Perma/Culture:: Imagining Alternatives in an Age of Crisis

The keyword of this book's 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. In an effort to introduce the concept of 'Perma/Culture' as a viable protocol for designing agricultural systems that mimic their natural counterparts, this edited collection brings together essays from an international team of scholars, activists and artists in which to provide a critical introduction to the ethicopolitical and cultural elements around the concept of 'Perma/Culture'. These multidisciplinary essays include a varied landscape of sites and practices, from postcolonial bioregionalism among coffee farmers in India to African American back-to-the-land movements; 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.