Perma/Culture:

Imagining Alternatives in an Age of Crisis

Molly Wallace, David Carruthers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351978422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

In the face of what seems like a concerted effort to destroy the only planet that can sustain us, critique is an important tool. It is in this vein that most scholars have approached environmental crisis. While there are numerous texts that chronicle contemporary issues in environmental ills, there are relatively few that explore the possibilities and practices which work to avoid collapse and build alternatives.

The keyword of this book's full title, 'Perma/Culture, ' alludes to and plays on 'permaculture', an international movement that can provide a framework for navigating the multiple 'other worlds' within a broader environmental ethic. This edited collection brings together essays from an international team of scholars, activists and artists in order to provide a critical introduction to the ethico-political and cultural elements around the concept of 'Perma/Culture'. These multidisciplinary essays include a varied landscape of sites and practices, from readings from ecotopian literature to an analysis of the intersection of agriculture and art; from an account of the rewards and difficulties of building community in Transition Towns to a description of the ad hoc infrastructure of a fracking protest camp.

Offering a number of constructive models in response to current global environmental challenges, this book makes a significant contribution to current eco-literature and will be of great interest to students and researchers in Environmental Humanities, Environmental Studies, Sociology and Communication Studies.

Part I
Pattern languages

1 A pain in the neck and permacultural subjectivity

Andrea Most

A few years ago, I emerged from routine abdominal surgery with a mysterious neck injury, and when traditional medical approaches failed to heal it, I set out to explore alternative options, soon finding myself confronting jarring questions about the integrity of my body. Simultaneously, my growing interest in food, agriculture and environmental activism had led me to join an all-women design team working to create Bela Farm, a centre for land-based art, scholarship, activism and spiritual practice in southern Ontario. As part of that project, I spent many months studying the history, language and process of permaculture.¹ The confluence of these two experiences served as the impetus for my current work-in-progress, a set of narrative non-fiction essays entitled A Pain in the Neck, which is about what happens to life-writing when individual human bodies – shaped by a long-standing cultural mythology that separates mind, body and earth – are suddenly reconnected to the body of the world.

In the introduction, I describe how, for decades, well-intentioned feminists have been trying to solve the seemingly intractable problem faced by a generation of women exhausted by the competing demands of home and work. At the same time, in another sphere, equally thoughtful writers and activists have been attempting, with limited success, to create and implement urgently needed solutions to our environmental crises. The first part of A Pain in the Neck shows how the core problems in these two apparently distinct spheres can be understood as a part of the same narrative roadblock. Whether depleting our bodies or draining our aquifers, we are following the plotline of a story that tells us that we are invulnerable to and in control of nature, but avoids the unspeakable reality that we are nature.²

After defining the narrative problem, I set out on a circuitous quest (one which I am still pursuing) to unearth possible solutions, gradually recognizing the key importance of the permacultural design principles I’d been practicing on the farm to the development of both a new literary method and a new relationship between land, mind, and body. Much of the second part of the book centers on how to express this new subjectivity in writing. What kind of voice, what literary forms might emerge to articulate this permacultural subjectivity? What narrative structures, characters, voices and life experiences might comprise a genre that can express the experiences of our biological bodies as effectively as those of our minds? And more specifically, what relationship might this voice and form have with the history of life-writing about the body (especially the modern tradition of women’s writing) and how might this kind of writing open up new avenues for understanding the self as nature, and hence a more productive understanding of the human body in a post-human culture? The book itself aims to be both an explanation and an example of permacultural subjectivity and literary form.

In the manuscript, I refer to a number of the permaculture principles outlined by David Holmgren in his book, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability (2002). I discuss Principle #2, “Catch and Store Energy,” for example, in terms of feminist arguments about so-called work/life balance while Principle #8, “Integrate Rather than Segregate,” becomes the jumping off point for a philosophical discussion on the relationship between mind and body in light of discoveries about the microbiome.

I include here an excerpt from the manuscript that first introduces permaculture Principle #1, “Observe and Interact.” It opens with an epigraph from Michael Pollan. As the excerpt begins, the insomnia caused by my aching neck has led to a whole host of unpleasant symptoms: digestive disorders, hormonal disarray, anxiety, depression, and migrating aches and pains. A sympathetic naturopath keeps telling me to “listen to my body,” but as an academic living in a Cartesian culture in which minds speak and bodies don’t, I am mystified. Slowly, however, through close reading of texts, one kind of listening leads to another.

