A little case for growing food in community (and doing with less money)

We all know wage-slavery is consuming the planet and as a result increasing amounts of land are being cleared and mined and militarised, and yet we continue on thinking someone else will fix the predicament.

Money materialises into plumes of aggregating waste, making life unbearable for many. Money must grow, it must keep taking. How much of your economy is dependent on money?

All we really need is a bicycle, access to land to grow food, simple shelter, loving community and the will to take responsibility for our actions. Is that really so difficult to achieve? 

Everything other than a clear-eyed relationship with food and energy resources, and the culture and care that comes from such activity, is excessive, fraudulent and destructive. Everything else is insane.

Accepting a life of neoliberal wage-slavery is accepting a life of permanent planetary war. The dots that join our lives to this scenario are few in number. Are we going to own this paradigm and enact change or keep pretending?

What will it take for you to become a regenerator of the flowering earth again, like our ancestors before us? What will it take for you to hear the songs of the earth again?

At what point will you say ENOUGH! I will not support this paradigm, and start living so more life can be lived after you?

Lessen your dependance on money and you will start reclaiming accountability from neoliberal hypertechnocivility and help grow again the flowering earth. It takes one to inspire another. There is no preaching to the converted. There is only action or inaction.

Fighting for the world's biospheres begins by changing our economy. In just seven years our household has decreased our dependancy on the monetary economy by 60%. Getting rid of our cars and growing our own food has been a big part of this.

Wishing you greater permapoesis into the new year. A very merry solstice to you.

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Reclaiming education as ecological knowledges

A number of us have been working on developing the fifth community food garden, the Daylesford Secondary College Food Forest, since June this year. Yesterday we signed an agreement with the school to begin work on it in 2013.

Drawing: Patrick Jones (click for bigger)

You can read more about the project here. 

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For the record

I gave a presentation on ecological and community food systems at RMIT a little while ago, invited by Juliette Anich who takes a pretty interesting class on urban food generation. Juliette's students have been developing a research project called The Inevedible Garden, and invited me back to talk as part of a short video work.



On The Inevedible Garden homepage these tenacious students get straight to the point:

"The inevitable advent of urban food gardens, to undermine the current unethical food production methods."

It is so great to see such courage and astuteness from students when big business (Coles and Woolworths and so-called public organisations such as CropLife Australia) is advocating so aggressively for ongoing chemicalised-industrial food production (check out CropLife's greenwash on their website).

We all have a role to play to bring on the local, mycorrhizal, ethical and ecological food revolution! And we all have a role to play to bring down the greedy, chemicalised, cancer-producing, environment destroying agricultures that are fueling climate change. Every dollar you keep out of the supermarkets is a small win for your health and the health of the planet. Don't be fooled by organic food in supermarkets – the ecological footprint of any supermarket food is far too much for the world to sustain. It only takes around 15-20% of market collapse to bring down a giant company, so get involved in your local community, backyard or balcony garden, start one up, find out more about the soil and its billions of workers, grow food anywhere you can, and share it and your experiences with others. These things will bring about significant change and raise your awareness of how our food and our ecologies are linked, things that all other earthly beings know inherently and we have temporarily forgotten. Take back our food systems, where possible make food a non-monetary resource, reduce our enslavement in the monetary economy that serves big business, and reclaim ecological functioning as creatures of the understory!

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Another community food garden

A drawing I finished today...

Click for bigger

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Gardens, ecologies and reclaiming the sensible

Daylesford Community Food Gardeners had a big day yesterday of multiple events to do with transition, gardening, music and global ecological crises. We blogged some of the activities on the DCFG blog just free food.

The day ended with a permaculture forum at the Neighbourhood Centre in which David Holmgren, Ego Lemos from Timor Leste and I presented on all things permaculture and transition from industrialised agriculture. This event was part of the Boite Singers' Festival and chaired by director Roger King.

Then this morning our super SWAP (social warming artist and permaculturalist) Heath showed us this short and sharp video. Another inspiring message from Vandana Shiva:

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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.

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Our Transition

To here –

Wheel of Ecological Culture (permapoesis)

From here –

Wheel of Progress Capitalism (another false cycle)

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Spring party

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

More here.

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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.

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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.

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We're all on 'work experience' thanks to Liam

We have just completed a week of work experience thanks to Liam Scott, a student from the local high school. Liam undertook to hang with us and see what a typical week for Artist as Family entails, and what 'work' constitutes, according to us. One of the things we did during the week was to measure up and draw a first draft design for the proposed permanent Daylesford Community Food Garden. Here's a short vid that snapshots the adventure.

