Permapoesis

Capitalism's Dirty Water

2012-01-31T23:14:00.002+11:00

Coca Cola takes a lot from my local region. It sucks Dja Dja Wurrung groundwater from the ecosystem, trucks it to a Melbourne factory where it's rumoured it's mixed with ordinary tap water, then it is packaged in petrochemical bottles, and marked up several hundred percent to sell to idiot consumer-polluters as bottled water.

I came up with the lyrics for this song after I and my son Zephyr came across a fellow community gardener, Lena, had picked up a half-consumed bottled of coke that had been thrown into one the community gardens. She looked at Zeph's interest in the bottle and said, "don't worry, I don't drink this toxic rubbish", and borrowing a line from a friend she added: "this is capitalism's dirty water you know." Awesome stuff! Lena is a true elder...

So, introducing to permapoesis for the first time, the band I'm in, Bunch of Bandits singing Dirty Water. (All of us in the band met through our community gardens... Corporate bullies beware! Strong language alert, this one's aimed straight at your pea brains; or for those who know better, a jingle to sing to your kids at night to counter the multi-million dollar ad campaigns Coke directs at them):

This little clip was filmed by Zephyr (aged nearly 10). Nice work Zeph!

Some Summer Reading

2012-01-31T14:35:00.000+11:00

Your mother is pure Black
happy forever with the Water Hen
Lionel Fogarty Ruby Dilli (Eyes) Southerly (Vol 71 No 2) 2011 p124

There is a cost to non-Indigenous as well as Indigenous people when the privileges of (white) society are based upon lies about ourselves and our past.
Sarah Maddison Beyond White Guilt: The Real Challenge for Black-White Relations in Australia Allen & Unwin Australia 2011 p20

Techniques and technologies necessary to manage our lives and natural resources sustainably are known. However, simple ways of living contradict the growth of commodities and services, which drives capitalism.
Anitra Nelson and Frans Timmerman Life Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies Pluto Press London 2011 p14

Even in the full blossom of life, decay and death were just around the corner. The world was a joyous thing with maggots at the centre, Wombalano Beeaar had once told him.
Craig Robertson Buckley's Hope: The Real Life Story of Australia's Robinson Crusoe Scribe Melbourne 1980 p160

As Lewis Mumford saw it amidst the carnage of World War II, "Western civilization became mechanically unified and socially disintegrated" (Values for Survival, 190)... The supposed rationalization of technology, he found, often concealed pockets of irrationality: "immense gains in valuable knowledge and usable productivity were canceled out by equally great increases in ostentatious waste, paranoid hostility, insensate destructiveness, hideous random extermination" (Lewis Mumford Reader, 134).
Jed Rasula This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry University of Georgia Press Athens and London 2002 p49

Say
Australia from the edges of a wound
a circus of dusty blood sucked
from a metal carcass in Minyirr's old heart
the softly burning horizon screaming
as if a mineral-old candle
had coagulated
around the wooden boats of Enlightenment and flared
up above us
the dancing phantoms of the flaming
place-time scrub.
Stuart Cooke Edge Water (excerpt from Broome Song) Interactive Press Queensland 2011 p63

Black Cockatoo Camp #1

2012-01-25T23:48:00.000+11:00

Peter Yencken and I today returned from taking 8 homeschoolers out into the bush for the first of what we hope will be many Black Cockatoo Camps. As a small tribe we made fire with a bow-saw, ate a lean and very local diet, made new friends (including one injured and feathered), mentally challenged and physically exhausted ourselves and began to tune into and interact with our best possible teacher – the land that supports us.

We made shelter with found materials.

We moved in and for four days we made it home.

At night mosquitos let themselves in and ate us alive.

Each morning we foraged along the creek before returning to our fire,

around which we honed our whittling skills.

We made simple tools with the litter of the forest floor.

We foraged yabbies, blackberries, apples, plums, wild herbs and vegetables,

which we added to the local produce we brought to the camp.

Then in the afternoons we played mind and body games

and headed to the lake

to do what kids love.

Perfect Fruit

2012-01-18T12:39:00.002+11:00

I wrote this nutty lil' ditty for my girl's birthday today. Happy Birthday Meg!

Perfect Fruit

Unclouded man (or, if only our journalists would also tell it how it is)

2012-01-17T13:17:00.000+11:00

My friend Peter Tyndall sent a number of us this little gem this morning:

Australia's day of monetary destitution cometh. Be prepared, be very prepared.

Gardens, ecologies and reclaiming the sensible

2012-01-15T13:11:00.001+11:00

Daylesford Community Food Gardeners had a big day yesterday of multiple events to do with transition, gardening, music and global ecological crises. We blogged some of the activities on the DCFG blog just free food.

The day ended with a permaculture forum at the Neighbourhood Centre in which David Holmgren, Ego Lemos from Timor Leste and I presented on all things permaculture and transition from industrialised agriculture. This event was part of the Boite Singers' Festival and chaired by director Roger King.

Then this morning our super SWAP (social warming artist and permaculturalist) Heath showed us this short and sharp video. Another inspiring message from Vandana Shiva:

Black Cockatoo Camp

2012-01-07T13:20:00.000+11:00

My friend Peter Yencken and I are just about to take 10 children out into the bush for 4 days and 3 nights to teach them what we know about foraging, intuitive movement, close observing, stalking prey, living with simple tools, making fire and building shelter. This is the first of what we hope will be many called Black Cockatoo Camps. The camps are designed to foreground bodily and ecological knowledges, while backgrounding digital, technical and abstract knowledges.

This video shares a very similar philosophy to ours. It's an inspiring story:

Find out more about this video here.

Food Forest - 18 months on

2011-12-29T15:41:00.000+11:00

We've just had a trip to Sydney where we visited friends and family and spent two days at the Food Forest with locals pruning, planting, thinning, watering, mulching and feeding the garden.

Here's my drawing of the Food Forest from May 2010. We planted it later in July.

Here's what it looks like after our working bee last week.

And here's what the garden looked like back in July 2010, just after the planting was finished.

Gardens subvert the dominant paradigm

2011-12-24T16:15:00.001+11:00

After Blake

2011-12-12T08:25:00.001+11:00

The story of Daylesford Community Food Gardeners first nine months demonstrating how a guerilla action at one garden developed into three community gardens throughout the town.

Permaculture Principles

2011-11-30T20:18:00.001+11:00

I've been at an advanced permaculture course with David Holmgren and today we unpacked, critiqued and revalued his 12 principles. Here I set them out with a selection of photos Meg and I have taken over the past couple of weeks.

1. Observe and interact.

Clover flowers amid eucalypt leaf litter.

2. Catch and store energy.

Renewable, local energies.

3. Obtain a yield.

Home garden harvest within chicken run.

4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback.

Community garden principles of take and return.

5. Use and value renewable resources and services.

Local food production and renewable transportation.

6. Produce no waste.

Easier to do in less affluent localities.

7. Design from patterns to details.

Parasitical relations; native cherry and friend.

8. Integrate rather than segregate.

Public (guerilla planted) broad beans.

9. Use small and slow solutions.

Bike maintenance workshop, DNC

10. Use and value diversity.

Today's course participants.

11. Use edges and value the marginal.

Jaara bush tucker; native cherry (turns red)

12. Creatively use and respond to change.

Design principles exercise, 4.45pm

North American Democracy

2011-11-26T13:04:00.001+11:00

From here.

