Publication details
The Importance of Rural Spaces in Permacultural Worldview: The Local Areas as Loci of Progress
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| Citation | |
| Description | Sustainable agricultural movements such as permaculture have been associated with contra-urban migration, when even born-urbanites relocate to rural areas to realize their desired alternative lifestyle. In the presentation, I argue relocations ignited by permaculture as a particular back-to-the-land movement are not primarily motivated by rejection of modernity or desire to return to a simpler lifestyle. Conversely, I show that the permacultural worldview presents itself as progressive, overcoming the supposed pitfalls of contemporary social organization. Combining a qualitative content analysis of 7 permacultural books with quantitative glimpses into a larger corpus of 24 books based on text mining in R, I reconstruct the worldview present in permacultural literature and its normative assertations of progress. Following Peter Wagner’s sociology of modernity, I then interpret these assertions as modernizing. The results of the analysis posit permaculture as an alternative modernity, which seeks to establish a more efficient and more sustainable mode of social and economic organization, where the focus on rural places and attention to local particularities play the central role. Starting from the local, permaculturists wish to reorganize and progress the society to a more efficient, environmentally considered and permanent system, where holistic integration with regional conditions is indispensable. This desired modernization is strictly opposed to contemporary modes of organization, which are condemned as detached, plundersome, and wasteful due to in no small part the disregard for the conditions as well as possibilities of local environments. While permaculture is quite a loose and varied movement and we cannot assume that this ethos is shared among all permaculturists nor that it universally motivates contra-urbanisation, understanding this ethos can somewhat explain the importance rural places hold within the movement and why it sometimes does inspire relocation. |
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