The Garden of Self Defence

Two New Blogs

2009-11-02T14:38:00.005+11:00

This blog has now been split into two and renamed as follows:

1. The more theoretical blog Permapoesis, which gives air to my poetics, critical writing, art and research.

2. The more pragmatic blog Garden Notes for Relocalisation, notes which began in October 2008.

The end of its digital life

2009-07-19T00:16:00.004+10:00

This blog has come to the end of its digital life. It is in decomposition mode, readying itself for a regeneration, somewhere else.

The themes of this blog have centred around cyclical time, chance, non-hierarchy, composting, self-sufficiency, radical other, permapoesis, excrement, regeneration, future scenarios, heirloom vegetables, distributed gender, distributed populations, cities as stasis, pop-fascism, agents for waste, loving humans, lovers of wild nature, disembodied centrists, the artist as family, and of course permaculture, energy descent and climate change.

Thanks for reading. Please click "next blog" above to find out what the picture means below.

Growing our own

2009-07-18T01:19:00.005+10:00

It will astound most people to realise that a visit to the supermarket to buy food is a greater threat to our environment than all the pollution caused by coal fired power stations. Nearly 30% of the CO2 in our atmosphere is caused by us not growing our own food. Non-renewable energy is used to plough the fields, harvest and process the crop and take it to market. The fertilisers, pesticides and weed killers used to grow the crop are derived from oil. In fact 75% of the energy that is used to grow our food occurs once it has left the farm. The kitchen fridge uses more energy than the farm tractor. In some areas more energy is used to drive to the supermarket than is used on the farm. Up to 25% of the energy is consumed in wasteful packaging. Clive Blazey, Digger's Seeds

This week I planted 8 rhubarb shoots among indigenous grasses along the top of the dry-stone wall. You can't see them, their hiding in the mulch. Rhubarb likes well-drained soil and will grow in full-shade to full-sun conditions. Abundant for breakfasts or desserts for much of the year.

Also planted in aged, thick bush mulch are our broad beans. Frost hardy, their young leaves make a great winter salad. We collected our broad bean seeds from our brilliant crop last year. No money spent, just working within a system of cyclical regeneration, rather than linear death – supermarkets, wage-slavery, et al.

You can never go back to supermarket eggs after caring for your own chooks. They make great family friends. We free-range ours and pen in our vegies. Their shit is as golden as their eggs in a simple system of ecological-economics; circulatory reciprocity. No packaging -much goodness.

Digger's heirloom seeds are sowed tightly in this bed, and will be planted out later when the seedlings are bigger and our new raised beds are built. We typically get about 85-95% success rate with their seeds. A range of seeds including garlic, elephant leek, kale, snap peas, silverbeet, cos lettuce, spinach and broccoli.

The shed of interrelation, SOI (in progress). This will soon become our artist-in-residence shed for budding permies.

A good friend

2009-07-15T12:20:00.011+10:00

Every morning at about nine and again at about eleven I call on my friend here. While tea is all the rage I celebrate my old-schoolness, black no sugar.

When I mentioned to a friend a while ago that we will quickly need to cease our reliance on the transportation of goods and resources he agreed, however added that there should be a few exceptions like spices and other things only grown in the tropics. We white people can be so flexible with our ethics. My preferred bean comes from Goroka in Papua New Guinea, owned and operated by locals and is certified organic by NASSA.

Of course the exceptions will soon be determined for us by energy descent and climate change. These luxurious days are numbered.

Kenneth Davidson

2009-07-14T12:18:00.017+10:00

Gertrude Stein warned the young and egotistical Ernest Hemingway that "if you keep on doing newspaper work you will never see things, you will only see words". I think this is a brilliant summary of journalists in general, but not so Kenneth Davidson who steps down as a senior columnist with The Age this week. Here's my letter they didn't publish in his honour –

Kenneth Davidson will be truly missed. Over his career he has painfully witnessed and brilliantly critiqued Mussolini's definition of fascism – the merger of state and corporate power – coming into full effect in Victoria under the Kennett, Bracks and Brumby governments. Very few journalists have so doggedly reported on the wasting away of public assets to benefit private interests at the expense of the environment, and therefore our future communities. With pop culture – endless festivals, grand prixs, touring spectacles – our attention is easily drawn away from years of democratic erosion. Thanks Kenneth for helping us remain informed and clear-eyed.

Davidson's last column on water is a cracker. He'll continue to submit articles to The Age and co-edit D!SSENT magazine.

We at the Garden of Self Defence salute you KD!

Seven days of recuperation

2009-07-12T14:58:00.012+10:00

Seven days in Blackwood, offline, setting out a new work, dozing in front of the fire, hanging out with my grand girl, reading Val Plumwood, David Holmgren, Derrick Jensen, David Graeber, Gertrude Stein and Joseph Jenkins' Humanure Handbook; seven days of recuperation with fellow, delicious rat-bags; seven oxygenating late-afternoon walks before beer o'clock.

Processes of circularity

2009-07-08T11:02:00.003+10:00

I'm in the early stages of writing a work on regenerating community for an RMIT conference later in the year. Here is my first thesis and a quote from Val Plumwood to give an idea where this work is heading.

Thesis One. It is not possible for communities to regenerate when their systems are based upon linear, aggregate-growth economics. Regeneration is embedded in the processes of ecological circularity – the sharing of resources.

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

2009-07-04T10:07:00.005+10:00

We are melancholic since the picture plane invention of prisons. (Graeber, McLuhan)

Play is all we have to treat our progressive pathologies. And so why do our children, who bring so much joy, also make us sad? Perhaps because they make us adults, perpetual servants to reason.

A greenhorn

2009-07-03T11:17:00.019+10:00

to be a novice or

amateur at life ;to dip in ,to string along (

sometimes hammering but generally smoothing what soft people call '

personal truth' –

revision ;)

means we can act ,get up and at a given moment after despair

ask? before answering in a straight line

:great" even walk out if we need to some of us have had t.o

after the kill and after the feed and after the shitful shitty ol crap .ew

reclamation )again

Nick Keys at Collective Wealth

2009-07-01T10:35:00.005+10:00

astrid had been talking incessantly about the alpacas, but we were yet to see one. i think she has been in love with them ever since we went to an alpaca farm in tasmania, where a rotund man with a grey bushrangers-beard talked breathlessly as he showed us around, emphasising the parental advantages of alpaca cria over human babies in between an information-stream about the minutiae of alpaca farming. a wide-eyed astrid soaked up every last detail and will recall them at any given opportunity. actually, she was sweet on alpacas before that, but the visit to the farm certainly consecrated the affection. read on.

