COMPOSING WITH THE LAND PERMACULTURE LISTENING PRACTICES AND GROTESQUE ECOLOGIES.

COMPOSING WITH THE LAND:

PERMACULTURE LISTENING PRACTICES AND

GROTESQUE ECOLOGIES

Introduction: Regenerative Design and Regenerative Resonance

I assumed climate change would be loud, appropriately wrathful, apocalyptic. We

would all be chastised by a fist-pounding all-knowing force shaking us from the

heavens. I wasn’t prepared for silence, for stillness. The sound and feel of what was

not there.

—Denise Von Glahn, “SEM President’s Roundtable 2018, “Humanities Responses to

the Anthropocene”

In her contribution to the 2018 Society for Ethnomusicology President’s Roundtable

on “Humanities’ Responses to the Anthropocene,” Denise Von Glahn speculates that “silence

may be the final, ultimate sound of climate change” (Von Glahn 2020: 316). While this

statement comes as a part of her reflection on the collapse of the energy grid in Tallahassee,

Florida in the wake of Hurricane Michael in 2018, she also references Rachel Carson’s

prophetic work on the effect of synthetic pesticides in industrial agriculture. These silences

are, of course, intimately interwoven, and they amplify one another. The grinding, static hum

of industrial life masks the deepening silence of mass extinction, and when cataclysmic

events disrupt the electric pulse of industrial infrastructure, listeners are confronted with a

doubly disturbing sense of absence. The most telling and chilling sound of environmental

disaster is silence; the lack of regeneration. Degenerative silence is an ecological echo of

industrial extractivism, a mute signal that life systems have been violated or stressed beyond

their capacity to persevere or recover. This silence intervenes in posthuman cyborg theories

that would collapse and conflate the agency and vibrancy of computers or couches or plastic

bags with the liveliness and creativity of soil communities and the squelching, yelping,

hollering, humming bodies that emerge from and merge with soils and waters. The always

not-quite-ness of this silence, though, reaffirms the need to think with porosity and

permeability, and to practice discernment between and within the many shades of potential

and actual liveliness and deathliness.

The necessary relationship between silence and listening—and between listening and

embodied experience—also serves as a reminder that the sounds of climate change are

always perceived from specific listening positionalities; silence is a relative perception that

emerges in the consciousness of sounding bodies, and “it depends on the types of entities that

produce and perceive it” (Ochoa Gautier 2015: 189) as well as on the forms of hegemonic

perception that operate on those entities. As Ana María Ochoa Gautier points out, “central to

the biopolitics of silence is the pervasive dialect between recognition and negation that is

constitutive of the modern” (ibid.: 186). Modern subjectivity, Ochoa Gautier argues,

“demanded a specific type of listening constituted by silent attention, understood as a crucial

dimension of an ideal, rational subject that is in control of the production of meaning,” which

in turn “required the cultivation of an enlightened notion of the senses, which involved the

silencing of irrational or noisy forms of listening” (ibid.). The disciplining force of modern

subjectivity shapes not just perceptions of silence and sound, but notions of who and what

can listen and make sound:

In Western culture, audition (or lack thereof) is associated mostly with humans and

animals; but in some other cultures, entities such as stones, wind, and other types of

nonhuman forms also have the capacity to listen, to lose hearing, or to provoke

silence. The question then rests on the changing metaphysics and physics of the

definition of forms of life across cultures and history…. The presence or absence of

sound then stands as the very mediator of the presence or absence of life, showing us

how myths (or cosmologies) can tie events into structures. But the acknowledgement

of such a relation—based as it is on admitting the agentive acoustic dimensions of

nonhuman entities in the affairs of humans—is largely based on an understanding of

the relations between humans and nonhumans that unsettles the historically

constructed boundaries between nature and culture, the human and the nonhuman, in

Western modernity. (Ochoa Gautier 2015: 189)

Following Ochoa Gautier’s analysis, modern experiences of silence as the ultimate

sound of climate change are shaped by a particular biopolitics of silence in which the

perceived presence or absence of sound mediates the perceived presence or absence of life.

Listening for climate catastrophe in this sense becomes a culturally situated act of identifying

auditory thresholds of liveliness and deathliness, and the concept and experience of silence

thus holds deep explanatory power and affective force in narratives of loss, destruction,

displacement, and death. This is crucial point in understanding the relevance of sound studies

to the cultural and ecological crises of climate disaster: experiences of climate disaster,

tethered as they are to experiences of colonial displacement, genocide, and ecocide, are

thoroughly entwined with human experiences of silence and silencing as shaped by the

construction of modern subjectivity. The deliberate use of sound as a tool for colonization,

for the breaking of certain silences and the imposition of other silences, situates listening,

and listening bodies, in the midst of ongoing histories of violence, resurgence, and

regeneration.

In his essay on “The Sound of Climate Change,” Jeff Todd Titon suggests that “you

don’t have to be a soundscape ecologist to know that a loud, buzzing, honking, croaking,

singing patch of forest is a healthy [ecosystem], or that a silent spring is not” (2016: 28).

Here Titon situates sound as a manifestation of ecological health; the listener (human or

otherwise) discerns thresholds of liveliness and deathliness through moments of copresence

with sounding entities, or through moments of absence. It is worth pointing out here that

loudness, the presence of sound, is not always indicative of ecological health and silence is

not always indicative of ecological ruin (the loudness that accompanies industrial extraction,

for instance, reverses this relationship). In either case, Titon charges the listening subject

with the task of discerning between regenerative and degenerative resonance, and, at the

same time, foregrounds copresence in sound as a critical step in building ecological

knowledge. To this same point, Denise Von Glahn offers a slight counter to Jeff Todd

Titon’s assertion that expressions of ecosystem health and dysfunction are intuitively self-

evident. Returning again to Rachel Carson’s foundational work, she offers that “Rachel

Carson heard the silence, but she was listening; you can’t hear the silence if you aren’t

listening. And you wouldn’t know there was silence if you hadn’t noted the sounds before”

(Von Glahn 2014: 23). Von Glahn indicates the need to cultivate specific practices for

“increasing listening, attentiveness, and awareness” (ibid.) as a crucial step toward

ecological discernment. While listeners certainly may not need to be soundscape ecologists

to determine the health and dysfunction of ecosystems, they do need to have intimate

experiential knowledge of how specific ecosystems express their health and dysfunction,

their degeneration and regeneration.

This dissertation responds to the question of how ecological regeneration is

perceived, conceptualized, and engaged in specific cultural and ecological contexts: How do

ecological relationships come to be conceptualized and experienced as sounded copresence?

How and why are sounding and listening operationalized in creative strategies for

collaborative survival in the midst of escalating ecological crises? In my specific iteration of

this inquiry, I investigate the role of listening in permaculture land-tending work and

demonstrate the importance of listening practices and discourses to the critical work of

ecological regeneration. I approach permaculture as a method for ecological-social design

that prioritizes and emulates the regenerative capacity of biodiverse ecosystems and that is

characterized by specific listening practices and specific understandings of sound, pattern,

sociality, and musicality. Through engagement with teachers, students, and pedagogical

texts, I explore how the experiential context of permaculture practice frames listening as an

embodied act of more-than-human sociality that sets practitioners in conversation with the

ethos and subjectivity of those ecosystems and landforms.

When tending land is framed as conversation, the goals and results differ from those

of conventional horticulture and agriculture. For instance, in the permaculture garden that I

tend with my landmates, two mature wild radishes block a section of the walking path that

leads toward the berm-and-swale beds on the high side of the semi-rural-suburban property;

they form a lively impasse that hums lightly in the daytime with the flight and forage of

pollinating insects; their roots wend slowly through the hard clay soil under the woodchip

mulch that we laid in the fall to define the path. We don’t pull the radishes. We walk around

them or shimmy between them, listening for the hum of pollination, the small resonances of

regeneration that persist into dry heat of early summer. As the bodies of radishes emerge

from the land, they call our bodies into conversation in the etymological sense of ‘turning

with’; they rise in our path and compel us to turn, to respond. The subtle sonic expression

that emanates from the radish-soil-insect assemblage constitutes one aspect of their

sympoiesis, their creative, collaborative survival (Haraway 2017: M27). It is toward this

sympoiesis that permaculture listening tends—perceiving and participating in regenerative

sympoietic patterns constitutes the fundamental goal of permaculture. So, in conversation

with the wild radishes, we celebrate their growth and the pulse of abundance that they

provide to what had previously been a silent stretch of wood-mulched path. If silence,

following Von Glahn’s speculation, signals an ultimate state of climate disaster, then the

cultivation and amplification of these subtle sounds—the resonance of insect bodies and

plant bodies and the slow, cycling growth of soil life—signal a different kind of futurity

characterized by liveliness and regenerative entanglements.

This vignette demonstrates one of the main differences between permaculture and

conventional agriculture or horticulture in the Western context. While conventional

landscaping, gardening, or monoculture farming generally holds no functional place for wild

radishes or other weeds—and would just as soon see them pulled up and discarded as

inconvenient intruders—permaculture begins from a place of curiosity about what the plant

is expressing in, about, and as the landform. The permaculture approach asks how the

radishes interact—generatively, degeneratively or both—with the other creatures and

elements of the landform, and allows this inquiry to be answered by the synergistic

expression of the landform as a holistic entity, a phrase for which Donna Haraway offers the

contraction holoent (Haraway 2017: M45). This does not mean, of course, that radishes and

other so- called weeds or feral plants are never pulled or killed—permaculture is a non-

innocent ethical practice of developing situated, partial relationships with place. The

decision of whether or when to take life, however, is in principle situated first and foremost

in a caring conversational relationship with the ecological subjectivity of the place and not in

an economic rationality or abstracted morality (Puig de la Bellacasa 2018: 153-155).

Permaculture: Movement, Method, Worldview

Permaculture is a globalized social movement for ecological regeneration and

restorative eco-social justice grounded in three fundamental ethical imperatives; “earth care,

people care, and fair share” (Henfrey 2018: 33). These particular conceptions of care are

rooted in a worldview that asserts the irreducible “coconstitution of nature and culture”

(Trauger 2017: 40, Mollison [1988] 2002: 95), and this epistemological commitment forms

the basis for permaculture as a “scientific and artistic design method” (Planting Justice 2020).

The term eco-social denotes a conceptual and experiential merger of the ecological and social

realms. The permaculture slogan “the ecological is social” communicates an activist

orientation to integrative strategies that ultimately understand earth care and people care to

be one in the same. The term eco-social is also utilized in environmental studies and the

environmental humanities to address the limitations inherent in theorizing social systems as

distinct from ecological systems (or ecosystems). The idea of eco-social systems, or social-

ecological systems, helps to “emphasize the integrated concept of humans-in-nature…. In

this perspective, the delineation between social and ecological systems is understood to be

arbitrary and artificial” (Neudoerffer et al. 2005: 12, also see Berkes and Folke 1998,

Waltner-Toews et al 2003, Folke 2004; Shinall 2015). The integrative concept of eco-social,

then, is transdisciplinary in the sense that it is utilized in academic and grassroots contexts. In

both of these contexts the concept of the eco-social functions in the construction of

ecocentric identities (scholarly, activist, and otherwise), where ecocentric refers to an

emphasis on articulating and demonstrating “interconnectedness between all life forms” and

a critical interrogation or displacement of hierarchical “notions of individual human worth”

(Bretherton 2001: 19).

Permaculture and its diverse communities of practitioners around the globe have

received relatively little scholarly attention, most of which is situated in critical geography

and environmental ethics. Within this small body of research, scholars identify the

permaculture movement as a crucial node of grassroots organizing for eco-social justice

(Trauger 2017: 46) and a “timely intervention at the heart of contemporary awareness that we

live in a naturecultural world” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2018: 127). Building an

interdisciplinary body of research and analysis of the historical, cultural, philosophical, and

ecological aspects of permaculture, in this sense, constitutes an important contribution to

natureculture theorizations in environmental humanities scholarship, as well as in

environmentally oriented music and sound studies scholarship. The term natureculture, “a

synthesis of nature and culture that recognizes their inseparability in ecological relationships

that are both biophysically and socially formed…is a concept that emerges from the scholarly

interrogation of dualisms that are deeply embedded within the intellectual traditions of the

sciences and humanities” (Malone and Ovenden 2017: 1). Natureculture theories grapple

with the limitations of these dualisms as well as the roles they play in narratives that

normalize and perpetuate ecological degradation and climate catastrophe. As a grassroots

movement that articulates and acts on these same concerns, permaculture is good to think

with in academic efforts toward identifying and cultivating “arts of living on a damaged

planet” (Tsing et al. 2017). Scholarly engagement with functional natureculture frameworks

such as permaculture become increasingly urgent in the context of escalating climate collapse

as Nature/Culture binaries, “those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics,

become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social…. Seriously unthinkable:

not available to think with” (Haraway 2016: 30).

Working from a music and sound studies lens, I am centrally interested in how

permaculture’s ethical and epistemological grounding gives rise to particular ways of

knowing the world through sound, what ethnomusicologist Steven Feld calls

“acoustemology” (Feld 2015, 2017). In examining permaculture’s ethical, epistemological,

and acoustemological orientations, I also give critical consideration to the movement’s

complex and contested relationships with diverse Indigenous ecological knowledges (Peña

2017: 348, Angarova et al. 2020), and to the challenges and opportunities that permaculture

inherits in the U.S. context as a settler-dominated cultural framework oriented toward

decolonial modes of eco-social relationality (Dolman 2016: 54).

I will give more in-depth discussion and analysis of permaculture as an eco-social

movement, agriculture method, and natureculture worldview in the following chapter. In my

discussion, however, I do not intend to present a broad, comprehensive analysis of

permaculture; instead, I will focus my attention specifically on those aspects of permaculture

that are relevant to listening discourses and ways of conceptualizing and perceiving sound

and music in ecosystems or landforms. As a result, my account of permaculture is, by design,

partial. There are many issues important to permaculture that are not explored in detail in this

study, such as the role of permaculture communities and organizations in coalition building

towards political mobilization and just transitions, the relationship between permaculture and

the Transition Town model, the Extinction Rebellion movement, the youth-led Sunrise

movement, or other environmental justice movements. My focus here is on qualitative

analysis and experiential knowledge of how permaculture ethics and practices orient listening

human bodies toward eco-social participation, collaboration, and more-than-human

musicality.

Positioning my research in the intersections of ecomusicology, sound studies, and the

environmental humanities, I consider the ways in which listening operates both discursively

as a conceptual tool for communicating permaculture values and ethics, and practically as

individuals and communities work within ecosystems and with the organisms and landforms

(hills, creek ravines, meadows, gardens, etc.) that constitute them. Listening, as a term, is

highly malleable across cultural frames and “encompasses a wide variety of modes, qualities,

or types of auditory attention” (Rice 2015: 99). Listening is also conceptualized and

experienced differently in relation to the senses, and while it is centrally associated with

perception of acoustic signals, “the meanings of ‘listening’ have proliferated into

nonauditory spheres” (ibid.: 100). Through my analysis of relevant permaculture texts,

engagement with permaculture discourses, and reflexive experiential practice, I present a

figuration (in the sense articulated by Neimanis 2017: 7-8) of permaculture listening as a

multisensorial form of eco-social participation oriented toward more-than-human

conversations (Hufford 2019; Rose 2002) that emerge within and between ecological

subjectivities (Posthumus 2017).

Listening, in this research context, refers to the direction of attention to the multisensorial

texture of copresence with landforms. This figuration of permaculture listening constitutes

the fundamental object of inquiry throughout my dissertation. One of my primary objectives

in taking up this object of inquiry is to critically assess the specific participatory character of

permaculture engagements with more-than-human ecological subjectivities, and to ask if and

how listening becomes a crucial aspect of multispecies cohabitation (Feld 2017:84; Tsing

2015:29) and sociality (Rose and Van Dooren 2017) in the permaculture context. From my

situated analysis, I argue that permaculture listening strategies gesture toward and invite a

kind of more-than-human musicality. My intention in making this (admittedly somewhat

provocative) assertion is to contribute to emergent discourses in ethnomusicology concerning

disciplinary responses to the challenges of posthumanism (Silvers 2020; Titon 2020:255-

274), which I discuss in more detail below.

Research Methods and Positionality

In this study I combine focused analysis of permaculture texts with multispecies

“ethographic” (Rose and Van Dooren 2016) approaches and ethnographic engagement with

permaculturists’ everyday practices and discourses. These three methodological modes

inform and support one another in crucial ways. Ethnographic engagement with

permaculturists, specifically with regard to listening practices, demands taking seriously the

more-than-human lives that permaculturists themselves orient toward in their discourse and

practice, and thus calls for a sustained multispecies sensitivity. The theoretical and practical

challenges of multispecies or more-than-human relationship-building, furthermore, need to

be understood in relationship to permaculture’s unique histories, worldviews, and

philosophies as expressed in written texts, which provide fundamental and ongoing

inspiration for permaculture practice. My interpretations of permaculture texts are set in

direct dialogue with my interpretations of permaculturists’ conversations, and also in direct

dialogue with the actual, lively, more-than-human encounters that are prompted and

anticipated by these texts and conversations. In this way I engage permaculture writers,

teachers, and practitioners as people who “for a diverse range of reasons, make it their

business to understand other forms of life” and whose “knowledges must be evaluated for

what they teach us as well as, with a critical eye, for the particular political and technical

architectures of framings within which they are produced” (Rose and Van Dooren 2016: 86).

I craft my methodology with an intention toward both intimate participation in and critical

understanding of how permaculture, as a social movement and a method for ecological

regeneration, asks people to listen and what it asks people to listen to.

Permaculture’s epistemological and methodological commitments align in significant

(if partial) ways with academic discourses on ecocentrism and natureculture: in this sense my

project of writing with rather than about permaculture also becomes, to a great extent, a

project of writing with relevant academic discourses and of seeking moments of both

alignment and tension between permaculture and academic scholar-activism around issues

of climate disaster and natureculture entanglements. The interweaving of the ‘etho,’ ‘ethno,’

and ‘eco’ in my methodology reflects my intention to explore these alignments; to follow

Puig de la Bellacasa’s call to think with permaculture as a naturecultural intervention into

contemporary awareness, and to take seriously the more-than-human subjectivities (plants,

animals, landforms) that permaculture practice steps into conversation with. Both the

‘ethnos’ aspect of this study—human permaculturists—and the ‘ethos’ aspect—plants,

animals, landforms, and collective ecological subjectivities—converge around the question

of embodied copresence. The discourses and embodied practices that permaculturists engage

in around listening to landforms, for instance, bring them into a visceral experience of

immersion with and within other bodies; plant, animal, soil, water, landform. The experience

of being a listening, expressing body amongst other listening, expressing bodies constitutes

the basic condition and context for permaculture’s fundamental endeavors to compose, be in

conversation with, and befriend specific landforms. As such, my inquiry into permaculture

listening practices is situated in my own embodied experience of doing permaculture

listening practices and setting myself into conversation with the ecological subjectivities that

permaculture discourse orients toward.

While a significant portion of the research and argument in this dissertation deals

directly with permaculture texts and discourses that circulate within and across permaculture

communities around the globe, my fieldwork and the overall analytical scope of my research

is focused in Northern California, and specifically in the coastal region of Sonoma County.

Even within the relatively small territory of Sonoma County, my study must be understood as

partial; permaculture is practiced and conceptualized in many different ways by local

practitioners in the area with distinct ancestral lineages, spiritual orientations, and specific

social-ecological visions. My access to these various iterations of permaculture practice is

shaped by my positionality as an academic researcher of European-settler descent; it is not

my intention, nor my place, for instance, to represent the kinds of permaculture practiced by

Black-led permaculture projects focused on Afro-diasporic ecological knowledge traditions.

Nor is it my intention or place to represent local Indigenous re-appropriations of

permaculture practices. While I seek out and welcome dialogue with these communities, the

content of this dissertation engages with public-facing discourses and does not represent the

practices of local Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous, or Afro-diasporic communities.

This aspect of my methodology honors a refusal, expressed to me by these

communities, of what Dylan Robinson describes as “Western premises of knowledge

acquisition and dissemination” (Robinson 2020: 21) that conflict with and violate their own

knowledge-sharing protocols. In this sense, my writing is shaped by “strategies of refusal,”

blockade, or subversion articulated both by Black and Indigenous permaculture practitioners

and by Black and Indigenous scholars (Robinson 2020: 22-23; King 2019: 19; Garneau 2016:

26; Simpson 2014: 11). I am compelled in this sense also by Deborah Wong’s aspiration,

specifically with respect to issues of Indigeneity, “to claim no knowledge, no authority, and

maybe not even request collaboration” (Wong in Robinson 2020: 246). In acknowledging the

limits of my positionality, I do not, however, step away from the necessity of recognizing

Indigenous and Black contributions to, and critical interventions in, permaculture as a

movement. I address this topic through analysis of public-facing discourse about identity

politics in permaculture and the role of Black and Indigenous communities—which is itself

abundant enough to write on extensively (see Escovedo 2021; Angarova et al. 2020;

Penniman 2018a, 2018b; Peña 2017; Akuno 2016; Baxter 2015: 7-8)—and through the

context of my study at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, which is a settler-and-

Indigenous led permaculture organization that prioritizes coalition building with Indigenous

communities and Black-led permaculture projects.

While the dense entanglements of decolonizing efforts and traditional ecological

knowledge are critically relevant to any study of permaculture, and while they shape my

methodology in concrete ways as described above, they are not the central focus of this

dissertation. In developing my own analysis of permaculture listening discourses, I move

from a recognition of these entanglements toward a situated analysis of listening discourses

bounded within the contours of my ethnographic and ethographic relationships (outlined

below) and within the more distributed mycelial context of permaculture texts that circulate

through and inform distinct permaculture communities. I am confident that the scope of my

research, while necessarily bounded, allows me to develop an analysis of key issues pertinent

to permaculture listening practices that have real bearing on both the experiences of local

practitioners in Sonoma County and on the ethical and practical concerns of permaculture

communities more broadly. With this said, more detailed study of different communities,

projects, and places would surely yield important insights relevant (and hopefully

challenging) to my findings and my arguments.

I have been involved in grassroots permaculture projects in Northern California, as

well as internationally in Greece and New Zealand, for the past ten years, and this depth of

experience informs and facilitates my fieldwork. Through my extensive involvement, I have

come to recognize Sonoma County as an important node in global permaculture networks

and also as a critical zone for confronting the immediate impacts of extractivist-driven

climate disaster (particularly the compounding effects of long-term drought and the

escalation of wildfire). Permaculture organizations in this area also emphasize the importance

of Indigenous leadership and collaboration with local Indigenous communities, which in the

western part of Sonoma County include the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo people, who

together won federal recognition as the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, and the

Kashaya Pomo, whose ancestral homelands are to the northwest of the Graton Rancheria.

Coast Miwok, Southern Pomo, and Kashaya Pomo lands are home to several prominent

permaculture centers and programs, including Starhawk’s Earth Activist Training (which

operates in Kashaya Pomo territory, with headquarters also in San Francisco on Ramaytush

Ohlone land), Pandora Thomas’ Earthseed Permaculture Farm, recently established in Coast

Miwok and Southern Pomo territory in 2021 as the first Black-owned and Black-run

permaculture center in the county, and the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, a prominent

regional and global hub for permaculture activism established in 1994, also located on Coast

Miwok and Southern Pomo ancestral land.

Of these multiple permaculture centers, my research in this dissertation focuses

largely on the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (henceforth abbreviated as the OAEC).

Much of my analysis in the following chapters of permaculture listening practices draws

directly on pedagogical materials from the OAEC’s permaculture design course, which I

completed in the spring and summer of 2021. While I had relocated to Sonoma County in

2020 to facilitate both my ethnographic interaction with local permaculturists and my

qualitative immersion in the ecosystems that they tend, my ethnographic pursuits were

significantly impacted by the deepening of the Covid-19 pandemic. The OAEC’s

permaculture design course was held remotely over zoom meetings, and my interactions with

the teaching staff and my fellow students were entirely virtual during this period. The

course’s virtual format, particularly in the context of the pandemic, did significantly limit my

capacity to engage with my classmates. My efforts to follow up with my cohort outside of

the virtual classroom, for interviews and email correspondence, yielded initial enthusiasm but

very little in the way of sustained participation. Whether this can be attributed to the

collective and individual stresses of the pandemic, the particular character of the cohort, my

failure to present compelling invitations to my classmates, or a combination of these and

other factors, it is the case that most of the ethnographic data that I present from this course is

gathered from in-lecture conversation and discussion. The twelve weeks of lecture materials

and discussions, however, do constitute an ample body of qualitative data to engage with,

which I analyze alongside my previous and ensuing interactions with local permaculture

practitioners.

Recognizing these challenges, the virtual format of the permaculture design course

also facilitated my research in unexpected ways. Most prominently, it facilitated my focus on

ethographic engagement with more-than-human research subjects and on my own embodied

practice of the listening exercises that I center in my study. This more-than-human research

focus followed in large part from the structure of the OAEC course itself, wherein students

were instructed to apply the course materials to the design of their own permaculture site.

The design site could be a backyard, a community garden, a sidewalk strip, an apartment

balcony, or a forest ecosystem; wherever and whatever the nature of the site, the focus was

on the application of permaculture principles toward some end goal that expresses or aligns

with the basic ethics of earth care, people care, and fair share. This is a standard format for

permaculture design courses across the globe, and in this way the otherwise intensely

disruptive character of the pandemic actually facilitated the trajectory of the course: instead

of meeting collectively in one place and then going back to our field sites to apply the

lessons we had learned, we attended our classes virtually while immersed physically in our

field sites or design sites. The teaching staff noted this as an unexpected benefit of the remote

learning format that was specific to the permaculture design course structure. We were also

prompted to carry out regular observation exercises, called sit spot listening exercises

(described in more detail below), in our respective sites. Without the benefit of in-person

meetings, carrying out the sit spot exercises became a primary way of integrating the lessons

and discussions from the classes and course materials, and prompted, in my experience, a

foregrounding of the embodied experience of listening that permaculture pedagogy

emphasizes.

Because I had moved to an already-established permaculture garden in Petaluma

(thirty miles southwest of the OAEC in Coast Miwok territory), I chose to apply my

educational experience from the design course to my engagement with that existing garden.

This approach made sense to me on several levels; first, it allowed me to carry out my

research within the constraints of the pandemic without leaving my residence; second, it put

me into regular contact with the land-owner, Rachel Kaplan, a permaculture teacher-

practitioner and somatic psychotherapist who had originally established the garden and who

continues to be the garden’s primary caretaker. Rachel is a well-recognized permaculture

practitioner and teacher in the Sonoma County area, and the author of a permaculture book

focused on urban homesteading (Kaplan and Blume 2011). I worked, along with my partner

Magnolia, in Rachel’s garden from 2020 through 2022, and during this time Rachel became

an important interlocutor and conversation partner in my research project. Throughout the

dissertation I set my interactions with Rachel in dialogue with the pedagogical material from

the OAEC course and with my own engagements with more-than-human entities of the

garden. The garden as a being, in turn, became a primary research subject in their own right.

The experience of living in intimate proximity with(in) the garden’s many fleshy, earthy,

fibrous, bodies who ventured up to and quite literally into my front door (curious cleavers in

the springtime curling their way around our door frame and into our small studio) facilitated

an in-depth, immersive ethographic study of the garden. My relationship with the garden is

ongoing, but for the sake of creating a bounded structure for this dissertation, I focus mainly

on a yearlong period of daily observations and participatory interactions with the garden,

from the winter of 2021 to the winter of 2022. This approach enabled me to collect

qualitative ethographic data throughout a full four-season cycle, bringing temporal and

seasonal depth to my study.

In positioning a garden as a primary research subject, I follow Deborah Bird Rose and

Thom Van Dooren’s framework of ethography, a field methodology “grounded in an

attentiveness to the evolving ‘ways of life’ (or ēthea; singular ethos) of diverse forms of

human and nonhuman life” (2016: 77). Rose and Van Dooren’s concept of ethography is

situated within “an extensive and growing body of work in the humanities and social sciences

in the broad area of ‘multispecies studies’” (Rose, Van Dooren, and Chrulew 2017: 4); other

related sub-labels within multispecies studies include multispecies ethnography (Kirksey and

Helmreich 2010), etho-ethnology (Lestel, Brunoies, and Gaunet 2006), anthropology of life

(Kohn 2013, anthropology beyond humanity (Ingold 2013), and more-than-human

geographies (Lorimer and Driessn 2014; Whatmore 2003). While these labels represent

distinct approaches to the study of multispecies worlds, “all these approaches are united by a

common interest in better understanding what is at stake—ethically, politically,

epistemologically—for different forms of life caught up in diverse relationships of knowing

and living together” (Rose, Van Dooren, and Chrulew 2017: 5). Ethography itself weaves

together natural sciences orientations toward biological and ecological processes with the

qualitative and participatory imperatives of cultural anthropology, and the philosophical

commitments of environmental ethics in order to understand and articulate “multispecies

stories in which entangled becoming across all of the kingdoms of life is an unavoidable

reality” (Rose and Van Dooren 2016: 86-87).

I integrate this ethographic method of multispecies attentiveness with a

phenomenological approach to fieldwork that prioritizes an experiential “knowledge-of” as

opposed to a positivist “knowledge-that” (Titon 2008: 27) and positions fieldwork as a

fundamentally intersubjective and reciprocal encounter (ibid.: 37). The emphasis on

knowledge as relational and situated (Haraway 1988) is crucial in all research contexts but

becomes particularly important in more-than-human encounters, where experiential

knowledge thoroughly evades human-linguistic frameworks. The evasive character of

experiential knowledge, particularly with regard to more-than-human encounter, poses

theoretical and methodological challenges; how do human bodies contain or perceive more-

than-human experience? And what is at stake in rendering these experiences through a

human-specific linguistic framework? Here I am inspired by Astrida Neimanis’ feminist

approach to posthuman phenomenology, in which she argues that “while our bodies…are

clearly human, we are also more-than-human bodies in ways that question the boundedness,

autonomy, and coherence of the human subject” (Neimanis 2017: 29-30). Neimanis reminds

us, in the current discussion, that Titon’s experiential “knowledge-of” is also, critically, a

knowledge-as; we experience the world as bodies-in-relation, “both above and below the

level of the human individual as classically conceived in liberal humanism, and as scaled to a

human spatiotemporal sensibility” (ibid.: 29). My engagement with the garden as an

ethographic subject takes seriously this destabilization of the bounded human individual, not

simply as a philosophical abstraction but as a critical affective step in more-than-human

methodology. Attending to more-than-human lives, from this perspective, entails coming to

terms with one’s own more-than-human-ness, permeability, and polycorporeality; another

of work.

It is important to note that my focus on more-than-human encounter is informed not

only by these academic frameworks but also by permaculture’s own theories and methods,

which emphasize attending to more-than-human conversation, befriending place, and

composing with landforms (concepts that I analyze at length in the following chapters). The

observational emphasis and the more-than-human orientation of permaculture techniques

align nicely with both ethographic and ethnographic approaches to developing relationships

in (and with) the field site. Permaculture methods and modes of eco-social participation, as

such, merge with and fundamentally shape my field methods, and selected portions of my

field notes and descriptions from specific sit spot listening sessions are included and

discussed throughout the second, third, and fourth chapters of this dissertation.

Throughout my yearlong period of focused ethographic observation I carried out

daily sit spot sessions in the garden, wherein I would sit still and apply the techniques and

concepts to my observational practice, gradually developing my familiarity with the practice

and my capacity to interpret increasingly subtle expressions from the garden’s ecological

subjectivity. For the sake of regularity, I returned to one of the same two spots each time;

one was on the west side of the garden, under the limbs of a coast live oak, and the other was

opposite on the northeast side, also under the canopy of several coast live oaks. I chose these

locations because they provided some visual shelter and allowed me to be right at the

garden’s edge without making myself too obvious to the other animals who frequented the

garden and might be discouraged by my presence. Once seated, I remained still for a

minimum of thirty minutes, and sometimes closer to an hour, depending on what events or

expressions took place during the flow of each sit spot session. In making these decisions I

was guided by the OAEC’s pedagogy (itself drawing from field methods of wildlife

biology), which suggests that “it can take up to twenty minutes for the animals and birds in

the immediate area to settle down after you first arrive.” The logic behind this technique is

that “by staying for a longer period, you increase your ability to merge more fully with the

landscape, and to experience the beings of that place in ‘baseline,’ without threats” (OAEC

2021: 22). The idea of ‘baseline’ is somewhat deceptive here because threats and

disturbances are a constant aspect of most suburban ecosystem niches—the idea, however, is

that after about twenty minutes of relative stillness on my part, my own presence would

begin to merge as a more stable aspect of the place. Birds would start to hop on the branches

directly above my head, or drop down to the ground around my feet to and forage for seeds

and bugs in the duff.

After completing my sit spot session, I would often step into the garden to begin

working, walking, crawling, or lying down to observe the soil and the small creatures on and

below the surface. I participated with the garden’s ecological subjectivity through cultivation

of the soil, watering, planting, casting seeds, pulling weeds, harvesting fruits, roots, flowers,

and seeds from the various plant beings of the garden, and sharing space, time, and breath

with the garden. Part of my fieldwork entailed tracking how my presence and subjectivity

both affected and was (and is) affected by the distributed ecological subjectivity of the

garden; in this respect I again follow Rose and Van Dooren’s articulation of ethography as a

practice of witnessing wherein “to witness is also to participate in the world in its relational

becoming” (Rose and Van Dooren 2016: 91). Another keyword for Rose and Van Dooren’s

ethography framework is responsibility: “Responsibility and ethography are delicately and

recursively entangled…. Responsibility requires attention to ethographic context, to others’

forms of worldly responsiveness, while ethography draws us into new relations and forms of

response-ability” (ibid.). Ethography, as a scholar-activist project, also holds within it a

responsibility toward a different kind of storytelling:

Storytelling is one of the great arts of witness, and in these difficult times telling

lively stories is a deeply committed project, one of engaging with the multitudes of

others in their noisy, fleshy living and dying. It is the aim of lively ethnographies to

seize our relational imagination. It is an engagement with the joys, passions, desires

and commitments of Earth others, celebrating their ēthea in all their extravagant

diversity. (Rose and Van Dooren 2016: 91)

In carrying out an ethographic study of a permaculture garden at the semi-rural edge of

Petaluma, then, I hold several key questions: How do I witness and participate in the

relational becoming of the garden? How does my body become-with the garden’s body?

What does that becoming-with sound like? What does it mean to cultivate response-ability in

relation to the garden? How do I carry out storytelling in a way that reflects and enacts this

response-ability and this relational becoming? What is the noisy, fleshy, living and dying of

the garden?

These ethographic questions, again, interweave with a parallel set of inquiries

regarding the ways in which permaculturists witness and participate in the relational

becoming of the landforms or eco-social systems that they tend, how they cultivate response-

ability in relation to these landforms, and how they perceive and apprehend their noisy,

fleshy living and dying. I address these questions through my engagement with permaculture

practitioners (as outlined above) and also, substantially, through close reading of

permaculture texts, which themselves constitute a dynamic arena of philosophical and

pedagogical discourse on the subject of cultivating more-than-human relationality. As a

social movement with a clearly identifiable (if contested) literary canon, which I will

introduce and describe in the first chapter, permaculture cannot be understood without

careful study of its texts. This, in any case, is my assessment as a longtime student of

permaculture and participant in grassroots permaculture projects, and this understanding

informs my methodology. Text-based study becomes even more imperative in the context of

my argument regarding more-than-human musicality, which is in part a philosophical one.

As such, I frequently foreground permaculture texts as sources of philosophy that inform

practitioners’ actions and worldviews. With this said, my intention is to weave these three

methodological approaches in generative dialogue with one another; ethographic engagement

with the ecological subjectivity of the garden, ethnographic engagement with permaculture

practitioners, and critical analysis of permaculture texts.

As a result of this weaving, this study does not attempt a classic ethnography, a

prototypical ethography, or a self-contained critical analysis of relevant literature; rather, I

draw from each of these methods and seek synergy between them. Each of these methods

converges on the central question of listening in permaculture practice. I track my analysis of

how listening practices are represented in permaculture literature alongside my analysis of

how my interlocutors discuss and experience listening as well as my own embodied practice

of listening within the discursive, pedagogical, and experiential context of permaculture. My

situated listening practice brings me into intimate embodied encounter with the ecological

subjectivity of the garden, and in this way the sounds and silences of the garden themselves

also figure into my study. This multi-layered inquiry into permaculture listening is also set in

dialogue with a constellation of scholarly discourses on sound, listening, and ecological

subjectivity, to which I will now turn.

Literature Review

Interdisciplinary Discourses on Sound, Music, Ecology, and Natureculture

My research is situated at the intersections of ethnomusicology and the environmental

humanities, and deals particularly with an inquiry into the relevance of environmental

humanities discourses to ethnomusicology’s engagements with environmental issues and

ecologically-oriented posthumanism. Posthumanism poses a fundamental challenge to

ethnomusicology, a discipline, as Michael Silvers notes, “inherently focused on the human

and social aspects of music” (2020: 199). The particular anthropocentrism that characterizes

ethnomusicology is also challenged by what Aaron Allen calls “the problem of ecology”

(2018)—the tendency toward reductive and humanistic interpretations of ecological concepts

and processes. This study of permaculture listening practices constitutes one (hopefully

generative) effort at grappling with both the challenge of posthumanism and the problem of

ecology as they pertain to ethnomusicology specifically; as such, it is necessary to give an

account of how these challenges are conceptualized, defined, and approached in the

literature. While the challenges of ecology and posthumanism are articulated separately by

Allen and Silvers, and while they are independent from one another in important ways, I

argue that the problem of ecology, for music and sound studies, necessarily entails the

challenge of posthumanism; that to relocate music and sound, both analytically and

experientially, from the realm of social life to the realm of ecological life, demands a

reworking of fundamental concepts such as sociality, liveliness, and musicality.

This reworking, at least at the analytical level, requires a thorough interdisciplinary

engagement both with ecological disciplines (ecology, acoustic ecology, environmental

humanities) and various threads of posthumanism. The main arterial inquiry of this

dissertation, which concerns the role of listening in permaculture practice, is formulated

through a synthesis of interdisciplinary approaches to sound and posthuman re-figurations of

ecology. My discussion will weave in and out of these multiple disciplinary frameworks,

setting them in generative dialogue with one another; the purpose here is not just to give a

broad account of the intellectual terrain from which the present study emerges, but to notice

synergies across disciplinary boundaries and to mobilize those synergies toward productive

engagement with the ethnomusicological challenges of ecology and posthumanism. In this

regard my discussion aligns with Steven Feld’s call for ethnomusicologists to “add a critical

posthuman and posthumanist perspective to the continued insistence on the centrality of

human practice and agency” (Feld 2017: 84). While I follow Feld’s appeal to “reimagine the

object of study more expansively, more philosophically, more experimentally” (ibid.), I also

follow Donna Haraway’s critical refusal of posthumanism as the default paradigm for this

(and other) re-imaginings. Haraway’s alternative formation of what she calls a “compostist”

(Haraway 2017: M45) frame is particularly salient to my study of permaculture, which also

centers compost and de/re/co-composition in its worldview and practice. I will arrive at a

discussion of the compostist frame toward the end of this chapter, after a synthesis of

relevant literature in ethnomusicology and environmental studies.

I begin this interdisciplinary encounter with an assessment of the reciprocal

relationship between music and sound studies on the one hand and environmental humanities

on the other. The main subfield of music and sound studies in which this reciprocal

engagement occurs is ecomusicology—as such, I will center the first portion of this literature

review on an exploration of ecomusicology, its guiding questions, and its key concerns. I will

build on the extensive work of Aaron Allen and other scholars in the subfield, and offer my

own understanding of ecomusicology’s prospects and problems (following Allen 2011),

particularly with regard to developing “ecocentric” (Allen 2020: 200) modes of musical-

cultural-ecological research, analysis, and practice. Critical appraisal of ecomusicology will

necessarily entail dialogue with adjacent formations of environmentally and ecologically

oriented music and sound studies, and particularly with Ana María Ochoa Gautier’s counter-

formation of acoustic multinaturalism, which advocates for more direct ontological unsettling

of the music concept (Ochoa Gautier 2016: 123) and Steven Feld’s concept acoustemology,

which articulates a shift from studying “music in culture, music and culture, [or] music as

culture” toward a consideration of “the nature of human sonic interaction with all other

species, with environments, [and] with technologies” (Feld 2017: 94), and stands as a crucial

precedent and resource for all ecologically-oriented ethnomusicological work. Having

established the current trajectories of music and sound studies, I will turn to the question of

how problems of ecology become entangled with the challenge of posthumanism—and how

ecofeminist and environmental humanities approaches can (and do) inform

ethnomusicological grapplings with more thoroughly naturecultural conceptualizations of

ecology. This will entail close readings of ecofeminist science and technology studies

(Haraway 2017), phenomenology (Neimanis 2017, Hufford 2019), and anthropology (Tsing

2015), tracking the ways in which classical conceptions of ecology are thrown into question,

crisis, and regenerative mutation by posthuman and alter-posthuman frameworks.

The “problem of ecology” and the “challenge of posthumanism,” I suggest, are not

things to be solved or overcome. Drawing inspiration from Donna Haraway’s emphasis on

“staying with the trouble” (2016), my intention is rather to take time to think on and dwell in

troubled states of ecology, both as its conceptual level and at the level of the earthly lived

relations that the concept references. To do this in the context of an ethnomusicological

study means, for me, to encounter music in and as the trouble, and to encounter the trouble as

music. What is the musicality of climate collapse? What is the musicality of Gaia as an

intrusive event (Stengers 2015: 12), and how is that musicality heard or ignored, amplified or

silenced by different actors in different contexts? Can ethnomusicology accommodate,

theoretically and methodologically, a concept (or a plurality of concepts) of Gaian

musicality? The following literature review and synthesis gives context to these questions

and to their relationship with my study of permaculture.

Music Studies and Environmental Studies: Disciplinary Intersections

In considering the reciprocal relationship between ethnomusicology and

environmental studies, it is necessary first to recognize the internal diversity of each of these

scholarly domains. Just as ethnomusicology as a discipline defies a “precise, concise, and

readily intelligible definition” (Nettl 2005: 1), any simple naming of environmental studies

would obscure a (certainly even greater) multitude of different theoretical orientations,

research methods, ethical commitments, and guiding questions. Without getting mired in an

exhaustive overview of all the component research frames of environmental studies (a task

beyond the relevant scope of this dissertation), I will foreground the interdisciplinary field of

ecomusicology as an organizational space and focus mainly on those sub-disciplines from

environmental studies that actively contribute to or are represented in ecomusicological

discourse. This decision is grounded in two assessments; first, that the question of potential

reciprocity (or its absence) between disciplines is best approached from the sub-field level

(which for examples see Mark 2016; Post and Pijanowski 2018), rather than trying to deal

with the unwieldy, amoebic literatures of two internally diverse disciplines; and second, that

ecomusicology stands as “the most common moniker for environmentally relevant research

in musicology and ethnomusicology” (Pedelty 2020: 311) and the most prolific arena for

environmentally-oriented music and sound scholarship.

Ecomusicology itself, of course, “represents a panoply of other fields and disciplinary

influences” (Allen 2018: 6), drawing broadly from acoustic ecology, soundscape ecology,

ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, and environmental justice studies in the effort to

generate interdisciplinary strategies for confronting issues of environmental and cultural

sustainability that center the role of sound-making and music-making practices and

discourses. This intellectual project is motivated by the conviction that culturally situated

understandings and experiences of music and sound have direct outcomes for the integrity of

eco-social systems, that these outcomes are worthy of scholarly attention, and that music and

sound scholars are well-positioned to wield their particular expertise in the study of these

outcomes (Allen 2019: 52-53). These studies are approached in a variety of ways, such as;

ethnographic study of the effects of climate change and desertification on music cultures

(Post 2019), or of the relationship between music-making and concern for the environment

(Guy 2009; DeWitt 2019: 96), quantitative analysis of the effects of industrialism and

ecological degradation on soundscapes (Post and Pijanowski 2018), and the entanglements

of environmental and cultural sustainability that figure into the production of musical

instruments, performances, and media (Allen 2019: 49; Titon in Cooley 2020). The

disciplines named above, it must be noted, operate with overlapping but divergent

understandings of ecology, environment, and nature as key concepts—thus, as Aaron Allen

emphasizes, “for ecomusicology at least, it is important to distinguish the key environment

(and/or nature) themes into those that are oriented to the specific scientific discipline of

ecology and those that are oriented to the interdiscipline (or transdiscipline) of the more

general environmental studies” (Allen 2018: 8). In making this distinction, however, it is also

important to recognize that all of these diverse disciplinary influences are mobilized under

the unifying (if multi-faceted) scholar-activist goal of meeting a perceived need within music

studies to develop more robust understandings of ecological realities and the naturecultural

mechanisms of climate disaster (Allen 2011: 417).

This scholar-activist orientation takes on serious theoretical and methodological

challenges; theoretical in the sense that ethnomusicology as a discipline remains “inherently

focused on the human and social aspects of music” (Silvers 2020), with the result being a

marginalization or reductive simplification of ecological aspects of music (Allen 2018: 6);

and methodological in the sense that while ethnomusicologists are thoroughly prepared to

study music as social life (Turino 2009), we are generally less prepared to engage with music

as an ecological process or an expression of a distributed ecological subjectivity—with music

as eco-social life. Aaron Allen argues along these lines in his 2017 explication of

ecomusicology, asserting that “we may study music and sound in human context, but,

notable exceptions notwithstanding, we still have not expanded well enough to the planetary,

non- human, and abiotic contexts that make human context possible” (Allen 2018: 5). This

disciplinary inertia becomes less and less tenable particularly as ecosystem collapse results in

planetary contexts that are less and less conducive to human habitation—riffing on Allen’s

argument, we can no longer assume that the planetary context will make the human context

possible, or vice versa. Ecomusicology coalesced, in large part, as an activist (in Allen’s

treatment of the word, see Allen 2018) effort to advocate for “research dealing with

environmental justice, biodiversity, and ecological crises like climate change, pollution,

overconsumption, and overdevelopment” (Pedelty 2020: 311). This activist effort is

expressed in one of the subfield’s fundamental guiding questions: “Is the environmental

crisis relevant to music—and more importantly, is musicology relevant to solving it?” (Allen

2011: 392). This inquiry, rather than asserting some elevated importance of music or music

scholarship, attempts to mobilize the particular qualities and capacities of music and sound

studies in contributing dialogue with environmental studies. In this interdisciplinary space,

disciplinary knowledge of music cultures and methodological approaches to their study are

framed within a critical centering of environmental crises (Allen 2011, Post 2019, Cooley et

al. 2020) and the colonial, neocolonial, and neoliberal arrangements that drive them (Cooley

2019a: xxxii). As such, ecomusicology endeavors to push against disciplinary inertia by

centering questions of ecological relationality, futurity, and survivability.

This critical orientation compels and provokes dialogue with various disparate post-

and decolonial frameworks including multinaturalism (Ochoa Gautier 2016, Seeger 2016:

93), ecofeminist science and technology studies (Kisliuk 2019: 221), and critical

environmental justice (Mark 2016, Cooley 2019a). In particular, Ana María Ochoa Gautier

has critiqued the field for inadequate interrogation of the conceptual ground of music, sound,

culture, and nature and, more importantly, their historical complicity (or symbiotic

functionality) with European colonialism (2016: 109-111, 119). In her critique of

ecomusicology, she argues that the subfield operationalizes hegemonic conceptualizations of

its key terms; nature, culture, and music that ultimately leave Western philosophical

commitments to the Nature/Culture binary intact. Ochoa Gautier challenges ecomusicologists

to “drastically rethink the political implications of keeping the underlying ontology that [the

relation of ‘nature’ culture, and music’] implies,” and advocates for more radical questioning

of “our very concepts of sound/music” (ibid.: 140-141). Her counter-formation of acoustic

multinaturalism takes inspiration from Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s anthropological

framework of multinaturalism or perspectivism, which the Brazilian anthropologist

developed through ethnographic encounter with Amerindian groups in the Amazon.

Multinaturalism, articulated in opposition to the concept of multiculturalism, intends toward

a radical ontological departure from Western academic theory. The analytical force of

multinaturalism lies in its elegant disruption of the Nature/Culture binary, or what Viveiros

de Castro describes as the distinction “between the cosmological and anthropological orders,

forever separated” (Viveiros de Castro 2011: 4), with the cosmological corresponding to

Nature and the anthropological corresponding to Culture.

Ochoa Gautier argues that “in the case of music, this ‘separation between the

cosmological and anthropological orders’ takes the form of rekindling the long historical

debate in the West about sound and music as phenomena that lie between nature and culture,

but one moved by an urgency that it did not have in earlier periods, now posed by the

‘intrusion of Gaia’ in the affairs of humans” (Ochoa Gautier 2016: 108). In referencing the

“intrusion of Gaia,” Ochoa Gautier sets Viveiros de Castro’s multinaturalism in dialogue

with ecofeminist science and technology studies discourses (Haraway 2017) and with

counter-hegemonic theorizations of ecology. Drawing on Lynn Margulis and James

Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis (Haraway 2017: M27), Donna Haraway articulates “Gaia as an

intrusive event…that undoes thinking as usual” (ibid.: M47). The Gaia hypothesis—the

hypothesis that living organisms regulate the atmosphere in their own interest (Lovelock

2003: 769)—has been broadly critiqued within evolutionary biology and the ecological

sciences as teleological (Turner 2023: 323) and at odds with prevailing theories of natural

selection (Barlow and Volk 1992: 688; Kirchner 2002: 400-402), but has been received with

greater interest in the environmental humanities as a paradigm-shifting intervention against

the hegemony of reductionist thinking and the veneer of moral neutrality that characterizes

Western scientific thought (Barrota 2011: 96). The concept has been adopted into

contemporary more-than-human discourse as a way of naming “complex nonlinear couplings

between processes that compose and sustain entwined but nonadditive subsystems as a

partially cohering systemic whole…Gaia is not reducible to the sum of its parts, but achieves

finite systemic coherence in the face of perturbations within parameters that are themselves

responsive to dynamic systemic processes (2016: 42-43). The intrusion of Gaia is also

implicated, in the context of multinaturalism, as the intrusion of the animate into the

mechanical, of the cosmological into the anthropological (Ochoa Gautier 2016: 108-109).

Most importantly, perhaps, the intrusion of Gaia is an intrusion of animist modes of thought

into or against hegemonic Western intellectualism (Haraway 2017: M45).

The other main thread of Ochoa Gautier’s acoustic multinaturalism framework is

Steven Feld’s theorization of acoustemology. She sets ecomusicology as a field in “contrast

with Feldian acoustemology as a tradition that—through its links to sound studies, acoustic

practices, and structuralism—suggests a different entry point in the problematics of

sound/music, the anthropological, and the cosmological” (Ochoa Gautier 2016: 109). Feld’s

articulation of acoustemology precedes the formation of ecomusicology, and his speculative

rendering of echo-muse-ecology (1994: 3) also anticipates the kinds of inquiries and

orientations that have become central to ecomusicology. It is along these lines (perhaps

among others) that Ochoa Gautier accuses ecomusicology of appropriating “the sense of

urgency that the topic of sound/music and nature has acquired today” (ibid.: 113). While

Feld’s work has been fundamentally influential to ecomusicology, Ochoa Gautier argues that

the subfield has not, by and large, “explored its full importance” (2016: 132). Ochoa Gautier

argues that Feld’s work “proposes a radically different set of possibilities than that proposed

by ecomusicology today” (ibid.), specifically in its focused “exploration of different

ontologies that do not take the idea of nature and culture for granted” (ibid.). Toward this

focused exploration, she identifies an alignment between acoustemology and

multinaturalism, arguing for the synergy of these two theoretical frameworks as an entry

point toward “unsettling the ontological grounds of ‘nature’ and culture’” (ibid.: 111).

Without delving too deeply into the friction between acoustic multinaturalism and

ecomusicology as adjacent scholarly frameworks (see Ochoa Gautier 2016 and Cooley et al.