Gazing across the meadow of sagebrush, I found it difficult to imagine the invisible chemical chatter, including the calls of distress, going on all around—or that these motionless plants were engaged in any kind of “behavior” at all.

Michael Pollan, “The Intelligent Plant”

People kept telling me to “listen to my body,” but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what language my body spoke and how to hear it. I could read four languages but my body communicated in a dialect in which, for most of my life, I had had little or no interest. I could generally be relied upon to mishear or disregard even those common elementary phrases that we are all basically born knowing—“I’m tired, maybe I should go to sleep” or “my foot hurts, maybe I should change shoes”—the sort of nagging truths that the world in which I lived fully supported me in ignoring. I was richly rewarded for my deafness with professional accolades, a personal sense of achievement, and increasingly serious health troubles.

In fact, I had spent most of the last two decades, maybe even my whole life, trying to get my body to shut up. And in comparing myself with many of the women I’d known since college—the vomiters, the who-needs-maternity-leavers, the marathoners, the botoxers—I was a rank amateur. I remember the time when, as an untenured junior professor, I was attending a conference in New York soon after my second child was born. Perpetually sleep-deprived, I was nearly nodding off in a session about representations of race in the short stories of Grace Paley when Irina, an old friend from graduate school, slid into the seat next to me, visibly pregnant. I hadn’t seen her in years so I shook myself awake, leaned over to kiss her on the cheek, congratulated her and asked her when she was due.

“About five weeks from now,” she whispered, adding, with a wry smile, “and I just found out!”

“Found out what?” I asked, assuming she meant the due date, or sex of the baby, or, with a slight frisson of anticipated intrigue, maybe the identity of the father.

“That I was pregnant,” Irina hissed into my ear. I stared back at her, utterly dumbfounded.

“You didn’t know you were eight months pregnant?” I blurted out in astonishment, eliciting affronted shushing from the audience members nearby. Irina was a large woman, but still, was this actually possible? She leaned back in her seat.

“I’m an academic,” she quietly replied with a guilty shrug. “I have a long-distance relationship with my body.”

And although I certainly knew well before eight months each time I was pregnant, I too had experienced the perils of this sort of long-distance relationship. I figured I would need a whole new degree to learn to hear the language of my body. Maybe my naturopath had a textbook on her shelf to teach me how to corral the loud clatter in my mind, to create the quiet space necessary to hear those long-suppressed signals and fainter frequencies on which my body seemed to express itself. And once I figured out how to listen, what would I do with what I heard? I would still need an advanced seminar in data interpretation, with a weekly lab for learning how to properly assess the evidence and respond to the findings.

I’m an English professor. So to solve a crisis of language I turned instead to the methods with which I am most comfortable. I wandered into the room at the front of our house, which features rows and rows of bookshelves and which, with the exception of the particular books and photos on the shelves, has been largely unchanged since the house was inhabited, nearly a hundred years ago, by another English professor and his family. This was the room that convinced me, the moment I stepped foot in it, that we had to find a way to live here. I stood for a few minutes staring out the windows at the massive beech tree which held court in our little patch of earth out front. I heard a scuffle, a rustling of leaves, and then saw two skinny black squirrels chasing each other up and down the tree in a mad spring mating dance. We had just taken down the storms and put up screens and the window was cracked open a bit to let in the still-cool spring air. The squirrels were so diverted by their games that they didn’t notice me, and I ventured perilously close to the window, and the branches beyond, so close that I could almost fancy I heard them breathing as they paused for a moment to contemplate one another. One squirrel turned, stared straight at me, and we both started back in surprise.

I clambered up on the window seat between two piles of already-read novels that I’d been meaning to shelve for months. The fiction section was a mess, but since I hadn’t touched Eliot in years, those volumes were still neatly shelved just above my left shoulder under “E.” I was searching for Middlemarch, wondering if I might find in the familiar words of a trusted old friend the direction I sought. I glanced over the row of hefty volumes, which ranged from stately hand-tooled leather editions purchased during a brief fling with the Folio Society, to falling-apart paperbacks gleaned from the used book stores which formed my favorite shopping destinations during my years in New York, pages grown brittle from years in damp grad school apartments, and in perpetual danger of falling from their bindings and scattering on the floor like autumn leaves.