Water Commons (zero carbon)

2011-11-24T18:07:00.001+11:00

As Summer approaches Artist as Family have been busy auditing Melbourne's drinking fountains.

Click for bigger.

When cops do good

2011-11-22T22:13:00.001+11:00

Former Philadelphia Police Cpt. Ray Lewis being arrested this week, Wall Street, New York.

Captain Ray Lewis arrested (Photo via @AdamGabbatt)

An alternative design framework

2011-11-17T09:52:00.001+11:00

I participated in a design workshop earlier this week, and what I brought to it was this little paper outlining why we need to compost the default framework – progress capitalism – for everything we do.

The contents of this document includes prose, drawing and poetry.

Jaara Jaara foods (and a peg from the big smog)

2011-11-11T19:56:00.001+11:00

Yesterday I gave a bush foods walk with a group of home schoolers. Today I went to Melbourne.

Little creatures.

Milk maids.

Yam daisies.

Yabbies.

Clever Melbourne.

Spring Garden

2011-11-09T21:40:00.000+11:00

Rabbit interview

2011-11-07T23:40:00.001+11:00

Find out more about Rabbit here.

Brien Nelson, Jaara Jaara Elder

2011-11-05T20:04:00.000+11:00

There's an opportunity coming up to meet Brien and his wife Jude at their Bunjil Park Aboriginal Education and Cultural Centre. Let me know if you'd like to come.

Pink Blossom

2011-10-31T18:35:00.000+11:00

Anthony Petrucci sings my slow text mesostic, Pink Blossom, at the launch of Rabbit Two.

GM...fail

2011-10-30T20:19:00.000+11:00

GM crops promote superweeds, food insecurity and pesticides, say NGOs
Report finds genetically modified crops fail to increase yields let alone solve hunger, soil erosion and chemical-use issues:

More here.

Monsanto biopiracy

2011-10-29T12:34:00.002+11:00

When all Australian state governments except for South Australia are greenlighting toxic (but nonetheless greenwashed) GM farming, the Indian government is showing courage and following Europe and Japan in banning Monsanto and co's crude and irresponsible shareholder science.

Meanwhile in Australia GM canola has contaminated an organic farm in WA, and the farmer is rightly suing. READ more here.

Boycotting supermarkets, growing your own, instigating or joining food co-ops that only support biodynamic and organic farms... we don't have to support biopiracy, corporate bullying and corporate destruction of the world's biodiverse free seed bank.

If you don't know where your food is coming from, and the means in which it is produced, then you are most likely supporting mass-scale biospheric degradation and consuming healthless foods.

Cargo bikes – carless joy

2011-10-25T14:46:00.000+11:00

Do something good for yourself and the planet.

from here.

My first cargo bike (made from recycled parts)...

Then our carport becomes our bikeport (car-free and not looking back)

we have spent money cleaning it and having it worthy of the road. we’re a little tense as it’s raining and one of us, eight years old, is not so aware or interested in the effects of mud on upholstery. we still have some petrol in the tank. it will be enough for the journey. it’s been a year since we made the decision and we’ve rehearsed being without it all through the winter recording each kilometre travelled, each litre expended. and now, we’re at this point, ready to drive for the last time from the town with little public transport to the city dripping in it, where the young guy who works for the armed services credit union will hand us a cheque to cash in at the bicycle shop.

from here.

Our Transition

2011-10-21T15:47:00.000+11:00

To here –

Wheel of Ecological Culture (permapoesis)

From here –

Wheel of Progress Capitalism (another false cycle)

The Great Interruption (or, 'We are members of the most destructive culture ever to exist')

2011-10-15T12:40:00.000+11:00

From here.

Occupy

2011-10-12T09:27:00.000+11:00

My new email signature

2011-10-11T22:49:00.002+11:00

Not sent from a blood minerals dependent iPhone responsible for the deaths, rapes and brutal torture of the Congolese people

Spring party

2011-10-11T22:42:00.000+11:00

We've organised a garden party. Hope you can come...

More here.

Just Free Water

2011-10-10T10:17:00.000+11:00

In 2007 I walked Melbourne's CBD mapping all the public drinking fountains (bubblers). It later prompted this article in The Age. Many of the fountains didn't work and I estimated on figures of population I obtained from the City of Melbourne that there was only one working bubbler for every 40,000 people.

Today I read in The Age that VCA has banned bottled water on its campus. This is great news as we move into the hotter months. If you're still a bottled water drinker here's an article I wrote that may dissuade you from partaking these toxic waters again.

Pushed to the brink, America rises

2011-10-08T21:02:00.001+11:00

Official Statement from Occupy Wall Street - this statement was voted on and approved by the general assembly of protesters at Liberty Square: Declaration of the Occupation of New York City

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.

They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.

They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.

They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.

They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless nonhuman animals, and actively hide these practices.

They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.

They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.

They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.

They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.

They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.

They have sold our privacy as a commodity.

They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.

They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.

They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.

They have donated large sums of money to politicians supposed to be regulating them.

They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.

They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantive profit.

They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.

They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.

They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.

They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.

They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.

They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.*

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

From here.

Greenwash #27 in Trouble: The Wheel of Progress Capitalism

2011-10-06T17:07:00.000+11:00

Click for bigger.

Bike the change you want to see in the world

2011-09-30T19:27:00.000+10:00

We celebrated a first birthday ride for our town's critical mass tonight in freezing, wet conditions. Our numbers were down but our spirits were up and I personally wasn't going to let some ferocious storm clouds get in the way of my desire for change, or my hand drawn placards from seeing the light of day.

My body as temple for experimental relocalisation

2011-09-29T17:48:00.000+10:00

There's a lot of fear around mushrooms, fear created mostly out of mycological ignorance. In Australia we have such little knowledge of fungi, their role in ecosystems and their edibility. This previous post goes further into that sort of thing.

My friend and fungi teacher Alison Pouliot, an ecologist, photographer, writer and mycologist, is vehemently encouraging of amateur mycology, so I thought I'd share a recent discovery that I made:

Camp fungi – nibble methodology #1, 24 September 2011 (from my journal). Trametes versicolour (Rainbow fungus).

I found this bracket fungus growing in eucalypt forest alongside Sailors Creek at Bryce's Flat, Central Victoria. I have heard that the Dja Dja Wurrung ate Fistulina hepatica (Beefsteak fungus), another bracket fungus that also grows in the Wombat Forest.

However I don't know for sure if the Rainbow is edible so I aim to taste-test in the name of local ecological knowledge and relocalisation.

I choose a few small brackets, cut off the woody parts that were the point of attachment to the log, and fried them up in the pan on the camp fire using a little olive oil from nearby Guildford.

As I write I'm not in the least bit sure I'm going to be poisoned and as we've walked here from home to this beautiful camping spot I'll just have to tough it out around the camp fire tonight and trust that I'll overcome any adverse toxins. I have only had a small chip, and I say chip because what it tasted like was an overcooked, cold potato chip that's been lying around for a few days. In other words, an oily albeit edible tasteless crispy starch. The smell of this mushroom uncooked is earthy, vaguely fishy (permeated by freshwater eucalypt tannins). A good mushroom smell really, one you can trust, at least for a nibble, anything more at this point would be stupid. I'm with my girlfriend Meg and my son Zephyr, who I've not invited to partake in the experiment in case it all goes terribly wrong, and as it was my idea it is only fair I should carry it out. As I cooked the chips the mushroom gave off no unsavory smell, as mushrooms I have eaten in the past have, causing me to abandon eating them.