Making new toys with old ones

2009-06-30T21:23:00.002+10:00

The Plan

2009-06-28T13:04:00.005+10:00

The Problem

2009-06-26T17:44:00.008+10:00

I don't believe you Brumby

2009-06-25T09:43:00.011+10:00

More here.

Shed of Interrelation (part three)

2009-06-24T18:16:00.021+10:00

Meg and I insulated and plastered the ceiling of the Shed of Interrelation (SoI) today. You're looking at the small bathroom where a bath and composting toilet will go. The shed is for artists/writers-cum-woofers to take short residencies and rest, make art and work a little in the garden. The shed is a place to encourage transitional thinking in the arts, to encourage permapoesis where art and organic food generation are embedded activities.

In the meantime our winter seeds are rocking. Heirloom elephant leek, garlic, silverbeet fordhook, pak choy, sweet pea, broad beans, broccoli, carrots, black kale, spinach, spring onions, beetroot, baby cos lettuce and cabbage mini. Meg and I were discussing today how many families could potentially be living on this quarter acre in 10-20 years. I think it could feed about 15-18 people in the Summer months and maybe 10-12 in Winter.

I'm looking down on young banksias and heavily mulched areas with lomandras, poa tussocks, broad beans, almonds, olives, peaches and my chain-sawed eucalyptus balls. The dry stone HaHa wall back-filled with rubble allows for water to pass through it without disturbing the integrity of the wall. You can also see a little of the social warming fence. We persuaded our neighbours not to have a fence that lined the whole boundary, but just enough to have a little more privacy. They also agreed that I could build it as a slatted fence, again for social warming properties. Of course the water tank finishes the picture and finishes an often quoted mantra on this blog spoken by Cuban permaculturalist Roberto Perez at our town hall last year–

Grow your own food, catch your own water, say hello to your neighbour.

Here's a pic of the main house showing flying fox route and solar panels. I'm also showing off my deck building skills here. Split level decks are party decks. You often hear of them collapsing and killing a dozen stomping teenagers, that's why this one is low to the ground.

I love Zeph's cubby as much as he does. Apart from the obvious – cute, small, red, up-in-the-air – it frost protects our toms. Meg collected another basket full last week. Almost unbelievably the fruit was still ripening despite the plants having died weeks ago. They're not great, but fine for cooking up. You can also see the beginning of the flying fox route and the tail end of the social warming fence. The bed in front of it will be the kick-arse rhubarb patch. Rhubarb is year-round gold for food gardeners. I remember my Dad's awesome patch when I was Zeph's age.

And, finally a place very dear to my heart – the compost area. Underneath the new window of the Shed of Interrelation is a herb bed that's doing OK, but I have decided to dig them out and extend the compost bays to three. We'll also have the humanure from the dry worm composting toilet. Therefore we can have four brews at four different stages. I'm so excited about this. The building of the Shed of Interrelation has already led to so many possibilities, even before the first resident.

Chewers Borers Suckers

2009-06-23T09:16:00.036+10:00

A friend of mine has some justifiable problems with the word 'permanent' and its use in the portmanteau 'permaculture' and in my portmanteaus 'permaplay' and 'permapoesis'. He writes:

I was reading Holmgren's 'Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability' last night and read a couple of passages which took me back to our brief exchange about the word permaplay, permaculture etc., and in particular to my mild general objection to the word 'permanent'. So I noted these passages when I read them: xxx "Even the idea of permanence at the heart of permaculture is problematic to say the least." And, xxvii 'The limitation of this concept of sustainable culture is that it suggests some stable state that we might arrive at sometime soon (by applying permaculture principles)".

It goes without saying that individual life is temporary. Cultures, however, are more ongoing. They are mutable and transforming, but ongoing. Some last longer than others, but of course no culture is totally permanent in a literal sense. The ones that last longer directly participate in, or mimic closely, natural systems. We can say these cultures are more permanent than others. The ones that die out more quickly have generally adopted linear, anti-ecological philosophies and economics based upon social divisiveness and relations of avoidance. As I've often quoted, the Dja Dja Wurrung lived in these parts for 40,000 years and aboriginal culture continues to survive in areas of Australia where their genocide was less fierce. Aboriginal culture is based on relations of common substance, they see themselves as contiguous with the world. If you compare continuous Aboriginal culture to our own, you can say it is permanent and ours is not, despite the fact that we have done everything in our power to make their culture impermanent like ours. We see ourselves as exclusive and separated, the corollaries of which (dioxins, warheads, plutonium, DDT) brand our culture abstract, fantastical and impermanent.

If you interpret the word 'permanent' in the above three portmanteaus as meaning 'static' or 'fixed' you've missed the point. Permanent here implies mutability. Nothing exists for very long in a rigid state. The most controlling regimes are generally the most vulnerable to collapse. Immutability equates to impermanency. The steady-state of a forest implies a forest in active, cyclical momentum, where everything is taken up by chewers, borers or suckers, used for life, excreted, only to be taken up and used again in a never ending cycle. The steady-state of a forest can only be mutable. Its health relies on constant change, active reciprocity and chance encounters. A natural ecology, operating within a non-hierarchical, closed-cycle where every organism is a participant, is what a modern permaculture mimics at a systems level.

Our culture is currently predominated by post-structuralist philosophy: post-modernism. "Keep moving, even in place keep moving." (Gilles Deleuze). Post-moderns brought us some better thinking about race and gender and sexuality, and brilliantly critiqued the modernist male bully, but all this has done little to mitigate our abusive impermaculture. In fact our culture's aggression has only intensified over the past 30 years. Post-modernism coincided with psychopathic Neo-liberalism, as if they begat each other through oppositional warring. But by linear progression – pre-modernism, modernism, post-modernism – Po-mo is yet another urban-centric, ecologically disembodied school of philosophy that "rages against permanency." (Hamish Morgan).