2020), I will suggest that the radical ontological disruptions of multinaturalism and

acoustemology are not incompatible with the pluralism and permeability of ecomusicology

as a field of interdisciplinary encounter. Following Ruth Hellier, I understand that while

“there are so many terms, ideas, practices,” theoretical and methodological frameworks, the

important thing is that “now is the time for all music scholars to be concerned with the

environment” (Hellier in Cooley et al. 2020: 308-309). Hellier’s call for broadscale

environmental engagement is presented as both pragmatic, in her advocation for the

development of course curricula that attends and responds to local social-ecological realities,

and theoretical, in her expressed commitment to “enabling the interrogation of of the

constitution of ontological categories” (Hellier 2020: 308, here in direct dialogue with Ochoa

Gautier 2016: 113). But immediately the question arises of how different disciplines (and

different scholars within and across them) bring different epistemological and ontological

commitments into their understanding and interrogation of these categories, and, on a more

basic level, to their use of the term ‘environment.’ To be concerned with the environment

means something quite distinct for acoustic ecologists using state of the art recording

technologies and super computers to capture, ‘salvage,’ and archive the sounds of fast-

disappearing species and ecosystems than it does for environmental justice scholars who

document the damaging effects of waste-industrial soundscapes in marginalized

communities, neighborhoods, and cities. It means something different again for

ethnomusicologists seeking to open conversations around the social, political, and ecological

lives of musical instruments (Bates 2012; Allen 2019) or the musical lives of nonhuman

beings (Keller 2012). Ecomusicology, in some sense, succeeds as a scholar-activist project to

the extent that it is able to accommodate epistemological and methodological pluralism

without compromising high standards of scholarship (Allen 2018: 417) and without diluting

(by way of over-theorization) the sense of urgency that motivates environmental research.

The “problem of ecology,” identified by Aaron Allen and introduced at the beginning

of this section, constitutes one of the main challenges with regard to both scholarly standards

and activist urgency concerning climate injustice. Allen argues that the multivariant

evolution of the ecology concept, since its coining and definition by Ernst Haeckel in 1866,

invites co-optation and misuse as well as generative re-use and re-purposing by non-

ecological disciplines. Particularly “when incorporated into music and sound studies, the

term ecology has often lost touch with the complex contexts (i.e. those both organic and

inorganic) and is instead re-simplified to focus only on the human organism” (ibid.: 6). This

re-simplification often results in purely metaphorical uses of ecology and ecological

processes, or what Australian music scholars Brent Keogh and Ian Collinson term “the

appropriation of ecological principles to articulate and explain human musical activity”

(Keogh and Collinson 2016: 1). The value of such metaphorical uses of ecology continues to

be the source of much scholarly debate (Allen 2017, Titon forthcoming), but such debate

buries or ignores nonmetaphorical engagements with ecology and the more-than-human.

Whether engaging ecology as metaphor or heuristic model (Titon forthcoming), or as the site

of more-than-human musical expression, ecomusicological scholarship grapples with the

problem of ecology and its contested epistemological and ontological dimensions (Titon

2020: 224). Of preeminent and enduring concern for ecomusicology moving forward is the

deepening of scholarly capacity to develop “ecocentric” (Cooley et al. 2020: 305, also see

Titon 2012) conceptions of sound, music and culture that more effectively account for the

concept of ecology, the critical ontological challenges posed to ecology (and music studies)

by posthumanism, and the existential challenges posed by ecological injustices

(environmental racism, industrial extractivism, the commodification of land and life).

Various articulations of the relationships between musical and ecological processes

have a longstanding precedent in ethnomusicology (Archer 1964, Feld 1982, Seeger 1987,

also see Silvers 2020: 201-203 for a current review of relevant literature), but these earlier

studies have tended to relegate ecological aspects and nonhuman actors to more passive roles

in the production of musical culture—the more-than-human holds a subjugated relevance and

utility in (often unreciprocated) servitude to human culture and human music. This persisting

anthropocentrism has, in one sense, contributed to the limited character of music scholars’

engagement with ecology as a scientific discipline as described above. Through deepening

interdisciplinary engagement, however, music and sound scholars express an optimistic

intention to “join our colleagues in the sciences, especially ecologists, in an effort to move

toward a ‘third culture’ in which humanists and scientists are co-investigators” (Cooley

2019a: xxv, Allen and Dawe 2016: 5, also see Post and Pijanowski 2018). It must be noted,

however, that the sciences (including ecology) are largely motivated by the same underlying

epistemological assumptions and anthropocentric motivations as the humanities (Haraway

1988, also Haraway 2017 ). Nonetheless, ecomusicology has emerged as an important space

for dialogue across disciplinary boundaries of historical musicology, ethnomusicology, sound

studies, and the environmental humanities.

Ecomusicology first gained currency at the turn of the twenty-first century in the

context of historical musicology (Rehding 2002, Allen 2016). Within this framework,

scholars leveraged familiar methods of textual analysis (both musical and literary) toward

philosophical considerations of the trope of Nature in culture and music (Edwards 2016: 157,

Ingram 2016: 221, Von Glahn 2013), attending particularly to “the physical and emotional

responses that music induces in listeners and how they shape our view of the world”

(Grimley 2011: 395). Sharing ecocriticism’s “investment in cultivating environmental

consciousness” (Opperman 2011: 153), musicological approaches to ecomusicology have

contributed centrally to a particular rhetoric of scholar-activism that advocates for critical

reflection on sustainability discourses (Allen 2016, 2019), as noted above. Historical

musicology’s text-based analytical methods often focus on the symbolic value of Nature and

ecological interaction (Allen 2016: 647-651), and normalize a metaphorical (as opposed to

embodied or sensual) treatment of environments. It is in this respect that ecomusicology

benefits from ethnomusicology’s methodological commitment to ethnographic fieldwork.

Given its proximity as a sibling discipline to musicology, ethnomusicology has both

been influenced by and contributed to the intellectual terrain of ecomusicology since its

inception. Ethnomusicological engagements with ecomusicology have also been influenced

by ecocriticism (Guy 2009: 219), and while earlier iterations of ecocritical musicology,

influenced by literary ecocriticism, focused mostly on interpretations of musical works with

demonstrable relationships to natural environments and places (Grimley 2011: 394; Allen

2018: 7; Titon 202: 226), ethnomusicological approaches have integrated ecocritical

discourse with ethnographic methods, bringing the academic and activist orientations of

ecomusicology (Allen 2011: 393; Redhing 2011: 411-412) into fieldwork contexts.

Furthermore, postcolonial and feminist interventions into the ecocritical frame (Gaard 2010,

Heise 2013) have opened the possibility for engaging the ethnographic field not just as a

human cultural space but holistically as a multispecies ecological space. Jennifer Post’s work

on eco-social soundscapes in both New Zealand and Mongolia (Post 2019: 76) offers an

example of how this re-envisioning of the ethnographic field as, perhaps, an ecographic field,

can open up new insights into the complexities of human-landform relationships.

Ethnomusicology, of course, has a well-established precedent of research that

recognizes the multispecies character of music-making and, as Michael Silvers notes,

discipline-defining work such as Steven Feld’s Sound and Sentiment (1982) and Anthony

Seeger’s Why Suya Sing (1987) precedes and anticipates growing scholarly concern for

ecologically-informed approaches and the development of posthuman theory (Silvers 2020:

200-203), even as the discipline as a whole remains committed to the humanist enterprise of

studying “people making music” (Titon 2016). Jeff Todd Titon’s concept of a sound

commons stands as another important precedent in ecologically focused ethnomusicology

that advocates for more integrated eco-social approaches to the study and experience of

sound as a cross-species commonwealth (Titon 2020: 220). These various threads of

ethnomusicological research engage with a widely interdisciplinary turn toward more-than-

human research, which is characterized as “research that has sought—in one way or another

—to take nonhuman life, and the entanglements of human/nonhuman life, seriously and thus

to step away from the modernist dismissal of nature and nonhumans as anything but

resources” (Bastian et al. 2017: 2). The concept of the more-than-human has emerged as one

of the main interdisciplinary tools for addressing “the two great conjoined ‘issues of shared

planetary life—social and ecological injustice,” which “seem to be entering new levels of

starkness and volatility” (Bastian et al. 2017: 1) with the escalation of climate catastrophe,

habitat loss, and mass extinction. In their introduction of the concept of more-than-human

participatory research, environmental humanities scholars Michelle Bastian, Owain Jones,

Niamh Moore, and Emma Roe explain:

Attention has also been called to the uneven ways that the consequences of living in

this changing world are felt and experienced by specific humans and nonhumans. The

vast scale of these changes, which are having profound effects on communities living

on land, in the sea and air, have prompted calls for the ‘ecologicalisation’ of

knowledge as an essential step in moving away from Enlightenment philosophies of

rational, self-aware humans in a machine-like world”. (Bastian et al. 2017: 1-2; also

see Plumwood 2002; Latour and Weibel 2005; Code 2006; Hinchliffe 2007)

Following Bastian et al.’s description of the concept, the more-than-human can be

understood as a branch of posthuman critique that focuses on the entanglements of living

organisms, their differences, and their situated experiences in the context of climate collapse.

The collective sense of urgency toward the ecologicalisation of knowledge and the terms of

knowledge production clearly resonates with disciplinary concerns in ethnomusicology and

music studies regarding the challenges of posthumanism, the problem of ecology. The

concept of the more-than-human stands as an entry point for deepening interrogation of the

theoretical and ontological grounds of core disciplinary concepts such as music, culture, and

nature.

Ecomusicology, from an ethnomusicological standpoint, moves toward a more-than-

human frame to the extent that it re-positions the study of music in or as culture to the study

of music in or as ecosystem or environment (where the distinction between in and as takes on

new significance). Here the terms music, culture, environment, and ecosystem remain

contested, porous, and multivalent place-markers (Allen 2011: 392; 2018: 7) which signal,

even in their inadequacy and partial failures, the urgent need for new ways of framing,

naming, and describing the generation of creative resonant expression within ecosystems (as

physiological, ideological, economic, political entanglements) and across species and forms

(Seeger 2016: 89). Efforts to define, re-define, and reframe these basic terms of engagement

have at times become stymied by an underlying epistemological commitment to music as a

given (special) category of sound and a given category of (uniquely) human cultural

production in opposition to sound or noise (Windsor 2016: 165-166). This commitment,

returning to Ochoa Gautier’s critique, runs counterproductive to the urgent task of finding

ways to confront and comprehend the “intrusion of Gaia” (Haraway 2017, Latour 2014). She

observes that “ecomusicology has tended to affirm a multiculturalist ethos—that is to say, an

ethos that accounts for all forms of diversity under a single epistemological umbrella, the

concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’” (ibid.: 111), and that rather than “unsettling the very

ontological grounds of ‘nature’ and ‘culture,’ [ecomusicology] seeks to establish a

musicological holism on a disciplinary foundation that takes such terms for granted” (ibid.).

This claim is both confirmed and problematized in the literature of ecomusicology. For

instance, in Kevin Dawe’s expanded definition of a musical instrument as a “creation of

nature and culture, where knowledge of how to exploit the acoustic and aesthetic properties

of materials is developed as part of a ‘sensual culture’” (Dawe 2016: 110), the normalization

of nature and culture as unexamined categories, as well as the normalization of exploitation

as the prevailing relational mode between the two, is hard to miss and dangerous to ignore. It

must be noted that Dawe’s focus here is not philosophical—but then this is precisely Ochoa

Gautier’s point; that this particular ontological binarism is pervasive in academic thought to

the point of invisibility, it being the intellectual air that scholars breathe.

As a counter-example, however, Anthony Seeger’s contribution to the same volume

warns explicitly that “we have to be especially careful about the way the words ‘nature,’

‘animals,’ ‘humans,’ and ‘music’ are defined and used” and offers to “demonstrate how

different concepts of nature, animals, humans and music can be understood from the post-

Cartesian Western philosophical perspective” through his case study of the Kisedje in Brazil.

Indeed, the problems of disciplinary inheritance have been relatively central to

ecomusicological discourse since its inception. In his contribution to the 2011 Journal of the

American Musicological Society colloquy on ecomusicology, Aaron Allen critiques the

concept of environment as “the nonhuman world” which “while useful…can promote a

problematic human-other duality” (Allen 2011: 392). Alexander Rehding also acknowledges

the importance of interrogating and deconstructing such terminology but expresses some

reservation regarding the intellectual and pragmatic goals of philosophical and linguistic

deliberation. He argues that “while the deconstructive movement has greatly advanced our

understanding of rhetoric and authority surrounding the term nature, it is often in direct

conflict with specific ecological aims. From its skeptical post-structuralist vantage point,

which centers on language as a site of conflict, it is all too easy to dismiss ‘nature’ as a

discursive construct.” (Rehding 2011: 411). The concern here is that the real tasks of halting

or reversing environmental degradation and ecosystem collapse might become deconstructed

themselves along with deconstructions of nature and culture. Rehding argues, to this end, that

“the step from identifying nature as a cultural construct to dismissing it as ‘just’ a cultural

construct is but a small one” (ibid.).

Redhing’s reluctance to unsettle the ontological grounds of nature and culture

emerges out of pragmatic concern for the integrity and success of environmental movements

which can tend to lean into these constructed notions and rely on them in community

organizing, fundraising, and legislative efforts. From this perspective, a focus on applied

work that centers and uplifts on-the-ground environmental activisms is just as urgently

necessary as philosophical critique of the categories that those activist communities might

make use of. Thus, the tendency for ecomusicological research to operate with

anthropocentric notions of music reflects, perhaps more than some kind of willful ignorance,

a pragmatic orientation and a conscious, strategic choice. As a result of this pragmatism,

much important work has been done under the rubric of ecomusicology that deals explicitly

with human musicking; the ways in which songwriting, composition, and performance relate

to cultural and political orientations to the environment, be it the “ideology of ever-

expanding economic growth and development” (Guy 2009: 230), gendered perceptions of

the natural world (Von Glahn 2013), or the tense negotiations between settler colonial and

Indigenous aesthetics and ethics (Hurely-Glowa 2019: 105); the complex and limited role of

popular music in galvanizing environmental consciousness (Dewitt 2019: 95); the toll of the

music industry on ecosystems (Pedelty 2012); music as a strategic performative mode of

climate activism (Pedelty 2016, Mark 2016); or music as a constellation of material and

spiritual relationships to threatened environments (Post 2019, Dirksen 2019).

In my own assessment of this internal debate around the merits of deconstruction

versus pragmatic application, I lean strongly toward a ‘both and’ approach. I share Rehding’s

concern over the possibility of dismissing actionable responsibility toward the natural world

through the insistence on nature as a discursive construct, and I also share Ochoa Gautier’s

frustration over the ways in which the discursive construct of nature allows for the dismissal

of ontological multiplicities and the reduction of difference to a hierarchical binary.

Rehding’s position regarding deconstruction, I will suggest, compels a direct engagement

with the problem of ecology (a la Aaron Allen); it asks scholars to prioritize the immediacy

of real ecological crises and the “very real urgency of the issues expressed by the ecological

movement” (ibid.: 411). Conversely, Ochoa Gautier’s multinaturalist intervention compels

engagement with the challenge of posthumanism (a la Michael Silvers); from this

perspective, any effort to address ecological crises without disentangling from the

anthropocentric philosophies that precipitate and justify these crises will do little to

effectively confront them.

As stated at the outset of this literature review, my understanding is that the problems

of ecology and posthumanism must be engaged simultaneously and in relation to one

another. Ontological unsettling of the grounds of encounter is only meaningful to the extent

that the encounter is actually lived, experienced, and communicated. And without unsettling

the grounds of encounter, ecological or environmental activisms can tend to reinforce the

fundamental logics of separation and extraction that enable environmental degradation—it is

in this way that activism often re-creates and strengthens the object of its struggle. My study

of permaculture listening practices is situated precisely in these parallel tensions; on the one

hand between activist efforts against the systemic causes of environmental degradation and

conservative recursions that strengthen these same systemic causes; and, on the other hand,

between pragmatic environmentalism and radical posthumanist/compostist ideals. Returning

to María Puig de la Bellacasa’s assessment of permaculture as “a timely intervention at the

heart of the contemporary awareness that we live in a naturecultural world” and her

assertion that permaculture “is not understandable along the reductive lines that oppose

romantic environmentalism to a pragmatic noninnocent acknowledgement that there is no

such thing as ‘nature’” (2018: 127-128), I engage permaculture as a (nature)cultural

formation that upsets the terms of the ongoing debate amongst music and sound studies

scholars described above.

The concept of natureculture, coined by Bruno Latour in his 1991 monograph We

Have Never Been Modern, has been developed as a key ecofeminist intervention in both

humanistic and scientific paradigms that insists on the inseparability of nature from culture

and their co-constitution in and as social-ecological relationships (Haraway 2008: 15-16, 32;

Birke and Holmberg 2018: 118). While the necessary synthesis of nature and culture might

read as painfully obvious and simple, everyday practices of living into natureculture

relationships quickly become highly politicized, contested, and precarious acts of alternative

worldmaking in the shadows and cracks of the heroic (and hegemonic) narrative of the

Anthropocene, which clings stubbornly, and violently, to myths of human separate-ness. The

work of the natureculture framework, and the work of ecofeminist and environmental

humanities scholars who make use of it, is to challenge, re-envision, and re-inhabit the

concepts of ecology, of home (oikos), of knowledge (logos), and to allow (through these re-

figurations) for creative re-thinkings and re-makings of the relational threads that inform and

form all experiences of living and dying together in and as the world. My intentions in

engaging natureculture as a concept and framework are to engage ecofeminism as a critical

arena for the development of ecocritical thought and to build continuity with other

ecofeminist concepts that I will engage throughout the dissertation. I approach ecofeminism

as a pluralistic constellation of diverse feminist lineages, and as a body of scholarship that

has been marginalized, misrepresented, and appropriated in ecocritical discourse (Gaard

2010: 643-646). In my own writing, I do not presume to represent the entirety of

ecofeminism’s diverse intellectual terrain, which “for four decades…has been encouraging

[scholars] to recognize the connections between the derogation of human bodies and a

mistreatment of environmental bodies” (Neimanis 2017: 11, also see Åsberg and Braidotti

2018: 10; Kings 2017). I recognize that my engagement with ecofeminism is somewhat

narrowly focused on its critical re-figurations of ecology and corporeality: in considering

these re-figurations, I am primarily occupied with addressing the volatile and morbid socio-

ecological issues of the present, what Isabelle Stengers calls the “intrusion of Gaia”

(Stengers 2015: 12), and in the intellectual-corporeal task of “facing Gaia,” (Latour 2012). In

dialogue with Stengers, Donna Haraway emphasizes that the intrusion of Gaia “undoes

thinking as usual” (2017: M47) and makes traditional concepts of nature, culture, ecology,

and humanity “seriously unthinkable, not available to think with” (2016: 30). The bluntness

and awkwardness with which nature and culture are shoved together into natureculture—the

word is a hasty bricolage, one that communicates the broken-ness of its parts as urgently as it

does the necessity of their imaginative abandonment—lends the word affective power:

natureculture is fashioned as a patchwork intellectual handbag from “the crumbling of the

foundational distinction of the social [and natural] sciences—that between the cosmological

and anthropological orders” (Viveiros de Castro in Ochoa Gautier 2016: 108).

In this sense natureculture, as concept and lived reality, becomes directly relevant to

diverse ethnomusicological efforts toward ecocentric, multinatural, or otherwise non-

anthropocentric re-figurations of music and sound. Whether under the rubric of

ecomusicology (Allen and Dawe 2016), environmental ethnomusicology (Ramnarine 2009),

acoustemology (Feld 2017), acoustic multinaturalism (Ochoa Gautier 2017), or other

emergent subfields, music scholars working in these inter-disciplinary spaces articulate an

urgent need to (re)think and (re)approach the study of music and music cultures with an ear

toward the escalation of global ecosystem collapse and the enmeshment of human and more-

than-human lives.

It is toward this rethinking that I engage in the present study of permaculture listening

practices and their implications for the study of music and musicality in contexts of

naturecultural worldmaking. I have structured my argument so as to engage, in stepwise

manner, the question of more-than-human musicality as prompted specifically by

permaculture listening practices. As such, I begin my argument with a focused description of

permaculture as a social movement and ethical framework, moving first into a consideration

of how permaculture ethics inform permaculture listening on a practical level, and then into a

consideration of how these listening practices and their ethical underpinnings are related to

permacultural articulations of more-than-human musicality. Having established this

relationship between ethics, listening, and musicality, I move toward a theoretical framing of

the kind of more-than-human musicality that permaculture conceives, perceives, and

participates in. I give a more detailed overview of my chapters below—for now my intention

is to emphasize in advance that the structure of my dissertation itself responds to key

questions central to the concerns of environmentally-focused ethnomusicology regarding

listening, sound, music, and nature, incorporating rigorous engagement with environmental

humanities and ecofeminist scholarship as instrumental to this central disciplinary task.

These questions have of course been asked and answered in myriad ways, as described

above. In this sense it is not my intention to bring any kind of resolution or closure to these

generative interdisciplinary dialogues, but to present a specific context, in the case of

permaculture listening, wherein more-than-human musicality becomes relevant to projects of

ecological regeneration and the cultivation of utopian eco-social futurities.

Chapter Summaries

The first chapter begins by identifying and working through the problem of defining

the permaculture concept. I set sociologist and permaculture scholar Terry Leahy’s

interpretation of permaculture’s utopian vision of sustainability society (2021: 38) in

dialogue with Amy Trauger’s assessment of permaculture as defined by an underlying

“ontology of integrativeness between nature and culture” (2017: 44). Following Trauger, I

argue that this natureculture ontology is crucial to permaculture’s identity both as a

methodology for ecological and agro/horticultural practice and as a global social movement.

I engage with key permaculture texts to contextualize this ontology within permaculture’s

historical emergence, its motivating concerns, and its core strategies. An examination of this

ontological orientation, furthermore, entails critical consideration of its entanglement with

Indigenous ecological knowledges and decolonial or counter-colonial discourses.

Recognizing the global diversity of permaculture, my discussion in this chapter centers

around the context of my study at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC) in

Sonoma County, California. In this context, I assess permaculture as a meeting ground for

settler and Indigenous activists; the implications of white-settler appropriations and syntheses

of Indigenous ecological knowledges in the uneven terrain of a settler state, and the

generative influence of Indigenous interventions into permaculture discourse and practice.

In the later portion of the chapter, I ground these considerations in the example of the

Aboriginal Australian concept of dadirri, a philosophy of listening which is incorporated into

the OAEC’s permaculture design course as a pedagogical model for permaculture listening

practices. Following Dylan Robinson’s discussion of critical listening positionalities in

settler-Indigenous encounters (2020) and Philip Deloria’s theorization of “playing Indian”

(1998), I track the ways in which both Indigenous and settler permaculture activists identify

listening as a rhetorical resource in articulating permaculture’s social-ecological purpose.

This chapter builds a contextual base for understanding how permaculture’s core ethical,

ontological, and political orientations shape its discourses and practices of listening.

The second chapter opens with a description of how listening is situated as a

fundamental skill and concept in permaculture discourse, coming into focus on the

pedagogical approach of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center and specifically on the

OAEC’s presentation of the sit spot exercise as a framework for practicing deep listening.

The sit spot exercise serves as an analytical focal point for examining key terms and

concepts that shape the “habits of thought and expression” (Turino 2008: 103) and

perception (Novak and Sakakeeny 2015: 1) for permaculturists. I give particular attention to

the ways in which concepts of (1) composing with land, (2) listening to landform

conversations, and (3) befriending land orient permaculture listening toward intersubjective

encounter (Robinson 2020; Feld 2017) and eco-social engagement with landforms. This

leads to a theoretical consideration of ecological subjectivity (Posthumus 2017) wherein I

articulate points of convergence between ecofeminist ethics (Puig de la Bellacasa 2018),

science and technology studies (Haraway2017), more-than-human anthropology (Tsing

2015), and sound studies (Kapchan 2015; Novak 2015) that serve to contextualize the

implications of permaculture listening practices within broader trans-disciplinary discourses.

I argue that the permacultural intention to “listen differently,” as expressed by Melissa

Nelson in the previous chapter, involves a practice of perceiving and dialoguing with

ecological subjectivities, which I theorize in relation to Michael Bell’s concept of grotesque

ecology (Bell 1994) and Mary Hufford’s theorization of grotesque ecological dialogism

(Hufford 2019: 22-23). Through discussion of my ethnographic and (more predominantly)

ethographic engagements, I demonstrate how the permaculture intention to dialogue with

ecological subjectivities is grounded and enacted in specific iterative practices. In

articulating a particular kind of grotesque ecological subjectivity relevant to permaculture

practices, I build the conceptual

ground for the following chapters’ discussions on grotesque musicality and participatory eco-

sociality.

The third chapter addresses ethnomusicological discourses concerning the “music of

nature” (Titon 2020: 256) and the “nature of music” (Ochoa Gautier 2016: 107), using

permaculture concepts of music and listening as case study material for building toward an

ecocentric (Allen 2019: 53; Cooley et al. 2020: 304) theory of musicality. I identify

divergent disciplinary approaches to the dual challenges that posthumanism and ecological

disaster pose to ethnomusicology, attending specifically to the contrast between Jeff Todd

Titon’s figuration of “sound ecology” (2020) and Ana María Ochoa Gautier’s critique of

cross- disciplinary tendencies to operationalize sound and “music as political positivity”

(2016, also see Keogh and Collinson 2016: 7, 12). I argue that permaculture listening

practices, as described in the second chapter, effectively model Titon’s sound ecology

through their orientation toward more-than-human community, copresence, and non-innocent

ethical entanglement, while also demonstrating a certain degree of romantic ecophilosophical

reification of music as an essentially positive political force. Relatedly, I suggest that the

ecocentric concepts of music invoked in permaculture texts align with Titon’s speculative

definition of music in the context of a sound ecology and offer a productive (if troubled) case

study for the disciplinary articulation of an ecocentric musicality, which I ground in the

concept of the grotesque (again building on the second chapter’s discussion). In developing

this argument, I analyze several key permaculture texts for their ecocentric concepts of

music; Masanobu Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution, Bill Mollison’s Designer’s Manual, and

Starhawk’s Earth Path. Through my analysis, I arrive at two key assertions. First,

permaculture is characteristically motivated by an enduring fascination with the musicality of

nature and oriented toward the perception and participation in that musicality, which I

identify as a kind of musical being-in-the-world, and second, these references to the

musicality of nature focus on natural patterns (cycles of birth, growth, decay, and rebirth that

unfold in landforms) and the capacity to understand these natural patterns. Experiences of

this musical being-in-the-world take place for permaculturists in the immersive context of

listening practices—epitomized in the sit spot exercise—that orient toward grotesque,

holoent forms of ecological subjectivity and their expressive, conversational, and musical

capacities. Working from these observations, I argue that permaculture listening perceives

and enacts a grotesque musicality, and I present the concept of grotesque musicality as a

generative contribution to disciplinary discourses on music and the more-than-human. I

address the implications of grotesque/holoent musicality in relation to sound ecology (Titon

2020), and the methodological challenges of a grotesque study of music.

While the previous chapters establish some key orientations or intentions of

permaculture listening (the emphases on landform collaborations, conversations and

friendships, and the aspiration to perceive music in and as landforms), and the

epistemological and political stakes of these orientations (such as the implications of

ecological subjectivity and ecocentric or grotesque musicality), these discussions raise as

many questions as they answer. What specific forms does “sound knowledge” (returning to

Kapchan 2015 and the second chapter discussion) take in this kind of intersubjective

encounter? How does the concept and experience of grotesque musicality compare to more

normative (anthropocentric) concepts of music, and particularly to ways in which people

think, talk, and act about environmental music. I address these questions in the fourth and

final chapter, which positions the concept of grotesque musicality within a framework of four

distinct types or renderings of environmental sound. This framework is modeled directly on

Thomas Turino’s theorization of music as social life, and particularly to his four-field

framework of music (Turino 2009). So, in parallel with Turino’s four fields of (1) studio

sound art, (2) high fidelity recording, (3) presentational, and (4) participatory renderings of

music, I construct four fields of (1) soundscape composition, (2) high fidelity soundscape

recording, (3) presentational, and (4) participatory renderings of environmental sound and

environmental music. In establishing this parallel, I explore the ways in which the

intersubjective encounters involved in permaculture’s landform listening practices align

particularly with participatory and presentational fields. My intention in making this

connection is to construct an analytical framework for considering the implications of music

as eco-social life, building off of a familiar precedent in ethnomusicology of studying music

as social life. More fundamentally, as described above, my intention in adapting Turino’s

framework to an eco-social context is to contribute to efforts in ecomusicology to locate

music and music making within eco-centric contexts (Allen 2016; Cooley 2019). It bears

reiterating here that this effort on my part is informed by and in dialogue with important eco-

centric precedents such as those named above in Jennifer Post’s acoustic communities

approach (Post and Pijanowski 2018: 73) and Jeff Todd Titon’s sound commons concept

(2012, 2020).

A Note on the Grotesque

The concept of the grotesque becomes central to my interpretation of permaculture

listening practice and eco-sociality, as well as to my repositioning of music and musicality.

As a keyword, and a somewhat cryptic one at that, it demands some introduction and

unpacking. My use of the term follows folklorist Mary Hufford, who engages Mikhail

Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism (Bakhtin1981) and the grotesque body (Bakhtin 1984) in her

own discussion of ecological conversation. Hufford observes that “Bakhtin’s distinction

between dialogic and monologic forms of communication…mirrors his distinction between

grotesque and classical bodies” (Hufford 2019: 22). In this parallel dichotomy, the closedness

of the classical body—which “has no openings” and “represents perfect symmetry and

closure, a fixity of social identity and the hierarchies of class society” (ibid.; Bakhtin 1984:

317)—corresponds with a monologic discourse that “violently [shuts] down reciprocities

hard-wired into ecologies of social interaction” and renders these reciprocities pathological

(ibid.: 28). Hufford associates the concept of monologic discourse with the corporate state,

wherein “communications are vigorously scoured of perspective and agency; its subjects lurk

under cover of passive voice,” and “if a subject does appear, it’s a version of corporate

personhood” (ibid.). The monological discourse of the classical body is fundamental to

modern conceptions of self and subject in Western societies, characterized by an

“individualizing way of conceiving personhood, what Bakhtin calls the ‘bourgeois ego’ that

underlies the classical canon” (Bell 1994: 74). Ecologist Michael Bell, who builds on

Bakhtin in his own theorization of grotesque and bourgeois ecologies, notes that “the

significant feature about the classical body is that it is an individual body” (ibid.), separate

from and impermeable to the world.

In contrast to the classical body, the grotesque body does not recognize “the

movement of finished forms, vegetable or animal, in a finished and stable world; instead, the

inner movement of being [is] expressed in the passing of one form into the other, in the ever

incompleted character of being” (Bakhtin 1984: 32). For Hufford, grotesque embodiment is

epitomized in the mycorhizzal associations of soil life. “Mycorrhizal associations,” she

posits, “exemplify the kind of body that Mikhail Bakhtin described as ‘grotesque’—a body

made up of two bodies fused in a productive act. The grotesque body is open to the world,

always growing, always emerging” (Hufford 2019: 22). Hufford builds on Michael Bell’s

concept of grotesque ecologies, which, in correspondence with the grotesque bodies that

compose them, “display all the stages of life: birth, death, decay, going to seed, composting,

harboring all manner of creatures, and so forth” (ibid.). Grotesque ecologies are also

characterized by dialogue between and across grotesque bodies—in Bell’s words, the

grotesque body is a “‘territory shared,’ the product of a dialogic world” (1994: 73). Whereas

bourgeois ecology operates on the principle of individuality and prioritizes the creation of

hierarchies and maintenance of boundaries—Hufford suggests the example of the suburban

lawn, weeded, leafblown, refusing contamination—grotesque ecology operates on the

principle of contamination (Tsing 2014) and polycorporeal entanglement; the messiness of

bodies merging with one another is understood in this way by Hufford as the fundamental

characteristic of the dialogical world (Hufford 2019: 28).

Bourgeois ecologies pathologize the grotesque realities of the dialogical world (ibid.),

and indeed the word ‘grotesque’ in English is strongly associated with repulsion. But the

word is derived from the Italian grotta meaning simply cave or cavern, with etymological

roots in the Greek word krypte meaning “hidden place.” Another English cognate with this

Greek root, cryptic, can then add to our understanding of the grotesque as that which, in its

repulsiveness, is unintelligible. Crucially though, the grotesque does not just resist meaning;

as Hufford explains, the meaning that emerges through grotesque dialogue is resisted, or

silenced by the hegemony of monological discourses.

The association of caves (grottos, grotesque places) with the feminine and with

gestation, emergence, and regenerative power suggests, not surprisingly, a gendered

dimension to this pathologizing, silencing discourse. Along these lines, Chickasaw writer and

literary scholar Linda Hogan suggests that “caves are not the places for men. They are a

feminine world, a womb of earth, a germinal place of brooding” (Hogan 1995: 31). She

describes her own experience seated in a cave, saying “I see all around me the constellations

of animals. Rabbits are etched by minerals on wet stone walls. Deer are revealed in the

moisture…there are the fetal beginnings of life to come, of survival” (ibid.: 32-33). While

Hogan does not use the term grotesque, her description here resonates strongly with Mikhail

Bakhtin’s use of the term; the regenerative unfoldings that she presents are grotesque in that

the borders between life and lifelessness, animal and mineral, are seriously transgressed.

Despite the most violent and herculean efforts to maintain the classical masculinist body and

the bourgeois ecology that it purportedly deserves, grotesque, cavernous logics persist and

intrude.

The permaculture worldview, I suggest, assumes and enacts grotesque bodies and

grotesque ecologies. Permaculture privileges polyculture over monoculture and seeks to

maximize, rather than minimize the symbiotic entanglement of multiple plants and animals

(this is the basis of the permaculture concept of the guild, see Mollison [1988] 2002: 19, 59).

Permaculture seeks dialogic, conversational relationship with landforms. Permaculture also

situates itself in opposition to the hegemony of the individual self and questions “the validity

of the existence of individual organisms or separate events” (Mollison 1982, referencing

Birch and Cobb 1984). Bill Mollison, co-founder of the permaculture movement, offers that

“organisms such as ourselves exist only as an inseparable part of our event environments,

and are in continual process of exchange with animate and inanimate entities that surround

us. We are acted upon and acting, created and creating, shaped and shaping” (Mollison

[1988] 2002: 95). Here Mollison gives a concise articulation of a grotesque ecology in which

bodies are continually exchanging and merging with one another, shaping, creating, and

acting upon one another. In this sense, I see the concept of the grotesque as a useful one in

developing a deeper understanding of permaculture thought and practice.

In establishing that permaculture assumes and enacts a grotesque ecology, I return to

the questions of listening, sound, and musicality: How is the dialogic character of the

grotesque specifically enacted through listening practices? How are the regenerative

resonances that permaculture listening attends to understood as more-than-human dialogues,

and how does the concept of the grotesque help to ground the concept of more-than-human

conversation? Moving from conversationality to musicality, how does the concept of the

grotesque help to ground permaculture concepts of a ‘music of nature’ in a counter-

normative concept of grotesque nature? These are reiterations of my central inquiries

concerning the role of listening in permaculture practice that deliberately foreground the

concept of the grotesque in order to clarify my use of the term. As the concept of the

grotesque is developed throughout the dissertation, it enacts an intrusion not just into the

body or the ecology of the “classic canon” (Bakhtin 1984: 432-433; Bell 1994: 73; Hufford

2019: 22), but into the musicality that is assumed by the body and ecology of the classic

canon.

Concluding Statement

Over the course of this dissertation, my aim is to present a persistent narrative arc: I

begin with a description of permaculture as a method for integrating ecological and social

systems tending toward biodiversity and regenerative design, and as a global social

movement characterized by specific internal struggles relating to the persistent influence of

colonial systems. This focused account of permaculture provides a necessary building block

in moving toward a focused analysis of permaculture listening practices and discourses; the

way permaculture practitioners talk about and do listening to ecosystems, landforms, or

places. The second chapter’s analysis of permaculture listening brings permaculture

discourse into dialogue with academic discourses on ecological subjectivity, grotesque

ecology, and sound and noise as registers of grotesque ecological embodiment. My analysis

of how permaculture practitioners approach the act and experience of listening to ecosystem

processes leads directly into a more focused consideration of how permaculture discourse

uses the concept of music to describe ecosystem processes. The concept of grotesque

musicality, which I construct in relation to the concept of grotesque ecology (Bell 1994;

Hufford 2019), is articulated as a conceptual placeholder for describing and taking seriously

the kind of ecocentric music concept that is present in permaculture discourse and practice

around listening to landforms. The fourth chapter’s adaptation of Turino’s four-field model

of music functions as a way of grounding the concept of grotesque musicality in

ethnomusicological discourse, and of exploring the potentialities and tensions of studying

music as eco-social life.

The idea of music as eco-social life is prompted by, or at least evidenced in,

permaculture’s worldview and listening practice. The concept of grotesque musicality is

similarly grounded in my own interpretation, internalization, and embodiment of

permaculture discourse and practice. As such, my argument is consistently woven through

with qualitative ethnographic and ethographic interpretation of my interactions with human

permaculture practitioners and with the more-than-human ecological subjectivity of the

hillside garden. It is through these descriptions of more-than-human encounter that I relate

my own ongoing process of grappling with permaculture’s particular eco-sociality; with the

endeavor to perceive eco-social, more-than-human conversation taking (and making) place

in the garden that I tend, and with the troubled endeavor to befriend the grotesque ecological

subjectivity of the garden. Ultimately, I argue that this permaculture eco-sociality is

intimately linked with an ecocentric concept of music as eco-social participation that informs

(however partially or variously) permaculture thought and practice. In this way, the

theoretical concept of grotesque musicality emerges, in large part, from my situated

integration of permaculture methods of observation and of cultivating a capacity for eco-

social participation. This mode of eco-social participation, I suggest, offers a generative (if

experimental) model for ecomusicology, and music studies more broadly, of an ecocentric

approach to music that unsettles or subverts anthropocentric commitments to music as

humanly organized sound.

Chapter 1

Permaculture History, Ethics and Indigenous Ecological Knowledges

Defining Permaculture

There are as many permaculture definitions as there are permaculturists.

—Looby Macnamara, People and Permaculture

Permaculture is notoriously difficult to define. Permaculture writers, teachers,

activists, practitioners, and students routinely comment on the difficulty of the task in their

own efforts to come up with succinct definitions of the term (Leahy 2021: 62). This is due in

part to permaculture’s multivalent character; it exists at once as “a sustainable system of

agriculture based on tree crops” represented in written texts and applied in rural and urban

settings, and also as a far-reaching “design philosophy for a sustainable society” that

galvanizes a global social movement with anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and anti-state

leanings (ibid.: 16, 82, 115). Sociologist Terry Leahy tracks the progression of permaculture

defined first simply as an agriculture of perennials in Bill Mollison and David Holmgren’s

Permaculture One (1978), second as a “sustainable agriculture and settlement design” in

Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual (1982), and third, in Holmgren’s

Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability (2002), as “a design system

for a sustainable society” grounded in an threefold ethical framework (previously outlined in

Mollison’s 1988 Designers’ Manual) of earth care, people care, and return of surplus. These

three texts are identified by Leahy as the core of the permaculture canon, laying the

methodological and philosophical foundation for the movement and charting the expansion

of permaculture’s definition and scope both as a methodology and as a movement.

Leahy notes that permaculture’s expanded definition obscures the fact that “texts and

activisms are mostly concerned with agriculture” and, I will add, horticulture. The masking

or decentering of its agriculture focus, he argues, causes specific problems for the

permaculture movement. Namely, it becomes difficult to define the term, as “the ethics of

permaculture are not too different from those promoted by other parts of the environmentalist

movement” and “a systems approach to design is not all that unusual in the broad

environmentalist movement” (ibid.: 86-87). So while, as Leahy notes, “what [ostensibly]

distinguishes ‘permaculture’ from ‘environmentalism’ is that permaculture is a ‘design

system’ for sustainability, drawing on the insights of systems theory” (ibid.: 55), it can also

be argued that “attending to design in the context of sustainability could be considered part of

what any sensible environmentalist would do” (ibid.: 87). In this sense, such an expanded

definition of permaculture risks becoming “so global in its scope that its usefulness is

reduced” (Holmgren [2002] 2011: xix). As the concept drifts further away from its original

agricultural-horticultural focus it becomes hollowed out, resulting in confusion around the

actual contours and content of permaculture.

Leahy suggests that one way “to approach what truly makes permaculture distinctive

from other parts of the environmental movement” is to “point to its particular understandings

of the environmental crisis and its particular vision of sustainable agriculture and settlement

design” (ibid.: 55). He identifies four main points of distinction in this regard. First,

permaculture recommends local production for local consumption and “has little faith in the

capacity of renewable energy systems to provide sufficient energy for a globalized industrial

culture” (ibid.: 57). This is a radical vision of post-capitalist, post-industrial society grounded

in Holmgren’s concept of energy descent which dialogues closely with degrowth and

postgrowth theories (Kallis 2018; Nelson 2018: 134-135, 244; Leahy 2021: 23-28; Prádanos

2018: 234-235). Second, permaculture recommends diverse polyculture agriculture with an

emphasis on tree crops. As Leahy emphasizes, the “emphasis on perennials distinguishes

permaculture from much of sustainable agriculture science and the sustainable agriculture

movement; writings that imply the continued dominance of cereals in our food supply”

(2021: 58). Third, “in contrast to much environmentalist thinking, permaculture argues

against the view [that] rural lands should be emptied of the destructive impact of people.

Permaculture aims at repopulating the countryside” (ibid.: 60). While urban permaculture has

become a more prominent aspect of the movement in recent years, Leahy determines that

permaculture ultimately rejects the notion that industrial cities can be maintained in the

inevitable progression of energy descent. Leahy’s fourth point of distinction for permaculture

is that it “recommends political decentralization as the best social system” and “opposes

centralized hierarchical states” (ibid.). Permaculture’s rejection of the state aligns with eco-

anarchist and degrowth advocates “who also propose rural self-sufficiency and political

autarchy” (ibid.), but contrasts sharply with ecosocialist commitments to central planning

(Baer 2019) and conservationist strategies that rely on the coercive power of the state (see

Jacoby 2003: 2).

Leahy offers a critical and much-needed sociological account of permaculture’s core

identifying characteristics, both as a body of agricultural-horticultural-ecological knowledge

and as a social movement. While much of the following discussion aligns with Leahy’s

analysis, I suggest that permaculture is also crucially defined by a particular natureculture

ontology that at once distinguishes it from many other environmentalist strains and brings it

into close dialogue with anti-colonial Indigenous activisms and discourses. An understanding

of this natureculture ontology is critical to my analysis of permaculture acoustemology, and

an important building block in my interpretation of permaculture listening practices as a

mode of more-than-human eco-sociality. As such, this chapter addresses the historical

emergence of permaculture’s natureculture ontology, as well as the political implications of

its engagement with Indigenous ecological knowledges. While discourses around listening

will come to the fore in the later portion of this chapter, the main focus here is on the

ontological commitments, and their historical and political situatedness, that underlie these

listening discourses.

In the first class meeting for the OAEC’s Permaculture Design Course, co-instructor

Eunice Neves defined permaculture as, in its essence, a philosophy of “taking responsibility

for our own lives and caring, caring for the planet and for the people and for all beings”

(Neves, personal communication 2021). This philosophy is realized through a design

methodology “that is rooted in ethics and ecological principles, so that we design with nature

as nature, and we start thinking like an ecosystem” (ibid.). This definition aligns with what

Leahy calls “the broad approach,” with its accompanying problematic vagueness. However,

what Neves is communicating here is that what defines permaculture is not doing a particular

set of things (planting trees or harvesting rainwater) but doing things in a particular way. The

rhetoric of designing “with nature as nature,” which has longstanding precedents in a

diversity of Indigenous philosophies as well as the Western concept of the economy of

nature, in which “all natural things…exist in reciprocal relation to other things” (McKusick

1996: 378, also see Worster 1994), communicates a natureculture ontology that subverts

hegemonic Western environmental discourses that position “‘nature’ as raw stuff to be

worked on by ‘culture’” (Millner 2016: 41). Human permaculture practitioners situate

themselves and their (perma)cultures within the ecosystems they tend, entwined in

collaborative coexistence that extends (ideally) even to modes of thought; a fundamental

character of permaculture design, for Neves and the other co-instructors at the OAEC, is that

it entails learning to think like an ecosystem. This phrase, as will be discussed at length in the

proceeding chapters, is more than metaphorical—it refers to an ontological orientation

toward a sentient earth that permaculture practices, from this perspective, are fundamentally

predicated upon. Permaculture is thus, in feminist geographer Amy Trauger’s definition, “a

design-based method of crop cultivation that emphasizes an ontology of integrativeness

between nature and society” (Trauger 2017:44). It is from this ontological stance that the

concept and possibility of thinking like an ecosystem emerges.

The concept and practice of thinking like an ecosystem, furthermore, raises important

questions for an acoustemological study of permaculture; as permaculturists endeavor to

think like ecosystems or landforms, what kinds of listening strategies do they employ? How

do differences in listening positionality (Robinson 2020: 60) motivate and shape listening

strategies? What metaphors and values undergird permacultural = sound and listening? How

does permaculture’s naturecultural ontology shape listening experiences in practice, and how

do the acoustic expressions of landforms play into permacultural efforts to think like

ecosystems? To begin to address these questions, it is necessary to consider the underlying

ethics and cultural history of permaculture as both a global formation of grassroots

environmental activism and stewardship (Ferguson and Lovell 2015) and as a

transdisciplinary framework for designing regenerative social-ecological systems based on

the observation and integration of natural ecosystem processes (Rhodes 2015: 404-405).

Permaculture Origins

It must be noted that this ontological character is not unique or original to

permaculture—indeed permaculture is largely a synthesis of pre-existing techniques,

sciences, knowledge traditions from across the globe (Leahy 2021: 257-261). As feminist

environmental ethics scholar María Puig de la Bellacasa writes, “while permaculture has

gained organizational identity, many of the techniques and practices it promotes are not

exclusive to this label—they are shared with and/or borrowed from agroecology,

biodynamical agriculture, indigenous modes of land care, and more” (2018: 126). Trauger

traces the emergence of what she calls “modern permaculture” back to early twentieth

century European writings (2017: 44), though she does not cite specific publications or

authors. She does identify the Japanese farmer-philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka’s One Straw

Revolution ([1975] 1978) as “perhaps the most enduring treatise on permaculture” (ibid.),

although Fukuoka’s book precedes the coining of the term, and his work is widely cited not

just in permaculture texts but in interdisciplinary academic discourses on agriculture

(Münster 2017: 71; Paul and Paul 2009: 10; Prasad 2005: 252; Delcore 2004: 37, 49;

Rapoport et al. 1995: 166; Aurora 1991: 120) and social ecology (Biel 2016: 51-52, 113;

Sullivan 2014: 236; Chou 2009: 157). Trauger’s assessment of Fukuoka’s writing as a

fundamental permaculture text is justified largely by the permaculture movement’s

particularly earnest adoption of Fukuoka’s philosophy, and the incorporation of his teachings

into permaculture pedagogies and practices.

Through poetic explanation of what he calls “do-nothing farming” ([1978] 2009: 11),

Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution articulates what would become the fundamental principles

of permaculture—specifically, the principles of protracted and thoughtful observation of

ecosystems, of modeling agricultural design after spatial and temporal patterns that emerge in

landforms (termed the principle of relative location in permaculture parlance), of seeking

maximum effect for minimal effort, and of facilitating closed systems that do not rely on the

extraction and import of unsustainable external inputs. These principles, of course, hold

meaning and context outside of permaculture framework: Fukuoka’s own writing and

activism is situated within a postwar resurgence of Japan’s shokuyō movement, a social

movement initiated in 1907 with the establishment of the Shokuyō Association (Kagakuteki

Shokuyōkai), which historian Sookyeong Hong identifies as “the first society formed in Japan

for the purpose of promoting a healthful ‘natural’ diet for the Japanese” (Hong 2018: 106).

The Shokuyō Association, which was comprised mostly of upper class elites—politicians,

military officials and medical professionals (ibid.: 105-106)—rallied around the conviction

that the cultivation of natural and ecologically appropriate foods and eating habits was “an

essential starting point of changing individuals as well as societies” (ibid.: 107). In the

postwar context, “actors in a variety of activities—such as the peace movement , consumer

movement, the critique of modern biomedicine, organic farming or environmental movement

—were also drawn to the idea that the act of eating can be a critical starting point for

individual and social change” (ibid.: 108). Hence the ambitious and galvanizing title of

Fukuoka’s agricultural treatise, One Straw Revolution.

Comprehensive description of the Shokuyō movement—its leadership, the particulars

of its scientific claims, moral rhetoric, and dynamic political implications—is beyond the

scope of this study (for detailed historical analysis see Hong 2018); my aim is rather to

situate Fukuoka’s work and make clear that, while his name has become synonymous with

permaculture (Trauger 2017: 44; De Goudroun 2016: 62), he gained international acclaim in

the broader context of the postwar resonance of the Shokuyō movement and, as such, his

philosophy shares some of the fundamental tenets of this movement—particularly concerning

the interconnectedness of the human body and the environment (Hong 2018: 107-108). This

is significant in part because, as Hong argues, the Shokuyō movement, both in its original

iteration and its postwar re-interpretation, was motivated by an anxiety concerning

modernization, industrialization, and westernization. Fukuoka, in particular, presents in his

writing a thorough rejection of modern industrial farming practices; for instance, he explains

his do-nothing agricultural method playfully and succinctly in the following passage:

The usual way to go about developing a method is to ask ‘How about trying this?’ or

‘How about trying that?’ bringing in a variety of techniques one upon the other. This

is modern agriculture and it only results in making the farmer busier. My way was

opposite. I was aiming at a pleasant, natural way of farming (farming as simply as

possible within and in cooperation with the natural environment, rather than the

modern approach of applying increasingly complex techniques to remake nature

entirely for the benefit of human beings) which results in making the work easier

instead of harder. ‘How about not doing this? How about not doing that?’ That was

my way of thinking. (Fukuoka [1978] 2009: 11)

Fukuoka’s critique of modern farming, aligned with the philosophy of the Shokuyó

movement, clearly advocates for a practice of working in interconnected cooperation with

nature rather than working in extractive domination of nature. In this sense his work speaks

directly, and inspirationally, to permaculture’s fundamental aspiration to work with or as,

rather than against or on, ecosystems.

I first came across Fukuoka’s seminal text in 2014 during my resident-internship at

the Greenstring Institute of Natural Process Farming in Petaluma, California. The book was

thin and well worn, pages softened by the hands of hundreds of previous interns. At that

time I was deeply inspired by the elegance of Fukuoka’s methodology, which applied the

deceptively simple question—“what is the natural pattern?” (Fukuoka [1978] 2009:11)—to

the daunting tasks of plant cultivation, tree pruning, and soil building. At the Greenstring

Institute my fellow interns and I crawled and twisted our way through thickets of thistle and

devil’s claw to harvest tomatoes from sprawling vines—the weeds certainly slowed our

harvesting operation, but they were respected as crucial contributors to the regenerative

pattern of soil health—cycling nutrients, dispersing and deterring insects and other animal

pests, balancing surface temperatures, and ultimately ensuring stronger crop yields while

minimizing needs for pesticide application and, to some extent, human labor.

Similar to Fukuoka’s do-nothing approach and the natural process techniques I

learned at the Greenstring Institute, one of the crucial outcomes anticipated within a

permaculture framework is a shift from mechanistic labor inputs to observation-based labor.

As Mollison and Holmgren write, “rather than the menial and repetitive labour of sowing,

ploughing and reaping in a labour-intensive annual crop system, work in the permaculture

system usually involves observation and control functions rather than power functions”

(1978: 9) Power functions generally require high levels of energy inputs, which are needed

to maintain a system’s superficial functionality; monoculture row-cropping of annual plants

requires intensive inputs to eradicate insect and microbes, to supplement degraded and

exhausted soils, and to transport water into waterless zones. The industrial monoculture

would quickly breakdown without these inputs and the economies and technologies that they

require. Alternatively, a permaculture system oriented toward perennial polycultures (trees

and shrubs) and the diversification of yields (gathering multiple kinds of harvests from a

system or area) will reach a mature state of regenerative equilibrium (ibid.: 1978: 7) where

plants and soils are sustained largely through their own symbiotic interactions and

intelligences. Mollison and Holmgren’s reasoning here closely mirrors the ethos of

Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution ([1978] 2009: 11-12), though the book is not explicitly

cited, probably owing to the two texts’ simultaneous publication. Fukuoka’s work is

referenced in Mollison’s subsequent publication, Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual (1982:

44-46), underscoring both the strong synthesizing impetus of Mollison’s permaculture

concept and the influence of Fukuoka’s techniques and philosophies.

