Paper short abstract:

This paper considers how counter-hegemonic notions of economic and ecological sustainability are built ‘from below’, by engaging the criminalised practices and socialities of radical ‘outlaw’ farmers in the toxic legacy of an industry in decline.

Paper long abstract:

Building on multiple interviews with long-time members of Mercato Brado (Feral Market), an outlaw farming collective located in central Italy, this paper considers re-ruralisation as a set of individual and collective political practices to investigate how counter-hegemonic notions of ecological and economic sustainability are co-produced in relation to industrial decline and to state regulation of late industrial landscapes (Fortun 2012). I track the trajectories of my interlocutors, first generation farmers who chose to ‘go rural’ as a strategy to gain autonomy from a work-society imperilled by the ever-accelerating individualisation and precarisation of labour and citizenship regimes, and who became outlaws once they chose to farm lands or engage in low-tech food-transformation practices recast by state authorities as hazardous, but understood by them as restorative and life-making. I follow Jason Pine’s notion of late industrial alchemy (2019) to conceptualise re-ruralisation as a generative process that transforms the (material and immaterial) toxic inheritances of industrialisation and deindustrialisation into nourishment, value, selves and socialities. This alchemical process, contra state discourses on environmental degradation, imagines toxicity not as the effect of an alien presence that could and should be excised, but rather as an organic quality of the man-ruined landscapes we inhabit. Thus I argue that, in my field, re-ruralisation follows a particular future-oriented yet recursive, non-discrete temporal logic according to which non-toxic social ecologies can only be nurtured through conscious and sustained acts of exposure, which simultaneously work to reckon with the past and its presence, and enable the latter to be transformed.