As myths of progress and modernisation collapse in the relentless polycrisis of our time, how do we strengthen other plots-in community, practice and struggle? How do we come together as movements for earthcare?
This book weaves stories, proposals, and analyses around a key domain of living reproduction in crisis: agriculture. Looking at peasant, indigenous, and transecofeminist practices, it formulates another plot on how we want to sustain life collectively-beyond progress, plantation, and patriarchy.
Recovering and repurposing old and new technologies, and breaking down the division between rural and urban, the ground is made fertile for growing other futures. Alongside writers like Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, this work of radical political theory raises critical questions about technology and storytelling, as matters of care and community.
Table of Contents:
Part I: Introduction
1. The Plot is on Fire
2. About This Book
3. The Axis Broke: Learning to Transform and Transition
Part II: RECLAIMING THE PLOT: TO CARE AS WE’D LIKE TO
4. To Care as We’d Like to?
5. Socioecological crisis and our impasse of care
6. Women* and the Playful Subversion of Community
7. Earthcare Manifesto
8. Care is Counterprepping
9. Counterplanning for Connectedness
10. Labours beyond Modernization
11. More-than-Work Manifesto
Part III: REBELLIOUS PLOTS: EARTHCARE AND THE RUINS OF MODERNIZATION
12. Dysphoria Latifundia
13. Becoming Rural-Urban Multitudes
14. Earthcare Trancestries
15. Cultivating Imaginaries of Agriculture
16. Peasant Stubbornness and the Politics of Tractors
17. Meat: Rural-Urban Class Tresspass
18. Meat: Necropolitics
19. Meat: Deathcare
20. Teleologies of Transformation
22. Plots and Pluriverses
Part IV. AFTER THE TECHNOPATRIARCHAL PLOT: BROKEN SOVEREIGN, BASTARD ALLIANCES
23. Digitalization, New Cycles of Accumulation and Exhaustion
24. Cracks in the Liberal Script
25. Who Said We Needed This?
26. Plotting against Tech Necropolitics
27. That Future: Remember?
28. Earthcare Tech Manifesto
29. Technopolitics versus Technoteleology
30. The Banality of Automation
31. Losing It (a Smartphone)
PART V: CONCLUSION
Earthcare Transitioning
Postface: Calling Back
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
About the Author :
Manuela Zechner is a researcher, educator and organiser. She co-founded the Common Ecologies school, produces the Earthcare Fieldcast and is affiliated with the Centre for Applied Ecological Thinking at Copenhagen University.
Review :
'Sylvia Wynter called the plots given to enslaved Africans in the Caribbean a source of cultural guerrilla resistance to the plantation system. Zechner’s work is another such source. Drawing on plot resistances amongst peasant communities from Europe to Latin America, she has written a guerrilla handbook indispensable in these times. With her as our guide, we can put out the fire and start some of our own'
'With charming prose, and built upon a solid basis of militant knowledge, this book asks the right questions at the right moment in the history of modern agriculture and land struggles. It will nourish the heart and mind of anyone who longs for 'earthcare transitioning''
'Zechner’s invitation is as tempting as it is prescient as her book masterfully recounts and grounds her calling in a plethora of peasant and indigenous struggles around the world. As a writer and an organizer, Zechner does not shy away from the gargantuan task at hand. We invite our partners, sister organizations, comrades, peasants, agricultural workers, social movements and trade unionists to read, engage and disseminate Zechner’s book so that all workers of this earth can strategize, organize and operationalize what an earthcare transitioning could look like in the near future'
'Finally, a new entire book on earthcare! In times of ongoing ecocide and genocide, this combative manifesto offers a unique, contemporary (trans)ecofeminist analysis grounded in the author’s long-standing social movement knowledge and experience. It champions the power of earthcare by truly thinking about transition from the resistant lands and fields in a class-sensitive and intersectional way'
'At a time when fear and fascism are on the rise, we need books like this to remind us that other worlds are possible, grounded in care, solidarity and abundance. And as Zechner shows us, these worlds are not only possible, they are being made and fought for all over the place'
'How do we feed ourselves? In this book the desire of ecological reparation and social justice meets the agroecological plot. Starting from the struggles for earthcaring agriculture, with their significant allies, Manuela Zechner invites us to think what autonomy as interdependence might mean'
