Degrowth and the anarcha-feminist politics of mutual aid herbalisms: Landed relations of care, solidarity and responsibility
 

K. Michelle Glowa

This article explores herbal mutual aid projects and approaches to better understand degrowth as strategy towards radical abundance centring care and social reproduction. Herbal mutual aid contributes to degrowth by strengthening analysis of the commons via communising care and unsettling dominant property relations by inviting new forms of being with land. This paper explores the ethics and practices of mutual aid herbalists and herbalism projects as contributions to existing critical conversations on transformative care commoning (Dengler & Lang, 2022; Federici, 2019; Woodly et al., 2021). I draw on decolonial concepts of solidarity and interrelationality to understand how friendship, joy, and care create the basis for lived politics in, against, and beyond contemporary propertied relations to land. Anarcha-feminist values of autonomy, mutual aid, and solidarity underlie many approaches to mutual aid herbalism, and this article contributes to the expanding literature analysing the connections between anarchistic practices and degrowth values and strategies. Through analysis of articles, podcasts, zines, conversations, interviews, and my personal participation in herbal mutual aid and gardening projects, I examine the work of practitioners creating decommodified and autonomous health solutions and advocating for greater respect for human-plant interrelationality through land-defence, gardening, and socioecological transformation. The everyday practices of mutual aid herbalists remind us of the relevance of anarcha-feminist practice and theories beyond niche activist communities and help address how degrowth solutions can spread from below.


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