Every available...

Designed by Abram Games, 1942. From here.

Thanks for the link Ianr.

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Greenwash #9 in Trouble - Uncapitalised Fruit

Have you ever wondered why public parks (with few exceptions) are not filled with fruit and nut trees, vegetables and herbs? Or why schools don’t teach children about local ecology and Indigenous food plants? Well that would be sending the wrong message: That people could forage at their leisure for their own resources.

Click on the below text to continue reading.

The work just installed, 1999.

Zephyr practicing parkour on the library wall, 2010.

Giving a Fuji a light late-summer prune, 2010.

Showing Zeph the ropes for maintaining the poems, 2010.

This work also derives from childhood memories of walking home from school with my older brother, picking apples and plums on the 'nature strips' as we went.

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March flies (Tabanids)

I caught a very large fly in order to make a brief study of it before letting it go. The wings span approximately 30mm, probably the largest fly I've ever seen. A half-baked Peej track seems to fit the sight.

Biting flies are distributed throughout the world and, apart from nuisance biting, some are responsible for the transmission of diseases in humans and livestock in many countries. Although Australian biting flies (other than the mosquitoes) do not transmit diseases to humans they are renowned for painful bites and annoying habits during the summer months in general. More here.

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Fabricating a forest of food

We have been asked to participate in an ecologies show at the MCA in Sydney which will open later in the year, and have been steadily working towards our proposed food forest since last December. We are getting closer to finalising a site. You can read a first post for the project here.

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A primitive project

In my research, at this early stage, I am trying to articulate how and why our society suffers ecological estrangement; in other words where disembodiment has its origins. At this point I think that reification, the process of giving abstract things (such as time and representations) concrete form, is at the heart of it. Another word for this of course is mediation. I'm currently reading John Zerzan, Val Plumwood and Thomas De Zengotita to assist me with this thinking.

The rationale for understanding the origins of ecological estrangement is to help keep in-check the dominant ideology from consuming our lives. Last week Meg removed our household clock and left a small red object on the wall peg in its place to remind us that dismantling civilisation occurs through small conscious steps. Ecological consciousness does not require the abstraction 'linear time', and therefore by reducing its place in our lives enables greater participation in cyclical life. While we are in transition we may need to refer to the time throughout the day here and there, however a time piece no longer takes centre stage on our living room wall, as it never has on our wrists.

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Greenwash #8 in Trouble - Carpentaria

Greenwash is a monthly column I write on art and ecology for a free street press called Trouble. The previous seven Greenwash columns can be read on this blog (go to the 2009 archive). Number eight is a review of Alexis Wright's novel Carpentaria. I really loved this book and recommend it highly.



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Trading civilisation for living

Until fairly recently – until civilization – nature was a subject, not an object. In hunter-gatherer societies no strict division or hierarchy existed between the human and the non-human. The participatory nature of vanished connectedness has to be restored, that condition in which meaning was lived, not objectified into a grid of symbolic culture. The very positive picture we now have of pre-history establishes a perspective of anticipatory rememberance: there is the horizon of subject-object reconciliation.

This prior participation with nature is the reverse of the domination and distancing at the heart of reification. It reminds us that all desire is a desire for relationship, at its best reciprocal and animate. To enable this nearness or presence is a gigantic practical project, that will make an end to these dark days.

John Zerzan, That thing we do, 1998, from Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization, Feral House, 2002

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Society for the retardation of time

I've been reading John Zerzan's Running on Emptiness, in which he describes a small group of Europeans who collectively call themselves The Society for the Retardation of Time. Zerzan argues that time and time compression are things of civilisation, things that require constant criticism and awareness if we are to reclaim our lives from alienation, reification and estrangement.

Joy and status anxiety rarely collaborate, and as Michael Pollan says "if it's advertised it's probably toxic".

Zerzan's essay Time and its Discontents is available here.

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A Poem for the Wetlands

It's been five years since I made this public work in Werribee, Victoria, completed not long after having had the realisation that poetic thought and poetic production can survive without language.

Every now and then the wetlands flood and this little work just disappears.

A Poem for the Wetlands, Patrick Jones and Mel Ogden, Glen Orden Wetlands, 2005

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Writing Reading Doing Thinking

As many of you know we're currently attempting to establish a quarter acre garden as a dynamic food forest. However, it's not only plant biology books, seed grower's guides and the land itself that's informing us.

