Buckley and me

During my doctoral research I got to know William Buckley pretty well. As I was scouring material on him a friend, Maya Ward, recommended I read Strandloper, which is an excellent novel based on his life. I have called Buckley the first Australian permaculturalist (cheekily, in front of David Holmgren). Last year Southerly published my Portrait of the escaped convict who slowly nativised into a Wathaurong man over 32 years before Batman and co discovered him. The poem features in my thesis alongside this photograph painted by an unknown artist and undated. The painting hangs in the State Library of Victoria.

Today I was rifling through some images and I came across this photograph taken of me reading at the Victorian Writers' Centre (next door to the SLV) in 2011. I'm standing in front of my poem Step by step, which also features in my thesis.

An uncanny resemblance between permaculture poets? Buckley is important to me because he is a rare European who listened to and learnt from Indigenous land spirit and intelligence.

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Excerpts from Dave Jacke's Daylesford talk

Edible forest gardener and permaculturalist, Dave Jacke, came to Daylesford for a brief talk last Wednesday while touring the country giving workshops on temperate climate food forestry.

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An essay that includes excerpts from my interview with David Holmgren

How permaculture and non-monetary economies are part of the solution to the problem of capitalism. Feature article by Patrick Jones in Arena: The Australian Magazine of Left Political, Social and Cultural Commentary, No. 119. August 2012

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Nicole Foss on resilience and financial collapse

Hepburn Relocalisation Network and Sustainable Hepburn Association (SHARE) last night hosted Canadian speaker Nicole Foss. A theorist and practitioner, Foss is well across looming energy, economics, psychology, sustainability (the real kind – not just economic), security and climate conundrums. Here's a slide from her talk:

And here's a snapshot about what's she on about:



And here's a wee bit of footage of Foss and David Holmgren fielding questions in the town hall last night.

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News propaganda for a Brown Tech future

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Gardens, ecologies and reclaiming the sensible

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:

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Permaculture Principles

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 

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

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.

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Greenwash #21 in Trouble - Michael Reynolds' Biotecture Future

Click for bigger, then click again for better focus.

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

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

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.

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Greenwash #18 in Trouble - composted & upcycled (part 2)

According to David Holmgren, co-originator of modern permaculture, history has revelled in humanism while remaining largely ignorant of energetic and ecological factors. For well adjusted progressive types, by which I mean schooled believers in human progress, this anthropocentric worldview is easily developed through the arts. But to those sensitive to the plight of nonhumans, ecologies and the world’s poor at the hands of progress, art can be seen as just another instrument of civilised brutality and species intransigence. Welcome to part 2 of Greenwash’s ‘composted and upcycled’. (see part 1)

Click on image to read on.

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The Long Descent

I've been reading John Michael Greer's The Long Descent, and have found it an extremely useful text in understanding political and social intransigence to ecological crisis. Early on he critiques two of our most dominant delusions: the myth of progress – that human brilliance and technology will always find solutions, and the myth of apocalypse – that industrial culture will end in one catastrophic McCarthian doomsday scenario.

His theory on our civilisation's descent is fairly original and compliments David Holmgren's work Future Scenarios. Greer is in no doubt that society is incapable of solving the interrelated problems of peaking fossil fuels and climate chaos. Therefore, rather than a problem to find a solution to (which we could have perhaps done thirty years ago), Greer argues we now have only a predicament which requires, not a solution, but responses.

"The chance that today's political and business interests will do anything useful in our present situation is small enough that it's probably not worth considering." p30

This sentence dovetails pretty nicely with my friend, Ian Robertson's, brilliant Victorian government adbusting (from last year).

The transportation of resources crisis; a revolving door.

Greer thinks there are parallels to make with the declines of previous civilisations. For example he reckons we can switch swidden agriculture for crude oil in the following paragraph.

"All the achievements of Mayan civilization rested on the shaky foundation of swidden agriculture – a system in which fields are allowed to return to jungle after a few years of cultivation, while new fields are cleared and enriched with ashes from burnt vegetation. It's a widely used system in tropical areas around the world, but, like dependence on fossil fuels, it has a hidden vulnerability. Swidden works extremely well at relatively modest population levels, but it breaks down disastrously when population growth takes over and farms can no longer return to jungle long enough to restore soil fertility."p25

By 2040, he projects, oil supply will be what it was in 1980, but with nearly twice the amount of people on the planet.

Energy Bulletin has posted a podcast titled Peak Oil vs Pathological Optimism just yesterday, which feeds off from these thoughts.