The sign below is representative of our culture. The three types of organisms found on Earth all coerced into being us, shooting off on their own singular path, everything operating autonomously, everything monological and separating out, everything getting closer to the end of their individual paths. Impermanence. Linear death. Chk chk boom.

From apocalypse to permapoesis

2009-06-22T09:54:00.043+10:00

Our culture, in its dominant form, has an unstoppable death urge. Nice thought. Great way to start the week. Yum. Mass death.

In a relatively straight line over six thousand years our efforts to wipe out every living thing including ourselves only intensify. Six thousand years of canonical philosophy has brought us merely doctrines for superior ecological disembodiment. Here, now, nearby, indigenous grasslands around outer Melbourne are next in line for the chop, to be replaced by a toxic sprawling development the size of Canberra. When it comes to the destruction of natural ecologies, Monsanto fan and state premier John Brumby would have to be the most extreme government we've seen in Victoria to date. As I said the death urge only intensifies, Brumby merely a wealthy (in relative terms) benefactor of its momentum. Be it grasslands, water systems, agriculture or energy consumption he is a major mass murderer of non-human life – life most of us don't even know exists.

Stasis. Death. The end of all life, if the dominant culture has its way. It's where we've been headed from the beginning of this several-thousand year journey. It is the only possible end for a culture of linear – as opposed to cyclical – progress. Beginning, middle, end. Self-extinguishment. The only solace and escape from separation: from ourselves, from each other, from the rest of the planet. Plutonium. DDT. Dioxin. Why else would we poison ourselves? No other explanation makes comprehensive sense. Apocalypse. Derrick Jensen p 227.

Put aside climate change and peak oil for a moment and think about how many other ways we can bring about mass destruction. The elimination of biodiverse systems; the collapse of insect populations causing widespread disease and pestilence to proliferate, in turn triggering a global chemical revolution that our governments will of course endorse. This will hand companies like Monsanto and Dow a license to stage more chemical warfare, causing further mass outbreaks of cancer, respiratory diseases and death to rich microbial life that does so much to keep us and our fellow organisms healthy. Apocalypse. The proliferation of factory farms; the growth of super viruses from live-stock antibiotic mutations and genetically modified grains; GM grains contaminating heirloom seeds that are generally hardier, more robust and more nutritious; dioxins and antibiotic pollutants (from paper mills and industrial farming) in our rivers and oceans killing biodiversity in our waters, triggering mass death of important ecologies which provide us and others health. More and more children raised in disembedded suburbs, completely unaware that their wage-slave parents, their toxic food, their creativity-destroying schooling – all constitute a dominant culture that is an unstoppable monster. Increases in self-harm, violence, anorexia, cancer, obesity, ADHD, mental illness, hatred, ecological ignorance, deafness to indigenous suffering, rape, warhead manufacturing, plutonium production, plastic waste dumping, and on and on it goes, an ever-expanding one-way road to annihilation. Why? Why do we agree to participate in a system so suicidal, so abusive, so destructive?

When you next read about a state or federal government making plans to wipe-out native grasslands, build new coal stations, mine wild mountains, ship soldiers, green-light GM crop trials, green-light businesses contributing to factory slave culture in poorer countries, throw millions at a Grand Prix, build new pulp mills, new airports, super farms, live-exporting, harvest old growth forests, dump toxic waste at sea, ask yourself what whole picture does this make. Is there anything sane about our culture? Do I have to participate?

Imagine if there were no industrialised agricultures. No ADHD, obesity, cancer, tooth decay, violent mood disorders. Imagine most of us contributed a few days a week, from an early age, to localised food production. We only ate our own community's organic food in season. Children were given age-specific responsibilities within community food production that, in turn, gave them skills, bodily strength and healthy self-esteem. There was little mental illness as everyone had a place, a role. Our schooling was specific to our community's ecology and social wellness, and to online communities we developed as we got older. We rarely travel, import or export because we know that a system based upon transporting resources and human resources is suicidal to our species and to much of non-human life. Because we all share in food production there is much time to pursue creative interests. We have much free-time, and we have little money. We participate in a "free-poor" society where free time is valued as the greatest wealth. The cults of celebrity, anxiety and wishfulness have all died in the arse and are no longer valued because we once again like who we are. Dags are sexy and cool, we're all big cool dags now. There is no obesity nor anorexia but a great diversity of body shapes inbetween. The only mining that takes place is for the production of renewable energy technology. Technologies that fuel our low-energy houses and a few other essentials such as digital networking devices for global connectedness and creative purposes. This technology is given out in greater quantity to communities who actively show they are repairing their local wild ecologies. A federal government merely provides security from global corporate terrorism and oversees mediation for neighbouring communities who are in dispute. They do not interfere with or attempt to trade resources belonging to small local communities, or rather that small local communities belong to. People are encouraged to only breed to the capacity of their local landbase; to their local food and water bowls. All Monsanto, Coke, Halliburton, Walmart and Mcdonalds (a more extensive list will be drawn up in due course) chief executives and board directors will serve a minimum of 10 years in community compost fields, and be taught the proper treatment of humans and non-humans through social-ecology classes. On release they will be monitored and if they abuse again, they will be humanely destroyed and composted. Politicians known to have actively contributed to and were therefore abusers in the old system of pop-fascism, will be also encouraged to work in the compost fields and be monitored by the community in case they attempt to abuse again.

All this is highly possible. It is highly possible to participate in our culture while exorcising the dominant abusive traits – supermarket food, celebrity culture, two-party fraudulence, male-aggression, warring religions (monotheism), aggregate-growth economics. We can start now as individual households and build relations with others who share values based on permapoesis – permanent, cyclical meaning-making – not suicidal, linear apocalypse. It's time to ditch the old school.

E. Alarmbell Australis (2003)

2009-06-21T15:24:00.004+10:00

Click for bigger.

2009-06-19T18:01:00.004+10:00

Suck and truck

2009-06-18T08:36:00.039+10:00

"It’s a gift under our land,” says Michael Opie, the managing director of Big Wet Natural Spring Water, in relation to his proposed second commercial bore licence at Musk, near Daylesford. I rang Opie a few weeks ago to ask him some questions about it. Whereas I can understand his desire to tap into the groundwater resource beneath his home for his family's use, I cannot understand why he is permitted to make commercial this public resource, transport it with dwindling and polluting fossil fuels to Melbourne, and sell it on to fill private swimming pools and to other bottled water companies such as Coca-Cola Amatil and Cadbury Schweppes.

