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

Read more...

Revisiting older writing while thinking about form and ecological poetries

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

Natural Bitterness

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



Read the full work here.

Read more...

Revisited, revised, reposted...

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?

Read more...

Greenwash #22 in Trouble - By Autonomous Association

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.

Read more...

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

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.

Read more...

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

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).

Read more...

What mushroom is that?

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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

Read more...

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).

Read more...

The Middle Kingdom of Weeds

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.

Read more...

Reading Nancy in the Kitchen

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.

Read more...

A little help from Costa

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.

Read more...

Permies and Fermies

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

The Getting of Anthropogenic Waste

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.

Read more...

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

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?

Read more...

A bit more shoulder on the road to Argy-Bargy

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

Read more...

Old School Economics Continues to Fuel Brave New Climate

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.

Read more...

These Arse End Around Days

Click for bigger.

nerdnivana.org

Read more...

Greenwash #19 in Trouble - carless company

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

Read more...

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.

Read more...

The Post Carbon Reader (a video snapshot)

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

Read more...

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

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

Read more...

Our SWAPs from Sweden

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.

Read more...

Artist as Family does Bed Intruder (in the garden)

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.

Read more...

Human generated electricty

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

Bike work,

bike tour,

bike camp,

bike draw,

bike fun.

Read more...

Permablitzing on pushies: critical mass goes Daylesford NYE parade

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.

Read more...