Showing posts with label progress-capitalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label progress-capitalism. Show all posts
How do we move from citizens, consumers back to ecozens
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
I thought I was clever coming up with the term 'ecozen' today to describe a participant or player within an ecology, but a quick search shows it is already used as a brand by several global businesses from synthetic pools to chemical companies. It seems today greenwashing and astroturfing occurs even before a thing exists or is named; such is the rapaciousness of progress-capitalism.
The word 'citizen' etymologically refers to a city dweller. But as cities are only responsible for half the world's human population, and account for 75% of global energy consumption and 80% of Greenhouse gas emissions, I think it's time to rethink its use despite already being superseded by the far more violent term 'consumer'. Words form us as much as we form them. To be clear about words and our choice of them is to be clear about who we are, what we are saying and how we are treading.
The word 'ecozen' simply means place dweller, which can be extended to mean inhabitant or being of place.
But all this is a rather slow and musing segue into sharing the main critical premises for my forthcoming book, Walking for Food: regaining permapoesis. I'm three years into writing it, which pretty much spans the life of this blog.
Here they are:
Life is uncertain and human ideologies are consistently flawed, but there are a few things we can be clear about:
1. Life is made and unmade within ecological communities; ‘man-made mass death’ is an interruption to life.
2. We are born animal, we require animal protein from birth, we excrete animal wastes, and we die animal. None of this need involve cruelty, markets or pollution.
3. Real wealth comes from the land; it is generative and relational, and non-extractive.
4. Poverty is a construction of private property and abstract systems of wealth. The answer to poverty involves free access to land and to local knowledges.
5. Energy, and its degrees of availability, shapes all life.
6. Life is not progressive but rather performs in waves of ascent and descent.
7. Sustainable societies foreground ecological knowledge and background technology and labour.
8. Sustainable societies produce no waste and do not engineer ecological overshoot.
9. Complex societies are primarily products of high energy availability, not superior intelligence.
10. Complex societies are rarely sustaining for long periods because they are inherently wasteful and destructive.
11. Mainstream thought promotes pollution, greed, narrow self-interest and shortsightedness, but rarely recognises itself as being ideological.
12. Science is merely an extension of humanism when it is accountable to industry’s imperatives.
13. Western culture, and those under its influence, operates as a doubling performance looping mastery and amnesia.
14. Climate change is a product of unsustainable development, driven by energy availability and market capitalism.
15. Governments control so as corporations can more effectively exploit; this is sophisticated violence.
16. Non-procreation doesn’t solve overpopulation, rather perpetuates the myth humans are not really animals.
17. Reckless procreation is a thing of ignoring limits or being under stress.
18. Love is a thing that cannot be measured or treated; it is always relational and generative, never extractive and violent.
19. Perennial food ecologies produce and return nutrients in place. Conventional annual agriculture mines the soil and requires the transportation of other mined inputs for synthetic succession.
20. A weed is a plant in the wrong place, according to anthropocentrism.
21. A sensible life involves the senses. In a violent and interrupting society sight dominates the other senses.
22. Schools perpetuate ideologies of mass control; they explicitly teach children how to veil or normalise mass violence by becoming conformist cosmopolitan consumers.
23. Being born is regarded a medical emergency. Infants are rushed into life in an ambience of hysteria.
24. Dying today is prolonged, passive and drugged. Bodies are either burnt as carbon or buried and released as methane. In either case death becomes pollution.
The following people helped form such views: Derrick Jensen, Peter Minter, Deborah Bird Rose, Bernard Stiegler, David Holmgren, Masanobu Fukuoka, John Zerzan, David Graeber, David Fleming, John Michael Greer and Vandana Shiva. Read more...
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...
Progress Capitalists – What will they think of next?
Friday, April 6, 2012
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Published on Thursday, April 5, 2012 by Common Dreams
USGS: Recent Earthquakes 'Almost Certainly Manmade'
Report implicates oil and natural gas drilling, aka fracking.
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A US Geological Survey (USGS) research team has linked oil and natural gas drilling operations to a series of recent earthquakes from Alabama to the Northern Rockies.
According to the study led by USGS geophysicist William Ellsworth, the spike in earthquakes since 2001 near oil and gas extraction operations is “almost certainly man-made.” The research team cites underground injection of drilling wastewater as a possible cause.
“With gasoline prices at $4 a gallon, there’s pressure to rush ahead with drilling, but the USGS report is another piece of evidence that shows we have to proceed carefully,” said Dusty Horwitt, Senior Counsel and chief natural resources analyst at Environmental Working Group. “We can’t afford multi-million-dollar water pollution cleanups or earthquakes that could pose risks to homes and health.”
Read on here.
An alternative design framework
Thursday, November 17, 2011
I participated in a design workshop earlier this week, and what I brought to it was this little paper outlining why we need to compost the default framework – progress capitalism – for everything we do.
The contents of this document includes prose, drawing and poetry.
Read more...
The contents of this document includes prose, drawing and poetry.
Wheel of Progress-Capitalism (another false cycle)
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
I created this drawing today as a teacher and parent teaching aid. It's incredible how pervasive the dominant ideology is, and how the ad-men get into even the most conscientious of schools. Zeph's school is founded on non-harm Buddhist principles, however 'the winners' (the popular and influential) are still the kids who drink caffeinated energy drinks, know all the celebs, obsess over brands and labels, and are across junk food products like junkies in a chemist.
This is a reasonably new phenomenon in the school, so before it really takes hold a number of us are getting fairly active. Ad-men (and of course women) are setting the social agenda in the school through their new disciples – the whatevs. Those kids restricted in their access to pop culture consumption are made to feel inadequate, uncool. Peer-group pressure has hit middle years primary school in a big way, Target stores sell padded bra t-shirts to girls in this age group. Peer pressure was a thing that happened at high school when I was a kid. This is more of the aggregating hyper-mediated state I keep writing about...
Advertorial enterprise is a trillion-billion dollar industry engaged in strategic warfare against a bunch of disparate volunteer parents, teachers and carers. It's a David and Goliath scenario, and Goliath is romping it in.
So here's my catapult, my slingshot. Feel free to rip it and distribute widely (I can send you a high res copy if you want to make a poster of it). The idea of this drawing is to ask each child to imagine they're in the hub of the wheel (the mediated blob, or ambient blur), ask them to choose their favourite bought item, and then find out about it by researching all the possible energy inputs, social inputs, ecological inputs and pollution outputs that each item is likely to produce.
Click for bigger.
NB. Schools shred diversity by ordering students into year groups. This makes them easier targets for commerce pests to pinpoint specific generational desires, much like reduced biodiversity in environments encourage plagues and outbreaks – a weakened state. There are actual companies who profit by collating all forms of social data on all the various age and interest groups, and sell this information to businesses so as they can target consumers with deadly accuracy.
If our schools were generationally diverse the ad-man's power would be considerably reduced, especially if our elders abandoned the wheel of progress-capitalism too and began to behave again as elders. Currently schools are breeding grounds for self-interested bystander consumers. Addressing this issue may be part of addressing the strategic war on children by big business.
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