Opie has spent considerable money setting up his first bore a year ago. The two hydrological studies required to obtain his first licence alone totalled more than $20,000. On top of this cost permit fees range between $1200-$1500, and the construction costs between $20,000-$50,000 for a bore of this size. Goulburn-Murray Water is the private company that oversees the licencing of bores in the region, and G-M W are ultimately answerable to the Minister for Water, Tim Holding. I spoke to Randal Nott, a hydrologist at the Department of Sustainability and Environment, and he said that onsite and immediate area ecological testing is quite extensive for a commercial bore, however nobody, to his knowledge, is assessing the ecological effects of pollution caused by the transportation and bottling of groundwater. Contrary to Nott's "extensive testing" a number of locals, immediate to the Musk bore, complained about their groundwater stores drying up last Summer.

After Michael Opie's initial costs and after obtaining his permit he can start pumping water, buying the precious resource for a mere $2.30 per megalitre, or in real terms, about 6 cents a water tanker load. Considering the cost of a 600ml bottle of water, there's some pretty big margin there.

While it is encouraging that Goulburn-Murray Water has indicated an interest in making the area of Wombat, which includes Musk, a water management overlay, it can be argued that this only sends these types of commercial licences elsewhere. The problem of harvesting finite natural resources aggregately is culturally systemic; the abstraction of accumulating figures that doesn't stack up to the reality of what the land can physically support. As Michael Opie pointed out to me, if he wasn't doing it someone else would be. Opie believes his business is conducted sustainably despite the steady stream of 28,000 litre water tankers he employs for cartage between Musk and Melbourne. And he maintains that he is not growing his business, however later in our conversation he mentioned the possibility of purchasing new bores at other properties, down the track. Like with all modern-capitalist enterprises, growth is God.

For Australians to drink water bottled in plastic we now burn over 500,000 barrels of oil every year. In 2006, figures from the Australasian Bottled Water Institute Inc. show the amount was a mere 315,000 barrels. That's about 35% growth in three years. Imagine the waste products – plastics and emissions. It is not surprising therefore that one of the directors of Coca-Cola Amatil (a company who has 70% of the bottled water market), was until recently a 10-year director of Woodside Petroleum. Jillian Broadbent is also a Reserve Bank director. Mount Franklin and Pump bottled water brands are, of course, Coca-Cola's healthiest products in relative terms. Their other products actively contribute to the obesity epidemic and related health disorders associated with high-sugar and high-preservative based foods and drinks – tooth decay, mood swings, self-harm, aggressive behaviour and ADHD, each especially prevalent in young people. But with all their products industrial-scale polluting is unavoidable and no amount of greenwashing or positive PR can remedy the fact that bottled water is a brown industry dressed up to look green. Opie told me that Coca-Cola Amatil is a model corporation with whom he's proud to do business.

The water Michael Opie is privileged to use and sell for profit in real terms still belongs to the Dja Dja Wurrung people. Several years ago Dja Dja Wurrung elder Aunty Sue Rankin asked the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment to produce documents proving that the Crown has the right to occupy these lands. According to the Daylesford Advocate newspaper on June 2, 2004, local DSE officers acknowledged that they "cannot produce these documents and doubt that such documents exist". Since the Dja Dja Wurrung's almost total genocide (through cultural coercion, European diseases and mass killings) in the mid-nineteenth century, the Monarch of England has "owned" this precious resource, although it is also argued it now belongs to the people of the Hepburn shire by proxy. In all this we can see that the ownership of groundwater, like all other natural resources in Australia, is at first sight ambiguous. But the ambiguity only comes from the fact that many of us do not actively acknowledge the chequered, abusive, colonising past on which most of our industries are enculturated; a past, on the back of which, Michael Opie has secured 'his gift'.

Click for bigger.

Since June 12, 6 days ago, we can see above that 336,000 litres (12 tankers) of groundwater have been transported to Cadburys in Melbourne. This is just one commercial bore of many in this area. Official charts and figures, such as these, are designed to mask the violence of environmental abuse by making this activity look rational and sane. To be fooled by this is to fool ourselves that our culture, based on aggregate-growth economics and the transportation of resources, can ever be sustainable and at peace with the world.

Future models are already among us, be they ancient or modern permacultures, and it is very evident that corporate capitalism – millions of people all acting selfishly at the expense of others and the environment – is not one of them.

Our average daily use

2009-06-16T08:26:00.018+10:00

The Federal Labor party has just axed the solar panel rebate and replaced it with a less than encouraging solar credits scheme.

We got our panels through a solar nieghbourhood scheme in February. Our bill for this quarter was $74, and as you can see our emissions in the last two quarters have decreased at kick-arse speed (admittedly rising a tad for winter). But, so far we haven't been paid for what excess clean energy we have put back on the grid. We found out today that Powercor had lost our record of payment for the buyback meter ($160). Convenient. Supposedly everything is cool now.

We would never have been able to afford these panels without the government rebate. The role of governments should be to support us to make our lives more and more ethical and less and less destructive, and yet the opposite occurs – they allow themselves, and we put up with it, to be controlled by corporate lobbyists. In this case the coal industry. That's why the Federal government has axed this brilliant scheme as it was just getting off the ground. Under the new scheme I'm not sure we could have managed the extra costs. The old scheme has been far too successful and therefore is a big threat to the 'culture of make believe' (Jensen). The government says on its website:

Unprecedented growth under the Government's Solar Homes and Communities Plan has resulted in closure of this program...

If you have panels already and haven't signed the petition for the Federal government to pay decent solar feed in tariffs, you can do so here. (Thanks O!)

Waterless composting toilet

2009-06-14T20:49:00.007+10:00

Since we started planning our permaculture garden two years ago we have given most of our energy to water conservation, renewable energy, heirloom food gardening, worm generation, composting, indigenous planting, companion planting and buying less and less items packaged in plastic. But we haven't yet got to black and grey water recycling and composting. So, after talking with a friend yesterday, who has just returned from a NZ permaculture farm where he saw a basic, home-made one in successful operation, I decided it's time to build a composting worm toilet in the guest shed. Any tips or good advice most welcome.
Design from here.

