A Wild Learning Journey in Rural and Urban China –

30 Nov

Written By Dr Rachel Sweeney

Long Read – Approx. 13 mins

The below reflects a one short chaper of Dr Rachel Sweeney’s seven week creative exchange and teaching tour of China and Japan, engaging in regenerative educational initiatives and participatory practices that bridge Higher Education initiatives with ecological communities.

· NYU Shanghai Inclusive Ecology Initiative, China

· Yungu Permaculture Farm and Ecovillage

· Mykunda community, Chengdu, China

CHINA:

YUNGU permaculture farm and eco village

Sitting in a sunny studio corner in the Yungu Farm community space, chewing on sugar cane, with smells of burning bamboo sheafs and melon peel drifting in the window mixing with heady jasmine incense, I wonder if and when my last quiet hour was spent these past six weeks. My morning walk, stretching out the intensive motions of yesterday’s day long workshop - a physical inquiry into Social Permaculture - is animated through a patchwork green quilt of both mainstream and alternative growing practices. The small treelined avenues that populate the outskirts of Shanghai, frequented by ambitiously stacked bicycles balancing bamboo and sugar cane, speak to two distinctly different stories; on the one side, the hyperbolic scale of industrial farming, with polytunnels stretching for kilometres, housing monoculture daikon, napa cabbage, water spinach and taro. And opposite, spacious yet crumbling domestic sites, bordered by neat rows of plantation, where every square centimetre is carefully tended to, and provides local food source for the farmers, despite an overreliance on pesticides to encourage these liminal growing spaces.

seasonal time

Inclusive Ecology Initiative – NYU Shanghai

Thoughts of yesterday’s intense exchange bubble up, as my rusty joints gratefully release into this late seasonal heat (still a delightful mid twenty or so degrees!) - unpacking some deep mapping perspectives and eco-somatic connections within a dynamic and alternative young farming community, many of whose 20 participants have already moved from inner city Shanghai (with its steadily growing population of 30 million), to support alternative and mycelial social structures. My journey here is aided by the progressive insight and creative interventions of Dr Liangliang Zhang, Associate Professor at the School of Global China Studies at NYU Shanghai, where I have spent my former few days working on campus, engaging sophamore and freshmen students through a composite range of seminars, workshops and talks, some of which are formed as part of the new Inclusive Ecology Initiative through the English Department that Liangliang is spearheading.

Classroom to Community

Two days previously, Liangliang and I are sitting in the canteen, surrounded by a slightly overwhelmingly choice of lunch menus from across the globe (NYUSH houses a learning community of 2000 students from its very recently launched campus in downtown Pudong, with over 50% forming a diverse international base, and with language classes in both Mandarin and English offered on enrolment, although the emphasis rests on developing academic writing skills where all programmes are taught through English). We reflect on our initial conversations, formed back in the UK over fennel and rose tea, sitting outside the Craft Ed building last June. Liangliang describes how her own experiences, taking short courses in Radical Love and Creative Leadership at Schumacher College, continue to inform the ecological roots and holistic learning ethos that fuel many of these new classroom to community initiatives that she is currently directing.

One of my tasks here is to support a small group of students from across the schools of Integrated Media Arts and Sociology in helping to frame their ethnographic research methods, as part of a series of field trips, mapping into the Yungu permaculture community. Though only one hour’s taxi ride from their own campus, the transition to the Yungu eco village - located in the Jinshan district of Shanghai, and forming one of the growing exemplary regenerative farming initiatives - could not be more diametrically opposed to their own formal learning environment. This workshop forms one of several ‘extra-curricular’ weekend activities that Liangliang has initiated in an already crammed curriculum and sits alongside diverse community engaged programmes including the culturally rich ‘Good Death’ seminar series, and ‘Making a “Good Education” for Migrant Children in Rural Guangdong Province’.

Yungu’s population, first established in 2014 by environmental activist and cook-turned-permaculture gardener Hi Tao, continues to slowly expand, where many of its ‘new villagers’ are welcomed by the area’s older inhabitants within a declining demographic, where land rights and water access still remain top down. Chew Ming Siew shares how the most successful initiatives since their two year establishment of communal gardens and cross generational teaching spaces, are the communal meals that they host for both new and established older generation villagers, as also aligning local older residents’ own skills base in the reconstruction of their new community workspaces, situated on a reclaimed dump, and now housing a pizza oven, raised herb beds, chicken coop and a well stocked tools-library. My own Schumacher/Dartington lineage traces its own interesting connections, where some of these new rural developments are linked to Rabinbranath Tagore’s ambitious Rural Revitalisation Policy, started in the turn of the last century and involving close consultation with Leonard Elmhirst’s own regenerative farming practices, even pre-dating his time at Dartington. Tagore’s vision, first modelled on the West Bengalese Sriniketan farming village, included the revival of cottage industries and crafts, a focus on rural health, reanimating traditional festivals for rice harvesting, tree planting and ploughing, and encouraging social interchange and cultural initiatives among the villagers (O’Connell, 2002.). Based on the progressive and holistic proposal ‘to take the problems of the village and the field to the class-room for study and discussion and to the experimental farm for solution’ Tagore’s combined efforts, alongside the young Cornell graduate Leonard Elmhirst, were instrumental to cultural enrichment around the agricultural environment, and continued to influence further initiatives globally.

