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- Convenors:
-
Ieva Snikersproge
(University of Neuchâtel)
Andrew Flachs (Purdue University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Great Hall
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to explore current agrarian initiatives in all their diversity (urban gardening, new peasantries, food sovereignty, etc.) and reflect on insights that these initiatives provide for a transition to a sustainable, low-energy society focused on human wellbeing, not profit-making.
Long Abstract:
An agrarian ethos proposing that life was better in the country than in the city emerged in the 19th century to counter urban industrialization. It provides a multi-faceted critique of modernity that idealises life in the countryside as more natural, authentic, free, and virtuous than life in the city. Throughout the last two centuries, the agrarian myth has inspired various back-to-the-land movements from religious currents such as Anabaptists to utopian communities, more individual transcendentalist experiments and the 1970s countercultural communes. The present moment, characterised by the superposition of various crises - health, economic, political, and ecological - is reviving the desire to engage in agrarian activities. Urban-to-rural migration, prosumers, urban gardening, alternative food networks, new peasantries, and initiatives aimed at achieving food sovereignty are all but some examples of this growing interest.
This panel would like to bring together papers that describe present-day "returns to the land" in all their diversity: who participates in these initiatives, how their participants attach meaning to their activities, and how these initiatives inscribe in the larger society. Moreover, the panellists are invited to reflect on what kinds of insights these initiatives provide for a transition to a degrowth society, understood as sustainable, low-energy society focused on human wellbeing, not production of profit: How do these initiatives imagine "good life"? What energy and other material resources are necessary to keep these initiatives going? What limits their capacity to be up-scaled?
Keywords: agrarianism, degrowth, ecological transition, good life
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Andrew Flachs (Purdue University)
Paper short abstract:
Smallholder economies follow different rules than other capitalist exchanges, in part because agriculture demands particular social and biological relationships tied to a local landscape. In decentering growth, we see a more accurate accounting of farmer decision-making and rural aspiration.
Paper long abstract:
I explore scholarship in degrowth and JK Gibson-Graham’s Diverse Economies to understand alternative agricultural production, including brief case studies drawn from empirical work in the US, India, and Eastern Europe. Established alternatives to extractive or plantation models of capitalist agriculture like organic or fair trade certification can still privilege growth, commodity production, or expansion as key goals. These metrics obfuscate the larger transformative potential of alternative agriculture in reorganizing production toward long-term stability of both community and place. With its emphasis on collective political organization, degrowth offers a different set of metrics by which to judge the potential of diverse alternative agricultural economies. On the other hand, agriculture forces degrowth to face difficult questions around labor, productivity, ecological plasticity, and technological change. Scholars from environmental anthropology, rural sociology, and critical agrarian studies have argued that the smallholder economies follow different rules than other capitalist exchanges, in part because agriculture demands particular social and biological relationships tied to a local landscape. While many small and alternative farmers pursue certain kinds of growth, much of their social and ecological work is motivated by factors apart from capitalist growth. In decentering growth, this approach permits a more accurate accounting of farmer decision-making and rural aspiration.
Quentin Gausset (University of Copenhagen)
Paper short abstract:
Members of Danish ecovillages have a carbon footprint that is almost 30% below national average and enjoy at the same time a higher life satisfaction despite having a lower income than average. They are happier with less, and present thereby an interesting model of intentional degrowth.
Paper long abstract:
Ecovillages are intentional communities composed mainly of people having left town to live in the countryside, either with the goal of living more sustainably, or with the goal of providing a healthier and safer environment for their children. Members usually spend a significant amount of time in building and maintaining the community by participating in a variety of different communal activities such as collective gardening, preparing common meals, attending chicken, maintaining common buildings and roads, sorting waste, securing a sustainable supply of energy, organizing the local system of shared cars, participating in collective meetings, etc. The high investment in time spent on collective activities means that members have less time to spend working on the labour market. They tend to work part-time and to have lower incomes than average. But at the same time, the community is constituted by a complex set of physical and social infrastructures allowing people to access a variety of services at a minimal cost, due to the high level of sharing and the low cost of housing and food. All in all, members of eco-villages live in an environment of physical and social infrastructures that create a more sustainable framework for their daily life and provide a comfortable materialist life and a rich social life. This makes it possible for people to live happily with less, without feeling that they sacrifice anything in their comfort. Ecovillages thus constitute an interesting model for painless degrowth that succeeds in combining reduced materialistic consumption with higher life satisfaction.
