Beyond Utopia - Imagining the Radical Community : A Creatively Pragmatic Approach to Metabolic Intimacy

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Charlotte Kunkel,  Scott Hurley  

How do we create the community we long for? How do we build relationships when we are seemingly so disconnected? Employing Machado de Oliveira's notion of metabolism, we build upon permaculture principles to envision the processes of community building. Metabolism captures how nested living entities are engaged in nonlinear movement, in nonlinear time. These systems and entities operate in rhythms and cycles that insist we recognize and embrace the constant exchange and processing of energy and matter. Permaculture principles such as integration, diversity, marginality and adaptability reinforce these rhythms. A radical community is not static or fixed, but a fluid system of “human and non-human, seen and unseen, known and unknowable” that through mutual interdependence and an ethic of responsibility can guide the work required to nurture, process, digest and expunge the toxic effects of capitalist praxis that centers individualism, misogyny, white supremacy, and anthropocentrism. Neither massive accumulation and overabundance nor starvation and dehydration are life sustaining. Using what Oliveira refers to as metabolic intimacies, we discuss how the building of radical community requires utilizing practical approaches to create, measure, and monitor processes that allow for regenerative ends and necessitates the establishment of interactive systems that are adaptable, diverse, interconnected and overlapping, decentered, and beautifully messy.