Despite holding these similarities in technique and philosophy, my teacher at the

Greenstring Institute, Bob Connard chose to distance his work from permaculture, which he

viewed as a newfangled redressing of older wisdoms that he had inherited from his family

and from earlier generations of ecologically-concerned farmers and gardeners from across

the globe—Fukuoka being one prominent bridging figure in this milieu. This aligns (though

with a decidedly less enthusiastic tone) with Trauger’s assessment of permaculture as an

emergent phenomenon that, somewhat paradoxically, already preceded itself in the practices

and writings of agrarians, gardeners, and environmental stewards around the world long

before its conception. This dynamic is recognized plainly in Mollison and Holmgren’s

Permaculture One, which was presented explicitly as a synthesis of pre-existing models of

“cultivated ecologies (1978: 3-4). From these models, Permaculture One derives an outline

of a comprehensive methodology for designing regenerative (permanently self-sustaining)

systems.

The synthesis and re-application of diverse agricultural and ecological models is

motivated, as noted above, by a sense of urgency around environmental crisis, which

Mollison and Holmgren articulated in their earliest description of permaculture’s purpose. In

Permaculture One, they write that “the actual damage which has been done to productive

land and the environment at large by high-energy [industrial] agriculture, in terms of soil

breakdown, pollution, and breeding of resistant pest strains, is not really known but there are

indications that it is considerable, wide-spread, and long-term. The extent of the damage will

not really come home to mankind until the ever-expanding energy-base of our system comes

to an end; as it surely will in the not-too-distant future” (1978: 3-4). As the environmental

impacts of extractive industrialism have become increasingly obvious and dangerous (Moore

2016; Post and Pijanowski 2018: 71-72), a large part of permaculture’s appeal in the present

moment is that it offers a lucid analysis of global environmental degradation and a whole-

systems approach to restoring ecosystem stability, health, biodiversity, and, crucially, the

capacity for land to provide food-security for local populations.

Permaculture Principles and Ethics

In coming to terms with the scope and magnitude of environmental destruction and

global ecosystem collapse, permaculture practitioners, thinkers, and writers have shifted the

meaning of permaculture from “permanent agriculture” to “permanent culture,” emphasizing

the holistic and intersectional character of global social-ecological crises and the existential

need not just for new food systems but for new cultural paradigms (Mollison 1991: 1, Kaplan

and Blume 2011: 18, Macnamara 2012: 3). Mollison, for instance, gives this revision in his

1991 Introduction to Permaculture; “the word itself is a contraction not only of permanent

agriculture but also of permanent culture, as cultures cannot survive for long without a

sustainable agricultural base and landuse ethic” (1991: 1). This statement maintains a

commitment to agriculture and ecology as the central focal points of permaculture, with

cultural integrity theorized as dependent on the integrity of food systems and ecological

practices. This confirms Leahy’s analysis that permaculture is best understood as primarily

focused on agriculture (2021: 6-9; 44-45).

The inverse observation, that a regenerative agricultural base and land use ethic

cannot exist outside of a broader cultural framework rooted in similar principles, also figures

into the development of permaculture thought. Earlier texts such as Permaculture One

(1978) and Mollision’s Permaculture: A Designers Manual (1982) also foreground the

importance of a holistic, multidirectional social-ecological analysis in confronting global

crises; on the opening page of Permaculture One, Mollison and Holmgren name their

foundational motivation as “an attempt to improve agricultural practices; both those of

Western agribusiness, and the peasant grain culture of the third world. The former system is

energy expensive, mechanistic, and destructive of soil structure and quality. The latter makes

drudges of men, and combined with itinerant herding, deserts of what were once forests”

(1978: 1, note the resonance here with Fukuoka’s philosophy). In presenting their argument

regarding existing agricultural systems, they take into account not only ecological processes

but also social issues, including “problems of unemployment and of early retirement, of

urban neurosis, and of the feeling of powerlessness and lack of direction common to many of

us in today’s world” (ibid.: 2). Social and ecological conditions and processes are understood

to be mutually influential and co-constituting—necessitating a design approach that considers

not singly ecological or social systems, but rather integrated eco-social systems.

Relatedly, permaculture has from its inception been critical of self-sufficiency

narratives that strive for complete independence from the mainstreams of society. As original

spokespeople for the movement, Mollison and Holmgren assert in Permaculture One that

“we do not subscribe to the isolated fortress mentality of a totally self-sufficient approach,

but believe in designing for the whole society…overall self sufficiency is a pointless goal,

but reduction of dependence on the wider industrial system can be taken a long way,

reducing the need for people to work in the industrial society and consume its products”

(ibid.: 12). This vision of transition toward a post-capitalist society, in Terry Leahy’s

analysis, is prefigurative; it is not “in any way hindered by the deeper structures of

contemporary capitalism” but instead seeks to establish alternatives that prefigure post-

capitalism (Leahy 2021: 203-204). Permaculture, in this sense, cannot be understood simply

as a countercultural disappearance fantasy of dropping off the map or escaping the system; it

is more accurately assessed as a strategy-frame for creating an enduring counter-public from

which a sustainable society can coalesce. In this sense, permaculture mobilizes around a

utopian vision of social change wherein the inherently violent and unsustainable structures of

industrial capitalist systems are rendered increasingly irrelevant by the grassroots expansion

of sustainable and equitable systems grounded in intentional, ethical, design (Ferguson and

Lovell 2015: 39; Holmgren 2011: xv). If, as Mollison emphasizes, “Design is the subject of

permaculture” (1982: 70), it must be clarified that this is a particular mode of design situated

within a social-ecological idealism characterized by “horizontal symmetry between natures

and cultures in which people are not bracketed off from their environments in the production

of food” (Trauger 2017: 44) or the production of culture (Dolman 2016: 54-56).

The ethical framework that undergirds this idealism is communicated in three simple

directives; care of earth, care of people, and return of surplus, also commonly rendered as

“earth care, people care, and fair share,” with subtle variations reflecting the political and

philosophical orientations of the individual or group using the phrase. These three ethics are

interlocking, particularly in the sense that the third principle, return of surplus, is directed

toward enacting both of the first two principles—caring for people and caring for the lands

and waters and air that they inhabit. Trauger notes that “the idea that surplus is to be returned

to the soil in the form of compost or to the people in the form of food security is a radical

departure from capitalized, industrial agriculture and is a key element of permaculture’s

emphasis on sustainability” (2017: 44). Thus, the concept of surplus, in this ethical

formulation, resists conflation with capitalist notions of surplus as profit to be accumulated.

Neither can permaculture conceptions of care be equated to capitalist and anthropocentric

notions of care as a service focused on the perpetuation of human life (Puig de la Bellacasa

2018: 22), as will be discussed further below.

It is important (particularly in the context of permaculture’s anti-colonial orientation)

to recognize here that the “return of surplus” ethic was originally conceived and articulated

by Bill Mollison as “setting limits to population and consumption,” with the rationale that

“by governing our own needs, we can set resources aside to further the [first two] principles

[of earth care and people care]” (Mollison [1988] 2002: 2). While the concept of restrained

self-governance is crucial to Mollison’s idealist egalitarian vision of permaculturists as

“neither employers nor employees, landlords nor tenants,” but self-reliant individuals and

sovereign cooperatives, the language of population control has been critiqued and largely

abandoned by later generations of permaculturists due to its association with imperialism,

cultural elitism, and eugenicist thought. The reactionary concept of setting limits to

population growth is rooted in Thomas Malthus’ influential (and incendiary) theories of

population growth, economics, ecology, and agriculture as articulated in his landmark 1798

“Essay on the Principle of Population” (Malthus 1973). Malthusian models of population

growth have continued to hold influence over ecological theories into the 21st century in

academic research and public policy contexts; his writing and reasoning were fundamental to

Garrett Hardin’s landmark “Tragedy of the Commons” (1968) which has sparked decades of

ongoing discussion around the ethics and tactics of public policy, conservation, resource

management, and food production (Bell 1986, Dutta and Sundaram 1993, Gardiner 2001,

Yundannima 2017). Hardin’s tragedy of the commons argument relied fundamentally on the

Malthusian assertion that populations grow exponentially and a socio-political economic

system will never be able to meet or catch up to the material needs of the growing population

—as global populations grow “this means that the per capita share of the world’s goods must

steadily decrease” (Hardin 1968: 1243).

Offering both prognosis and treatment for this theorized scenario of inevitably

compounding scarcity, Hardin theorized that the only way to effectively confront global

over-population (aside from the total system collapse and mass death anticipated from

inaction) would be coercive and restrictive management of human breeding, or what he

euphemistically terms “mutual coercion” (ibid.: 1246-1247). Hardin’s theory has been

critiqued both for its misuse or misapplication of the concept of the commons (Gardiner

2001: 387-388) and, relatedly, for its inability to account for the structural violence, resource

extraction, and wealth hoarding that drive the apparent crises of scarcity and overpopulation,

or for the broader geopolitical implications of the technocratic surveillance-state structures

related to population control (Zubrin 2012: 33; also see Strathern et al. 2019: 169). The

revision of the third permaculture ethic, from “limits to population growth” to “return of

surplus” or “fair share,” parallels these critiques of Malthusian economics and Hardin’s

theorized tragedy of the commons, and pivots from a narrative frame of economic scarcity to

one of ecological surplus. These reformulations, however, are still internally precarious and

continue to invite (or demand) scrutiny. For instance, to act on the ethic of “return of

surplus,” one must ask several questions; return of what, to who, by who? How is surplus

discerned from subsistence? Who labors to produce surplus? These questions are asked and

answered differently by different permaculturists in different circumstances; the playful-

serious permaculture axiom “it depends” (Dolman and Dunnigan, personal communication

2021) is pertinent here in communicating the inadequacy of formulaic applications and

generalizations. This ethic, along with the other two, is approached both in pedagogical and

real-practice contexts not as some kind of explicit directive but as a vessel for contemplation

relative to circumstance.

The Question of Care in Permaculture

The simplicity of permaculture’s three-fold ethical framework, and the great extent to

which it leaves itself open to contemplation and interpretation, is both its strength and its

weakness. Each word is in itself a contested terrain of meaning. The concept of care, for

instance, becomes immediately complicated by its inherent directionality—to care for

someone or something means, more often than not, to marginalize and sacrifice others. Acts

of care and acts of harm are often entangled, simultaneous, and indistinguishable, particularly

in contexts of ecosystem tending. Permaculture’s utopian aspirations and the naturecultural

intention to work “with nature, as nature” (returning to Neves’ statement above) in no way

undo the entanglements of care and harm; rather, they compel permaculturists to dwell in the

uncertainty of these entanglements.

María Puig de la Bellacasa engages permaculture ethics in her own articulation of

alterbiopolitics, “connecting the practices of permaculture ethics as everyday ecological

doings with a feminist notion of care” in order to displace “biopolitical moralities, allowing

us to envision alterbiopolitics as an ethics of everyday collective empowerment that puts

caring at the heart of the search of everyday struggles for hopeful flourishing of all beings, of

bios understood as a more-than-human community” (ibid.: 22). Still, she maintains, it is

always necessary to ask “for what worlds is care being done for?” (Puig de la Bellacasa

2018: 65). She draws on her participation in the Sonoma County-based Earth Activist

Training (EAT) permaculture course, led by Erik Ohlsen and Starhawk, two leading figures

in the permaculture community locally in Sonoma County who are also deeply involved in

the international collaborations. She remarks that “In EAT trainings, the teachings were not

about morality; nor did we spend much time discussing ethical implications. The focus was

on learning how to make and live with everyday systems and techniques that embody and

embed care for the earth” (ibid.: 127). Everyday engagement with “the tasks and

consequences of living in naturecultures” (ibid.: 127) involves what Puig de la Bellacasa

calls “noninnocent care” (ibid.: 164). “In some contexts,” she notes, “care is inseparable

from killing…sometimes the question of how to care might mean that we have to engage

with issues concerning if, why, and how we kill and for what” (ibid.).

Weeding, for example, is a routine aspect of both food-plant cultivation (gardening

and farming) and restoration work that involves killing certain lifeforms with the intention of

allowing others to thrive; even in adhering to a do-nothing methodology, some selective

cultivation becomes necessary, particularly with highly domesticated species in their early

phases of growth (Mollison and Holmgren 1978: 10, 32). When my landmates and I pull

annual grasses out of the ground around the high bush blueberry, calendula, and mint guild in

my garden, we are making a choice to care for some organisms and harm, maim, and kill

others. We justify our actions on multiple levels; by conceptualizing the super-organism of

the soil as overflowing with an excess of annual grasses and benefitting from their measured

removal; by anticipating the greater trophic cascade of the blueberry bushes and calendula

and mint flowers as sources of forage for many small creatures; and by anticipating the

excitement of our friends and family as we hand them fresh blueberries from homegrown

soil. We also speculate, worriedly, about the ecological burden of concentrated water use

required to obtain a healthy yield of fruit from a blueberry bush in the drought-stricken

climate of Northern California, and the question of whether the killing of individual grass-

beings effectively excludes them from the ecosystem community that we imagine ourselves

benefitting and participating in.

This more-than-human community is an intricate assemblage, and its contours and

boundaries are marked, in part, through sonic expression in the garden—they are sounded out

in the hum of native bees and song birds foraging amongst the blossoms, in the tug and

crunch of plant fiber as gophers eat at the strong root systems of the bushes, trees, and

flowers, and by the countless creatures whose bodies I cannot hear, but whose lifeforce I

perceive in the gestalt vibrancy of the garden bed. The vibrancy of the assemblage disperses

and fades into the nearby grass, which is quiet and still by contrast. Our acts of care are small

but significant participatory gestures that facilitate a multitude of cross-species interactions,

and the direction of our care has resonant consequences for the land; where we carry water

and maintain irrigation lines, where we carry compost. The concept of resonance and

listening as a mode of care will be discussed in more detail in coming chapters.

What worlds are we caring for? What worlds are we excluding from this care? After

two heavy rainstorms in October and November of 2021, we broadcast calendula, red clover,

poppies, wildflowers, and fava beans in the new berm I made from a mix of compost, rabbit

manure, and clay loam over felled oak limbs, and I sit and watch and listen to the miraculous

steady emergence of the young plants. I pluck young grasses as they shoot their leaves over

the slower growing flowers and legumes, whose fleshy cotyledons are still capped with soft

crumbles of topsoil, barely peeking their bodies above ground. From a permaculture design

perspective, these choices of caring and killing are grounded in the principle of

diversification; that biodiverse polycultures are generally more healthy and resilient than

monocultures. It must also be emphasized that human food production is not the primary

goal of this particular permaculture design; a whole ecosystem trophic cascade is the design

goal, operating on the principle of diversification; plant polycultures facilitate soil

biodiversity and invite a diverse array of pollinators, both insect and avian. Biodiverse

ecosystems are generally more productive, resilient, and stable than monocultures, which are

prone to disease, collapse, and resource depletion (McCann 2000: 232, Markandya and

Chiabai 2011: 4, Grossman 2019: 5-6)—but biodiversity necessarily involves predation,

cycles of eating and being eaten, what Donna Haraway calls “mortal relatedness” (2007: 12,

also see Puig de la Bellacasa 2018: 164). In my practice of gardening and permaculture

design, I arrive at the choice of taking the lives of grasses as a way of tending to biodiversity

and participating in a regenerative polyculture. The biopolitics of care in this context entails

bodily engagement with and attention to the phenomena of death and life, of tending and

neglecting.

The distinction between “earth care” and “people care” also implicates permaculture

ethics in a constellation of Nature-Culture binaries—although permaculture discourses

generally refuse, or at least confuse, any separation of nature and culture, of earth and people,

this same dualism is reproduced, superficially, in its ethical foundation. The terms are

employed strategically as familiar concepts but positioned deliberately so as to illuminate

ambiguities regarding their boundaries and co-constitutions. Puig de la Bellacasa writes that

in the permaculture frame, “the natural and the cultural, human and not, are not bifurcated…

but attempt to be entangled otherwise. This movement [permaculture] is not understandable

along the reductive lines that oppose romantic environmentalism to a pragmatic noninnocent

acknowledgement that there is no such thing as ‘nature’” (2018: 128, with critical reference

here to Morton 2009). Permaculture practice entails a more reflexive and iterative

engagement with human-environment embeddedness; as she continues, “there is a fair

amount of awareness among permaculturists about technoscientific context, about this

human practice being a trial-and-error effort of imperfect beings attempting to fray more

flourishing ways into ecological futures, acknowledging that we are as much earthy creatures

as implicated inheritors of the patently poor environmental record of human history” (ibid.).

It is important to note here, as Puig de la Bellacasa does in her further discussion, that “this is

an alternative tradition that emerged among the technoscientific offspring of the

industrialized Global North, the West (something that the charge of whiteness and privileged

background of permaculturists often highlights, prompting to challenge and extend its

constituencies)” (ibid.: 128-129). Ontological orientations to natureculture entanglement in

the permaculture context arise from a particular kind of Western cosmopolitan that stands in

dynamic (shifting and unfolding) relationship to traditional practices and ecological

knowledges of Indigenous and non-Western cultural formations. Indigenous cosmologies,

which also inform and inspire academic discourses on ecology and ethics (Shilling 2018: 8-

10), natureculture (Haraway 2017: M46-M50), multinaturalism (Viveiros de Castro 2015: 3-

6, Kohn 2013: 40; Ochoa Gautier 2016: 140-141), and animism (Van Dooren and Rose 2016:

81), fundamentally inform the nuanced ways in which permaculturists (Indigenous and

otherwise) navigate the tensions, contradictions, and potentials of Nature and Culture as

entangled conceptual and phenomenological realms.

Permaculture Demographics: Whiteness, and Indigeneity

Permaculture is an internally diverse constellation of communities with distinct

historical, cultural, cosmological, and political orientations and commitments. The unifying

framework of these interlocking ethics allows for a diversity of interpretations, even to the

extent of re-defining and repurposing permaculture as a concept. As the movement’s co-

founder Bill Mollison emphasized in a lecture given in 1994; “it’s a little difficult to define

what the permaculture community is, it’s not a community which has a hierarchy, it has no

paid administration, it has no offices…It is totally disintegrated. You own the word

permaculture…as much as anybody does. And nobody can tell you what to do. So don’t let

them. There’s no kings or royal family in this system” (Mollison 1994). Following from this

ethos of anarchic collectivism, permaculture author Looby Macnamara observes that “there

are as many permaculture definitions as there are permaculturists” (2012: 1). While clearly

hyperbolic, Macnamara’s statement effectively communicates the movement’s commitment

to the ideals of local and individual autonomy, and to principle of prioritizing diversity (here

extended from biological and social diversity to the level of epistemology).

The deliberately decentralized character of the global permaculture movement,

however sincere in its penchant for radical egalitarianism, has not been impervious to the

influence of broader structures of power. Along these lines, agroecologists and permaculture

researchers Rafter Ferguson and Sarah Lovell assert that “in dismissing [or downplaying] the

possibility of constraints on participation other than individual interest, Mollison encourages

a ‘demography blind’ perspective that ignores the forces of privilege and exclusion in race,

gender, and class relationships” (Ferguson and Lovell 2015: 39). Their demographic study,

based on a sample population of 731 survey respondents, identifies a white supermajority of

96% (ibid.). It is worth noting here that study participants were mainly located in the United

States (59%), Australia (15%), Canada (8%), and the United Kingdom (5%), with remaining

13% of respondents distributed across 42 other countries. While this study is limited in scope

and methodology (relying on an English language survey distributed solely over the

internet), the results resonate with a popular perceptions of permaculture as a mostly white

movement.

In settler-colonial contexts such as Australia, where permaculture originated, and the

United States, where my study is situated, permaculture has drawn critique from Indigenous

scholars, activists, and community leaders who observe complicity in settler-colonial patterns

of land-theft, disenfranchisement, and the appropriation of Indigenous cultural resources and

knowledges into setter-dominated spaces. As Indigenous anthropologist Devon G. Peña

notes, “there are many well-intentioned scientists and sustainability advocates who have

made successful careers since the 1970s urging farmers to turn the world right side up again

by adopting permaculture principles. These are truly seldom recognized as having

Indigenous origins and analogs: perennial and annual polycultures, crop rotations with long

duration fallows, intercropping with biodynamic and allelopathic companion plants, the

classification and care of soils, the preparation and application of biodynamic soil treatment

concoctions— all these and many more agroecological practices are results of Indigenous

knowledge created in the centers of origin and well before the arrival of the fashionable,

modern, and profitable advocates of biodynamics and permaculture” (Peña 2017: 348).

Peña’s analysis of

the commoditization of Indigenous knowledges, particularly in conjunction with Ferguson

and Lovell’s statistical identification of permaculture’s white supermajority, speaks to the

power imbalances that characterize the production of knowledge across environmentalist,

conservationist, and agroecology discourses.

Mollison and Holmgren do explicitly recognize and emphasize that the permaculture

concept draws fundamentally from various Indigenous agroecological practices from around

the globe in their original text. For instance, they refer to pre-colonial Tasmania as “a highly-

evolved permacultural region sufficient to sustain tribal life indefinitely” (1978: 10-11),

identifying Aboriginal Tasmanians as a model and inspiration for their own approach to

ecosystem design. However, they distinguish their conceptualization of permaculture as a

synthetic framework, arguing in Permaculture One that:

In spite of all [these precedents], little reference can be found to the type of system

that is developed in this study. Thinking about the productive landscape in terms of

an ecology which considers relationships, interactions, and elements is relatively

recent…Where ‘cultivated ecologies’ do exist, they are usually simple, involving the

few elements (plants and animals) providing the traditional needs of the culture and

are not necessarily transferable to other environments. The possibilities of

complexity have not been explored. (1978: 4)

While Mollison and Holmgren are not wrong in their observation that Indigenous ecological

knowledges are often intimately placed-based and not easily reduced to formulaic re-

applications, their wording here can also be read as a diminutive, dismissive assessment of

Indigenous ecological knowledges as simple, primitive and provincial. Buryat community

leader and Indigenous rights activist Galina Angarova, along with 15 other Indigenous

leaders from around the globe, gives this rebuttal to permaculture’s claim to a uniquely

comprehensive complex analytical approach, arguing;

Regenerative Agriculture and Permaculture claim to be holistic in approach. When

regenerating a landscape, ‘everything’ is considered: soil health, water cycles, local

‘wildlife’, income and profit. ‘Everything’, however, tends to EXCLUDE history:

Why were Indigenous homelands steal-able and why were our peoples and lands

rape-able? Why were our cultures erased? Why does our knowledge need to be

validated by ‘Science’? Why are we still excluded from your ‘healing’ of our land?

(Angarova et al. 2020, emphasis in original)

The coauthored piece, titled “Whitewashed Hope,” aligns with the analyses identified in the

previous paragraph of permaculture as both appropriative of Indigenous knowledges on the

one hand and exclusionary toward Indigenous and non-white individuals and communities

on the other.

It must be emphasized that permaculture, as a global cultural formation, does not

always take place in settler-colonial contexts, and indeed is at times employed specifically as

a framework for anti-colonial efforts, for instance in Gaza (Esteves and Abusalama 2020),

across the Middle East and North Africa (Karim 2018), in South and Central America

(Millner 2016), India (Lakshmi KP 2016), and Indonesia (Leahy 2021: 270). In these

contexts, permaculture becomes a banner for collectivist self-determination and for food

sovereignty as well as geopolitical sovereignty and stability. Within settler states such as

Australia and the United States, permaculture is also utilized as a strategic approach toward

food sovereignty, land reclamation, community resilience, and coalition for Indigenous

groups and other communities of color (Figueroa and Alkon 2017: 224-225; Wires and

LaRose 2019: 34; Alkon, Cadji and Moore 2020: 231-232; Curry 2015: 41, Sbicca 2018:

180-188; Brinbaum and Fox 2014: 57-58).

White settler permaculture projects have also responded to critiques from Indigenous

and POC communities, centering decolonial rhetoric and active coalition-building strategies

(see Leahy 2021: 262 for extended discussion). In its course materials, the Occidental Arts

and Ecology Center emphasizes the fact that “in the U.S., a very small percentage of mostly

white people own the vast majority of land. This has come about through land theft by

terrorization and force, but also through political and market-based forms of colonization and

displacement, such as redlining, gentrification, and speculative real estate” (OAEC 2021:

58). A primary focus of the OAEC’s pedagogical framework is to challenge students to find

“ways you can disrupt and divest from colonial systems and do the work of repair” (ibid.:

59). The OAEC models this repair work through collaboration and coalition-building projects

with local Indigenous and POC communities, such as the Federated Indians of Graton

Rancheria and the Indigenous-led Cultural Conservancy in Sonoma County, as well as with

the Urban Tilth project in Richmond, Contra Costa County and Pandora Thomas’ Earthseed

Permaculture Farm, the first Afro-Indigenous and Black-owned permaculture center in

Sonoma County. Of these four groups, two were represented on the OAEC’s teaching staff;

Doria Robinson, executive director of Urban Tilth, and Melissa Nelson, founding executive

of the Cultural Conservancy (as well as president of the board of directors at the OAEC)

taught as guest lecturers in the 2021 spring course.

The OAEC’s focus on repair work and environmental justice is representative of a

shift in permaculture discourse broadly from a critique of capitalism and industrial

agriculture to a more radical critique of socio-political structures rooted in an analysis of

colonialism. This re-orientation toward de-colonial thought and action is spurred largely by

Indigenous interventions such as Angarova et al.’s “Whitewashed Hope” piece, as increasing

numbers of Indigenous people and people of color, both within and adjacent to permaculture

demand recognition and equitable inclusion in the movement. A collective statement titled

“Requests from the People of Color Caucus at the North American Permaculture

Convergence,” published in the Decolonizing Permaculture issue of Permaculture Design

Magazine (2015) advocated specifically acknowledgement of “the historical rights of

indigenous peoples to the land on which we gather. We ask event organizers to make a

sincere request to use the land, as well as issue an invitation to the appropriate indigenous

peoples to open events and/or bless the space before we gather” (2015: 10). This language

stops short of advocating for the legal return of land back to Indigenous communities, and

instead gestures toward alternative strategies for presenting Indigenous leadership in

colonized spaces. This less radical strategy is also taken up by the Occidental Arts and

Ecology Center; while the organization and the land is technically owned within the

colonialist-legal framework, it develops systems of shared-leadership and collaboration with

Indigenous individuals and communities.

There is little identifiable consensus in permaculture discourse around the issue of

decolonization, however. Permaculture educator and writer Jesse Watson draws on Eve Tuck

and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” (2012) in his assertion that “in a

literal and legal sense, decolonization ‘brings about the repatriation of indigenous land and

life’…ideally, this process should be done without strings attached. Questions of what

happens to present settler peoples is secondary to the act of returning Native land to Native

peoples” (Watson 2015: 34). In the same issue of Permaculture Design Magazine, Cree and

Chihuahua permaculture educator and activist Heather Jo Flores writes “alas, it doesn’t seem

as if people who own land will start signing deeds over to sovereign nations anytime soon,”

arguing that “there’s not much point in continuing a discussion about equality until people

are willing to do way more than just talk about it…Fair Shares, anyone?” (Flores 2015: 23).

Flores’ reference to the third permaculture ethic points to the stubborn hypocrisy of the

movement in its U.S. context.

Terry Leahy argues, to this point, that fair share strategies need to be focused on the

more fundamental structures of political and economic control, targeting not middle-class

landowners but the capitalist class and the political-economic institutions that protect them.

“The capitalist market economy,” he notes, “produces an underclass and refuses the lessons

of Indigenous knowledge because of its economic structure” (Leahy 2021: 188). As long as

this structure is hegemonic, “demanding that middle-class permaculture people divest

themselves of their small allotments and residential properties to show solidarity with

Indigenous struggle at the present time is quixotic,” as it will do little to disrupt the

accumulation of financial and political control amongst the capitalist class. Leahy suggests

that “using discretionary middle-class wealth to fund community projects that work with

marginalized communities—to develop new strategies for poverty relief, community

strength and food security…can point the way to a more total system change” (ibid.: 188).

This marks a point of uncertainty and friction within and across permaculture communities

regarding best strategies for just transitions and just futures. Leahy’s gesture toward a system

change that does not (immediately or primarily) include the rematriation of stolen lands

(Wires and LaRose 2019: 31; Jacobs 2021: 280-282) stands somewhat at odds with

decolonial demands from Indigenous activists. As Tuck and Yang emphasize;

“decolonization is not a swappable term for other things we want to do to improve our

societies…decolonization doesn’t have a synonym” (Tuck and Yang 2015: 3).

Permaculture can, however, become part of anti-colonial work for Indigenous and

Indigenous-allied activists and community organizers. Guillermo Vasquez, director of the

Oakland-based intertribal organization Indigenous Permaculture asserts that “permaculture is

a way of cultural resistance” (quoted in Brinbaum and Fox 2014: 61) with revolutionary

potential. Vasquez “describes his vision of permaculture as a universal philosophy that builds

bridges” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures through a foregrounding and

privileging of “Indigenous science” (ibid.: 60-61). Similarly, after asserting that “Indigenous

worldviews are the bedrocks that our agricultural practices and lifeways arise from” (ibid.),

Angarova et al. conclude their critique with a direct invitation to (white settler and other non-

Indigenous) permaculture practitioners:

We invite you to ground your daily practices in these ancestral ways, as we jointly

work towards collective healing…. Healing of land MUST include healing of people

and vice versa. Recognizing and processing the emotional traumas held in our bodies

as descendants of assaulted, enslaved, and displaced peoples is necessary to the

healing of the land. Returning our rights to care for, harvest from, and relate to the

land that birthed us is a part of this recognition. (Angarova et al. 2020)

Their critique, then, is not a simple rejection of permaculture as an appropriation of

Indigenous knowledges, but a stern assertion of the need to build partnerships of deeper

integrity across the uneven geopolitical terrain of settler-Indigenous and imperial-Indigenous

relations. A permaculture of greater integrity, from this perspective, would necessitate a

commitment “to not just ‘take’ practices from Indigenous cultures without their context, but

also to encompass the deeper Indigenous worldviews…inspiring a consciousness shift that

hopefully will support us to go from a dominant culture of supremacy and domination to one

founded on reciprocity, respect, and interrelations with all beings—including, of course,

among all humans” (ibid.). Such commitments, while not in themselves decolonizing,

prefigure post-capitalist futures built on the respectful integration of Indigenous worldviews.

One of the co-authors of “Whitewashed Hope” is Melissa K. Nelson, an Anishnaabe,

Cree, and Metís scholar of Indigenous ecological knowledges who also serves as the

president of the board of directors of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (as mentioned

above). Nelson taught as a guest-instructor for the permaculture design course that I took in

the spring of 2021, where she focused her lecture and discussion primarily on the relationship

between Traditional Ecological Knowledges and permaculture design methods, ethics, and

principles. She emphasized, reiterating the message of “Whitewashed Hope,” that if

permaculture is fundamentally rooted in observation practices, then permaculture must be

observant of the ways in which colonization has affected ecological and social patterns and

processes. Moreover, permaculture observation needs to attend to the reality that, in Nelson’s

words, “we live on storied landscapes,” landscapes imbued with generations of Indigenous

cosmological and ecological knowledge and practice. Traditional ecological knowledge,

according to Nelson, is held not just in the minds and hearts of human practitioners, but

endures as stories in landforms themselves, in the relationships between different creatures

and different aspects of the land and the flow of seasons in a place—in Nelson’s words,

“there is always something to listen to in terms of the rocks, the winds, the trees, the flowers,

the animals, what is it trying to tell you?” (Nelson, personal communication 2021).

Here she weaves together the concept of landforms as agential and expressive

(communicating through the movement of their various constituent elements and lifeforms)

with the concept of landforms as reverberating with the stories of Indigenous human

inhabitants who create what she calls “storyscapes”—landscapes that are understood as

holding “traditional stories about the land and the relationship between people and the land”

(ibid.). Guest instructor A-dae Briones, who is the director of the Native Agriculture and

Food Systems program at the First Nations Development Institute, gave an example in her

lecture of the ways in which landforms and waterways are understood to hold stories of

ecological relationship that are as deeply entangled in histories of colonization and settlement

as they are in histories of Indigenous ecological knowledge:

When we talk about soil, we really need to be talking about the salmon, when we

think about some of the California waterways, some of the major fertile soil in

California came from generations and generations of the salmon nation going up the

rivers and then dying and their bodies floating down and literally becoming the

ground we walk on. And when I told this story to one of my friends in the Pacific

Northwest he said, you know A-dae when you look at this picture [shown on the

right], it’s not only telling you that the salmon nation created fertile soils, it’s telling

you that the people created fertile soils. And he said, you know, some of our people

are buried in some of these places, and it takes about fifty years in acidic soil for

bones to become soil, and so when we think about soil nation, building fertile soil,

we’re thinking about Indigenous peoples’ bones, and even settler bones now, people

who have come after settlement. People who’ve come after settlement. People who

are buried in these lands become the fertile soil we depend on today.

These stories and storyscapes are directly relevant to the work of permaculture—as A-dae

continues, “you can’t talk about soil regeneration and carbon sequestration without talking

about logging, without talking about the alteration of waterways, because that has done much

damage to soil fertility, but also much damage to tribal people.” The ecological knowledge

that these stories hold shapes both Indigenous- and settler-permacultural understandings of

soil—the present animacy and historical potency of soil. Returning to Nelson’s assertion that

“there is always something to listen to” in storied landscapes, the land is understood to

resonate with the lives and deaths of countless bodies, becoming and un-becoming,

composing, decomposing, and re-composing. What Briones presents as Indigenous

ecological knowledge is incorporated into the pedagogical structure and epistemological

framework of the OAEC’s permaculture course, and students are prompted to listen to the

land as bones-becoming-soil; as Indigenous bones, settler bones, salmon bones, and the

bones and bodies of all creatures collectively weaving the storyscape.

The Indigenous perspectives that Nelson and Briones offer align with and inform

permaculture’s natureculture ontology outlined earlier in this chapter, making the crucial

intervention that learning to “think like an ecosystem” involves learning the history of that

specific ecosystem and one’s own relationship to it. In his 2020 monograph Hungry

Listening, Stó:lo music and sound studies scholar Dylan Robinson observes that “to

decolonize perception in general, and listening in particular, requires different strategies for

settler and Indigenous listeners” (2020: 72). He argues that “while it is important for

Indigenous listeners to understand and practice forms of resurgent perception based in our

individual nations and communities’ cultural logics, for settler listeners decolonial strategies

may at times be necessarily agonistic” (ibid.) toward the hegemonic cultural logics of settler

society. Learning to think like an ecosystem, within the permaculture frame, also entails

different strategies for settler and Indigenous permaculturists. Indigenous worldviews

become crucial resources for articulating and enacting counter-hegemonic ontologies that

engage with landforms, soils, and waterways as agential, lively, and expressive entities.

Within Indigenous contexts, Robinson notes, conceptions and perceptions of the agency or

“the subjectivity of place (or ‘animacy’ as it is often referred to in anthropological discourse)

seem uncontroversial…our ancestors are the land” (ibid.: 97). For settler permaculturists,

whether or not they inherit animist ontologies from their ancestral lineages, thinking like an

ecosystem entails, as a first step, a recognition of settler involvement in the histories of

displacement, genocide, and extraction that characterize that ecosystem. As Briones’ story

about bones-becoming-soil illustrates, Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are diversely

(differently) implicated, politically and materially, in the storyscapes of colonized landforms.

Playing Indigenous: Invitations and Appropriations

The implications, intentions, and outcomes of non-Indigenous engagements with

Indigenous perspectives are diverse, divergent, and locally specific. In the U.S. context, these

engagements collide with a broader history of settlers adopting or consuming Native

American philosophies, identities, and material cultures (Watson 2015: 36). Melissa Nelson,

for example, noted in her lecture that “there’s a lot of discussion about non-natives engaging

with a sense of place and becoming native to place again. Of course, its treacherous and

dangerous territory because we know there are white folks who do crazy things and pretend

to be Indian and steal ceremonies and steal knowledge” (Nelson, personal communication

2021). Historian Philip Deloria places this phenomenon, which he terms “playing Indian”

(following Green 1988) at the very heart of American culture continuing from its moment of

revolutionary inception (Deloria 1998: 1-4). Deloria’s historical cultural analysis is directly

relevant to the invitations made by Indigenous practitioners for settler permaculturists to

engage with the storyscapes of traditional ecological knowledge and to “encompass the

deeper Indigenous worldviews” (Angarova et al. 2020). Particularly in discussing

permaculture’s natureculture ontology and ethical commitments, the friction between

practicing permaculture and playing Indian must be critically examined.

In Playing Indian, Deloria argues that key white-settler sociopolitical movements in

the United States, from the revolutionary inception of the Boston Tea Party (Deloria 1998:

161) to the 1960s hippie counterculture (ibid.: 95) and the postmodern emergence of New

Age cultural formations (ibid.: 170), act on a “deeply rooted desire to be Indian and thereby

aboriginally true to the spirit of the land” (ibid.: 179). This desire has been expressed

through various forms of “Indian play,” such as the costuming, face painting, and war

chanting employed by tea party revolutionaries (ibid.: 1), woodcrafts and primitive skills

programs that continue to the present day (ibid.: 96-102), the earnest critiques of U.S.

capitalism by countercultural radicals in the postwar period, the patchwork adoption of

Native American

spiritualities by New Age truth seekers (ibid.: 157-161), and, importantly, the mobilization of

Indianness as an abstracted symbol of righteous relationship to the land and natural

environment (ibid.: 166-167, also see Voyles 2016: 234).

Each of these modes of Indian play, Deloria observes, has historically relied more on

the symbolic weight of Indianness than on actual lived relationship with Indigenous Native

American peoples (ibid.: 169-170). The exclusion of Indian people from white definitions

and imaginations of Indianness that Deloria details is rooted in the dual settler-colonial

impetus of eradication and becoming; as he argues, “if Indianness was critical to American

identities, it necessarily went hand in hand with the dispossession and conquest of actual

Indian people” (ibid. 182). Angarova et al. call attention to the replication of this dynamic in

their observation that Native American peoples (and Indigenous peoples globally) are often

excluded from environmental restoration projects that claim to be healing the land and

returning it a pristine (imagined and ahistorical) state (Cronon 1996: 7-10, 18; Gilio-

Whitaker 2019: 103). Environmentalist discourses in the United States are largely

characterized, both historically and presently, by the marginalization of Indigenous (and

other non-white) voices, interests, and claims to ancestral lands (Cole and Foster 2001: 30;

Ryder 2017: 88). Relatedly, the homesteading and back-to-the-land impulse that motivates

many permaculturists in the United States draws from a deep well of frontier and wilderness

mythology, the same mythology that Deloria links to the broader phenomena of playing

Indian. Furthermore, the acquisition of land by settler permaculturists relies on naturalized

property rights structures that give a bureaucratic camouflage to colonial forces and legalize

land theft. Settler colonial discourses around “becoming native to place again,” as noted by

Nelson, are often predicated on the structural violence of colonial governance that strip actual

Indigenous communities of political power, voice, and visibility.

The active legacy of playing Indian, while intimately relevant to permaculture in the

United States context, is somewhat complicated by the movement’s global character and

non-American origins. A more fitting analogue to Deloria’s concept, adapted to the

permaculture context, might be ‘playing Indigenous’—where the abstraction of Indigeneity

as a paradoxically universal yet place-based marker of authenticity fills a similar function in

(mostly white) cosmopolitan imaginaries of an environmentalist counterculture. For

example, in presenting the observational method of sit spot listening, the Occidental Arts and

Ecology Center foregrounded the Aboriginal Australian concept of dadirri, as described by

Aboriginal artist and educator Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann. The OAEC course

materials included a passage written by Ungunmerr-Baumann on dadirri, which was also

posted on her MiriamRose Foundation website, and available for free download as a pdf

document (Rose 1988). In her writing she introduces dadirri as “inner, deep listening and

quiet, still awareness” (Ungunmerr-Baumann 1988: 1). She explains that “when I

experience, I am made whole again. I can sit on the riverbank or walk through the

trees….There is no need of words. A big part of dadirri is listening” (ibid.). Her concept of

dadirri imbues listening with a spiritual and ethical aspect, evident in her emphasis that “in

our Aboriginal way, we learnt to listen from our earliest days. We could not live good and

useful lives unless we listened. This was the normal way for us to learn—not by asking

questions. We learnt by watching and listening, waiting and then acting. Our people have

passed on this way for over 40,000 years…” (ibid.: 2).

The concept of listening as an ethical and utilitarian prerequisite to action is

somewhat analogous to the permaculture principle of thoughtful and protracted observation

as the primary responsibility of the designer, gardener, or farmer. Appealing to 40,000 years

of Aboriginal culture, Ungunmerr-Baumann correlates ethical listening with Aboriginal-ness

in the Australian context. Dadirri, as a listening practice, is also implicated in traditional

ecological knowledges; Ungunmerr-Baumann continues to explain that “our Aboriginal

culture has taught us to be still and to wait. We do not hurry things up. We let them follow

their natural course—like the seasons. We watch the moon in each of its phases. We wait for

the rain to fill our rivers and water the thirsty earth…We watch the bush foods and wait for

them to ripen before we gather them” (ibid.).

The poetics of this passage, in which Ungunmerr-Baumann names a relationality

between listening and waiting while imbuing both with an ethical righteousness, serves

several functions in the context of its inclusion in the permaculture course materials. First,

the authenticity and authority of Indigeneity is invoked by the OAEC staff, associating the

Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (on a surface, textual level) with a more conscientious

mode of permaculture that valorizes Indigenous voices and leadership, and social-

environmental justice more broadly (see Millner 2016: 42, Brinbaum and Fox 2014: 59).

Ungunmerr-Baumann’s specific identity as an Aboriginal Australian community leader and

cultural icon seems significant, given that permaculture originated as a concept in Australia

and was first modeled through direct observation of the ways in which Aboriginal

stewardship practices had shaped the lands and waters of Australia (Brinbaum and Fox 2014:

61-62). Second, the foregrounding of Ungunmerr-Baumann’s words on dadirri serves to

place permaculture, discursively, outside of normative Western epistemological, ideological,

and ethical frameworks. She describes dadirri as simultaneously exterior and imperative to

Western culture, asserting that “it is our [Aboriginals’] most unique gift. It is perhaps the

greatest gift we can give to our fellow Australians” (ibid.). But it is also a gift that

Westerners and settlers are obligated, ethically required to take up, as she continues; “we

have learned to speak the white man’s language. We have listened to what he had to say.

This learning and listening should go both ways. We would like people in Australia to take

time to listen to us. We are hoping people will come closer” (ibid.: 64). This rhetoric mirrors

the invitation that closes Angarova et al.’s otherwise more confrontational “Whitewashed

Hope” piece, and it aligns with Deloria’s assessment, in the US context, that Indigenous

people have always been “insinuating their way into Euro-American discourse, often

attempting to nudge notions of Indianness in directions they found useful” (Deloria 1998: 8,

172). While Ungunmerr-Bauman’s words are directed at a generalized conception of white-

settler-Australian society, her teaching around dadirri finds a particularly receptive audience

in permaculture as a global movement already invested in the synthesis of Indigenous

ecological knowledges and worldviews.

The OAEC’s use of dadirri as a teaching tool must be analyzed within the broader

context of the organization’s pedagogical approach. Specifically, returning to Melissa

Nelson’s cautionary against “white folks doing crazy things and pretending to be Indian,” it

should be noted that non-Aboriginal Australian students (whether Indigenous or settler) are

not meant to practice dadirri or to pretend to embody the depth of Aboriginal philosophical

and spiritual tradition that dadirri contains. Dadirri is not, in this sense, available for simple

appropriation; rather, its presence in the OAEC’s pedagogy serves to call attention to issues

of listening positionality. (To my knowledge, none of the participants in this course, either

students or instructors, were of Aboriginal Australian descent, and while Ungunmerr-

Bauman’s words were included in the course’s written materials, dadirri was not taught

directly by any of the instructors.) Through cautionary statements such as Nelson’s, students

(myself included) were encouraged to reflect on what it means to engage with the concept

and practice of dadirri as cultural outsiders; what it means, after “having grasped a sense of

this rich Indigenous gift, [to] consider using, in some way” (OAEC 2020: 60) the advice that

Ungunmerr-Baumann offers in “the spirit of dadirri that we have to offer” (ibid.: 65).

Students are challenged, in the context of the course, to build a relationship with this practice

and philosophy outside of the paradigm of acquisition or consumption and, more

fundamentally, to build into our own ecological listening practices an awareness of

Indigenous precedents such as dadirri.

Dylan Robinson’s discussion of critical listening positionality is relevant to this

circumstance; Robinson asserts that alternative configurations of listening cannot be adopted

or applied at will: “Unlike iPhone photo filters,” he explains, “one cannot simply select and

add noncolonial, feminist, queer, or black listening filters in order to listen otherwise. This

reductive approach essentializes critical listening positionality as something that might

simply be applied by choice, and fails to recognize that to apply a form of Indigenous

listening would also constitute appropriation” (Robinson 2020: 51). Nelson, along with the

rest of the OAEC teaching staff, expresses a similar sentiment in warning against what she

refers to as cultural fraud, the theft of Indigenous ceremonies, knowledges, and identities.

The OAEC teaching staff challenges their students to situate their own listening practices in

relation to dadirri as an Indigenous—and specifically Aboriginal Australian—precedent to

contemporary discourses on deep listening and permaculture observation while resisting, as

Robinson would say, “the hunger to consume alterity and Indigenous content” (Robinson

2020: 72).

Revisiting Permaculture’s Ontology of Integrativeness

This chapter began with an overview of permaculture’s definitive characteristics, its

ethical framework, and its ontology of integrativeness between nature and culture (Trauger

2017: 44), progressing through a brief history of the movement and into a critical

consideration of the relationship between permaculture and Indigenous ecological

knowledges. Indigenous interventions into permaculture discourse have been crucially

important, particularly to the mode of permaculture taught and practiced at the Occidental

Arts and Ecology Center, as demonstrated above. The morphing of permaculture ethics and

principles over time (such as the shift from “setting limits to population growth” to “return of

surplus”) reflects a deepening influence of Indigenous critiques and challenges to

permaculture, as well as critiques from other communities of color and marginalized

communities within and outside of the global north. The eloquence of permaculture’s ethical

framework has ensured its durability and adaptability to these critiques, and the basic tenets

of earth care, people care, and return of surplus have been refashioned to accommodate more

explicitly anti-colonial interpretations and commitments.

Parallel to this anti-colonial turn, permaculture’s natureculture ontological orientation

has been fundamentally influenced by Indigenous worldviews and cosmologies. In the

context of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center specifically, the foregrounding of

Indigenous listening practices (such as Ungunmerr-Baumann’s description of dadirri and

Nelson’s discussion of listening to storied landscapes) is inextricable from a foregrounding of

Indigenous understandings of earth-animacy. Indigenous engagements with permaculture

stress a need to listen not to a world of inert material objects, but a world of animate beings

and relationships, to the point that permaculture appropriations of Indigenous ecological

knowledges are argued to be hollow and reductive if they “maintain the ‘dead’ worldview of

Western culture and science” (Angarova et al. 2020). As Angarova et al. continue, “rocks,

mountains, soil, water wind, and light [in this Western scientific worldview] all start as

‘dead’. (E.g., ‘Let’s bring life back to the soil!’—implying soil, without microbes, is dead.).

This worldview believes that life only happens when these elements are brought together in

some specific and special way” (ibid.). The authors emphasize that “Indigenous cultures view

the Earth as a communion of beings and not objects: all matter and energy is alive and

conscious. Mountains, stones, water, and air are all relatives and ancestors. Earth is a living

being whose body we are all a part of. Life does not only occur when these elements are

brought together; Life always is. No “thing” is ever dead. Life forms and transforms” (ibid.).

While these essentializing constructs of both Western culture and Indigenous cultures neglect

to account for the ways in which “for all its perennial dualisms, the ‘West’ has, for the most

part, animated its cosmoi” (Rubenstein 2018: 109), and obscured the endurance of

counterhegemonic lineages of animism, paganism, and panpsychism within Western-

identified cultural spheres (Dombrowski 1988, Mathews 2003), the Western-Indigenous

binary is reproduced in permaculture discourses (as well as academic and political discourses

for the most part, see Brondizio et al. 2021) and becomes an important starting point for

conversations around Indigenous ecological knowledges as well as strategies for confronting

Western systems of colonization (see Scoz and Zamora 2015: 3; Watson 2015: 34-35;

Shilling 2018: 12, Martinez 2018: 152; Leahy 2021: 176-177).

Permaculture has from its inception constituted an entanglement of Western and

Indigenous ecological knowledges, as well as Western and Indigenous cosmologies,

spiritualities and ontological frameworks. This entanglement is epitomized in the cover

illustration of Mollison’s canonical text Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual, which

combines the Indo-European symbol of the cosmic egg (see Nilsson 1935: 199) with the

Aboriginal Australian symbol of the rainbow serpent and the globally significant Tree of

Life. Mollison explains the symbolic synthesis as follows:

The great oval of the design represents the egg of life; that quantity of life which

cannot be created or destroyed, but from within which all things that live are

expressed. Within the egg is coiled the rainbow snake, the Earth-shaper of Australian

and American Aboriginal peoples…within the body of the Rainbow Serpent is

contained the tree of life, which itself expresses the general pattern of life forms…

The whole cycle and form is dedicated, as is this book, to the complexity of life on

earth. (Mollison [1988] 2002: xi)

The cosmic egg-rainbow serpent-tree of life amalgam speaks directly to the synthetic nature

of permaculture as a design methodology, and social movement, and it also encapsulates the

creative tension between Indigenous and Western identities and worldviews that has

characterized permaculture, particularly in the settler-colonial contexts of Australia and the

United States. Throughout the Designer’s Manual, Mollison weaves back and forth between

Western materialism (ibid.: 16) and Indigenous animisms (ibid.: 98), seeking moments of

interstitial overlap. Indeed, he names his understanding of Western-Indigenous difference as

a primary motivation for the conception and development of permaculture as a design

methodology, arguing that:

In western society no popular body of directives has arisen to replace the injunctions

of tribal taboo and myth. When we left tribal life we left with it all guides to sensible

behaviour in the natural world, of which we are part and in which we live and die.

More to the point, by never having the time or commonsense to evolve new or current

guiding directives, we have forgotten how to evolve self-regulating systems. Hence,

the call for a society in which we are all designers, based on an ethical and applied

education, with a clear concept of life ethics. (ibid.: 10-11)

While Mollison’s language around Indigenous ethical and eco-cosmological frameworks

read as distinctly outmoded, it is interesting to note that Angarova et al. 2020 puts forth a

similar argument from the perspective of Indigenous scholar-activists. Crucially, however,

Angarova et al. argue that permaculture cannot succeed in its stated goals without more

meaningful recognition and integration of Indigenous perspectives and leadership. They

assert that while permaculture and permaculturists “borrow practices from Indigenous

cultures, critically, they leave out our worldviews and continue the pattern of erasing our

history and contributions to the modern world” (Angarova et al. 2020). The case study of the

Occidental Arts and Ecology Center offers an example of how permaculture organizations

and communities have received and responded to these critiques; through direct partnerships

with Indigenous communities, teachers, and scholars, and through a foregrounding of

Indigenous worldviews in course curricula and programming. A-dae Briones spoke to the

intention of these partnerships in her lecture by relating a story from Samish (a federally

recognized tribe in Washington state) clam farmer Marco Hatch:

Marco said, you know, when his people first started making canoes, they would look

for the biggest tree and they would go to the tree and they would ask the tree, tree can

we please make you a canoe, please give your life so we can make a canoe, and the

tree would talk to them; like, they would watch it for a couple weeks and if there

were any sorts of weaknesses they wouldn’t use the tree. So the idea was that this one

tree would become the tree that would carry people across the San Juan Islands in the

Pacific Northwest. And that tree had to be strong and it had to be whole because any

little crack or any little weakness would mean that most likely the canoe would drown

if the canoe gave out during some of those rough seas. And he said today they no

longer have trees that are big enough to make one canoe. That they have to talk to

several trees and they have to meld them together in order to make a canoe, so

ultimately their canoes are much weaker but they’re having to learn how to meld trees

together so that these canoes can take them across these very rough seas. And he said

that that’s how he thinks of Indigenous practices and some of the science of

environment and agriculture, is that we’re having to figure out how to make these two

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things meld so that ultimately they carry people across the rough seas should they

become rough. And I leave you with that story because I think part of that melding

process begins with conversations like this one, and Indigenous people interacting in

courses that look at agriculture and environmental movements and environmental

science. So melding those two trees together so that we find ourselves all in the same

canoe and we’re all trying to reach the other side across these rough seas together.