I write this post several days later and I'm pleased to announce that I suffered no adverse effects. Next time I may soak this fungus in milk for a day as I've heard this makes beefsteak fungus more delectable. I will then eat a few more chips to text the toxicity again before being confident to serve up to others.

Stay tuned for more non-lab, in the field amateur science soon!

Unwatchable – more 'at arm's length violence'

2011-09-29T16:28:00.000+10:00

This short film is disturbing to watch but probably more disturbing not to.

With Apple being responsible for about a quarter of this unwatchable, unknowable violence, this is just another reason I will never get an iPhone and why when my seven year-old crapola phone dies I'll not replace it with anything except longer walks in the bush.

The even shorter vid below filmed on location gives some further context for the extremely disturbing, five minute vid, Unwatchable.

We went to the garden of love

2011-09-24T16:26:00.001+10:00

Community gardeners, poets and readers met at the new community garden Rea Lands Park today to share poems and food in the sunshine.

Some of the poems were musical.

Some political and intense.

And some a little difficult to swallow but were appreciated as part of this creative commons.

America and Oil: Declining Together?

2011-09-19T20:18:00.000+10:00

by Michael T. Klare

America and Oil. It’s like bacon and eggs, Batman and Robin. As the old song lyric went, you can’t have one without the other. Once upon a time, it was also a surefire formula for national greatness and global preeminence. Now, it’s a guarantee of a trip to hell in a hand basket. The Chinese know it. Does Washington?

Read on here.

DuPont's Herbicide Goes Rogue

2011-09-19T20:13:00.003+10:00

The company's landscaping weed-killer turned out to be a tree-killer.

by Jim Hightower

In the corporate world's tortured language, workers are no longer fired. They just experience an "employment adjustment." But the most twisted euphemism I've heard in a long time comes from DuPont: "We are investigating the reports of these unfavorable tree symptoms," the pesticide maker recently stated.

Read on here.

Talking the local

2011-09-11T23:54:00.001+10:00

My friend Fe grills me on my thoughts about food, relocalisation, democracy, the commons and community gardens.

A video by Fiona Porter, camera and editing by Anthony Petrucci, music by Souls on Board.

Greenwash #26 in Trouble - Growing a Community Food System

2011-09-01T07:48:00.003+10:00

From Trouble magazine

Click for bigger, then click again for clarity.

Short video documenting the planting day at Rea Lands Park.

Tout le pouvoir terrestre aux abeilles

2011-08-24T17:35:00.006+10:00

All earthly power to the bees.

Roundup and Simulation (toxic waste cultures in arms)

2011-08-23T14:05:00.005+10:00

Trip to the local tip yesterday.

2011-08-18T13:16:00.006+10:00

A still from the film The Ister

Compare Heidegger's quote with this one, which I keep returning to of late:

"Several species of cockatoo can be serious agricultural pests… controlled by shooting, poisoning or capture followed by gassing." (source)

2011-08-16T18:20:00.002+10:00

Wheel of Progress-Capitalism (another false cycle)

2011-08-10T22:10:00.013+10:00

I created this drawing today as a teacher and parent teaching aid. It's incredible how pervasive the dominant ideology is, and how the ad-men get into even the most conscientious of schools. Zeph's school is founded on non-harm Buddhist principles, however 'the winners' (the popular and influential) are still the kids who drink caffeinated energy drinks, know all the celebs, obsess over brands and labels, and are across junk food products like junkies in a chemist.

This is a reasonably new phenomenon in the school, so before it really takes hold a number of us are getting fairly active. Ad-men (and of course women) are setting the social agenda in the school through their new disciples – the whatevs. Those kids restricted in their access to pop culture consumption are made to feel inadequate, uncool. Peer-group pressure has hit middle years primary school in a big way, Target stores sell padded bra t-shirts to girls in this age group. Peer pressure was a thing that happened at high school when I was a kid. This is more of the aggregating hyper-mediated state I keep writing about...

Advertorial enterprise is a trillion-billion dollar industry engaged in strategic warfare against a bunch of disparate volunteer parents, teachers and carers. It's a David and Goliath scenario, and Goliath is romping it in.

So here's my catapult, my slingshot. Feel free to rip it and distribute widely (I can send you a high res copy if you want to make a poster of it). The idea of this drawing is to ask each child to imagine they're in the hub of the wheel (the mediated blob, or ambient blur), ask them to choose their favourite bought item, and then find out about it by researching all the possible energy inputs, social inputs, ecological inputs and pollution outputs that each item is likely to produce.

Click for bigger.

NB. Schools shred diversity by ordering students into year groups. This makes them easier targets for commerce pests to pinpoint specific generational desires, much like reduced biodiversity in environments encourage plagues and outbreaks – a weakened state. There are actual companies who profit by collating all forms of social data on all the various age and interest groups, and sell this information to businesses so as they can target consumers with deadly accuracy.

If our schools were generationally diverse the ad-man's power would be considerably reduced, especially if our elders abandoned the wheel of progress-capitalism too and began to behave again as elders. Currently schools are breeding grounds for self-interested bystander consumers. Addressing this issue may be part of addressing the strategic war on children by big business.

Melbourne's commons (more monological every day)

2011-08-06T09:30:00.008+10:00

Click for bigger.

Greenwash #25 in Trouble - Locavore Intimacy

2011-08-01T11:07:00.011+10:00

Click for bigger, then click again for better resolution.

Please note, my critique of agriculture in this piece is not an attack on farmers per se. We are agricultural consumers, farmers are agriculture providers. Urban-centric attacks on farmers for being ecological destroyers are misguided and simplistic. We grow the demand, desire and populations that necessitate ecological crisis. We're all participants, or as Gary Snyder puts it: "No one today can afford to be innocent, or indulge himself in ignorance of the nature of contemporary governments, politics and social orders." (Earth House Hold, 1957)

If only the following table read: "The Main Types of Damage Anthropocenes Inadvertently Cause to Wildlife," and unpacked all the different ways in which we dwell on Earth and the consequences for each. When white people began farming in Australia, Aborigines were rounded up and killed as 'cattle stealers'. I find the same continued hypocrisy in this table:

Click for bigger.

Honey graft

2011-07-30T18:50:00.005+10:00

Grafting the commons (cont.)...

The antibacterial property of honey makes it a perfect skin cure for a graft. In this image a hawthorn rootstock has a quince scion grafted on to it.

Forest transformers

2011-07-28T15:41:00.007+10:00

Grafting pear and apple scions onto wild hawthorn.

(More) grafting the commons

2011-07-26T20:29:00.018+10:00

Last year I wrote an article about grafting various fruits onto wild hawthorns and apples. I was keen to trial various fruits without doing any research, as this attitude can sometimes lead to the quite unexpected. However, not surprising to me now, all these grafts failed. So today, armed with a little more knowledge and an awesome grafting tool, I took a small jar of honey, some pear cuttings, a roll of grafting tape and walked into the bush.

