Paper short abstract:

Permaculture is debated from the perspective on contextualizing ‘care’ within resilience rhetoric of ‘tierratrauma’ experienced communities, shown via the literary dimensions of profiling ‘permaculture’ techniques in Chornobyl fictional writings within debating narrative tools of utopian resilience.

Paper long abstract:

An uncertain time of increasing vulnerabilities – climate change, pandemics, toxic localities, high-risk zones, environmental degradation, geological hazards etc – tries to not only find the solutions of disaster management but also minimize sufferings via framing the instruments of survival, hope and resilience. Some suggest developing disaster preparedness via scientific/technological tools (Bhatia 2022), while others suggest appealing to ‘permaculture’ (’a set of gardening techniques, the creation of human systems which provide for human needs, but using many natural elements’, Chapman, 2015), highlighting the indigenous agricultural technics as a tool of switching from survival to resilience. The presentation aims to debate ‘permaculture’ from the perspective on contextualizing ‘care’ within permaculture ethics (earth care, people care, future care), expected to be a tool of weakening ‘survival’ rhetoric of ‘tierratrauma’ (Albrecht, 2017) experienced communities and strengthening ‘resilience’ but the expected intensification of social interdependence as a step towards resilience within toxic locality happens to be relevant and even utopian. The presentation aims to show the literary dimensions of profiling ‘permaculture’ techniques within ‘survival‘ narratives in post-Chornobyl fictional writings – such as Andrea White’s Radiant Girl (2008), Helen Bate’s The Lost Child of Chernobyl (2021), Pavlo Arie’s At the beginning and at the end of times (original: На початку і наприкінці часів, 2015), Kateryna Mikhaylitsyna’s The Flowers near the Fourth (original: Квіти біля четвертого, 2022) – where critical thinking perspective on permaculture activities and technics within storytelling ‘tierratraumatic’ experience contributes to debating narrative tools of ‘utopian’ resilience within a post-traumatic community.