(Briones, personal communication 2021)

The emphasis on Indigenous presence, collaboration, and leadership that Briones

communicates, and also embodies as an instructor in a settler-majority permaculture design

course, marks somewhat of a difference from the “Indian play” that Deloria describes as

characteristic of twentieth-century environmentalist (and various revolutionary or

countercultural) movements in the United States, which have generally excluded or

marginalized Native American people while adopting and re-imagining symbolic forms of

Native American-ness. However, Briones also emphasized that the metaphor of permaculture

as a melding of trees should not be mistaken for a utopian vision of egalitarian

multiculturalism; she notes that while settler-descended people can make ethically and

morally motivated decisions to engage with Indigenous peoples and Indigenous ecological

knowledges, Indigenous peoples for the most part do not have the privilege of choice. This

constraint operates on multiple levels. First, whereas settler-descended people are not forced

by broader social structures to engage Indigenous ecological knowledges, Indigenous peoples

are forced to accommodate settler colonial structures, even to the point that the very future of

Indigenous communities often depends heavily on their ability to negotiate settler colonial

society (Deloria 1998: 188). Second, Briones explained that “when you’re an Indigenous

person of your place…you don’t have the privilege to not adhere to your responsibilities to

that land, so it’s not like you can say, ‘oh I’m a sustainable agriculturist, but I think I’m

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gonna practice regenerative practices…you have to maintain your relationship with that land

no matter what type of system you’re applying” (Briones, personal communication 2021).

Briones communicates here that permaculture, like other subsets of environmental

and ecological activism, holds different use values for Indigenous and non-Indigenous

people. For settler-descended people, permaculture offers a framework for learning how to

be good neighbors or respectful guests, whereas for Indigenous people, permaculture is

useful to the extent that it opens pathways to the maintenance of longstanding relationships

and responsibilities to their traditional territories. Permaculture is also potentially useful, as

demonstrated in the examples above, as a space in which Indigenous people can intervene in

settler discourse about ecological stewardship and advocate for deeper commitments to

decolonial practice (Brinbaum and Fox 2014: 59-61).

The metaphor of melding trees as melding worldviews also speaks directly to the

Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s vision of permaculture, and to the broader collective

aspiration of the permaculture movement in the twenty first century as “a universal

philosophy that builds bridges between contemporary [non-native] and native cultures”

(Brinbaum and Fox 2014: 60-61). The sense of precarity and urgency that colors these

metaphors also speaks to the ways in which these decolonial aspirations are often uncertain,

contested, or unsuccessful. As Kendall Dunnigan observed in response to Briones’

recounting of the canoe metaphor, “in this class, there are Indigenous people from the

United States, some live in their traditional territory, some don’t, and then there are many of

us who have been so long separated from our Indigenous roots that we may or may not know

what they are or where they’re from. And then we’ve found ourselves as part of, really, a

genocidal lineage in this country” (Dunnigan, personal communication 2021). Dunnigan

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underscores this colonial condition as the necessary starting point for permaculture work in

the US context, asserting that “part of permaculture, inherent to it, is that question; how do

we remember to be people of place where we have now found ourselves, to be respectful to

the rights of Indigenous people who are here, and then how do we remember ourselves as

people of place together with those who are here?” (ibid.).

Listening is employed in this discourse as a key concept in describing the task at

hand for settler permaculturists. As Dunnigan also emphasized earlier in the course; “the

depth of internal colonization, for all of us, it runs deep…and we are remembering together

how to listen to the land, and listen to each other, and part of that remembering process can

be painful and scary” (Dunnigan, personal communication 2021). The rhetorical use of

listening as a mode of decolonial work aligns with Melissa Nelson’s emphasis on listening to

places as storyscapes and with the OAEC’s presentation of Ungunmerr-Bauman’s

articulation of dadirri as an Aboriginal Australian practice of deep listening; it also

constitutes an integration of Angarova et al.’s critique in that it, ideally, moves beyond the

tokenizing appropriation of Indigenous symbols, cosmologies, and theories about a sentient,

storied land and into an actual practice of relationship-building with that land situated in an

awareness of colonial structures. In addition to listening to what Indigenous peoples have to

say and write about land and ecology, Dunnigan suggests that permaculture, for her and for

the OAEC, is about listening to and learning from the land one finds one’s self on, and from

the historical trajectory of one’s relationship to that land.

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Chapter Conclusion

The above discussion describes the ethical and ontological commitments of

permaculture as well as the entanglement of settler colonial and Indigenous worldviews and

practices that characterizes these commitments. As demonstrated, Indigenous interventions

have been crucial to the development of permaculture; these interventions are marked by a

sharp rejection of white-settler tendencies toward consumptive and alienating modes of

appropriation and, at the same time, by a challenging invitation for white-settler

permaculturists to find generative, participatory ways of relating to Indigenous worldviews

that do not re-enact expectations of settler privilege (Gilio-Whitaker 2018) or Western-

scientific intellectual hegemony.

Listening becomes a realm of discourse and practice in which these precarious

invitations and challenges are engaged; permaculture’s utopian idealism, its counter-

normative ethical commitments, and its natureculture ontology, are epitomized and realized

in the work of remembering how to listen to the land (returning Kendall Dunnigan’s

statement above). Permaculture notions of listening are troubled by the settler-colonial

inheritances of “playing Indian (Deloria 1998) and “hungry listening” (Robinson 2020), and

permaculture’s increasingly self-reflexive discourse continues to grapple with the

entanglement of its white-settler majority with colonial structures of privilege, control, and

extraction. In the face of colonial governance and capitalist systems of land-ownership/theft,

listening does not in itself effect or constitute a fruitful strategy toward social-environmental

justice. Still, permaculture discourse hones in on listening as a building block toward eco-

social change. As Melissa Nelson emphasized in her course lecture, “we live on storied

landscapes, and it is our responsibility to listen, and to listen differently” (Nelson, personal

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communication 2021). The following chapter will turn to a consideration of what Nelson

means by listening differently—moving particularly toward an understanding of

permaculture listening as a mode of more-than human-eco-sociality.

Closing Note

In closing, I will briefly note that this description of permaculture reflects my own

research focus and does not account for the great diversity of approaches and perspectives

both within and outside of the movement. As mentioned previously, permaculture is a

relatively under-researched cultural formation, and each of the topics I have brought up in

this chapter warrant additional ethnographic, demographic, sociological and ecological

study. Specifically, while this chapter has focused largely on issues of Indigeneity within

permaculture, a more comprehensive study of racial politics in permaculture would address

the experiences of Black and other POC permaculturists (Ferguson and Lovell 2015 make a

similar call for further research into permaculture’s racial politics). I have also only touched

briefly on the politics of gender in the permaculture movement (see Leahy 2021: 324-327 for

a focused discussion on this topic). An exhaustive engagement with permaculture’s politics,

subcultures, techniques, or practices, however, is beyond the scope of the current study,

which engages permaculture primarily as a mode of eco-sociality characterized by specific

multispecies and whole-landform listening practices; the remainder of this dissertation will

address these listening practices.

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Chapter 2

Sit Spot Listening and Ecological Subjectivity

Let the land speak to you, let the birds speak to you, let the slopes, the stones, all of

the animate force of that place.

—Brock Dolman, OAEC Permaculture Design Course, Spring 2021

The first task, and first principle, of permaculture design is protracted and thoughtful

observation, abbreviated as PATO by Brock Dolman and, in its original formulation, as

TAPO by Bill Mollison (Mollison [1982] 2002: ix, 28). “Protracted” here refers to temporal

duration and density—the extension and repetition of immersion within ecosystems as a

foundational aspect of observation. Adopting Mollison’s vocabulary, María Puig de la

Bellacasa explains that “the point of immersed observation [for permaculturists] is to take the

time to ‘experience’ the specific ‘schedules’ happening within the arrangement of life cycles

(involving species, climate, localized interactions, etc.) that constitute temporal niches in a

particular ecology” (2017: 201). Observation of ecosystem processes is understood as a

prerequisite for interaction. For example, in planning or designing a garden, it is necessary

first to observe and experience the place over a long period of time, preferably across

seasonal changes (Starhawk 2002: 164), taking note of what species of plants, animals, and

fungi inhabit or traverse the space at what points in the year; the way that water moves across

the land and the temporal rhythms of wetness and dryness in that place; the ways that light

and sound and scent fill the place, and how these each relate to the creatures of that place, the

soil and the water there. Working from this experiential knowledge the gardener, or farmer

or ecosystem steward, can then make decisions that promote biodiversity and eco-social

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thriving by recognizing and meeting the needs of specific creatures (including humans) who

inhabit, move through, or rely on that place.

While the imperative of observation, as Leahy notes, is also demonstrably “inherent

in the scientific method” (2021: 15), permaculture observation is characterized (in contrast to

the Western scientific paradigm) by an underlying relational natureculture ontology, as

discussed in the previous chapter. Thus, while Western scientific frameworks generally strive

toward a separation of the observer from the observed (the researcher from the object of

study or manipulation), the permaculture framework orients toward a relational copresence

of the observer within the observed; this is particularly the case with ecosystem or landform

observation, where immersed observation becomes “an ethos that contributes to the

cocreation of a particular ecology and the mutual multilateral obligations and interdependent

doings it entails” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017: 201). By identifying permaculture

observational practices as an ethos, Puig de la Bellacasa underscores their “ethical and

affective dimensions” (ibid.)—through immersive observation, permaculture practitioners

involve themselves in “webs of doings, obligations, and asymmetrical reciprocities” and

mortal dependencies (ibid.: 199).

As this chapter’s discussion will demonstrate, the orientation toward copresence and

naturecultural relationalities positions permaculture listening as a form, or aspect, of multi-

species and holoent (Haraway 2017: M45) eco-sociality. This recognition gives rise to

questions of more-than-human ecological subjectivity (Posthumus 2017), the possibilities

and stakes of intersubjective encounters (Robinson 2020: 97), the resonance of these

encounters, and the “sonic consequences of concepts of co-habitation and cross-species

sociality” (Feld 2017: 94) in the context of permaculture practice. I will frame these areas of

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inquiry within an analysis of a specific exercise central to the Occidental Arts and Ecology

Center’s pedagogy called “sit spot listening.” Sit spot listening, which I will describe in detail

below, functions as a pedagogical training tool wherein the principle of protracted and

thoughtful observation is foregrounded and inhabited with heightened intensity. This exercise

also serves to cultivate habits of attention and relation that extend beyond the container of the

exercise into everyday acts of eco-social engagement for permaculturists.

My analytical approach is informed by sound studies discourses that situate sound in

a “feedback loop between metaphor and materiality” (Novak and Sakakeeny 2015: 1; Feld

2017: 84-85); permaculture listeners likewise reside in metaphor-materiality feedback loops,

as their experiences of listening are shaped by conceptual understandings and theories of

listening communicated in permaculture pedagogy. Just as “metaphors for sound construct

perceptual conditions of hearing and shape the territories and boundaries in social life”

(ibid.), so do metaphors for listening. Listening, as a category of discourse (Turino 2008:

103), as learned cultural practice (Sterne 2003: 19), and a phenomenon of perception that

unfolds “within the holistic context of lived experience” (Rice 2015: 108), figures crucially

in permaculture efforts to expand the boundaries of social life and to cultivate whole-

landform sociality. Specific metaphors or concepts pertinent to permaculture landform

listening that I will address in this chapter are; the concept of “composing-with,” rather than

imposing on, the land; the concept of conversation as an expressive capacity of place; and,

the concept of befriending place. Each of these concepts is foregrounded in the OAEC’s

instruction on sit spot listening, as detailed below, and each also shapes experiences and

conceptions of listening for permaculturists in everyday immediate encounters with places

as more-than-human subjectivities (Feld 2017: 93).

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Sit Spot Listening in Permaculture Pedagogy

The principle of protracted and thoughtful observation is epitomized in a practice

called sit spot listening, in which the listener is seated or otherwise stationary for a period of

time, observing their immediate environment. This practice itself is not unique to

permaculture; it has precedents in scientific methodologies (particularly wildlife biology and

ecology); various Indigenous traditions (such as the Aboriginal Australian practice of dadirri

discussed in the previous chapter) and ecological knowledges (Kimmerer 2013: 46); animal

tracking and bird watching techniques; and, various realms of artistic practice, such as

Pauline Oliveros’ approaches to deep listening (Oliveiros 2005: xv, 53). Like most aspects of

permaculture, the sit spot is a synthesis of these diverse influences, and permaculture

approaches to sit spot listening vary across different communities and contexts. For the sake

of coherency, I will focus my discussion here on the sit spot exercise as described and taught

at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center.

In this specific context, Brock Dolman emphasized his professional background in

wildlife biology as foundational to his interpretation and instruction of sit spot listening,

underscoring the influence of Western frameworks of ecology and biology. Kerry Brady,

who wrote out all of the sit spot assignments, draws on her work in somatic psychology and

deep ecology, emphasizing the integrated nature of bodily, psychological, and ecological

processes and experiences. Brady draws connections between the ecosystem and what she

calls the “ego-system,” the embodied sense of self that experiences interaction with and/or

alienation from ecosystems. Emphasizing that “we are shaped by the setting—the ecology—

in which we are immersed,” she presents the sit spot as a practice of building both ecological

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awareness and internal sensory awareness, a practice of noticing the porosity of the

boundaries of selves and bodies to the ecologies they inhabit. Both Brady and Dolman also

mention naturalist and nature connection mentor Jon Young as a major influential figure in

sit spot pedagogy, particularly with respect understanding and experiencing bird language as

a resonant expression of complex multi-species relationships (OAEC 2021: 198-200; also

see Starhawk 2002: 164-165).

One of the most important characteristics of sit spot listening, across all of these

lineages and contexts, is that it is a regular, repeated practice. In the case of the OAEC’s

course, students (myself included) were instructed to carry out at least one sit spot session

per week. I made the sit spot a daily practice, as it brought me into embodied engagement

with the topic of my research; the role and character of listening in permaculture frameworks.

The following is an excerpt of the course’s initial sit spot instruction, written by co-instructor

Kerry Brady, which would serve as a reference point guiding the students’ regular

observation sessions:

Notice what you smell, what the wind and weather feel like on your skin, what the

texture of the moment feels like, what images come. Open your field of vision to

include what you see in your periphery. Listen to sounds with your ears and your

whole body. Notice what is happening with the birds. And the temperature, wind and

light. What is the conversation happening before you? Notice both pattern and detail.

Activity and rest. (Brady in OAEC 2021: 22-23)

A key aspect of this initial sit spot prompt is that it presents an explicitly multisensorial

conception of listening. As the whole body is ascribed listening capacity, and as listening is

wrested from a narrow conception of audition, a wider range of phenomena become

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listenable: light becomes listenable to the whole-body listener, and temperature; the gestalt

textures of moments are engaged within this conception of listening. This contrasts with the

tendency, as described by sound anthropologist Tom Rice, for listening to be regarded as “a

sensory process that involves the isolation and intensification of auditory attention and

experience” (Rice 2015: 103); listening is inhabited or intended as “a mode of consciousness

that reaches beyond the merely auditory” (ibid.: 101). As a whole-body listening practice, the

permaculture sit spot exercise destabilizes the assumption of a privileged relationship

between hearing and listening; listening is rather repositioned from the hearing ears to the

feeling body, distributed across all aspects of sensory perception.

Composing-with: Listening as a Means to Eco-Social Collaboration

The work of permaculture design consists in four basic phases; assessment, visioning,

designing, and implementation. This four-phase process is recursive in the sense that

assessment follows implementation, initiating further iterations of the sequence. While

different modes of listening play important roles throughout each of these phases, sit spot

listening is particularly essential to assessment, which itself pervades and co-occurs within

each of the other phases. As presented in the OAEC course materials, “assessment guides

and grounds design so it is reflective of and responsive to place. The aim of assessment is to

discern a pedagogy of place that allows us to compose with the land and its inhabitants”

(OAEC 2021: 15). In explaining this concept further, Kerry Brady and Brock Dolman

emphasize a distinction between “composing with” and “imposing on” the land, where the

opposition between composition and imposition ascribes a specifically collaborative

character to the act of composing. This is in opposition to non-collaborative engagements of

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ecosystems that are “not rooted in the Earth, but in human ego” (OAEC 2021: 15). The idea

of composing-with (I insert the hyphen here to avoid grammatical confusion in my prose)

moves from an understanding first that all living beings have intrinsic value and that their

lives and deaths are matters of care and concern (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017: 201), aligning in

this sense with the environmentalist philosophical tradition of deep ecology (Witoszek and

Mueller 2017: 210) and with Angarova et al.’s generalized articulation of Indigenous

worldviews discussed in the previous chapter (Angarova et al. 2020). The commitment to

collaborative composition runs counter to capitalocentric constructs of land as commodity or

as resource available for extraction and manipulation. It also counters Western scientific

constructs of land as mute, unresponsive materiality; composing-with discerns, or anticipates,

an agential subjectivity of place, and it is in this sense that the human permaculturist’s

collaboration is understood as “responsive to place” (drawing from excerpt above).

Permaculture listening strategies are thus infused with a sense of responsiveness to place;

this is a “multi-species response-ability” (tracking with Haraway 2016: 10), an ability to

discern and enact collaborative strategies across species difference.

Efforts to compose and collaborate with the land and its inhabitants, however,

inevitably also involve friction and contest, exclusionary and adversarial approaches.

Composing with the land rests first on an ability to identify (or construct) existing contours

of community and camaraderie; listening in this way becomes a practice of familiarization

with the frictions and exclusions that mark a place at its boundaries and also characterize its

more interior relationships. For example, the fence uphill from my garden is high enough to

keep deer from entering and foraging on the tender greens and flowering plants that grow

amongst the fruit trees in the garden. The fence also marks a property line, separating my

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landlords’ parcel from the neighbor’s; the garden’s boundary is determined by this imaginal

property line and by the physical fence that embodies and enforces legal imaginations. In

analogy to the ways in which our human bodies are constructed or brought into being by

social and political discourse (Butler 1999: 12-13), bodies of land are brought into being by

social, political, and legal structures, and inscribed by the power of the settler-colonial state.

The garden that I tend with my landmates emerges, and re-emerges, as a product of these

structures. Along the fenceline patterns of movement are rendered transgressive; histories of

colonial dispossession are perpetuated, the theft of land is masked in a maze of legal

proceedings and market transactions; bureaucracy staked into stone and soil.

But the fence is also permeable to many aspects of the land; foxes slip through the

wire squares and haunt our rabbit hutches and chicken coop at night; squirrels rely on the

upper fence railing as a safe passage between oak trees throughout the day; scrub jays,

titmouses, and sparrows flitter through and over the fence as they forage; the creatures of the

soil, the roots of plants and webs of mycelia spread unheeded by the fence line. The land

itself evades the logic of land ownership, even as ecologies suffer real devastation under

colonial regimes. The fence, as a site of exclusion and surveillance, an embodiment of the

“hygienic State” (Chen 2012: 210), is also always a site of transgression or contamination

(Tsing 2015: 27-28). In sit spot listening, I am oriented toward these earthy contaminations,

perceiving contamination as opportunity or even prerequisite for collaboration and

composing-with. As I hear, again and again, the wash of birdsong descend upon the garden, I

become increasingly familiar with the ways in which the birds and I each give our bodies to

the garden, and the ways in which we each take from the garden into our bodies. My and my

landmates’ efforts to nurture the soil facilitate (in a small but significant way) their foraging

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efforts; conversely, their activities in the garden, their eatings and excretions, keep insect

populations in healthy balance while also adding to soil fertility. Their contaminations in the

garden become, literally, the ground of collaboration. In my sit spot listening, then, I learn to

hear density and variation of birdsong as expression of soil health and ecosystem health, and

as an invitation to further collaborations.

I also hear and experience the fence line that the neighborhood birds transgress so

easily as a form of contamination in itself. As Anna Tsing explains, both contamination and

collaboration are non-innocent concepts; “the diversity that allows us to enter into

collaborations emerges from histories of extermination, imperialism, and all the rest.

Contamination makes diversity” (Tsing 2014: 29). The chatter of birds in the garden also

sounds out the violence of enclosure (Dayanani 2021), as do the dizzying oscillations of my

neighbors’ quadracycle as they race circles in their spacious backyard. The garden and race

track are each aspects of the “audible archive of long-lived relational attunements and

antagonisms that have come to be naturalized as place and voice” (Feld 2017: 93) in west

Petaluma. They each sound out, in different ways, the division of land into bounded

properties, which are at once porous and deadly-solid, at once contaminating and sterilizing;

they give rise to new kinds of interwoven diversities (sonic, machinic, biological, cultural)

while upholding the exterminationist inheritance of the colonial capitalist state that wrought

genocide, dispossession, and discrimination on the Coast Miwok people who are Indigenous

to the land we garden, and who continue to struggle for recognition and reparations (Gilio-

Whitaker 2019: 106-108). Composing-with also means composing within, even if against,

these plural, contradictory realities of non-innocent contamination. Non-innocent

contamination in west Petaluma feels like birdsong bleeding into diesel motors; like the

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barely audible (for me), mostly palpable sub-frequency rumble of trucks on the freeway

rising from the soil into my body; like deer staring at me from uphill across the fence,

stamping their hoofs in territorial display as my dog wanders close to the property line—

boundaries are reinhabited and repurposed for diverse world-making projects. While the deer

come to depend on the fence for their own safety, sleeping alongside it under the shade of

oaks and wild plums, my landmates and I depend on the fence for the safety of the plants and

soil we tend from the deer themselves. We compose with the fence, with all of its trouble, to

create abundant forage for fugitive, trespassing birds.

Conversation and More-than-Human Expressivity

In her chapter contribution to Timothy J. Cooley’s edited volume Cultural

Sustainabilities, folklorist Mary Hufford poses the question; “can it be that patterns of

ecological rationality exhibited in soil communities are replicated in human sociality?”

(Hufford 2019: 21). She engages with biologist David George Haskell’s writing on the

complex information-exchanges and negotiations that characterize root-fungi interactions in

the soil, noting that, in Haskell’s analysis, the “rhizosphere teems with performances of

calling and responding, propositions made and accepted, permissions sought and granted or

refused, functioning for all the world like genres of social communication” (ibid.: 22). Soil

life emanates what Haskell calls “ancient, vital conversation” (quoted in Hufford 2019: 22), a

conversation that, Hufford argues, is “structurally recapitulated in human conversations”

(ibid.: 23). The word conversation can be re-apprehended here in more direct accordance to

its Latin roots; com-, meaning with, and versare the frequentive form of vertere, meaning to

turn. Thus, to converse means to turn with. Roots and fungi turn together in the soil, turn

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together into soil; soil being the ground of lively conversation. Soil conversations emanate

outwards and upwards into the above-ground portions of plants, into the insect and bird and

mammalian bodies that tread and dig through the soil—ecosystems, and eco-social systems,

from this perspective are characterized by a continuity of conversational genres; mycorhizzal

conversations, pollinator conversations, avian conversations, and human conversations. The

replication of multi-species sociality in human sociality that Hufford describes through her

engagement with Haskell constitutes one aspect of this continuity.

Hufford’s repositioning of conversation as an expressive and relational capacity of

soil communities as well as human communities provides a helpful framework for

understanding the kind of conversation that permaculture sit spot listening orients toward.

Conversation is the resonant, tactile, multisensorial object of attention. In posing the

question, “what is the conversation happening before you?” Brady gestures toward more-

than-human modes of expression and communication; the land, and the creatures of the land

(including but not limited to humans), are understood to have conversational and social

capacities. Sit spot listening is positioned in this way as an act of more-than-human sociality,

or what I will call eco-sociality. The droning hum of pollinators foraging amongst blooming

flowers, resonant requests for pollen and nectar; the guttural buzzing of chainsaws limbing

trees and clearing brush; these are also registers of eco-social conversation that interweave

with one another, particularly in the semi-rural environment of west Petaluma.

Perceiving conversation to be ubiquitous and continuous in ecosystems does not

necessarily lend itself to comprehension, however. While individual exchanges, such as a

bumblebee buzz pollinating or sonicating (De Luca et al. 2013: 805-806) the blueberry

blossoms in my garden, might be identified under Haskell’s rubric, and also within the

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permaculture framework, as instances of conversation, the positioning and signification of

these individual exchanges within the broader unfolding conversation(s) of the place as a

whole is not easily discerned or described. What is the relationship between the bumblebee-

blueberry sonication in my garden and the tractor-powered removal of blackberry bramble

from the neighboring property? How does the dusty whisper of bare soil and blackberry

ghosts affect the life choices and opportunities of local bumblebees? Does the tractor work

clear space for more burrowing habitat, prompting an expansion of the local bumblebee

population, or does the removal of the abundant forage that Himalayan Blackberries provide

stress the bumblebees, along with other pollinators and bird species? Taking up another

aspect of the situation, what relationship do I notice between the bumblebee’s conversational

exchange with the blueberry blossom and the moisture of the soil? What kinds of soil is the

blueberry in conversation with? From whom does the blueberry gather the strength and

nurturance to generate desirable nectar and pollen?

Questions like these are not necessarily answered during sit spot listening, and the

aim of sit spot listening is not so much to extract knowledge about these relationships but

rather to dwell amidst them, and to dwell in the uncertainty of the question, “what is the

conversation happening before me?” The act of listening for conversation, following María

Puig de la Bellacasa, is more about “intensifying attentiveness within already existing

relations of interdependency and mutual involvement, rather than setting ethical expectations

on a teleological event that would shift species activity” (2017: 207) or provide some

ultimate answer to questions that arise in the midst of “a potentially immeasurable mesh of

interdependent agencies” (ibid.: 202). While identifying trophic cascades, acoustic patterns,

and other ecosystem processes is directly relevant to the work of permaculture, and an

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important aspect of observation (Ford 2015: 30), attending to the eco-social conversations of

the landform in the sit spot, for Brady, primarily involves a relational and affective

component. So, listening to songbirds, for instance, is not so much about making detailed

species lists and categorizing songs, but about opening “up to a larger sense of place—to the

worlds within worlds in which we exist” (Brady 2021: 198). In her instruction, Brady

suggests that “when we attune to songbirds in our neighborhood, we open up to a new sense

of community and our circle of friends and family members increases” (ibid.). The concept

of friendship will be discussed in more detail in the following section; for now, I reference

Brady’s instruction here to demonstrate the way in which listening to—and becoming

involved in—eco-social conversation with the land and its inhabitants is affectively oriented

toward cultivating to a new sense of community.

Befriending Place: Listening, Intentionality and Positionality

As suggested in the previous paragraph, one of the main intentions of the sit spot

exercise, and of permaculture in general, is to “befriend” the place one is listening to

(OAEC 2021: 21) or to otherwise develop a mutually beneficial eco-social relationship with

that place and the creatures that inhabit and constitute it. Brady explains in a sit spot prompt

that “the objective here is not to simply name things, but to begin (or continue) to build

relationships with them (how much do you know about a person if you only know their

name?)” (OAEC 2021: 145). Here, she gestures toward a conceptualization of place not as a

collection of material objects in space, but as a relational being, an agential subjectivity with

personhood.

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Permaculture discourses around personhood of place emerge in participatory

dialogue with legal, scholarly, and grassroots activisms for rights of nature (Kersten 2017;

Athens 2018) which themselves are informed in local contexts by local Indigenous

worldviews and struggles for geopolitical-ecological sovereignty (Brondizio et al. 2021:

496-497; Kalantzakos 2017; Berros 2017; O’Donnell and Talbot-Jones 2018). Legal-

political arguments for rights of nature, which are often motivated by pragmatic concerns

over the loss of habitat and life-threatening destabilization of planetary systems, are

fundamentally indebted to and allied with animist conceptions of a living, sentient earth. It is

this ontological commitment that also informs permaculture sit spot listening practices, and

which shape listening experiences for permaculturists. Specifically, the listening act is

approached with the anticipation of building relationship, or bonding with the place-as-

person.

Along these lines, permaculture teacher and earth rights activist Starhawk writes that

“when we begin this practice, we can begin to understand something of what it means to be

bonded to a place” (Starhawk 2002: 165). She suggests that developing this kind of bond can

be a deeply political act, as “the whole system we call ‘globalization’ is predicated on the

destruction of this bond. The global corporate economic system has displaced millions of

people. A capitalist economic system needs a workforce of mobile and expendable people,

who can be brought to work when the need for production is high, laid off or transferred

when it’s low” (ibid.: 165). Similarly, economic and legal-political power structures depend

on the normalization of anthropocentric or capitalocentric notions of personhood and the de-

personing of land; “the real arguments against the Rights of Nature do not come from

philosophy but from those actors of social welfare and those with invested economic

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interests, who want to own, use, pollute, or destroy Nature without noteworthy obstacles”

(Kersten 2017:10), and capitalism fundamentally requires the commodification (perceptual,

legal, and material) of land. In this way the intention to befriend a place through person-to-

person or subject-to-subject encounter constitutes a direct application of permaculture’s

prefigurative approach to post-capitalist and counter-colonial futures. In sit spot listening,

the intention and action of listening to landforms outside of the logics of capitalism—and

more in alignment with Aldo Leopold’s land ethic (Nelson 1998) and with diverse

Indigenous orientations to ecological relationality (Nelson 2018)—as eco-social relations

and potential friends rather than a commodities, prefigures legal challenges for rights of

nature and enacts an eco-social reality in which landforms already are beings worthy of

attention and relationship.

Given this prefigurative dimension of sit spot listening, it is also important to note

that the rhetoric of befriending place can presume an openness of place to human friendship,

as well as a human entitlement to listen in on the conversations and eco-social lives of more-

than-human beings. The presumed accessibility of place has particular implications in settler-

colonial contexts, such as Sonoma County, California and the broader United States. For

Euro-American descendants of settlers or immigrants (the majority of permaculturists in the

U.S. context), the underlying conditions of efforts to befriend colonized lands are in many

ways predicated on settler privilege. Namely, as Dina Gilio-Whitaker notes in her

explanation of “the invisible knapsack of settler privilege,” settler and immigrant people can

live (and listen) “anywhere in the US without being disturbed that people of my race or

ethnic group were not systematically killed or displaced so that I could live there” (Gilio-

Whitaker 2018). In this context, Donna Haraway’s remark that “the unwilling heirs of

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colonizers are poorly qualified to set conditions for the recognition of kinship” (2016: 89)

holds enduring relevance.

While Gilio-Whitaker’s argument is somewhat complicated (though certainly not

thrown into question) by the experiences of refugees whose families were and are displaced

by genocides and imperial expansions, or who were brought to the United States against their

will as slaves, she identifies a fundamental difference in Indigenous and non-Indigenous

perception and experience in relation to colonized land. The ongoing trauma and violence of

colonial governance continues to privilege settler and immigrant positionalities, and the

normalization of colonial conditions renders this privilege invisible, its habits of thought and

perception unmarked (Robinson 2020: 10). To the extent that the OAEC’s pedagogy focuses

on the confrontation of colonial realities, befriending colonized land takes on a dimension of

reconciliation or reckoning for settler- and immigrant-descended peoples; the act of listening

ideally becomes a reflexive encounter with one’s own relationship to the traumas and

resurgences of colonized land, as well as with the perceptual filters that are naturalized in

settler-colonial society.

In his discussion of critical listening positionality, Dylan Robinson draws on Mary

Louise Pratt’s notion of the contact zone (Pratt 2008: 7) in order to “consider how listening

takes place as a haptic and proprioceptive encounter with affectively experienced

asymmetries of power” (Robinson 2020: 11). Sit spot listening can (must) be approached as a

contact zone in which human listeners’ experiences are (as always) shaped by lived

relationships to property rights, colonial regimes of cultural and ecological domination, and

hierarchies of race, gender, ability, and species. I will discuss my own listening positionality,

as a hearing-able Euro-American settler- and immigrant-descended male-bodied person, in

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more detail in the following chapter; for the moment my intention is to contextualize the idea

of befriending place as an aspect of permaculture listening discourse that situates the listener

in uneven terrains social-ecological-political power, and prompts the listener to reflect on

what friendship means for their specific embodied relationship to the place to which they are

listening.

Listening Differently: Agonistic Strategies for Grotesque Ecologies

Melissa Nelson’s charge for permaculturists to “listen differently” (as discussed in the

previous chapter) comes into focus through the concepts described above; listening in order

to compose with the land, listening to the conversations of the land, and listening to the land

as a potential friend. These concepts communicate some of the basic premises and terms for

permaculture discourse on listening, and they give rise to a particular “constellation of habits

of thought and expression” (Turino 2008: 103) that in turn shape permaculturists’

experiences of listening to ecosystems, or landforms. Through iterative embodiment of these

discourses, listening becomes a strategy for collaborative eco-social engagement oriented

toward co-composition, conversation, and befriending. As I will discuss below, these

strategies come into friction with hegemonic forms of perception and interaction that reduce

(or enclose) subjectivity to the “legal body” (following Kapchan 2015: 39) of the human

individual. To the extent that “the legal body has become second nature, the one that Western

subjects inhabit most unconsciously” (ibid.), listening becomes an agonistic practice for

Western-enculturated permaculturists wherein multiple ontologies and perspectival regimes

are at play.

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I will reiterate here that listening is not the end goal of permaculture practice, but a

practical aspect of a larger vision of ethical eco-social participation (as outlined in the

previous chapter). The long-term implementation of permaculture designs—the preparation

of soil for seeds or transplants, the contouring of land to encourage water retention, the

everyday care and maintenance of polyculture guilds—entails many diverse skills and

actions beyond listening or protracted and thoughtful observation, and indeed (returning to

Leahy’s argument) it is in the growing of food and the active maintenance of “cultivated

ecosystems” (Mollison and Holmgren 1978: 10) that the bulk of permaculture labor lies. The

ethos of immersive observation that is cultivated in the sit spot exercise is diffused

throughout, and is foregrounded to varying extents depending on the specific needs and

proclivities of different permaculture practitioners. Most (though not all) permaculture

practitioners, in my experience, describe themselves as designers, gardeners, or farmers

before they describe themselves as listeners. Yet, it is recognized as axiomatic that “in order

to compose with a place, deep listening or observation is a foundational practice.” (OAEC

2021: 21).

The rhetorical weight that listening holds in permaculture discourse reflects a

foundational commitment to intersubjective encounter, which itself constitutes an expression

of the movement’s underlying natureculture ontology. Just as “to ‘hear’ a person is to

recognize their subjectivity” (Novak and Sakakeeny 2015: 1), listening serves for

permaculturists as a way of hearing and recognizing a place or landform as an eco-social

person, and thus of recognizing their subjectivity. However, as Dylan Robinson notes in his

discussion of spatial subjectivity in relation to Indigenous and settler ontologies,

intersubjective encounter does not consist in, or result from, the simple imposition of “an

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intersubjective reading upon experience where subject encounter is not felt” (Robinson 2020:

97). While there is great value in the theorization, interpretation, and explanation of

experiences of intersubjective encounter (Titon 2020: 81), these experiences are not reducible

to any analytical framework or philosophical construct that justifies political or ideological

goals; they consist, fundamentally, in a felt sense of connection with another being or subject

in the world. Robinson continues, “while intersubjective encounters [with place or the more-

than-human] may not be frequent for some, they may not occur at all for others, and this may

occur for many reasons including the self-censoring of settler colonialism that avoids certain

kinds of listening experience, and especially ones that would affirm human-nonhuman

relationships” (Robinson 2020: 97-98). While humans regularly engage in cross-species

sociality and intersubjective encounter with pets and other animals (Haraway 2008: 16-17),

Robinson’s point holds particular weight for entities deemed non-living or otherwise too

inhuman by hegemonic Western epistemologies (Robinson 2020: 15-16, 96-97).

Sit spot listening, in the permaculture context of the OAEC, is situated deliberately in

agonistic relationship to these self-censoring patterns of perception, and orients toward the

affirmation of human-nonhuman relationships. However, alternative configurations of

listening cannot simply be applied at will (ibid.: 51); the recognition of spatial subjectivity is

a learned aspect of cultural identity and practice, in the same way that the refusal of spatial

subjectivity must be learned and normalized as an aspect of cultural identity and practice

within hegemonic Western perceptive regimes. Whether variously animist or otherwise, “any

‘authentic’ experience is always-already ensnared in a wily web of discursive mediations”

(Glasson 2016: 88), and “the meaning of an experience or an object does not emerge

spontaneously but is interpreted through historically contingent discourses” (ibid.) which are

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naturalized through practice. The capacity for eco-social perception, experience, and

participation is intended and tended through iterative practices in permaculture, such as the

sit spot listening exercise, directing the listener toward the possibility and reality of

experiencing and encountering a subjectivity of place.

Because permaculturists generally navigate a plurality of ontologies, intersubjective

encounters with more-than-human beings are often approached or experienced with a sense

of uncertainty, multiplicity, or even failure; anthropocentric and individualist expectations of

normative social engagement are disrupted, disappointed, or rendered irrelevant, and the

structure of interaction and conversation becomes warped or defamiliarized. For example,

one of my classmates recounted an experience during their sit spot in which they attempted

unsuccessfully to get the attention of a hummingbird that was hovering and foraging nearby;

they tried to make sounds and communicate verbally with the hummingbird, but the bird just

continued their fluttering and foraging, seemingly unheeding, and eventually darted off. My

classmate reflected, “my presence doesn’t seem to affect them.”

While the hummingbird most likely was aware of and affected by my classmate’s

presence, they did not give a response that my classmate could discern; their subjectivity was

not, in that moment at least, available to acts of interpellation (Althusser 2014: 263-264).

Similarly, I could not, were I so inclined, hail the hummingbirds that visit my garden with an

Althusserian “Hey, you there!”—their subjectivity seems to subvert or shunt this effort. At

other times, hummingbirds will fly directly in front of my face or hover above my head; I

feel the unmistakable, palpable sensation of intersubjective encounter, of being perceived

and assessed, thought about and thought toward. In these moments as well, my own

habituated anticipation of being interpellated is triggered, and my body responds out of habit

as if it

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were being hailed with a “hey, you there!,” but the structure of the interaction diverges from

Althusser’s scenario, and as I remain in the encounter I am compelled, both out of a certain

necessity and out of an uncertain curiosity, toward other modes of apprehending myself, the

hummingbird, and the relational trajectory of our copresence.

The hummingbirds resist interpellation both as individuals and from individuals (such

as myself and my classmate), but this reflects a limitation of the hailing force of ideology

more so than it does an absence of subjectivity in the hummingbird. In thinking through this

encounter, I will suggest that the hummingbird possesses and interacts within what might

better be described as an ecological subjectivity (Diehm 2002: 29-33)—a subjectivity that, as

ecocritical scholar Stephanie Posthumus describes, “is relational [and] cannot be equated

with the individual, as it does not have a single center” (Posthumus 2017: 26). This is not to

erase or diminish the physical, relational, and affective integrity of the hummingbird’s (or

anyone else’s) personal being, but to unsettle the reductive conflation of modern subjectivity

with individuality more broadly (Taylor 1989: 71). Ecological subjectivity, in Posthumus’s

description, “is embodied, but not contained by the body” (Posthumus 2017: 26), it

permeates and “extends beyond the living body” (ibid.: 46). Relatedly, political theorist Jodi

Dean writes against the normative conflation of subjectivity with the individual by re-

fashioning Althusser’s influential theory that ideology interpellates individuals as subjects,

offering the inverse theorization that “the subject is interpellated as an individual” (Dean

2016: 364). “An advantage to reversing the Althusserian account,” Dean suggests, “is that the

subject is not pre-constrained to the individual form,” and “with this reversal, the individual

form itself becomes a problem, the coercive and unstable product of the enclosure of the

common in never-ceasing efforts to repress, deny, and foreclose collective political

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subjectivity” (ibid.: 367). Recognizing that “the individual is itself an imaginary figure” (a

socio-political fiction), she positions this figure specifically as a product of “bourgeois

ideology that treats conditions that are collective and social, embedded in histories of

violence and systems of exploitation, as if they were relationships specific to an individual,

as if states arose through individual consent, as if politics were a matter of personal choice,

and as if desires and capacities, affects and will naturally originate from and reside in an

individual form” (ibid.: 368).

While Dean is focused on theorizing political subjectivity, her writing aligns with

Posthumus’ conception of ecological subjectivity as preceding and exceeding the individual

form, and her conceptualization of “the individual as a form of enclosure” (ibid.: 369) signals

a link between the enclosure of landforms and the enclosure of the bodies who would inhabit,

traverse, and constitute those landforms. Here she also converges with permaculture’s anti-

capitalist philosophy, which orients explicitly (if strugglingly) toward the subversion of

enclosures. OAEC co-instructor Gopal Dayaneni makes this link clear in his assertion that

whereas “all enclosures ultimately must be maintained through violence,” strategies of

resisting are “entirely about relationships, entirely about community, it’s entirely about being

in communities of practice, communities of care” (Dayaneni, personal communication 2021).

In articulating the need for community-based strategies against the violence of enclosure,

Dayaneni gives a critical reading of Descartes’ theory of mind: “You can say ‘I think

therefore I am,’ it’s the super individualistic, the foundation of the sort of rational mind

business, but guess what, you only have a name because you are not alone…before anything,

we are nodes of relationship, and that’s the thing that matters, that’s the only thing that

matters” (ibid.). Like other forms of deviant subjectivity (Jack 2019: 7-9), permacultural

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subjectivities emerge and merge in a collective ethos; but the collective imaginary is recast

within the assertion that “what you do to the land, you do to the people, and what you do to

the people, you do to the land” (Dayaneni, personal communication 2021). Social solidarities

are enmeshed within ecological solidarities, just as subjectivities are understood to emerge

across nodes of relationship between bodies in social-ecological systems.

The theorization of subjectivity in relation to embodiment, furthermore, can be set in

dialogue with Deborah Kapchan’s concept of the sound body which, like ecological

subjectivity, disrupts neoliberal commitments to enclosure and individuality. Kapchan

defines the sound body against the “legal body,” which “is equated with property—and

specifically with property-in-the-person,” a body whose “boundaries are the edges of the

skin” (Kapchan 2015: 39). In contrast to the legal body, “The sound body, however, resists

the property principle” (ibid., italics in original), just as ecological subjectivity resists

interpellation as individual. In this way Kapchan’s figure of the sound body offers a relevant

conceptual tether to the kind of eco-social subjectivity that Dayaneni articulates from the

permaculture framework; a body that resists the violence of enclosure, and that emerges as a

relational node in eco-social assemblages. The sound body is “a resonant body that is porous,

that transforms according to the vibrations of its environment, and correspondingly

transforms that environment” (ibid.: 38). Thinking about ecological subjectivity in terms of

the sound body concept helps move toward a conception of the sensorial character of

ecological subjectivities; what they sound like and how they are perceived.

I am drawn by this inquiry to another moment in my fieldwork in which I

encountered hummingbirds in the garden. In the late morning of September 13th, during my

sit spot listening practice, I heard the thrumming and chipping of two hummingbirds dancing

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around one another while they gathered nectar from coyote mint beneath a young pluot tree

—the dizzy purring of tiny iridescent wings and thin scratchy voices pulsing in and amongst

the mint and calendula flowers, who bloomed steadfast in the dry heat of the California fall,

yielding their precious watery nectar to the foraging birds. A small but intense commotion. I

observe the magnetism of plant bodies toward avian bodies as the birds merge with the

flowers, their wingbeats making rainbow extensions to the purple petals, their resonant

throats drinking in and sounding out the vitality of nectar. The acoustic signals that pulse

from the hummingbird bodies belong, in this moment, equally to the bodies of the coyote

mint, whose nectar forms a sweet, watery tether from the soil to the air, from the creatures of

the soil to the creatures of the air. This is the sound of remembering where water is on the

land, of where sweetness emerges, of an invitation and a request for pollination, of water

slipping in and out of transforming bodies in conversation. This is the sound of

making-with; of critters not preceding their relatings (Haraway 2017: M25); of long-lived,

and short-lived, relational attunements; attunements of desire and sensibility becoming

collective resonance (Feld 2017: 93).

I perceive the quick wingbeats and chipping voices as the sound of mint on the land,

the becoming-audible of lively relationships that constitute the garden as landform. Tracking

with Dean, the desires and capacities that play out in the garden do not seem to originate

from or reside in an individual form, whether an individual hummingbird or an individual

coyote mint, but they coalesce as a relational density that animates the space between and

within hummingbirds and coyote mint flowers with affective tension. Their bodies extend

toward one another, resound together and form one another in pliant ambiguity (Kapchan

2015: 38). Eventually, as hummingbird bodies fall to the ground and decompose, coyote

mint

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may take digested bits of their dulled feathers and softened bones up through their roots.

Birds and plants (like all creatures) grow into and out of one another from the soil to the air;

their ecological subjectivity extends beyond living bodies, permeating the porous, shifting

body of the garden.

Kapchan’s theorization of the sound body against the legal body has an intellectual

predecessor in Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptualization of the grotesque against the bourgeois

body. The bourgeois body, analogous to the legal body, is constructed on “the ‘classic canon’

of the body” (Bell 1994: 74), itself grounded in ideological and material commitments to an

individualistic sense of self; “the significant feature about the classic body is that it is an

individual body” (ibid.), strictly limited and impenetrable (Bakhtin 1984: 320). As Bakhtin

describes: “The body of the new canon is merely one body…All that happens within it

concerns it alone, that is, only the individual, closed sphere. Therefore, all the events taking

place within it acquire one single meaning: death is only death, it never coincides with birth”

(Bakhtin 1984: 321; also quoted in Bell 1994: 74). The grotesque body, in contrast, is

characterized by its porosity and its openings; “all these convexities and orifices have a

common characteristic; it is within them that the confines between bodies and the world are

overcome” (Bakhtin 1984: 317). Ecologist Michael Bell builds on Bakhtin toward a theory of

bourgeois and grotesque ecologies (1994: 77). In a grotesque ecology, bodies inhabit,

consume, grow into and out of one another, “death is a part of birth, fertility, and plenty, the

living cycle of grotesque unity” (Bell 1994: 74). Following Bakhtin, Bell locates grotesque

ecology in the consciousness of medieval European folk culture, in which the sense of self

“was oriented toward the collective of people and nature, not the individual” (Bell 1994: 71).

The ideological tools of the bourgeois body and bourgeois ecology, in Bell’s analysis of

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Bakhtin, necessarily accompany the hierarchical individualism of statist class formations;

they oppose, or pathologize, what he calls the grotesque body and grotesque reality, in which

the body is not experienced as a “terminal creation” but “a point of transition in a life

eternally renewed, the inexhaustible vessel of death and conception” (Bakhtin 1984: 318;

Bell 1994: 72).

The garden, as a sound body and an assemblage of sound bodies, is in this sense

grotesque. In their openness to the world, they exceed the legal boundaries that are imposed

upon them; their soil grows or erodes across and beneath property lines, their creatures dig

and crawl and fly and root fugitive routes. They resist the property principle; they “sound and

resound but cannot be captured” (Kapchan 2015: 39). In copresence with the garden, I am

also a sound body, porous and part of the garden, my flesh and intention dwell in them and

animate them, and in turn I am animated by the garden. Rather than listening to capture, or

sounding to enclose, I am compelled to attend to the ways in which “sound—as affect, as

vibration—heralds a new body” (ibid: 42). I attend to the ways in which my own body is

rendered grotesque, as is the body of the garden and their holoent constituencies (Haraway

2017: M25, this term is explained in more detail below)—we transform and are transformed.

My capacity to witness and enter into conversation with the sound body of the garden hinges,

to some extent, on my ability to inhabit myself as a porous, sound body, and to understand

myself as inhabited by the garden even as I inhabit the garden, as a node of relationships.

Brock Dolman, in permaculture parlance, refers to this kind of copresence as “receding into,”

or becoming “infused within” a place; a relational process that he identifies as crucial to sit

spot listening (Dolman, personal communication 2021). Having receded into a place, Dolman

suggests, “you begin accumulating observation…that begins to build a narrative, begins to

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support you with a pattern, and you begin to be in that beginners mind, some might call that

gestalt, you might call it intuition, you might call it pattern understanding” (ibid.). This

intuitive, experiential understanding of the ethos of place emerges not just through being in a

place but through being open to the affective aspects of mutual, dialogic transformation that

constitute the place. Undergirding the intention to “let the land speak to you, let the birds

speak to you, let the slopes, the stones, all of the animate force of that place” (ibid.) come

into conversation, is an openness to transformation through encounter.

While Brock’s instruction to “let the land speak to you” computes only, perhaps, as a

fairytale metaphor within the paradigm of legal bodies and bourgeois ecologies, it takes on a

different density of meaning in the framework of sound bodies and grotesque ecologies.

Grotesque forms of dialogic communication weave across the “convexities and orifices”

(revisiting Bakhtin 1984: 317) of grotesque bodies in subversive friction with the logics of

enclosure. Illuminating this point, folklorist Mary Hufford notes that “Bakhtin’s distinction

between dialogic and monologic forms of communication (1981) mirrors his distinction

between grotesque and classical bodies” (Hufford 2019: 22), as well as Bell’s distinction

between grotesque and bourgeois-classical ecologies. “Dialogism is a problem for class

society,” Hufford continues, “because, like the grotesque body, dialogue engages

reciprocities that undermine class [and, I will add, species] distinction” (ibid.). She also

extends Bakhtin’s sense of dialogic communication toward “a dialogue that anticipates and

connects the conversations of humans to the more-than-human dialogues surrounding us”

(ibid.: 25). Dialogic conversation, as an enactment of subjectivity, is conceived here not as an

action of individuals, but as an inherently collective and co-constituting ecological process

that subverts individualist logics of enclosure. This logic of enclosure, for Hufford, is

enacted

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through “the monological discourse of the corporate state [that] opposes the inclusivity of

the dialogical discourse of communing, violently shutting down reciprocities hard-wired into

ecologies and social interaction, reciprocities that come to be seen as ‘pathological’”

(Hufford 2019: 28). It is the hegemony of monological discourse, returning to Dylan

Robinson’s discussion of intersubjective encounter, that undergirds the “self-censoring of

settler colonialism” (Robinson 2020: 97-98) and resists perceptions and experiences that

would affirm human-nonhuman relationships. This is a monologic self-censoring wherein

“communications are scoured of perspective and agency; its subjects lurk under cover of

passive voice. Its monocular gaze sees nothing looking back” (Hufford 2019: 28).

Anna Tsing presents a similar argument in developing her concept of contamination

(mentioned above with regard to eco-social conversation), which aligns in many ways with

the concept of grotesque ecology. She traces the mythology of individualism to hegemonic

trends in twentieth century scholarship (particularly biology and economics) that favored

“the self-contained individual actor, out to maximize personal interests” as a fundamental

unit of analysis. If this “assumption of self-containment made an explosion of new

knowledge possible,” it was only because “thinking through self-containment and thus the

self-interest of individuals (at whatever scale) made it possible to ignore contamination, that

is, transformation through encounter” (Tsing 2015: 28) and, setting Tsing in dialogue with

Hufford and Bakhtin, to justify monologic modes of the knowledge production. For Tsing,

contamination is about understanding that “we change through our collaborations both within

and across species” and that “the evolution of our ‘selves’ is already polluted by histories of

encounter” (ibid.: 28-29). The “modern human conceit,” Tsing argues “ blocks attention to

patchy landscapes, multiple temporalities, and shifting assemblages of humans and

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nonhumans: the very stuff of collaborative survival” (ibid.: 19-20). Collaborative survival is

contaminated, grotesque, and, as Tsing emphasizes, always precarious (Ibid.: 20-21). What I

draw from Tsing with regard to ecological subjectivity is the suggestion that subjectivity, like

precarity, is about “being vulnerable to others” (Ibid.: 20), porous (Kapchan 2015: 42), or,

tracking with Hufford, being “open to the world” (Hufford 2019: 22) like the grotesque body,

contaminated, displaying “all the stages of life: birth, death, decay, going to seed,

composting, harboring all manner of creatures” (ibid.).

