In this episode we speak with Amaranta Herrero, an ecofeminist sociologist and agricultural engineer who is currently coordinator of the Barcelona 2030 Sustainable Food Strategy and works for the Barcelona Strategic Metropolitan Plan of Barcelona City Council. Cities are where vast amounts of food are consumed and discarded, but how may we think food production and distribution from the viewpoint of the city?
In this episode we speak to Andrea Ghelfi from the Italian food sovereignty network Genuino Clandestino. What does the Italian peasant movement have to do with urban social centres and migration struggles? Why do peasants insist on selling “genuine, but clandestine food” in Italy, and what does it mean to reinvent rural life and the peasantry as a community of practice?
In this episode we hear about the antiracist and feminist self-organization and grassroots-union-building of the Jornaleras de Huelva en Lucha (“Huelva women day labourers in struggle”). They are women working in industrial berry production in southern Spain who push for better conditions, social rights and ecological transition. They build vital mutual aid, solidarity and alliances with other struggles, in the face of unions who don’t recognize them, and bosses who exploit them as workers, women and migrants.
This episode features conversations with the Austrian Sezonieri and Swiss Widerstand am Tellerrand campaigns for the rights of seasonal agricultural workers. How to organize with the migrant workers who do life-sustaining labors on temporary regimes? How can unions be pushed to take this seriously?
In this episode we speak to Attila Szocs of Ecoruralis, a 14,000 member-strong peasant farmer organization in Romania that is part of La Via Campesina Europe. The first part of this episode explores the work of Ecoruralis at the community level: their seed house, peasant-to-peasant knowledge exchanges, local production and distribution networks, Ecoruralis’ approach to agroecology and organization, and the horizon for strengthening rural feminism.
In this first episode, we present the twin concepts of earthcare and fieldcasting in two short conversations with environmental justice scholar Stefania Barca and cooperative farmworker Tobias at Ochsenherz, Austria. We speak with Stefania Barca about the concept of “earthcare labour” which she explores in her recent book and we discuss definitions and avenues for thinking about social reproduction and environmental struggles. What is earthcare labour? Who are its subjects and workers? And what perspectives for organizing and alliances does it open — both transversally and translocally?
This time-travel session takes us from desirable futures back to our complicated past, asking: How do we imagine transformation? Centering on a performative interview with Amaranta Herrero and Dimitris Papadopoulos, set in 2050, this session engages the playful and transdisciplinary method of the Future Archive project. Animating and complicating questions of what is desirable, this session encourages to go beyond strictly utopian and dystopian visions of the future, based on their own implicatedness in worlds and struggles.
Recently, I announced my intention to write a long essay about Malm to a circle of degrowth communists. One, a researcher and activist of US pipeline struggles, was exasperated at Malm’s apparently contradictory embrace of a strategy of pushing the capitalist state to do the right thing in Corona, Climate and Chronic Emergency (2020) and his stringent support of sabotage in How to Blow up a Pipeline (2021).