ANY ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACH TO THIS PERMACULTURE COMMUNITY MUST NAVIGATE THE COMPLEX ENTANGLEMENTS OF LAND OWNERSHIP, WHERE AN OLDER GENERATION OF VILLAGERS STILL RETAIN ONLY NOMINAL RIGHTS RATHER THAN LEGAL CUSTODIANSHIP OF THEIR LAND, AND WHERE THE AFFECTIONATELY NAMED ‘NEW VILLAGERS’ HAVE TO NAVIGATE RELATIVELY COMPLEX TERRAIN WORKING TOWARD REGULAR PLATFORMS FOR COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT AND EXCHANGE.

PERHAPS AT BEST, MY SHARING TODAY REFLECTS AN ATTEMPT TO OFFER A TEMPORARY PLATFORM FOR CREATIVE EXCHANGE AND SHARING INSIGHTS WITH THESE NEWLY FORMING COMMUNITIES, BRIDGING YOUNG AND OLD, ACTIVATED IN THE CONNECTIONS AND CROSSOVERS THAT THESE SOIL STORIES MIGHT FURTHER REVEAL.

MOVING ECOLOGIES ACROSS BOTH SCALE AND SCAPE, FROM WHAT MIGHT APPEAR AS THE POLARISED HUMAN MOTIONS OF RURAL DEPOPULATION VERSUS THE EVER-EXPANDING MEGACITY’S PERIMETER. JOURNEYING HOME IN THE WARM TAXI, I WONDER WHAT OTHER KINESPHERES MIGHT EMERGE IN THESE NEW STORIES OF PLACE AND PEOPLE? AS I REFLECT ON MY PAST SIX WEEKS OF NOMADIC TEACHING AND SHORT MEDICINE DOSAGE, MY OWN SENTIENT PEDAGOGY IS SPED UP AND DISTILLED BY THE DEEPENING ECONOMIES OF COLLECTIVE SOMATIC PRACTICE, DIPPED INTO AND RESONATING ACROSS BORDERS AND OCEANS.

Fengjing

My workshop runs well overtime, so we divide into taxi’s and heard for Fengjing, Shanghai’s old Maple River town, where waterways would historically have been the main thoroughfare, and whose busy street vendors offer a glimpse into Shanghai’s more sensory past. Bellies full, Wen Wen and Tzu Li soon doze off, as the assault of fresh air and the shared dynamics from today’s workshop offer a stark contrast to their usual lecture-intensive curricular diet, where learning activities are navigated through lifts and long corridors in temperature-controlled buildings. Over the break, they share in their frustrations regarding the pressure of GPA ratings and intense financial strain that the commitment to study in this urban environment demands. I think about Tzu Li’s reflections around how the University system encourages them to articulate and review constantly their own opinions, decisions and strategies as they navigate their learning landscapes, yet, as she articulates, never fully landing in sense making. As to the how and the why of sharing knowledge and exchanging language in this learning community.

Mid-way through the morning’s session here in the Yungdu community centre, attended by several Schumacher alumni and friends, I pause mid-sentence, and notice that my fish-spine movement directive has quietened the group, absorbed in their individual fluid and shimmering imaginations. It is hard to read the room. I retract swiftly my own well-worn facilitation habit to round off the exercise, to come back to the bone and breath, choosing instead to gently increase the volume of our watery accompaniment. The swelling music encouraging more full-bodied waves to enter in between our rippling scaley bodies, our outbreath and our membraneous exchange, and I observe from the perimeter, as bubbles of connective, collective movement-as-thought spill out into the studio.

This eco somatic and intra-material work becomes a practice of its own present-tense making. Responsive to the culturally thick acts of description, of sensation, of collective imagination. It is a preverbal and sense-making process, arrived at through deep listening, and only partly emergent as a placemaking practice. Rounding off our full day together, having scaled the perimeter of the paddy fields blindfolded, with bamboo sticks as our guide, drawn sound maps of the biophonic and anthrophonic, and having feasted together on lovingly prepared dishes of organic rice, fermented duck eggs and numerous sweet green leaves, I listen carefully, as individual participants share details of their hand drawn maps; this final prompt of the full day’s workshop - a mark making exercise in pairs - attempting to engage a vision of this soil, these plants, this animate world, 100 years down the line.

sense making

MANDARIN MAPS ITS OWN MUSICAL RHYTHMS IN MY PERCEPTUAL FIELD. LOOSENING THROUGH LANGUAGE RATHER THAN FIXING THROUGH DEFINITION, IT BECOMES EASY TO READ THE ROOM; THE GIGGLES, THE SOMBRE NODS, THE TEARS AND THE TILTED HEADS. KIMMERER’S ‘BRAIDING SWEETGRASS’ (THAT FORMED THE BASIS OF MY OWN PRESENTATION AT THE INCLUSIVE ECOLOGY INITIATIVE FIRST SPEAKER SERIES THE PREVIOUS WEEK), OFFERS HOW WORDS CAN OPERATE AS A SPATIAL PRACTICE (‘GRAMMAR IS JUST THE WAY WE CHART RELATIONSHIP IN LANGUAGE’). MOVING ACROSS SCALES, INTERTWINING TODAY WITH MY OWN MOVEMENT-BASED ECOLOGICAL ENCOUNTERS, SHARING CASE STUDIES OF PLACE AND PEOPLE, HER WRITINGS REVEAL A FURTHER MAP, SIMILAR TO THOSE FUTURE DESIGNS THAT LITTER OUR WORKING SPACE, TO BE UNPACKED AND ARRIVED AT THROUGH MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES.

georgina campbell