Food Forest - 18 months on

We've just had a trip to Sydney where we visited friends and family and spent two days at the Food Forest with locals pruning, planting, thinning, watering, mulching and feeding the garden.

Here's my drawing of the Food Forest from May 2010. We planted it later in July.

Here's what it looks like after our working bee last week.

And here's what the garden looked like back in July 2010, just after the planting was finished.

Gardens subvert the dominant paradigm

After Blake

The story of Daylesford Community Food Gardeners first nine months demonstrating how a guerilla action at one garden developed into three community gardens throughout the town.

Permaculture Principles

I've been at an advanced permaculture course with David Holmgren and today we unpacked, critiqued and revalued his 12 principles. Here I set them out with a selection of photos Meg and I have taken over the past couple of weeks.

1. Observe and interact.

Clover flowers amid eucalypt leaf litter.

2. Catch and store energy.

Renewable, local energies.

3. Obtain a yield. 

Home garden harvest within chicken run.

4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback.

Community garden principles of take and return.

5. Use and value renewable resources and services.

Local food production and renewable transportation.

6. Produce no waste.

Easier to do in less affluent localities.

7. Design from patterns to details.

Parasitical relations; native cherry and friend.

8. Integrate rather than segregate.

Public (guerilla planted) broad beans.

9. Use small and slow solutions.

Bike maintenance workshop, DNC

10. Use and value diversity.

Today's course participants.

11. Use edges and value the marginal.

Jaara bush tucker; native cherry (turns red)

12. Creatively use and respond to change.

Design principles exercise, 4.45pm 

North American Democracy

From here.

Water Commons (zero carbon)

As Summer approaches Artist as Family have been busy auditing Melbourne's drinking fountains.

Click for bigger.

When cops do good

Former Philadelphia Police Cpt. Ray Lewis being arrested this week, Wall Street, New York.

Captain Ray Lewis arrested (Photo via @AdamGabbatt)

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.

Jaara Jaara foods (and a peg from the big smog)

Yesterday I gave a bush foods walk with a group of home schoolers. Today I went to Melbourne.

Little creatures.

Milk maids.

Yam daisies.

Yabbies.

Clever Melbourne.

Spring Garden

Rabbit interview

Find out more about Rabbit here.

Brien Nelson, Jaara Jaara Elder

There's an opportunity coming up to meet Brien and his wife Jude at their Bunjil Park Aboriginal Education and Cultural Centre. Let me know if you'd like to come.

Pink Blossom

Anthony Petrucci sings my slow text mesostic, Pink Blossom, at the launch of Rabbit Two.

GM...fail

GM crops promote superweeds, food insecurity and pesticides, say NGOs
Report finds genetically modified crops fail to increase yields let alone solve hunger, soil erosion and chemical-use issues:



More here.

Monsanto biopiracy

When all Australian state governments except for South Australia are greenlighting toxic (but nonetheless greenwashed) GM farming, the Indian government is showing courage and following Europe and Japan in banning Monsanto and co's crude and irresponsible shareholder science.



Meanwhile in Australia GM canola has contaminated an organic farm in WA, and the farmer is rightly suing. READ more here.

Boycotting supermarkets, growing your own, instigating or joining food co-ops that only support biodynamic and organic farms... we don't have to support biopiracy, corporate bullying and corporate destruction of the world's biodiverse free seed bank.

If you don't know where your food is coming from, and the means in which it is produced, then you are most likely supporting mass-scale biospheric degradation and consuming healthless foods.

Cargo bikes – carless joy

Do something good for yourself and the planet.



from here.

My first cargo bike (made from recycled parts)...

Then our carport becomes our bikeport (car-free and not looking back)

we have spent money cleaning it and having it worthy of the road. we’re a little tense as it’s raining and one of us, eight years old, is not so aware or interested in the effects of mud on upholstery. we still have some petrol in the tank. it will be enough for the journey. it’s been a year since we made the decision and we’ve rehearsed being without it all through the winter recording each kilometre travelled, each litre expended. and now, we’re at this point, ready to drive for the last time from the town with little public transport to the city dripping in it, where the young guy who works for the armed services credit union will hand us a cheque to cash in at the bicycle shop.

from here.

Our Transition

To here –

Wheel of Ecological Culture (permapoesis)

From here –

Wheel of Progress Capitalism (another false cycle)

The Great Interruption (or, 'We are members of the most destructive culture ever to exist')

From here.

Occupy

My new email signature

Not sent from a blood minerals dependent iPhone responsible for the deaths, rapes and brutal torture of the Congolese people

Spring party

We've organised a garden party. Hope you can come...

More here.

Just Free Water

In 2007 I walked Melbourne's CBD mapping all the public drinking fountains (bubblers). It later prompted this article in The Age. Many of the fountains didn't work and I estimated on figures of population I obtained from the City of Melbourne that there was only one working bubbler for every 40,000 people.