I decided to use two cultivars of pears (Winter Nelis and Beurre Bosc) that cross pollinate with eachother. Apparently, hawthorn makes a good rootstock for any of the rose family – apples, medlars, pears, quince, etc. On a 'wild urban spaces' workshop taken by David Holmgren earlier this year we were shown a 10 year old medlar graft David had done onto wild hawthorn. It was doing really well with abundant fruit (though hard to see in this photo).

Brett Adamson and David Holmgren stand on either sides of the graft.

The grafts I did today were dipped in honey to mitigate disease before being wrapped in grafting tape. Each was then given a splint for strength and protection. I'd like to keep making rose family grafts onto hawthorn over the next two months, so hopefully I can report some significant success, even unexpected, next year.

If you have any grafting tips or anecdotes I'd love to hear them.

Simulated poetics – beaming in from home

2011-07-23T14:28:00.008+10:00

I'm participating in a poetry event in NSW today from the low carbon comforts of my central Victorian home, courtesy of Skype.

Of course digital culture is fully supported by industrial technics, so I'm not pretending this participation isn't without its pollutions and abuses. And I'm only guessing that my decline to be flown/driven up to participate in person constitutes a lower footprint, in comparison to using all this technology (including a plasma screen at the event end) to beam me up.

Here's the poster that was produced for this gig, in which the Bundanon Trust designer has taken an excerpt from a statement I wrote in 2004 and laid it over a photograph taken by Heidrun Lohr.

My Fellow panel participants are Yvette Holt, Chris Mansell and James Stuart.

Two forms of death: ecological and anthropocene made

2011-07-18T18:19:00.015+10:00

Deborah Bird Rose (2011):

There are two big contexts of death. The first is the fact that death resides in life... Death, as a corollary to life, happens to all of us complex creatures. It may happen through old age, or illness; it may happen through hunting or killing; it may happen on larger scales through events such as cyclones, earthquakes, or volcanoes. In this context, living things are bound into ecological communities of life and death, and within these communities life is always making and unmaking itself in time and place.

The second context differs from the first in being a uniquely human invention: man-made mass death. This form of death arises out of a will-to-destruction that seems to be confined to humans... The will-to-destruction can most vividly be thought of as death work. It involves imagining a future emptiness, and then working systematically to accomplish that emptiness... In ordinary life, death is the necessary completion of life. Man-made death is not necessary and does not complete life. Instead it is a massive interruption, a negation of the relationships between life and death.

A complete failure of government to protect us from corporate intransigence

2011-07-12T10:00:00.004+10:00

Take this survey to estimate the level of toxicity in your home.

Click for survey.

If only every Australian business was scrutinised like this

2011-07-04T14:10:00.003+10:00

Take action!

Poetics and Future Scenarios: poems and poets in an age of energy descent and climate chaos

2011-07-03T12:36:00.004+10:00

I have put together a panel for a forthcoming poetry symposium to be held at Trades Hall in Melbourne. Here are the details, followed by a film trailer that features David Holmgren called Anima Mundi, due for release shortly.

The opening panel for the forthcoming national poetics symposium, “Poetry and the Contemporary” (Trades Hall July 7-9), is a panel of three poets joined by sustainability leader, David Holmgren, the co-originator of the permaculture movement.

The panel is titled:

“Poetics and Future Scenarios: poems and poets in an age of energy descent and climate chaos”, July 7, 2.30pm Meeting Room 1(downstairs), following the Welcome to Country, 2.20pm. (Entry by donation).

David Holmgren will open the panel outlining the four main scenarios he believes we face as a result of human engineered climate change and energy depletion. He will draw on his bestselling book “Future Scenarios”, and over thirty years of research that has made him one of the key ecological thinkers of our time and a national treasure.

Three poets, Sue Fitchett, Patrick Jones and Peter O’Mara will respond with critical papers, prose and poems. Each are ecological activists in their respective regions.

Greenwash #24 in Trouble - Suck and Truck

2011-07-02T10:23:00.003+10:00

Click on image to read, then click again for better focus.

We're all on 'work experience' thanks to Liam

2011-06-19T16:54:00.006+10:00

We have just completed a week of work experience thanks to Liam Scott, a student from the local high school. Liam undertook to hang with us and see what a typical week for Artist as Family entails, and what 'work' constitutes, according to us. One of the things we did during the week was to measure up and draw a first draft design for the proposed permanent Daylesford Community Food Garden. Here's a short vid that snapshots the adventure.

Walking Bare

2011-06-13T22:26:00.011+10:00

A video poem written in response to a long shoeless walk, thinking further about technics and technical mediations, mediations such as shoes and the digital footage that preceded, inspired and ultimately simulated this poem.

Flesh of the forest

2011-06-11T21:43:00.004+10:00

A find of wood blewits (Lepista nuda) yesterday on a walk was last night cooked up with garlic and parsley as a protein bomb, and shared with friends.

More uncapitalised food from the commons.

Even in death Monsanto follows

2011-06-06T20:16:00.010+10:00

Today I walked through a graveyard and noticed the grass around the tombstones had been recently herbicided. It caused me to make the observation, that which is hidden is no less violent, in fact the hiding makes the act a double atrocity.

Herbicides even kill the good soil microbes where we finally lay. Is there no rest from the tireless ecocides of Monsanto and co? Can not our bodies be simply left to rejoin the dynamic microbial flux that is supposed to renew life?

Roundup ready? Rapture Ready!

Monsanto'd graves.

Critical Mass Daylesford (latest ride)

2011-06-02T11:23:00.002+10:00

Critical Mass hard liners brave the early winter and take over the street on sun down, last Friday in May. Local singer Anthony Petrucci, from Souls on Board, comes into view for an instant just as his voice comes into sound.

Greenwash #23 in Trouble - Goodly Spores

2011-06-01T11:09:00.001+10:00

To read, click on image and then click again for better resolution.

A scientific justification of nonscientific 'slow text'

2011-05-30T14:02:00.006+10:00

Just as I was finishing a slow text treatment of a Bernard Stiegler transcript (below), my friend Ian sent through a link to an article that states “The reason that the unusual fonts are effective is that it causes us to think more deeply about the material,” a co-author of the study, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton, wrote in an e-mail. “But we are capable of thinking deeply without being subjected to unusual fonts. Think of it this way, you can’t skim material in a hard to read font, so putting text in a hard-to-read font will force you to read more carefully.”

A Free-dragging manifesto - FREE

2011-05-28T15:14:00.002+10:00

We have just made Words and Things, and my A Free-dragging Manifesto from How to do Words with Things (with Peter O'Mara) available for free download. More info can be found down the right hand column of this blog. Otherwise just click away.

Amusing reverbs

2011-05-26T21:45:00.005+10:00

Town.

City.

Ten months later

2011-05-25T14:29:00.005+10:00

I was in Sydney earlier this month, so I checked in on the Food Forest and did a little work there with some local residents. When I got back, a family friend, Rory, who works for ABC radio, sent me the audio file of the interview I had with Deborah Cameron on 702 in September last year. This little archive vid brings all these things together.

Public is public

2011-05-24T20:04:00.005+10:00

Pic. Adam Trafford

A number of us turned out to protest the sale of a community park in Daylesford last week. Read more at the Daylesford Community Food Gardener's blog Just Free Food.

