title: Staying with the Bioregional Trouble in Two Permaculture Sites: An Ethnography and Four Films
Creators: name: Krawczyk, Michal
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: permaculture
subject: ethnography
subject: environmental humanities
subject: Anthropocene

description: This doctoral project involves a written ethnographic account and a portfolio of moving images. It explores two permaculture sites and their design in an effort to weave nurturing relationships with(in) the environment (the more-than-human realms) in the Valley of Sagana (Sicily, Italy) and the Wombat Forest (Djaara Country, Victoria, Australia). Following the environmental humanities’ call for new kinds of stories, this study aims to move beyond a descriptive account of existing relations. I intend it as an act of researching, witnessing and making stories to help revive our relationship with the world by enriching us with new socio-ecological meanings to cultivate our response-abilities to the environment. Staying with the Bioregional Trouble concerns thinking-with, living-with and becoming-with the lively meshwork of the land. Staying with the trouble also means staying with troubled bioregional places, responsibly navigating cross-species and cross-elemental relations and relationships. Staying with the trouble means humbly accepting we are living within lifedeath worlds and their inextricabilities, where care is entangled with power and mortal relatedness. Anthropocene stands for an age in which human activity has come to equal or even exceed the processes and events of geology, and humans’ attempts to exploit more-than-human worlds have become a major force in the destruction. The Anthropocene is not just an ecological crisis but a tangled web of questions concerning culture and nature, geology and economy. It is also a crisis of cognition and imagination. As such, this research tells the story of the human and more-than-human journeys of the forms of dwelling, performances and becomings in the two permaculture sites. The work is attentive to the current epoch’s unequal power relations and social/environmental injustices and is inspired by slow and sensory ethnographic cinema with experimental aesthetics. The project addresses a haunting ethico-political task: how can we live with the land’s fluid, more-than-human meshwork on a human-damaged planet? More-than-human is not a mere synonym for the natural world; it is a perspective that foregrounds a relational view of the world, calling attention to and prioritising relations over entities. By using the term more-than-human, I consider how tangled social, cultural and political networks are formed in relation to the more-than-human processes, events and forces in the two permaculture sites. The more-than-human perspective is both an ethico-political stance and a methodology. Venturing beyond the human, my aim is to challenge the self-ordained figure of Anthropos and displace it from its centrality. In this sense, the project is not so much anthropocentric as it is geocentric, grounded in a relational view of the lively world. The filmworlds of the portfolio situate the viewer sensorially within the materiality of the fieldwork sites and their specific bioregions, laying the groundwork for the written ethnographic chapters. Through ethnographic stories, I seek to reveal both the complexities and (im)possibilities of the permaculture by narrating situated arts of living. The guiding questions in this thesis arise from, and are grounded in, the encounters with the lively meshwork of the land. The following troubling and lively ethico-political questions are considered: Who inhabits the land? What does it mean to care for the land? Can we work to overcome binaries of good/bad, invasive/welcomed species? How is care entangled with relations of power and mortal relatedness? How can we live with pests that threaten our agricultural logic? Is killing well possible? What does it mean to common well on stolen land? These are uneasy and complex ethico-political tasks as they demand finding multispecies ways worlds can flourish in the face of divergent worldmaking projects. Weaving relationships with the lively meshwork of the land through permaculture is not free of its inherent frictions and misunderstandings in the exercise of reading the land. Rather than shortcomings of the permaculture dwelling, this comes from living in flourishing lifedeath worlds, where ethics stick close to the ground and care is ambivalent and can be charged with violence. Through permaculture, we situate ourselves among the multiplicity of more-than-human others who call to us to respond in the design process. This is grounded in ongoing lively correspondence with more-than-human realms and among relationalities to be addressed, in turn laying the groundwork for novel responses, relations, response-abilities and obligations to the lively meshwork. Through such ongoing correspondence with the lively meshwork of the land, permaculture is an attempt at weaving nurturing relations. These relations are charged with inequalities of power and inextricabilities of mortal relatedness, yet offer glimpses of a mutual correspondence, even shared alliances, with the more-than-human realms. Overall, this research’s findings contribute to understanding permaculture design through a more-than-human perspective.