Showing posts with label permaculture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label permaculture. Show all posts
Permacultural neopeasantry and people care
Sunday, July 1, 2018
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.
re:)Fermenting culture (audio version)
Saturday, June 30, 2018
I have recently recorded re:)Fermenting culture: a return to insight through gut logic
as an audio book.
Ruffling the feathers of KeepCup scholarship
Thursday, April 19, 2018
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
Monday, February 12, 2018
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.
re:)Fermenting culture: a return to insight through gut logic
Sunday, November 12, 2017
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!
Walked-for 'free tucker' and walking 'knowledge is free'
Thursday, June 4, 2015
I wrote my doctorate paid for by public money, so (in memory of Aaron Swartz and in the spirit of Creative Commons), I make it available here free, to the public. I encourage all other scholars to do the same with their research, regardless of what copyright laws unethically demand otherwise. #knowledgeisfree.
Everything you've learnt is just provisional; it's always open to recantation or refutation or questioning. The same applies to society. — Aaron SwartzRead more...
Excerpts from Dave Jacke's Daylesford talk
Friday, March 15, 2013
Edible forest gardener and permaculturalist, Dave Jacke, came to Daylesford for a brief talk last Wednesday while touring the country giving workshops on temperate climate food forestry.
Edible forest gardens afoot
Thursday, March 7, 2013
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| Poster by Ian Robertson |
Dave Jacke, author of Edible Forest Gardens, is coming to Daylesford to speak on Wednesday March 13. Jacke is a permaculture pioneer who has taken the Forest Garden concept beyond it tropical origins showing it can be adapted to temperate climates. This talk is a unique opportunity for local permaculture practitioners and anyone interested in ecological solutions to hear Dave Jacke speak while he is in Central Victoria. More
And, from this week's The Advocate newspaper, more local food forestry plans afoot...
DAYLESFORD will soon boast a five-acre food forest, thanks to a partnership between Daylesford Community Food Gardeners, Daylesford Neighborhood Centre and Daylesford Secondary College. The food forest will be built on permaculture principles and will boast more than 60 species of food producing plants, a poultry system and bees. Daylesford Community Food Gardeners co-ordinator Patrick Jones said the Daylesford Secondary College Council had already approved plans and the project was now seeking funding. The food forest will be planted at Daylesford Secondary College and will be a fifth community garden for Daylesford. Read on.Read more...
Reclaiming education as ecological knowledges
Saturday, December 15, 2012
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.
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| Drawing: Patrick Jones (click for bigger) |
You can read more about the project here.
An essay that includes excerpts from my interview with David Holmgren
Saturday, September 1, 2012
How permaculture and non-monetary economies are part of the solution to the problem of capitalism. Feature article by Patrick Jones in Arena: The Australian Magazine of Left Political, Social and Cultural Commentary, No. 119. August 2012
Read more...
Another clear picture to draw inspiration from...
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Milkwood Permaculture co-founder, Nick Ritar, puts together a well-structured argument to help fight human complacency, idiocy and anxiety in an age of crises.
Nicole Foss on resilience and financial collapse
Friday, February 17, 2012
Hepburn Relocalisation Network and Sustainable Hepburn Association (SHARE) last night hosted Canadian speaker Nicole Foss. A theorist and practitioner, Foss is well across looming energy, economics, psychology, sustainability (the real kind – not just economic), security and climate conundrums. Here's a slide from her talk:
And here's a wee bit of footage of Foss and David Holmgren fielding questions in the town hall last night.
Read more...
Gardens, ecologies and reclaiming the sensible
Sunday, January 15, 2012
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:
Read more...
After Blake
Monday, December 12, 2011
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
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
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
Read more...
We went to the garden of love
Saturday, September 24, 2011
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.
Read more...
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