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.

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The World According

It's been two years since Meg and I watched one of the darkest films of our lives, The World According to Monsanto. This brilliant and highly informed film is a precursor to the more popular and recent Food Inc., which we actually enjoyed a few months ago. However after watching The World According to Monsanto it took us several days to resurface from a very black cloud, at which time I wrote the following letter to the intransigent John Brumby (click for bigger).

Only after speaking to David Holmgren recently was I was a little more relaxed about Monsanto. Holmgren basically said that any science driven by such intense greed is bound to fall over; is bound to fail – the money clouds the science.

However for a company like this to entirely own the seeds that support human life, while at the same time engineering seeds to be dependent upon harmful petro-chemical pesticides, is very troubling for human populations, not to mention non-human. So, despite the very poor (albeit highly funded) science we still have to remain vigilant about their agenda.

Growing or foraging for our own food not only makes us more resilient to global ecological and economic crises, it disempowers monological corporates like Monsanto from experimenting despotically.

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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.

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