Washington State U. Grad Students Develop ‘Plantifa’ Curriculum to Publicize ‘Eco-Justice’

Washington State U. Grad Students Develop ‘Plantifa’ Curriculum to Publicize ‘Eco-Justice’

It’s like Animal Farm, but in real life. Do you look forward to sampling ‘anti-fascist’ produce?

The College Fix reports:

Scholars develop ‘Plantifa’ curriculum to promote eco-justice ‘guerrilla gardening’

“The world is facing a looming existential threat caused by exploitative habits and intentional
human negligence.”

That is how Brandon Edwards-Schuth and Marco Cerqueira, a pair of graduate students at Washington State University, describe the pending global crisis as they see it in their recent Northwest Journal of Teacher Education article.

Their solution to combat this dystopian future? “Plantifa.”

Plantifa is situated “at the intersections of anti-fascism, eco-justice, decolonization, and arts-based curriculum theories,” the scholars write.

“We feel that education rooted in a Plantifa curriculum can be one potential way for both teachers and communities to use a diversity of tactics to fight climate change and subvert power structures working against environmental justice,” the scholars state in their November 2022 paper.

If adopted, the authors note, they envision Plantifa being carried out by communities, as well as incorporated into current classroom lesson plans, perhaps as a final class assignment.

For that assignment, the scholars suggest students engage in the practice of guerrilla gardening, “a subversive and communal eco-justice approach to environmental degradation and inequity.”

Unlike traditional gardening, which the duo describe as taking place in “designated flower beds or defined community gardens,” guerrilla gardening, they write, entails intentionally “gardening without borders,” for example on somebody else’s land.

Anti-fascist guerrilla gardeners, they write, assist “nature in breaking trespassing laws, where it is really the insatiable consumption inherent under capitalism which has trespassed Earth.”

“[V]acant lots, medians, and ‘derelict land’” are just some of the sites anti-fascist guerrilla gardeners may target, note the pair of scholars, as these are all “spaces of eco-potentiality.”

In laying out what Plantifa assignments might look like in the real world and hence beyond the pages of the Northwest Journal of Teacher Education, the scholars write of how students would start assignments with an initial reconnaissance mission to scout out possible locations for their guerrilla assault on the colonialist regime. Next, they would choose their flora. Then finally, the planting would begin.

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