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Ten months later

I was in Sydney earlier this month, so I checked in on the Food Forest and did a little work there with some local residents. When I got back, a family friend, Rory, who works for ABC radio, sent me the audio file of the interview I had with Deborah Cameron on 702 in September last year. This little archive vid brings all these things together.

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Public is public

Pic. Adam Trafford

A number of us turned out to protest the sale of a community park in Daylesford last week. Read more at the Daylesford Community Food Gardener's blog Just Free Food.

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Greenwash #22 in Trouble - By Autonomous Association

The human plates themselves are the seats of reciprocal and crossed interrelations among individuals and subgroups, their tools, their world-objects, and their knowledge, assemblages that little by little are losing their relations with place, locality, neighbourhood, proximity. Being-there is getting rarer. (Serres, 1995 p.20)

Click for bigger.

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A little help from Costa

We launched the Daylesford Community Food Garden yesterday with the energetic help from SBS gardening guru, Costa. This garden is on a disused council site that we've temporarily taken over to grow free, organic food.



So far council are supportive of our squat (by virtue of the fact it still remains) and we are therefore very supportive of their position of support. A few years ago there may have been an extreme ideological battle to be had, but the current council seems to be increasingly open to new modes of thinking.

However, just in case council's response was less than positive, we prepared a positive response that they could freely use (all rights relinquished):

Council applauds the efforts of this community group to work towards food security in the shire.

Council recognises the need for community-led organic food systems to attend to the health crisis that nutrition-low, carcinogenic-high fast food and supermarket food has delivered to its residents – slow death by industrial agriculture.

Council recognises the social merits of such a project, and encourages other community groups to work together to prepare for worsening climate change and energy descent scenarios, and therefore further rising food and energy prices.

Council recognises that we are all squatting on Djadjawurrung land be it at the Town Hall or the Daylesford Community Food Garden. There has never been a proper sale or transfer of land either under Aboriginal or European law.

Council is thrilled that a community group has taken over the maintenance of this site, and that council workers no longer have to use polluting and expensive resources – herbicide and petroleum – to maintain it.

Council would be happy to work with this community group to help them relocate to another site for community food production if the library next-door needs to expand, or some other public building of merit needs to be built on this site.

Council recognises that although this mode of community participation is different to its own form, it nonetheless values such independent, creative and positive responses from its residents.

Council recognises that its own processes of behaviour change are heavily bureaucratic making positive change impossibly slow, and that residents will naturally move faster, working in small groups, and will at times better attend to the fast pace of global financial, social and ecological changes.

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Greenwash #20 in Trouble - Post Carbon Food Systems (authorised and unauthorised)

I concentrated this month's Greenwash article on one specific chapter found in the very brilliant Post Carbon Reader anthology. The chapter is called Growing Community Food Systems and is written by US artist-farmer Erika Allen. Click on the image below, then click again to read in high definition.

You can buy a copy from HRN, or read free chapters online.

In news closer to home, last weekend a group of about 40 locals were involved in taking over a disused council plot and did what we've been asking permission for over many years – develop a community garden. Whereas I see some relevance in working with local government to plan against ecological and energetic crises, I don't believe we should wait around for any level of government to drive behaviour change.

When the current CEO at our local council took up her position I made a time to meet with her and raise my chief concerns in the shire – public transport, privatised bottled water and community food gardens. She agreed with me on public transport (and to give credit, there has been a little work done in this area, although she herself drives solo transit from St Kilda to Daylesford for work everyday); and she was interested in the bottled water argument (although nothing more has been done to curb this polluting, exploitative industry very specific to our shire - read more here); however she totally dismissed the community garden issue with the rationale that people in this region have enough space in their own backyards to grow whatever food they wish. This meeting was three years ago.

But to be realistic, change generally comes from a 'hacker' (in the broadest, McKenzie Wark, sense) or activist class, who aim to inspire a wider, bottom-up, grassroots movement to take direct action. By contrast, the bureaucratic class renders itself static through its own red tape. Politicians play between the bureaucracy and the hackers.

In our case this latest action is involved with developing another chapter in our local community food system. The shire council can either get behind us, ignore it and hope it goes away, or become adversarial. We'll see. Here's the wee video I made to document the first stage of this unauthorised community food project.

This garden (beside the Daylesford Public Library) acts as a continuation of a range of community food systems that have been developing in the area for many years. Such systems include a permaculture garden next door (behind the library) and my own public artwork comprising of 19 fuji apples (in front of the library), which were both planted in 1999 and are well used and tended by the community and wild bird population alike.

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