Thinking-Being With a Garden: Developing Ecocentric Ethics for Sustainable Organising

Abstract In this paper, we turn to gardens to offer a new ethics of being with the world that can inform sustainable organising. For this, we develop an ecocentric ethics perspective informed by the writing of Karen Barad, in particular her notion of ‘agential cuts’. By reviewing gardening literatures, and exploring our embodied gardening practices, we attempt to ‘step out’ of institutionalised ways of thinking and working to reach for different embodied and relational ways of being with earth-others. We contribute to debates by: (a) tracing multispecies mutualities of ‘cutting-together apart’ within the gardens we tend, to show how such cutting can develop understandings of an entangled ethics in which human involvement can at times be peripheral; and, (b) showing how garden(ing)s can help enrich understandings of ‘ethico-onto-epistemologies’ by situating embodied practices of organising within planetary processes and rhythms which are variously consequential for sustaining forms of life. These contributions stemming from garden(ing)s can help to inform ecocentric thinking-being in business organisations by developing possibilities for (re)conceptualising: how businesses practices, and connected imaginaries, are entangled in creating conditions that can diminish and enhance earth-others existences; and, how the fluidities and temporalities of specifically located webs of life in which businesses activities are part necessitate sensitivities to working with unknowing.