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The World According

It's been two years since Meg and I watched one of the darkest films of our lives, The World According to Monsanto. This brilliant and highly informed film is a precursor to the more popular and recent Food Inc., which we actually enjoyed a few months ago. However after watching The World According to Monsanto it took us several days to resurface from a very black cloud, at which time I wrote the following letter to the intransigent John Brumby (click for bigger).

Only after speaking to David Holmgren recently was I was a little more relaxed about Monsanto. Holmgren basically said that any science driven by such intense greed is bound to fall over; is bound to fail – the money clouds the science.

However for a company like this to entirely own the seeds that support human life, while at the same time engineering seeds to be dependent upon harmful petro-chemical pesticides, is very troubling for human populations, not to mention non-human. So, despite the very poor (albeit highly funded) science we still have to remain vigilant about their agenda.

Growing or foraging for our own food not only makes us more resilient to global ecological and economic crises, it disempowers monological corporates like Monsanto from experimenting despotically.

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Writing Reading Doing Thinking

As many of you know we're currently attempting to establish a quarter acre garden as a dynamic food forest. However, it's not only plant biology books, seed grower's guides and the land itself that's informing us.

Here's a list of books that I've recently read or I'm currently reading which are assisting me in the garden:

John Zerzan's Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (2002)
Masanobu Fukuoka's The One-Straw Revolution (1978), The Road Back to Nature (1987)
Val Plumwood's Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (2002)
Judith Wright's Born of the Conquerors (1991)
David Holmgren's Future Scenarios (2009)
Alexis Wright's Carpentaria (2006)

And, here are some associated notes from my reading:

In Europe if you wish to imagine life before agricultural settlements, you'd have to conjure up an imagination that went back 10,000 years. A difficult task by any one's standards. However in Australia our imagination need not be so stretched or even fanciful.

On the scale of things, their history was just a half-flick of the switch of truth – simply a memory no greater than two life spans. (A Wright, p57)

If we lack the imagination to understand our domesticated bonds – time, symbol, language, capital, property, technology, and so forth – we forfeit the possibilities of a natural, non-hierarchical and unmediated self.

Culture has led us to betray our own aboriginal spirit and wholeness, into an ever worsening realm of synthetic, isolating, impoverished estrangement. (Zerzan, p16)

Permaculture, based upon relocalising resources, may well be an achievable bridge back for ecologically disembodied society to greater aboriginality and timelessness. Philosophically, permaculture can be seen as a loose modus that conscientiously steps away from progress and technology, rather than a rigid system that attempts to dominate and cage people. In my version of permaculture, agricultural toil and endless hard work are replaced by tending one's own or community's food garden for a few hours a day. And where ever-expanding wilderness is no longer available in which to forage and free-range, permaculture asks us to disregard set ideas of public and private land, and concentrate on that which is possible with all manners of so-called 'disused' land (Holmgren, 2009).

In our own community the Hepburn Relocalisation Network, established by David Holmgren, Su Dennett and Maureen Corbett, is working to encourage and assist community and local council to plant nut trees along roadways and in parklands. These trees will accompany already established feral and publicly planted fruit trees that supply free food to humans and non-humans alike.

When you get down to it, there are few agricultural processes that are necessary. (Fukuoka, 1978, p15)

Our reliance upon grains, domesticated meat and dairy renders us passive consumer-abusers and grave polluters. Wild and semi-cultivated foods are our future if we are to liberate ourselves from the pathologies of civilisation. Therefore, we feel we have to make a stance against factory supply (supermarkets), transition to free-ranging foods (organic farms and small gardens) before reacquainting ourselves with the possibilities of the wild. Almond meal is going to become a more significant supplement for us in years to come.

Above: A young almond tree grows shrouded by Indigenous poa tussock grasses in our garden. The poas protect the delicate leaves of the almond from late frosts until it is established enough to survive them.

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Robin Hood

There's so much to speak to today. Here's the local news: Firstly, my friend Josh, who I write about in the special bike issue of Greenwash, delivered my 'Junkie' (pictured below). He has put it together over the past several weeks using many reclaimed parts and a few new ones such as the spokes. As you can see it is absolutely beautiful with a Brookes seat that dates back to the 1940s and an Australian Rob Special frame that could be just as old. I've decided to call it Robin Hood after the red robins that appear on the original paint-work, and in honour of our 'hood, this beautiful neck of the world wide woods, and, of course, because of the carbon I wont be emitting for the profits of corporate pop-fascists – stealing from the grossly rich by generating my own renewable human generated electricity.