In the bikeport (more on being carless in the country)

2011-05-14T08:58:00.005+10:00

Revisiting older writing while thinking about form and ecological poetries

2011-05-11T14:58:00.009+10:00

From How To Do Words With Things: A Free-dragging Manifesto (2008), this text first published as Lalgambook: the Djadjawurrung and Coca-Cola Amatil, in D!SSENT magazine, Spring 2008.

Energy, primitivism and slow text

2011-05-09T14:13:00.047+10:00

Primitivism, as a purely intellectual thing, is indeed problematic terrain. However, once the primitive, by which I mean activity that transcends history (such as foraging), cohabits everyday practice, it ceases to be utopian and becomes instead pragmatic, or something not of wishfulness or fantasy. This is especially the case if we are to consider global energy powerdown, where primitive forms will again have currency due to a fall in affluence.

So often ecological thought rides exclusively between humanism and ecology and skips energy altogether. "The energetic is nearly always left out of the equation" (David Holmgren, 2010), which seems strange especially when the aestheticisation or mediatisation of nature – our very predicament, or crisis – is precisely linked to high energy inputs – our affluence. Three hundred years of high fossil fuel productions has necessitated that art leads the disembodiment or 'hyper-separation' (Val Plumwood, 2002) process as populations swell into cities and radicals, peasants and indigenous folk no longer have anywhere to practice unclocked forms.

William Blake, printer and poet, with a love of being naked and in the garden, is one such marker of the end of European art as a low energy, unclocked, minimal noise activity. At the time of writing The Garden of Love (1794) coal furnaces were being build and beginning to change his beloved Albion for ever. Today, the screeching, oil dripping 'blob' of Thomas De Zengotita's Mediated (2005) culture, or the all-tech 'ambient blur' that Timothy Morton describes in Ecology without Nature (2007), are both – blob and blur – necessarily immersed in cheap crude oil, and they must necessarily find primitivist forms abhorrent or at best just another choice in a smorgasboard of options. Whereas, when you consider a powering down, even as a 'long descent' (Greer, 2010), the options to pollute, to be allopoetical, or to drive aesthetics globally, necessarily reduce. This reduction is very scary if you imagine energy powerdown (post global aggregated capitalism) as a return to agricultural toil, direct animal cruelty (as opposed to the indirect global cruelty we exhibit today; passivism is an option as long as others are doing the dirty work), and authoritarian sexual repression. But not so if one considers the possibility of an eroding private property (intellectual and physical) culture and the reestablishment of a foraging commons courtesy of collapsing globalised economies wholly reliant on cheap fossil fuels.

Rather than some vague Rousseauian pigmented or pixalated image of primitivism, which is of course just groundless fantasy, we now have real, of the soil, applied ecological breakthroughs that are current practiced modes of primitivism. These can be evidenced in Masanobu Fukuoka's 'do nothing farming', Permaculture's 'food forestry', and in a growing culture of urban foraging witnessed across the blogosphere (such as here and here).

For me, at least, primitivism is not a conjuring of the old world for old world's sake, but rather an attempt to concieve of a present and future with low energy inputs; today, for reasons to do with social and ecological justice, and tomorrow, for issues of species resilience. We are at the tailend of an era of cheap oil and many thinkers haven't factored this within their intellectual framework. It's like there's an abiding belief there will always be an abundance of energy, making what we do today always possible. Conceiving energy powerdown is to concieve of redistributed (reruralised) populations, which, among many other things, will attend to the homogenisation of global ascent capitalism – the so-called global village. Any socialism – from Marxism to Fascism – persevering with industrialisation is thinking fairly short-term, unless of course there is a conjuring of fantasy world resources on some distant planet.

I'm not advocating here a pure primitivism or necessarily a whole primitivism. It's way too simplistic to think along these lines, or perhaps just too early. However, in attending to technofetishisation and the spectacle and 'false cycles' (Guy Debord) of clock-time, I am advocating a rethinking of the primitive per-se at a time of peaking fossils, phosphates, fish, water and just about every other essential element that drives industrial culture on and on.

As a kind of 'doing-saying' (Joan Retallack) evidence of this rethinking, I repost my video-poem-recipe, A Place of Simple Feeding, after re-recording the spoken words today and adding a brief visual clip of the poem as a slow text 'mesostic' (John Cage) for the page. Or, at least a seconds worth of detail of it. The aesthetics aren't pure, instead they're mutable responses to the less than bodily in art today. The slow text (super and subscripted vowels) shows the physical relationship between letters, words, chance, foraging and berries. A move away from Cartesian letters lining up in monological rows (like this text), or ambient representations requiring large energy inputs – styrofoam art, international careerism et al.

Decapitalised art, decapitalised food.

Natural Bitterness

2011-05-08T20:26:00.007+10:00

Natural Bitterness is now available online as a slow text mesostic:

Read the full work here.

Revisited, revised, reposted...

2011-05-03T01:49:00.008+10:00

Is the metabolic potential for a biophysical poetry – formed by the body (in an era of unfolding climate chaos and fossil energy descent) – an essential transition from catabolic literatures, which feed upon each other and perpetuate the systems of art that mediate our logic?

Greenwash #22 in Trouble - By Autonomous Association

2011-05-01T19:55:00.013+10:00

The human plates themselves are the seats of reciprocal and crossed interrelations among individuals and subgroups, their tools, their world-objects, and their knowledge, assemblages that little by little are losing their relations with place, locality, neighbourhood, proximity. Being-there is getting rarer. (Serres, 1995 p.20)

Click for bigger.

Sketch – Making a slow text poem, with hyper (hyphae?) text inputs

2011-04-30T00:45:00.013+10:00

Video-sketch: Drawing, singing, yelling, thinking a slow text poem into being with hyper text inputs and world-as-everything mania, this video illustrates a fictional process of writing the first four stanzas of a new slow text mesostic, Step by Step, after the fact. The attempt with a slow text mesostic is to create silence out of industrialisation's hammering, thus utilising John Cage's mesostics as a chance-induced trigger for slow reading.

Doctoral mindmap (or, the unavoidable fact of nearly everything)

2011-04-29T11:38:00.008+10:00

In preparation for my doctoral review...

Click for bigger.

The unavoidable fact of everything is a line from my friend Ian Robertson – graphic artist, John Cage enthusiast and designer of countless arts related books and publications, including my first two books, Words and Things and How to do Words with Things (with Peter O'Mara).

What mushroom is that?

2011-04-28T19:17:00.010+10:00

I found this mushroom in a pine forest while taking Alison Pouliot's fungi workshop last weekend.

It was new to both of us, so Alison asked if I'd take a spore print and send her the results.

As the spores were white Alison emailed me back saying it may belong to the genus Tricholoma, though she wasn't entirely sure.

Regardless of the genus, the real excitement was that I made my first spore print (thanks Alison) demonstrating firsthand and emphatically the incredible reproductive ingenuity of fungi.

I took this peg today of a small colony of Inky Caps (Coprinus atramentarius) inhabiting ground under our young pomegranate. They are not only autonomous, auto-digesting and self-determined beings in our food garden, but edible too as long as we don't add alcohol to the meal as the combination creates allergy-like symptoms.

