well as cultivating trust between staff and students. Attempting to revitalise these gardens post-lockdown illuminates underlying tensions and inconsistencies between institutional visions of a net zero future and everyday life on campus. Ethnographic and theoretical insights into permaculture projects such as community gardens can contribute to understanding the relationships between global flows and local politics. I will focus on the tensions that arise between activist projects like permaculture and institutional net zero transitions. This paper concentrates on the reflections of three students and one staff member at Monash University in the context of a larger ethnographic study on transitioning to net zero including 55 participants who study and/or work in Clayton VIC. What I am suggesting is that anthropological understandings of what ‘net zero transitions’ means and how it is imagined, can contribute to the design of a more nuanced, inclusive and hopeful future.