Food for Degrowth

Perspectives and Practices (2021 Routledge)

Edited By Anitra Nelson and Ferne Edwards, this collection breaks new ground by investigating applications of degrowth in a range of geographic, practical and theoretical contexts along the food chain. Degrowth challenges growthism and advocates for everyday practices that limit socio-metabolic energy and material flows within planetary constraints. As such, the editors intend to map possibilities for food for degrowth to become established as a field of study.

Included in this collection is a chapter written by us, Replacing growth with belonging economies: A neopeasant response, Patrick Jones and Meg Ulman.

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Perma/Culture:

Imagining Alternatives in an Age of Crisis (2019 Routledge)

Edited By Molly Wallace and David Carruthers, this collection offers a number of constructive models in response to current global environmental challenges. This book makes a significant contribution to current eco-literature and will be of great interest to students and researchers in Environmental Humanities, Environmental Studies, Sociology and Communication Studies.

Patrick contributed Chapter Three to this anthology, which he titled, Reclaiming Accountability from Hypertechnocivility, to Grow Again the Flowering Earth. It is a rare example of scholarly work that derives from a lived response to what he describes as the problem of foregrounding technology and backgrounding connection to and knowledge of land. It draws on Indigenous wisdom holders and his own ancestral traditions, which are still carried in his much more-than-human body and are accessed by returning to a animist-spiritual practice and becoming custodial in one’s everyday actions again.

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re:)Fermenting Culture

A return to insight through gut logic (2017 TreeElbow)

Patrick’s writing of this book has been an experiment of forms and senses, which places equal responsibility on the gut – the enteric nervous system or First (or primal) Brain – to inform the book’s trajectory as another significant centre for logic and knowing. The mind in Western thought dominates everything, constructing a Cartesian blindness that is inherently patriarchal and thus, I argue, constructing a gender-lopsidedness that has contributed significantly to climate, species, social and ecological ruinations. To uncover this assertion I’ve gone right back, well before Descartes (he is just part of the succession of such lopsidedness), back to early Greece, to Hesiod and his misogynistic rewriting of the Pandora myth, and to the related myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus – a precautionary tale of twinned opposites concerning technology and memory that has long been forgotten.

This publication is currently out of print, but you can download the pdf below. If you’d like to support our work and future works feel free to make a donation.

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The Art of Free Travel

A frugal family adventure (2015 NewSouth) ABIA shortlisted 2016

We had built a rich community life in southern Djaara country, but in late 2013 we found ourselves craving an adventure. This was a road trip with a difference, a road trip to honour the lands we cycled to and living as cheaply as possible − guerrilla camping, hunting, foraging, gifting our permaculture skills, and living mostly on a diet of speared fish, feral tucker, and the occasional fresh road kill. We spent time in Aboriginal communities learning from Elders and other knowledge holders, joined an anti-fracking blockade until we won, documented and shared on our blog freely found edible plants, and dodged speeding cars and trucks on the country’s most dangerous highways.

The Art of Free Travel is our story of a rule-breaking year, applying permaculture principles to the road and finding community along the way.

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