This essay on agroforestry and translation is the eighteenth installment of the Botanical Imaginations series, which complicates, diversifies, and proliferates the stories we tell about plants. Series editors: Laleh Ahmad, Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Ellie Kincaid, Rebecca Laurent, Kayleigh Lobdell, Clare Michaud, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey
We are in Brumadinho, a municipality in Brazil that was struck in January 2019 by the collapse of an iron ore tailings dam. About thirteen million cubic meters of toxic mud spread along the Paraopeba River and traveled 300 kilometers to the Atlantic Ocean. The flow of waste resulted in 272 human casualties and the loss of around 300 hectares of Atlantic Forest and Permanent Preservation Areas. But these figures are not sufficient to express the dimensions of the tragedy. Seven years later, the local community still grieves.
We respond to our ecological traumas according to our gifts. For Lucas Sigefredo, a local inhabitant, that meant regenerating twenty hectares of land by planting food forests on his farm, Fazenda Sertão. For myself, a wandering researcher recently settled in Minas Gerais, that has meant searching possibilities of regenerating language.
In 2025, we began a research project that interweaves ecocriticism, translation studies,1 and field work. This research includes working with our bodies—seeding, pruning, and harvesting. Some evenings our research continues on the deck outside the house where we talk and take notes. We ponder names and concepts employed in discourses about all that is beyond human, that has a language different from ours, and with whom we are so lame in communicating. What joins us together is a common pain and longing for restoring our communion with life on Earth.
This essay results from that project. In what follows, we draw on conversations, theory, and the thinking of Swiss-Brazilian farmer Ernst Götsch to explore how language reflects the ecological crisis. We focus specifically on the idea of the foreigner and the derogatory terms that are usually employed to name it: exotic, invasive, and non-native. Our entwined experiences as forest planter and translator means we both share space with the foreigner.
Our research thus partakes in the efforts to keep the Earth habitable. Ethnocentric translation practices disdain unfamiliar linguistic structures and tend to either deform or erase them. Similarly, industrial agriculture reduces variety to sameness by eliminating all that opposes its monocultural project. In creating homogeneous landscapes, monocultures turn elements that serve as buffers for diversity into weeds, plagues, or diseases. Word choices are not innocuous: They create and destroy worlds.
From the perspective of a farmer, the first step to heal the earth is to humbly admit that we humans do not have the exclusivity of language, and that our language of words is not superior to the silent language of the world.
From regenerative agriculture, we borrow the word syntropy to mean creating diversity and reestablishing lost cycles in degraded ecosystems. The aim of syntropy is to restore the system’s capacity of producing food in abundance, not only for humans but all living beings. Syntropy is about generating more life. We link it to poetics, which relates to the forms of literary creation, meaning the way a text functions, or how its elements (subjects, compositional techniques, vocabulary) cooperate to produce a certain effect.
Taken together, a poetics of syntropy means a commitment to living together and keeping human language permeable to the language of the world. The idea of a poetics of syntropy pertains both to linguistic and agricultural practices. In the first case, it is interested in the interactions between languages and cultures in literary texts, including their diverse manifestations in translations. As for agriculture, it allows us to better describe its major forms and perceive the differences between conventional agroindustries and regenerative practices.
We perceive translating as a symbiotic practice—one that welcomes the other. Translation is not compatible with purity. Indeed, every interaction with the stranger that favors diversity is welcome.
An Ecological Ethics of Translation
Translation is a human practice that reflects the transformations and metamorphosis of the universe. That is, translation is a mimetic activity that humans perform by observing how life works: animals eat one another, caterpillars become butterflies, fungi and algae associate in lichens.
Likewise, translated texts result from negotiations between source and target cultures, author and translator styles, and form hybrid verbal expressions. The political dimension of translation dwells in its capacity to connect, socialize, and circulate forms and discourses.
A radical ethics of translation, from this angle, implies renouncing the comfort of familiar phrasing and favoring the expression of linguistic diversity.
The ecological crisis has led to interrogations on the possibility of plants having a language, though it has always been evident for smallholder farmers and many Indigenous communities. Brazilian Indigenous leaders like Ailton Krenak, Kaká Werá Jecupé, and Davi Kopenawa Yanomami all claim that the Earth is alive and breathes.