Holding up the Mirror (or, the indecency/idiocy of shareholder science)

2011-04-26T18:32:00.019+10:00

I photographed this ridiculous wall sculpture at the Department of Primary Industries (DPI) in Melbourne a few weeks ago. I was there for a symposium on weeds organised by the Weed Society of Victoria. Two friends of mine were giving papers on the ecological and social benefits of wild, autonomous plants, calling into question our governments' open cheque books to chemical companies who profit from a hyper-ideological ground war on weeds – which, in effect, is a war on our foraging commons.

It was an intense day with multiple views being aired and argued. It was clear change was in the air, not just because my pro-weed friends and others were invited to participate in a domain that has been a typically pro-war assault from science and government on self-organising floras, but because it is evident that this dumb-arse science isn't working. Katherine Wilson, writing in Meanjin back in 2009, holds up the mirror:

At the time I was among those campaigning against the Howard government's courting of Monsanto – a company that US courts had found guilty of negligence, trespass, nuisance and suppression of the truth, among other crimes. For its environmental damage, including poisoning of rivers, Monsanto is one of the very few companies found guilty, under Alabama law, of 'outrage' – a conduct 'so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly tolerable in civilized society'.

With CropLife Australia we don't just have Monsanto advocacy in place to court unconvinced politicians, but Monsanto's brown brothers and sisters too – Dow, Syngenta, Dupont, Bayer, Nufarm etc. Here's a taste of their greenwash:

CropLife Australia promotes a life-cycle, or stewardship, approach to the management of crop protection products. Lifecycle stewardship starts with research and development, and includes manufacture, transport and storage, through to use, and eventual disposal of waste, including empty product containers and the management of unused and unwanted registered products. Our stewardship programs raise awareness and enhance the capability of farm chemical distributors and users to manage any risk posed by these products to people, the environment or trade brought about by incorrect transport, storage or use. The overall aim of the stewardship approach is to maximise the benefits, and minimise any risk, from using crop protection products. CropLife, its members and its wholly-owned subsidiary, Agsafe, either collectively or individually undertake a range of activities to ensure that products are developed, sold, used and disposed of appropriately.

The use of life-cycle and stewardship are clever, if you are a moron. But many of us aren't buying the profit-focussed science and there seems to be a bit of a rethink at the moment as government expenditure is requiring contraction. At the end of the weeds symposium the convener asked the room "where do we want to be in thirty years time?" I answered that we will want to hope that CropLife Australia is bankrupt and out of the picture, to which he, a DPI bureaucrat, clammed up with discomfort and mumbled something like "well, we won't go there, will we".

Oh yes siree, many of us will:

including friends Diego Bonetto and David Holmgren.

Greenwash #21 in Trouble - Michael Reynolds' Biotecture Future

2011-04-01T21:35:00.004+11:00

Click for bigger, then click again for better focus.

Ecological pioneers: David Holmgren and Michael Reynolds at the Daylesford tip, 2011

Permapoesis at the Victorian Writers' Centre

2011-03-26T11:59:00.021+11:00

I gave a reading of mainly new work at the Victorian Writers' Centre last night. I came to the centre from a peripheral place, and spoke poetics, ecology, food, energy, climate chaos, population dispersal and 'slow text', among other things.

In question time I was asked about 'food security' and quoted this report in my reply.

Meg and I took hawthorn fruit leathers to share so as the audience could more fully embody the video-poem, 'A place of simple feeding' (see video on previous post), that I finished my reading with. We were gifted in exchange some home-brewed beer made by the director of the VWC, Roderick Poole. This sort of exchange or gift – the hand-made or home-made – is incredibly touching, and exemplified another key area of my talk – uncapitalised exchange.

Roderick and I had never before met, however we share 4 very similar and wonderful things: side burns, a love of home-brewing, permaculture and the love of a good Jewish woman.

Extrapolating on 'free-dying' beside Roderick Poole

(after Michael Farrell asked the question).

The Middle Kingdom of Weeds

2011-03-24T23:24:00.019+11:00

I was asked to contribute something to The Middle Kingdom of Weeds Festival, which I was naturally enthusiastic about.

'A place of simple feeding' is a line from Jean-Luc Nancy's book 'The Birth to Presence' (1993), which I gobbled up as the title for this work. I made a simple video as a poem-recipe celebrating autumn's hawthorn (crataegus) berries, using a recipe appropriated from UK forager and BBC presenter, Ray Mears.

In Australia hawthorns are considered pesky weeds, but this passage from Alfred W Crosby's 'Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900' (1986), puts this limited attitude into some perspective:

"The weeds, like skin transplants placed over broad areas of abraded and burned flesh, aided in healing the wounds that the invaders tore in the earth... The colonizing Europeans who cursed their colonising plants were wretched ingrates." p170

Are we all 'in abandonment', as Bossuet spoke of the West, or are we in varying degrees of naturalising our wounds and settling in?

Aboriginal bush foods, cultivated garden produce, some wild meat, and weeds and wild herbs altogether constitute the mainstay of our relocalised diet. Autumn, for us, is a time to ferment and preserve the bounties of the warm months, to use as medicinal foods throughout the winter, as our ancestors once did.

Hawthorn berries have been used continuously in both Eastern and Western medicine traditions for thousands of years. There are around 200 species, although that figure is a little ambiguous. All species, as far as I'm aware, can be used for human consumption, and are especially good for treating heart pathologies such as high blood pressure and hypertension.

Reading Nancy in the Kitchen

2011-03-21T18:53:00.009+11:00

I'm not sure we can speak about the end of wilderness when the autonomous yeasts in our homes still raise our breads and enact our ciders. An end to presence lies in the cultivars of representation, whereas birth, in the formless breaths of being, owes itself to wild fermentation.

A moment arrives when one can no longer feel anything but anger, an absolute anger, against so many discourses, so many texts that have no other care than to make a little more sense, to redo or perfect delicate works of signification. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, p5, Stanford University Press, 1993.

A little help from Costa

2011-03-11T17:11:00.013+11:00

We launched the Daylesford Community Food Garden yesterday with the energetic help from SBS gardening guru, Costa. This garden is on a disused council site that we've temporarily taken over to grow free, organic food.

So far council are supportive of our squat (by virtue of the fact it still remains) and we are therefore very supportive of their position of support. A few years ago there may have been an extreme ideological battle to be had, but the current council seems to be increasingly open to new modes of thinking.

However, just in case council's response was less than positive, we prepared a positive response that they could freely use (all rights relinquished):

Council applauds the efforts of this community group to work towards food security in the shire.

Council recognises the need for community-led organic food systems to attend to the health crisis that nutrition-low, carcinogenic-high fast food and supermarket food has delivered to its residents – slow death by industrial agriculture.

Council recognises the social merits of such a project, and encourages other community groups to work together to prepare for worsening climate change and energy descent scenarios, and therefore further rising food and energy prices.

Council recognises that we are all squatting on Djadjawurrung land be it at the Town Hall or the Daylesford Community Food Garden. There has never been a proper sale or transfer of land either under Aboriginal or European law.

Council is thrilled that a community group has taken over the maintenance of this site, and that council workers no longer have to use polluting and expensive resources – herbicide and petroleum – to maintain it.

Council would be happy to work with this community group to help them relocate to another site for community food production if the library next-door needs to expand, or some other public building of merit needs to be built on this site.

Council recognises that although this mode of community participation is different to its own form, it nonetheless values such independent, creative and positive responses from its residents.