Tsing’s call to develop “arts of noticing” the contaminations that make collaborative

survival possible also align with the OAEC’s discourse around sit spot listening and the

emphases on composing-with and conversation described above. Sit spot listening, I suggest,

moves toward (or from, or better both) the noticing of contaminations, and the noticing of

grotesque ecological subjectivities. My and my classmate’s attempts to hail our respective

hummingbird neighbors with a proverbial “hey, you there!” offers a valuable teaching

moment in this respect. The failed hailings were predicated on the interpellation of the

subject as an individual hummingbird, rather than ecological subjectivities; enculturated into

bourgeois conceptions of the body as individual, and in monologic refusal of grotesque

ecological subjectivity, these hailings attempt to interpellate (enclose, or capture) a subject in

the body of the hummingbird. When “the monocular gaze sees nothing looking back,” or

hears no subjective response from the imagined individual, the hummingbird is thus “scoured

of perspective and agency” (revisiting Hufford 2018: 28). Habits of perception “acquired

over time through ideological state apparatuses at the heart of subjectivation” (Robinson

2020: 10) that assume the self-contained individual actor as a basic “unit of analysis” (Tsing

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2015: 28) render imperceptible any collective ecological subjectivity that the hummingbirds

might embody.

Perceptual Dialogue and Holoent Noise

The sit spot exercise is situated by Kerry Brady, Brock Dolman, and the OAEC, as

an invitation to de-familiarize monologic experiencing and engage in more grotesque modes

of conversation. In the invitation to “let the land speak to you” (Dolman, personal

communication 2021), the metaphorical use of the verb ‘speak’ does not reference linguistic

speech acts between individual persons, but rather to the ways in which the animate force of

a place is expressed through the relationships between the bodies that constitute that place,

that constantly make and unmake one another as they make place. This speech is more akin

to what Bakhtin calls “living speech acts,” (in Hufford 2019: 26) which, as Hufford writes

“engage the mute dialogue of perception” (ibid.: 25-26); weaving between Bakhtin and

Merleau Ponty, Hufford articulates living speech as a “a site of world making at the

interstices of human and more-than-human being” (ibid.). World making here signifies a

“perceptual dialogue” (ibid.) a generative process of sensing and being sensed.

Brock speaks of landforms in terms of “units of perception” (following House 1999:

152) that are embedded and nested within one another. For example, the hummingbird

(staying with our small case study) is a unit of perception nested within a hillside (the same

hillside I inhabit), which forms part of a watershed (named the Burdell Mountain watershed

by the settler-colonial state) which is a larger, differentiated but coconstituting unit of

perception. One of the goals of permaculture practice, Dolman suggests, is to develop the

capacity to “think like a watershed” (Dolman, personal communication 2020)—a more

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specific iteration of Eunice Neves’ similar statement, discussed in the previous chapter, on

learning to think like an ecosystem. The watershed’s perception emerges from the distributed

experiences of the many creatures who animate the waters of the rivers and creeks and the

soils of the riparian zones and flood plains; the fish spawning, migrating, dying, becoming

living soil and wood; the trees seeding, rooting, growing, falling; the water, rushing into and

out of roots and hearts and bodies. All of these bodies and their relational ties form the

porous, poly-corporeal body of the watershed, and their corporeal perceptions and

expressions coalesce as the expression and perception of the watershed. This is the “dialogic

world” that Hufford describes in relation to Bakhtin’s dialogism and Bell’s grotesque

ecology.

The continuity of perceptual dialogue, drawing still from Hufford and Merleau Ponty,

“continually deposits and replenishes” a “‘soil’ or ‘flesh’ of sensibility…a lining that gives

rise to perceiver and perceived, subject and object, namer and named” (Hufford 2019: 25).

Perception, for Merleau-Ponty’s sensory phenomenology, is “not the operation of an active

subject on a passive object. Rather, perception is a collaborative, mutually constitutive

activity” (ibid.). The flesh of sensibility “marks the point at which the sensing of ‘intertwines

with the sensible, and this intertwining is carnal” (ibid.). Perception is rearticulated here as a

web of collaborations, contests, and copresences, a thing that arises between, rather than

within, perceptive and perceived bodies.

The living speech acts of birds and stones and slopes and “all the animate force of

place” (Dolman, personal communication 2021) emerge from this collective flesh of

sensibility, forming what Donna Haraway calls “sympoietic patterning” (2017: M26), a

phrase she uses in reference to the ways in which “critters do not precede their relatings; they

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make each other through semiotic material involution, out of the beings of such

entanglements” (ibid.). Haraway builds on M. Beth Dempster’s concept of sympoiesis as a

term for “collectively producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal

boundaries” where “information and control are distributed among components” (ibid.:

M27), noting that ultimately “sympoiesis is a simple word; it means ‘making with.’ Nothing

makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing” (ibid.: M25). Here Haraway

converges with the critiques of bounded individualism presented above, and advocates for a

language and practice that can account for and attend to “symbiotic assemblages, at

whatever scale of space or time, which are more like knots of diverse intra-active relatings in

dynamic complex systems than like the entities of biology made up of pre-existing bounded

units” (Ibid.: M26). She offers the term holoent as a grounding figure for sympoiesis; the

holoent being a polycorporeal assemblage that encompasses “the biotic and abiotic in

dynamic sympoietic patterning” (ibid.). Haraway’s holoent is a character of Bell’s grotesque

ecology, an unbounded shape-shifting “existential territory” (Guattari in Posthumus 2017:

32) that is imbued with distributed ecological subjectivity.

Permaculture listening discourses, I suggest, gesture and intend toward a world of

holoents—porous assemblages of different lifeforms within which units of perception are

understood to coalesce. The listening act, within this frame, is positioned discursively and

experientially as an act of attending to holoent conversations, of composing with holoent

assemblages, and making friends, or making kin (riffing on Haraway 2016: 2, 11) with

holoent subjectivities. This holoent orientation, which decouples subjectivity from

individuality, prompts strategies for listening and sounding that diverge from individualist

conceptions of social and ecological interaction. It unsettles habitual modes of listening to,

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from, and for an individual body (as described above). But if the holoent is a helpful figure

for thinking away from the individual and toward ecological subjectivity, it are also puzzling

for this same reason. Because they are persistently non-discrete in all aspects, always

inviting contamination, they confound positivistic attempts to extract knowledge about them;

“without self-contained units, it is impossible to compute costs and benefits, or functionality,

to any ‘one’ involved” (Tsing 2015: 34). The coyote mint blossoms in the garden display the

vitality of soil microbes and plastic irrigation tubing, their bodies are both compost and

cyborg. They resound with municipal water systems and hummingbirds, as the garden itself

resonates sympathetically with the rumble of cargo trucks and coyote howls. Holoents

intrude into and become parts of one another; in listening to the holoent-garden I am at every

moment drawn to the resonance of their “convexities and orifices,” their openness to and as

the world. Noise proliferates.

Noise becomes a helpful concept for thinking with, and listening within holoents.

Noise is a resonant manifestation of contamination, “the unintentional and unwanted”

(Novak 2015: 126). For modern fixations on acoustic (as well as social and ecological)

fidelity and cleanliness, the persistence of noise constitutes an ever-present reminder that

“truly nothing is sterile” (Haraway 2019: 29). Noise intrudes into the enclosure of the

classical body and re-affirms porosity and vulnerability; a resonance of the grotesque.

Theorizing noise in terms of social circulation, David Novak observes that “noise stands for

subjectivities of difference that break from normative social contexts”, and, I will add,

normative eco-social contexts. He also notes that noise “interpellates marginal subjects into

circulation, giving name to their unintelligible discourses even as it holds apart unfamiliar

ways of being” (ibid.: 130). Discourses of noise are shown to reinforce racial ideologies, as

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in the labelling of “the music and speech of slaves as noise” (ibid.) as well as class

ideologies, as in the targeting of working class and migrant communities; in Victorian

England, Novak writes, “noise echoed the unrest of the brawling, milling crowd, with its

rude dialects and unconstrained bodily sounds of work, sex, digestion, and disease” (Novak

2015: 130, drawing from Smith 1999; Picker 2003; Schwartz 2011). Noise references at once

the grotesque and the collective, as well as the anxiety of the unmarked positionality (the

body of the classical canon) that wields the term as a technique of (futile) dissociation.

Legacies of Lo-fi and Hi-fi Listening

These bourgeois-colonialist ideologies of dissociation also operate on the more-than-

human scale, particularly with regard to landforms and wilderness discourses; here, noise

comes to represent the intrusion of unwanted human bodies into colonial fantasies of a

pristine wilderness. High-fidelity representations of wilderness spaces as noise-less ecologies

are most often products of technological mediation—whale and bird song recordings, nature-

sound meditation tracks, and digital archives (Krause 2015: 26; Blumstein et al. 2011: 759-

760)—and techno-industrial imaginations. R. Murray Schafer’s soundscape concept,

grounded in a discourse of lo-fi (industrial) and hi-fi (pastoral or wild), falters precisely in its

inability to account for the irony of its own entanglement in “the very modern technologies

of sound reproduction that Schafer decries as sources of ‘lo-fi’ pollution” (Eisenberg 2015:

198). The soundscape, in this sense, presents sound in the framework of the “classical canon

of the body,” which dissociates from the pollution, or noise, ascribed to urban modernity.

Listening for hi-fi soundscapes precludes the possibility of hearing holoents in all their noisy

contaminations; their machinic brilliance and subtle muddy whisperings.

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Hi-fi perceptual regimes also construct and police sonic and eco-social boundaries,

interpellating undesirable and desired subjectivities of difference. This is seen, for instance,

in the compartmentalizations of biophony and geophony against anthrophony, as outlined by

Bernie Krause (2011: 11-12) and operationalized in the overlapping disciplines of acoustic

ecology, soundscape ecology and ecoacoustics (Pijanowski et al. 2011: 204; Farina 2018: 28-

29). Biophony, geophony, and anthrophony or technophony are studied for their

interrelationships in the context of complex socioecological systems, wherein the synergies

of the “three sources, when combined, create unique acoustic signatures or soundscapes”

(Farina 2018: 28-29). Analytical models in these disciplines tend to emphasize “two

unidirectional components between humans and soundscapes” (Pijanowski et al. 2011: 205);

first, “in the direction of humans to soundscapes…anthropogenic sounds often permeate

natural landscapes. Unwanted sound, or noise, is a common issue in cities globally, and the

problem has spread to more rural and remote areas”; and, second, “in the opposing direction,

soundscapes can influence human well-being” (ibid.). Here, acoustic expressions of

ecosystem health are reduced to a “natural resource” (ibid.), stripped of subjectivity,

monitored, and managed by academic and political institutions such as the US National Park

Service (NPS), which “recognizes the importance of healthy soundscapes for positive park

visitor experiences” (ibid.). In this disciplinary framework, noise represents the pathologized

presence of the human (the anthropological order) in the natural world (the cosmological

order), reifying the separation of Nature and Culture (Ochoa-Gautier 2016: 108). Even as

these orders are understood to be inter-related, their inter-relations are cast as unidirectional,

or monologic. While this narrow focus allows for the proliferation of valuable knowledge on

the “effects of anthropogenic noise on animals” (Blumstein et al. 2011: 761, also see Rossi-

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Santos 2015), the methodological focus on isolation and quantitative analyses of

unidirectional effects across constructed boundaries of Nature and Culture can predispose a

failure to “notice” (following Tsing 2015: 28) the fundamental conditions of contamination

that precede categories of anthrophony, geophony, or biophony.

Permaculture discourse on listening also engages, to an extent, with unidirectional

conceptions of human-to-soundscape interrelatedness. The sit spot exercise, for instance, is

presented as “a powerful antidote to the pervasive disconnect that is present for so many

people in modern industrial times” (Brady in OAEC 2021: 21). This mirrors one of the

threshold concepts of soundscape ecology; that “the natural world is the most information-

rich environment that humans can experience [and] some of the most important information

conveyed is through sound” (Pijanowski et al. 2011: 205). This assertion, following in the

tradition of Schafer and the World Soundscape Project, relies on the contrasting juxtaposition

of modern urban soundscapes “as containing little acoustic information” and “reinforcing a

growing disconnect between humans and nature” (Pijanowski et al 2011: 205). Permaculture

demonstrates a similar concern regarding the “degenerative disturbances” (Dolman 2016: 54)

of urban and industrial expansion and the experiential alienation of human beings from their

eco-social arrangements, although this concern is articulated from a somewhat different

epistemological position, grounded as it is in the conviction that “we are nature working”

(Yanez 2013). From this standpoint, anthrophony cannot be disarticulated from biophony and

geophony without enacting some level of violence-through-enclosure. Beyond the

recognition that the noise of anthrophony is integral to the imagined “voices of the wild”

(Krause 2012), permaculture’s natureculture ontology positions noise as an expression of the

fundamental co-constitution of nature and culture (Trauger 2017: 44). For this reason, sit spot

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listening, for permaculturists, doesn’t need to happen in a wild space free of the intrusive

pollutions of industry. Indeed, sit spot listening is considered equally crucial and rewarding

in urban centers as in remote rural spaces.

Noise also figures into intersubjective encounters with landforms in terms of the

listener’s own sounding body; sit spot pedagogy generally instructs the listener to be as still

and silent as possible for the duration of the exercise. Dolman describes this as creating “an

energy field where the disturbance ring that you’re putting out gets narrower and your

awareness ring gets larger” (Dolman, personal communication 2021). Here, the listener’s

body is recognized as a potential source of noise, or of disturbing copresence. There are also

clear parallels to Dolman’s awareness-to-disturbance ratio and the signal-to-noise ratio

common in soundscape discourses; a wider disturbance ring correlates to lo-fi listening

experiences, with little meaningful information coming through in comparison to the

narrower disturbance ring which yields (in tandem with a wider awareness ring) a more

information-rich listening experience.

However, the conception of noise in opposition to signal, as theorized in soundscape

ecology, is premised on a unidirectional model of human-to-environment inter-relation (as

described above) that does not characterize Dolman’s conceptualization of disturbance in

opposition to awareness. Dolman’s concept of disturbance is rooted, rather, in an experiential

understanding of intersubjective encounter; a fundamental recognition of multidirectional

communicative copresence, and a recognition that humans are not only listening, but being

listened to by the land and its inhabitants (Robinson 2020: 98). This understanding informs a

protocol of engagement grounded in a particular concept of respect. As Michael Ford writes

in his introduction to permaculture observational practices:

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Approach the area slowly and with reverence, because as you approach and enter, you

will change the energy and activity taking place there. Allow yourself time to sit or lie

down in each area, and wait patientontly until the land slowly returns back to its

routine and comes back to life with you and your energy now blended in to the whole.

Remain silent and passive until your presence is accepted by all, and then continue to

be quiet and respectful. (Ford 2015: 30)

Kerry Brady expresses a similar sentiment in her sit spot instruction, noting that “by staying

for a longer period, you increase your ability to merge more fully with the landscape, and to

experience the beings of that place in ‘baseline,’ without threats” (Brady in OAEC 2021: 22).

Interestingly, the concept of merging or blending with the whole (holistic, holoent) landscape

or landform hinges here on an etiquette of quietude; an idealization of a noise-less listener.

This is another of the tensions that permaculturists navigate in sit spot listening; the idea that,

while “we are nature working,” we are working across difference, and the acoustic

expressivity of the landform depends, in part, on the relative silence of the human listener.

When I approach my garden, foraging birds will flutter out of reach into the canopies

of the larger trees, gophers will go silent, pausing their work underground in assessment of

my approach. If I sit still and silent, however, after about twenty minutes, the garden holoent

will return to what Kerry calls “baseline,” a dynamic but relatively calm state of everyday-

ness; creatures going about their daily endeavors without alarm. Baseline flows are often

disrupted by perceived threats. For example, if scrub jays spot a coyote lying beneath an oak

tree, they will sound an alarm that ripples throughout the holoent (animal behavior scientists,

and permaculturists for that matter, refer to jays as sentinel species for this reason).

Conspicuous silence can also constitute the perception of threat; as my arriving footsteps

alert the birds, they retreat and pause their chatter, waiting to assess my presence and

intention. To become familiar with the eco-social conversations of a place, it is necessary to

become acquainted with the various baseline states of that place throughout different times

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day and across the seasons. Otherwise, the silences that mark the presence of potential

predators (including humans) may be mistaken for a relative mute-ness of place or a lack of

biodiversity. Similarly, the alarm calls of birds and mammals may be assumed as random,

pervasive sounds without the experiential awareness that builds from witnessing the patterns

of movement that accompany these alarm calls, and the ways in which the landform, as a

holoent assemblage, transforms and re-integrates through these resonant expressions.

Developing familiarity and discernment with regard to the affective fluctuations of eco-social

conversations entails, within the permaculture frame, strategies of slowing down, becoming

still, and becoming quiet. These strategies are adopted in recognition of the porous nature of

the listener’s own “sound body” as it merges with the sound bodies of holoent forms.

I am writing holoents here as “sound bodies” (Kapchan 2015: 38), and also as noise

bodies—thinking alongside David Novak’s assessment of noise as “‘pollution’ that degrades

the sonic balance of nature” (Novak 2015: 129). What noise degrades, I suggest, is more

precisely the nature of bourgeois ecology (returning to Bell 1994 and Hufford 2019). The

ecological subjectivity of holoents, in their inevitable noisy pollutions, confounds the

categories of Nature and Culture, human and nonhuman; my garden is plastic, prosthetic,

fugitive, feral, human and humus (living soil), and resounds as such. They also confound the

category of the individual, in that their resonances are thoroughly intrusive and intruded

upon; resonant bodies collide and mingle in and as holoents; signal-to-noise ratios become

confused in multidirectional webs of expression. Holoent conversations evade enclosure as a

series of isolated, coherent sounds. In this way the concept of noise, as theorized by Novak

and other sound studies scholars, becomes critically relevant to the theorizations of

ecological subjectivity that I have woven together above, and to permaculture discourses on

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listening. Ecological subjectivities resist interpellation as individual, and they are rendered

unintelligible within hegemonic perceptive regimes; their grotesque expressivity can only be

discerned reductively as competing layers of noise. Hearing holoent subjectivity, then, also

entails listening against the category of noise, resisting the tendency to experience noise as

“the discursive borderline that separates one kind of person, or sound, or place absolutely

from another and ultimately reduces all the ‘noncultural’ elements that cannot be folded into

normative systems of meaning” (Novak 2015: 133). Listening differently, tracking again

with Melissa Nelson’s concept, entails dwelling in the borderline, or the edge-zone (an

important permaculture concept with various applications) where different kinds of persons,

sounds, and places fold into and become-with one another.

Listening and Eco-Social Life

The eco-social conversations and collaborations that permaculture listening attends to

become sites of nonnormative meaning-making; they trouble normative systems of social and

ecological engagement. At the same time, these troubling conversations often take place in

non-spectacular, subtle ways. While not normative, or even ordinary in the sense of

following orders, they are quite everyday intra-actions (Barad 2007: 33; Browning 2020:

500); turning the compost pile, feeling the heat and wreak of tiny lives, writhing and

whispering and shuddering subtly against my skin; fixing leaks in the irrigation lines that

bring precious water to our plant companions in the long dry season, hearing the hollow

plastic pop resonate throughout the empty tube as I pull out a broken emitter and mend the

prosthetic artery of the garden; studying the steady alarm calls of scrub jays in the oak trees

as they track the patient movements of coyotes on the hillside; the small crunch of dry oak

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leaves from somewhere behind me as I dig; the tiny inaudible suck of nectar from blossom to

beak.

I am reminded, amidst the lively resonant space of the garden, that “every movement

is in fact vibration, and every vibration has sound, however audible to the human ear. What

we cannot hear, we can sense. Intuition is this: awareness of the body perceiving, the senses

moving” (Kapchan 2015: 34). I am aware of my body perceiving, but I am also aware of

other bodies perceiving, of distributed perceptual dialogue that leaves “a lining of visibility

between the viewer and the visible, of audibility between the hearer and the audible, of

tangibility between the toucher and the touched” (Hufford 2019: 25). These relational linings

lend a thickness to the atmosphere of the garden for me—a thickness that emerges from my

experiences and feelings within the garden. Deborah Kapchan calls this “sound knowledge—

a nondiscursive form of affective transmission resulting from acts of listening” (2015: 34).

Sound knowledge is the “fruit” of perception, or, setting Kapchan in conversation Merleau

Ponty (who she also engages in her theorization), sound knowledge is the fruit of perceptual

dialogue, the collective flesh of sensibility.

The accumulation of sound knowledge through perceptual dialogue, I suggest, forms

the ground of eco-social life for holoent beings. In other words, permaculture efforts toward

befriending place or engaging in eco-social conversation and collaboration, as described at

length above, hinge on the capacity to accumulate “affective transmissions resulting from

acts of listening” (Kapchan 2015: 34). Indeed human-human friendships and collaborations

similarly hinge on such affective transmissions; non-spectacular, everyday acts of

worldmaking all the way down. So, in the same way that human conversational genres re-

enact or recapitulate soil conversations (returning to Hufford 2019: 23), human sociality can

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be argued to re-enact or recapitulate eco-socialities. The intention here is not to dismiss the

critical role of difference and flatten relationality to a universal principle of vibratory

copresence, but rather to attend to the subtle ways in which the boundaries of the social are

made porous to noisy sympoietic contaminations, and to tend to the ways in which the

affective transmissions that characterize more-than-human relationships figure into eco-

social life in specific ways.

I have given several examples in the discussion above of specific ways in which

permaculture listening orients toward eco-social life (such as through the precarious

intention to befriend), and also to the ways in which the listener is positioned asymmetrically

within ecological subjectivities (such as through the etiquette of quietude), but questions

remain (as always), particularly regarding the contours and limits of participatory listening

and sounding. To what extent is the silence (and sound) that characterizes sit spot listening

participatory or non-participatory? How do the contours of participation shift outside of the

structure of the sit spot exercise, in everyday engagements with holoent landforms? In the

following chapter I will turn to more in-depth discussion of my field study, as a way of

addressing these questions.

In weaving this extended theoretical dialogue across sound studies, political

philosophy, and feminist ecologies, my intention is not to render listening as an abstract

thought experiment, but to demonstrate what is at stake in the experiential act of listening for

permaculturists. What is at stake is the personhood of more-than-human beings; the rupturing

of eco-cidal political imaginations; the possibility of friendship across difference and amidst

the violence of enclosure; the experiential vibrancy of eco-social life. While (most)

permaculturists do not use the concepts of sympoiesis, or holoent, or contamination (in

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Tsing’s sense of the word), grotesque ecology, ecological subjectivity, or sound knowledge, I

find this constellation of scholarly discourses helpful in communicating these stakes in a way

that allows for (or effectively demands) a slower reading of permaculture listening strategies

and the sit spot exercise in general. While superficial readings of sit spot listening as

solipsistic “nature connection” or utilitarian “site assessment” can quickly conjure all of the

trappings of wilderness mythology, settler privilege, and the mystical privileging of sound, it

is worthwhile, I hold, to think more slowly with the sit spot as a method of “shifting the

places, models, and structures of how we listen” (Robinson 2020: 97). In this vein, I have

presented the sit spot and the “constellation of habits of thought and expression” (Turino

2008: 103) that it engenders as a mode of grappling with the lesson that “all enclosures must

be maintained through violence” (Dayaneni, personal communication 2021), and as a way of

accumulating sound knowledge both within and against the realities of enclosure as they

resonate in geopolitical, material, and eco-social registers.

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Chapter 3

Listening for Grotesque Musicality

Teaching music to children is as unnecessary as pruning orchard trees

—Masanobu Fukuoka, The One Straw Revolution

Environmental crises and ecological disaster are “not only the fault of failed

engineering, bad science, ecological misunderstanding, poor accounting, and bitter politics”

(Allen 2011: 414). They are also, as Aaron Allen argues, symptomatic of “a failure of

holistic problem solving, interpersonal relations, ethics, imagination, and creativity” (ibid.).

Allen’s assertion that “in short, the environmental crisis is a crisis of culture” (ibid.) is not

meant to dismiss or marginalize the physical reality of unraveling planetary systems, or to

reinscribe an anthropocentric narrative of Culture over Nature. Rather, he calls to attention

the ways in which those aspects of existence that are relegated to the category of nature are in

fact emergent manifestations of human activity, sociality, and creative imagination—just as

human beings and human cultures are emergent manifestations of ecological activity, cycles

of growth and decay, and the creative capacities of ecosystems. He gestures toward the need

for a naturecultural framework of inquiry into the problems of ecological disaster, and

particularly, as a music scholar, toward the potential for developing more ecocentric

approaches to the study of music. Here he builds on Arne Næss’ concept of ecocentrism as

“biospherical egalitarianism” (Næss 1973; Allen in Cooley et al. 2020: 305) grounded in “a

perspective that privileges the integrity, health, or functioning of ecological systems”

(Jenkins and Bauman 2010: 119). Allen notes that the concept of ecocentrism poses a direct

challenge to ethnomusicology’s commitment to human-centered study, and, furthermore, that

ethnomusicologists and musicologists will have little to offer in confronting environmental

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crises “until we can move away from the anthropocentric study of people making music to

the more ecocentric environments enabling people to make music or the equally awkward

ecologies of nature and people making music” (Allen in Cooley et al. 2020: 306). However

awkward the poverty of nomenclature that Allen runs into may be, the challenge that he

identifies constitutes one of the more urgent and necessary for music scholars to address.

Growing anxiety around ecological crises and planetary collapse corresponds, in the

humanistic disciplines, with a growing interest in posthumanism, which, as Michael Silvers

notes, “has demanded that we confront the reality that our fates are tied to those of other

species, which in many cases, moreover, exhibit behaviors and capabilities previously

understood as uniquely human” (Silvers 2020: 200, also see Taylor 2017: 270). Recognizing

that posthumanism is “a vast and varied literature” (ibid.: 199) with divergent iterations, my

focus is particularly on the ecological implications and origins of posthuman inquiry. This

approach, gleaning from Donna Haraway, might be better understood as compostist—I join

Haraway in the assertion that, “we are compost, not posthuman; we inhabit the humusities,

not the humanities. Philosophically and materially, I am a compostist, not a posthumanist”

(Haraway 2017: M45). Here Haraway asserts the importance of attending to human-soil

entanglements, epitomized in the phenomena of composting and grounded in the inherently

natureculture materiality of humus. But what does a compostist approach to the study of

music sound like? How does music emerge from or figure into the soft, trickling, squishing

sounds of bodies-becoming-soil?

Haraway’s compostist orientation toward the enmeshment of human and more-than-

human bodies, forms, and lifeways offers a generative framework for developing Allen’s

concept of ecocentric music studies. Synthesizing Allen and Haraway, I suggest that moving

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away from “the anthropocentric study of people making music” (returning to Cooley et al.

2020: 306) might also mean turning toward the musicality of the holoent, of beings—human

and not—becoming with each other, composing and decomposing each other, “in every scale

and register of time and stuff in sympoetic tangling, in earthly worlding and unworlding”

(Haraway 2017: M45). Locating music in and as the grotesque processes of earthly worlding,

in the feel and resonance of sympoietic tangles, has the potential both to defamiliarize or

subvert normative definitions of music and, conversely, to reify these normative definitions

by extending or imposing them onto more-than-human forms, experiences, and expressions

(see Gautier 2016: 132). Both of these potentials, furthermore, can take place simultaneously

to different extents and different effects. This is the case in permaculture discourse and

practice, where permaculturists work agonistically with and against hegemonic concepts of

Nature and Culture, as described in the first and second chapters. As normative definitions of

music and musicality are composted into permaculture’s natureculture ontology, they do not

cease to exist, but they are deformed, reformed, and repurposed.

As described in the second chapter, the ecological subjectivities that permaculture

listening practices orient toward are grotesque, holoent forms; their grotesque conversation

and expression constitute the dynamic, multi-sensorial object of the listener’s attention. In

this chapter I will turn to permaculture discourses on music specifically, describing and

interrogating the desire to perceive music in the expressions and natural patterns of

landforms, holoents, or grotesque ecological subjectivities. In this way I build from a

description of grotesque listening toward a description of grotesque musicality in critical

dialogue with permaculture discourse and practice. In dialogue with (eco)musicological and

ecofeminist critiques of anthropocentrism and individualism, I offer the concept of grotesque

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musicality as a contribution toward ecocentric and compostist efforts at musical-ontological

inventiveness, and also as a helpful tool for understanding and taking seriously permaculture

concepts of music as an emergent expressive aspect of landforms. Building on my central

inquiry into the role of listening in permaculture practices, I position grotesque musicality as

a way of listening for, perceiving, and engaging with grotesque ecological subjectivities.

Musicking, in this conceptual and experiential frame, becomes a matter of attending to the

sympoeitic entanglements—the coalescing and dissolution of patterns of growth and decay—

that constitute landforms, and encountering these entanglements as music.

In developing my argument in this chapter, I will first turn to a focused, synthesizing

analysis of several permaculture texts; Masanobu Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution (1978),

Bill Mollison’s Permaculture Designer’s Manual ([1988] 2002), Starhawk’s Earth Path

(2004), and Toby Hemenway’s Gaia’s Garden (2009). These publications span over four

decades and demonstrate a persistent, if persistently vague, ontological orientation to music

as an emergent aspect of ecological patterns and cycles of growth and decay. I assess these

texts not only for their theoretical and pedagogical content, but for their influence on and

continuity with everyday permaculture discourse and practice. To this end, my textual

analysis is interspersed with ethnographic and ethographic reflection. In the second half of

the chapter, I return more directly to critical disciplinary engagement with the music

concept: I set the aforementioned permaculture texts in dialogue with disciplinary debates on

“the music of nature” (Titon 2020: 256) and the “nature of music” (Ochoa Gautier 2016:

107), attending specifically to the contrast between Jeff Todd Titon’s figuration of “sound

ecology” (Titon 2020) and Ana María Ochoa Gautier’s critique of cross-disciplinary

tendencies to operationalize sound and “music as political positivity” (Gautier 2016).

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Ultimately, I observe that permaculture listening practices effectively model Titon’s sound

ecology in their orientation toward eco-social copresence and ethical entanglement while

demonstrating an idealizing ecophilosophical commitment to music as political positivity.

The concept of grotesque musicality serves here as a tethering term that holds the

disciplinary concerns of music and sound studies in generative tension with permaculture

concepts of music and listening.

Do-Nothing: Masanobu Fukuoka’s Philosophy of the Natural

In explaining his concept of natural or ‘do-nothing’ farming, Masanobu Fukuoka

argues that “when you get right down to it, there are few agricultural practices that are really

necessary. The reason that man’s improved techniques seem to be necessary is that the

natural balance has been so badly upset beforehand by those same techniques that the land

has become dependent on them” (1978: 10). But the dependence that Fukuoka speaks to can

be severe, and attempting to halt or shift agricultural practices can have disastrous, even

deadly, consequences, as he communicates in reflecting on his first attempts at do-nothing

farming:

When I went up to the citrus orchard to practice what I then thought was do-nothing

farming, I did no pruning and left the orchard to itself. The branches became tangled,

the trees were attacked by insects and almost two acres of mandarin orange trees

withered and died. From that time on the question, ‘What is the natural pattern?’ was

always in my mind. In the process at arriving at the answer, I wiped out another 400

trees. Finally, I felt I could say with certainty: ‘This is the natural pattern.’ (Fukuoka

1978: 10)

This passage presents an important paradox; do-nothing farming is not about doing nothing.

Mandarin trees need human collaboration to grow in their natural pattern—the orchard tree

and the human are companion species (Haraway 2008), each providing sustenance and

support for the other. Human intervention is thus, in this circumstance at least, a necessary

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aspect of Fukuoka’s concept of nature and natural-ness. But most conventional agricultural

interventions, Fukuoka argues, do not facilitate regeneration; instead, they inflict a systemic

damage of deepening dependency wherein external and synthetic inputs become increasingly

necessary for short-term survival or productivity at the expense of long-term futurity.

Fukuoka’s theory of difference “between natural and unnatural” (1978: 11) begins with the

discernment of a parallel difference between damage or disturbance on the one hand as

unnatural, and health and regenerative capacity on the other hand as natural. For Fukuoka,

the natural and unnatural refer to structural and essential aspects of worldly things that are,

respectively, generative or degenerative. For instance, he explains that:

If a single bud is snipped off a fruit tree with a pair of scissors it may bring about a

disorder that cannot be undone. When growing according to their natural form,

branches spread alternately from the trunk and the leaves receive sunlight uniformly.

If this sequence is disrupted the branches come into conflict, lay upon one another

and become tangled, and the leaves wither in the places where the sun cannot

penetrate. Insect damage develops. If the tree is not pruned the following year more

withered branches will appear. (Fukuoka 1978: 11)

The onset of an ‘unnatural’ or degenerative (these words being etymologically parallel, if

semantically disparate in their normative modern English usage) pattern in the tree’s

emergent structure necessitates further intervention; this intervention can, theoretically, tend

toward the natural or unnatural for Fukuoka, but once natural patterns are broken, the

resultant disorder ‘cannot be undone.’ Here he constructs a clear hierarchy of the value of the

natural over the unnatural, and, by extension, of nature over the ostensibly unnatural

character of modernity (paralleling LaDuke 1983: ii-iv). Crucially, Fukuoka’s skepticism of

modern technoscientific agricultural practices is not grounded so much in an appeal to an

untouched Nature separate from (and vulnerable to) Culture, but rather on a fundamental

enmeshment of human lives and decisions in webs of growth and decay. This enmeshment,

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for Fukuoka, is the “nonmoving point of origin, which lies outside the realm of relativity”

(1978: 12).

The conception of nature as outside the realm of relativity is grounded in Fukuoka’s

understanding of Buddhism which, although he does not identify with the religion (ibid.: 63-

64), he draws on extensively in his explication of naturalness and natural farming. For

instance, he notes that;

Among natural farming methods two kinds could be distinguished: broad,

transcendent natural farming, and the narrow natural farming of the relative world….

If I were pressed to talk about it in Buddhist terms, the two could be called

respectively as Mahayana and Hinayana natural farming. Broad, Mahayana natural

farming arises of itself when a unity exists between man and nature. It conforms to

nature as it is, and to the mind as it is. It proceeds from the conviction that if the

individual temporarily abandons human will and so allows himself to be guided by

nature, nature responds by providing everything…. Narrow natural farming, on the

other hand, is pursuing the way of nature; it self consciously attempts, by ‘organic’ or

other methods, to follow nature. Farming is used for achieving a given objective….

The narrow view of natural farming says that it is good for the farmer to apply

organic material to the soil and good to raise animals, and that this is the best and

most efficient way to put nature to use. (Fukuoka 1978: 64)

Fukuoka writes that the narrow view of natural farming is functional and appropriate “in

terms of personal practice…but with this way alone, the spirit of true natural farming cannot

be kept alive” (ibid.). This spirit or ethos of ‘true natural farming’ is expressed in Fukuoka’s

do-nothing philosophy, which he explains further by analogy with swordsmanship:

Narrow natural farming is analogous to the school of swordsmanship known as the

one-stroke school, which seeks victory through the skillful, yet self-conscious

application of technique. Modern industrial farming follows the two-stroke school,

which believes that victory can be won by delivering the greatest barrage of sword

strokes. Pure natural farming, by contrast, is the no-stroke school. It goes nowhere

and seeks no victory. Putting ‘doing nothing’ into practice is the one thing the farmer

should strive to accomplish…when it is understood that one loses joy and happiness

in the attempt to possess them, the essence of natural farming will be realized. (ibid.:

65)

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The practice of natural farming, to the extent that it entails a practice of “doing nothing,” is

thus integrated into the broader practice of inhabiting nature as the “non-moving point of

origin.” Fukuoka’s articulation of “non-active nature,” which he builds in dialogue with the

Taoist philosophy of Lao Tzu (ibid.: 65) and in relation to Buddhist concepts of nature as

“infinite motion [and] non-moving motion” (ibid.: 72), is fundamental not just to his farming

method but to his worldview and theory of change. For example, in the final section of One

Straw Revolution, Fukuoka communicates his conviction that “there is no other road to peace

than for all people to depart from the castle gate of relative perception, go down into the

meadow, and return to the heart of non-active nature. That is, sharpening the sickle instead of

the sword” (ibid.: 96). Fukuoka’s call for a “one straw revolution,” then, is a call to “get rid

of inside and outside. Farmers everywhere are at root the same farmers. Let us say that peace

lies close to the earth” (ibid.).

While this poetic prose can be read dismissively as a naïve ‘back to nature’ appeal to

universal consciousness, it can (more productively, I argue) also be understood as an open-

eyed assessment of the challenges that the infrastructures and ideologies of industrial

capitalism pose to the continuity and stability of agricultural ecosystems. “In travelling up to

Tokyo,” he writes;

I have seen the transformation of the Japanese countryside. Looking at the winter

fields, the appearance of which has completely changed in ten years, I feel an anger I

cannot express. The former landscape of neat fields of green barley, Chinese milk

vetch, and blooming rape plants is nowhere to be seen. Instead, half-burned straw is

piled roughly in heaps and left soaking in the rain. That this straw is being neglected

is proof of the disorder of modern farming. The barrenness of these fields reveals the

barrenness of the farmer’s spirit. (ibid. 98)

Fukuoka’s revolutionary call, thus, expresses at once a spiritual conviction and an

agricultural vision rooted in principals of biodiversity and social-ecological holism,

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anticipating and influencing the permaculture axiom that “what we do to the land, we do to

the people, and what we do to the people, we do to the land” (Dayaneni, personal

communication 2021).

Fukuoka’s Influence on Permaculture

As stated in the first chapter, Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution is identified as a

foundationally influential text for the permaculture movement (Trauger 2017: 44), and his

philosophy continues to guide permaculture activism. The text is widely referenced and used

across permaculture design curricula (including at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center),

in everyday permaculture discourse, and in contemporary permaculture texts (Brinbaum and

Fox 2014). In his seminal permaculture text Gaia’s Garden (2009), for example, Toby

Hemenway builds explicitly on Fukuoka’s philosophy in his explanation of the permaculture

concept of guilds, recounting a dialogue between Fukuoka and Oregon-based permaculture

activist Tom Ward:

One day…Fukuoka was asked, ‘if we grow our fruit trees the way you recommend,

with no pruning, how do we harvest the apples and what do we do with them?’

Fukuoka’s answer was, ‘You shake the apples out of the tree and make cider, or feed

them to pigs.’ His point was, you go in a whole other direction.’…. The order of a

conventional row-crop garden is the order of the machine. This regimentation invites

us to view plants as mechanical food factories. We fuel them with fertilizer, service

them with rakes and hoes, and measure their production in bushels, bins, and tons.

We view plants as part of our dominion. In a guild [by contrast], we are but one living

being among many others; and, like all the other animals enfolded by this community,

we nurture and are nurtured by an almost-wild place. We prune and cull, as do the

deer and mice. The fruit we leave does not rot on the ground to breed disease; it is

gladly devoured by our many companions. We turn over a bit of soil, and the worms

turn over yet more. We participate rather than rule. With guilds, we can begin to shed

the mantle of command and return to nature the many responsibilities we have

unnecessarily assumed. (Hemenway 2009: 134-135)

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In his discussion, Hemenway carries Fukuoka’s philosophy into a more contemporary

permaculture rhetorical style that focuses on participation and community in guilds. The

participatory merger with polyculture guilds that Hemenway describes holds the spirit of

Fukuoka’s ‘no stroke school,’ particularly in the expressed intention to relinquish the ‘mantle

of command.’ Hemenway’s explanation of the distribution of responsibility and care

amongst the countless creatures of the guild invokes the productive paradox of Fukuoka’s

do-nothing methodology, and also gestures to the paradox of responsibility in permaculture’s

ethical framework. Just as do-nothing farming does not entail doing nothing, returning

responsibilities, for Hemenway, does not mean becoming irresponsible; it means becoming

more intimately responsive and responsible to the patterns of growth and decay that

constitute specific guilds, places, landforms or ecosystems. He gives an example in his

discussion of forest succession:

When not interrupted by fire or other disaster, the end result of succession nearly

everywhere is forest. Even in the arid southwest, dryland forests of ironwood,

mesquite, and saguaro cactus blanketed what is now desert, until the sheep-grazers’

depredations and the lumbermen's axes destroyed them. Given twelve or more inches

of annual rain and the respite of a handful of years between wildfires, tree and shrub

seedlings will sprout on almost any ground, patiently outwait the other vegetation,

and create a woodland. This is why…suburbanites must constantly weed and chop

out woody seedlings from their well-watered lawns and garden beds. The typical

yard, with its perfect regimen of irrigation and fertilizer, is trying hard to become a

forest. Only the lawnmower and pruning shears prevent the woods from taking over.

(ibid.)

Rather than work tirelessly against the maturation and stabilization of natural systems, and

rather than abandoning the ecosystem entirely in the narrow belief that humans can only

degrade ecosystem health, Hemenway asks, “why fight this trend toward woodland? Instead,

we can work with nature to fashion a multistoried forest garden, a food- and habitat-

producing landscape that acts like a natural woodland” (ibid.). This attitude is typical of

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permaculturists, and communicates a do-nothing ethos of relinquishing certain

responsibilities, like weeding and maintaining monoculture grass lawns, while taking on

others, like tending to polyculture guilds by harvesting and distributing fruits and seeds.

In practice, the distinction between responsibilities that have been ‘unnecessarily

assumed’ and responsibilities that emerge in reciprocating interaction with other ecosystem

participants can be rather evasive. For instance, the garden that I tend with my landmates is

situated in a semi-suburban oak woodland; an aerial photograph from 1965 shows

significantly less tree cover, indicating that the woodland has recovered significantly from a

period of deforestation in the early twentieth century (through which the area was made

accessible for cattle grazing and chicken farming). The suburban-woodland canopy is fairly

mature, and the property is ringed by a dozen mature oak trees that provide habitat for

countless songbirds and squirrels, not to mention fungi in the soil under their canopies.

Interspersed amongst and within these mature oaks, are a variety of wild plums, ceanothus,

manzanita, olive, and one glorious flowering mimosa tree. The inner rings of the property

are home to many fruit and nut trees, as well as a pair of small redwoods (the landowner and

resident permaculture teacher Rachel guesses they are stunted from drought), altogether

forming a rich tapestry of biodiversity. Over years of planting and tending, Rachel has, in

line with Hemenway’s approach, fashioned a multistoried forest garden that gives food and

habitat to many creatures, human and more-than-human, in a concentrated space. However,

we still find oak saplings and wild plums shooting up in conspicuous places—in the root

mass of an elderberry, nestling up against a young fig or a blueberry bush, or in a bed of

perennial herbs. We uproot these tree seedlings, recognizing that if the oaks and wild plums

were left to grow they would eventually shade out the other trees, shrubs, and herbs that give

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the garden so much of its polyculture vitality. In some ways the garden has arrived at

Hemenway’s ideal food forest archetype, but as gardeners we still find ourselves selecting,

plucking, shaping the forest.

Rachel has expressed to me multiple times a deep sense of ambivalence around

pulling up oak seedlings. On the one hand, pulling the young oaks before they root in and

mature is necessary to maintain the overall health of the food forest; too many oaks would

eventually change the soil life and sunlight patterns, making it difficult to grow other

productive fruit and nut trees and vegetables. The oak canopy is already full and healthy

around the garden, and our culling work ensures that oaks don’t fully take over and crowd

out other plants; in this way we enact the permaculture principle of maximizing biodiversity,

and the resonant abundance of insect and animal life that hums and scuffles throughout the

garden serves as a colorful, clamorous index of our tending work.

On the other hand, the removal of oaks enacts a resistance to the natural processes of

succession that tend, in this area, toward oak savannah. Our cultivation of abundant habitat

and forage for a diversity of creatures itself exists within a legacy of colonial displacement;

displacement of Coast Miwok and Pomo peoples and also displacement of rivers and creeks

and oak woodlands. The act of uprooting a persistent oak seedling, in this sense, perpetuates

these patterns of displacement and bears a lingering affective residue of unrest. One day, as

we pulled an oak from a garden bed full of young spring vegetable starts, she reflected, “this

is their land, they belong here way more than I do. If they want to grow here, who am I to tell

them no? Is that just my colonizer impulse?” Carefully, we put the oak in a tall plastic pot, in

the hope that the taproot would establish and the oak could be transplanted to another spot

away from the vegetable bed. We have not had much luck with transplanting oaks from this

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land, but we agree that it feels important at least to try, out of respect for the oaks as a local

keystone species.

I give this vignette from my fieldwork to demonstrate that Fukuoka’s do-nothing

farming and Hemenway’s guild gardening cannot be applied without intimate encounters

with what Melissa Nelson calls the ‘storied landscape,’ and that these philosophies cannot be

applied without participating in non-innocent webs of care, harm, violence, and persistence.

This is a poignant instance of what Anna Tsing calls contamination (2015: 27-28). We work

with the natural pattern of the land in its tendency toward oak woodland, but we also assume

the responsibility to tend to the food forest and to check the encroachment of oaks. We make

decisions about how the woodland will mature, and these decisions involve taking life as

much as they involve facilitating birth and the proliferation of biodiversity. The question of

which beings proliferate, and which responsibilities we assume as necessary or unnecessary,

cannot be answered definitively outside of the visceral, intimate encounter with the soil of

the garden, the roots and shoots of young perennial herbs and vegetables, and the thin, sturdy

beginnings of oak saplings. They also, as my teachers at the OAEC stressed, cannot be

answered outside of honest conversation with the Indigenous communities who have been

displaced by colonial systems of governance and extraction. Attempts to apply or adapt

Fukuoka’s do-nothing method, or Hemenway’s guild design method, in the colonial context

of North America are necessarily burdened by the degrading and traumatizing conditions of

colonialism, which compel a thorough consideration of how histories of displacement and

resurgence literally grow up from the soil, and how permaculturists (along with all other

peoples in the settler-colonial society) choose, one seedling at a time, to encounter and

interact with those histories.

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Another parallel between the philosophy and practice of Fukuoka’s natural farming

and contemporary permaculture can be found in the conceptualization of nature. The

permaculture refrain “we are nature working” (Livingston in Puig de la Bellacasa 2018: 128),

for instance, echoes Fukuoka’s concept of nature in its refusal of hegemonic Western

ontological commitments to a priori separation. The commitment to being ‘nature working’

mirrors Fukuoka’s commitment to “casting aside the thought that humans exist apart from

heaven and earth” (ibid.: 83), and emphasizes the embodied, performative aspect of this

philosophy which is grounded in the paradox of non-active action and a re-positioning of

work away from capitalist concepts of labor and within everyday ecological collaborations

(ibid.: 82). The concept of being-nature-working, furthermore, subverts nostalgic concepts of

unspoiled nature or primordial natural states; nature is invoked, rather, in a more radical

interpretation of its etymology as a fundamental earthly condition of birth or emergent life,

and the work of being nature entails (and requires) non-innocent participation in the ebb-and-

flow emergence of lives and deaths.

The example above of pulling oak seedlings speaks to the messiness and uncertainty

of non-innocent participation, and to the ways in which the concept of being-nature-working

does not diminish the immediacy of concerns about doing that work in ethical or generative

ways. In our further conversation on this topic, Rachel posed the question; “when we get an

idea to do something in the garden, how do we know if that idea is actually coming from the

land, or if it’s just coming through our colonial hardwiring? Because that colonial hardwiring

runs so deep in us, sometimes it feels like it’s all we know how to do!” For settler

permaculturists, the concept and practice of being nature working cannot exist outside of a

fundamental complicity in the depredations of colonization, and a reckoning with the

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implications of being nature working while also participating in legacies of displacement and

genocide. Indeed, the power of the phrase, “we are nature working,” lies in its call for

responsibility and response-ability; nature is non-innocent and must be inhabited, embodied,

experienced, and perceived with care.

Natural Farming and ‘True Music’

In articulating his theory of difference between the natural and the unnatural,

Fukuoka also turns briefly to the topic of music, articulating a concept of what he calls “true

music” as co-extensive with nature. Continuing from his pruning example, Fukuoka argues

that “teaching music to children is as unnecessary as pruning orchard trees. A child’s ear

catches the music. The murmuring of a stream, the sound of frogs croaking by the riverbank,

the rustling of leaves in the forest, all these natural sounds are music—true music” (1978:

11). The teaching of music becomes necessary, like the pruning of a tree, only in the wake of

unnatural disturbance, which Fukuoka explains in this way: “when a variety of disturbing

noises enters and confuses the ear, the child’s pure, direct appreciation of music degenerates.

If left to continue along that path, the child will be unable to hear the call of a bird or the

sound of the wind as songs. That is why music education is thought to be beneficial to the

child’s development” (ibid.: 35). He does not elaborate directly on what constitutes

disturbing noise, though it can be safely inferred from the broader scope and context of his

argument, that these would be sounds associated with modern industrial and urban

environments. As discussed in the opening chapter of this dissertation, Fukuoka’s

philosophy is situated in the historical context of the postwar resurgence of Japan’s Shokuyó

movement, which articulated a theory of natural ecological eating rooted in a philosophy of

“oneness of

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the body and the soil” (Hong 2018: 107). In this context, Fukuoka’s philosophy of “true

music” takes on deeper meaning; the confusion of the modern ear that results from “a variety

of disturbing noises” parallels and compounds with the confusion of the modern diet and the

(in)capacity to perceive music in and as natural environment is identified by Fukuoka as

another expression of the bodies interconnectedness with the environment, where the

“oneness of the body and the soil” is experienced even at the level of musical perception.

Fukuoka’s concept of modernity’s confused ear has direct parallels to R. Murray

Schafer’s theorization of hi-fi and lo-fi soundscapes (1994 [1977]: 43), and to Schafer’s

cautionary against the deafening effects of industrial noise pollution. Paralleling Fukuoka’s

cautionary against the confusing or dulling effect of ‘disturbing noises,’ Schafer describes

the pervasive spread of industrial soundscapes as reaching “an apex of vulgarity in our time,”

such that “many experts have predicted universal deafness as the ultimate consequence

unless the problem be brought quickly under control” (ibid.: 3). This convergent concern for

the sonic sensitivities and sensibilities of people living in modern industrial contexts also

extends to an analysis of modern musicalities. Fukuoka, for instance, laments a progressive

displacement of ‘true music’ with formal music education and instrumental music, arguing

that the latter is only “thought to be beneficial” once the ability to perceive the former has

degenerated (Fukuoka 1978: 11). Schafer, in his turn and giving a much more in-depth

historical account of musical developments in parallel with industrialization, observes that;

“music moves into concert halls when it can no longer effectively be heard out of doors. That

is to say, the string quartet and urban pandemonium are historically contemporaneous”

(Schafer 1994 [1977]: 103). While Fukuoka and Schafer are operationalizing music in

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distinct ways here, they come into rough agreement on their analyses of modern musical

forms as outcomes of industrial din.

Also, like Schafer’s soundscape philosophy, Fukuoka’s idealization of pastoral

sounds operationalizes a romantic and, importantly, hearing-centric, nostalgia. Similar to the

way in which Schafer’s soundscape concept assumes, or privileges, a normative listening ear,

Fukuoka’s idea of the child’s “pure ear” can be reasonably construed as operationalizing a

certain “sonocentrism as [some] sort of determining force of essentialist sensory master

plans” (Feld 2015: 15). I reference Feld’s critique of Schafer’s soundscape concept here to

emphasize that Fukuoka’s true music concept can, to a certain extent, be deconstructed along

the same lines. Fukuoka relies on the idealizing construction “an ear pure and clear” (1978:

11) in describing his concept of ‘true music,’ seeming to imply that those of us—really all of

us—with impure ears, ears shaped by countless traumas and disturbances (uncountable but

each counting for something), cannot actually perceive true music. This is a concept of music

as lost, and of music as loss, that informs permaculture discourses around the tragedies of

colonialism, capitalism, and industrial extractivism.

