With our recent project in Sydney I think we have achieved what we set out to do in showing how art can itself be a biophysical resource. In this new work, Natural Bitterness, I attempt a similar thing – the poem doubles as video field guide for edible weeds and wild foods abundant in our area this spring.
This poem is dedicated to Alexis Pitsopoulos, our local wild foods expert and cook.
Amanita muscaria
"Once you abstract, to the extent that humans do, you lose the sense of connection to the earthly scentscience of another species... perhaps."This is a beautiful example of budgetless (no waste) filmmaking – poetic, humorous, philosophical and essential; contiguous with mycelial, and in the spirit of interweb, networks. Read more...
The very same company who refuses to acknowledge its responsibility, pay out proper recompense and decontaminate the water in Bhopal in India twenty-five years after the world's worst chemical disaster, is currently building a chemical agriculture department at La Trobe University to deliver us more government supported monological and polluting commercialised science.
Here's how the Victorian Government's, Invest Melbourne, introduces us to Dow Chemicals:
Dow AgroSciences LLC, based in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, is a top-tier agricultural company that combines the power of science and technology with the "Human Element” to constantly improve what is essential to human progress. Dow AgroSciences provides innovative technologies for crop protection, pest and vegetation management, seeds, traits, and agricultural biotechnology to serve the world's growing population. Global sales for Dow AgroSciences, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Dow Chemical Company, are $4.5 billion. Learn more at DowAgro.Really? Well we should all feel very secure and happy that we're in good hands after reading that.
I’ve been in the bush again, grafting a variety of fruit tree cuttings onto wild apples and hawthorns. I pruned quince, peach, apricot, Fuji, Granny Smith, and nectarine from local street trees. I spent six dollars fifty on grafting tape and from this I aim to make about a hundred grafts onto mature, wild stocks. My girlfriend Meg has nicknamed one of the hardy, well-established wild apples we’ve been experimenting on, The Fruit Salad Tree. It’s a work in progress to see how many different varieties of fruits we can grow onto it. Click image to read on...
A party that doesn't believe in climate change is a party that champions pollution.
Twelve Russian scientists famously chose to starve to death rather than eat the unique collection of seeds and plants they were protecting for humanity during the 900-day siege of Leningrad in the second world war. But the world's first global seed bank now faces destruction once more, to make way for a private housing estate.Read on here.
I was recently invited to submit a critical work for Cordite's issue 33: Creative Commons. Here's an excerpt from All Rights Relinquished, in which I outline my perception of the relationship between private property and ecological crises.
The reestablishment of local food commons in union with the development of a global creative commons comes from the recognition that we are biological beings, evolved from fungi – and thus evolved from complex networks of interrelation; webs of mycelial and intellectual connectivity not limited by private capital. The dominant ideology attacks the reciprocity of open, public supply networks. A public supply of resources, both conceptual and corporeal, is a decentred supply system that makes local communities more resilient [in the face of climate chaos and peaking oil supplies]. Read on.
Cheap oil has made us forget the proper relationship we once had to the first six inches of the Earth’s crust. Yet we now know that microbial forests—networks of microfauna and microfungi—operate invisibly beneath us, generating the conditions for plant life to flourish and thus produce food. Soil not oil is a clear enough message, but increasingly difficult to translate to an expanding urban population evermore estranged from the interdependent processes of healthy soil ecology and permanent food supply.
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
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.
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.
Click for bigger.---------------------------
1. Val Plumwood, 2002
2. ibid.
Shelling acorns (click for bigger).
If the above is difficult to read (click for bigger), you can also read it at Trouble by clicking here.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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?
Read more...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.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.
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.Read more...
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.
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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