Here's a list of books that I've recently read or I'm currently reading which are assisting me in the garden:

John Zerzan's Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (2002)
Masanobu Fukuoka's The One-Straw Revolution (1978), The Road Back to Nature (1987)
Val Plumwood's Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (2002)
Judith Wright's Born of the Conquerors (1991)
David Holmgren's Future Scenarios (2009)
Alexis Wright's Carpentaria (2006)

And, here are some associated notes from my reading:

In Europe if you wish to imagine life before agricultural settlements, you'd have to conjure up an imagination that went back 10,000 years. A difficult task by any one's standards. However in Australia our imagination need not be so stretched or even fanciful.

On the scale of things, their history was just a half-flick of the switch of truth – simply a memory no greater than two life spans. (A Wright, p57)

If we lack the imagination to understand our domesticated bonds – time, symbol, language, capital, property, technology, and so forth – we forfeit the possibilities of a natural, non-hierarchical and unmediated self.

Culture has led us to betray our own aboriginal spirit and wholeness, into an ever worsening realm of synthetic, isolating, impoverished estrangement. (Zerzan, p16)

Permaculture, based upon relocalising resources, may well be an achievable bridge back for ecologically disembodied society to greater aboriginality and timelessness. Philosophically, permaculture can be seen as a loose modus that conscientiously steps away from progress and technology, rather than a rigid system that attempts to dominate and cage people. In my version of permaculture, agricultural toil and endless hard work are replaced by tending one's own or community's food garden for a few hours a day. And where ever-expanding wilderness is no longer available in which to forage and free-range, permaculture asks us to disregard set ideas of public and private land, and concentrate on that which is possible with all manners of so-called 'disused' land (Holmgren, 2009).

In our own community the Hepburn Relocalisation Network, established by David Holmgren, Su Dennett and Maureen Corbett, is working to encourage and assist community and local council to plant nut trees along roadways and in parklands. These trees will accompany already established feral and publicly planted fruit trees that supply free food to humans and non-humans alike.

When you get down to it, there are few agricultural processes that are necessary. (Fukuoka, 1978, p15)

Our reliance upon grains, domesticated meat and dairy renders us passive consumer-abusers and grave polluters. Wild and semi-cultivated foods are our future if we are to liberate ourselves from the pathologies of civilisation. Therefore, we feel we have to make a stance against factory supply (supermarkets), transition to free-ranging foods (organic farms and small gardens) before reacquainting ourselves with the possibilities of the wild. Almond meal is going to become a more significant supplement for us in years to come.

Above: A young almond tree grows shrouded by Indigenous poa tussock grasses in our garden. The poas protect the delicate leaves of the almond from late frosts until it is established enough to survive them.

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The oblivious cruelty of humans (chapter 2034)

Today Zeph and I helped this local goose free from a fishing hook stuck in her neck. Read more here.

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Waste Warriors

Meg and I displaying the commonsense adage of our grandparents' generation at this year's New Years Eve parade in Daylesford. Thanks to Glen, Ian, Jason and Larisa for their support and flavoured documentation, and thanks too to the thunderstorm that washed us all away pretty soon after Glen shot this peg. BTW, I think that's Paul Stewart, Painters and Dockers frontman, crossing the street behind us.

And here's a rear view at the arse end of 2009.

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Robin Hood

There's so much to speak to today. Here's the local news: Firstly, my friend Josh, who I write about in the special bike issue of Greenwash, delivered my 'Junkie' (pictured below). He has put it together over the past several weeks using many reclaimed parts and a few new ones such as the spokes. As you can see it is absolutely beautiful with a Brookes seat that dates back to the 1940s and an Australian Rob Special frame that could be just as old. I've decided to call it Robin Hood after the red robins that appear on the original paint-work, and in honour of our 'hood, this beautiful neck of the world wide woods, and, of course, because of the carbon I wont be emitting for the profits of corporate pop-fascists – stealing from the grossly rich by generating my own renewable human generated electricity.

In other news, I've just been awarded a three-year scholarship to do a doctorate at the University of Western Sydney. I'm hanging up my tool-belt, at least for commercial building work. My research basically concerns permaculture as a modus for the arts, centring on relationships between poetics and ecology. I will be arguing that the twentieth century delivered the flawed threesome Communism, Capitalism and Fascism, none of which offered human settlements an embedded ecological framework, and as a result, humans and non-humans alike have suffered terribly. The arts have largely operated as the dutiful court jester to triumphant capitalism's anthropogenic riches. However, I will also argue that the arts have radical genes, fit and flexible enough to lead an ecological insurrection across fields. I'm going to be spending a lot of time on my bike.