It is worth briefly mentioning that, in this sense, Fukuoka’s argument also reflects

early twentieth century musical folklore conceptions of folk music as pure, natural, and

vulnerable to degradation and loss under the expansion of modern industrial society. For

instance, English folklorist Cecil Sharp focused his archival work on “remnants of the

peasantry” who “are to be found only in those districts, which, by reason of their remoteness,

have escaped the infection of modern ideas” (Sharp [1954] 1965: 5). Hungarian folk-song

collector and musician Béla Bartók operated on the related conviction that trained musicians

would be incapable of perceiving the beauty and artfulness of peasant melodies (Bartók

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1976: 6). The unintelligibility of folk musicality to trained musicians and scholars was also

identified as a barrier to effective study by Japanese folklorist Tokashi Ogawa, who lamented

that archival projects had “incessantly been troubled with the difficulty in obtaining experts

or students who have affection toward and understanding of Japanese folk songs, which are

characterized by obsolete language, unique melody and rhythm, and peculiar atmosphere”

(1961: 83). The fear that folk musics would—or had already—become unintelligible to

modernized ears and minds in their corresponding societies is broadly characteristic of early

to mid-twentieth century folk music discourses, which, as Timothy Cooley and Gregory Barz

observe, effectively “invented an Other within their national borders by creating cultural and

evolutionary development distinctions that separated the scholars from the individuals they

studied” (Cooley and Barz 2008: 9). Fukuoka’s argument on ‘true music’ similarly invents an

idealized Other whose hearing is not degraded or confused by modernity and who can thus

perceive the music of nature. Fukuoka operates, however, within fundamentally different

conceptions of nature, sound, and music from those operative in twentieth century folklore

studies and comparative musicology. Rather than worrying over whether trained musicians,

or urban populations, would comprehend folk music sung or played by their rural

compatriots, he expresses a more radical anxiety that modern-industrial listeners will not

comprehend ‘true music’ as it resides in and emanates from landforms and ecological

relationships.

There is, along these same lines, a fundamental difference between Fukuoka’s and R.

Murray Schafer’s conceptions of sound and nature. Whereas Schafer privileges humans as

composers responsible for the conscientious crafting of acoustic environments and the

meticulous manipulation and regulation of decibel levels (Schafer 1994 [1977]: 195-198),

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Fukuoka’s do-nothing philosophy suggests a definite skepticism of the presumption that

humans can hope to succeed in the “tuning of the world” (Schafer 1994 [1977]: 6).

Following Hemenway’s dialogue with Fukuoka and Tom Ward, perceiving ‘true music’ is

about beginning to “shed the mantle of command and return to nature the many

responsibilities we have unnecessarily assumed.” (Hemenway 2009: 134-135). In his Tuning

of the World, Schafer argues for a “reaffirmation of music as a search for the harmonious

influence of sounds in the world around us,” drawing inspiration from 17th century English

humanist philosopher Robert Fludd’s image of the earth as “the body of an instrument across

which strings are stretched and are tuned by a divine hand” (Schafer 1994 [1977]: 6).

Invoking the occultist flair of Fludd’s work (Giles 2016: 136-137), Schafer proposes urgently

that “we must try once again to find the secret of that tuning” (1994 [1977]: 6). He thus

saddles the human soundscape composer with a quasi-divine and somewhat patchwork task

in continuity with medieval traditions of speculative music (Giles 2016: 137), the Greek

concept of the harmony of the spheres, and the Vedic concept of anāhata or unstruck sound

(Schafer 1994 [1977]: 6).

The decidedly cosmological challenge that Fukuoka presents of “returning to the

source” (Fukuoka 1978: 11) can in some ways be read in alignment with Schafer’s

orientation, but the two authors present divergent strategies of finding or returning to their

respective idealizations of a harmonious nature, and these divergent strategies reveal even

more fundamental divergence in their conceptualization of music. Music and composition,

for Schafer, remains unquestionably in the domain of human creation, which draws

inspiration from a nature-as-resource. Fukuoka, in contrast, argues that ‘true music’ has

nothing to do with the music of instruments. Rather than nature-as-resource, Fukuoka claims

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nature-as-source in his concept of true music while also claiming a discontinuity between

human music and ‘true music.’ There is some apparent inconsistency or tension here with the

permaculture concept, discussed above, that ‘we are nature working’—if humans are

inseparable from nature, how can any music that we make not be of nature and thus ‘true’?

Despite this inconsistency, the concept of ‘true music’ as discrete or discontinuous from

human music informs permaculture discourse in fundamental ways.

Fukuoka’s ‘true music’ concept plays a similarly paradoxical role in his broader

treatise on do-nothing farming; seemingly peripheral and central at the same time. On the one

hand his definition and discussion of music is underdeveloped, and he uses the concept of

‘true music’ mainly as a supportive rhetorical device in his distinction between the ‘natural’

and the ‘unnatural.’ He does not give any meaningful description of ‘true music’ beyond the

negative assertion that it “does not have anything to do” with the music of violins or pianos,

and he offers little in the way of explanation of what the perception of this music might feel

like for his ideal, capable, listener who is, somehow, “raised with an ear pure and clear” and

whose “heart is filled with song” (ibid.: 37). He likewise offers no explicit pedagogical

approach for learning how to perceive or participate in true music per se. On a meta-level,

however, his do-nothing farming approach is fundamentally about the perception and

apprehension of true music. Even while his explanation of do-nothing farming focuses on

careful instructions for cover-cropping, straw-mulching, and direct-sowing in alignment with

natural cycles, Fukuoka maintains that “ultimately, it is not the growing technique, which is

the most important factor, but the state of mind of the farmer” (1978: 22-25). This state of

mind is explained, in part, as a capable orientation toward natural cycles and their expression

in the world as ‘true music.’ However, Fukuoka does not specify a pedagogy of the

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perception of these natural cycles, which are, perhaps, implied to be self-evident and

intuitively encountered (as one would encounter the accompanying cyclic transformations of

seasonal changes, for instance).

It is tempting, in this sense, to write Fukuoka’s ‘true music’ off as a thin, speculative,

and ultimately unwieldy over-extension of his agricultural philosophy, or as a particularly

radical iteration of the anxiety concerning the problems of the modernity that compelled the

broader Shokuyó movement and its post-war resurgence. Still, his music concept is

significant in its relevance to permaculture listening discourses and practices, and any

reading of permaculture listening practices (in my assessment) must necessarily engage with

Fukuoka’s ideas. I observe, for instance, that permaculture listening discourses take

inspiration from Fukuoka’s philosophy and orient toward what Fukuoka calls “true music,”

even if this term has not achieved as widespread a currency as Fukuoka’s broader “do-

nothing farming” concept. I furthermore propose that the more developed and nuanced

discourses around listening in permaculture practice (as presented in the previous chapter)

invite and allow for a critical development and application of Fukuoka’s music concept.

Specifically, I suggest that permaculture practices offer a generative intervention against, or

rather alongside, Fukuoka’s polemical claim that teaching music is “as unnecessary as

pruning orchard trees” (1978: 11). Permaculture pedagogy moves from the recognition that

in a world thoroughly contaminated by histories of encounter and fundamentally shaped by

ecological illiteracy and degenerative disturbance (Dolman 2016: 53), careful pruning

becomes a necessary aspect of collaborative survival. Similarly, permaculture also takes

seriously the necessity of learning how to perceive what Fukuoka calls true music.

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Musicality, Pattern Understanding, and Permaculture Practice

Permaculture rhetoric around remembering how to listen to the land (returning to

Kendall Dunnigan’s phrase discussed in the first chapter) and counteracting the imposition of

“ecological illiteracy” (returning to Dolman 2016: 54) tracks closely with Fukuoka’s

argument that the capacity to hear ‘true music’ is either stunted or unlearned through

socialization in modern industrial settings. The sit spot exercise, described in the second

chapter, is presented specifically as an iterative method for building ecological literacy—as

Kerry Brady emphasizes;

People have been sitting and listening on the land for as long as humans have been

roaming the planet. Through the practice of a Sit Spot, we are bringing intention and

consciousness to this age-old process amidst a manic modern world. With this

practice, we visit the same place again and again, immersing in the patterns and

cycles of a particular place within our bioregion….Sit Spot is a simple yet powerful

antidote to the pervasive disconnect that is present for so many people in modern

industrial times. When we are primarily indoors, immersed in technology and life

within four walls, significant parts of our brain atrophy. However, when we go

outside on a regular basis and allow the rhythms and cycles of nature to permeate our

being, we open up new brain patterning and enhance our capacity to be present with

the life all around us. (Brady in OAEC 2021: 21-22)

Here Brady makes a counter-industrial appeal similar to Fukuoka’s regarding the

degenerative effects of the ‘manic modern world’ on people’s capacity to perceive and ‘be

present’ with the patterns and cycles of the living, birthing (natural) world, which is situated

in opposition to the technological and industrial immersion. Brady’s language does imply a

discontinuity between the ‘indoor’ world of technology and the ‘outdoor’ world of ‘the

rhythms and cycles of nature,’ and, by extension, between the kinds of information and kinds

of intelligence that are cultivated and atrophied in each context. Tracking with Fukuoka’s

‘true music’ concept, the Sit Spot is positioned as a remedial or rehabilitating exercise that

orients toward ‘rhythms and cycles of nature’ in specific places—it is a musical exercise in

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the Fukuokan sense of the word. While most permaculturists do not speak of their work as

musical per se, it is more common for them to reference the ecosystems they tend as musical,

or as holding and emanating music. Gardens are often described as filled with the music of

birds, insects, and plants (Hemenway 2009: 19), and gardeners participate in anticipation of

the song and dance of pollinators (returning to Dunnigan, personal communication 2021)

with the animate force of place (returning to Dolman, personal communication 2021).

In conversation with Brock Dolman about permaculture listening practices and the

concept that emerges from these practices of music as an ecological expression, he

suggested, quite adamantly, that I read or re-read Bill Mollison’s chapter on pattern

understanding in his Designer’s Manual (1988). In this chapter, as Dolman emphasized,

Mollison models a comprehensive set of fundamental patterns that characterize and support

growth, decay, movement, and transformation in the world. These patterns are described

through recourse to musical analogy; as Mollison writes, “patterns are forms most people

understand and remember. They are as memorable and repeatable as song, and of the same

nature. Patterns are all about us: waves, sand dunes, volcanic landscapes, trees, blocks of

buildings, even animal behaviour” (1988: 70). Developing intimate, experiential knowledge

of how these patterns emerge and unfold in specific places constitutes the core substance of

permaculture practice for Mollison: “The final act of the designer, once components have

been assembled, is to make a sensible pattern assembly of the whole. Appropriate patterning

in the design process can assist the achievement of a sustainable yield from flows, growth

forms, and timing or information flux…. It is the pattern that permits our elements to flow

and function in beneficial relationships. The pattern is design, and design is the subject of

permaculture” (ibid.). Just as Fukuoka’s do-nothing farming begins with the inquiry ‘what is

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the natural pattern?’, Mollison’s permaculture begins with the task of identifying and

building intimate experiential awareness of patterns of growth, decay, movement and

stillness as they emerge in the world.

Dolman’s point in referring me to Mollison’s Designer’s Manual was not just to

reassert the centrality of the text in the permaculture canon, but more specifically to highlight

the connection that Mollison makes between ecosystem patterns and music and, by

extension, between pattern understanding and musicality. Having established the

fundamental focus on pattern understanding, Mollison describes permaculture as “a linking

discipline that equally applies geology, music, art, astronomy, particle physics, economics,

physiology, and technology” (ibid.: 71). This hugely ambitious characterization is made

somewhat self-reflexively, and Mollison expresses a hope that “others, better equipped, will

expand and further explain the basic concepts” of pattern application relevant to “the

information flow and transfer processes that underlie all our disciplines” (ibid.). While he

focuses on presenting a “general pattern model of events” that demonstrates the related

formal qualities and integrated characters of waves, streamlines, cloudforms, spirals, lobes,

branches, scatters, and nets (Mollison 1988: 71-72), Mollison also gestures toward the

importance of experiential encounter with the substance of the world that expresses these

patterns, emphasizing that “we should not confuse the comprehension of FORM with the

knowledge of SUBSTANCE—‘the map is not the territory’” (ibid.: 71, emphasis in

original). As discussed in the previous chapters, the emphasis on cultivating ‘knowledge of

substance’ orients permaculture practice toward the immersive experience of patterns as they

emerge, fuse, and diffuse in the world.

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But Mollison does not expound directly on a musical character of ecological pattern

understanding. Instead, his continued discussion of music consists mainly in survey

references to various Indigenous song traditions as models for ecological knowledge (ibid.:

96-98). As an example, he gives particular attention to the tradition across various seafaring

cultures of using songs as maps and timekeeping devices during long journeys. “Song

stanzas,” he writes, “are highly accurate timers, accurate over quite long periods of time, and

of course reproducible at any time” (1988: 97). He also advocates for the functionality of

cross-species song knowledge, again taking inspiration from Indigenous (in this case Inuit)

practices, of which he gives thin description: “Just as the eskimo navigated, in fog, by

listening to the quail dialects specific to certain headlands, we can achieve similar insights if

our ear for bird dialect is trained, so that song and postural signals from other species make a

rich encyclopedia of a world that is unnoticed by those who lack pattern knowledge” (ibid.:

97-98). This reliance on Indigenous knowledges, and on past-tense stereotypes of Indigenous

or “tribal” communities as being close to nature, is typical of early permaculture discourse, as

discussed at length in the opening chapter. It also reflects Mollison’s academic training as a

survey ethnologist in Australia before his turn toward developing the permaculture concept

with David Holmgren. In this particular discussion, Mollison uses Indigenous precedents to

advocate for what he understands to be a re-integration of music, dance, and other arts with

natural patterns and ecological meaning. He argues that:

Much of modern art is individualistic and decorative; some ‘motif’ art is plagiarized

from ancient origins, but no longer has an educational or sacred function.

Entertainment and decoration is a valid and important function of the arts, but it is a

minor or incidental function. Social comment is a common art form in theatre and

song, and spirited dances and songs are cheering and uplifting. But I know of no

meaningful songs or pattern in my own ‘monoculture,’ based as it is on the jingles of

advertisements and purely decorative and trivial patterns of art, and on education

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divorced from relevant long-term observations of the natural world. (Mollison 1988:

100)

Mollison’s lamenting analysis of the relationships between art and capitalism are coupled

with a strong conviction that “art belongs to, and relates to, people. It is not a way to waste

energy on resources for the few. Sacred calendars melted down to buillon or objets d’art are a

degradation of generations of human efforts and knowledge, and the sacred art of tribal

peoples hidden in museum storerooms are a form of cultural genocide” (ibid.). Here Mollison

gives an insightful, if romanticizing and prescriptive, critique of the ways in which modern

concepts of art are often formed around the justification (aesthetic, moral, and political) of

colonial and capitalist accumulation. This critique can be read in direct dialogue with

Fukuoka’s argument that the “popular tunes played on the violin or fiddle” do not have

“anything to do with the ability to hear true music” (Fukuoka 1978: 12) —both Fukuoka and

Mollison decry what they perceive as the divorcing of human music practices from lived

understanding of natural patterns.

Rhythms of Nature and Musical Being

As Mollison burdens the concept of music with the ideological task of integrating and

expressing ecological relationality, he also, like Fukuoka, gestures implicitly toward the

musicality of ecological relationships and the cycles and patterns that constitute them. It is to

this point that Dolman emphasized the importance of Mollison’s writing to me: While

Mollison himself does not state this explicitly, Dolman identified the work of building

pattern understanding and fluency in ecosystem dynamics as akin to musical activity in that

it orients toward patterns of expression and relationship that emanate from landforms. These

patterns, he posited, are the physical manifestation of ecological relationships that emerge in

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various kinds of harmony and disharmony with one another. Growth ratios of plants,

seasonal cycles of blooming and withering, the movement and expression of animal life in

response to these cycles, all of these interweaving patterns are characterized fundamentally

by spatiotemporal relationships that hold visceral meaning for their participants, humans

included. Cultivating an experiential understanding of the blooms of different flowers

through the spring and summer, for instance, does not consist simply in documenting the

timing of rainfall and the movement of rain over the land and marking the dates of first and

last flowers for each species in an ecosystem or place; the blooms of flowers are felt and

experienced through copresence with the flowers and with the many creatures who interact

with and fundamentally constitute the flowers—the pollinators, the burrowing insects and

mammals, the creatures of the soil. These creatures all participate in the bloom and wither of

the flowers, and their participatory engagements thicken into dense knots of sympoiesis—

these knots are resonant, aromatic, visceral and lingering. When Mollison refers to

cultivating “knowledge of substance,” it is to the substance of these lively, and deathly,

knots of blooming and withering, growth and decay, that he refers.

Knowledge of substance is cultivated, for permaculturists, through practices of

sustained, observant copresence, as described in the previous chapter. The knowledge that

arises through the sit spot exercise and other modes of participatory observation with

ecological subjectivities is an experiential “knowledge of,” as opposed to a positivist

“knowledge that” (Titon 2008: 32). I draw this rhetorical parallel between permaculture’s

orientation toward ‘knowledge of substance’ and Jeff Todd Titon’s phenomenological

prioritization of experiential knowledge as a preliminary step toward a larger, more

experimental argument: that the practices of pattern understanding that Mollison describes

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can engender a particular kind of “musical being-in-the-world” (Titon 2008: 32) that locates

music in the grotesque expression of landforms.

Musical being, for Titon, is a “special ontology,” a “mode of being that presents itself

as different from normal, everyday modes of experiencing, from my self-conscious modes of

experiencing and from my objectivizing modes of experiencing” (ibid.). In his

phenomenological description of musical being-in-the-world, Titon writes: “I feel the music

enter me and move me. And now the music grows louder, larger, until everything else is

impossible, shut out. My self disappears. No analysis, no longer any self-awareness…I no

longer feel myself as a separate self, rather, I feel myself to be ‘music-in-the-world’” (ibid.).

There are several points of convergence to discuss here with regard to permaculture sit spot

listening. First, whereas Titon feels the music enter his body and move him, Kerry Brady

emphasizes the need to allow “the rhythms and cycles of nature to permeate our being”

(Brady 2021, quoted above). This permeation, furthermore, becomes a merger of selves both

for Titon and for Brady; where Titon becomes music-in-the-world through allowing music to

enter him and move him, permaculturists strive to become nature-working through allowing

the rhythms and cycles of nature to permeate their beings. In both cases, this merger of selves

is predicated on achieving a flow state where analytical, objectivizing and reflective mental

processes are suspended. Brock Dolman described this as being able to “turn off the designer

mind” and “just let the land speak to you” (Dolman, personal communication 2021). Titon

writes of this state as “a curiosity of all [the] bodily senses” (Titon 2008: 31) and as an

affective experience; “music overcomes me with longing. I feel its affective power within

me” (ibid.). While the experiential goal of merger with and within ecological subjectivities,

like Titon’s experiential goal of collective merger with other human musicians, is not always

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attainable, the memory and concept of such peak experiences motivates permaculture

listening practices.

I suggest here that experiences and perceptions of musical being, or of musical being-

in-the-world, are not only convergent with permaculture listening experiences, but also a

helpful way of understanding and articulating permaculture references to the music of

landforms. This is important because references to the music of landforms, or to ecological

musicality, are simultaneously central to permaculture discourses on listening and somewhat

underdeveloped in these same discourses (as noted above in analysis of Fukuoka and

Mollison’s writing). Titon’s figuration of musical being allows for an evaluation of these

references to ecological musicality outside of the formal rubrics of musical structure (pitch,

melody, rhythm, meter), recognizing that music is not just (humanly) organized sound but a

way of encountering the world, and a way of becoming-with the world. The capacity or

tendency to perceive the song and dance of pollinators as, indeed, song and dance, does not

hinge on a formal appeal to the sophistication or regularity of rhythmic cyclicity in the

sounds and movements of pollinating insects and birds, or on the degree of melodic

similarity between the pollinators’ expressions and human musical precedents. Rather, the

tendency to seek and encounter ecological musicality hinges on the capacity to inhabit a

particular mode of being-in-the-world that is musical, and that allows “the rhythms and

cycles of nature” to enter into and move the listener’s body as music. Fukuoka’s privileging

of “true music” takes on more actionable meaning in this context, where the perception of

true music is situated in the body of a listener whose “consciousness is filled with music” and

is thus “in the world musically” (Titon 2008: 32). The sit spot listening exercise, similarly,

can be engaged as an exercise in a particular kind of musical being, an iterative practice of

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allowing consciousness to be in the world musically and to engage and receive the world

musically.

Musical being-in-the-world constitutes a fundamental aspiration that can often (not

always) take on a spiritual or cosmic character for permaculturists. Starhawk writes in her

book Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature, for instance, that “when

we can observe and truly understand some of the basic patterns in nature, we can learn not

just to speak back to her, but to sing with the music of the spheres” (Starhawk 2004: 187).

Here she frames the aspiration toward musical being-in-the-world within her own lineage of

pagan goddess worship, into which she weaves the Pythagorean concept of music of the

spheres. While Earth Path is centered on the topic of earth-based spirituality, Starhawk

grounds her writing explicitly in her work as a permaculture activist and teacher, placing

specific emphasis on the importance of pattern understanding and observational practices and

drawing directly from Mollison’s earlier work (Starhawk 2004: 13, 67). Her language around

close observation also aligns closely with Kerry Brady’s instruction on Sit Spot listening

presented in the context of the OAEC’s pedagogy, and with Fukuoka’s brief remarks on the

degradation of perception. As she writes:

Observation seems like the simplest, most natural thing in the world. We’re all born

observers. From the earliest moments of life, babies stare at, listen to, and taste the

world….By observing others we learn how to…experience and navigate the world

we’re born into. But between infancy and adulthood, something gets in the way of our

childlike, unclouded vision. Few of us can walk into a forest and simply be in the

forest. Instead, by adulthood, we are inside a story we’re telling ourselves, partly

about the forest, but mostly about ourselves. (Starhawk 2004: 51)

Starhawk names a litany of psycho-somatic damages that cause interference or

confusion in human observers, echoing and developing Fukuoka’s reference to the damaging

of a child’s “pure” ears and Brady’s assessment of the challenges of the manic modern

world.

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“To truly observe,” she suggests, “we must be able to close the book on the story, turn off the

dialogue (or at least turn it down), and hear what’s around us” (Starhawk 2004: 52). True

observation is idealized for Starhawk, as it is for Fukuoka, Brady, and Mollison, as a state of

concentrated copresence, what she calls elsewhere in the book “wide awareness” (ibid.: 54).

It is in this state of concentrated copresence that, in Starhawk’s words, one might be able to

sing with the music of the spheres. Importantly, as she emphasizes, this also requires a

fluency in pattern understanding—it is only once we can observe and truly understand some

of the basic patterns in nature that the possibility for musical being-in-the-world arises for

the aspiring listener.

The exercises that she proposes for cultivating pattern understanding are directly

inspired by Mollison’s writing and teaching on the subject (Starhawk 2004: 67) and they also

align closely with the OAEC’s sit spot pedagogy described in detail in the second chapter.

For instance, Starhawk reiterates the importance of sitting still for long periods of time, of

“observing communities” and relationships rather than individuals, and on holding curiosity

toward the emergence and function of patterns; “what is growing together with what in this

area? Which trees with which bushes, which groundcovers? Are there patterns you can

discern?...What functions might these patterns serve?” (ibid.: 68). Building familiarity with

patterns and “practicing the skills of observation, taking the time to ground and listen,”

Starhawk emphasizes, “we begin to be able to hear something. When we clear away some of

our inner obstacles so that we can open up to the outer world, when we allow ourselves to be

present, we can be fed and informed and delighted by the richness of life around us” (ibid.:

69). This concept of music accrues substance in the lived experiential context of these

everyday practices of listening and noticing—music becomes perceptible as the listener

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begins ‘to be able to hear something’ in the growth and decay patterns of plants, and in the

dense relational webs of life that constitute specific landforms.

Rather than reproduce the entirety of Starhawk’s approach to sit spot listening and

pattern understanding, I reference her work as an important iteration of these pedagogical

themes, and one that also frames ecological observation in terms of musicality. While her

reference to the ‘music of the spheres’ is, like Fukuoka’s music concept, thinly developed,

she does communicate clearly her understanding that this music becomes perceptible

through close observation not of celestial bodies but earthly ones; her writing foregrounds

the intimate relationships between creatures of the soil, the collective growing and dying of

plants and animals and fungi.

Returning to the second chapter’s discussion on sit spot listening’s orientation to

ecological subjectivities, I propose that music is likewise situated in Starhawk’s writing, as in

Fukuoka’s, in the grotesque ecological subjectivity of the holoent. Each of these authors, and

Mollison as well in a less direct way, articulates a concept of musicality as the capacity ‘to be

able to hear something’ in the growth and decay of landforms. That these articulations are

thinly developed does not diminish their significance with regard to permaculture practice.

As demonstrated above, understandings of the musicality of ecosystems also shape everyday

experiences of ecosystem intra-action for permaculturists, wherein efforts to listen to the

grotesque conversations of the land become entangled with an aspiration to hear music. This

conflation of landform conversationality with musicality will be discussed at length in the

following chapter, in close dialogue with Thomas Turino’s theorization of participatory

music (Turino 2008), but for now I will simply note that this concept of musicality

disappoints, or subverts, many of the fundamental, definitive assumptions about music as an

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object of study for musicologists and ethnomusicologists. These definitive assumptions are

what Ana María Ochoa Gautier refers to as “the theoretico-analytical dimensions of music

qua hard scientific musical data: scales, pitches, rhythmic structure, and so on” (Ochoa

Gautier 2016: 117). The spaciousness and irregularity of the sonic patterns that characterize

landform expressivity render them largely illegible to modes of musical analysis that focus

on melodic or rhythmic structure. Additionally, the emphasis on multisensorial engagement

frustrates disciplinary tendencies to reduce the music object to a sonic one. In this sense,

grotesque musicality, as a concept and as a quality of being, is not in clear continuity with

normative concepts of musicality.

To reiterate, this specific concept of grotesque musical being is not discussed

explicitly, either in these texts or in the permaculture spaces that inform my research—this

concept emerges from my own synthesis of permaculture thought and academic discourse.

Following from this synthesizing approach, I propose that it is a helpful concept both for

permaculture practitioners and for scholars as a way of framing permacultural efforts to ‘be

able to hear something.’ The expressed aspiration to ‘be able to hear something’ is persistent

and pervasive in permaculture discourse. For instance, Fukuoka, Mollison, and Starhawk

represent three different generations of permaculturists (following Trauger’s assessment of

Fukuoka as an influential proto-permaculturist) working on three different continents, and

they each bring distinct positionalities and histories into their writing and teaching. These

differences, however, only underscore the significance of the thematic continuity that

characterizes their work with regard to observation, pattern understanding, and music. Their

ideas also align with the OAEC’s pedagogical approach, as described previously, and they

pervade everyday permaculture discourse. In noticing and analyzing this persistency and

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pervasiveness, I arrive at the following two assertions. First, permaculture is

characteristically motivated by an enduring fascination with the musicality of nature and

oriented toward the perception and participation in that musicality, which I have identified as

a kind of musical being-in-the-world, and second, these references to the musicality of nature

focus on natural patterns (cycles of birth, growth, decay, and rebirth that unfold in

landforms) and the capacity to understand these natural patterns.

Musical Being-in-the World: A Story for Living, A Story for Listening

I want to emphasize at this point that I am not presenting musical being-in-the-world

as a requisite aspect of some normative permaculture attitude, but rather describing a

pervasive aspiration toward musical being-in-the-world that informs permaculture discourse

and shapes permaculture experience. This aspiration is critically relevant to, and even co-

equal with, the prioritization of composing with, conversing with, and befriending ecological

subjectivities as described in the previous chapter. To reiterate, though, not all

permaculturists talk or think about their eco-social participation in terms of music. In this

chapter I have, thus far, explored the way in which several prominent permaculture figures

craft non-normative concepts of music that integrate with their understandings of

regeneration and eco-social or naturecultural co-constitution. However, there are many

permaculture texts (and many of these are referenced in the opening chapter) that do not give

any substantial consideration to eco-social music or musicality. This is another example of

permaculture’s internal diversity, as described in the opening chapter. In the same way that

“there are as many permaculture definitions as there are permaculturists” (returning to

Macnamara 2012: 1), there are as many permaculture definitions of music and ecological

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musicality as there are permaculturists. The indication that I observe in my data regarding

this eco-social conceptualization of music must be considered in this broader context of

diversity. Within this diversity of thought and practice, the idea of musical being-in-the-

world is somewhat diffuse, but not fringe. More so than an errant weed, out of place and

(seemingly, but never actually) inconsequential, I understand musical being-in-the-world

more so as mycelium in the (metaphorical) ecology of permaculture discourse; it is subtly

pervasive and even mostly non-apparent in permaculture conversations, threaded without

mention underneath concepts like conversation, composition, listening, patterning. Mentions

of music per se are few, like mushroom fruiting bodies scattered thinly across a forest floor

— but what they indicate, and what they extend from, is a much more ubiquitous affective

orientation toward ecological subjectivities as expressive entities.

The idea, and experience, of music as an aspect of ecosystems that emerges from, and

thus can be perceived as, patterns of growth, decay, and expression in and across landforms

is, following Haraway, one of many “stories for living in the Anthropocene” for

permaculturists, and as such, it demands “a certain suspension of ontologies and

epistemologies, holding them lightly in favor of more venturesome, experimental natural

histories” (2017: M45). To this end, one of the intriguing aspects of permaculture discourses

on listening, pattern understanding, and musicality is that they prompt a reconsideration of

the ontological and epistemological commitments that undergird normative and disciplinary

conceptualizations of music as humanly organized sound. This prompting has already been

named above, but I find it a worthwhile refrain—the loosening of epistemological certainties

is a necessarily iterative process (Robinson 2020: 72). In this particular iteration, in the

context of the permacultural music concepts articulated by Fukuoka, Mollison, and

Starhawk,

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I observe a shift in register in which normative epistemological commitments regarding

music and musicality are both disengaged and reinforced, rejected and repurposed.

To give a more detailed account of these reinforcing and disengaging aspects, the

final part of this chapter will frame the permacultural music concepts described above within

interdisciplinary debates on “the value of nature and the nature of music” (Gautier 2016:

107). Scholarly approaches to environmental issues in music and sound studies are

characterized by divergent and contested conceptualizations of music, sound, nature, and

ecology, and by a pervasive sense of urgency in addressing the escalation of planetary crises

(Gautier 2016: 113-116, 134). Two of the key concepts at the heart of these debates and

concerns that I will address below are; the eco-social implications of music as vibration and

eco-social relationality, as explored in Jeff Todd Titon’s sound ecology concept (2020) on

the one hand, and the persistent commitment, described by Ochoa Gautier, to “music as

political positivity” (ibid.: 123-124), on the other. In the follow discussion I will explore the

tensions between Titon’s and Ochoa Gautier’s perspectives, seeking generative friction in the

dialogue and analyzing the permaculture music concepts described above in the context of

this friction. Setting permaculture discourse in dialogue with music and sound studies

discourses, I suggest, challenges and (hopefully) enriches each of these discursive spaces.

Permaculture Musicality and Sound Ecology

In developing his concept of sound ecology, Titon offers a definition of music as “the

corporeal expression of a sound connection as a vibrational exchange,” adding that music “ is

also an information exchange, an economic exchange, and an ecological exchange” (2020:

274). While he argues that, “for human beings, nothing represents the sound connection and

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the sound and just community, economy, and ecology better than music,” he emphasizes that

“all beings are in the world of vibrations and sound experience” (2020: 274). Extending

Titon’s definition, it follows that all beings are in the world of music—the world is

constituted by beings of all kinds enmeshed in a “copresence of sound vibration” (ibid.: 272),

and this enmeshment of vibrational exchange is the stuff of music. This ecocentric definition

of music does not negate the reality of more immediately recognizable human musical

structures, performative modes, technologies and media, but it places these within a broader,

and more differentiated, realm of phenomena and experience.

Vibrational copresence, for Titon, constitutes the fundamental condition for

connectedness and relationality in the world, and thus forms the basis of both ecological

relationships. A sound ecology, Titon proposes, takes seriously this fundamental condition of

vibrational copresence and orients toward the consequences of how copresence is navigated

and experienced through sound vibration; “of course,” he writes, “copresence of sound

vibrations need not be benign. It can lead to predation and destruction” (ibid.: 272). He points

to the negative effects of noise pollution, the military utilization of sonic torture (ibid., citing

Cusick 2008) and the use of vibrational force for “sonic manipulation and crowd control in a

modern nation-state” (ibid., citing Goodman 2009) as examples of sound’s destructive

potential. It is not despite, but precisely because of the tendency for sound to be mobilized

toward destructive and extractive ends in industrial capitalist contexts that Titon argues for

taking seriously the fact that “in a world of vibrating molecules, each vibrating body in the

world may be understood to be reciprocally copresent with the others” (ibid.: 273).

Copresence is, like care, a noninnocent condition. Similarly, vibration in Titon’s sound

ecology concept is a noninnoncent phenomenon, and music as sound vibration is likewise

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entangled in both generative and degenerative relational webs. With this said, Titon

ultimately orients toward the generative potentiality of sound and music; his theorization

proceeds from the assertion that “as sound announces presence, copresence in sound vibrates

two or more beings and in connecting them forms the basis for organic solidarity and,

possibly, community” (ibid.: 258). “A sound community,” Titon offers, “is a community

connected by sound, and it is also a healthy community” (ibid.: 255).

This focus on the possibility of community arising from experiences of copresence

parallels the rationale behind permaculture listening practices, which (as described in the

previous chapter) orient toward collaboration and friendship with ecological subjectivities. I

will also note that permaculture efforts to “compose with” and within holoents engender, or

intend to cultivate, what Titon describes as “an ecological way of being, knowing, and doing

that grows out of the copresence of living beings connected through sound” (ibid.: 264).

While permaculture discourse does not center sound to the same extent as Titon, this

difference is somewhat mitigated by Titon’s reframing of sound as physical vibration that

extends beyond audibility. Titon’s sound ecology is in this sense more oriented toward haptic

immersion (Eisenberg 2015: 197), and thus more compatible with permaculture’s

multisensorial conception of listening as immersion into and as place.

Titon’s sound ecology concept also aligns with permaculture listening discourses in

its underlying critique of Western individualism and economic rationality. Titon rejects the

cultural construction of “Homo Economicus,” or the Economic Man, and suggests “a

different model, homo reciprocans, or reciprocating human” (2020: 261) characterized by

cooperation within community. In the paradigm of homo reciprocans, Titon suggests, “the

common good is not the added sum of private goods but rather the emergent good of the

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social group and its environment as a whole” (ibid. 261-263). This critique of individualism

and the proposal of a more collectivist subjectivity in the figure of homo reciprocans echoes

the transdisciplinary discussion on ecological subjectivity presented in the second chapter;

Titon’s argument aligns closely with Anna Tsing’s critique of homo economicus and the

‘selfish gene’ theory (Tsing 2015: 28, Titon 2020: 263), and extends, as Tsing does, toward

models of collaboration and collectivism. Where Tsing focuses on the concept of

contamination as a fundamental condition of copresence, Titon focuses on sound. For Tsing,

contamination is collaboration (ibid.: 27); for Titon “sound connects” (Titon 2020: 255).

Sound contaminates. Contamination sounds. Vibrational contaminations form the ground of

difference that gives rise to ecosystems, their function and their dysfunction.

Permaculture listening practices, to the extent that they seek holoent collaboration

and friendship through immersive copresence, can be understood to enact or prefigure

Titon’s sound ecology. Importantly, they offer a concrete example of how sound ecologies

are imagined and cultivated (however strugglingly) in everyday contexts. The sit spot

exercise, for instance, as practiced in the context of permaculture’s ethical framework,

provides relatively plain instruction for developing an ecological rationality grounded in

experiential knowledge of specific landforms. Just as Titon privileges a multisensorial

concept of sound as fundamental to possibility for ecological solidarity and community,

permaculturists privilege a multisensorial concept of listening as fundamental to the

possibility for eco-social participation and friendship. The recognition that these are

precarious possibilities, and not a priori certainties, motivates the construction of an iterative

practice around strengthening the listener’s capacity to engage with vibrational copresence in

a generative manner. This

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practice is epitomized and codified in the sit spot listening exercise, as described in the

second chapter.

It is also important to note that Titon’s call to “consider the music of nature” (2020:

256) dialogues productively with permaculture references to ecological musicality—it

invites serious consideration of Fukuoka’s ‘true music’ concept, Starhawk’s concept of

‘hearing something,’ Kendall Dunnigan’s emphasis on tending to the song and dance of

pollinators, and everyday permaculture practices of allowing “the rhythms and cycles of

nature to permeate” their beings (Brady 2021). Permaculture discourses and practices, in this

sense, model a particular way of conceptualizing and engaging viscerally with what Titon

calls the music of nature. The term ‘music of nature’ itself becomes quickly entangled in an

ongoing disciplinary debate around the value of music in relation to environmental crises,

and I will turn to this debate presently. For now, I will emphasize that concepts of a ‘music

of nature,’ or plural musics and musicalities of nature, motivate permaculture listening

practices, and that my own study of how this motivation is articulated and acted upon is itself

informed by Titon’s identification of a disciplinary need to consider the music(s) of nature.

Titon’s writing on cultural sustainability (2009), sound commons (2012), and ecology

(2016) have been fundamentally influential to music and sound studies discourses, and

particularly to the formation of ecomusicology as an interdisciplinary field focused on “the

study of music, culture, sound, and nature in a period of environmental crisis” (2013: 8;

Allen and Dawe 2016: 1-2). At the same time, Titon’s concept of sound ecology represents a

school of thought that is contested within music and sound studies, particularly with respect

to the positive identification of sound with ecological connected-ness. In the following

section, I will present counter-perspectives on the question of sound as a condition for

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ecological connection, focusing primarily on Ana María Ochoa Gautier’s argument against

“music as political positivity” (2016: 123-124) and her engagement with David Ingram’s

philosophical critique of “the ecologization of sound” (Ingram 2010: 16). These critiques are

not only pertinent to scholarly debate, but they are also directly relevant to permaculture

listening discourses and to the music concepts described earlier in the chapter. As I will

demonstrate, permaculture concepts of music and of listening offer compelling case studies

for thinking through the turbulence of interdisciplinary discourses on sound and its

relationship to hegemonic and counter-hegemonic constructions of nature and culture.

Ecophilosophical Claims and Music as Political Positivity

In establishing her critical assessment music as political positivity, Ana María Ochoa

observes that “during the second half of the twentieth century…a prevailing Euro-American

ontology of music, sound, and listening has emerged in which these are understood

politically as that which sutures torn relationships either between humans and the

environment or among humans. This is an acoustic philosophy,” she continues, “that

increasingly prevails in the conceptual order that defines the place of music, sound, and

listening in the modern public sphere” (Ochoa Gautier 2016: 127). In her argument, she

builds on philosopher David Ingram’s concept of the ecologization of sound (Ingram 2010:

16) as “closely associated with the notion that music, sound, and listening are understood as

that which politically resolves the separation between nature and the human or the

conflictive relations between humans, understood as part of the ecological crisis” (ibid.:

125). The popular ecologization of sound, in Ingram’s analysis, is grounded in several

ecophilosophical claims; first, “that music is a form of utopian expression that prefigures a

better society in the

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future, including a healed relationship between music and the natural world” (Ingram 2010:

15); second, that popular entertainment thus holds “utopian promise” (ibid.); and third,

which Ingram terms “eco-listening,” that “the activity of listening itself has a special role to

play in the formation of ecological awareness” (ibid.: 15-16). In this discussion I will address

the first and third claims, regarding the attribution of a connective capacity to music and eco-

listening, as these are particularly salient both to Titon’s sound ecology concept and to

permaculture music concepts of music and listening.

First, I will return to Fukuoka’s concept of ‘true music,’ which, on a surface level,

seems to fall neatly in line with Ingram’s critique. ‘True music’ is cast as the music of an

undisturbed nature, a utopian expression and experience, and the capacity to perceive ‘true

music’ is equated with an undisturbed closeness to nature. However, it must be remembered

that Ingram and Fukuoka hold divergent definitions of music, and that this divergence

demands a more nuanced reading; Ingram’s philosophical skepticism precludes the

possibility of a musicality located outside of the atomistic human individual, whereas

Fukuoka’s eco-centrism locates music explicitly as an expressive aspect of the world that

humans can apprehend to varying degrees depending on the level of damage they have

accrued under the yoke of industrialism. Furthermore, Fukuoka seems to dismiss the idea of

continuity between ‘true music’ and normative definitions of music as humanly organized

sound. He argues, for instance, that “the child who is raised with an ear pure and clear may

not be able to play the popular tunes on the violin or the piano, but I do not think this has

anything to do with the ability to hear true music or sing” (Fukuoka 1978: 11). To the extent

that Fukuoka argues for a discontinuity between ‘true music’ and popular tunes, his concept

of music cannot be accurately assessed under Ingram’s rubric of ecophilosophical claims,

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which focuses precisely on case studies of popular music in developing his notion of music

as prefiguring connections between humans and nature.

A similar issue arises in consideration of Ingram’s critique of eco-listening; while

permaculture discourse operationalizes many of the tropes that Ingram identifies around what

he calls “immersive listening” (ibid.: 59), Ingram’s analysis is focused on discourses

surrounding rock music, which is imbued with “quasi-mystical promise” and “ego-less

merger” through “sheer amplified loudness” (ibid.: 62), and New Age efforts at musical

entrainment which he argues hold music as “a form of benign magic” (ibid.: 67). None of the

musical examples that Ingram engages in his explanation (and somewhat derisive dismissal)

of eco-listening actually involve listening to ecological processes (the growth and death of

plants, the seasonal fluctuation of water levels in the soil, the appearance and departure of

pollinators, etc.). In this sense, Fukuoka’s concept of ‘true music’ and permaculture’s related

eco-social listening strategies, again, fall somewhat outside the purview of Ingram’s critique.

This is not to say that permaculture listening strategies do not operationalize some of the

same ecophilosophical speculations around the connective character of physical vibration and

the relational potential of directed awareness, or that Fukuoka’s ‘true music’ concept does

not position music as a utopian harmony—indeed, it is these points of convergence that

prompt a more sustained and nuanced consideration of the contours of musicality and

listening in permaculture discourse.

Fukuoka’s distinction between an ostensibly ‘true music,’ identified with frogs and

rivers and wind, and an assumedly, by contrast, ‘untrue music’ that he associates with

playing instruments like violin or piano, constructs an ideal form of music that is

undoubtedly “a form of utopian expression” (Ingram 2010: 15), while at the same time

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displacing a normative music concept (music as humanly organized sound) from that ideal

form. Similarly, permaculture listening discourses share with Ingram’s eco-listening case

studies an orientation toward ecological subjectivity, but instead of seeking immersion in

ecological subjectivity through a proxy of human musicking (rock and roll or New Age

music), permaculture listening endeavors immersion into ecosystem processes in specific

places, and into the emergent patterns (sonic and otherwise) that constitute those places. So,

when Ingram observes that “building on [the] recognition of music’s role in the formation of

collective identity, theorists within the deep ecology and New Age movements have begun to

speculate on the role that it can play in fostering a sense of ‘community’ that is expanded to

include not only human beings but also the natural world itself” (Ingram 2010: 65), he takes

for granted, and operationalizes, a definition of music that is itself contested and (to some

extent) displaced in permaculture discourse. Of course, permaculture communities do indeed

use music to foster an expanded sense of community, and normative human-centric

musicking practices do figure prominently into permaculture community-building strategies

(this topic merits its own in-depth study and is beyond the scope of this dissertation). In the

context of this discussion, however, it is crucial to recognize the distinction between an eco-

listening that is tethered to the performance and reception of specific human-centric genres

such as rock and roll or New Age, on the one hand, and an eco-listening that is oriented

toward ecological processes and ecological subjectivities. While Ingram is concerned with

the former, my study of permaculture listening is focused on the latter. I have demonstrated,

to this end, that human encounters with ecological processes and ecological subjectivities are

referred to as a musical experience in permaculture discourse, constructing a distinct eco-

centric concept of music.

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Ingram’s argument, furthermore, is rooted in his dismissal of the concept of the

“ecological self” as New Age-y radicalism that trades away rationalism for magical thinking.

Ecophilosophical claims regarding ecological subjectivity, and derivative claims about the

value of sound for ecological connection, emerge, in Ingram’s assessment, from “different

branches of radical environmentalism, including deep ecology, ecofeminism, ecosocialism

and ecoanarchism” (ibid.: 14). Ingram dismisses these claims as “essentially political

speculations” with little philosophical or scientific merit” (ibid.: 14-15). Against ecological

subjectivity, he privileges the persistent skepticism of “neo-Darwinists, who reject the idea

that the natural world really is a ‘community’ of living organisms” and instead “understand

habitats as characterized by competition, either between species, between individuals within

those species, or between individual genes” (Ingram 2010: 65). Ingram thus argues that

“when radical ecophilosophers assert that the natural world is a ‘community,’ then, they tend

to be making a political rather than a scientific point. In doing so, they risk conflating

political arguments with scientific ones in order to give authority to their claims” (ibid.: 65-

66, also see Keogh and Collinson 2016: 5-7). Woven into this political argument, Ingram

observes, is a belief in sound and listening as medium and method toward the realization of

the natural world as community. This construction obviously bears certain resemblance to

permaculture discourses (as described extensively above) and also to Titon’s articulation of

sound ecology, which is indeed explicitly political in its call for “changing our unsound and

unbalanced world to a world worth having” (2020: 274).

But all knowledge, and all systems of knowledge production, are situated in political

projects of consolidating, challenging, or transmuting power (Haraway 1988). Titon, in

contrast to Ingram, points out that scientific theories rooted in competition narratives are

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themselves cultural constructs (2020: 262-263, 269); the separation of scientific argument

from political argument that Ingram posits hinges on what Donna Haraway famously called

the “god trick” of objective scientific authority, “seeing everything from nowhere” (1988:

581). The dismissal of ecofeminist theories of ecological subjectivity as political arguments

seeking scientific authority, ironically, enacts a god trick of ascribing political neutrality

(Keogh 2013: 5) and scientific authority and objectivity to neo-Darwinian theories of

competition which themselves are deeply implicated in the consolidation of political power

(Smith 2008: 43-45).

It is not within the scope of the current discussion to prove or disprove Ingram’s

philosophical argument; my intention here is rather to illuminate and explore a rift in

thinking that has serious implications for the possibilities (and limits) of music as a concept

and subject of study. The privileging, as scientific and apolitical, of the competitive-

individualist worldview constitutes a fundamental epistemological difference with respect to

Titon’s sound ecology, and this difference leads to different conceptions of music; music for

Titon, as “the corporeal expression of sound connection as a vibrational exchange” is

fundamentally oriented toward not just the possibility, but the necessity of a more-than-

human musicality. “In our posthuman Anthropocene,” Titon writes, “distinctions blur

between culture and nature, between music and sound, and between humans and nonhuman

beings…. What it tells us, as musicians and music scholars, is that we must consider the

music of nature in asking about the nature of music” (Titon 2020: 256). Ingram, however,

relies on a definition of musical meaning (from Shephard and Wicke 1997) in which the

bounded human individual is the only recognized actor, and within which nature, the

“natural principles of acoustics and physiology shared by all [human] listeners” is cast as the

given,

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and culture, “the meanings that human beings project” is cast as the not-given (Ingram 2010:

19; Ochoa Gautier 2016: 116 also critiques this Nature-Culture binarism, although Ingram’s

argument becomes central to other aspects of the article). Ingram’s rejection of ecological

subjectivity thus seems to preclude, or at least ignore, the possibility of more-than-human

musicalities or, in Titon’s words, a music of nature.

These divergent ontologies of music, like all “stories for living in the Anthropocene”

(Haraway 2017: M45) are best held lightly and with a sense of serious curiosity. What is

certain, returning to Ana María Ochoa Gautier’s critique of music-as-political-positivity

narratives, is that “we can no longer afford a particular Western ontology and its relation to

academic knowledge, that is, the ‘persistent anthropocentric effort of constructing the human

as the not given, as the being itself of the not given, as observed in all of Western philosophy,

even the most radical’” (Ochoa Gautier 2016: 116, quoting Viveiros de Castro 2011: 44). In

dialogue with Eduardo Viveiros De Castro, she argues for “the need to generate ‘a new

anthropology of the concept that corresponds to a new concept of anthropology, in which the

conditions of ontological self-determination of the studied collectives prevail absolutely over

the reduction of human (and non-human) thought to a dispositive of recognition’” (ibid.: 123,

quoting Viveiros de Castro 2011: 16). As an example of how this new anthropology of the

concept might proceed, she offers the notion of Gaia, which, in her assessment, “has

increasingly been employed as a term that displaces the taken-for-granted notions of nature,

earth, culture, human, and so forth in anthropology” (ibid.) This displacement is an outcome

of “the central place given to rethinking the conceptual order within the political recasting

that the crisis of the environment poses for all disciplines” (ibid.). Ochoa Gautier argues that

music studies has struggled to incorporate this kind of rethinking, suggesting:

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The reaffirmation of the values of musical analysis, of musico-cultural relativism, of a

post-colonial critique based on the constant confusion between Western ontology and

epistemology (knowledge as being), and of the rejection of the drastic need to rethink

the political stakes provoked by climate change is deeply rooted in certain political

positivities that prevail within the notion of music itself in Western disciplinary

contexts. (Ochoa Gautier 2016: 123)

What Ochoa Gautier advocates for here, riffing on Viveiros de Castro, is the need to

cultivate a new ethnomusicology of the concept that corresponds to a new concept of

ethnomusicology. This entails finding ways to disrupt taken-for-granted notions of music,

specifically, of allowing for and giving language to “the intrusion of Gaia” (Stengers 2015:

43) into the study, and more fundamentally into the conceptualization, of music.

In this sense, while she utilizes David Ingram’s critique of the ecologization of sound,

Ochoa Gautier also gestures beyond Ingram’s commitment to a normative disciplinary

concept of music, and beyond disciplinary commitments to conventional modes of musical

analysis. “The history of Western music’s analytical categories—melody, rhythm, and,

perhaps, most crucially of all, the voice,” she observes “is traversed by a zoopolitics of the

acoustic that is obsessed with separating the human from the nonhuman” (ibid.: 131). She

argues furthermore that “music, like language, has been a fundamental ‘anthropotechnology’

used in projects that seek to ‘direct the human animal in its becoming man’ and that are

central to Western philosophy and to the establishment of the human as a separate political

community” (ibid.). What is at stake then, in the disruption of taken-for-granted notions of

music, is a disentanglement, however agonistic and partial, from the political project of

human domination.

It is important to note, returning to Aaron Allen’s critique of anthropocentrism in

music studies presented at the opening of this chapter, that Ochoa Gautier and Allen

converge in their perceived need to move away from disciplinary commitments to the study

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of ‘music as humanly organized sound,’ or of ‘people making music,’ and orient toward

critical re-examinations of basic terms of scholarly engagement. Disciplinary disagreements

over the efficacy of ecomusicology, acoustic multinaturalism, or other subfields

notwithstanding, there exists a shared interest in destabilizing anthropocentric notions of

music. Whatever the figure of Gaia has done or not done for anthropology, ecofeminism, and

the environmental humanities, Ochoa Gautier points to the need for music studies to generate

similarly destabilizing figures for music studies. Similarly, whatever the successes and

shortcomings of ecocentrism as a concept for ecology and the environmental humanities,

Allen argues for a need to cultivate non-anthropocentric approaches to the conceptualization

and study of music. This imperative also guides Titon’s theorization of sound ecology, as

well as Steven Feld’s longstanding and influential framework of acoustemology (Feld 2017).

