After reading ecopoetics 6/7 and coming home

A poem for Jonathan Skinner and mIEKAL aND.

Greenwash #6 in Trouble

Albatross chick photographed by Chris Jordan.

If you’ve read this column before you will know that I have more than a passing interest in anthropogenic waste – pollution caused by human activity. Is there any other? There are of course nasty toxins and poisons found readily in natural systems but none that systematically diminishes the health of ecosystems and impoverishes food and water supplies like our non-compostable waste.

Read on here.

Slow-text as food forest

detail: Jones, P. ‘A Free-dragging Manifesto’, pp. 41-43, ecopoetics, no. 6/7 2006-2009, Australian Ecopoetics Feature, eds. Michael Farrell and Jonathan Skinner, Periplum Editions, USA

Under the lens of the bottle green sea

This TED talk is brilliant! An exposé of the health of the world's oceans.

Michel Deguy Compost Tea

We're back from our waste gleaning residence in Newcastle, NSW. Our final post on the Artist as Family blog includes a short creative doco called 17 Days that I made using my track "Michel Duguy Compost Tea" where I sing Deguy's poem "O great apposition of the world" rockoperaesque with beats. You can see/hear here –

Greenwash #5 in Trouble

While it’s true that Western culture is the sum of its many, varied parts, the dominant paradigm can be packed into two obsessions – privatising resources (natural, human and creative) and killing off wild nature in case it takes us over. René Descartes (1596-1650) is responsible for articulating this paradigm; our refusal to live at peace with non-human nature continues the Judeo-Christian resolve of separateness and avoidance. ‘I think therefore I am’ is the Cartesian maxim (and early secular transition from God as centre to man as centre) that, for many, justifies our ecological abandonment and gives philosophical weight to the stupid idea of our superiority over all other things.

Read on here.

In the meantime our project centred on gleaning waste continues over here.