And, then there's Copenhagen, the global news: What a mess. At least with Bush, Blair and Howard we knew they were evil. It helped that they were upfront about it. With Kev and Barack it's the same as before just a more ambiguous, fuzzy-feeling style of politicking, utilising 'clever' semiotics. With these latter two so-called leaders we were made to feel change is in the air, but really it's growth as usual. Where is the critique of growth-capitalism at Copenhagen? Growth, of course, is at the heart of ecological crises. When Obama was sworn in not all of us were wishful though. Regarding his 'change' and 'hope' wash, this is what I wrote almost a year ago:

Obama will either be shot or fully bought within 12-24 months. And most likely we'll be just as disappointed as we are with Kevin07.

But to keep an eye on global politics is a rather hopeful, wasteful occupation. It generates in people a deep sense of powerlessness and futility (with some moments of apparent redemption and hilarity, as above). In the twenty-first century, our three future scenarios (David Holmgren outlines four, and I'll speak to the fourth at a later stage), are Brown Tech, Green Tech and Earth Stewardship (permaculture, and the like). At a systems level, the former two are based on just growth and consumption, the latter based upon biomimicry where growth and consumption are dynamically relational with birth, decomposition, death and rebirth (regeneration) – alltogether making up what I call the six seasons of circularity.

Permaculture together with steady-state economics offers human settlements relocalised food, water and energy while repairing the ills of twentieth century capitalism and anthropocentric idealism. Permaculture bypasses two-party hopefulness and re-engages us with the local. Holmgren, in this book, is quite simply outstanding.

For more on this book go to futurescenarios.org

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Towards a steady-state economics (by George)

George Monbiot in Copenhagen...

This is a meeting about chemicals: the greenhouse gases insulating the atmosphere. But it is also a battle between two world views. The angry men who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their self-fulfilment, have understood this better than we have. A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially by environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have granted the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For a moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful mindlessness.

Read on here.

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Home-brewing

The only member of the Artist as Family born at home.

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Greenwash #7 in Trouble

Special Bike Issue.

Environmental writer Derrick Jensen believes the only level of technology truly sustainable was developed in the Stone Age. Pretty harsh claim at first glance. Then there are the majority of folk who believe technology can redeem us, who believe that only an investment in newer and better technology can rescue us from the mess we’re in. For me this argument is perennially flawed. Technology nearly always creates more problems than it solves. Take dentistry for example. It appears that we have progressed immensely in this field, but this level of technology has only come about as our diet has become more and more disembodied from natural systems; as our diet has been fashioned by food technologists and their commercial patrons.

Read on here.

Steve Futo, Bike Ball, Daylesford NYE Parade, 2008. Photo: Lisa Gervasoni.

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Poethics of food

What are your ethics when it comes to food? Is there an honourable way to kill an animal, or does all meat eating rely on merciless acts of anthropocentric violence? Do you believe that both factory farms and traditional cultures' treatment of animals for meat production belong to the same dirty moral code? Where do you cross the line in terms of killing non-human nature? Is pulling a carrot out of the ground a better sort of violence, committed upon hundreds of microorganisms, than pulling a fish out of water? At what point does sentient non-human nature begin and end for you?

Earlier this week I left the following comment on a vegan blogsite whose authors moderate their comments. It thus far has not been published and therefore I wonder whether this discussion could take place elsewhere, such as here, now, with you?

hello,

i've been enjoying your blog and watching your transitions with great interest. i and my family are doing similar things here in central victoria. we do however have quite a different view when it comes to certain foods, which i wish to speak to here if i may.

i tend to take my lead from traditional communities when it comes to food, and i read every industrialised and transported carrot, synthetic consumable or rump steak as an abuse on the landbase and upon non-human nature.

growing our own food is probably the most beautifully loaded thing we can do. growing food while repairing the landbase is the most essential thing i've ever done. in our household we eat a little meat for protein and simple joy. it is always local. we occasionally catch redfin (english perch) out of the nearby lake. and whereas, i find fishing for recreation a pretty cruel endeavour, i don't when it comes to survival. i watch our chooks eat worms, fish remains or dead mice for protein and i tend to follow their lead as much as possible as they free-range over several neighbouring properties, living a life i cld only wish for in terms of carefreedom. we provide our chooks with shelter, warmth, love and protection from foxes. they in turn provide us with eggs, manure and joy. we are in a reciprocal relationship with them specific to a permaculture.

