Liberal pollution

A party that doesn't believe in climate change is a party that champions pollution.

Liberal Party anthropogenic waste left outside a polling booth in Surry Hills, Sydney.

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Seed commons attacked (once again by private-capital ideology)

Twelve Russian scientists famously chose to starve to death rather than eat the unique collection of seeds and plants they were protecting for humanity during the 900-day siege of Leningrad in the second world war. But the world's first global seed bank now faces destruction once more, to make way for a private housing estate.

Read on here.

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Creative commons, foraging commons

I was recently invited to submit a critical work for Cordite's issue 33: Creative Commons. Here's an excerpt from All Rights Relinquished, in which I outline my perception of the relationship between private property and ecological crises.

The reestablishment of local food commons in union with the development of a global creative commons comes from the recognition that we are biological beings, evolved from fungi – and thus evolved from complex networks of interrelation; webs of mycelial and intellectual connectivity not limited by private capital. The dominant ideology attacks the reciprocity of open, public supply networks. A public supply of resources, both conceptual and corporeal, is a decentred supply system that makes local communities more resilient [in the face of climate chaos and peaking oil supplies]. Read on.

Many thanks to David Prater and Matt Hall, Cordite editors. And many thanks to Ian Robertson who came up with the title, some years back, when we first used it in A Free-Dragging Manifesto.

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Greenwash #14 in Trouble - Urban Food Forestry as Public Art

Cheap oil has made us forget the proper relationship we once had to the first six inches of the Earth’s crust. Yet we now know that microbial forests—networks of microfauna and microfungi—operate invisibly beneath us, generating the conditions for plant life to flourish and thus produce food. Soil not oil is a clear enough message, but increasingly difficult to translate to an expanding urban population evermore estranged from the interdependent processes of healthy soil ecology and permanent food supply.

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