Global Ecological Crisis

Reading The Australian newspaper is normally a very distressing thing for me – the underweight ballerinas/models, the overweight businessmen/politicians, a Cartesian smorgasbord for privatised relations of avoidance – so I generally leave it alone. However I've been privy to free copies over coffee these past few mornings and so was again inclined to dip in. The more fool I.

This is the letter to the editor I wrote out of G20-despair.

Michael Stutchbury's anthropogenic economics, as displayed in 'Earning seat at the table' (Opinion, 29 September), again ignores the relationship between global growth capitalism and the rapidly unfolding Global Ecological Crisis (GEC). Stutchbury champions an economics that is a short-term abstraction – our standard of living has peaked in correlation with global oil supplies – climate change and energy descent will shortly reveal why his favoured economics is a nonsense and how it is at the root of the GEC. An economics based upon a cyclical, reciprocal system is what we need to move quickly towards. To continue to herald a broken-cycle system which will make the Earth uninhabitable is sheer idiocy.

But I'm not waiting around for The Australian to publish such views, it feels like many years off, if ever. In the meantime here's where our gleaning waste as family holiday project has gotten us so far.

Anthropogenic fruits

Otherwise known as pop-fascism.

From our project over here.

Rain on my brain

It has been really wet here. I like to think Josh, Ziggy and I had something to do with it. We went into the bush a few days ago and Rain Dance is what we came out with. I guess you'd call this a Peej video clip, but shaking off the stiffness of late winter without spending a dollar is a more accurate description. I'm off to Newcastle tomorrow as one-third of the Artist as Family trio. You can follow our movements by clicking on the AAF link. This music vid is a timely loosen up for a warmer climate – Newcastle NSW, and more generally the planet – a low-carbon, non-specialised, free idiocy. Enjoy!



Thanks to Josh and Ziggy for their added flavour – I set out to do this solo and bumped into Josh beforehand. You can't beat chance! And thanks to Meg for her editing suggestions and general critical eye for loose m'goose activity. You can't beat critique, love and support!

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.

Unexpected turn with microbials

WorkmanJones' latest offering.

A return to free-dragging

I have just returned from a poetics symposium at UWS organised by Kate Fagan and chaired by Ivor Indyk. Some of the things discussed involved language, translation, identity, form and ecology by poets and academics – Ann Vickery, Philip Mead, Pam Brown, Stephen Muecke, Martin Harrison, Anna Gibbs, John Hawke and Peter Minter, to name a few. And at the end of the symposium a number of us read including Tom Lee, Fiona Wright, Jill Jones and Michael Farrell. I read A Free-dragging Manifesto for the first time this year and, for the first time, as a 'fast text'. The work is about to be published in US journal ecopoetics in its original 'slow text' form. In the meantime you can read a fast text version here.

My book, A Free-dragging Manifesto, can be purchased from this site. Just scroll down the right hand side column and find the details. In case you've missed the many plugs of this two-sided book on my various sites... Peter O'Mara's brilliant volume of spatial poetry, subtext, is published on the reverse side and we share the overall title How To Do Words With Things. Read Astrid Lorange's review in Jacket.

Regenerating Community

I gave my Processes of Circularity: Permapoesis and the Shed of Interrelation presentation today as part of the panel Understanding the Value of Arts in Communities at the ReGenerating Community conference, RMIT. My participation was joined by both Ian Cuming's and Victoria Stead's presentations, and there was much biodiversity in our thoughts and activities. My work begins using pragmatic language and ends up as a poem, a transgressional device I have been working on to shift language from the 'rational' to the poethical. It starts:

By the time crude oil was discovered early on in the twentieth century the major socio-political forces – capitalism, communism and the third option fascism – were busily competing for attention and power. Sadly, not one of these three systems offered human societies an ecological model and we have paid dearly for this grand omission ever since.

You can read the entire work here.

A language older than words

Greenwash #4 in Trouble

Glen Dunn recently made a short film about a kiln firing in Southern Tasmania, posted it online and found an unexpected viral enthusiasm for it around the globe. The film’s fusing of the ancient and the modern, the physical and the digital, taps into some of our most basic inclinations to form meaning of the present with things and activities that are common to the past. Things such as clay and wood and fire.

Read on here.