Permacultural neopeasantry and people care

 Here is my Melbourne Free University (MFU) talk, in video (audio) form:



If you're reading this in an email, you'll need to click through to see the link.

A few thoughts since I gave this talk, where I became the subject of an unproductive ambush:

While the Left attacks itself over technicalities, different lifeways and language use – the very things that herald the potential for diversity – the Right runs away with the ball, laughing hysterically all the way to the banks. How we treat one another is key to a transition from dominating power relationships that aim to hurt and divide and towards a culture of true diversity.

The most destructive part of question time in my MFU talk was the product of a few people coming to the gathering with a will-to-violence that disallowed the possibility for deep listening. This is how violence establishes itself, it feeds on reductionism.

I wrote about the project of people care in Perma/Culture: Imagining Alternatives in an Age of Crisis. My chapter is called Reclaiming accountability from hypertechnocivility, to grow again the flowering earth (you can read it below), and it outlines approaches to understanding how violence, especially in language, be it privileged or retaliatory (or somewhere on the hierarchical scale), is a force for the destruction of the other who is not living our values. The ecological ramifications for humans endlessly attacking one another are of course innumerable. Business thrives on such hatred, which in turn creates assaults on ecology because consumption often ramps up when people are unsettled, shamed, angry, desperate or self-loathing.

To include the potential of the other in one's frame is a practice of understanding through deep listening. Buddhists and others might say it's the heart where compassion resides, but it really seems apparent now that the relationship between the enteric biome (of the gut) and the cortex-limbic biomes (of the brain) are where our social selves speak and act from.

Read more...

re:)Fermenting culture (audio version)

I have recently recorded re:)Fermenting culture: a return to insight through gut logic 

as an audio book. 

Read more...

Permacultural neopeasantry in the burbs

I have a forthcoming (May 24) talk in Melbourne as part of MFU's program. It would be great to see you there and join the discussion.

Modern Australia (in its very linearity) is a melting pot of cultural diversity forever being homogenised in an obsessive pursuit of progress. Neoliberal modernity lauds its one solution; one economy agenda, which is the shocking process of cultural, biological and economic pasteurisation that follows in the (gender-lopsided) footsteps of reductive science, social Darwinism and classical political economy. Peasants first, then First Nations people were labelled sloths and lazy by pundits of a so-called moral philosophy. Yet, for many of us, our old people (before the dispossessions, ecocides and genocides) lived carbon-positive lifeways and with intimate connection to earth processes. Acknowledging this past and drawing on it seems like a matter of pragmatic resilience more than moral altruism or romantic/political wishfulness. In an era of climate change (digi-industrial capitalism), ecological illiteracy (aggregating urbanisation), greater social divisions (reinvention of class relations), and human population explosion (chronic species loss), what stories and what lifeways can we action within the household and community economies? Patrick Jones (from Artist as Family) – living a neopeasant economy through the application of permaculture principles – offers not one solution, but a microbially-rich suburban response to the complex predicaments of our time.

Read more...

Ruffling the feathers of KeepCup scholarship

Against ‘neo-peasantry’ and the desire for self-sufficiency, an article recently written in Overland, misses three crucial points: Neopeasantry concerns community-sufficiency, an abiding connection to ancestry, and modelling carbon positive futures. These three things have been crudely disappeared by Rachel Goldlust in this polemical writing parading as scholarship. 

Here is the reply we posted on the Overland site:

Hi Rachel, we are that family from Daylesford you mention. We would have been open to being interviewed, even a visit, it’s a pity you only refer to a new.com.au article as your main reference to us. 

In this writing you attempt to disappear our ancestors. Of course, ‘neo’ locates our ‘fessed up privilege in choosing to be peasant-like, but ‘peasant’ is our heritage, our families, our pre-industrial past prior to the enclosures and the ‘primitive accumulation’ of our ancestral lands.  

There is both an everyday intimacy and lived-politic that we’re advancing by championing this term. Our politic goes like this: If people can again have access to land they can produce alternative, land-conscious economies. They can decouple themselves from the giant wrecking ball global economy and potentially live a carbon-positive lifeway. We are modelling this politic every day. 

We don’t deny we’re on Dja Dja Wurrung country, we live that reality. We also don’t deny our own indigenous-peasant past and we draw on it to transition from what we call hypertechnocivility.  

Ultimately, we are neopeasants who apply permacultural principles to our home and community economies to further become accountable mammals of place, and this constitutes our practice of art, our culture making and our corporeal forms of feminism. 

Your article strikes us as another act of urbane violence directed at an imagined and clearly poorly understood target. We question your scholarship.

Read more...

Radical economy making - the imperatives of productive home economies for the reestablishment of ecological cultures of place

In this video I present a case for the home economy as the primary place from where ecological culture is remade, reclaimed and re:)fermented.

