Capitalism's Dirty Water

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!

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Greenwash #24 in Trouble - Suck and Truck

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

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Cartesian Wells

The first online site I created was justfreewater, a site dedicated to platforming the woes of bottled water. In the past three years since I began that site I have enjoyed watching greater public awareness and a broader debate around bottled water. During this time I have spent many hours putting together a comprehensive picture of our local situation while concurrently finding out more about the global pattern of privatising this fundamental public resource. My film Lalgambook (Mt Franklin) attempts to communicate, via poetical terrorism rather than journalistic rationalism, the link between the occupation of Aboriginal land and genocide of Aboriginal people in the nineteenth century and the occupation of public water and ecocidal practices of the bottled water industry today in the same region, which I call home. 

Over the years friends have sent me links, newspaper articles and their own ideas for ethical modes for drinking water that don't pollute the landbase or capitalise upon that which should be a free and public resource. 

As we have become increasingly a culture of destructive Cartesians it has become difficult to see, surrounded by our affluence, that anthropocentrism is central to our undoing as a species. While growth economics and corporate greed predominate in capitalised marriage, the vacuuming of our artesian wells (groundwater) will continue to play a significant part of the pathological dowry. 

For a concise snapshot of the bottled water crisis, which dovetails emblematically into the wider Global Ecological Crisis (GEC), watch this trailer.

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