Soil, solidarity, and sustainable agriculture: the grounded negotiation of environmental care in eco-farming

Abstract

Abstract Agroecological communities act within economic and geopolitical structures that contradict and undermine important commitments, raising the critical question: how can ethical life be sustained under such conditions? Drawing on ethnographic research in Italian agroecological farms during the Gaza war, this article argues that farming is both an object of ethical concern and the material ground for ethical reflection. Extending feminist care ethics and Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity, it develops the concept of an ethics of grounded negotiation to show how solidarity and environmental care emerge through embodied, interdependent, imperfect practices that make space for ethics within constraint rather than through purity.