It is an excerpt from a talk I gave in Ballarat last week, with a surprise cameo appearance. Watch this video, listen to it as a podcast, and check out this quote from Shannon Hayes, redefining wealth and poverty:

For the Radical Homemakers, wealth and poverty are determined by a different paradigm. One of the first determinants of "impoverishment" was a lack of personally "owned" time  – life-hours lost to participation in soul-sucking work pursuing excessive desires and, ultimately, leading to neglected and disintegrated relationships. Other signs of impoverishment included the inability to access nourishing food, to get adequate rest, to properly nurture their relationships, or to live an ecologically responsible life. Understanding this new view of poverty, it becomes clear that the definition of wealth is far more complex than the mere accumulation of cash. In fact, in the eyes of most Radical Homemakers, money has little, if anything, to do with their perception of enduring wealth. – Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers: reclaiming domesticity from a consumer culture, 2010.

Read more...

re:)Fermenting culture: a return to insight through gut logic

While my main work resides with Artist as Family, performing our day to day neopeasant home-economy radicalism or continuing to facilitate the network of community gardens in our home town, I have my own side projects always brewing away. Each day I research and/or write for two hours. Anymore than this and I feel myself becoming just another privileged Western thinker relying on my resources to be brought to me in the most earth-damaging intransigent way. I rail against such reliance to fuel my thought, and as a result (and being so odd within my culture) I'm writing work that doesn't yet have a wide readership, let alone a publisher in the conventional sense. This enables a wonderful freedom to experiment and be bold. Such obscurity is indeed a liberty, and paid for in the vegetables I grow myself and with friends and family. 

This year, after the compromises I felt co-writing The Art of Free Travel (compromises not with my awesome co-writer, but with the monetary demands placed on the book and how that eroded the spirit of it), I have returned to the fertile place of home and community publishing. My many editors have been my considerable brain trust – friends, family and the community of authors who I rate so highly. The result is this book, beautifully and sensitively designed by Adele Del Signore. 

The writing of re:)Fermenting culture has been an experiment which placed equal responsibility on the gut to inform the book's trajectory as another significant centre for logic and knowing. The mind in Western thought dominates everything, constructing a Cartesian blindness that is inherently masculine and thus, I argue, has constructed a gender-lopsidedness that has contributed significantly to climate, species, societal and ecological ruinations. To uncover this assertion I've gone right back, well before Descartes (he is just part of the succession of such lopsidedness), back to early Greece, to the Pandora myth and to the related myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus – the West's yin and yang story – a precautionary tale of twinned opposites concerning technology and memory that has long been forgotten.

My book is also an experiment in radical distribution. I'm going to steal it into bookshops and leave it in many more places besides. It's Free to take: pay later model is as original in Australian publishing as the content, and this ethico-politic, modelled on the honesty system of the ubiquitous Aussie farmgate stall, is another conceptual unsettling of bourgeois urban publishing. My only financial aim is to recuperate the modest expenses to pay for its production. The book is light and therefore cheap to send and distribute on foot, or via bicycle and public transport, but weighty in its cultural scope. A culture only of mind, of gender-lopsidedness, I argue, has become a culture of sterility, extraction and imperialism. This culture attacks our gut's logic. The gut is the Pandoran hub of human health, an underworld where 90% of serotonin and 50% of dopamine is produced, that is if the gut is given to kindly. I argue in re:)Fermenting culture the trouble that springs from gut reductionism (refined sugars, antibiotics, pesticides, acidic and non-fibre foods) is not to be underestimated.

So, this has been a snapshot into my cerebral contribution to the flowering earth this year. If you'd like an ebook version of it I will send it through for free. Just send me an email. But if you're like me and prefer to read off-screen it will cost you $10 plus postage. You can also barter me for a hardcopy. Please feel comfortable to get in touch.

Update (27 Sept 2018): My book in hard copy has sold out...

Here's the media release for those wishing it,

and here is the invitation to come to the book warming in our garden on the 26 November.

Happy gut reading wildly folk!

Read more...

It's time for...

Capitalism – so full of itself, full of its poisons and waste, of hatred of everyone, the land and its diverse communities – has run its course. Exhausted it begins to shut doors. To build more coffins. To plan more war – its finest economy. The Left with drab succour watches the Right running away with the ball (and the goalposts) yelling out ‘that’s not fair’. But Trump has been a long time in the making. He has been manufactured by capitalism's core value: aggressive competition. Only we can choose not to participate or dwell in the milieu of this illness; not to join the money markets that empower the Trumps of the world. Only we can take up land, learn again to grow food, energy, ecology and community, and leave nascent neo-fascism to the 1%. #divestfromcapitalism #divestfromfascism

Written and unauthorised by the neopeasant quiet and non-violent revolution going on in the magnificent underworld everywhere around the world.

Read more...