Sunday morning

2009-06-14T12:05:00.003+10:00

Steady-state for future growth

2009-06-12T17:59:00.008+10:00

The word economics comes from the Greek ‘ta oikonomika’, which means the science of household management. It is how one takes care of one’s house. The word has suffered devaluation, and now means the management of money.

The word ecocide comes from Greek as well, ‘oikos’, meaning ‘house’, and ‘cidium’, meaning to ‘slay’ or ‘destroy’. Ecocide is the destruction of the house. Derrick Jensen

If you walk into a healthy forest it is brimming with life from deep down in the soil to the highest branch. If you walk into a paddock of industrialised agriculture there is only one or two species growing in dead soil, and there’s a heavy reliance on oil - tractors, pesticides, fertilisers – to keep these things alive. That is before anything is transported to our tables. Oil, of course, is running out. The forest provides our future model, the paddock represents the old school – John Howard, Milton Freidman, General Pinochet et al.

We have to get the carbon cycle back in balance and to do this, permaculture – based on steady-state economics – is the best ‘whole systems’ solution we have. Many will laugh now, but a gardeners’ revolution is the future; a return to localised, healthy food. Suits and hipsters will exchange briefcases, cafes and dark rimmed specs for pitchforks, raised beds and shovels. They’ll find a way to make them sexy, and good for them, while metrosexuals, the boys nature forgot, will actually grow muscle.

Shed of interrelation (part two)

2009-06-11T17:39:00.006+10:00

On dusk tonight, relations of common substance, the world comes in, relations of avoidance in decline. Some new, some reclaimed materials from the local tip. The future of food is under our feet.

Give up hope on the environment

2009-06-11T13:37:00.007+10:00

A wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place. Hope implies powerlessness, a lack of agency, and a reliance on forces beyond your control. To focus on an abstract sustainable future neglects the real-world actions that can be taken right now. When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to ‘hope’ at all. We simply do the work. Derrick Jensen, 2006

More here.

Image by Brian Carlson, licensed under Creative Commons.

Shed of interrelation (in progress)

2009-06-10T21:52:00.019+10:00

Click for bigger.

Tomorrow we start work on finishing the guest shed. The idea for this shed is to encourage artist and writer friends to come and stay and work on their various projects while contributing an hour or so a day to food gardening. Permapoesis is permanent meaning making. Sustainable food is central to sustainable arts practice. This guest shed will represent the coming together of these two things, the coming together of a modern permaculture.

Webs of interrelation (under construction)

2009-06-09T10:24:00.010+10:00

Sand & skin

2009-06-08T14:41:00.042+10:00

Almost every day people from all over the world come to my blog via the following two images.

If you missed the original post, I drew the above work in the sand at Port Fairy last Summer (2008). I used a stick of driftwood to etch with.

And this, etched into my flesh in 2006, represents a future societal model that has made an intelligent return to ecological functioning. WOW! all that in a tat that looks like someone has used my shoulder to rest their beer on. The original post can be read here.

Slow text (towards a definition)

2009-06-08T10:16:00.029+10:00

Here's another excerpt from Free-dragging, Slow Text and Permapoesis: towards a biophysical poetry, recently completed for a forthcoming Angelaki issue. To give some background I have just introduced the concept of hopelessness: By understanding that life is painful, unnecessarily destructive and generally hopeless, we have nothing to loose but to hop on it.

A portrait of the artist as superscript type.

Caged, the Silent Piece: 2'20"

2009-06-05T10:51:00.013+10:00

Dja Dja Wurrung elder Aunty Sue Rankin at the Human Rights Day gathering in Melbourne, 2005

The best way [to procure a run] is to go outside and take up a new run, provided the conscience of the party is sufficiently seared to enable him without remorse to slaughter natives right and left. It is universally and distinctly understood that the chances are very small indeed of a person taking up a new run being able to maintain possession of his place and property without having recourse to such means - sometimes by wholesale...

Ian D. Clark, pp1, Scars on the Landscape. A Register of Massacre sites in Western Victoria 1803-1859, Aboriginal Studies Press, 1995 ISBN 0855752815

Religion, there is no reason to argue

2009-06-04T14:52:00.073+10:00

I used to think, naively, that religion is arbitrary; that people are entitled to their opinions and beliefs so long as they don't abuse others. But, of course, religion is anything but arbitrary. Over the past week I have had three very different encounters with religious extremism. One from each of the main monotheisms.

The first was virtual and Islamic. I watched a documentary on SBS detailing how the Taliban are operating in Pakistani villages that they've captured. It revealed that first they use terror to frighten people into submission by beheading dissenters (an oldie but a goodie). Then they take over schools, kick out the girls and teach the boys with only one book, one way of life – Sharia law. The journalist asked a Taliban official why young boys were fighting this war and the response was, "they love to carry the guns for us" (as boys do), "we teach them to use the guns and when they're older to fight the infidels".

"Get them early!" It's the same slogan for all monotheistic religions and, of course, advertising.

The second was a little more personal and Jewish. I read newmatilda this week and made a positive comment on a Jewish writer's intelligent argument about both anti-Semite's and certain Jewish lobbyists' bigotry. I thought it was very good and clear-eyed. Whenever I make a comment online people can click on my blog name and it will direct them back here. Last night I received an abusive Anonymous comment attempting to upset my goyishness, especially by virtue of the fact he (or she) knew part of my family was raised Jewish. Right-wing Zionists can be so vulgar for chosen people, enlightened by God.

The third was my most direct experience and Christian. Today, in hospital (more knee troubles), an 83 year old Catholic man lay next to me and between life-challenging coughing fits proceeded to tell me that no one can live without God. I reminded him that the Djadjawurrung had lived in this area for 40,000 years before the missions and the state destroyed them. "Children today need to be caned by a priest or teacher", he ranted, "otherwise they will never know discipline". He later said, sensing he hadn't convinced me, "if you have no religion, you're no good; you're a communist". He had grown up in a country whose people were only given these two monological options – oppressive religion or oppressive secularism. In the end it's the same thing. We shared the air and we shared numbers. I am 38.

