Sistema Prepago en Argentina

“To recognise our actions and ourselves as part of nature is a cultural transformation begun but not completed. The change from seeing

human impacts on nature as improvements to seeing them as destructive may be a necessary step in [our] evolution, but the transformation comes when we no longer see

ourselves as outside nature.”229

Permaculture’s commitment to deep ecological thinking neither is nor stems from a theoretical or metaphysical trope but comes from an understanding of nature’s flows and a belief that following those will lead to more productive, sustainable systems. In the natural world, everything is connected to everything else and the relationships

that bind them are, if allowed to flourish naturally, productively complex. Though our cultural-scientific Western bias has long been to reduce complexity and isolate elements in order to study them in their purity, such a ’purity’ is no longer possible. This is exactly what led Peter Haff to posit the technosphere as a new category of geological phenomena. Traditional geology looks at the physical earth and the processes that alter it; it deliberately removes the human from the equation. This was becoming increasingly impossible, Haff says, and it thus became necessary to create a new frame of reference for geological study because a human-free ‘pure’ Earth no longer exists. The dualistic hyperseparation, of human and nonhuman and human and environment, to which Western humanities are prone, can no longer be entertained. Permaculture bases its designs on this very principle: nothing is segregated—including humans from nonhumans and their environment—and it is diverse polycultures that most

Figure 18: The Permaculture Flower. Adopted from Introduction: Permaculture Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability. Copyright 2002.

We see here (Figure 18) how the permaculture ethics and design principles are the core of the practice, connecting all elements of the human-technology-nature system and guiding our behaviors within it. Each petal represents one of the domains that must, according to Holmgren, be included in our permacultural designs. These are, as

indicated by the spiral, integrated elements and a sustainable global socio-economic permaculture requires each petal domain be considered, beginning on the personal-local level and, eventually, spiraling outward toward the collective-global level.

What the permacultural flower does is expose relationships between humans and nonhumans (both living and non) and the environment (and even climate) as it opens, provokes, and permits new questions about humans, nature, policies,

consumption, waste, and practices of living.

In permaculture, systems—whether they be farms or officespaces—are

deliberately designed as relationships: every element, including the human, is linked to every other and each element performs several tasks within the system. The body, the earth, and all of the systems human and nonhuman each contains are conterminous and continuous. In permaculture’s ecosystemic way of thinking, the frame of reference becomes as Braidotti says, “the world in all its open-ended, interrelational, multi-sexed, and trans-species flows of becoming.”230 _{From a more human positioning, permacultural}

thinking frames the environment as our habitat.

This is the type of material ecological thinking that permaculture can help us draw out of digital theory. In When Species Meet, Haraway talks about the “relentlessly fleshy entanglements” we have with what she calls the ‘techno-organic’ world.

Katherine Hayles, though using different terminology, has too long held that our bodies and technologies are connected, are co-evolutionary, and in her How We Think she explores how we think through, with, and alongside digital media. For Haraway,

though, the relationships is one more of living with, it is more metabolic: Haraway uses the concept of ‘companion species’ to think through these relationships and to

understand how we live with them. “Thinking with,” Maria Puig says, “should always be a living with, aware that relations of significant otherness transform those who relate and the worlds they live in.”231 _{Haraway says her “real concerns” are “to explore the}

layered meanings of historically cohabiting companion species of many ontological kinds, organic and not.”232 _{Drawing out this more physical interconnection is the task of}

digital metabolism—the digital not only changes how we think but in, material terms, changes the very earth we live on. Just as Pinar Yoldas’s Ecosystem of Excess showed us in chapter three, if everything gardens we cannot affect one system without destroying, or creating, another bred from that alteration. And if everything gardens, every action, and as Latour warns, even every act of the imagination (including terminology or notions of care-full response-ability) leaves long traces.

Permacultural thinking considers as present artifacts the long-range effects of our technologies; it shortens the space between our behaviors and their interminable

afterlives. It is designing thinking, asking us to imagine the consequences of our current cultural designs and the possibilities of others. “Understanding our dependencies” Jed Purdy says, “is a key to understanding our obligations. This means considering not only

231 _{Puig, 2012, 207.} 232 _{Haraway, 2004, 5.}

what we rely on for our convenience, but what is required for the continued well being of the achievements, practices, and values that we love most.”233 _{The goal of responsible}

living isn’t so much to “save the environment” but to save ourselves and our preferred ways of living. “In the lifeworld of connectivity,” Deborah Bird Rose says, “the well- being of one is enmeshed in the well-being of others…To care for others is to care for one’s self.”234 _{The anthropo-technosphere’s metabolic nature ensures that what we do to}

the earth, we do to ourselves—the traces we leave, and all of our actions leave traces Latour rightly says, are fed (literally often through food) back into our (eco)systems altering not only our habitats but also our bodies—and certainly too the habitats and bodies of those who’ll come after us. All of our traces leave traces and all of the things we care for—or are careless with—are tied into countless relationships and processes.