Chapter Conclusion

My analysis of Fukuoka’s true music concept, and its relevance to and influence on

permaculture practices, is situated in the context of the disciplinary imperative toward non-

anthropocentric, ecocentric, or posthuman approaches to music. I have demonstrated that

while permaculture concepts regarding a ‘music of nature’ operationalize an ecologization of

sound that relies on familiar ecophilosophical claims regarding the connective, harmonizing

power of sound, music, and listening (as described by Ochoa Gautier 2016, Ingram 2010),

the grotesque ecological musicality that permaculture orients toward also upsets normative

definitions of music and model an ecocentrism grounded in multisensorial listening and

ecological pattern understanding. While permaculturists of course engage in more

recognizable or normative forms of music-making, I have argued that permaculture’s

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ecocentric musicality is characterized by a discontinuity with these recognizable,

anthropocentric forms. This ecocentric approach to music is embedded in key permaculture

texts, expressed in conversational and pedagogical references to the musicking of more-than-

human beings, and enacted in multi-sensorial listening (as codified in the sit spot exercise). It

is critical to note here that, while this eco-centric understanding is pervasive and influential

in permaculture discourse and practice, it operates alongside, and against, hegemonic

understandings of music as humanly organized sound. In my own articulation of grotesque

musicality or musicking—by which I refer to the experience of music as more-than-humanly

organized sound emerging within grotesque ecological subjectivities—I seek to provide a

grounding figure for this agonistic concept of music. The word grotesque is of key

importance here, in that it builds on the previous chapter’s discussion of how permaculture

listening orients, in opposition to hegemonic perceptive regimes, toward grotesque

ecological subjectivities and seeks eco-social conversation with these subjectivities.

Grotesque musicking, importantly, is not a phrase that permaculturists use themselves or

identify with, but it is, I suggest, a thing that they do.

Similar to the way in which grotesque ecological subjectivities disrupts the logic of

enclosure that undergirds individual subjectivity, I have argued that grotesque musicality

disrupts the disciplinary tendency, noted by Ana María Ochoa Gautier, toward the

“reaffirmation of the values of musical analysis” (2016: 123). Instead of sonic structures or

events open to analysis in familiar terms of melody, meter, or rhythm, the grotesque music of

landforms that permaculture listening orients toward is constituted by the sympoietic tangling

of bodies making and unmaking one another as soil, root, rock, and flesh. This figuration of

grotesque musicality emerges in synthesizing transdisciplinary dialogue with permaculture

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texts and discourses, music and sound scholarship, and ecofeminist environmental

humanities discourses. Through this synthesis, I cast the figure of grotesque musicality as a

helpful figure for destabilizing taken-for-granted notions of music, and also as a helpful tool

for taking seriously the permaculture approaches to listening and landform musicality

described in this chapter and throughout this dissertation.

While grotesque musicality disrupts, or disappoints, familiar modes of musical

analysis, this does not render it beyond the reach of systematic study. As I will demonstrate

in the following chapter, grotesque musicality can be understood to be both in discontinuity

and intimate relationship with other kinds of musicality. While this chapter has identified

and introduced permacultural concepts regarding a musicality of nature, ecology, or

landforms, the following chapter will present an extended analysis of how these concepts of

music and musicality exist in relation to various other forms or concepts of environmental

music, such as soundscape compositions and the trope. I will use Thomas Turino’s four field

framework of music as a model for this analysis, in an effort to integrate my

conceptualization of grotesque musicality into existing ethnomusicological methods and

theories.

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Chapter 4

Listening in Fields and Fields of Listening

I would also suggest that participatory music has more in common with a neighborhood

baseball game or a good conversation than it does with presentational music and the recorded

forms.

—Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life

October 25th, 2021

I sit in the middle of the garden, in between the two swale-and-berm beds, with

elderberry, apple, and peach trees behind me, and blueberry bushes, pluot, and nectarine

trees in front of me. I sit amongst the grasses, who are moist from the first heavy storm of the

year, their seed-bodies awakening to the life-giving force of the water. An oak titmouse

descends onto the branches of the nectarine. The bird calls out in a raspy, clicking voice—

contact calls to their kin in the nearby oaks and wild plums. They notice me, and they turn

their attention toward me, assessing the stillness of my body. I return the bird’s

acknowledgement with silence and calm. This is the closest that a titmouse has come to me in

the garden, just a couple yards away. They drop down to my level on the ground, signaling

that my presence is not immediately threatening, and hop into the swale that I had expanded

during the summer months. I had dug out the swale (kind of like a long, shallow vernal pool)

to slow the movement of rainfall down the slope, allowing the water to sink into the earth of

the hillside, recharge the water table and nurture the soil life. Now, after the first heavy

storm of the year, the soil is saturated and water lingers in the bottom of the swale. It is

really not much more than a glorified puddle, but nonetheless a welcome, joyous

transformation after the long dry months. The return of water is not to be taken for granted

here—it compels marvel and celebration!

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The titmouse forages in the swale, jumping cautiously back and forth between the

water and the branches of the nectarine tree, grasping little bodies and bits of earth in their

beak, and sipping rainwater from the swale. Throughout their foraging, they continue their

contact calling; no other titmice come to join them, but I know they are nearby and I can

perceive their small clicks and rustles in my peripheries. I am immersed in a mesh of

communicative resonance. I listen to the contact calls, and to the soft landing of the tiny

bird’s body onto the water-heavy soil, a lively composting tangle of grass straw, rabbit

pellets, chicken manure, and mature clay loam. I hear, barely, the dipping of the titmouse’s

beak into the soil and water as they drink and poke the ground for forage. I hear the scraping

of the bird’s claws as they return, moments at a time, to their perch on the nectarine limbs.

What are the relationships being expressed or sounded out in this moment? There are

soil relationships at play, as the rainfall stimulates the soil, as root systems expand and

microbial life swells, the lively wetness of the swale becomes a beacon and invitation for the

titmouses. They descend to the swale as a place of water as well, as a place to drink from. In

this way the very contour of the earth functions as a container for conversation; as a

container for the expression and pursuit of desires. These desires fold into one another; the

swirling desires of roots and soils bare fruits that become the object of desire for the titmouse

and other animals, including myself.

My fieldnote entry above recounts a moment of everyday eco-social conversation in,

and of, the garden. As discussed in the second chapter, this is conversation in the

etymological sense of ‘turning with,’ wherein the bodies of the holoent garden turn with and

make with each other. Following the third chapter’s discussion, this is also a moment of

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grotesque musicality taking place in and as the garden’s ecological subjectivity; the

conversational turning of bodies into and away from one another and the patterns of growth

and decay that emerge from these conversations. But what is the relationship, in this holoent

context, between music and conversation? Understanding music as a multivalent concept

with diverse interpretations, what kind of music does grotesque musicality orient toward, and

how can that particular music be situated in relationship to other, more normative, conceptual

renderings of music and musicality? In following this inquiry, this chapter’s discussion will

situate the concept of grotesque musicality in relation (not equation) to a corresponding

conceptualization of environmental sound as a crucial medium for eco-social participation. I

will argue that grotesque musicality is characterized by eco-social participation amongst

human and more-than-human beings, while giving a critical assessment of the textures and

limitations of this more-than-human participation.

In many ways, the scene described in my fieldnote above is not unusual; all manner

of songbirds were doubtless foraging in gardens, meadows, and along sidewalks throughout

the city and into the pastures of Petaluma at the time, searching for puddles, chipping to their

kin, and pecking at the moist earth. All over the city humans were surely noticing them,

perhaps in passing or in rapture or anywhere between, as they pulled weeds or walked about

in schoolyards or glanced out the windows of their trucks or offices or houses. Some humans,

maybe, were feeding the birds by tossing breadcrumbs or pre-packaged seed mixes, and

some by turning the soil. In this garden, my landmates and I feed them by turning the soil and

tending the flowers and trees. Through our tending and turning we participate in and amplify

patterns of growth that provide forage for the birds. Their chirping and scuffling is thus

indexically tethered to my experience of working the soil—in this sense the scene, for me, is

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definitively more about soil becoming birds and then soil again than it is about birds alone. In

any case, there is nothing unusually spectacular going on here; most things are most always

composting.

And yet, this moment holds specific significance for me in my relationship to the

garden, because I have waited months to see what would happen when the first rains filled

the swales that I dug. As subtle as the movements and resonances of these soil-human-water-

bird-tree intra-actions are, they express a holoent relationality that at once extends beyond

my participation in the garden and is also fundamentally shaped by it. This moment also

signals an important point in my fieldwork; at the threshold between summer and autumn, I

witness the ethos of the garden transform with the season, and I witness the ways in which

my small, cautious initial efforts at permaculture design with this garden holoent become

entangled in seasonal transformations. In this way, the moment is both very mundane and

very poignant—indeed, much of the work of permaculture entails cultivating, and noticing,

affective potency in mundane moments.

In order to explain this affective potency, I will briefly contextualize this moment in

the trajectory of my ethographic engagement with the garden. Following the principle of

protracted and thoughtful observation, I witnessed the drying of the land from the late spring

through the summer, and I carefully walked the contours of the land, tracing the etches of the

rains, past and future. I mapped out the topography of the hillside and the flow of water both

on paper and kinesthetically in my body. I felt the hardness of the clay soil, still compacted

from the generations of cattle ranching and chicken farming, evidence of the ongoing

ecological neglect that has accompanied colonial land theft. I listened and watched for the

movement of birds through the garden, how they clung to the shadowed edges where Coast

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Live Oaks and Wild Plums offered shelter, safety, and softer soils. I watched deer graze in

the open meadow beyond the fence, just downslope from where Rachel said there had been a

seep-spring that went dry a couple years back. I felt and smelled the dry heat baking the open

meadow, the air shimmering with thirst and sucking moisture from leaves and petals and

roots and from soils, and also from my skin and my lips. I felt sweat bead and evaporate on

my back, and I felt the bodies of grasses and flowers withering. In attending to the

conversation of the land, I perceived and experienced a desire for moisture, both within

myself and pervading the holoent.

My perception, like my emplacement in the garden, “emerges at the porous interface

between my exterior environment (the world ‘around’ me) and interior environment (my

embodied, cognitive-affective subjectivity)” (Goffman 2020). It partakes of and participates

in the collective flesh of sensibility that forms and animates the garden—and it is in this way

that I, with a mixture of certainty and curiosity, felt a relationship between my own thirst and

the thirst of the ecological subjectivities that I was comingling with. I responded to this

sensibility in a small, cautious way by digging out the garden swale, to slow the rainfall and

let the earth drink in the water before rushing down to the roadside and the storm drains.

After digging, I covered the bare earth in grass and mulch to keep it sheltered from the

drying effect of sun; if the clay soils became too baked, they would lose their capacity to

absorb rainfall, and our whole effort would result in injury to the land. I watched the mulch

turn golden and dry, and added more where it withered or shifted away, checking the soil for

signs of overexposure. I tapped the soil, listening for brittleness or the presence of water,

feeling the structure and crumble. I waited, with the soil, and with my landmates, for rain. So

then, on that October afternoon described above, the small pools of water were filled,

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brimming, not just with water but with affective potency for me; they were pools of relief,

gratitude, and curiosity. I did not just listen to birds in the garden, but I listened for the

resonance of my care, and for the ways in which my participations within the ecological

subjectivity of the garden brought transformations, however subtle, ephemeral, or

ambivalent.

But what does it mean to listen for the resonance of care, and where are the

resonances of care located? This is a question that emerges in direct response to

permaculture’s commitment, on the one hand, to a particular eco-social ethics of care

(described in the first chapter), and, on the other hand, to a practice of listening to eco-social

conversations as they emerge in and across ecosystems. How do permaculturists listen for

and perceive the resonance of specific acts of care and participation in specific eco-social

contexts? And how does the anticipation of these affective qualities (in participation and

care) give rise to a particular conception of sound? Moving from these questions, this

chapter’s discussion will situate permaculture understandings of sound and sonic gesture

within a comparative framework that identifies and describes four distinct renderings of

environmental sound (a phrase full of contested terrain that I will discuss in detail below).

By the word rendering, I refer to the ways in which “the senses are mediators of social

values rather than simply mechanistic receptors of information” (Rice 2005: 200).

Information, furthermore, does not exist prior to its mediation, and is rendered in specific

ways in specific contexts. In this specific context, for instance, I posit that the coalescing and

dissipating of patterns of growth and decay in the garden constitute a grotesque music, and

that my observation of and participation in those patterns thus becomes an enactment of

grotesque

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musicality. This position operationalizes a particular rendering of music, and, implicitly, of

sound and resonance, which will be the topic of the proceeding discussion.

Copresence and Eco- Sociality

One important distinction of permaculture listening, I suggest, is that it is grounded

(both ideologically and practically) in participatory copresence. As discussed in the second

and third chapters, permaculture listening techniques are oriented toward immersion within

the animate force of landforms, and toward immediate encounter with the resonance of place.

Permaculture comes to know and relate to the animate force of place through whole-body,

multisensorial immersion, which entails attending not just to the audible resonance but to

inaudible vibrancy and multisensorial interaction. To talk about a permaculture

acoustemology then, is to foreground copresence (as Feld does in his explication of

acoustemology as an analytical framework, see Feld 2017) and, further, to privilege

copresence over audibility. In this sense listening is primarily about copresence within

ecological subjectivities, and secondarily (not unimportantly) about audition or sensory

perception of those subjectivities. The primacy placed discursively on immersion within (or

merging with) ecological subjectivities mediates the perception of environmental sounds and

renders them as holoent gestures and expressions of participatory eco-sociality.

But copresence does not necessarily entail collaboration or participation. Copresences

can be marked by indifference, antagonism, or any array of compounded affective

orientations; for instance, the mule deer who graze in the meadow above the garden are

generally wary of my presence. They will sleep right on the other side of the fence, under the

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same wild plum that drops fruit into the garden soil, but usually when I come out to work or

listen they take some distance, shifting uphill a few yards or sometimes slipping into the

cover of the oaks. In these moments the deer and I scuffle about on the hillside in loose

proximity and relative calm; I check the health of the garden, testing handfuls of soil and

bringing pails of water, while the deer browse the grasses and brush. During their fawning

months in spring, however, they can be quicker and more expressively forward in their

distrust. In March of 2020, during my first spring of fieldwork, the does would approach me

with hard halting steps, stamping, hissing, and staring at me intently, tracking my every

sound and movement. In these encounters I would stay still for a moment and then slowly

walk away, accommodating their clear demand for distance. These encounters gave me a

visceral understanding of how copresence is also something that cannot be taken for granted

or assumed as a given, unchanging condition of experience within holoent formations.

Copresence is of course—and particularly in circumstances of species and

ontological difference such as human-to-deer or human-to-landform encounters—

experienced asymmetrically. The deer’s affective reaction to my presence and observation,

the stamping and snorting, sound out at once the certainty and discomfort of copresence.

This discomfort is mostly unknowable to me, except through my reception and interpretation

of these agitated gestures, their resonance, their movement, and the atmosphere they

generate. I recognize my presence as unwelcome, and step back, absorbing and enacting the

deer’s desire for distance. From the time of our earliest encounters, these deer and I have

shared the meadow many times (always, still, separated by the neighbor’s thin wire fence); I

have learned how to navigate our copresence in ways that do not upset the deer, and the deer,

I suspect, have grown more accustomed to and trusting of my presence and intention. We are

learning to co-

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habit calmly with one another—though it would be dishonest and disrespectful of me to

claim to be in participatory relationship with these beings. I hold deep admiration and

gratitude for them, for the way that they graze the meadow so listeningly and quietly. But

the deer, apparently and very understandably, hold a different affective orientation toward

my presence. Our copresence is marked by impasse, not just the physical impasse of the

fence and the ideologies of property and species hierarchy that the fence enacts upon the

bodies of the deer, but by the firm gestures of refusal from the deer themselves. These

physical and affective impasses contribute to a pervasive, palpable atmosphere of wariness

in the space between our bodies.

This wariness that marks my intersubjective encounter with the deer across the fence

however, is only a part of the dense web of affective tethers that coalesce in the atmosphere

of the garden. My presence in the garden sets me into relationship not just with the

neighboring deer, but to countless other creatures below and above the soil; the seeds that

grow from the deer’s manure and eventually tunnel under or float over the fence, the coyote

who track and stalk the deer, resting under the oaks and waiting for moments of

vulnerability and opportunity; the wild plums who shade and feed the deer in the summer

months, and who also shade and feed me and the plants in the garden. The ecological

subjectivity of the garden, as discussed in the second chapter, emerges in the relational

between-nesses that proliferate in and around them. As I move toward building friendship

with the ecological subjectivity of the holoent garden, then, I hold the affective tension of

my relationship with the deer in relationship to these many between-nesses. The non-

participatory impasse that I respect with the deer shapes the way I move in and participate

with the holoent; in seeking approval, or at least calm indifference from the deer, I become

enculturated into a sort of

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quietude that I perform as I go about my tending, weeding, watering and other work in the

garden. I have learned, and continue to learn, about how to gauge the mood of the deer in

relationship to the mood of the meadow and of the garden and in relationship to my own

active copresence.

Listening, serving here as a metaphor for giving careful attention, is crucially

oriented toward this kind of affective learning through copresence. Listening in this

permaculture frame is about absorbing and integrating the particular patterns of expression,

behavior, and sentiment that pervade the garden in the troubled endeavor to make friends,

and “learning to be affected” (Roelvink 2015: 57; Latour 2004: 209-210). The encounter

with the deer is one salient example of how the ecological subjectivity of the ecosystem

shapes and permeates my affective body, and also of how ideas about friendship can become

troubled or falter. But making friends takes staying with the trouble (Haraway 2016)—with

regard to the deer, this means finding ways to respect the eco-social boundaries that they

express while continuing to tend to the ecological subjectivity that we share and co-

constitute.

Mediation and Rendering of Sound and Environment

The emphasis on copresence within holoent subjectivities distinguishes permaculture

listening from modes of engagement with environment and environmental sound based on

audio recordings, wherein sounds are processed and perceived in extracted isolation from

their sources and listening becomes a schizophonic (Schafer 1994 [1977]: 90; Feld 1994b;

Eisenberg 2015: 197) or acousmatic endeavor (Chion 2012: 52; Sterne 2012: 210).

Prominent examples of recording-based ecosystem listening include the disciplinary methods

of acoustic ecology and soundscape ecology, which have come to rely increasingly on

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“automated digital recording systems” (Pijanowski et al. 2011: 206), and the musical practice

of soundscape composition, which actively and creatively constructs a place’s (real or

imagined) soundscape through the recording and manipulation of acoustic phenomena, as

well as other related forms of environmental audio recording that create sound objects for a

variety of listening experiences, such as musical curations of whale song (Rothenberg 2014),

or documentary representations of “everyday life” (Edwards 2016: 161). The audile

techniques that sound reproduction technologies engender certainly shape listening habits

and experiences outside of recorded-audio contexts; the very concepts of liveness and

originality emerge interdependently with the technological-ideological possibilities of non-

live recorded sounds and copies (Sterne 2003: 220-221; Benjamin [1968] 2007: 232-233).

However, just as Greg Downey refutes the conflation of musical objects with musical

experience (Downey 2002: 487), I suggest that the participatory copresence that

permaculture listening practices orient toward cannot be mapped onto objectifying concepts

of liveness and originality, or vice versa. This has to do, in large part, with the fact that

permaculture listening practices are situated precisely in the experience of intersubjective

encounter, which is irreducible to an acoustic dimension.

The characteristic emphasis on collaborative co-composition in permaculture

listening also results in an experiential rendering of environmental sound that differs

(though again with certain influence and overlap) from less participatory forms of ecosystem

listening. Examples of less- or non-participatory ecosystem listening include wildlife tours

and wilderness excursions where human presence is situated legally and ideologically as

external to the (curated) presentational spectacle of the wild, as well as more everyday

experiences of human-nonhuman encounter in urban and rural settings, where hegemonic

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ideologies regarding wildness, and the spectacle of the nonhuman, remain operative. Even

while, as Dana Graef notes in dialogue with William Cronon, that “wildness ‘can be found

anywhere,’ that is ‘within and around’ each of us. It can be found in a backyard garden; it can

be found in the city…wildness need not reject the human” (Graef 2020: 523; Cronon 1996:

86-89), the hegemony of wilderness discourses still bear heavily on Western popular

imaginations of wildness as a quality external to (imaginations of) built environments. Where

wildness, or nonhuman-ness, is rendered as spectacle (though not necessarily spectacular),

the sounds of wildness are also rendered presentational. Listeners, in this wilderness

scenario, are compelled to inhabit positions of audience to environmental sound. Listeners

with distinct positionalities will inhabit and enact wilderness scenarios in varying (creative)

ways, but this variance does not negate the existence or compelling force of hegemonic

wilderness ideology.

I will go into more detailed discussion of each of these renderings of environmental

sound in the following sections of this chapter. Before proceeding further in this comparative

discussion, however, I will emphasize that the term environmental sound itself warrants

scrutiny and explanation. Parallel to “the problem of ecology” identified by Aaron Allen

(2018: 1), there exists a problem of environment, or, to riff on Allen’s writing, one

environment and many environments. The word holds diverse associations in different

contexts and, as Allen and Kevin Dawe argue “goes beyond multivalence to be downright

problematic: by setting up ‘environment’ as distinct from what is ‘human,’ we create a

nefarious binary that seems somehow to set up ‘out there’ as distinct from ‘us,’ when we are

in fact part of, from, and nothing more than nature or the environment ‘out there’” (Allen and

Dawe 2016: 9-10). When operating as a sort of hyperobject within Western epistemologies

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(Morton 2013: 19, 28) the concept of Environment conflates with Nature, invoking

dichotomies that exclude human material cultures from the environment, or include material

culture as a marked form of “built environment” (Allen and Dawe 2016: 10; Christensen and

Heise 2017: 452; Novak 2015: 129).

Music technology scholar Robindra Raj Parmar observes that “the main problem with

‘environmental’ is epistemological. It assumes a model of place in which objects occupy an

environment that pre-exists their presence, where object and surround can be readily

distinguished, and where objects are shaped and defined by their environment, but not the

other way around” (Parmar 2019: 22). Parmar argues, however, that the term can be usefully

disentangled from “an exclusive definition of nature” and reoriented toward “an inclusive

formulation, one that recognizes our species’ place in the Earth System” (ibid.: 24). Here he

draws explicitly on an Aristotlean construction of “nature as physis” wherein “humans are

similar to growing plants and the remainder of the cosmos, since these constituent parts are

always in motion, always changing” (ibid.: 19-20). Parmar’s own theorization of

environmental music in his dissertation Platial Phenomenology and Environmental

Composition sets Aristotle’s view of “an inclusive nature, one that integrates our species with

the life forces around us” (ibid., emphasis in original), along with a plurality of Greek

conceptualizations of place (geos, topos, khoros, xoros) in dialogue with the artistic practices

of electroacoustic composers who incorporate field recordings into their work (ibid.: 9-12).

Parmar then proposes environmental music as a term “to include products (fixed pieces,

installations, performances) that use field recordings as primary material, where the

intentions of the practitioner are primarily aesthetic, as opposed to scientific or documentary”

and where “the sounds are not planned or scored, but are largely unexpected, encountered at

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hazard. The composer first encounters these within a phenomenological milieu, as a listener”

(ibid.: 9). His formulation involves a philosophical re-tooling of environment as much as, or

perhaps even more than, it does of music, which remains largely in the discretionary mind of

the composer.

My own conception of environmental sound takes inspiration from this articulation of

environmental music, while also gesturing beyond the boundaries of Parmar’s definition.

Specifically, I note that while Parmar explicitly challenges exclusive definitions of nature in

his compelling theorization of platial phenomenology, his particular use of the term music

simultaneously reinscribes these exclusionary boundaries: music is ultimately affirmed in

Parmar’s writing as a material product of human composers. “Natural sounds,” tracking

Parmar’s engagement with influential composer Luc Ferrari, only become musical sounds

when captured and re-composed by the human artist. In Ferrari’s conception, natural sounds

“do not exist for you, they are not there waiting for you. An outdoor sound is fugitive. One

wonders, will it return?” (Parmar 2019: 20). The recordist-composer renders these fugitive

sounds musical through techniques of technological capture and recognizable compositional

styles. The composer, in this sense, acts as an alchemist or gatekeeper between the basically

exclusive realms of natural and (human) musical sounds. In substituting sound for music (if

only temporarily and in relation to Parmar’s writing), I invite the fugitivity of these

ostensibly natural sounds into a broader consideration of both recorded and unrecorded sonic

gestures that emerge in the context of an inclusive nature, a grotesque nature of holoent

relations. This invitation is logical and necessary in the context of my study of permaculture

listening, which attends directly to these fugitive and grotesque sounds. I am primarily

interested here in using the broad category of environmental sound to facilitate inquiry into

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how the worldmaking sounds of sympoiesis are situated within different modes or fields of

discursive and experiential framing, and how listeners’ relationships to environmental sounds

shift across each of these framings. In other words, I am interested in what is at stake in

choosing to encounter environmental sound as grotesque music versus a compositional

resource for human music, or a tool for retrospective, quantitative ecosystem analysis.

Understanding what is at stake in these distinct renderings, I suggest, requires a systematic

exploration of each of their characteristics, to which I will now turn.

Framing Four Fields of Environmental Sound

In dynamic and partial contrast to the non-participatory listening engendered by

wilderness and conservationist discourses, and to the acousmatic character of recorded forms

of ecosystem acoustics (high-fidelity recording and soundscape composition), I identify

permaculture as a realm of immersive participatory eco-social listening. In doing so, and in

direct dialogue with Thomas Turino’s four-field model of music (2009), I propose a model

of four conceptual and experiential registers or fields of environmental sound: participatory,

presentational, high fidelity field recording, and soundscape composition. These four realms

are not exhaustive or exclusive, but are intended to account for four distinct ways in which

environmental sound can be imagined, rendered, perceived, and mediated within and across

cultural contexts. To reiterate my purpose in more direct dialogue with Turino, I attend here

to the ways in which environmental sound becomes something different and does something

different in each of these renderings, as does the task of listening.

In his four-field model of music, Turino distinguishes between four specific but non-

exclusive fields of music—participatory performance, presentational performance, high

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fidelity recording, and studio audio art recording (2009: 95; 2008: 90-91). Turino’s model

explicates nonhierarchical differences that “point to fundamentally different conceptions of

what music is and what it can do for people” (ibid.: 88) within and across cultures. For

instance, he identifies studio audio art as generally operating within a conception of “music

as an art object to be created by one group for consumption by another group not present in

face-to-face situations and with no reference to live performance,” directing “maximum

attention to shaping the sonic object,” whereas music in the high fidelity field references

face-to-face situations and is “recorded to represent live performance” (ibid.: 91). Both of

these fields are grouped as “recording music” in Turino’s model, in juxtaposition with

participatory and presentational fields which are grouped as “live performance” forms (ibid.)

and are differentiated in turn by the level of separation between performers and audience

members. Understanding that these fields often combine and shape one another (ibid.: 87),

Turino’s model challenges “people to suspend their habitual conceptions of what music is

and to actually think of the four fields as separate art forms with different potentials for

human life” (ibid.: 89). For instance, whereas studio audio art, Turino suggests, “has more in

common with sculpture, painting, and other studio art forms,” participatory music has more

in common with “a good conversation than it does with presentational music and the

recorded forms” (ibid.: 89).

Turino’s model, as described within his broader theorization of “music as social life”

(2008) stands as one of the most comprehensive and enduring approaches to the study of

music within the discipline of ethnomusicology. My intention in paralleling Turino’s model,

then, is to ground my discussion in an analytical framework familiar to ethnomusicologists,

and to make explicit the task of resituating the study of music from a social to an eco-social

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context. As may be clear already, the four fields of environmental sound that I have

proposed map one-to-one onto Turino’s four fields of music making; I suggest correlations

respectively between participatory eco-social conversation and participatory performance,

presentational ecosystem listening and presentational performance—the mapping of high

fidelity recording category and the soundscape composition/studio audio art category are

even more obvious. These correlations are not meant as simple equations, and I draw them in

order to interrogate differences as well as similarities. To do so, I have repopulated Turino’s

table from Music as Social Life (2008) in which he breaks down the differentiated aspects of

each field (see figure 1 on pp. 238-239). I have also adapted the content of the table to reflect

my own interpretations of these four fields of environmental sound, keeping the same

evaluative criteria in the left column to facilitate analytical continuity. In the discussion

below I will attend briefly to each of these four fields, giving most weight to the

consideration of participatory eco-social listening.

Why construct this parallel model? What is the value of constructing these categories

of environmental sound? While Turino’s four-field framework is focused explicitly on

human social life and human musicking, I suggest that an adaptative repurposing of his

model toward environmental sound is helpful for thinking through the acoustic experiences

of permaculture eco-sociality and intersubjective encounter, and for thinking through

cultural constructions of environmental sound and music more broadly. My approach here is

guided by the following inquiry; as the social becomes eco-social, what becomes of music?

How does the defamiliarization of social life prompt a further defamiliarization of music, as

an object of study and as a mode of everyday experiential interaction with the world?

Situated inquiries into the musicality of eco-sociality, I propose, can illuminate culturally

situated

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logics and experiences of environmental sound. For instance, it becomes apparent through

this four-field framework that while environmental sound is effectively rendered musical in

normative Western frameworks through soundscape composition, high-fidelity recording,

and even the curational framing of presentational listening to natural or wild soundscapes,

participatory eco-social immersion does not so readily render environmental sound musical

unless one of the other three fields comes into play. As noted above in engagement with

Parmar’s conception of environmental music, the fugitive and grotesque sounds of eco-

social conversation are often excluded from the category of music until they are captured by

recordists or composers, rendered as resource and raw material for the material-cultural

practices of human beings. Thus, as I will discuss, the participatory field represents a space

of more-than-human encounter, both crucial and quotidian, in which ideological and

perspectival commitments to “music as something essentially human” (Brabec de Mori and

Seeger 2013: 270) are enacted and contested both discursively and experientially.

The point of this extended comparative engagement with Turino’s model is not

simply to further inflate the category of music to consume eco-social participation, but to

interrogate the discursive terrain of music at its ragged, fugitive edges, to follow musicality

to places of precarity, where anticipated logics and structures begin to falter and different

strategies of listening and sounding emerge out of necessity. Permaculture’s particular

acoustemological character serves as one vehicle for this interrogation—and it is certainly

not the only one; immersive approaches to participatory eco-social listening, of course, do

not begin or end within the framework of permaculture. Environmentally-oriented threads of

ethnomusicological scholarship offer myriad examples of naturecultural conceptions of

musicality and their implications for the study of music and sound (Silvers 2020; Dirksen

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2019; Seeger 2016; Ramnarine 2009; Feld 1990). As such, I position permaculture as one

example among many of participatory eco-social listening and sounding, and I offer my

analysis of permaculture’s specific entanglements and frictions with hegemonic conceptions

of environmental sound as a small contribution to longstanding and emergent

interdisciplinary discourses on the perception and engagement of more-than-human

entanglements.

Soundscape Composition, or Environmental Music: A Studio Art

While I use the term soundscape composition as a more recognized term, I

acknowledge Parmar’s proposal of the term environmental music (discussed above) as

perhaps a more versatile referent. Parmar notes, for instance, that Barry Truax’s authoritative

definition of soundscape composition “though couched in neutral language…masks problems

of ideology that are inherent in Schafer’s soundscape. The primary problem is a foundation

in an exclusive nature, one in which humanity is apart from (and even superior to) the natural

world” (Parmar 2019: 23). While Parmar, as a practicing composer, is understandably

invested in crafting a less ideologically burdened musical identity, my own engagement here

is more descriptive; I understand a rough referential equivalence (also identified in Parmar

2019: 23) between the terms soundscape composition and environmental music. Recognizing

its wider currency and familiarity in music and sound studies literature, I will use the term

soundscape composition in this section, although the concept of environmental music will

remain relevant throughout the discussion.

Under either name, soundscape composition or environmental music presents as a

rather clear subset of Turino’s studio audio art field. This is a crucial point, because it signals

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the recognition of environmental sound as musical material, if only within the cohorts of

studio artists and academics (Turino 2008: 88); environmental sound becomes transformed

through the mediation of sound technologies and through the human composer’s creative

process, rendered as an artistic product with aesthetic and cultural value. The transformative

element is a central defining feature, as composer Michael Rüsenberg notes in his reflexive

observation that “the soundscape composer very often works with sonic phenomena other

people in the same context call noise…Let’s face it: soundscape composition often means

bringing noise into the concert hall” (Rüsenberg in Westerkamp 2002: 54). Composer and

co-founder of the World Soundscape Project Hildegard Westerkamp challenges this

perspective, advocating for more ethical considerations, arguing that it is “in fact the

composer’s responsibility to create a sonic environment with his or her compositions that

does not damage the listener’s hearing, as much as it is the city planner’s responsibility not

to expose commuters to excessive noise? Is it not the soundscape composer’s responsibility

to act like an acoustic ecologist?” (ibid.). Barry Truax (also a founding member of the World

Soundscape Project) gestures toward this ethical precarity in his assertion that, in principle, a

soundscape composition “enhances our understanding of the world, and its influence carries

over into everyday perceptual habits” (Truax 2008: 106). As Westerkamp and Truax both

note in their own way, it is not just noises that move into and out of concert halls through the

vessel of soundscape composition, but ways of attending to and feeling about particular

noises in particular places.

The contested relationship between composer, composition, audience, and place that

surfaces in this dialogue between Rüsenberg, Westerkamp, and Truax illuminates the key

characteristics of studio audio art as presented in Turino’s analysis; the “desire for maximum

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individual control” and the temporal-spatial distancing of human interaction (2009: 105;

2008: 83). “Socially and artistically,” Turino observes, “studio audio art is the most

autonomous field, and, like the other fields, it has its own positive aspects and drawbacks.

On the positive side there is artistic control and a broad sound palette; on the negative side

there is less human interaction to guide the artistic process (e.g., direct audience response), or

to be enjoyed as a basic part of music making” (Turino 2008: 83). Extending Turino’s

analysis, I observe that soundscape composition also, at least in the moment of listening,

entails a physical separation of the listener from the sources of the environmental sound; in

this sense there is less eco-social interaction to guide both the artistic process and the

listening processes of the audience. The spatial-temporal separation of sounds from their

original physical sources gives rise to new listening discourses, strategies and proficiencies

(Sterne 2003: 25; Chion 2012: 50-52). Building on Pierre Shaeffer’s concept of acousmatics,

Michel Chion notes that “acousmatic sound draws our attention to sound traits normally

hidden from us by the simultaneous sight of the causes—hidden because this sight reinforces

the perception of certain elements of the sound and obscures others” (Chion 2012: 52). Thus,

he argues, “the acousmatic truly allows sound to reveal itself in all its dimensions” (ibid.).

Acousmatic listening involves deeply historical practices of enculturation (Sterne 2003: 12)

as well as specific skillsets for attending to sound as revealed ‘in all its dimensions.’

Chion’s assessment, it must be noted, relies on an a priori assumption of sound as a

thing that somehow exists in all its dimensions outside of any relationship to other

phenomena, as well as a positioning of sound-reproduction technologies as “purely natural,

instrumental, or transparent conduits for sound” (Sterne 2003: 25). Sound is rendered here

not just as capturable, but as inevitably captive to the technologies of its reproduction to the

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extent that it can only be fully apprehended through its reproduction in an acousmatic state.

The learned transparency of sound reproduction technologies is necessary to the feeling of

immersion that soundscape compositions seek to facilitate. Soundscape compositions can

also, however, deliberately and creatively disrupt the learned transparency of sound-

reproduction technologies. Hildegard Westerkamp demonstrates this nicely in her piece

“Kit’s Beach Soundwalk” through a narrative explanation of her in-studio manipulation of

bandpass filters. By naming the role of technological mediation and post-production in the

creation of soundscapes, Westerkamp also elegantly demonstrates “the problems with

treating a soundscape recording as pure documentarity” (Sterne 2012a: 92).

The challenge of soundscape composition, in Westerkamp’s assertion, centers around

the question of how “to create such a composition from the found sound materials, in other

words as a piece with its own integrity, a new moment in time in a new place with its very

own life and characteristics, yet still sonically connected to the place and time of the original

recordings and composer’s own experiences?” (Westerkamp 2002: 53). This inquiry can also

be understood as relevant to non-musical approaches to soundscape recordings, which also

inevitably confront the challenge of creating new sound objects that simultaneously

communicate their own integrity and a convincing sonic connection to the place and time

they capture. All soundscape recordings, however scientific or objective in their

presentation, are fundamentally tethered to studio art practices (Sterne 2003: 219). In this

sense, the proceeding discussion concerning high-fidelity recording unfolds in continuum

with practices of soundscape composition. As I will discuss below, the threshold between

soundscape composition and what I will call high fidelity environmental recording consists

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mainly in the prioritization of the sonic connections to originality, or of representations of

liveness.

High-fidelity (Environmental) Recording: Representing Liveness

High-fidelity recording, as a category distinct from soundscape composition,

redirects technologies and techniques of sonic capture toward a distinct rendering of

environmental sound grounded more fully in the concept of liveness. Tracking with Turino is

again helpful here: whereas soundscape compositions, like studio audio art, generally focus

inward on the “compositional process and product” (Turino 2008: 91) and toward the

composer’s experience and intention, high fidelity recordings of environmental sound aim to

produce sonic objects that accurately, or evocatively, represent live events. This is akin to the

“emphasis on the art object and the representation of live performance” that Turino

associates with the high fidelity field of recording music (ibid.). High fidelity representations

of environmental sound become critically important to scientific research methods,

particularly to the fields of acoustic ecology and soundscape ecology, wherein the collection

of reliable acoustic data sets has becomes a central methodology (Angeler, Alvarez-Cobelas,

and Sánchez-Carrillo 2018; Krause 2017; Krause 2015: 91-96; Kohut 2015; McKinnon

2013: Sykes 1993: 82). These disciplinary frameworks operate on the conviction that

“soundscape observation creates an opportunity for emplaced analysis” (Goffman 2020) of

ecosystem interactions as well as the behavior and perception of individual organisms in the

landscape (ibid.; Farina and Belgrano 2006).

Scientific methodologies project positivist ideological and epistemological

assumptions onto sound-production technologies that rely (similarly to the artistic practice of

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soundscape composition) fundamentally on “the idea of a sound’s ‘fidelity’ to its source”

(Sterne 2003: 25) and the transparency of sound-production technologies as “vanishing

mediators” (ibid.: 218). Listening to environmental sound as rendered through high fidelity

recordings entails the practiced development of what Jonathan Sterne calls “audile

technique” (ibid.: 223) and the “extension of pure audition” (ibid.: 256-265); the separation

of foreground and background sound into interior and exterior, the privileging of sounds

interior to the recording and the learned dismissal, or “wishing away” of the exterior “noise

of the machine,” which Sterne equates with “wishing away the noise of society,” the noise of

the complex social relations and practices that constitute the medium of sound-recording

technologies (2003: 259). This move toward pure audition (which is by no means limited to

the context of scientific research, but normalized throughout society, as Sterne demonstrates)

takes on added significance in the context of environmental sound, where the technophonies

of modernity are methodologically and epistemologically separated from sounds labeled

discursively natural and categorized as biophony and geophony. Modernity (and its cyborg

mediation) is carefully excised (vanished) from “wild soundscapes” (Krause 2015: 25-26,

125) and society is wished away from Nature. It is in this sense that soundscape recording

also becomes a form of salvage activism—recording the last “natural” or “wild

soundscapes” before they fall prey to the expansion of “human din” (Krause 2017; Spring

2012: 34).

Tracking with Turino’s analysis of high fidelity recording, the high fidelity soundscape

achieves a “semi-permanent existence” as a sound object, allowing for the archiving and

preservation of acoustic imprints of actually vanishing ecosystems, species, and lifeways;

sonicized ghosts of the Anthropocene (a la Tsing et al. 2017). The extent to which these

recordings are valued as accurate and meaningful representations, memories, or continuances

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of “voices of the wild” depends on the maintained integrity of cultural ideologies and audile

techniques that adhere to discourses of fidelity and authenticity.

The production and perception of an authentic realism in soundscape recordings is an

inherently and thoroughly ideological process, enacting and “reflecting our sonic and

epistemological predilections quite as much as music does” (Goffman 2020, also see

Doughty, Duffy, and Harada 2019: 1; Chatterjee and High 2017; Coates 2005; Moore 2003;

Sterne 2012b). In recognition of this fact, Krause notes that the goals of acoustic realism “are

still largely subjective and depend entirely on the listener-cum-recordist at one end, and the

listener-cum-audience at the other” (Krause 2015: 78). Here he converges partially with

Sterne’s argument that fidelity is more so a result of cultural practices and learned techniques

of production and audition, but his formulation effectively positions (through omission)

sound-production technologies as vanishing mediators; the ideal recording system captures

and faithfully reproduces everything except for its own presence. In this way, high fidelity

soundscape recordings, like soundscape compositions, render environmental sound as a sonic

object that has an ostensibly (and culturally constructed, following Sterne’s analysis) faithful

representational relationship to a place in the world at a particular time.

To this point, I observe that Sterne’s analysis of acousmatic sound is bounded by his

focus on recordings of the human voice. His argument, for instance, that “sound reproduction

always involves a distinct practice of sound production” (2003: 241) is based exclusively on

case studies wherein human singers and speakers modified their performance practice in

response to the recording technology and the organized network that the technology

embodies. It is not apparent, however, that this argument can be extended to more-than-

human circumstances such as soundscape recording; garden holoents, for instance, do not

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apparently modify their acoustic performance in the presence of sound recording equipment,

unless that equipment is accompanied by some disruptive sound or movement (e.g., if I am

carrying a recording device with me as I walk heedlessly through the garden). Indeed, the

disciplines of acoustic ecology and soundscape ecology proceed fruitfully on this

fundamental premise; that recording devices can (to varying degrees of success) be placed

clandestinely and strategically within ecosystems to record a wide spectrum of animal

communication and environmental sounds, and that the sounds that these surveillance

devices capture correspond to authentic (meaning true and unprovoked) acoustic expressions

of the ecosystem and its cognitive landscape (e.g., Farina and Belgrano 2006; Farina and

Pieretti 2013; Staaterman et al. 2014; Ricci et al. 2016). Sterne’s argument that sound

reproduction always involves a distinct practice of sound production certainly applies to the

curational intentions of recordists and the operative ideological constructs of nature, culture,

and technology (and their technical correlates of biophony, geophony, anthrophony, etc.)

that inform their choices, but it does not necessarily apply to the ecological subjectivities that

recordists seek to capture.

The philosophical implications that arise here with regard to originality and

authenticity deserve extended consideration beyond the scope of the current study. My brief

engagement with Sterne’s critical historiography of sound-reproduction technology serves

mainly to articulate several key aspects of high fidelity recording of environmental sound.

First, like high fidelity music recording (Turino 2008: 73), it prioritizes the representation of

liveness. Second, like high fidelity music recordings, high fidelity environmental sound

recording entails an “unspecified time delay between production and reception” through

which listeners and producers alike are separated from the environmental sounds and eco-

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social contexts that are represented in the recording, although reproductions strive toward

realism and a sense of “emplacement” (Goffman 2020). Third, I have noted that the high

fidelity recording of environmental sound cannot be analyzed on the same terms as human-

centered recording processes, specifically because the ecological subjectivities that are

represented in environmental sound recordings cannot be understood to employ “a distinct

practice of sound production” in relationship to sound reproduction. In this way, soundscape

recordings also diverge somewhat from Turino’s category of high fidelity music recording,

which identifies (in alignment with Sterne) a certain modification of performance practices

on the part of human musicians toward mediated networks of representation and circulation.

Presentational Ecosystem Listening

What I am terming presentational ecosystem listening involves spatiotemporal

copresence of the listener with or within the ecosystem being listened to, and, at the same

time, a level of social separation between the listener and the listened that renders the sound

object presentational or spectacular. For example, in curated wilderness spaces such as

national parks where, in the U.S. context, human participation is limited by environmental

legislations and conservationist ethics, park visitors are expected to enjoy the serenity and

perceived beauty of wilderness soundscapes as presentational displays but they are

discouraged from participation in those presentations, or from attending to the colonial

histories from which they emerge (Cronon 1996: 79). In this sense, the ‘leave no trace’

motto of the National Park Service engenders a non-participatory form of listening wherein

park visitors take on the role of audience members; “wolves howl and people listen” (Deluca

2016: 87). Of course, park visitors, along with rangers, researchers and citizen scientists, are

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actively participating (in various ways) in the ideology and institution of wilderness, and in

the perpetuating construction of wilderness as an intellectual category and a geopolitical

terrain, as well as in the design and implementation of conservation strategies. For this

reason, Deluca argues that citizen-scientists and wildlife biologists enact “a nuanced form of

participatory, situational environmental music playing out in everyday life” (2016: 89).

While Deluca uses the term ‘participatory’ to distinguish this form of co-present

environmental music from recorded soundscapes and soundscape compositions (ibid.), I

suggest a more nuanced understanding of this kind of ‘environmental music’ that takes into

account the alienating ideologies that shape, constrain, and ultimately restrict participatory

modes of encounter and experience. I argue that the operative ideologies of wilderness and

scientific reductionism engender (though not incontestably or entirely, as practices such as

the stocking of lakes and waterways with fish for reacreational and subsistence fishing

demonstrate) a separating orientation toward the ecological subjectivities of curated

wilderness ecosystems, which are rendered spectacular and presentational.

The separation of listener and listened that characterizes Deluca’s description of

environmental (wilderness) music bears resemblance to Turino’s description of

presentational music, which he defines as “a field involving one group of people (the artists)

providing music for another (the audience) in which there is pronounced artist-audience

separation within face-to-face situations” (Turino 2008: 52). However, this definition cannot

be simply resituated into the context of ecosystem listening without accounting for the

ontological, political, and agential differences between ecosystems and their ecological

subjectivities, on the one hand, and human artists and listeners on the other. Specifically,

while Turino’s discussion of presentational music focuses on consenting musicians

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performing in presentational settings, wilderness enclosures—and all property enclosures—

on the other hand entail the domination and (variously evaded) capture of landforms and

their inhabitants, rendering “performers” captive to the audience if only on an ideological

level.

The anthropocentric logic of this scenario operationalizes “exoticism as a mediator of

everyday experiences of nature” in “natural urban environments” as well (Colléony et al.

2017). In this way, normative listening often orients to environmental sound as presentational

display.

One of Turino’s key points regarding the presentational field that holds relevance to

the context of environmental sound is that, for the audience, “attention is in the moment,

sound-motion exists only in the moment” (2008: 90). While Turino gestures here to the

temporal, ephemeral nature of sound, he is also, and more importantly, speaking to the

situated ephemerality of intersubjective encounter that marks copresence. This ephemerality

of encounter also figures into the experience and act of listening to ecosystems in

presentational contexts. While audio recordings can, within the logical framework of

acousmatic sound, be played back repeatedly for extended analysis, environmental sounds

that are perceived and not recorded can only be “re-experienced” within the continuous

temporal flow of the encounter. The reverberations and relationships of sonic gestures can be

traced almost limitlessly (Nancy 2007: 2), but they cannot be re-experienced in isolation or in

fragmented repetition outside of their co-present unfoldings. For example, as the citizen-

scientists and researchers in Deluca’s case study hear a wolf howl, they can listen for how

this sound reverberates in the world, the silences and shuffles and rejoinders that arise in its

wake, the sensuous, affective imprint that the howl leaves on the land and on their own

bodies, but they cannot re-experience the specific timbre and pace of the initial sonic gesture.

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This is significant because it engenders different strategies of listening outside of the

possibility (but not outside the imagination) of reproduction.

The enduring (continuously re-emerging) ephemerality of copresence does not

indicate a lack of mediation, however, as noted above. In the case of wilderness listening,

copresence is often mediated both physically and ideologically, by fences or walls, signs,

officials and guides, as well as by the invisible structures of the underlying colonial

apparatus. Prominent among these, returning to Dylan Robinson’s discussion on listening

positionalities, is “the self-censoring listening of settler colonialism” that acts as a

“percepticide” (see Taylor 2003: 28) against the experiential possibility of human-nonhuman

relationships. These ideological and epistemological mediations are situated in specific

bodily histories and their outcomes cannot be assumed universal; “hearing requires

positionality” (Sterne 2012a: 4). As such, different people will (dis)inhabit and relate to the

presentational field differently. It is, nonetheless, a mode of perception that is pervasive and

actively imposed by real social and political structures (for instance the institutionalization

and ideology of wilderness conservationism named above). The related institutional logics of

private property can also serve to facilitate presentational renderings of environmental sound,

as they similarly alienate listeners from the (objectified, owned) environment and its sonic

gestures.

Another prominent layer of mediation that shapes presentational renderings of

environmental sound, and an illuminating example in this discussion, is the cultural

expectation of non-reciprocating silence—returning to Deluca’s observation that in national

parks “wolves howl and people listen” (Deluca 2016: 87). First, Deluca’s observation is

explicitly situated in the cultural framework of conservation biology; outside (and, doubtless,

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also within) this cultural framework, many people do in fact howl back, and for many

different reasons. But Deluca points to the overriding hegemony of wilderness discourse

characterized by particular conceptions of Nature and Culture as alienated and exclusive.

This hegemonic acoustemology infiltrates, affects and even provokes counterhegemonic

modes of listening; Robinson calls this the “civilizing sensory paradigm” of hungry listening

that has been imposed murderously on Indigenous peoples in the North American context

(Robinson 2020: 3), as well as on European populations in the brutal imposition of capitalist

relations (Federici 2004). The perceptive regime of wild-as-spectacle pervades everyday

listening in the world, variously shaping humans’ situated perceptions of squirrels and

supermarket isles, oak trees and gas stations, ridgelines and fencelines; the vibrant matter

(Bennett 2009) of the world is rendered presentational through ideological (and physical)

structures of enclosure that effect a kind of “disenchanted enchantment” (Ritzer 1999;

Jenkins 2000).

This is not to suggest that presentational renderings of environmental sound are

completely determined by, or even originating in, the alienating logics of capitalism and

colonialism. Just as the motivations for listeners to inhabit the role of audience for human

speech or musicking can vary infinitely, motivations to inhabit the role of audience for more-

than-human sonic gestures are similarly (if asymmetrically) variable across cultural,

historical, and socioecological contexts. Ethnomusicological literature provides a diversity of

examples of cultural frameworks wherein environmental or more-than-human sounds are

attended to as presentational sonic gestures (Brabec de Mori and Seeger 2013: 270; Seeger

2016; Feld 1994). Feld’s seminal study of Kaluli acoustemology, for instance, describes

ways in which the “pattern of sounding in the natural environment [becomes] the inspiration

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for many Kaluli vocal and instrumental forms” (Feld 1994: 4) through extended and

enculturated practices of listening to the sounds of the forest as the musical-presentational

displays of the dead and other beings. Michael Silvers’ research on the relationships between

popular music and traditional ecological knowledge in Brazil describes the importance of

listening to birdsong as a method of predicting rainfall and drought conditions (Silvers 2015:

382-383). In Silvers’ case study, birdsong and other sonic gestures of ecosystems are

rendered presentational displays with prophetic meanings. As these studies demonstrate, the

role of audience-to-the-land may be inhabited from a plurality of ontological and

cosmological positions that result in differential renderings of environmental sound as

presentational or performative. Furthermore, presentational experiences of environmental

music or sound often directly inspire human musical forms and expressions (Taylor 2017;

Simonette 2016; Seeger 2016; Von Glahn 2013; Keller 2012; Feld 1994).

These roles of audience and performer are also neither static nor mutually exclusive,

either within or across cultural and eco-social contexts. For instance, as discussed in the

previous chapters, permaculture listening techniques include an etiquette of quietude that

aligns, at least superficially, with hegemonic expectations of the ideal nature-listener as silent

and external to the natural world. In permaculture contexts, however, this etiquette is

positioned within a conversational, call-and-response flow of eco-social encounter. Whereas

wilderness areas under the auspices of the National Park Service render audible and palpable

the nature/culture dualism (ibid.), permaculture listening techniques are oriented intentionally

(if strugglingly) toward the transgression of the boundaries of this dualism through

regenerative, participatory strategies. But boundary-crossing always implicates an interstitial

experience and a navigation of multiple realities (Rose 2002: 314). It is in this sense that

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hegemonic and counterhegemonic listening habits are also both at play and in friction with

one another in presentational renderings of environmental sound. And it is also in this sense

that permaculture’s participatory strategies proceed from, and return to, moments of

relatively removed observation in dynamic interplay with moments of participatory intra-

action.