All three men are products of childhood propaganda. They've never grown out of it. They have suffered a similar thing to what obese kids suffer today – a life-sentence of being fed the fruits of industrialised agriculture, a new era of oppressive secularism I call pop-fascism. All of this is against nature, disembodied from wild nature, hateful of wild nature. The Taliban official was partially veiled to screen his face on camera, the Jewish Anon was fully and cowardly veiled behind his cum-stained digital screen, and the Catholic man, dying beside me, was fully transparent in his resoluteness that his God will soon offer him just rewards. None of them think of the soil when they fear death, the richness of microbial life. The possibilities for wild new life to rise from it.

Men require the silencing of others to make their mutable truths concrete. Today is the Twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the sole dance of the beautiful Tank Man (Tank Man Tango).

In the past few years I have many times dreamt of being tortured by men who hate that which is not in their own image. It's as though I'm preparing myself for my final hours. I'm hung up in a dark cell, I've been there for several days. (I have been in a hospital for nearly a week). I'm thinking that this will all end soon. I get lanced by a hot poker. I swallow. I choke. I like to think that none of this will hurt me, that I have my humanity. I'm punched in the groin with a metal glove. I will not hate these men, they are frightened, I have no fear today, they will not have my liberty today. I am free-dying. Then acid burns into my skin. I scream. Silence. 4 minutes and thirty three seconds. More screams, then –

relating

to the care of souls,

it says)

He had smiled at us,
each time we were in town, inquired
how the baby was, had two cents
for the weather, wore
(beside his automobile)
good clothes.
And a pink face.

It was yesterday
it all came out. The gambit
(as he crossed the street,
after us): "I don't believe
I know your name." Given.
How do you do,
how do you do. And then:
"Pardon me, but
what church
do you belong to,
may I ask?"

And the whole street, the town, the cities, the nation

blinked, in the afternoon sun, at the gun

was held at them. And I wavered

in the thought.

I sd, you may, sir.
He said, what, sir.
I sd, none,
sir.

And the light was back.

For I am no merchant.

Nor so young I need to take a stance

to a loaded

smile.

I have known the face

of God.

And turned away,

turned,

as He did,

his backside

Charles Olson, from The Maximus Poems, 1960

(With thanks to Ianian, Pete O, Meg and Z for their added love this week).

Desperate stuff

2009-06-03T15:04:00.014+10:00

The Victorian government has recently formed an alliance with US chemical and plastics giant Dow Chemical. Here's what Dow states on its website:

The new $230 million Biosciences Research Centre, a joint venture between the Victorian Government and La Trobe University, will boost Victoria’s ability to make these important scientific discoveries. To be located in Bundoora, Melbourne, the facility will be a world-class centre for agricultural biosciences research and development. Other agencies and organisations with complementary science objectives are invited to partner or link in to the new Centre. (GOSD added the bold)

Government backed commercialised science is based on profits at the expense of natural ecologies. There is no longer an independent CSIRO. Contrary to what it says about averting a potential food supply crisis, CSIRO, like the other hijacked departments, is part of the problem. Science has been bought by chemical companies. University scientists are paid to deliver the science that best reflects the products of large corporations, which of course isn't science at all but at a systems level, a monumental ecological travesty. Chemical agriculture can never enhance the complexities of complex microbial life in the soil, can never mimic the complexities of natural systems, and therefore can never produce sustainable agriculture. Governments who support chemical companies such as Dow and Monsanto, support the abuse of the landbase and the abuse of those that eat their food.

As people, we have to move beyond desperate monological AgriBusiness and start to once again feed ourselves in healthy ecologies. Governments think the future of agriculture is with super farms that rely on broad acre chemicalisation, but the future lies with community food sovereignty. AgriBusiness will never protect diverse life with its single focussed aggregate-growth world view.

Too Much of Me (reviewed today)

2009-06-03T09:37:00.007+10:00

Reviewed in The Age by Robert Nelson.

The rage against permanency

2009-06-02T10:57:00.010+10:00

The system of economics that both defines and bullies modern Australian society is rarely questioned or comprehensively critiqued. That is until there is collapse. But even then, and despite all the evidence against aggregate-growth economics, the system largely remains intact and it’s business as usual. Why is this? Why is it that profit-growth capitalism is resistant to being more economically efficient, more ecologically embedded and less destructive?

Arm people with organic methods of self-sufficiency and see the rapid decline of factory farms, obesity, self-harm, ADHD, tooth decay, factory slaves, dioxins, wage-slaves, drug addiction, non-compostable waste, poisoned soil, carbon pollution, and on and on and on it goes.

The artist as family

2009-05-31T22:36:00.005+10:00

Go to our blog The Artist as Family.

Abundance

2009-05-29T08:31:00.015+10:00

We've been eating locally gleaned fruit since January and this week marks the end of the season; apples, plums, blackberries quinces and pears have been in abundance in these parts and we have had free fresh fruit for almost six months.

After eating this food it is not possible to eat supermarket fruit again. In the meantime our own fruit trees are growing up.

Starting off

2009-05-27T08:22:00.011+10:00

I first started gardening when I was in primary school. I watched my Dad striking Margarita daisies and asked him to show me how to do it. Several weeks later my first tray had struck more or less, and I had caught the propagating bug. Throughout high school I built up a collection of plants and designed and tended my own herb garden. I built a hot house and turned the old chicken run into a well ordered wholesale nursery. It was probably my nursery, writing, music, drawing, painting and first serious girlfriend that got me through my troubled high school years.

Before I left home for art school I sold the nursery to pay for a 10 day white-water rafting trip down the Franklin River in Tasmania. This was my first excursion into the real wild. The interrelationship between mimicking ecology (permaculture gardening), creativity and wild nature forms my art practice today.

Mulch Island

2009-05-26T21:14:00.004+10:00

or, this is what we think of newspaper work (after Gertrude Stein).

Car(port)pentry

2009-05-24T20:25:00.009+10:00

Our house bakes in Summer in the afternoons when the sun radiates through the West side slit windows. It heats up the house dramatically and we wont, of course, get an air conditioner. So we've been saving our pennies to build a carport that will block out the sun and house the car underneath. Other benefits include no defrosting of the car's windscreen in the colder months, and our books inside, which spine to the west, wont need to be covered up from direct sunlight again.

Ideally we'd like to get rid of our car, but living in the country with poor public transport it's not yet possible. Last year we sold our second car and haven't looked back. This one will prove more difficult, but once we work out how then my carpentry business will become my bikepentry business, and this carport will make a lovely greenhouse (with red trims).

