Global Ecological Crisis

Reading The Australian newspaper is normally a very distressing thing for me – the underweight ballerinas/models, the overweight businessmen/politicians, a Cartesian smorgasbord for privatised relations of avoidance – so I generally leave it alone. However I've been privy to free copies over coffee these past few mornings and so was again inclined to dip in. The more fool I.

This is the letter to the editor I wrote out of G20-despair.

Michael Stutchbury's anthropogenic economics, as displayed in 'Earning seat at the table' (Opinion, 29 September), again ignores the relationship between global growth capitalism and the rapidly unfolding Global Ecological Crisis (GEC). Stutchbury champions an economics that is a short-term abstraction – our standard of living has peaked in correlation with global oil supplies – climate change and energy descent will shortly reveal why his favoured economics is a nonsense and how it is at the root of the GEC. An economics based upon a cyclical, reciprocal system is what we need to move quickly towards. To continue to herald a broken-cycle system which will make the Earth uninhabitable is sheer idiocy.

But I'm not waiting around for The Australian to publish such views, it feels like many years off, if ever. In the meantime here's where our gleaning waste as family holiday project has gotten us so far.

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Anthropogenic fruits

Otherwise known as pop-fascism.

From our project over here.

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Rain on my brain

It has been really wet here. I like to think Josh, Ziggy and I had something to do with it. We went into the bush a few days ago and Rain Dance is what we came out with. I guess you'd call this a Peej video clip, but shaking off the stiffness of late winter without spending a dollar is a more accurate description. I'm off to Newcastle tomorrow as one-third of the Artist as Family trio. You can follow our movements by clicking on the AAF link. This music vid is a timely loosen up for a warmer climate – Newcastle NSW, and more generally the planet – a low-carbon, non-specialised, free idiocy. Enjoy!



Thanks to Josh and Ziggy for their added flavour – I set out to do this solo and bumped into Josh beforehand. You can't beat chance! And thanks to Meg for her editing suggestions and general critical eye for loose m'goose activity. You can't beat critique, love and support!

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Cartesian Wells

The first online site I created was justfreewater, a site dedicated to platforming the woes of bottled water. In the past three years since I began that site I have enjoyed watching greater public awareness and a broader debate around bottled water. During this time I have spent many hours putting together a comprehensive picture of our local situation while concurrently finding out more about the global pattern of privatising this fundamental public resource. My film Lalgambook (Mt Franklin) attempts to communicate, via poetical terrorism rather than journalistic rationalism, the link between the occupation of Aboriginal land and genocide of Aboriginal people in the nineteenth century and the occupation of public water and ecocidal practices of the bottled water industry today in the same region, which I call home. 

Over the years friends have sent me links, newspaper articles and their own ideas for ethical modes for drinking water that don't pollute the landbase or capitalise upon that which should be a free and public resource. 

As we have become increasingly a culture of destructive Cartesians it has become difficult to see, surrounded by our affluence, that anthropocentrism is central to our undoing as a species. While growth economics and corporate greed predominate in capitalised marriage, the vacuuming of our artesian wells (groundwater) will continue to play a significant part of the pathological dowry. 

For a concise snapshot of the bottled water crisis, which dovetails emblematically into the wider Global Ecological Crisis (GEC), watch this trailer.

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Unexpected turn with microbials

WorkmanJones' latest offering.

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A return to free-dragging

I have just returned from a poetics symposium at UWS organised by Kate Fagan and chaired by Ivor Indyk. Some of the things discussed involved language, translation, identity, form and ecology by poets and academics – Ann Vickery, Philip Mead, Pam Brown, Stephen Muecke, Martin Harrison, Anna Gibbs, John Hawke and Peter Minter, to name a few. And at the end of the symposium a number of us read including Tom Lee, Fiona Wright, Jill Jones and Michael Farrell. I read A Free-dragging Manifesto for the first time this year and, for the first time, as a 'fast text'. The work is about to be published in US journal ecopoetics in its original 'slow text' form. In the meantime you can read a fast text version here.

My book, A Free-dragging Manifesto, can be purchased from this site. Just scroll down the right hand side column and find the details. In case you've missed the many plugs of this two-sided book on my various sites... Peter O'Mara's brilliant volume of spatial poetry, subtext, is published on the reverse side and we share the overall title How To Do Words With Things. Read Astrid Lorange's review in Jacket.

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Regenerating Community

I gave my Processes of Circularity: Permapoesis and the Shed of Interrelation presentation today as part of the panel Understanding the Value of Arts in Communities at the ReGenerating Community conference, RMIT. My participation was joined by both Ian Cuming's and Victoria Stead's presentations, and there was much biodiversity in our thoughts and activities. My work begins using pragmatic language and ends up as a poem, a transgressional device I have been working on to shift language from the 'rational' to the poethical. It starts:

By the time crude oil was discovered early on in the twentieth century the major socio-political forces – capitalism, communism and the third option fascism – were busily competing for attention and power. Sadly, not one of these three systems offered human societies an ecological model and we have paid dearly for this grand omission ever since.

You can read the entire work here.

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A language older than words

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Greenwash #4 in Trouble

Glen Dunn recently made a short film about a kiln firing in Southern Tasmania, posted it online and found an unexpected viral enthusiasm for it around the globe. The film’s fusing of the ancient and the modern, the physical and the digital, taps into some of our most basic inclinations to form meaning of the present with things and activities that are common to the past. Things such as clay and wood and fire.

Read on here.

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Notes for a manifesto on free-dying

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Processes of circularity

Below is the introductory quote, premise and first paragraph to an essay I have written for the forthcoming ReGenerating Community conference at RMIT (September 2-4) in Melbourne. The essay's title is Processes of Circularity: Permapoesis and the Shed of Interrelation.