Council recognises that its own processes of behaviour change are heavily bureaucratic making positive change impossibly slow, and that residents will naturally move faster, working in small groups, and will at times better attend to the fast pace of global financial, social and ecological changes.

Permies and Fermies

2011-03-06T21:38:00.016+11:00

A little while ago I overheard some students discussing a paper given by a professor on the 'end of wilderness'. The justification I think, for this seemingly totalising view, is that anthropogenic climate change effects every inch of the world and therefore everything is now of human making.

David Holmgren, on a walk and talk a few weeks back, spoke about two dominant strains concerning 'the wild' in western thought. He posited historian Simon Schama's suggestion that there is the dark, foreboding and conspiratorial strain, and the pure, unadulterated and sacred strain. Holmgren spoke about how both predetermine land management and environmental politics today. On the one hand you have the 'better tame wild nature before it's on your doorstep' ideology – bulldoze, herbicide, sterilise, etc., and on the other hand you have urbane ideologues obsessing over the few last bastions of wilderness as it were a church, while flying all over the world and buying their food transported in – evidently sacredness is somewhere else.

All of this is a segue to singing the praises of Sandor Katz and his brilliant book 'Wild Fermentation', which I'm totally obsessing over at the moment. And there are many of us, permies and fermies alike, falling deeper and deeper into the everyday wilderness that is live-culture food. The wild is airborne. It is microbial. We speak it out and breathe it in. Below, you can see my new ciders (made from wild apples) gathering in the wild yeasts (fungi) inherent in our home. Some will be left open for longer to be further exposed to the vinegar microorganisms that are also everywhere.

Yesterday my awesome boy Zephyr turned nine. Our friend Brett came over to join the festivities and to teach a small group of boys to hand carve spoons from plum wood prunings.

With a lovingly carved spoon and apple cider vinegar on the make, Hippocrates knows we will need no petroleum-based pharmaceuticals once again this winter.

Greenwash #20 in Trouble - Post Carbon Food Systems (authorised and unauthorised)

2011-03-01T12:26:00.016+11:00

I concentrated this month's Greenwash article on one specific chapter found in the very brilliant Post Carbon Reader anthology. The chapter is called Growing Community Food Systems and is written by US artist-farmer Erika Allen. Click on the image below, then click again to read in high definition.

You can buy a copy from HRN, or read free chapters online.

In news closer to home, last weekend a group of about 40 locals were involved in taking over a disused council plot and did what we've been asking permission for over many years – develop a community garden. Whereas I see some relevance in working with local government to plan against ecological and energetic crises, I don't believe we should wait around for any level of government to drive behaviour change.

When the current CEO at our local council took up her position I made a time to meet with her and raise my chief concerns in the shire – public transport, privatised bottled water and community food gardens. She agreed with me on public transport (and to give credit, there has been a little work done in this area, although she herself drives solo transit from St Kilda to Daylesford for work everyday); and she was interested in the bottled water argument (although nothing more has been done to curb this polluting, exploitative industry very specific to our shire - read more here); however she totally dismissed the community garden issue with the rationale that people in this region have enough space in their own backyards to grow whatever food they wish. This meeting was three years ago.

But to be realistic, change generally comes from a 'hacker' (in the broadest, McKenzie Wark, sense) or activist class, who aim to inspire a wider, bottom-up, grassroots movement to take direct action. By contrast, the bureaucratic class renders itself static through its own red tape. Politicians play between the bureaucracy and the hackers.

In our case this latest action is involved with developing another chapter in our local community food system. The shire council can either get behind us, ignore it and hope it goes away, or become adversarial. We'll see. Here's the wee video I made to document the first stage of this unauthorised community food project.

This garden (beside the Daylesford Public Library) acts as a continuation of a range of community food systems that have been developing in the area for many years. Such systems include a permaculture garden next door (behind the library) and my own public artwork comprising of 19 fuji apples (in front of the library), which were both planted in 1999 and are well used and tended by the community and wild bird population alike.

The Getting of Anthropogenic Waste

2011-02-26T07:20:00.008+11:00

A number of us have been working pretty hard to organise a trip to Daylesford by Michael Reynolds. He came and gave a workshop on Thursday and a knockout public talk in the town hall that night. Between the workshop and the talk I raced home and put together this footage of the prepwork we volunteers carried out before his arrival and of the workshop itself so as the 300 peeps that came to the town hall in the evening could get a sense of what we had started. One of the local councillors was at the talk and there is word that he is going to pass a motion that this building remain so it can be completed and serve as a demonstration site for experimental building using waste.

Anticipating biodiversity in the car spaces of yesteryear (or, CARtesian idiocy momentarily renewed)

2011-02-23T15:22:00.012+11:00

Yesterday I received this strange email from a project manager acting on behalf of the university where I'm conducting research:

Dear Students,

Over a 10 week period commencing Wednesday 23 February 2011, 200 additional car park bays will be constructed on the southern side of the P4 car park on B campus. During this time, a small section of the P4 car park will be fenced off as part of the construction site.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause and ask for your patience and understanding while the works are carried out to extend the P4 car park.

Regards

Neil H
A/Senior Manager
Major Projects
Capital Works and Facilities

The strangeness of this email prompted me to respond immediately, as such:

dear neil,

200 additional car park bays?

we're entering a period of permanent expensive oil as this resource has peaked and entered decline.

any construction based around the car is twentieth century thinking, wasteful and is heading in the entirely wrong direction.

cld you pls let me know what public transport and bike infrastructure works the university is currently developing.

university buses with the ability to carry bikes is now urgently required to cope with today's economy.

it is simply not good enough for a progressive university to be making provisions for regressive and polluting technologies.

many thanks,
patrick (doctoral student, b campus)

As chance would have it, my friend Ianian sent me this image today of a parking lot at one of the abandoned car factories in Flint, Michigan:

Image: Wes Janz. His accompanying essay can be read here.

"Speaks volumes," said my friend.

I look forward to Neil's reply and the chance to respond to him with this image, alone, because what else can one say?

A bit more shoulder on the road to Argy-Bargy

2011-02-16T08:11:00.008+11:00

The sense of entitlement that many drivers have on the road has become decidedly apparent since we gave up our car and began riding greater and greater distances. It got me thinking about that ridiculous word 'progress', and got me redefining it, absent of the prejudices of twentieth century thinking.

Image: Meg Ulman

Old School Economics Continues to Fuel Brave New Climate

2011-02-04T08:27:00.013+11:00

On ABC News 24 this morning I listened to the mayor of Cairns give a report on the devastation caused by Cyclone Yasi. She finished with an advertisement-cum-plea: "Don't fly to Europe, fly to Cairns instead and spend your money here, this is the best way you can help us."

That's akin to saying this: Please continue carrying on doing the things that we know triggers worsening anthropogenic climate change (air travel; indulgence consumption), so as we can put off changing our behaviours until we absolutely no longer have the choice.

Screen grab taken from ABC NEWS 24.

These Arse End Around Days

2011-02-03T18:46:00.006+11:00

Click for bigger.

nerdnivana.org

Greenwash #19 in Trouble - carless company

2011-02-01T08:33:00.006+11:00

Click on image to read, then click again for better resolution.

