Home > News & Public Affairs > Partisan Gardens > April 2022: The 2022 Earthbound Farmers Almanac

April 2022: The 2022 Earthbound Farmers Almanac

Play

This month’s Partisan Gardens is all about the Farmer’s Almanac, specifically the 2022 Earthbound Farmer’s Almanac. Our listeners are probably familiar with the old farmer’s almanac, with its planting charts, weather forecasts and random tidbits of folksy wisdom and jokes. It’s an artifact of an earlier time, probably not the first place our listeners go to decide what to plant or when to plant it.

The Earthbound Almanac, on the other hand, is situated in the present moment. Last year, we dedicated an episode to their first almanac- and we encourage you to listen to that, too. The book’s back cover reads:

This is a Farmer’s Almanac for the end of the world. We glimpsed one such world emerging after the storm last Summer, as people in the darkened city gathered around generators and grills to share the brief abundance from their thawing freezers. The crises all around us, and the attempts by the ultra-rich to flee the Earth entirely, make clear that none of the reigning institutions will make any effort toward our survival. The way forward, out of this mess, will mean charting a new course informed with Black and Indigenous knowledges developed through generations of struggle against land theft and enslavement. We will have to work together — constructing and re-constructing the ability to sustain and care for each other. This almanac is for developing the necessary knowledge, infrastructure and practices.

In a moment when so many are refusing exploitative work, whether by striking, quitting, slacking, calling in sick or “lying flat”, it feels both more urgent and more possible than ever to reclaim the joy and value of our work as meaningful. The old farmer’s almanac presented conventional wisdom. This almanac is a place for experimentation, for finding new forms and retrofitting old ones, for sharing stories of lived efforts toward a collective exit from this colonial nightmare, this separateness from the Earth.

So for today’s episode we’re taking you on an audio tour of the almanac – less like an audio book and more of an interpretation and an exploration based on the almanac. We will have a few readings from the book, some tarotscopes, along with a couple brief interviews with some of the authors of those pieces.

The Almanac hopes to be back next year, so if you’re excited to contribute to future issues, send pitches to [email protected] with “2023 Almanac:” and the pitch topic in the subject by July 31st, 2022.  Thank you to all the contributors who sent in and read their pieces from the almanac for us. You can get a copy of the almanac and find out more by going to emergentgoods.com. Thanks to Xiamara Chupaflor for the tarotscopes. Thanks to Lyn Rye for our theme music.

Check Also

April 2023: Brown Water Utopia

In this episode of Partisan Gardens, we explore the competing utopias at stake in the …