Catharina Lüder (Technische Universität Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
People, plants and pots put together: Edible cities shall foster degrowth practices, but what potential lies in "climate cooking"? With a look into cooking and eating practices in a climate mitigation project, questions around potential sustainable transformations in cities will be discussed.
Paper long abstract:
Andreas and Jessica and the other members of Kassel’s Edible City initiative were very happy to be elected to receive funding by Germany's most important federal funding program for climate change mitigation. Every second Monday from 2019 to 2020 the project offered a cooking space for experimenting with known and unknown edible plants from the urban surroundings, from urban gardens and from a local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). The talk gives a glimpse into cooking and eating practices in this project's "climate kitchen" (Klimaküche) organised by Jessica & Andreas. How is eating perceived as a transformational practice? Does „climate cooking" potentially foster degrowth practices in a neighbourhood? What can be learned from the project for wider transformations of urban (political) ecologies? The above questions frame the collaborative, ethnographic encounter between me and an urban gardening initiative in Kassel, (Hesse, Germany) who combine solidary gardening logics with climate change mitigation policies aiming at (re)connecting people with their surroundings, with nature and with each other. Through vivid vignettes on preparing magenta spreen together and (not) finding herbs alone on the way I discuss potentials and hindrances for the spreading of sustainable practices.
Katarina Sajovec (University of Ljubljana)
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic field work, this paper presents examples of urban foraging initiatives in in Tucson, Arizona in the United States, and discusses what insights they offer on the transition to a degrowth and sustainable society.
Paper long abstract:
Tucson, Arizona was designated as the first UNESCO City of Gastronomy in the U.S.A. in December 2015. One unique feature of this desert city’s food system which has gained attention is its many novel means of providing easy and affordable public access to diverse food crops, wild and cultivated, that have persisted among many cultures over long periods of Tucson’s history. Community gleaning collectives, public-private partnerships, and training initiatives for recognition and usage of cultivated and wild “free” foods are here examined as examples of the present-day “returns to the land”. Participants do not only focus on free, culturally appropriate and nutritious food as a crucial element of "good life" but understand their practices in acquiring and redistributing free food as a transition to curbing the usage of the desert’s most precious resource – water, and also functioning outside market-based neoliberal system. The paper will present participants in such initiatives, including landowners, volunteers, beneficiaries of free food, NGOs and city officials, and how meanings of “back to land” and “good life” are formed through their daily practices and imaginings. We see that out of daily practices and imaginings of gleaners and foragers arise images of “good life” focusing on abundance versus scarcity, and cooperation and solidarity among and across groups which also extent do their relationship with the environment. However, all of these practices depend heavily on human labor, class differences as well as funding for nonprofits and the city, which in turn raise new questions about social justice and long-term sustainability.
Ieva Snikersproge (University of Neuchâtel)
Paper short abstract:
By analyzing household-level data of back-to-the-landers and their neighbors in French Prealps, this paper will explore attempts to create a semi-autonomous, livelihood-centered territorial economy that opportunistically profits from the capitalist growth economy
Paper long abstract:
One of the key obstacles to a transition to a post-growth economy is that we all have stakes in economic growth: it produces jobs and taxable incomes that fund state redistribution and ecological transition programs. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and a representative quantitative study in a relatively isolated rural area in France that attracts diverse back-to-the-landers, this paper will explore attempts to create an economy that is constructed on the (re)production of human livelihoods while profiting from the capitalist growth economy only marginally. It will analyze household-level data on livelihood strategies to learn how households combine informal economic practices, state redistribution measures and economic opportunities in the formal market economy to make a living in an economically poor area. By looking at how individual livelihood strategies add up to a peculiar territorial economy, the survey will reveal whether and, if so, how internally diverse settlement in a relatively isolated countryside is conducive for creating new, more autonomous modes of life on the sideways of the productive capitalist economy. Above everything, this paper aims to contribute to theory about how to create economies constructed around (re)production of livelihoods, not (re)production of capital and thus sketch pathways towards a post-growth economy.