The 2011 Exceptional Aussie Awards (or, Notes Against Nationalism #1)

2011-01-30T12:01:00.017+11:00

There has been a rampant growth of nationalism in Australia over the past few decades, following America's "we are the greatest democracy, ever, period, etc..." We used to be a country smart enough to take the piss, so to speak. Blind nationalism seems to take foot when the dominant strains of the culture forgets to critique itself, and looks for others to apportion blame when things go wrong. So, with a full metal rejection of idiotic Aussie flag waving, I've compiled a list of outstanding, although completely unsung Australians, whose work will no doubt become increasingly important in the coming years:

Anthony Loewenstein - writer of nonfiction, internet activist
Val Plumwood - writer of ecological philosophy, feminist (deceased)
Julian Assange - hacker, publisher, internet activist
David Holmgren - permaculture co-originator, sustainability writer
McKenzie Wark - hacker, writer of nonfiction
Alexis Wright - writer of fiction and nonfiction, aboriginal activist

Please help me expand this list with the names of those who are either critiquing consumer society or helping to rebuild socioecological resilience within communities.

The Post Carbon Reader (a video snapshot)

2011-01-27T21:46:00.005+11:00

I'm currently reading The Post Carbon Reader, which is a timely anthology of resilience thinking and transition planning. This video is a brief summary of its parts.

"...excessive human activity – either resource exploitation or waste production – can erode the functional integrity of the same ecosystems that make these human activities possible..." p27. "...the human enterprise is a fully embedded, totally dependent subsystem of the ecosphere." p32. "Resilient communities will develop policies that favor greater regional self-reliance..."

– William E Rees, Thinking Resilience, Ch.3, The Post Carbon Reader, Edited by Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch, 2010

What the time calls for is a collective hack...

2011-01-26T22:14:00.007+11:00

As there have been new calls for a new national flag today, here is my small contribution to Australia Day, otherwise known as Invasion Day and Hackers United Day.

The time is past due for new forms of association to be created that can steer the world away from its destruction through commodified exploitation – McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto, Harvard, 2004

Our SWAPs from Sweden

2011-01-17T16:41:00.007+11:00

Maria and Erikka, our inaugural SWAPs – social warming artists and permaculturalists – have just left our home en route to another permaculture garden. Here's a snapshot of their great visit.

Artist as Family does Bed Intruder (in the garden)

2011-01-15T14:03:00.008+11:00

Last year a solitary news report became the seed bank for this near-readymade musical anomaly, which soon sporulated into hundreds of covers, rip offs and responses.

Not before time, here is ours:

A big thanks to Nicholas Hansen, Rider and Rachael Leslie and Glen Dunn for their assistance in production and the the fun we shared in recording this little piece of counter-propaganda.

Human generated electricty

2011-01-07T12:28:00.007+11:00

Since selling our car it's been treadlie power everyday:

Bike work,

bike tour,

bike camp,

bike draw,

bike fun.

Permablitzing on pushies: critical mass goes Daylesford NYE parade

2011-01-03T14:05:00.016+11:00

Fifty cyclists turned up for critical mass this month, which landed on NYE, so we joined the annual parade, as we're want to do. Here we are getting ready on the back streets...

Oliver Holmgren is Obtainium Engineering.

St Mel and Leah Rogers as superheroes.

Pia, Brett and Fyfe beside my new bike.

Peak oil Zephyr and mates.

David Holmgren, Su Dennet and wwoofer Gabe as medieval cycle gang.

Nicholas Hansen and Ivan Carter (behind mask).

And then when we were ready, Meg and Zero lead the ride down the main drag.

Thanks Ian for your help with the Artist as Family signs, and thanks Glen for the great pics.

Carless in the country

2010-12-25T12:22:00.023+11:00

Three years ago we gave up supermarket food. Two years ago we took down the kitchen clock. A year ago we gave up air travel. And, this week we sold our car.

We have spent money on cleaning it and having it “worthy” of the road. We’re a little tense as it’s raining and one of us, eight years old, is not so aware or interested in the effects of the mud on his shoes on the upholstery. We still have some petrol in the tank. It will be enough for the journey. It’s been a year since we made the decision and we have rehearsed being carless all through the winter recording each kilometre travelled, each litre expended, and the extent to which our participation in global resource wars disables our reembodiment, our relocalisation, our humanity. And now, we’re at this point, at this significant milestone of our transition, ready to drive for the last time from the town with very little public transport to the city dripping in it, where the young guy who works for the Armed Services Credit Union, will unironically hand us a cheque which we will in turn cash in at the bicycle store. (from a letter to a Hamish Morgan, Dec 2010)

We kept a logbook for this past year for no other reason but to enable a more conscious examination of our largest polluting activity.

The financial savings living without a car will be about $10,000 pa, including initial cost of the vehicle, depreciation, petrol and maintenance. But the ecological and social savings for living the rest of our lives without one will be immeasurable. The carport will become a bikeport, garden tool shed and potting area. The driveway will be ripped up, heavily manured and become an extension of our food forest.

Yesterday we headed to Melbourne on foot, bus and train to collect our new long-tail cargo bikes. We had our helmets with us so we thought we'd give the Bike Share a go en route to the bike shop.

On the way we checked out some spontaneous urban natural history.

Then the exciting moment... Our new bikes and a tourist-like snap in the city by a passer-by.

After a quick lunch we hopped back on the train.

And rode 30km from Ballan to Daylesford. We sang and screamed for joy at the immense sense of freedom. Cars and trucks belted past, some only a foot or two away from collecting us.

We both have front baskets to take Zero, the family's Jack Russell, and Zephyr, our awesome eight year old, has new panniers and a pack rack on his ten speed racer. Stay tuned, probably on the Artist as Family blog, for bike camping/touring adventures and, more generally, a family's everyday refusal to participate in the chronic abusiveness of the dominant culture and its industrial military complex.

Critical-creative

2010-12-21T17:43:00.005+11:00

For more info try here.

Eucalyptus (Percy) Cum - white flowering gum

2010-12-14T11:49:00.003+11:00

Spermapoesis

Man arrested after ejaculating during TSA pat-down

A 47 year old gay man was arrested at San Francisco International Airport after ejaculating while being patted down by a male TSA agent. Percy Cummings, an interior designer from San Francisco, is being held without bail after the alleged incident, charged with sexually assaulting a Federal agent.

According to Cummings’ partner, Sergio Armani, Cummings has “multiple piercings on his manhood” which were detected during a full body scan. As a result, Cummings was pulled aside for a pat-down. Armani stated that the unidentified TSA agent spent “an inordinate amount of time groping” Cummings, who had apparently become sexually aroused. Cummings, who has a history of sexual dysfunction, ejaculated while the TSA agent’s hand was feeling the piercings. The TSA agent, according to several witnesses, promptly called for back up. Cummings was thrown to the ground and handcuffed.

A TSA spokesperson declined to comment on this specific case, but said that anyone ejaculating during a pat-down would be subject to arrest.

from here.

Eucalyptus (Gary) Snyder

2010-12-13T10:31:00.008+11:00

"Dreaming" or "dreamtime" refers to a time of fluidity, shapeshifting, interspecies conversation and intersexuality, radically creative moves, whole landscapes being altered. It is often taken to be a "mythical past," but it is not really in any time. We might as well say it is right now. It is the mode of the eternal moment of creating, of being, as contrasted with the mode of cause and effect in time. Time is the realm where people mainly live and within which history, evolution, and progress are imagined to take place. p84

Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, 1981