MSc Pre-Capstone End of Year

PresentationNicole Vosper

Wednesday 25th March 2015

Welcome

Learning IntentionsThe strategic focuses of my Masters:!

1. To observe, collate, create & disseminate the most effective skills, tools & practices of community organising that can accelerate the speed and scale of the application of agroecology practices & principles and radical social change.

2. To research, collate, create & disseminate practical & applicable knowledge for plant based system design and care.

3. To research the hypothesis that plant-based systems without produce from domesticated animals could feed current human populations in temperate climates.

4. To support myself to become a skilled community organiser, permaculture practitioner, writer, teacher, researcher and agroecologist that can be of service to all beings and have the widest & most strategic impact possible in achieving social justice for all beings & ecological restoration.

Three Pillars of my Action Learning

Community Organising

Agroecological System Design

& Care

Personal & Professional Development

Three Pillars of my Action Learning

Community Organising!

• Thematic focus e.g. prison abolition, economics, speciesism

• Documentation, tracking & processing of own interaction with projects

• 'How can these patterns be used for ecological restoration & social justice? What community action needs to happen for their implementation?'

Three Pillars of my Action Learning

Agroecological System Design & Care!

• Thematic focus e.g. Propagation, soil science

• Documentation, tracking and processing of my own land-based design work, such as at home or through consultancy projects.

• Ongoing collation of best practice and research around plant-based systems.

Three Pillars of my Action Learning

Personal & Professional Development!

• Self Care: How am I looking after myself during this process? What patterns am I observing in myself, any re-stimulation?

• Professional skill flex development: Using learning opportunities to stretch my skill flex edges & gain new skills.

So, what exciting things happened?!

Output 2: Resistance, Repression & Resilience

!!

"While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in

prison, I am not free" - Eugene V. Debs

Output 2: Resistance, Repression & Resilience

• Thematic focus on prison abolition & resistance to the prison industrial complex

• Action research in resilience to repression

• Organising - building power, community organising, group design processes, leverage, strategic & systems thinking

• Counselling & design of my own healing

• Developing as a popular educator

Political Agroecology • Repression is one of largest

determinants of social change incl. food sovereignty movements

• Food autonomy is essential to successful resistance & resilience

• Prisons sold as solutions to social & economic problems - permaculture can offer a more regenerative future

• Self-reflection on imprisonment reaffirms empathy with all animals in cages & commitment to anti-speciesist agroecology!

Output 3: Energy & Economics!!

"Capitalism, as a social-economic system, is necessarily committed to racism and sexism. For

capitalism must justify and mystify the contradictions built into its social relations - the

promise of freedom vs. the reality of widespread coercion, and the promise of prosperity vs the

reality of widespread penury - by denigrating the “nature” of those it exploits: women, colonial

subjects, the descendants of African slaves, the immigrants displaced by globalisation.

!At the core of capitalism there is not only the

symbiotic relation between waged-contractual labour and enslavement, but together with it, the

dialectics of accumulation and destruction of labour-power, for which women have paid the highest cost, with their bodies, their work, their

lives.” !

- Silvia Frederici, Caliban and the Witch

Output 3: Energy & Economics

• Thematic focus on anarchist economics & alternatives e.g. financial permaculture, solidarity economy, gift economies, DIY, regenerative economics

• Energy struggles & colonialism • Growing Resilience Project • Designing workers cooperative, Feed

Avalon • Livelihood & personal finances

design; simultaneously surviving & resisting capitalism !!

Political Agroecology • The violence of the food system is skilfully hidden • Our food system perpetuates the neocolonialist

domination of the global south and patterns of harm and exploitation globally

• The capitalist mindset influences the alternatives we are pursuing!

• The privatisation of land, essential to capitalism, is fundamental, therefore recollectivising ‘land ownership’ in order to support agroecology, will be one of our greatest challenges

• That access to capital is still necessary to accelerate agroecology

• There are diverse alternative economic models in existence

• A culture of resistance is necessary to resist capitalism & build agroecology

Output 4: Towards an Anarchist Agroecology

!“I am vegan because I have compassion for animals; I see them as beings possessed of value not unlike humans. I am an anarchist because I have that same compassion for humans, and because I refuse to settle for

compromised perspectives, half-assed strategies and sold-out objectives. As a

radical, my approach to animal and human liberation is without compromise: total freedom

for all, or else.” !

- Brian A. Dominick, Animal Liberation and Social Revolution

Output 4: Towards an Anarchist Agroecology

• Complex world views around animal agriculture

• Survey & analysis of strategies confronting animal oppression: processing decades of observations

• Patterns of oppression in movements for food system change e.g. role of the state, racism, class, gender

• ‘Towards an Anarchist Agroecology’ summary

Political Agroecology • Transformation of all social relations, not just food system • Agroecology underpins potential of achieving autonomy !• Requires resistance to, and dismantlement of capitalism &

the state!• Aim to de-monetise the food system • An anarchist agroecology means rejecting and actively

resisting industrial and capitalist agricultural models while creating alternatives e.g. GM, monocultures, plantation slavery, factory farming

• Historical understanding of relationship between agriculture, patriarchy, colonialism & other forms of oppression

• How and why knowledge is produced and shared matters • Animals do not deserve to be commodified, exploited, abused

or enslaved

It’s the journey not the destination

Organising at the centre, not at the sidelines…

Obtain a yield: personal & professional growth

Thank you to everyone, you know

who you are!