Ever since high school I had loved Middlemarch, and especially its central character, Dorothea Brooke, a young lady with too much passion and enthusiasm in a world which simply had no viable outlet for such immoderate drive housed in a woman’s body. Even as a teenager, I knew Dorothea’s passions not only made her a fascinating character, they also got her in trouble – that disastrous marriage to the much older and duller Casaubon, her too-high principles which kept her apart from Ladislaw for so long, her naïveté and her often misplaced faith. As an eager and terribly earnest young woman myself, I certainly didn’t see these as problems. After all, Dorothea did get Ladislaw in the end, and was always beautiful and good even when she was mistaken. And so, I blithely assumed, was I.

But now, with my adolescence safely consigned to memory, swaddled instead in the stable comforts of my own late-Victorian home, secure in a tenured position at an important university, and only barely hanging on to the fluttering wisps of a once-fierce romantic passion to do right and be right, I was looking to Eliot for a different purpose.

I finally located the weighty tome and was immediately drawn to a passage in the Preface in which Eliot tells the reader, in no uncertain terms, that she does not intend to center her tale on an epic character like Saint Theresa, a martyr who was memorialized and celebrated because her passions fit into a grand story that the Catholic world wanted to tell. Eliot figured that Saint Theresa had received enough attention already. Rather, her interest was in the women whose passion and brilliance were lost in the “meanness of opportunity,” who found no grand historical stage for their deeds and therefore sank “unwept into oblivion” (Eliot 1985, 25). Eliot’s task, as she explained in the first few pages of the novel, was to serve as the poet of these unsung women, who dreamt grand dreams while stuck in a limited provincial life. With a shock of recognition, I realized that only a woman in middle age, a woman who had dreamt many dreams for herself, and suffered the disappointments of a full life in which sometimes some dreams simply don’t turn out as planned, could write such a story. Hope flared that this novel, which had long ago been consigned to the dustbin of my past, could speak to me once again, could offer me hints about how to hear the faint whispers of my now middle-aged body and figure out how to heal it. And so I moved to the couch and settled in for the long haul (the novel is, after all, nearly 1000 pages) eagerly, even desperately, searching for wisdom, as I neared the age at which Eliot wrote her masterpiece.

I lugged that book around with me everywhere that summer, drawn in once again by Eliot’s learned, careful prose, challenging and comforting in equal measure. I read it on subways and airplanes, in bed and on the beach, in New York, in Toronto, on the way to a conference in Paris, and finally finished it in the back garden of a cottage in a small village in Oxfordshire, immersed in the landscape and architecture of the very provincial British towns which Eliot had described in such loving and particular detail. I groaned anew at Dorothea’s bad choices while remembering how I too strode through my youth similarly proud and self-righteous. I still disliked Rosamond but now I saw that she was not entirely to blame for Lydgate’s troubles. I noted, with a little shudder, that in my own scholarly obsessions I might actually resemble Casaubon – the dried-up forty-something pedant obsessed with finding the Key to All Mythologies – more than I would care to admit. And I questioned this time whether or not Dorothea’s long-awaited marriage to Ladislaw was, indeed, the perfect happy ending.

But it wasn’t until page 900 or so that I began to worry that perhaps Eliot didn’t have an answer to the questions that kept me awake at night. Middlemarch, like so many other stories of the time, is a novel about women with extremely limited options, forced into the same unpleasant compromise over and over again, the expectations of society taking precedence over the calling of their souls, the limited range of motion allowed to their bodies curtailing the sharp activity of their minds. Eliot changed English literature by resisting that compromise herself, at great personal cost (of her real name – Mary Ann Evans – and identity, to mention only two of many sacrifices), and then writing from her own lived experience about the narrowness of Dorothea’s palette of choices and the impact of that restriction on her interior life, whose contours were still recognizable to me centuries later, even if my range of options was considerably broader.

Nonetheless, I was disappointed: a reaction which I knew was unreasonable. Eliot was, for all of her brilliance, a creature of her time and place, a woman publishing under a male pseudonym and living with a man she could not marry. A woman writing at the beginning of the modern industrial age, and in the early days of liberal society, could hardly be expected to offer solutions to a confused...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Poem: The Seeds of Aleppo
• Introduction: Perma/Culture
• Part I Pattern languages
• Part II Transitions in practice
• Part III Revolution disguised as gardening
• Poem: the Gleaner difference
• Afterword: Gleanings
• Index