Alphabet mask Zephyr (A :- Z)

2009-05-24T20:11:00.001+10:00

Words[worth]

2009-05-23T23:17:00.006+10:00

It is easy to be caged by words: A convincing argument about a two-state solution; a memoir de profundis; a quote I've carried since I was nineteen –

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

If you want to become better at joining the dots... read this

2009-05-21T18:30:00.021+10:00

I've since come to understand the reason why school lasts thirteen years. It takes that long to sufficiently break a child's will. It is not easy to disconnect children's wills, to disconnect them from their own experiences of the world in preparation for the lives of painful employment they will have to endure...

I'm not saying by all this that Mrs. Calloway, my first grade teacher, was trying to murder the souls of her tiny charges, any more than I have been trying to say that individual scientists are necessarily hell-bent on destroying the planet or that individual Christians necessarily hate women and hate their bodies.

Derrick Jensen argues that the dominant culture's processes are psychopathic and destructive and that this destruction is often rendered invisible, or seen as "normal". The culture rapes and exploits because Darwin (and later Richard Dawkins' selfish genes) tells us this is what dominant cultures do. But Jensen reminds us that bears do not dam rivers and kill all the salmon, nor do they harvest all the berries until there are no more left. They understand that if their food supplies are healthy so are they. Thus they don't bred beyond the land's capacity. This model is what Herman Daly calls steady-state economics. The dominant culture's selfish genes destroys traditional communities in order for civilisation to expand. For those who survive, assimilation is absolutely necessary so as we no longer witness how these communities had got it so right for so long. And this is why it's so important not to use words like abuse, genocide or destruction when it comes to teaching our children about what we have done to traditional communities and ecologies. Instead destruction and violence must be rationalised to appear virtuous and reasonable – the characteristics of a psychopath.

"We're here to liberate the people of Iraq and spread democracy".

Jensen illustrates that the dominant culture's unwellness is due to its disembodied state, devoid of feeling, devoid of the visceral, creative and spiritual dimensions of life. At a systems level school traumatises us, the trauma is normalised over thirteen years, and we become competitive, destructive capitalists ready for work. Jensen argues we were not born this way. Modern schooling came with industrialisation, developed simply as a way to sever the body from the head, a necessary performance in the manufacturing of the modern wage-slave.

We constrain children spatially, we give them highly processed, out-of season food and when they fly off the walls we label them with disorders such as ADHD. Our culture is pathological and cruel, however by investing in Descartian science or in a Descartian God we can avoid admitting we are truly unwell peoples.

In A Language Older than Words, Jensen is mapping out a comprehensive third option.

The city fakes, the landbase bakes

2009-05-19T20:00:00.010+10:00

A steady-state crawl to self-sufficiency

2009-05-18T09:07:00.012+10:00

It's been a year and a half since we started the garden. We began with a cleared block and one beautiful 30 year old oak tree. The soil we inherited was highly disturbed and compacted clay. Since we started we have brought in about 18 cubic metres of mulch, weekly collected green scraps from a local cafe, regularly gleaned brown biomass from the neighbourhood, occasionally bagged horse shit from the nearby horse farm, paid for mushroom compost, and free-ranged about 12 chickens. They're outside the window as I write. They bring us so much pleasure.

Here's what the garden looked like in November, 2007. The first thing I did was build a garden shed out of reclaimed materials and a dry stone wall to deal with the cut that our neighbours had created for their house site.

Over Summer this year we got up to about 25% self-sufficiency, while our indigenous grasses, banksias, wattles and sedges took root and began to grow. We failed dismally with both our sunflower and potato crops due to the lack of soil quality, but our leeks, corn, lettuce, garlic, tomatoes, broccoli, broad beans, snap peas, cucumber, onions, pumpkin, spinach, carrots, basil, strawberries, chillies, herbs and rhubarb were incredibly generous in what they provided for us.

So, this winter it's soil improvement time again. More raised beds are about to be built and I've just gleaned more top soil from local council works up the road, brought down by a friendly worker in his truck.

Here's what the garden looks like today.

With permaculture one mimics natural ecologies to grow food in healthy environments. In other words one establishes a significant connection between indigenous and exotic plants, microbes, insects, birds and animals. This constitutes a collective health based on diversity and relations of common substance. Hierarchy, or relations of avoidance, are not honoured here. That's why this garden is based on non-capitalist principals. It goes without saying we don't use anything synthetic on our land. We do, however, kill weeds on our drive by pouring boiling water onto them. This process kills microbes in the soil so we don't do it anywhere else in the garden. And there are many other ways we still behave like capitalists competing for dominance, and this is why our garden to date merely represents a steady crawl away from the dominant culture to a socio-ecological embedded life.

If it's advertised it's probably toxic

2009-05-16T11:46:00.018+10:00

A follow on from Pollan's thoughts...

If you join the dots between a thing advertised and the materials, environments, humans and non-humans used in the process of making that thing, you'll see what I mean.

Take this example:

I walk up to the shops in my town... a massive water tanker passes me by... they advertise their phone number on the side of the truck... I call them up... I'm told they cart bore water for bottled water companies such as Big Wet and Coca-Cola... I then call those companies... they confirm that they exploit this public resource... once public to the Djadjawurrung before their genocide... I start to think about the water being taken from an ecosystem and wonder what large scale, long term water mining will do to it... I start to think about how much carbon pollution the bottled water industry generates by trucking its product around the country... and about the amount of oil required to make the plastic and therefore the landfill of toxic waste...I find out, in Australia alone, nearly 500,000 barrels per year, and for what? Because everyday people like us, just trying to earn a living, conned us into believing that bottled water is cleaner and healthier? My body, my temple – fuck the rest of everything else.

Conned by religious nuts, conned by business creeps, conned by dodgy politicians? Or do we just con ourselves by falling for the comforting lies of madmen? Why do we pay them attention, why do we pay them our wages?

Here, in my hand is one dot (a discarded water bottle thrown from a car window), and over there is another dot (the ecological sources of that waste). It's up to us to join the dots, for they represent industrial civilisation; they represent our modes of production; they represent us – ecophobic, disembodied and ignorantly abusive.