In other news, I've just been awarded a three-year scholarship to do a doctorate at the University of Western Sydney. I'm hanging up my tool-belt, at least for commercial building work. My research basically concerns permaculture as a modus for the arts, centring on relationships between poetics and ecology. I will be arguing that the twentieth century delivered the flawed threesome Communism, Capitalism and Fascism, none of which offered human settlements an embedded ecological framework, and as a result, humans and non-humans alike have suffered terribly. The arts have largely operated as the dutiful court jester to triumphant capitalism's anthropogenic riches. However, I will also argue that the arts have radical genes, fit and flexible enough to lead an ecological insurrection across fields. I'm going to be spending a lot of time on my bike.

And, then there's Copenhagen, the global news: What a mess. At least with Bush, Blair and Howard we knew they were evil. It helped that they were upfront about it. With Kev and Barack it's the same as before just a more ambiguous, fuzzy-feeling style of politicking, utilising 'clever' semiotics. With these latter two so-called leaders we were made to feel change is in the air, but really it's growth as usual. Where is the critique of growth-capitalism at Copenhagen? Growth, of course, is at the heart of ecological crises. When Obama was sworn in not all of us were wishful though. Regarding his 'change' and 'hope' wash, this is what I wrote almost a year ago:

Obama will either be shot or fully bought within 12-24 months. And most likely we'll be just as disappointed as we are with Kevin07.

But to keep an eye on global politics is a rather hopeful, wasteful occupation. It generates in people a deep sense of powerlessness and futility (with some moments of apparent redemption and hilarity, as above). In the twenty-first century, our three future scenarios (David Holmgren outlines four, and I'll speak to the fourth at a later stage), are Brown Tech, Green Tech and Earth Stewardship (permaculture, and the like). At a systems level, the former two are based on just growth and consumption, the latter based upon biomimicry where growth and consumption are dynamically relational with birth, decomposition, death and rebirth (regeneration) – alltogether making up what I call the six seasons of circularity.

Permaculture together with steady-state economics offers human settlements relocalised food, water and energy while repairing the ills of twentieth century capitalism and anthropocentric idealism. Permaculture bypasses two-party hopefulness and re-engages us with the local. Holmgren, in this book, is quite simply outstanding.

For more on this book go to futurescenarios.org

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Towards a biophysical poetry

Below is the title, introductory quote and first two paragraphs of my first substantial work since A Free-dragging Manifesto. It is soon to be published in Angelaki, the journal of the theoretical humanities, by Routledge in the UK.

Free-dragging, Slow Text and Permapoesis:
Towards a biophysical poetry

If language is of the world, like galaxies and ecosystems, this means it participates in what it represents, though how privileged it may be either as a representative or as a participant remains to be seen. Ira Livingston

I suppose it could go without saying that with every culture the interrelationships between food (survival) and art (living) are wholly understandable. To mark this point a friend and I, at an airport shop recently, wheeled a large stand of brightly coloured packets of potato chips ten metres across the floor to sit beside a large stand of brightly covered paperback books. This small, unplanned action was filmed and later published online as a free-to-air video poem called Best Sellers.

How we obtain our food directly informs our imaginative psyches and links our art to our food. In this essay I aim to make conscious the link between principles of agro-ecology and permaculture and a decapitalised and carbon fixed poetry – poetry that consciously and explicitly participates within a dynamic biosphere, not just in content but also in form. Just to be clear and ’fess-up here, when I made Best Sellers I was at an airport flying home from a festival where I had presented a paper that centred on art’s relation to carbon. In this work, I will begin with a premise based on the relocalisation of resources; present four theses identifying the material and social woes of ‘impermanent culture’; reference a fifth thesis proposed by anthropologist and activist David Graeber on the material and social woes of liberalism’s aggregate-growth model; show the transitional practices of ‘free-dragging’ and ‘slow text’ as examples of biophysical art (post John Cage); and posit the portmanteau, ‘permapoesis’, as a post-capitalist ethic that articulates an ecological mode of production for the arts.

You can read the entire work (with its specific formatting) here.

I especially thank commissioning editor Kate Fagan for her generous assistance, critique and clear-eye over this piece, as well as Ian Robertson, Meg Ulman, Hamish Morgan, Jason Workman and Peter O'Mara for their valuable suggestions and supportive peerage. I am also indebted to David Holmgren's incredible life's work and writing, as well as Derrick Jensen and David Graeber for their inspired thinking and activism.

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