Echoes of Ecologies: Quest(s) for Sustainability, Writing, and Activism

Abstract

Echoes of Ecologies: Quest(s) for Sustainability, Writing, and Activism Giulia Lepori (bio) and Michał Krawczyk (bio) Departure In January 2016 our customary lives caught their breath to get on a plane that would begin our itinerant project in South America— four months of traveling life that we enclosed in an independent ethno-graphic research named Echoes of Ecologies: a blog collection of practices of ecological sustainability. Since its conception, the plural title was chosen to acknowledge the great variety of nuances within the words ecology and sustainability. From the humanistic perspectives of our backgrounds in anthropology, languages, and literary studies, we view sustainability as an ontology based on inextricable environmental and social relations. However, back in 2015, when we opened the blog, as we prepared for the travel, and had to provide an accessible introduction to the research, we were not as focused as we are today on its conceptualization. Over the years, as our reflections evolved, we readjusted the description of the project, and today the homepage reads, Nowadays Echoes of Ecologies is an independent investigation on the stories of the ecological relationships between humans and nonhumans. Initially the project took shape as an itinerant travel in South America, through Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia, to document and inform about socioenvironmental practices of ecological sustainability. . . . Echoes of Ecologies means stories of relations . . . the narrations from the first travel, together with those from following experiences day by day in the circle of change. Word and image, images in words, video [End Page 103] and text, texts with videos, writings and photographs, a written photograph.1 Blessed by the financial ability to buy the tickets, we put theories aside, packed some luggage, and moved to one of our dream places, covering more than 9,000 km through the core of South America, to gather and narrate the reasons and manners of people caring for an ecologically sustainable life. From gardening at 3,600 m to attending environmental education in rural schools, our multisited, mobile fieldwork represented sustainability as a gradual dynamic learning process toward a conscious way of being human. As early researchers, it was our first attempt to apply our studies to a fieldwork investigation, hence our decision to attend to topics that reflected our feelings, interests, and practices. Spontaneously, the ethnography of our blog became research within the research— recounting the lives of those who sought their ecological sustainability in South America helped us conceive our cycle of discovery at home in Italy. We envisioned our project as an opportunity to publicly perform activism— intended as ethical thought and action that acquire political value as they trigger changes in both inner and outer landscapes. That is in part why we resolved to have a photo-narrative blog, to blend word and image in a creative and informative way that would be widely accessible. As it turned out, the recollection of our travels on the blog became an alternative story place to (not always easily) advocate for a sustainable world while we were on the move. This article is an autobiographical account of how our disciplines handled ethnographic research to illuminate the strict connection we found between writing and activism within the humanities. Thus, we analyze our project through the lens of “empirical subjectivity,”2 in which the first-person poetical dimension generates both hindsight for our itinerant fieldwork and insight into the application of our studies. In acknowledging such connection, we use ethnographic material from our blog as the leitmotif between the present text and the narration during the research. The Making For the creation of the project, we decided to adopt the social bargaining philosophy, as we felt akin to those who “are willing to earn less [End Page 104] money in order to employ their time to contribute to socio-political and environmental change.”3 We contacted associations, rural schools, NGOs, collectives, or individuals to go live with them and understand their practices, in exchange for work, solutions, and stories for different imaginaries of life on Earth. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Giulia writing at Conamuri Headquarters, Asunción, Paraguay. Behind, the flag reads, “Stop violence against women.” Courtesy of Echoes of...