Scholars like Walter Benjamin echo something similar when suggesting that language is inherent to everything. The task of humans, according to Benjamin, is to translate the linguistic essence of things into names.
Naming is crucial for how we understand the world.
When the forest nurtures a community, and when people live in and for the forest, care for and love it, then that community becomes closer to knowing its name.
The same holds true for farmers who care for plants and soils. Sustainable farmers cannot work as if the land was simply a resource, nor take by force what it refuses to give away. Some kind of attentive interaction must take place, even in the face of radical alterity. From the perspective of a farmer, the first step to heal the earth is to humbly admit that we humans do not have the exclusivity of language, and that our language of words is not superior to the silent language of the world.
Rather, human language acts as a translation of this silent language.
The Philosophy of a Forest Planter
Ernst Götsch, creator of syntropic agriculture and from whom Lucas learned to farm, does not believe in hierarchies of intelligence or language. For Götsch, everything born is equipped to communicate, whether that be bacteria, viruses, plants, fungi, or animals.
In this way, humans are part of an intelligent system that encompasses but extends beyond them. Thinking of intelligence as an innate characteristic of forests and of the macroorganism Earth puts into perspective the translator’s task of revealing the kinship of languages.
We became acquainted with Ernst’s practice of syntropic agriculture around 2015. The short film Life in Syntropy, introducing his method of growing food based on natural succession, was presented during the COP21 in Paris. Ernst grows food by creating ecosystems similar to each plant’s native region. He sows seeds with different rhythms of growth side by side.
As the vegetal succession takes place, a stratified forest emerges. Regular pruning and thinning of trees guarantee the entry of light on the lower layers of the system, maximizing photosynthesis. The resulting material of leaves and trunks forms a bedding that fertilizes the soil.
Ernst Götsch defines syntropy, from the Greek word sintropos, as a process of growing from simplicity to complexity. Life is a strategy Earth has developed to become a sintropos: The purpose of life is to generate more life.
When the system becomes dense and stratified, too shadowy for the culture of vegetables and fruit trees, Ernst creates a clearing somewhere else where he may improve the forest. He chops the trees down, profiting from their wood, and restarts the cycle: seeds of short cycle vegetables mixed with fast and slow growing trees. The result is the recovery of rich soil and the return of formerly dry springs.
In only five years of using Ernst’s methods, Lucas has managed on his own farm to recover a previously silted-over stream and to create black soil that presently nurtures a great variety of vegetables, roots, and fruit trees. In the next few years, we expect the succession to develop towards an abundance system. The goal of agroforestry is to mimic the dynamics of a degraded land’s original forests.
The characteristics of the previous ecosystem can be guessed from traces left on devastated landscapes, such as remaining bushes or trees. Syntropic agriculture’s concept of “homology of dynamics” allows us to think of these new forests as translations or, as Haroldo de Campos would put it, trans-creations. They are like isomorphic constructions of an original text from which we have only vestiges.
The Principle of Hospitality
Thus, agroforestry meets translation by its principles of hospitality and diversity. The former principle allows the foreigner to interact with the local in favor of the reconstitution of an ecosystem in agroforestry, or a literary work, in translation. The latter grants that this new system, or text, will do justice to the complexity of the original one. A land already devastated by hundreds of years of colonial violence doesn’t just recover by itself. Syntropic agriculture can also be performed on a large scale, helping reverse the destruction brought by monocultures.
Likewise, for Benjamin, translation does not monotonously unify languages, like monoculture does, reducing diversity to sameness. Instead, it puts languages back in relation. For us, this perspective corresponds to a poetics of syntropy, as languages are considered both in their uniqueness and in their mutual complementarity. The perspective of a poetics of syntropy also allows us to observe the metamorphosis of language as paradigms change.
Old vocabulary can become inadequate for describing new perceptions. For example, after the establishment of the heliocentric model for the solar system, Earth, previously considered the pillar of the universe, became a “planet,” one like many others. In the same way, as the agroindustrial model fails to preserve life, other models of agriculture (re)emerge, such as agroforestry.
Now, words like enemies, pests, killing, and eliminating no longer serve to describe the new models, which call for words such as resilience, dynamism, cooperation, harmony, and abundance.
