Nuts, pulses, grains and fruit, KILL BIRDS!

The title for this post is a line from a neopeasant folk-punk song I recently wrote, which harks back to what I discovered in my doctoral research: that the production of nuts, pulses, grains and fruit require the wholesale killing of wild birds. No food, I have argued in many places before, is ethical if it is commercialised because money asserts a special kind of pressure on life that non-monetary gardening, farming, hunting and foraging does not. Business indebtedness to the money system applies an incalculable pressure on ecologies in order to guarantee the crop or harvest does not fail. If this means gassing, poisoning and shooting wild birds then that is what occurs, and my research has found this takes place on the smallest commercial farm to the largest. Various government agencies produce research surveying which wild critters negate monetised agriculture, such as this one. And this recent newspaper article demonstrates once again that commercial "vegan-friendly" food doesn't really exist.

Despite what members of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance and others might espouse there is no ethical meat in Australia that is bought, and despite what militant vegans might advocate there are no ethical nuts, pulses, grains and fruit either. Food that isn't under monetary lock and key has a greater opportunity to be produced in relationship with the broader biome. Like many food industries including almond, peach, fish and pork, countless species (and relationships) go to waste in order to procure the one desirable harvest or produce one specific crop. This is the monological nature of monetised food. Of course, food labelling is so poor in Australia few really know what they're eating and certainly less know of the biome harm that is done to produce food.  

To bring this story home, we neopeasants net and scare off wild birds from our fruit and nut trees, and occasionally kill the odd raiding critter, which has the effect of deterring others. However, nothing of this taken life is wasted and with such lovely fruitarian flesh we make more life possible. For us all is food, all is life, all is the exchange of energy and matter from one form into another. Money corrupts this relationship and constructs wasteful industries. The so-called ethical food movement needs to radicalise and transition to non-monetary economies if we are to attempt to stop species decline, climate chaos and anthropogenic violence on the earth. 

While this may seem crazy to suggest in a certified capitalist society, viewed from the context of money's assault upon the living world (from small business to big), we have to start thinking whole-biome culture, which essentially requires macrobiome economy.

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Black market, liquid gold (or, nabbing a hive for honey money?)

Huh, the propaganda of banks is priceless! They have been whingeing for a while about the growth of the household and community economies (lumping these virtuous economies in with the black market), and have even pressured governments to "crack down". 

What's remarkable about the below NAB ad is the bank's blatant double standards. Bees produce all their gold by freely foraging non-monetised flowers in a 5-7 km radius of their hive. Isn't it just a case of double-standards to whinge about the growth of bank-less economies (as what Artist as Family is developing where honey is just one currency in a dynamic gift economy), and at the same time promote the foraging commons as being "more than money?" You can't have your cake and eat it too, NAB, or are you once again just trying to rob a hivelyhood?

I took this pic in Melbourne yesterday on my way to speak to RMIT students about, among other things, building a waste-free, moneyless society

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Food sovereignty? It's a peasant (not a money) thing...

Food Sovereignty Alliance chair Tammi Jonas recently took umbrage at Artist as Family's application of the term neo-peasant. She wondered whether we were "colonising the discourse". Tammi has just hosted Joel Salatin, other food celebrities and a host of punters, at her farm in Central Victoria. The event raised nearly $40,000 for the purposes of setting up a legal defence fund. I wrote to Tammi in the spirit of debate. 

Hi Tammi, if you're interested, here's a little more unpacking as to why we use the term neo-peasant:

In an economic sense it's peasant non-relianace on money that we identify with, and see money as the great curse [to ecological] cultures of place due to money's need to grow markets and exploit people and environments. This, essentially, [ends up as] neo-liberalism, growing anti-ecological city-centric cultures permissive of their pollution outputs. Hence our concentration on degrowth money economies and the growth of localised (non-transported) non-monetary economies (urban, rural, suburban).

Neo-peasant Woody (4 yo) walks-for and wheelbarrows a small portion
of the household's fuel in readiness for the winter.

We feel that Joel Salatin, for instance, is super cool when it comes to biology, but super problematic when it comes to his choice of economics. His form of economics we consider Christian-capitalist or conversion-capitalism. It is by nature imperialist as it must aggregate. In this way the great work he does in the biological field is undone by his economic form. To feed hypertechnocivilians (city dwellers) is not a reason for such activity, it only aggregates the problem of people not being accountable for their resources and not in relationship with the processes and communities of life that make life possible. We will never become an ecological culture of place while this pattern continues.

An ecology of money's waste in Central Queensland (passed by bicycle).

These books also give contexts for our term neo-peasant:

Life without money (editor lives in Castlemaine, RMIT academic)

The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (on how self-reliant and organising peasants were kicked off land and forced into the factories to become essentially what our grandparents were).

Debt: The first 500 years (you've probably read this awesome text)

It seems strange to us that regrarian is OK but neo-peasant is not. Perhaps you could unpack this? Do you think traditional agrarians would be offended by this term you use? I understand we have a (middle-class) choice to reconnect with our respective family peasant histories, and hence that's what the neo is doing. It immediately locates our privilege of education. We're immediately 'fessing up to this by using the prefix while honouring our ecologically intelligent ancestors and calling for a return. 

Yours in community of change-makers.

Patrick

So far I haven't heard back from Tammi. But the questions raised concern us all. Why participate in the monetary economy? Why serve a system of economy that is inherently flawed and ecologically destructive? Why raise money to pay lawyers and thus pay heed to laws that only apply if raising money is at the heart of your economy? 

Meg prepares gifted, grown and gleaned food in Artist as Family's kitchen.

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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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