Today I read in The Age that VCA has banned bottled water on its campus. This is great news as we move into the hotter months. If you're still a bottled water drinker here's an article I wrote that may dissuade you from partaking these toxic waters again.

Pushed to the brink, America rises

Official Statement from Occupy Wall Street - this statement was voted on and approved by the general assembly of protesters at Liberty Square: Declaration of the Occupation of New York City

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.

They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.

They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.

They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.

They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless nonhuman animals, and actively hide these practices.

They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.

They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.

They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.

They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.

They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.

They have sold our privacy as a commodity.

They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.

They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.

They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.

They have donated large sums of money to politicians supposed to be regulating them.

They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.

They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantive profit.

They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.

They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.

They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.

They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.

They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.

They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.*

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

From here.

Greenwash #27 in Trouble: The Wheel of Progress Capitalism

Click for bigger.

Bike the change you want to see in the world

We celebrated a first birthday ride for our town's critical mass tonight in freezing, wet conditions. Our numbers were down but our spirits were up and I personally wasn't going to let some ferocious storm clouds get in the way of my desire for change, or my hand drawn placards from seeing the light of day.

My body as temple for experimental relocalisation

There's a lot of fear around mushrooms, fear created mostly out of mycological ignorance. In Australia we have such little knowledge of fungi, their role in ecosystems and their edibility. This previous post goes further into that sort of thing.

My friend and fungi teacher Alison Pouliot, an ecologist, photographer, writer and mycologist, is vehemently encouraging of amateur mycology, so I thought I'd share a recent discovery that I made:

Camp fungi – nibble methodology #1, 24 September 2011 (from my journal). Trametes versicolour (Rainbow fungus).

I found this bracket fungus growing in eucalypt forest alongside Sailors Creek at Bryce's Flat, Central Victoria. I have heard that the Dja Dja Wurrung ate Fistulina hepatica (Beefsteak fungus), another bracket fungus that also grows in the Wombat Forest. 

However I don't know for sure if the Rainbow is edible so I aim to taste-test in the name of local ecological knowledge and relocalisation. 

I choose a few small brackets, cut off the woody parts that were the point of attachment to the log, and fried them up in the pan on the camp fire using a little olive oil from nearby Guildford.

As I write I'm not in the least bit sure I'm going to be poisoned and as we've walked here from home to this beautiful camping spot I'll just have to tough it out around the camp fire tonight and trust that I'll overcome any adverse toxins. I have only had a small chip, and I say chip because what it tasted like was an overcooked, cold potato chip that's been lying around for a few days. In other words, an oily albeit edible tasteless crispy starch. The smell of this mushroom uncooked is earthy, vaguely fishy (permeated by freshwater eucalypt tannins). A good mushroom smell really, one you can trust, at least for a nibble, anything more at this point would be stupid. I'm with my girlfriend Meg and my son Zephyr, who I've not invited to partake in the experiment in case it all goes terribly wrong, and as it was my idea it is only fair I should carry it out. As I cooked the chips the mushroom gave off no unsavory smell, as mushrooms I have eaten in the past have, causing me to abandon eating them.

I write this post several days later and I'm pleased to announce that I suffered no adverse effects. Next time I may soak this fungus in milk for a day as I've heard this makes beefsteak fungus more delectable. I will then eat a few more chips to text the toxicity again before being confident to serve up to others.

Stay tuned for more non-lab, in the field amateur science soon!

Unwatchable – more 'at arm's length violence'

This short film is disturbing to watch but probably more disturbing not to.

With Apple being responsible for about a quarter of this unwatchable, unknowable violence, this is just another reason I will never get an iPhone and why when my seven year-old crapola phone dies I'll not replace it with anything except longer walks in the bush.

The even shorter vid below filmed on location gives some further context for the extremely disturbing, five minute vid, Unwatchable.

We went to the garden of love

Community gardeners, poets and readers met at the new community garden Rea Lands Park today to share poems and food in the sunshine.

Some of the poems were musical.

Some political and intense.

And some a little difficult to swallow but were appreciated as part of this creative commons.

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.

DuPont's Herbicide Goes Rogue

The company's landscaping weed-killer turned out to be a tree-killer.

by Jim Hightower

In the corporate world's tortured language, workers are no longer fired. They just experience an "employment adjustment." But the most twisted euphemism I've heard in a long time comes from DuPont: "We are investigating the reports of these unfavorable tree symptoms," the pesticide maker recently stated.

Read on here.

Talking the local

My friend Fe grills me on my thoughts about food, relocalisation, democracy, the commons and community gardens.



A video by Fiona Porter, camera and editing by Anthony Petrucci, music by Souls on Board.

Greenwash #26 in Trouble - Growing a Community Food System

From Trouble magazine

Click for bigger, then click again for clarity.

Short video documenting the planting day at Rea Lands Park.

Tout le pouvoir terrestre aux abeilles

All earthly power to the bees.

Roundup and Simulation (toxic waste cultures in arms)

Trip to the local tip yesterday.