The Syntropic Path
Perhaps most fascinating in Ernst’s philosophy is the place of the foreigner in the ecosystem, and his refusal to treat diseases, fungi, plants, or animals as evil. Having moved from Switzerland to Brazil, he likes to joke: “I am exotic myself.”
When mimicking original ecosystems, Ernst will sometimes introduce foreign species, often because they serve an important function for native species.
In fact, in some cases he is legally compelled to. For example, his most provocative attitude against stereotypes of good and bad plants emerges in his planting eucalyptus alongside roots, vegetables, and fruit trees. When ecosystems are too degraded, remaining species may become unable to recover it alone. One solution is to incorporate species from other ecosystems who will perform similar tasks as native ones. Eucalyptus does just this.
As fast growers, eucalyptus provide large amounts of organic matter for the plants to come.
Ironically, Brazilian environmental laws prohibit him from planting native species as organic matter source, since he would be forbidden to prune the trees. There are no such barriers for exotic species. As Ernst states, “If I want to reforest the Pampas, I have the right to plant, without legal problems, olive, fig, peach trees, and create a Mediterranean forest.” Presently, agroforesters all over Brazil integrate eucalyptus in their systems—and so do we.
A land already devastated by hundreds of years of colonial violence doesn’t just recover by itself. Syntropic agriculture can also be performed on a large scale, helping reverse the destruction brought by monocultures.
Ernst shows us that, in the syntropic path towards abundance, so-called “invasive” species are not “evil” or “aggressive”: They are sometimes necessary interveners that may remain for decades until soil becomes capable of supporting more nutrient-demanding native plants again. After accomplishing its task in the system, organisms from other ecosystems naturally disappear. For example, Ernst argues that jackfruit is a great cultivation partner for Brazil’s nut because when Brazil’s nut grows taller than the jackfruit, the jackfruit under its shadow eventually goes away.
Ernst Götsch defines syntropy, from the Greek word sintropos, as a process of growing from simplicity to complexity. Life is a strategy the Earth has developed to become a sintropos: The purpose of life is to generate more life.
On Parasites, Plagues, and Diseases
From a practical perspective, syntropy provides a way of producing what humans need for nourishment, based on natural principles. No one plant or element exists in an ecosystem by chance, not even diseases.
In Fazenda Sertão, we can already testify to the beneficial relations between foreign botanical species and the local wildlife. Australian eucalyptus serves as support for native passion flowers (passiflora). Their interaction benefits both native and foreign bees who feed from its flowers. These same bees, as well as other insects, enjoy Asian citrus flowers. Local species also guide us in choosing where to plant: It took some time until ants allowed us to cultivate avocado. They repeatedly ate our seedlings until the soil was fertile enough.
In our very first conversation about our research project, Lucas summarized the continuities between translation and agroforestry by the principle of hospitality. Agroforestry does not call the non-native “alien,” consider pests as diseases, or treat difference as harmful.
In translation, we receive another human culture in our language of words. In agroforestry, we welcome the other in the soil, through vegetal culture.
Working together in our differences is ultimately what enables prosperity and abundance. We support each other through the challenges of growing food and perusing the mysteries of language.
Featured Image: An aerial view of Fazenda Sertão Agrofloresta picturing fields, ponds, and surrounding native forest. Photo by the authors, 2024.
Lia A. Miranda de Lima is a professor at the Faculty of Letters of Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil, where she integrates the research group Nave—Nature, Violence and Ecocriticism. Presently she carries postdoctoral research at Université du Québec à Montréal under the supervision of Professor Rachel Bouvet and cooperates with Grive – Interdisciplinary Research Group on Plants and the Environment. Website. Contact.
Lucas Sigefredo is the owner of Fazenda Sertão Agrofloresta, in the municipality of Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil. He has been cultivating organic fruit and vegetables according to the principles and techniques of Syntropic Agriculture since 2015. Website. Contact.
- For an approach inspired in natural sciences, see Gengshen Hu (Hugs), in Eco-Translatology: Towards an Eco-paradigm of Translation Studies (Springer, 2020). We prefer, however, the broader perspective of Michael Cronin, who explores the consequences of the ecological crisis on translation practices and theory in Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2017). ↩︎
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