If only Gillard was this much of a leader

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More light on supermarket food

A Monsanto winter collection taken at our local tip today.

Until 20% of us stop consuming supermarket food and lead the way in alternative food supply systems, it will be more and more of the above idiocy.

As expected, the same corporate interests that have created the two crises [climate chaos and peak oil] tried to offer the disease as the cure – more fossil fuel-based chemical fertilizers, more non-renewable genetically engineered seeds bred to respond to the intensive use of chemicals, more corporate control of food, and more globalized trade. Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil, 2008

Combine these things, add growth economics, and local populations become increasingly reliant on a fragile food supply system; a food supply system that pollutes soils, oceans, the atmosphere and our bodies.

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Outsourcing

The ABC, by virtue of so-called rationalist accountancy, is yet another public institution being systematically degraded of standards. The latest degradation is the outsourcing of news resources which apparently happened on the eve of Julia's ascension to the crown (see previous post here).

I don't watch TV much. We don't have one. So you can imagine the occluded laughter when on Saturday night we tuned in with friends to watch the ABC news and saw that I was labelled "Patrick White" and "Garden Artist"?


It was very kind of the ABC to report on our Food Forest plant-in and help further the idea of free, local-community organic food, I just feel for those in the ABC who have to work within such a culture of sub-standards, or rather sub-less standards, because it's sub-editors who seem to be our absent friends across the media.

Here's an idea: slash accountancy departments in half and put the resources back into content and editorial services. But of course this won't happen so we have to remain evermore cynical that what content the mainstream media simulates into our living rooms should always be taken with a grain of salt.

Come to think of it, if any of you are budding sub-editors and find fault on this blogsite, we'd be happy to hear from you. We have neither an accounts department or a salaried editorial team, but we do have standards we'd like to maintain.

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Greenwash #13 in Trouble - Eating Weeds

We're in Sydney planting out the Food Forest this week, and it's equally beanie weather here as it is at home. A few weeks ago twenty of us rugged up and roamed the hills of Daylesford in search of edible weeds. Here's the story (click on image):


On my Garden Notes for Relocalisation blog I've posted images and descriptions of the edibles we found.

An abundant, free world is an uncapitalised world.

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Two parts

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Fungi's answer (a slow text mesostic)

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---------------------------
1. Val Plumwood, 2002
2. ibid.

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Greenwash #12 in Trouble - Eating 7000 Oaks

Shelling acorns (click for bigger).

My little Greenwash column in Trouble magazine is a year old this month, and to help celebrate this anniversary I've made a cake almost entirely from forest foods.

Bill Mollison says that a mature oak tree can provide as much food as an acre of agriculture in a given year. Once established a tree requires little toil and can be a home for diverse biology, whereas a field requires constant toil and generally doesn't allow much scope for beneficial flora and fauna, especially on non-organic farms. After collecting a handful of acorns and preparing them for cooking my experimental poem-cum-cake-cum-festival-announcement (Greenwash #12), I have begun to realise the potential that Mollison is talking about. In fact I would go so far to suggest it's urban food forestry that's key to sustainable cities, over and beyond urban farming. Urban food forestry makes even more sense due to space limits. A food producing tree can be 'slotted in' anywhere in an urban context due to its verticality, however an acre of horizontal land for crops is almost impossible unless we start bulldozing suburbs.

On this note our Food Forest community garden based in Sydney is coming along nicely over here on the Artist as Family blog. And my research work at UWS is also being fed forest based nourishment as I start to consider the form of my creative-critical project as potentially modeling a recipe book – a kind of Alice B Toklas cookbook goes anarcho-primitivist.

Oak trees, acorn recipes and urban food forests are all segues into introducing Melbourne's forthcoming festival of art and sustainability seven thousand oaks.

If the above is difficult to read (click for bigger), you can also read it at Trouble by clicking here.

If you want to know more about the seven thousand oaks festival please click on the link.

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The World According

It's been two years since Meg and I watched one of the darkest films of our lives, The World According to Monsanto. This brilliant and highly informed film is a precursor to the more popular and recent Food Inc., which we actually enjoyed a few months ago. However after watching The World According to Monsanto it took us several days to resurface from a very black cloud, at which time I wrote the following letter to the intransigent John Brumby (click for bigger).

Only after speaking to David Holmgren recently was I was a little more relaxed about Monsanto. Holmgren basically said that any science driven by such intense greed is bound to fall over; is bound to fail – the money clouds the science.

However for a company like this to entirely own the seeds that support human life, while at the same time engineering seeds to be dependent upon harmful petro-chemical pesticides, is very troubling for human populations, not to mention non-human. So, despite the very poor (albeit highly funded) science we still have to remain vigilant about their agenda.

Growing or foraging for our own food not only makes us more resilient to global ecological and economic crises, it disempowers monological corporates like Monsanto from experimenting despotically.