In Western thinking, in contrast [to Aboriginal thinking], the human is set apart from nature as radically other. Religions like Christianity must then seek narrative continuity for the individual in the idea of an authentic self that belongs to an imperishable realm above the lower sphere of nature and animal life. The eternal soul is the real, enduring, and identifying part of the human self, while the body is animal and corrupting. But transcending death this way exacts a great price; it treats the earth as a lower, fallen realm, true human identity as outside nature, and it provides narrative continuity for the individual only in isolation from the cultural and ecological community and in opposition to a person's perishable body. 

Val Plumwood, Being Prey.

Premise: If regeneration is embedded in processes of ecological circularity – the sharing of resources at a local level – it is not possible for communities to regenerate when based upon an exclusively linear, competitive, broken-cycle, aggregated and centrist socio-economic system. When you have an economic system based on growth any positive initiative to repair local ecologies and communities is merely bandaid work. Growth economics, to expand Dennis Potter’s quip about religion, is the wound not the bandage. Regenerating communities requires remodelling with steady-state systems, where growth becomes an integral, but not dominant, part of an open-cycle.

The construction of ecologically disembodied culture, where desire and hope are among the abstractions that predominate, has been greatly assisted by the introduction of clock time or what Guy Debord called ‘psuedo-cyclical time’. In this work I will argue that industrial culture’s subversion of the cyclical limits the possibilities for social and ecological regeneration. In previous writing I have articulated industrial culture as a succession of ‘broken-cycle toxicologies’ where exploiting finite non-renewable resources for short-term economic gain, over-extending the capacity of the landbase to regenerate, compressing time and space to enable monological schooling, wage-slavery and other forms of social bondage, generating toxicological waste aggregately and applying and entrenching an anthropocentric worldview are all corollaries. Traditional communities live according to ecological principals – processes of circularity – where by observing cyclical time and space enables life to be more easily lived in what Gertrude Stein termed ‘the continuous present’. This work will first assess how industrial culture continues to negate the capacity for ecological and social communities to regenerate, and second offer context for counter-participation away from dominant industrial-centrist modalities, and towards distributed social-ecologies; towards a free-poor, time-expanded relocalisation.

Many thanks to Hepburn Shire Council who gave financial support to assist with the writing of this work, with special thanks to Sue Jones, the arts officer. Many thanks to Peter O'Mara, Jeff Stewart, Meg Ulman, Su Dennett, David Holmgren, Hamish Morgan and Prof Stuart Hill for their valuable thoughts to help enable this work, which currently remains a working document. Once completed it will be made freely available to read online.

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Joys of the dark months

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Greenwash #3 in Trouble

Waste. No other single word defines our civilisation better. Ninety years of crude oil extraction, refinement and burning has turned the planet and its atmosphere into a monumental toxicological dump. But the rapid exploitation of oil deposits is only one corollary of our anti-ecological state, our mindset for waste has been gradually developing over 6,000 years.

Read on here.

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Greenwash #2 in Trouble

A few years ago I met and shared a meal with John Peterson, a US artist-farmer who worked out a unique way to put the mardi gras back into microbial life. Peterson has spent a lifetime building interrelationships between the earth, art and food. He transformed his family’s farm from using conventional ecocidal farming practices into a world of creativity and experimentation where wild nature was encouraged to coexist with cultivated nature.

Read on here.

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Greenwash #1 in Trouble

As this is the first in a series of columns on art and the environment, I thought I’d begin with my own definition of the much bandied about word ‘sustainability’, and talk about how my thoughts and understanding of ecology have radically changed my own art practice over the years.

Read on here.

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Towards a biophysical poetry

Below is the title, introductory quote and first two paragraphs of my first substantial work since A Free-dragging Manifesto. It is soon to be published in Angelaki, the journal of the theoretical humanities, by Routledge in the UK.

Free-dragging, Slow Text and Permapoesis:
Towards a biophysical poetry

If language is of the world, like galaxies and ecosystems, this means it participates in what it represents, though how privileged it may be either as a representative or as a participant remains to be seen. Ira Livingston

I suppose it could go without saying that with every culture the interrelationships between food (survival) and art (living) are wholly understandable. To mark this point a friend and I, at an airport shop recently, wheeled a large stand of brightly coloured packets of potato chips ten metres across the floor to sit beside a large stand of brightly covered paperback books. This small, unplanned action was filmed and later published online as a free-to-air video poem called Best Sellers.

How we obtain our food directly informs our imaginative psyches and links our art to our food. In this essay I aim to make conscious the link between principles of agro-ecology and permaculture and a decapitalised and carbon fixed poetry – poetry that consciously and explicitly participates within a dynamic biosphere, not just in content but also in form. Just to be clear and ’fess-up here, when I made Best Sellers I was at an airport flying home from a festival where I had presented a paper that centred on art’s relation to carbon. In this work, I will begin with a premise based on the relocalisation of resources; present four theses identifying the material and social woes of ‘impermanent culture’; reference a fifth thesis proposed by anthropologist and activist David Graeber on the material and social woes of liberalism’s aggregate-growth model; show the transitional practices of ‘free-dragging’ and ‘slow text’ as examples of biophysical art (post John Cage); and posit the portmanteau, ‘permapoesis’, as a post-capitalist ethic that articulates an ecological mode of production for the arts.

You can read the entire work (with its specific formatting) here.

I especially thank commissioning editor Kate Fagan for her generous assistance, critique and clear-eye over this piece, as well as Ian Robertson, Meg Ulman, Hamish Morgan, Jason Workman and Peter O'Mara for their valuable suggestions and supportive peerage. I am also indebted to David Holmgren's incredible life's work and writing, as well as Derrick Jensen and David Graeber for their inspired thinking and activism.

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