Caring Earth, Caring People, SharedPresent

The article reflects on how permaculture offers a framework for signifying sustainability on a daily basis, focusing on practices and projects carried out by permaculturists in Sardinia. Three ethics of permaculture—earth care, people care, and fair share—emerge as pivotal in driving actions and choices. Projects are modelled on an ecological resilience-oriented model mimicking nature, which allows for structuring the world based on relationships that can address growing environmental concerns. Through ethnographic examples of wheat production and customs among visiting friends, the article illustrates how nature serves as a model for people, merging with local agro-pastoral traditions and claims to island identity. In Sardinia, permaculturists’ ethical orientation towards every living and non-living element of the system combines with local cultural customs, in a shift from agricoltura to agricultura. This alternative ontology based on relatedness blurs the boundaries between human and non-human and between past, present, and future. Caring for humans thus becomes caring for soils, microbes, vegetation, winds, and rain; caring for future generations means fairly sharing the world between humans and non-humans in the present.