UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation presents an analysis of permaculture listening practices as a set of strategies for perceiving and participating with more-than-human ecological subjectivities (Diehm 2002: 29-33; Posthumus 2017: 26). Today, permaculture is a grassroots social movement for ecological regeneration and eco-social justice grounded in a three-fold ethics of “earth care, people care, and fair share” (Henfrey 2018: 33). These conceptions of care are rooted in a worldview that asserts the irreducible “coconstitution of nature and culture” (Trauger 2017: 40, Mollison 2002: 95) and in a relational practice of ecosystem observation, immersion, and co-composition. Recognizing permaculture’s global and internally diverse character, my study combines ethnographic engagement with permaculture practitioners in Northern California, ethographic engagement (Rose and Van Dooren 2016) with more-than-human ecological subjectivities, and extended analysis of permaculture texts and discourses. Positioning my research in the intersections of ecomusicology, sound studies, and environmental humanities, I consider the ways in which listening operates both discursively as a conceptual tool for communicating permaculture values and ethics, and practically as individuals and communities work with landforms and ecosystems. One of my primary objectives is to critically assess the specific participatory character of permaculture listening as a crucial aspect of multispecies cohabitation (Feld 2017: 84; Tsing 2015: 29) and sociality (Rose and Van Dooren 2017). From my situated analysis, I argue that permaculture listening strategies gesture toward and enact a grotesque (following Hufford 2019: 22) more-than-human musicality. This thesis contributes to emergent discourses in ethnomusicology concerning disciplinary responses to the challenges of posthumanism (Silvers 2020; Titon 2020: 255-274), and to broader environmental humanities discourses on the cultivation of “arts of living on a damaged planet” (Tsing et al. 2017).