Guerrilla Gardening in a Time of Ecological and Social Crisis: An Exploratory Endeavour to Feel Connected with a Lost Piece of Forest

This four-year explorative study is located in a nearby forest, or more accurately a clearcut, in the western part of Sweden. The objective is to contribute to existing knowledge about forest gardening by exploring a forest milieu without trees in the Northern Hemisphere where the conditions are poor. The aim is to support biodiversity in the short term and to find out whether we could cultivate root vegetables, potatoes, and summer flowers in this nutrient-poor and shadowless environment. The study has an eco-philosophical approach that promotes eco-pedagogy and environmental education and a pragmatic pedagogical approach that adopts a "learning-by-doing" belief. The exploration is underpinned by collaborative autoethnography, and the research is conducted in and through practice. The findings show that a planting project in a clearcut requires a lot of preparation and planning and that it is possible to use a clearcut to grow potatoes, peas, and some summer flowers without special efforts, but hard to grow other crops such as vegetables and root vegetables. The project implies that the planting activities in a clearcut may have a deep impact on people’s sense of human-nature identity and respect for the natural environment

Dunlap, "Inherited Silence: Listening to the Land, Healing the Colonizer Mind"

Louise Dunlap's book "Inherited Silence: Listening to the Land, Healing the Colonizer Mind" is a heartfelt exploration of the historical harm caused by colonization, with a focus on Dunlap's Californian roots. Through a blend of personal experiences and broader themes such as climate change, resource wars, and genocide, Dunlap offers insight into the trauma caused by colonization and suggests self-healing strategies for descendants. The book is split into ten chapters, each of which explores a different aspect of the issue

The Great Forgetting

Why did the modern world enter into a “great forgetting” about the more-than-human world so many indigenous peoples took for granted? Second, how can this previous knowledge be reacquired without rejecting the very real accomplishments of the modern mentality? Many deep ecological writers have done extraordinary work on this second question.  I will focus on the first, and use its analysis to add some insights regarding the second. Central to the argument I will make is how language both empowers us and to some degree separates us from direct experience of the other-than-human world. Western languages are particularly prone to reinforcing this separation. Equally central will be a discussion of how media of communication rooted in language further distances us from direct encounter.  Also important will be work in contemporary biology and ecology exploring how deeply interconnected all life forms are. The traditional Western idea of individuals, be they plants and animals or human beings, are ultimately irreducibly distinct from their environment has been shown to be mistaken. Individuals have been shown to be made up of simpler individuals who, in relationship with one another, enable emergent qualities to arise at ever greater levels of complexity. Further, while genuinely individual, they cannot be understood without reference to relationships outside what are normally considered individual boundaries. By seeking the foundations of morality and other values in theology, reason, or will, many moderns are blinded to the fact values supporting morality and beauty exist immanently within the natural world. There is no need to import them from elsewhere. By way of conclusion, I reverse direction and describe one method available to the reader how a ‘remembering’ can come about experientially. This remembering will reconnect with an indigenous and sometimes shamanic perception of the world as alive and connected

Accumulated Wisdom: Alan Drengson, Merv Wilkinson and Ecoforestry

To be added late

Hiding a Hurricane Under a Beach Umbrella: Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night's Ecological Latencies

At first glance, Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night seems like a far cry from what Matthew M. Lambert has termed “Green Depression” literature. Philip Rahv’s critique that Tender attempted to hide from a hurricane under a beach umbrella tagged it with the lingering perception that it was incongruously out of touch with its era’s “climate.” Revisiting Tender through the lens of Antonioni’s 1960 film L’avventura that showcases a copy of Fitzgerald’s novel, this article looks back on the novel itself to reveal the powerful undertow of its “ecological latencies,” which were there all along in submerged and “dormant” form. The creation of this lens through which to view Tender Is the Night does not mean that this article aims to offer a comparative reading of Antonioni’s film and Fitzgerald’s novel. Side-by-side formal comparison is not the goal of this article. Rather, the article underscores a carefully staged yet critically overlooked reference in Antonioni’s 1960s film itself—to Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night—in order to offer a completely new reading, an ecologically engaged one, of Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel