Permaculture in Times of the Anthropocene Predicament. An Ethnography of Practices in and Around Montreal Quebec

"In 1970s, the ecological crisis emerged as a growing cause of worry following the publication of The Limits to Growth (1972). Since then, multiple warnings have been issued by the scientific community concerning the ongoing ecological destructions. Tales of growth, development and progress have fuelled the Great Acceleration in which natural and human resources have been carelessly exploited - at great costs - for the benefit of a few. Still, business as usual remained and we have now shifted into a new geological era. The Anthropocene marks a clear boundary, 'what comes after will not be like what came before'. What we are now facing is a predicament, an irreversible, complex and unpredictable situation to which there exists no solution, only ways to adapt in order to survive. The materiality of climate change is making it impossible to uphold the veil separating human from the so-called 'environment'. In moving forward thus, it is argued that the 'story must change'. We must 'decolonize our imaginary' in order to open up the possibilities for a climate unstable, post-oil, post-growth future. This exercise asks that we figure out 1. what we wish to maintain and how to do it, 2. what we want to relinquish, and 3. what we want to restore. A quick historical review shows that the hyper-globalized world of the Anthropocene stems from the plantation system that relies on both extractive logics and the ontological division of Nature and Culture (2.). Following, scholars have proposed the term of the Plantatio(no)cene to highlight that the 'anthropos' of the Anthropocene is not neutral. Rather, industrialization has left in its wake a myriad of worlds to pieces and relegated a part of humanity to 'Nature'. Humans (and nonhumans) are not all in the same boat in facing the Anthropocene predicament. In search of environmental justice, then, alternative stories must take into considerations multispecies co- becomings (1). Keeping all of these insights in mind, I follow Tsing and Haraway in arguing that our best hope for precarious survival in multispecies environmental justice is to work towards restoring refuges (3). As part of this doctoral thesis, thus, I propose to explore one of the stories currently promoted and put into practice as an alternative to the Tale of progress: Permaculture. Thus far, permaculture has been studied as a strategy to promote sustainability yet, I argue that this conceptualization is embedded in an outdated framing of the ecological crisis and therefore not relevant in the current context. In light of this, I rather propose to explore how permaculture practices participate (or not) in reconstituting refuges. Paying attention to what kind of multispecies assemblages and what kind of ontological categories are promoted though permaculture practices appear both livelier and more relevant to the Anthropocene predicament. To explore these interrogations, I will undertake fieldwork in Montreal, Canada where I will be engaging myself in permaculture practices with other human and nonhuman agents."

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