Participatory Eco-social Listening

In his description of participatory musics, Turino emphasizes that “music making in

the participatory field is not about making music for listening apart from the act of doing”

(2009: 99, emphasis in original). This is the most fundamental distinction between the

participatory field and the presentational, high fidelity, and sound art fields, in which sonic

gestures are reified through various mediations as an object of attention for listeners “who do

not participate in producing sounds or motions that are deemed fundamental to the

performance” (ibid.: 101). Characteristic distinctions in formal structures, emphases on

variety and contrast, evaluations of virtuosity, and approaches to achieving flow states (ibid.)

can be understood to hinge largely on the basic understanding that “in this [participatory]

field, ‘music’ is more like a game, or a ritual, or a conversation, than an art object or product”

(ibid.: 106). As mentioned in this chapter’s introduction, Turino’s identification of

correspondence between participatory music and conversation holds direct implications for

permaculture’s acoustemological orientations toward the eco-social, holoent conversations

that take place within landforms. Specifically, while music is rendered as a genre of

conversation or “direct social intercourse” (2009: 106) in Turino’s participatory field, I

observe a parallel rendering of environmental sound practices (sounding and listening) as a

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genre of eco-social conversation, or, following Turino’s phrasing, direct eco-social

intercourse. While much of Turino’s explanation of participatory music (such as collective

decision-making processes regarding event preparations, the accessibility and difficulty level

of repertoires, and overall aesthetic cohesion) holds specific and seemingly non-transposable

meaning for human-to-human social interactions, I will focus here on several aspects of his

discussion that can be usefully extended to the experiential frame of grotesque eco-sociality

as described in the second and third chapters. These include; the goal of maximum

participation, the emphasis on doing among all present, and the diminished attention to sound

as an art object.

Turino observes that “a primary distinguishing feature of participatory performance

is that there are no formal artist-audience distinctions, only participants and potential

participants” (2009: 98, emphasis in original). His intention here is not to construct a

universal (flattened) category of the participant—indeed, the navigation of difference (both

in musical inclinations or abilities and in intersectional positionalities) is recognized to play

crucially into both the function and dysfunction of participatory events. In the eco-social

context of permaculture co-composition, the category of “participants and potential

participants” also entails differences of species and ontology, further complicating the

(bio)politics of participation and, on a more phenomenological level, the discernment of

participatory modes. For instance, in my fieldnote at the opening of this chapter, I discern the

titmouse’s movements and sounds as gestures of holoent response to my call of widening the

swale; the movement of water, the growth patterns of the soil and plants, and the movements

of the foraging bird all participate, or take part in, the invitation that I (and my landmate

Rachel before me) gave in the digging and shaping of the earth. All of these participations,

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including my own, are asymmetrical to one another, and at the same time they are woven into

what Deborah Bird Rose calls “multispecies knots of ethical time” wherein “time, species,

and nourishment become densely knotted in ethics of gift, motion, life, and desire” (Rose

2012: 127). The bird eats the creatures of the soil, the body of bird “returns to bacteria, and

bacteria return the body to the living earth” (Rose 2012: 127; Margulis and Sagan 2000: 91),

lives and deaths fold and unfold synchronously and sequentially in entropic cascades.

While the corporeal and energetic realities of these multispecies knots is undeniably

ever-present, their status as modes of participation are fundamentally situated in my own

perception and discernment. I cannot presume to represent, or even comprehend, the

titmouse’s internal affective experience; nor can I presume to represent the affective

experience of the holoent’s distributed ecological subjectivity outside of my own partial and

porous positioning within it. However, just as the participatory nature of these gestures does

not precede my situated perception, neither does it follow my perception in some reflective,

after-the-fact manner. Rather, my perception, following Don Idhe’s phenomenological

account of listening, is pervaded by “certain ‘beliefs’ which intrude into my attempt to listen

‘to the things themselves’” (Idhe 2012: 23). For Idhe, to listen phenomenologically entails a

process of “gradual deconstruction of those beliefs which must be surpassed” in order to

arrive at “the things themselves,” implying that perception does precede interpretation but

emerges entangled in and constituted by it. To the extent that Idhe’s phenomenological

method is deconstructive, it both articulates the inherently mediated nature of perception and

applies further layers of mediation. That is, it does not arrive at a more immediate reality;

perceptions cannot be extracted from ontological commitments, but always take, and make,

place within them. It is in this sense that permaculture’s particular relational ontology

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informs the perception of environmental sounds or sonic gestures, rendering them

participatory and eco-social.

The perception of participation unfolds in the context of interactions and intra-actions

that constitute eco-social conversation; perception is oriented toward what holoent bodies are

doing with, to, and within each other, and to the dynamic emergence of the ecological selves

that coalesce through these doings. Returning to my opening field note example; the land

emanates thirst, I dig a swale, seeds drift into it, water fills it, birds scratch at it, worms turn

through it, the soil ruptures and bulges with the growth of roots and the burrowing of

animals. I perceive and experience participatory co-composition through the actions of

ecological subjectivities in relationship to my actions. My focus is inward on the

relationships between our actions and the emergent conversational sympoiesis that they

sound out. Through concentration on this emergent sympoiesis, this making-with of the

garden, I come into increasing clarity and intimacy with the ethos of the garden’s ecological

subjectivity.

This intimacy can be further understood through a brief engagement with Michel

Chion’s formulation of three basic listening modes: causal, codal (developed from the

category of semantic listening), and reduced (2012: 48-52; 2019: 22-26). While Chion’s

analytical framework is developed in the disciplinary context of film studies, his work

engages directly with broader sound studies discourses and holds important implications for

the study and perception of environmental sound. Causal listening, which for Chion “consists

of listening to a sound in order to gather information about its cause (or source)” (Chion

2012: 48), involves locating specific sonic gestures within specific bodily interactions, such

as the coarse scratching of a bird’s feet against the bark of a tree. Causality can be listened

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for at various levels of uniqueness or generality; from the level of a general scraping sound,

to the level of something scraping against a tree, to the level of bird’s feet clutching and

scraping against a tree, to the level of that titmouse perching and scraping their feet against

that nectarine branch. Discernment of sonic causality thickens with extended copresence and

experience, and also with affective-cognitive engagement. In this way, causal listening

quickly becomes entangled with codal or semantic listening.

Chion’s concept of codal listening builds on Pierre Schaeffer’s concept of semantic

listening, and refers to “the listening mode that aims to decode the signal to get the message”

(Chion 2019: 25). While Chion focuses on human language and symbolic code systems, this

mode of listening for signals and significations, I suggest, can be extended to the context of

holoent conversations as well. Here I reframe Chion’s codal listening, in dialogue with

Donna Haraway’s conception of sympoiesis as semiotic materiality, as semiotic listening—a

weaving of making-with and knowing-with. In listening for semiotic materiality, I perceive

that the contact calling of the titmouse as they forage in the swale not only communicates

directly to other titmice and songbirds in the surrounding brush, but contributes to the

dynamic mesh of perceptive awareness, the flesh of sensibility (reengaging the second

chapter’s dialogue with Hufford and Merleau-Ponty) that constitutes the porous holoent of

the garden. The sound of feet on branches holds layers of signification that emerge between

the experiential awareness of the listener and the expressive resonance of ecological

subjectivities. In my situated awareness, the titmouse’s feet on the nectarine bark signifies

the presence of water in the swale, and the accompanying presence of worms and insects for

the bird to eat. I cannot see these from where I sit, but my experience widening the swale,

and my hopeful anticipation of providing forage and quenching sustenance for the creatures

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of the garden intrudes upon and informs my perception, fills it from the first instant with

semiotic density.

My perception, as named in the opening of this chapter, is furthermore filled with

affective density, particularly as I interpret an indexical relationship between my work in the

swale, the lingering of water (however short-lived), and the nourishing of the titmouse’s

body, as well as the bodies that the titmouse eats and whom I cannot see or hear from my

position. In this moment I recognize my own investment in permaculture’s non-innocent

ethics of care, and in the ontological stance that “we are nature working” (Puig de la

Bellacasa 2018: 128). The semiotic and affective density of my perception, which

accumulates over extended periods of copresence and collaboration, engenders a

participatory perception, a perception of sympoietic tangling in which I am intimately, if

peripherally and differentially, involved.

The focus of attention on these sympoietic entanglements renders environmental

sound inseparable from the actions and interactions that they accompany, signal, invite or

discourage. In this way, techniques of “reduced listening,” oriented toward an extractive

apprehension of “the traits of [a] sound independent of its cause and of its meaning” (Chion

2019: 25) become less important in eco-social participatory renderings of environmental

sound. This parallels Turino’s analysis of participatory music and his argument that it

characteristically involves diminished attention to the sound as an art object, becoming

something more akin to conversation. While enculturated senses of beauty certainly affect

participatory perception (as they do in the realm of human participatory music making), sonic

gestures are interpreted primarily for their semiotic and affective associations, and

secondarily for their perceived aesthetic value.

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The Four-Field Framework in Review: Categories and Crossings

In outlining these four fields or renderings of environmental sound, I do not intend

for them to be considered exclusive or independent from one another; like Turino’s fields of

music, they act in dynamic interplay with one another and collectively provide a (partial)

account for a continua of sonic, multisensorial, and/or musical experiences (Turino 2008:

87). The modes of listening associated with each rendering, furthermore, can be employed or

experienced in quick succession or overlap. Returning to the example above of my encounter

with the deer, I notice myself inhabiting a kind of reduced listening, attending to the specific

timbral and durational qualities of their exhalations and their stamping; clusters of high

frequency vibrations that start and stop sharply, abruptly, interspersed with heavy, thudding

tones that are equally staccato but that I feel with my body more than I hear with my ears.

But almost simultaneously, I inhabit causal and semiotic listening; which deer gave that

hissing sound? What is the soil like under their feet that carries those low frequencies to my

body? Why are the deer stomping and hissing? Different modes of listening co-occur and

inform one another (Rice 2015: 107-108).

Also, while participatory copresence is prioritized in conceptions of permaculture

listening, recordings could be deemed appropriate and useful for developing generative site

designs. I myself took many audio recordings of and within the garden, though these have

primarily functioned in the context of my role as an academic researcher (acting as

extensions of my memory and a sonic augmentation of my field notes) and not so much in

my role as a participant in the ecological subjectivity of the garden; nonetheless, the

presence of my field recorder shapes my listening. When I take the recorder to the garden, I

anticipate

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sound reproduction, and this anticipation of a “copy” orients me toward the concept of an

“original” experience in the garden. When I don’t bring a recorder, this dichotomy is less

relevant to my experience of encounter; however, when I make the decision to not take audio

recordings, the logic of acousmatic sound and my own internalization of audile techniques

that serve me in other contexts still, inevitably, shape the way that I attend to the resonances

of the garden. For example, my co-present listening to non-recorded moments in the garden

is colored by my deep enculturation in to the concept of liveness (Sterne 2003: 220-221), and

to the extent that I listen to the garden as “live,” I listen in relationship to the potentiality of

the copy, and of acousmatic sound. This is one way in which the fields of high fidelity

recording or even soundscape composition, distinguished by their orientation toward

acousmatic listening practices, permeate my experiences of eco-social participatory listening.

While the identification of distinct listening modes and fields of environmental

sound may serve as a useful analytical “strategy for imposing conceptual order on the flux of

sounds and approaches to sounds,” these categorical distinctions, extending Tom Rice’s

argument, “may not accurately reflect—and indeed may at times distort—the perception of

listening as it occurs within the holistic context of lived experience” (Rice 2015: 107-108).

This is particularly relevant to the context of my engagement with environmental sound as

both a researcher and a permaculture practitioner, where my encounters within the holoent

form of the garden inevitably bleed across and exceed categorical descriptions. The

grotesque aspects of holoent bodies (all bodies), their permeabilities, excesses and

contaminations, necessitate a grotesque approach to categorization as well; boundaries “are

to cross” (Rose 2002: 314), containments are to exceed, types are to contaminate. Any

imposition of conceptual order on experience must also reckon with grotesque reality. As

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such, the four-field framework for environmental sound that I outline above, and that is

presented in the table below is characterized by “boundaries [that] exist to connect

difference” (ibid.).

Figure 1. Four Fields of Environmental Sound

Grouping Ecosystem Copresence Ecosystem Recording

Field Participatory Presentational High Fidelity Studio Audio Art

Listening mode Participatory

eco-social

Presentational High Fidelity Soundscape

composition

Goal Co-

composition,

maximum

participation

Curation of

sound

environment

for aesthetic

appreciation

Recorded to

represent live

ecosystem

interactions

and

expressions

Maximum attention

to shaping the

sonic object

Conception, Environmental Environmental Environmental Environmental

rendering sound as a sound as an sound as an sound as an art

medium of activity and object to be object created by

eco-social object created recorded for one group for

participation— by one group analysis, consumption by

listening as a (an ecosystem circulation, another group not

mode of eco- or holoent) and/or present with either

social and received consumption. the recorded

intercourse by another Listeners are environment or the

amongst group not in recordist/composer.

copresent (listener, copresence Reference to live

participants; observer) in with the performance not

emphasis on situations of ecosystem but necessary;

the doing copresence; the sound emphasis on the

among all emphasis object compositional

present separately on references process and final

the doing copresence or product.

(ecosystem) emplacement;

and listening emphasis on

(listener) representation

of liveness

Roles/Mediation Human Clear Ecosystem mediated by electronic

listener ecosystem- devices; human technicians not

intends toward audience necessarily co-present with

participatory distinctions; recording devices in the field.

role, activities ecosystem and

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vary among

participants

and across

time (call-and-

response,

stillness-and-

movement)

audience

mediated by

physical

markers such

as fences,

ropes, and

signs within

situations of

copresence

Ecosystem-listener relations

mediated by recordings.

Time and

Attention

Focus of

listener is

inward among

eco-social

participants,

and is in the

moment;

sound motion

exists only in

the moment

Focus for the

listener is on

the ecosystem,

its inhabitants,

and its sounds,

attention is in

the moment,

sound-motion

exists only in

the moment

Recordists’

focus is on

sound for

information

density and

fidelity. For

listener, focus

is on recorded

sound, visual

representations

of acoustic

data;

unspecified

time delay

between

production and

reception;

sound object

has semi-

permanent

existence

Composers’ focus

is largely inward

within soundscape

composition art

cohort; artist focus

on compositional

process and

product; listener

focus on

compositional

process and

product;

unspecified time

delay between

production and

reception; sound

has semi-

permanent

existence

Continua Less attention to sound as art

object

Quality of eco-social

interaction is of central concern

Sound-motion in the moment,

immediate and nonlinear

feedback as to how one is

doing; sound is ephemeral but

resonances transform the

grounds of encounter

Increased physical separation among

actors (recordists, listeners,

ecosystems)

Quality of sound is of central

concern

Greater planning and control of

sound object

Indefinite time delay between

ecosystem sounding and listening;

sound is semi-permanent

Focus for recordists is on the

shaping of sound object and the

reception of audience, focus for

listener is toward the sound object

alone

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This framework is also helpful in that it lends conceptual order not just to different

modes of experience (in experiencing sound as presentational or participatory for instance),

but to the permeable boundaries between ecological subjectivities. Discernment of the

experiential boundaries between participatory or presentational listening and sounding entails

the discernment of the material boundaries and the ways in which these boundaries are

crossed by bodies and gestures. Sound, as a material vibration, traverses space, fills

environments, spilling from and across thresholds of place and being. Attending to the

shifting character of perceived sound, as well as inaudible vibration and movement,

constitutes a way of noticing holoent boundaries in the world, and the character of these

boundaries. The thresholds between and within holoents are permeable and subtle, but their

crossings are consequential, and often resonant. For example, when I step into the garden,

certain sounds might recede at first (like the contact calling of song birds), and other sounds

might arise (like the alarm call of a scrub jay). Sonic gestures signal the crossing of

thresholds, and they also enact these crossings themselves; the dialogue, or conversation that

permaculture orients toward happens in the crossing of these myriad thresholds within and

across ecological subjectivities. What makes these conversations meaningful, and

challenging, is the diversity of thresholds and crossings. Some boundaries are, returning to

Rose, to be crossed, and some boundaries are not. Some crossings signal participation, some

signal indifferent copresence, some signal hostility, some waver ambivalently in mixtures of

affective orientations and desires. Additionally, some boundaries are substantial and large,

like a fence or a cliff, and some boundaries are more subtle, like the boundaries of a low-

point in the land that stays cooler throughout the day and night, or the boundaries of the

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microclimate created by a system of swales and berms that stores an increased amount of

water in the soil.

Listening in the Field(s): The Smallest Things

In efforts to notice the permeable yet differentiating thresholds between holoent

ecological subjectivities, permaculture pedagogy often orients toward the everyday and the

small. In the context of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s course, for example,

emphasis was placed on noticing how subtle variations in cross-species interactions, the

cycling of matter (soil, water) and the flowing of energy (sunlight, wind) shape the eco-social

conversation. In one of our discussion groups, OAEC instructor Leslie Geathers reflected that

“we often notice the biggest sounds…but it’s the smallest things, the birds and insects, that

will teach us more about the microclimates that we have in our yards.” Small sounds express

the characteristics and contours of microclimates and ecological subjectivities, and their

temporal and spatial dynamics. For example, when I pull grasses from our bermed garden

beds, I experience the being of the ground through the small resonance of my hands against

the grass and the soil. I will give an example from my field notes of an ethographic encounter

that took place in November of 2021, a little less than a month after the swale-titmouse

encounter presented at the opening of this chapter:

November 23, 8 AM

Today the sun came early, a clear sky from dawn—when I went up to the

garden the grass was thick with the shimmer and brilliance of the morning dew, all

whites and silvers and golds cloaking the green bodies of the plants. They have grown

considerably just in the past week, which has been consistently warm and sunny, and

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they are forming a thick cool carpet over the hillside. I pulled a few encroaching

grasses from the new berm, where Rachel, Magnolia, and I buried elecampane root

cuttings and fava beans, and broadcast wildflowers and an oat and clover cover crop

just last week. As I pulled the grasses from the fresh-seeded berm, I focused my

attention on the sound of my weeding.

The acoustemology of pulling a body from the earth—noticing the slip and

drag of fiber against soil, watery, slick, squishing. The soil sounds wet and vital, feral

and cold to me in the morning, and the grass sounds plump with water, full and

resonating under the pressure of my grasp with squeaky sounds that fill the whole

tiny body and shiver into my own fingertips as they tug. But I don’t need to tug, the

roots come loose almost immediately. I am reminded now of how honeybees give

their honey willingly (to those who know and respect the protocols) in the early glow

of spring when nectar is abundant on the land and their winter stores are not needed,

and they are overflowing with energy and sweetness. But they become wary and

stubborn in the dry season as they prepare for the thin months of winter. The grass,

or the earth, or both, feel similar in the sense that, in times of plenty, times of growth

and overflow, they give their vitality freely—roots loosen from the soil without

resistance—but in the summer the roots set in and cannot be pulled, and the earth

refuses to let them go, knowing that each fiber, each blade, each body, is a precious

bit of protection against the hardening, hollowing heat of the long dry season.

My slowly deepening awareness of subtle differences in this soil’s timbre across seasons is

inextricable from my bodily engagement with the soil; my tugging at leaves and roots, my

observation of the fine mycelial threads that cling to the roots and crumbs of soil, my

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smelling of the earth, and also from my desire to care for the soil, to cultivate vitality, and to

learn to be affected (Latour 2004: 210). My listening, in this sense, cannot be reduced, but

is rather wholly and messily involved in the sympoiesis (the making-with) of the holoent.

Bigger sounds cross thresholds between microclimates and ecological subjectivities,

simultaneously traversing and expressing (making noticeable) these boundaries. As I listen to

the small, sparse sounds of the soil, louder sounds seep in from the rumbling drone of

freeway traffic from the 101, which snakes along a hilly mile to the east, charting the sloping

ridges of Petaluma. The soil tremors in sympathetic resonance with the passing of the

heaviest trucks on the road, a vibration that enters also from the soil into my body. In these

moments, I experience that the garden and I are filled and moved by the same low shadow of

sound.

The sounds of the passing trucks and the sounds of the squeaking grasses being

uprooted are both situated in the same soil, and in the same holoent, but they signal different

kinds of copresence and they engender different modes of listening from me in the context of

my observation and tending in the garden. I listen to the tiny sounds of my weeding work in a

participatory way; indeed, the sound is fundamentally a resonant result of my hands on the

grass and in the soil, and my own being and intention is implicated in the sound. In contrast,

my attention to the resonance of cargo trucks in the soil is less participatory—I am not (in the

moment) involved in the production of the sound and the sound does not respond to my

copresence or my action. The physical distance and character of irresponsiveness that defines

the freeway resonance renders the sound more presentational for me—I inhabit the role of

audience. Of course, I am implicated in the sound of the freeway traffic, and when I myself

drive on that same freeway I participate directly in its resonance—this embodied

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transtemporal awareness also shapes my perception of the sound itself. In this sense, the

sound of trucks in the garden soil gives another example of how the four-field model of

environmental sound outlined above must be approached in a fluid manner; participatory and

presentational modes of listening overlap and co-constitute holistic everyday experiences.

Chapter Conclusion: Environmental Sound as More-than-humanly Organized Sound

As has been demonstrated, the fields of soundscape composition and high-fidelity

recording fall, for the most part, within conventional disciplinary definitions of music; high

fidelity recordings are also used as a tool for re-presenting or rendering “natural sounds” as

music both in the context of scientific research and artistic creation. The field I term

‘presentational,’ modeled upon Turino’s framework, also entails a kind of musicalization of

more-than-human sonic gesture. I have shown how, in Western contexts, this musicalization

is grounded to a large extent in a wilderness ideology that exoticizes the nonhuman. The

“environmental music” that Deluca describes in his study of citizen-scientists listening to

wolves in national parks presents a compelling example of the ways in which nonhuman

sounds are rendered musical through the mediating (and neutralizing, dominating) apparatus

of colonialism and capitalism. But Deluca’s figuration of environmental music gestures

toward a conceptual and experiential “place where music as environmental activism is not

only an objectification of the very nature it seeks to protect but also an act of listening

through an ongoing dialogue with humans and their relationship with ‘nature’ through

sound” (2016: 89, quote in original). Deluca’s concept of environmental music as a

“participatory, situated” act of dialogic listening, however, conflicts with Turino’s

formulation of participatory music, which uses “the idea of participation in the restricted

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sense of actively contributing to the sound and motion of a musical event through dancing,

singing, clapping, and playing musical instruments when each of these activities is

considered integral to the performance” (Turino 2008: 28). Turino’s stated criteria for

participation largely negate the possibility of more-than-human participation; his model

operates from a disciplinary definition of music as humanly organized sound, and the

structures of participation, presentation, and reproduction that he articulates follow from this

fundamental epistemological commitment (see Ochoa Gautier 2016: 120-121).

The value, and challenge, of Deluca’s proposed conception of music as a dialogic

more-than-human experience lies in its grappling with the possibility and reality of more-

than-human participation, and contributes a multispecies and whole-ecosystem perspective to

ongoing discourses across music and sound studies on the more-than-human subjectivities at

play in musical expression and experience (Robinson 2020; Taylor 2017; Keller 2012). I

have argued that Deluca’s case study of citizen-scientists and wolves ultimately constitutes a

more presentational rendering of environmental sound, shaped by the hegemony of

wilderness ideology and an exotic-transcendent construct of Nature; however, I extend his

idea of “participatory, situational, environmental music” (Deluca 2016: 87) toward my study

of everyday permaculture listening practices and toward the concept of grotesque musicality

articulated in the previous chapter. I situate permaculture thought and practice as another

context for understanding this extension of participation from the strictly (human) social

frame to the (more-than-human) eco-social frame, and particularly for understanding the

impacts this extension may have on concepts and experiences of music.

It is important to reiterate that while normative concepts of music—both disciplinary

and popular—are relatively compatible with the first three fields of environmental sound that

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I describe in this chapter (soundscape composition, high fidelity recording, presentational),

the concept of participatory music, as articulated by Turino and operative in

ethnomusicological discourse, is less immediately amenable to more-than-human

participatory listening and to the related concept of grotesque musicality. This is largely due

to the fact that the musical potential of human-nonhuman relationships hinges, in the

Western hegemonic frame, on human organizational actions that render “natural sounds”

(returning to Parmar 2019: 20) reproduceable or presentable and legible to the analytical

categories that emanate from Western music’s canonic center (Ochoa Gautier 2016: 118).

The organizational capacities and actions of more-than-human actors are deprioritized in this

disciplinary definition of music, leaving little room for theorization of or practical

engagement with the potential of human participation in more-than-humanly organized

sound.

Counter to the hegemonic construction of music as humanly organized sound, the

experience of music as more-than-humanly organized sound operates in important ways for

permaculture discourse on and practices of listening differently and composing with place.

Musicality is frequently referenced as a way of describing ecosystem interactions or

perceptions of landforms. This is evident in permaculture literature, as described in the

previous chapter, and in permaculture discourse. For instance, in reflecting on the challenges

and traumas of the Covid-19 pandemic, OAEC instructor Kendall Dunnigan offered the

following perspective: “Amidst all the intensity of our pandemic, the land still continues to

care for us, the plant roots continue to build soil that we can grow our food in, the water

cycle and the bacteria conspire to give us rain and sweet water to drink, the insects continue

to sing and do their pollination dance.” The singing and dancing of insects here is not

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separable from, but in coconstitutive participation with, the conspiring of water cycles and

bacteria, the growth of soil and plant communities, and also with the needs, desires, and

actions of humans. These participatory webs are understood to be characterized by a more-

than-human singing and dancing that constitutes, in this instance, a register or aspect of care;

a more-than-human care in which humans are held and within which humans act. The

resonant expressions of these grotesque sympoietic entanglements, as more-than-humanly

organized sound, are imbued with musical potential for permaculture listeners. This

grotesque musicality is in turn imbued with a participatory potential; composing with

landforms becomes a way of participating in their resonant expression. In digging swales,

tending soils, tugging at roots, and listening for the permeable and affectively resonant

boundaries of ecological subjectivities, permaculturists enact an intention to reciprocate

within these sympoietic entanglements and their perceived musical potential.

This kind of eco-social participation interfaces in productive ways with Turino’s

more anthropocentric concept of participation that informs his categorical definition of

participatory music (2008: 28). In the same way that social musical participation, for Turino,

centers on participants’ capacities to make active contributions that are integral to group

performances, eco-social participation, in the permaculture context, hinges on participants’

capacities to contribute in integral ways to ecosystem processes and patterns of ecological

regeneration. Following Turino’s analogy between participatory music and conversation,

participation is about doing the right things to keep the conversation going well, or at least

going. What this means varies from one context to another: in joining Turino’s string band

circle it means bringing an appropriate instrument—an acoustic steel string guitar as opposed

to an electric guitar, for instance—and knowing when to play or sing quieter and louder,

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when to be silent, how to maintain conversational rapport with other musicians, and how to

track and respond appropriately to countless physical, linguistic, sonic, and musical cues. In

my encounter with the deer that I describe earlier in this chapter, keeping the conversation

going means first and foremost being still and quiet, learning how to move slowly enough to

maintain an equilibrium of copresence with them. My slowness and quietness also allows the

deer to continue and deepen into eco-social conversation with other creatures in the

ecosystem and within the distributed ecological subjectivity of the hillside of the landform. If

I have a louder, more active task to do, such as digging out a swale or transplanting a young

pomegranate tree, I will try wait for a moment when the deer are either not in the meadow or

at least farther off and actively grazing. I develop my own pattern of relative quietness and

loudness through a learned sense eco-social etiquette that is hyper-specific to my relationship

with this garden, this hillside, and these deer.

The similarities between learning how to participate within a string band circle, on the

one hand, and a hillside garden, on the other, are clearly limited, and it is not my intention to

conflate the two scenarios or to reduce them to some essential unity. My aim is rather to

demonstrate the consistency of the principle of participation that is operative in both

scenarios—the anthropocentric social and the grotesque eco-social. This consistency is

significant because it invites a consideration of eco-social participation as a learned and

learnable skill. Just as the cultivation of string band musicianship involves a learning process

unique from that of orchestral musicianship or hip hop musicianship, for instance, the

cultivation of grotesque musicianship involves a unique learning process that brings

participants into intimate, iterative encounters with specific ecological subjectivities. I have

described aspects of this learning process in this chapter and in previous chapters—the

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second chapter’s explication of the sit spot listening exercise being a central example.

Through these descriptions, it has been demonstrated that permaculture listening practices

are oriented toward the task of learning how to join an ecosystem, sonically and otherwise.

This task appears obvious and inevitable from the perspective of permaculture’s

natureculture worldview (and from other natureculture worldviews), but it is not a task that is

obvious or inevitable within worldviews that operate more fundamentally on Nature-Culture

binaries.

The hegemonic concept of (Human) Culture as separate from Nature renders the task of eco-

social participation irrelevant at best or even absurd; the monologic perspective (returning to

Hufford 2019: 28) cannot conceptualize the task of participation as long as it “sees nothing

looking back” (ibid.). Learning eco-social participation, then, means first choosing to

perceive and encounter something looking back, sounding back, touching back—to

encounter ecological subjectivity. My adaptation of Turino’s four-field model presented in

this chapter serves as a tool for understanding how the conception or rendering of

environmental sound figures into these choices and perceptions. In this regard, it makes a

difference whether environmental sound is rendered as (resource for) a sonic art object, a

high-fidelity data point, a presentational display, or a medium of eco-social participation.

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Conclusion: Toward a Grotesque Study of Music

Throughout this dissertation, my intention has been to weave together several distinct

lines of inquiry: the challenge of developing ecocentric approaches to the study of music, the

inquiry into listening as a mode of more-than-human, eco-social participation, and the

inquiry into the ecological subjectivity of landforms. The first and second of these,

concerning ecocentric conceptions of music, musicality, and listening, are pertinent primarily

to music and sound studies discourses, while the third, regarding ecological subjectivity, has

mainly been addressed in the context of environmental humanities and ecofeminist

discourses. The interdisciplinary task that this dissertation leans into, then, entails developing

an ecocentric approach to music and musicality that accounts for the liveliness and being-

ness of ecological subjectivity, and that takes seriously the implications of ecological

subjectivities as musical subjectivities or as emergent sites of musicality. My analytical and

practical focus on permaculture’s particular conception of listening as a mode of eco-social

participation grounds this somewhat expansive interdisciplinary task in a specific embodied

practice and allows for an exploration of the metaphorical, phenomenological, and affective

dimensions of how ecological subjectivity might be imagined and encountered as musical

within the experiential context of listening. Permaculture is of course not the only cultural

formation that engages ecological subjectivities, nor is it the only cultural formation that

assigns musicality to more-than-human beings, and in this sense studies of ecocentric

musicality can of course be situated in a variety of contexts aside from permaculture. With

this said, I chose to situate my study in the context of permaculture specifically as a salient

framework that prioritizes ecological subjectivity and eco-social participation through its

own rhetorical and methodological emphases on composing-with and befriending places or

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landforms, its embodied practice of listening for patterns in ecosystem expression, and its

intentions toward developing the capacity to perceive musical expression in and within

landforms.

The overarching structure of my dissertation reflects the demands specific to my

project and its interdisciplinary contours. Namely, I found it necessary to introduce my

inquiry into concepts of music and musicality gradually and only after establishing a

thorough understanding of permaculture itself as a globalized social movement, agricultural

method, and natureculture worldview. Thus, I began this dissertation with a focused account

of permaculture, honing in on its particular ethical and ontological commitments, its

entanglements with traditional ecological knowledges, and, relatedly, its privileging of

listening to the land as a key principle and practice that constitutes the foundation of

permaculture work. Having established permaculture’s worldview and its historical and

cultural contexts, I moved, in the second chapter, into a discussion of how permaculture

pedagogy orients practitioners toward immersive encounters with and within the places or

landforms they tend, and I set this orientation in dialogue with academic discourses on

grotesque ecology and ecological subjectivity. In this dialogue I presented my situated

analysis of how the sit spot exercise, as a central component of permaculture pedagogy,

mobilizes concepts of observation and listening, and their correlates of sound, noise, and

expression. I then proceeded in the third chapter to describe how immersive encounters with

the grotesque ecological subjectivity of landforms are framed as musical in specific

permaculture texts and discourses—how listening to and within grotesque ecological

subjectivities can become a musical experience in permaculture contexts. I presented the

concept of grotesque musicality—defined as an intention and capacity to listen for, perceive,

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and engage with grotesque ecological subjectivities—in order to describe this particular kind

of musical experience. In the fourth chapter I outlined a comparative framework, in direct

dialogue with Thomas Turino’s four fields of music, of four distinct conceptualizations of

environmental sound: (1) studio audio art or soundscape composition, (2) high fidelity

soundscape recording, (3) presentational, and (4) participatory. I positioned the concept of

grotesque musicality within this framework as distinctly characterized by an orientation

toward eco-social participation. The idea of eco-social participation operates in two crucial

ways in the fourth chapter: first, as an application of permaculture’s natureculture ontology,

and second, as a theoretical corollary to Turino’s focus on social participation and his

concept of music as social life. From this approach, I articulate grotesque musicality as one

way in which permaculture practitioners experience and participate in eco-social life.

Reflections on Sit Spot Listening

My theoretical articulation of grotesque musicality emerges in significant part from

my reflexive engagement with the practice of sit spot listening. Over the course of my study,

my daily sit spot exercises became a central aspect of my methodology and, relatedly, a

crucial setting for developing my own experiential understanding of ecological subjectivity.

One of the most significant challenges I encountered in these exercises was that of sustaining

my mental focus on the garden’s collective subjectivity and not latching onto the actions of

specific organisms, such as birds, squirrels, insects, or plants. I found myself inclined to let

my awareness settle on the bodies and actions of individual animals, plants, or fungi, and

found it difficult to keep my awareness focused on the between-nesses that constitute the

ecological subjectivity, the collective, holoent being-ness, of the garden. This inclination

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would become particularly strong after about twenty minutes into the exercise as animals

(mostly songbirds, jays, and squirrels) became more comfortable with, or unaware of, my

presence and thus more active, making forays into the garden and into the foliage around me.

In this sense, somewhat counterintuitively, I found it easier to take in the collective

subjectivity of the garden in the moments of relative disturbance that followed my arrival,

when animals were still mostly hiding from me, peering out from invisible perches and

waiting for a collective sense of safety to reemerge. During this time—roughly the first half

of my average sit spot exercise—I could perceive the presence of songbirds or squirrels only

as rustles and shimmers in the foliage of the larger trees at the garden’s edge. They were

otherwise invisible, and this lent a quality of collective embodiment to my perception of the

garden—the trees were physically vibrating with the hidden bodies of birds, bodies that

would only individuate themselves from the trees in spells of calm, and who would merge

again with the trees at the first sign of potential trouble.

Earlier in my fieldwork, however, I often found myself spending this first period of

the sit spot in somewhat anxious anticipation—waiting for songbirds, squirrels, deer,

dragonflies, and gophers to return, and to grace me with their presence. When they did, I

would track their movements and expressions carefully, letting the rest of the garden fade

into the background of my awareness. I experienced a habitual tendency, in other words, to

perceive the garden as a place occupied and traversed by discrete, individual organisms—

what Bakhtin would call classical bodies or what Deborah Kapchan would call legal bodies

(returning to Kapchan 2015: 39)—as opposed to an animated and animating web of

collective subjectivity emerging and merging across nodes of relationship. The exercise of

the sit spot consisted (and still consists) then, for me, in repeated efforts to shift my

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awareness from individual to collective subjectivities, from classical to grotesque bodies.

Through iterative practice over the course of my fieldwork period, I noticed this shift become

increasingly easier to make and to sustain. For example, in reflecting on my fieldnote

description of hearing a hummingbird’s flight as the sound of coyote mint flowering on the

land (described in the second chapter’s discussion of permaculture strategies for listening

differently) I realized that, at that point in my practice, I had become decidedly more

habituated to a grotesque mode of perception. My listening had become increasingly oriented

toward the garden’s sympoietic processes of becoming-with; what in permaculture parlance

would be called composing-with, or what Anna Tsing would call contamination, the

principle of transformation through encounter (returning to Tsing 2015: 28). In the context of

permaculture intentions to perceive music in and within landforms, strengthening my

capacity to sustain a grotesque mode of perception also became a practice of cultivating

grotesque musicianship—of learning to discern patterns of expression and activity as they

would emerge from grotesque bodies within the ecological subjectivity of the garden.

I will reiterate here that my articulation of grotesque musicality emerges from my

own particular positioning as an interdisciplinary music scholar and permaculture student,

and from my situated interpretation of permaculture texts, conversations, and practices. I

recognize that it is my own tendency to seek musical being-in-the-world that fundamentally

motivates my research and orients me toward the consideration of landforms as sites of

musical expression and experience in the first place. In addition, my longstanding

commitments to grassroots efforts toward ecological regeneration and eco-social justice

compel me to stay with the trouble that is permaculture, and to situate my investigation of

grotesque musicality in permaculture as a “timely intervention at the heart of contemporary

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consciousness that we live in a naturecultural world” (returning to Puig de la Bellacasa 2018:

128). Just as not all music scholars share my fixation on issues of ecological subjectivity and

eco-social justice, not all permaculturists share my fixation on musical being-in-the-world.

As such, my argument regarding grotesque musicality is not that permaculturists, as a rule,

consider either themselves or the landforms they tend to be grotesque musicians, but rather

that a grotesque model of musicality is identifiable in permaculture discourse and that this

particular musicality is enacted in permaculture listening practices. This kind of musicality

can be engaged by scholars in a variety of ways, of which my research is just one. In the

following closing section I will discuss some further directions and implications for

grotesque studies of music.

Further Directions and (Inter)disciplinary Implications

My decision to use the concepts of music and musicality in my theorizing responds to

and corresponds with permaculture practice, wherein approaches to listening to the land are

informed partly by an aspiration to perceive a ‘true music’ in the patterns of growth and

decay that shape landforms and constitute ecosystem relationships. As fraught as the concept

of true music may be, it nonetheless merits serious inquiry and analysis as a formative aspect

of permaculture philosophy and practice. It would be easy to dismiss or deconstruct the

permacultural appeal to the musicality of landforms and ecosystem patterns as a romantic,

anthropomorphizing metaphor (this being the almost inevitable charge put to any study that

engages more-than-human agency, as discussed by Bastian et al. 2017: 7-9). Indeed, due to

permaculture’s proximity and entanglement with hegemonic Western cultural formations,

slippage into romantic metaphor can be hard to avoid: familiar anthropomorphizing tropes

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are more legible to most audiences, popular and academic alike, and discussions of more-

than-human subjectivity quickly activate anthropocentric expectations. This is certainly the

case when engaging the concept of music, wherein more-than-human or nonhuman

musicalities are inevitably measured for their compatibility with normative Western concepts

of music as a human art form, and other species are granted musical capacity only to the

extent that ostensibly human attributes can be projected onto them (such as the capacity for

rhythmic entrainment, relative pitch, or production of ordered phrases, see Taylor 2017: 212-

215). Interestingly, however, I have found that permaculture articulations of the musicality of

ecosystems do not often demonstrate this particular anthropomorphic tendency—the

axiomatic expression of listening to the land does not, in the scope of my research, seem to

assign to landforms a capacity to do things that human musicians do. Individual species, such

as birds or crickets, may be identified as contributing recognizably melodic or rhythmic

expressions within ecosystem patterns, but the collective ecological subjectivity of the

landform operates on a different (more grotesque) order of musicality.

Moving beyond the critique of anthropomorphism, then, I advocate for a nuanced

analysis of permaculture practice and discourse that remains open to the musicality of

participatory immersion in ecosystem patterns and expressions without mapping familiar

concepts of music onto those patterns and expressions. This analysis must, of course,

recognize the influence of hegemonic forms of Western thought (i.e. anthropomorphism,

anthropocentrism, the Nature/Culture binary) as a part of permaculture’s historical and

cultural context. Permaculture’s particular natureculture ontology is intimately marked by its

proximity to, and emergence within, globalized regimes of hegemonic perception (returning

to Ochoa Gautier 2015: 189); the strategic reproduction of Western-Indigenous binaries (as

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discussed in the first chapter) and the awkward, generative friction (in the sense theorized by

Tsing 2005: 4) of Indigenous-settler collaborations toward eco-social justice, for instance,

emerge in agonistic relationship to the persistent and pervasive logics of Western

imperialism. In this sense, the permaculture aspirations to perceive music in landforms can

be understood, in part, as an embodied practice of resistance against the perceptual

imperatives of Western imperialism and its ecocidal, genocidal outcomes.

This cultural analysis is limited, however, to the extent that it ignores the lived

experience of human engagements with ecological subjectivities and the cumulative effect of

eco-social encounter. The corporeal intimacy of copresence with more-than-human entities

reaffirms permacultural commitments to befriending and composing with land, as well as

permacultural aspirations to perceive land as musical. Taking seriously the experiential

reality of this kind of more-than-human musicality enables not just a fuller and more

collaborative description of permaculture listening practice, but also a more fruitful dialogue

with ethnomusicology and music and sound studies more broadly. As stated in the

introduction to this dissertation, the intended practice, on the part of permaculturists, of

encountering musicality in ecosystem interactions is directly relevant to disciplinary efforts

not just to document ecocentric music cultures in the contested terrain of sustainability

discourse, but also to efforts to build theoretical and methodological tools for more robustly

ecocentric studies of music (Allen 2018).

The dichotomy between grotesque and classical or bourgeois ecologies, as described

by Michael Bell (1996) and developed by Mary Hufford (2019), is helpful in thinking

through this disciplinary relevance. In my introduction, I posed the question of how the

concept of the grotesque helps to ground, or re-ground, permaculture concepts of a ‘music of

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nature’ in a counter-normative concept of nature or ecology. Throughout this dissertation I

have moved from the conviction that, to the extent that permaculture operates within a

grotesque conception of ecology, references to the musicality of ecosystems and the more-

than-human world ought then to be understood and studied as references to a specifically

grotesque musicality. But disciplinary definitions and understandings of musicality do not

normally operate within a grotesque conception of ecology: the bulk of ethnomusicological

theory, I contend, takes for granted a comparatively classical or bourgeois conception of

ecology (following the dichotomy theorized by Bell 1994 and Hufford 2019) and, in this

sense, of music, which can only be conceived and theorized within the anthropological order

as a “cultural category” (Wong 2014: 348-350). Aaron Allen’s frustration with the dearth of

ecocentric approaches, in both musicology and ethnomusicology, can be attributed in

significant part to this commitment to bourgeois ecology. Holly Watkin’s critique of

musicology’s enduring tacit support of human exceptionalism (2018: 3) is also relevant here,

and further demonstrates that this is an issue concerning not just ethnomusicology or the

interdisciplinary terrain of ecomusicology, but music studies more broadly. In light of this

cross-disciplinary concern regarding ecocentrism and anthropocentrism, the concept of

grotesque musicality, as articulated in this dissertation in relationship to permaculture

discourse and practice, offers a productive intervention and suggests a model for theorizing

and engaging more-than-human worlds that includes, or allows for, the possibility of musical

expression and experience. It is in this sense a concept that can help ethnomusicologists do

the work of building more robust ecocentric theories and models.

The articulation of an ecocentric concept of music that is specifically grounded in a

grotesque ecology also pushes against the pervasive epistemological commitment to

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environmental sound as a resource for human musical creativity. Tacit commitment to

environment-as-resource narratives, I suggest, informs much of the existing literature on

music and environmental and cultural sustainability and can be understood as an aspect or

outcome of the “continued insistence on the centrality of human practice and agency”

(returning to Feld 2017: 84) that characterizes music studies. The concept that the natural

world inspires human musical creativity is a captivating and productive one, but it also

constitutes one of the more widely circulated and commonly accepted aspects of a more

fundamental ideology that often re-inscribes a hierarchical anthropocentric Nature-Culture

binary. This concept also tends to operationalize or take for granted a universal,

undifferentiated, and ahistorical concept of the human; what Feld describes as the

“anthropocentric belief in an essential human nature” that undergirds the foundational

assumptions of Renaissance and Enlightenment humanism. This belief has real ethical and

political consequences, and is directly implicated in the “the domination of people, species,

and places” (Feld 2017: 94).

In confronting these consequences, both for the study of music and sound specifically and

for the production of knowledge more broadly, it is crucial to acknowledge that the human,

as a historically situated liberal humanist construct, “comes into formation through Black and

Indigenous death in the Western hemisphere” (King 2019: 11), and that the boundaries of the

human are continuously maintained through racialized violence. The interrelatedness of

ecological, social, and racial hierarchies and the binary logics of dominance and

subordinance, while more squarely in the wheelhouse of Black diaspora studies (King 2019:

79-80; Smith 2020: 118), Indigenous Studies (Smith 2008: 25-26, 55-56; Harjo 2019: 10-11;

Robinson 2020), posthuman geology (Yusoff 2017: 53-54), and critical environmental justice

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(Pellow 2016: 3, 2018:79, 97), quickly become relevant to music and sound studies once

concepts of ecology and more-than-humanness are engaged. Reciprocally, questions

regarding the ecological and social boundaries of music and musicality quickly become

relevant to interrogations of the racialized construction of the human subject. Musicality is

often taken for granted in popular discourse as a fundamental aspect of the universalized

human subject, as one of the few things that makes a human a human. As a pillar of human

exceptionalism, music is then implicated in structures of (de)humanization and racialization,

particularly in colonial contexts where “the question of how to distinguish between human

and nonhuman sounds [has] troubled, in different ways and for different reasons, the many

people that originally populated, willingly came, or were forcefully brought” (Ochoa Gautier

2014: 5, also see Ochoa Gautier 2014: 167).

One of the questions that the concept of grotesque musicality has to answer to, from this

discursive vantage point, is how it might contribute to interdisciplinary efforts to challenge

the undifferentiated concept of the human being. This is an inquiry that warrants further

dedicated study beyond the scope of this dissertation: my provisional suggestion, however, is

that the concept of the grotesque has potential to act as an unmooring force on music, first by

prompting a recognition of the ways in which music is normally operationalized in tacit

support of human exceptionalism (returning to Watkins 2018: 3; Feld 2017: 94) and then by

offering a model for boundary refusal or transgression. Perceiving and experiencing the

grotesque entails a radical reorientation toward the ways in which bodies and beings become

one another, and toward the ways in which death and life coincide in and collectively co-

constitute bodies and places. When music is theorized in this context, its functionality as a

definitive and disciplining aspect of the discrete, bounded human subject becomes troubled.

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Theorized as grotesque, the music concept becomes less available as a tool for determining

or reinforcing boundaries between human and nonhuman, and between dominant and

subordinate.

Locating music within grotesque ecologies also confounds normative expectations

attached to music as an object of study and experience: basic terms of engagement like pitch,

melody, harmonic relationship, and rhythm, seem to be missing entirely or warped beyond

use. The polyphony of the garden holoent resists melodic analysis—even to refer to the many

sounds of the garden as polyphonic or polyrhythmic imposes an analytical expectation that

holoent expressions disappoint or subvert. Following and expanding on Mary Hufford’s

assessment of the grotesque as resisting meaning, I suggest that the musicality of holoent

interactions resists the application of analytical tools that take for granted a classical or

bourgeois conception of music: grotesque musicality is hidden (returning to the etymology of

the word) from normative musical analytical approaches to the extent that these approaches

seek to isolate and derive meaning from sonic structures abstracted from the holoent

subjectivities that produce them. While this presents certain practical challenges for scholarly

research, these challenges are by no means new to ethnomusicology, and are even somewhat

compatible with the discipline’s general orientation away from formal musical structures and

relative distrust of traditional musical analysis (Wong 2019: 30, Rice 2017: 167, though see

Solis 2012: 533 for a rebuttal). Deborah Wong’s articulate refusal of traditional musical

structures and her reframing of music as “part of a range of expressive behaviors that are

beautifully and exuberantly difficult to contain” (Wong 2019: 30), for instance, aligns with

and allows discursive space for the subversive qualities of the grotesque. Her reflections on

the problems and limitations of traditional musical analysis, while grounded in her study of

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Asian American taiko, speak well to the context of permaculture listening practices and the

more-than-human, grotesque musicality that they intend toward.

Grotesque musicality is revealed or experienced in moments of copresence with

holoent subjectivities, and in this way can be understood as an affective state that human

listeners achieve through specific forms of enculturation or training in eco-social

participation and in the perception of ecological subjectivities. The sit spot exercise, for

instance, and the rhetoric that surrounds it, can function as a key pedagogical device for

cultivating grotesque musicality amongst permaculture students and practitioners, as I have

endeavored to demonstrate through reflexive analyses of my own sit spot listening

experiences. In keeping with Wong’s critical discourse, these practices of participatory eco-

social listening, and the expressive behaviors that they attend to, “are fundamentally at odds

with the principles and ideologies of music analysis” (ibid.). Their study necessarily entails a

more committedly experiential or phenomenological approach that focuses on corporeal co-

presence and on eco-social participation as a learned and learnable skill (returning to chapter

four’s closing discussion). Ecosystem patterns are indeed beautifully and exuberantly

difficult to contain—they are lively and deathly in the same pulse and their subtle unfoldings

demand an intensity of attention and sustained whole-body awareness from the aspiring

listener, as well as an ontological reorientation toward grotesque bodies and ecologies.

Perceptual (and analytical) reorientation toward, and embodied participation in, grotesque

ecologies disrupts “the ontological reliance on music as a cultural category” (Wong 2014:

348) by repositioning music as a thoroughly naturecultural or eco-social category of

experience and expression. Whereas construing music as a cultural category places the

“mantle of command” (returning to Hemenway 2009: 134-135) and responsibility on the

264

(undifferentiated) Human to create and control, construing music as a naturecultural category

invites a shedding of this mantle of command and a sharing of the responsibilities concerning

musicality with and within ecological subjectivities. Riffing on Donna Haraway, it matters

what muses muse music. Positioning music within holoent forms, and positioning holoents

as muses (as musical, musicking subjectivities and emergent sites of musical expression),

changes the eco-social stakes of music and music scholarship. Put simply, music scholarship

becomes directly concerned with place-specific ecosystem patterns and the holoent

assemblages that express them, as well as the humans who listen and participate within these

assemblages. My own descriptions and reflexive analyses of ethographic engagement with

my garden as a site of ecological subjectivity and musicality offers one example of this kind

of research; further studies might develop or interrogate the implications presented above in

this concluding section, such as the question of how the concept of grotesque musicality

might contribute to interdisciplinary efforts to challenge the undifferentiated concept of the

human being and its racializing logics, or the problem of musical analysis in relationship to

grotesque musical experience and expression. To this end, rather than abandoning or

rejecting music as a powerless and unproductive cultural category (as advocated in Wong

2014: 349), I suggest once more that the development of grotesque modes of perception and

study can allow for a generative re-inhabiting of music as a concept and as a relational, eco-

social experience.

I will clarify, in conclusion, that while I understand the concept of the grotesque to hold

generative potential for ethnomusicological research and discourse (including the related

subfield frameworks of ecomusicology, acoustemology, acoustic multinaturalism, and sound

ecology), I am not proposing or conceiving of grotesque musicality as the object of a

separate

265

subdiscipline, but rather as a conceptual tool that can dialogue with and expand the already

rich constellation of ecologically-oriented scholarship in these disciplinary orbits. The

concept of the grotesque fits nicely under the rubric of acoustemology, for instance, which

“asks us [music and sound scholars] to consider the human as but one life form, one organic

possibility among many” (Feld 201: 94), as well as under the rubric of ecomusicology,

which, as Jeff Todd Titon describes in relation to his concept of sound ecology, prompts

scholars “to think not narrowly of music but of the flow of all sound in the environment”

(Titon 2020: 235). In agreement with Michael Silvers’ assessment of the discipline, “I

believe ethnomusicologists have long been doing this sort of [more-than-human,

ecologically-oriented] work,” and that “we should continue to do so in a concerted manner”

(Silvers 2020: 217). My articulation of grotesque musicality is offered toward continued and

expanded disciplinary engagement with the question of more-than-human musicalities, and

with the question of what more-than-human entanglements mean for the study of music.

266

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