Meeting Vandana Shiva

I walked along Diamond Creek from Eltham Station on my way to Montsalvat late yesterday afternoon to listen to Vandana Shiva. Gertrude Stein wrote 'People are the way their land and air are'; this is the current state of the sediment infested Diamond Creek, which feeds into the Yarra River.

I found evidence of both human and more-than-human restoration of the stream-side ecology. However most of the naturalising floras along the creek have no ecological status – chickweed, spear thistle, dock, dandelion, stinging nettle, oxalis and blackberry to name a few. These are all edible-medicinal plants (oxalis in small doses) that fix nitrogen and carbon, build soil structure and mycorrhizal relations, provide habitat and food for all forms of creatures and help reduce soil erosion and thus sediment flows into the river – sediments that could potentially kill aquatic life. The areas of restoration carried out by humans, which have ecological status, is especially marked by pollutants (plastic bags) and soil disturbance created by heavy machinery and the spraying of glysophate poisons. Where there might eventually be some ecological value in this sort of anthropocentric reconstruction of the biosphere (if left to its own devices) the ecological benefits being carried out autonomously by the more-than-human seem far more significant, generating no pollution and requiring no money. This photo shows an example of the two zones – the autonomous and the anthropocentric split down the middle.

Earlier I had walked past the local primary school and noted two large banners on the front fence advertising both Coles and Woolworths supermarkets. These two con campaigns from Australia's industrial food duopoly were something to do with raising money for school sports equipment. After I left Diamond Creek I waited a long time for a break in the traffic to cross Main Road and walked on towards Montsalvat recalling Vandana's brilliant critique of car ideology in Soil Not Oil. Not far from where I was to hear her speak I came across a disturbing sign, which was more evidence of so-called 'green' initiatives really being an act of warfare against the planet. To use money (to be in debt) to buy poisons to kill what freely and lovingly avails itself to us is the very definition of insanity.

I arrived early at Montsalvat and sat in the barn where the event was to take place. Vandana Shiva also arrived early and I introduced myself. She is a remarkable being, fiercely intelligent, a stern defender of the grandmotherly earth. I took around 20 minutes of footage of Vandana speaking before my camera's memory ran out. I then relied on my own, transferring technics for my mind's ecological carrying capacity. I'll upload a short video of excerpts from Vandana's talk shortly.

Afterwards there was time for a few questions. Mine went something like this: 

One environmentalist [Jensen (2006:547)] believes that the only level of technology truly sustainable was developed in the Stone-Age, a million years ago. We know industrial technology is inherently abusive and damaging but what level of technology, between a million years ago and say 300 years ago, do you think should we be employing? 

To which she immediately dressed down my question, attacking the very notion of 'levels', calling them Cartesian, abstract, mechanistic. Jensen has written extensively on the ills of Descartes and favouring abstract and mechanistic thinking, but it's obviously still so entrenched. Vandana's attack on my language is indeed a gift. "Yes," I was thinking as she spoke, "yes levels are these things, and more than this they are also affluence speaking." She went on (and I'm paraphrasing her here): "Collapse is already occurring, people will use what tools they have available to make a life." And of course this is the same argument permaculturalists follow; that biological activity and technical complexity is enabled by what energy is available.

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An alternative design framework

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.

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Greenwash #27 in Trouble: The Wheel of Progress Capitalism

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America and Oil: Declining Together?

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.

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Wheel of Progress-Capitalism (another false cycle)

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.

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

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.

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Energy, primitivism and slow text

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.

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Natural Bitterness

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



Read the full work here.

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Permapoesis at the Victorian Writers' Centre

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).

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

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.

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Peak Shell (a poem on the slide)

Let's make what

>we've<

got [left]

go further.

Let's go!

to the

other side

of

Hubbert's

Peak.

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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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Preparation poetics: an economist speaks

Oil and the End of Globalization : Mr. Jeff Rubin from ASPO-USA on Vimeo.

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Tipping Point: the realities we face

My inspiration for life is our parents; so many of the values we have come from them … they told us that if you live by your conscience there is no reason to be afraid. - Vandana Shiva

This was probably the most important conference I've attended, and the only one that has employed social-ecology frameworks, while paying attention to the environmental details (such as the considerable percentage of the food that fueled us over two incredible days was organic and locally sourced). It was very apt that the feature on Shiva's life and work appeared in The Age yesterday, the second day of the conference. Shiva will be in Melbourne on friday. My own contribution was, naturally, centred around art and resources, specifically food:

Today I speak on behalf of my household, the Artist as Family, and our very intentional practice of transition away from pollution based ideology. We believe there is a direct exchange between the resources we consume and the kind of art we make. I call this exchange permapoesis. Read on...

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More light on supermarket food

A Monsanto winter collection taken at our local tip today.

Until 20% of us stop consuming supermarket food and lead the way in alternative food supply systems, it will be more and more of the above idiocy.

As expected, the same corporate interests that have created the two crises [climate chaos and peak oil] tried to offer the disease as the cure – more fossil fuel-based chemical fertilizers, more non-renewable genetically engineered seeds bred to respond to the intensive use of chemicals, more corporate control of food, and more globalized trade. Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil, 2008

Combine these things, add growth economics, and local populations become increasingly reliant on a fragile food supply system; a food supply system that pollutes soils, oceans, the atmosphere and our bodies.

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Two parts

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A chance hound

I caught a ride on a Greyhound bus recently, traveling overnight between Melbourne and Sydney, and had the pleasure of sitting next to Chris, a blogger from Newcastle. He got me up to speed with some of the climate science debate that I'd tuned out of, and I relayed to him some of the potentially exciting permaculture bottom-up rebuilds going on around the world, including the hot topic of Detroit. Chris is a mathematician and physicist by trade, and puts his digital two cents worth (quite literally) here. He is also part of the Newcastle Transition Town movement and I was able to explain to him a little about our own group – the Hepburn Relocalisation Network. I'm a snorer and a constant mover in sleep at the best of times so if you read this Chris, apologies in retrospect if I kept you up. One of the things we discussed while still compus, and something I can't ever appreciate, is why the mainstream press is only interested in "Climate Change" when Peak Oil is actually more calculable, arguably better understood and just as societally problematic, and why aren't all these things – energy descent, global warming, aggregate-growth based ecological destruction, factory farming, animal slavery, anthropogenicism and anthropocentrism just labeled for what they are collectively – Ecological Crisis?

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