Seeds of Another Future: Grandmothers and the Ecologies of Diaspora

This paper examines how ancestral ecological wisdom preserved among marginalized women offers alternative visions of human–Earth relations in the context of intensifying ecological crisis. While dominant environmental discourse often focuses on technological solutions or policy reform, this study highlights everyday ecological practices that sustain relational forms of environmental care within diasporic communities.
The paper draws on ethnographic research that includes interviews with sixty-two Korean grandmothers in both Korea and the Korean diaspora in New York. These women maintain ecological practices shaped by intergenerational knowledge, including seasonal attunement, food preservation, seed-saving, water reuse, and relational understandings of land and nonhuman life. Although many of these practices originated in agrarian settings, they are creatively adapted in urban diasporic environments through apartment-based cultivation, community gardens, and church-centered networks of food sharing and care. By foregrounding the lived ecological practices of grandmothers, this paper argues that ancestral wisdom represents a living archive of ecological knowledge that sustains relational understandings of care for land, community, and future generations. These practices reveal how alternative ecological futures may emerge from intergenerational memory, embodied knowledge, and everyday forms of ecological responsibility within diasporic religious communities.