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:
Introduction
Part I: Enter Into Crisis
1. The axis broke apart / in the historical drift
2. Dead ends & endings of modern binarisms
3. Connective tissues and technologies
Part II: To Care As We'd Like To
4. Climate, Covid, Class: War and Care
5. Socioecological crisis and our impasse of care
6. Commoning Vulnerability: Radical Politics of Earthcare
7. Earthcare Manifesto
8. Counterplanning Safety-Security
9. Within, Against and Beyond the Wage
10. Work Manifesto
Part III: Earthcare and the Ruins of Progress
11. Rural-Urban Multitudes and More-Than-Urban Worlds
12. Reclaiming Earthcare Ancestry
13. Irma and Nil - A Tale of Two Elders
14. Earthcare Labour and Struggles
15. Peasant Stubbornness and the Politics of Tractors
16. Meat: A Tale of Rural-Urban Class Tresspass
17. Teleologies of Transformation
Part IV. Broken Sovereign, Cosymbiont Technologies
18. Losing it (Liberalism)
19. Toxic Binaries vs. Bastard Alliances
20. Tech Necropolitics
21. Autological Exhaustion: Letter to the Fatigued
22. The Banality of Automation: AI Antifesto
23. Earthcare Tech and Ecofeminist-Decolonial Hacking
Conclusion: Transition
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'