factory farms are a telling pathology of civilisation. living in some form of natural order alongside or directly with non-human nature is for me being led by nature, not human ideology or growth economics. this is why i supplement my diet with our eggs and a little local meat. ideally i wld like to get my protein just from roadkill, which attends to my relationship with anthropogenic waste. i do use roadkill in my compost as a starter, like a leaven.

i've never worked out why most vegans i meet see carnivores as having the same dirty moral code. it seems to speak out against one of the most sustainable human cultures ever to inhabit the earth – indigenous australians. their aquaculture, agricultures (yams in these parts) and hunting methods enabled an unprecedented permanent culture.

one of my great problems with western veganism is that it seems to come from an urban disembodiment. it seems to me like a mediation, rather than an ethic that is gleaned through active biomimicry.

these are a few of my thoughts thus far. your thoughts/ comments/ critique of them might prove to be a valuable discussion.

yours in congenial anarchism,

patrick

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Seed Ball (after Masanobu Fukuoka)

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WorkmanJones do nothing

A few weeks ago Jason Workman and I pulled the pin on a funded trip to the US scheduled for next year. Our practice has always included a critique of contemporary art and its development driven agenda. Several years ago we 'developed' the practice of free-dragging as a form of 'do-nothing' art. This morning I read this passage from Masanobu Fukuoka –

The more people do, the more society develops, the more problems arise. The increasing desolation of nature, the exhaustion of resources, the uneasiness and disintegration of the human spirit, all have been brought about by humanity's trying to accomplish something. Originally there was no reason to progress, and nothing that had to be done. We have come to the point at which there is no other way than to bring about a "movement" not to bring anything about. 1978 p159

I received an email from an artist last week advertising the 5 different shows that he was involved with this month. I have previously interviewed this artist for a column on ecological art practices and was made aware that his career development was superiorly more important than ecological crises.

Jason and I have spoken about our practice as 'no-practice', and that pulling the pin on flying to the US is contiguous with free-dragging; a practice of embracing hopelessness.

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Anarchist Syndicate (with Broad Beans)

For a full report on our garden under early-heat-wave duress as well as a new recipe, read my Garden Notes for Relocalisation.

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After reading ecopoetics 6/7 and coming home

A poem for Jonathan Skinner and mIEKAL aND.

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Greenwash #6 in Trouble

Albatross chick photographed by Chris Jordan.

If you’ve read this column before you will know that I have more than a passing interest in anthropogenic waste – pollution caused by human activity. Is there any other? There are of course nasty toxins and poisons found readily in natural systems but none that systematically diminishes the health of ecosystems and impoverishes food and water supplies like our non-compostable waste.

Read on here.

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Slow-text as food forest

detail: Jones, P. ‘A Free-dragging Manifesto’, pp. 41-43, ecopoetics, no. 6/7 2006-2009, Australian Ecopoetics Feature, eds. Michael Farrell and Jonathan Skinner, Periplum Editions, USA

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Under the lens of the bottle green sea

This TED talk is brilliant! An exposé of the health of the world's oceans.

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Michel Deguy Compost Tea

We're back from our waste gleaning residence in Newcastle, NSW. Our final post on the Artist as Family blog includes a short creative doco called 17 Days that I made using my track "Michel Duguy Compost Tea" where I sing Deguy's poem "O great apposition of the world" rockoperaesque with beats. You can see/hear here –

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Greenwash #5 in Trouble

While it’s true that Western culture is the sum of its many, varied parts, the dominant paradigm can be packed into two obsessions – privatising resources (natural, human and creative) and killing off wild nature in case it takes us over. René Descartes (1596-1650) is responsible for articulating this paradigm; our refusal to live at peace with non-human nature continues the Judeo-Christian resolve of separateness and avoidance. ‘I think therefore I am’ is the Cartesian maxim (and early secular transition from God as centre to man as centre) that, for many, justifies our ecological abandonment and gives philosophical weight to the stupid idea of our superiority over all other things.

Read on here.

In the meantime our project centred on gleaning waste continues over here.

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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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