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Greenwash #11 in Trouble - a poethics of foraging

For a few years now I’ve been interested in how permaculture, and its siblings – biodynamic and natural farming – can inform an arts practice. In other words, how an arts practice can follow suit in the way in which it produces things, biomimicking natural systems and therefore having something to return to the land it has taken from. More recently I’ve been thinking about foraging as another such activity that can inform art and help move it on from an industry embedded in capitalist structures. An ethic of foraging attends directly to the reclamation of public food lands and to the reclamation of a ‘collective wealth’. Read on here.

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See also: collectivewealth.org

Image: (detail) Feral Fruit Map, Google map collaboration (as initiated by Axel White), Melbourne, 2010 onwards. To participate contact: axelinaustralia@yahoo.com

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A permaculture poetics

Last year I wrote that "The potential for a (post-industrial, post aggregate-growth) biophysical poetry originates in the development of intellectual humus – nutrient rich, responsive, aerated and well-drained minds not functioning in isolation to everything else" (Angelaki 14:2, Ecopoetics and Pedagogies). I was outlining why I believed permaculture, at a systems level, was a far better model for the arts and for culture generally if we are to move beyond the dominant anti-ecological ideology of aggregate growth capitalism. Employing biomimicry as a conceptual model for our food production can also apply to the arts, and will assist in building an ecological culture.

This year I was invited to submit a poem to a new online poetry journal called Spiral Orb, which its US based editor, Eric Magrane, suggests is "an experiment in permaculture poetics". Wow! Things are really moving now. Here's the link to Spiral Orb's table of contents page, itself a composted poem. And here's a link to my contribution, Permamesostic, my first substantial poem for the year (which you can see a detail of below).

So, enjoy the polyculture that is this exciting new poetry journal!

With poems by Bailey, Bowden, Buckheit, Buntin, Conrad, Delea, Doreski, Gens, Jones, Lang, Peterson, Rerick, Staples, Sugar, Toso, Wankan and an opening poem composting lines from each of the pieces in Spiral Orb One. Each line is embedded with a hyperlink to its original poem. Once at each poem, you will find links to the other poems in Spiral Orb One. Anticipate the poems making contact with one another in an odd and perfect manner.

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Aggregated idiocy

We are at a point in time in Australia where environmental consultants are having to recommend to government which rivers will need to die in order for others to survive. Such is the legacy of our occupation. Man-made ecocide follows the banners of "progress" and "growth". But the reports will get buried; another ecological violation will go unaccounted; another government policy, greenwashed as "sustainability", will seduce and delude a largely urban constituency.

The often-invoked term 'sustainability' tends to obscure the seriousness of the situation; clearly no culture which sets in motion massive processes of biospheric degradation which it has normalised, and which it cannot respond to or correct, can hope to survive for very long. Val Plumwood, 2002

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Greenwash #10 in Trouble - Art, Abstraction and Animal Cruelty

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Plasticity?

I was recently invited to submit a short video poem as part of a collection to be exhibited at this year's Sydney Writer's Festival (17-23 May), curated by Angela Stretch. What, video poetry at a writer's festival? Outrageous! But don't be alarmed, the exhibition doesn't make the official programme.

So, I decided to make a new work with Zeph, which I finished editing today. It will be viewed without sound in Sydney, but I've made it to work with audio as well. Meg helps build the vocals and all together we make another Artist as Family + Peej collective effort. Enjoy!

born free of ideology
we are gullible and trusting.
we learn from our elders
and we pass on the abstractions
to our children.
the depression rate
doubles every ten years.

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A chance hound

I caught a ride on a Greyhound bus recently, traveling overnight between Melbourne and Sydney, and had the pleasure of sitting next to Chris, a blogger from Newcastle. He got me up to speed with some of the climate science debate that I'd tuned out of, and I relayed to him some of the potentially exciting permaculture bottom-up rebuilds going on around the world, including the hot topic of Detroit. Chris is a mathematician and physicist by trade, and puts his digital two cents worth (quite literally) here. He is also part of the Newcastle Transition Town movement and I was able to explain to him a little about our own group – the Hepburn Relocalisation Network. I'm a snorer and a constant mover in sleep at the best of times so if you read this Chris, apologies in retrospect if I kept you up. One of the things we discussed while still compus, and something I can't ever appreciate, is why the mainstream press is only interested in "Climate Change" when Peak Oil is actually more calculable, arguably better understood and just as societally problematic, and why aren't all these things – energy descent, global warming, aggregate-growth based ecological destruction, factory farming, animal slavery, anthropogenicism and anthropocentrism just labeled for what they are collectively – Ecological Crisis?

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Anybody can be good in the country

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Not everybody can be good in the country...

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Primitive poetics

On Saturday a few of us adults took 12 boys on a bush adventure for Zeph's birthday. We walked for two and a half hours, stopping to make, observe or find things to collect. One of the activities they were assigned was to collectively build a shelter in ten minutes. The first peg shows the result. At the end of the walk we came across the remnants of a large forest installation I made between 2000 and 2005, where boardwalks and wallaby grass tracks led you through a series of environments subtly altered as physical or biophysical poems.

The type of sedge grass in this forest is the oldest locally living flora. Their origins predate eucalypt forests and are supposedly as ancient as the dinosaurs.

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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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