Take any advertised product, spend a day online researching who's behind that product and where the materials used for it come from, make numerous calls, join the dots, factor in the transportation costs to the environment, and I guarantee you'll find what I have found. Welcome to capitalism!

It's now time to "grow your own food, catch your own water [and energy], and say hello to your neighbour" – Roberto Perez, Cuban permaculturalist, Daylesford Town Hall, 2008.

Don't buy any food you've ever seen advertised

2009-05-15T08:44:00.009+10:00

Michael Pollan is one of America’s leading writers and thinkers in the country on the issue of food. He is author of several books about food, including The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and his latest, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. In light of what he calls the processed food industry’s co-option of “sustainability” and its vast spending on marketing, Pollan advises to be wary of any food that’s advertised.

Watch here.

Open wound, closed-mind

2009-05-12T20:02:00.018+10:00

This time last week I had just opened up my knee up with my trusty old Husqvarna 394. In the meantime, as you might of gathered, I've been reading Derrick Jensen's brilliant critique of René Descartes' "I think, I am". Are we to assume by this maxim that Descartes, a hero of modern science and philosophy, didn't experience bodily pain?

"René, my friend, don't you feel anything?" asks Jensen.

This is what my wound looks like today.

I used to believe that Descartes' most famous statement was arbitrary. Why hadn't he said, "I love, therefore I am," or "I breathe, therefore I have lungs," or "I defecate, therefore I must have eaten," or "I feel the weight of the quill on my fingers therefore I rejoice in the fact that I am alive, therefore I must be"... I no longer see Descartes' statement as arbitrary. It is representative of our culture's narcissism. This narcissism leads to a disturbing disrespect for direct experience and a negation of the body. Estranged from all of life, Descartes thought that everything was a dream, and he the dreamer.

Does Descartes' ever-expanding dream explain why companies like Monsanto dump millions of tonnes of poisons into the world's environments and strut about as though they have delivered the world a gift? Does it explain why animals are often the subjects of our abuse, or why all the ecosystems our culture comes into contact with are unwell? Does it explain why Aboriginal peoples are still largely treated with contempt or simply silenced and ignored? When we dream, Jensen is suggesting, the bombing of innocent civilians, the rape of women, the beatings of children, the genocide of indigenous people, the stealing of another's resource, the polluting of the atmosphere are all made very possible.

I am, I think, I deny (Ian Plimer)

2009-05-11T16:30:00.009+10:00

Clive Hamilton, in his feature, "Nature will deal with skeptics", critiques climate change denier, professor Ian Plimer's monological world-view. Hamilton describes Plimer's "reason" as coming from one whose ego has been bruised by a new era of ecologically embedded science.

Read his article here.

While permacultural and biodynamic science are making inroads into modern existence methods (by recalling ancient methods), tech-driven science persists with its make-believe: we can invent our way out of ecological crisis with more product and more technology. The former system understands ecology and promotes steady-state economics, the latter persists with aggregate-growth economics and thus relies on continued resource wars.

I am, therefore I feel

2009-05-10T23:11:00.005+10:00

Compost – post.com

2009-05-08T23:31:00.003+10:00

Conversations with non-humans

2009-05-08T19:02:00.004+10:00

Story after story, they pile up, dozens upon dozens of conversations, with or without words, conversations with pets, bears, coyotes, rivers, trees, owls, hawks, eagles, mice.

A friend said, "That's all very nice, but do you have any scientific verification?"

I have plenty of empirical data, but that just means I'm relying on direct experience, not abstract theory. Strictly speaking, scientific verification is impossible, because science is by definition the study of objects, and a conversation is an interaction between two or more subjects. In science, you repeat an experiment in a controlled environment, and you eliminate variable after variable until any moderately careful person can make the same thing appear. Derrick Jensen, A Language Older than Words, p.64

Too Much of Me

2009-05-07T16:14:00.009+10:00

Click for bigger. Image from Art Monthly, May issue 2009

Cuts, Descartes and compost

2009-05-04T20:37:00.014+10:00

I put a chainsaw into my leg this morning because I am enjoying Derrick Jensen's A Language Older Than Words so much I wanted to get off working to read more. It's true. Well partially true, I did put a chainsaw into my knee this morning, and I did get to read more of Jensen's brilliant book in all the waiting rooms I sat in.

I talked to the physician as he stitched 6 internal and 10 elegant black knots across my knee, finding out about his most difficult jobs – the violent attacks by bottle cut drunks, the vomit he's endured while being on duty, the guy who bit half through his own tongue – it took three hours to stitch, he told me, with perspiration beading along his forehead.

After he cleaned up he left me to wait for the nurse to come and jab me a tetnis shot. While I waited Jensen was in full swing critiquing René Descartes' 'I think therefore I am' maxim, arguing Descartes as the father of the disembodied; the father of aggression against sentient non-human nature.

Because life is uncertain, and because we die, the only way Descartes could gain the certainty he sought was in the world of abstraction. By substituting the illusion of disembodied thought for experience (disembodied thought, of course, not possible for anyone with a body), by substituting mathematical equations for living relations, and most importantly by substituting control, or the attempt to control, for the full participation in the wild and unpredictable process of living, Descartes became the prototypical modern man. He also established the single most important rule of Western philosophy: if it doesn't fit the model, it doesn't exist...Welcome to industrial civilization. Jensen p10.

Swine flu is just another recent event that shows Descartes' philosophy, like its counterpart Christian-capitalism, to be so utterly misguided. But, this is supposed to be a week of compost related posts.

Change and flexibility, though not in my left knee right now, are also constant subjects for any garden. Blood and bone is, of course, also required material for any healthy garden, and equally good for a compost. When a chook of ours dies or I have to kill one because she is not well, I bury her in the compost respectfully. Her body feeds the brew, drawing greater diversity of microbial life to the heap. When I die I want to be composted aerobically, I couldn't think of a better way to spend my death but sequestering carbon for future life. Speaking of which, here's a pic of Zeph gleaning old grass clippings for compost along a public laneway close to home.

On death, sex and compost

2009-05-02T12:44:00.015+10:00

One of the fantasies my girlfriend and I share in bed is our compost fantasy. It's one where we become part of a whole underground domain; our bed wriggling with a world of re-embodying substances, de-centered egos, legs and limbs akimbo, rolling and turning in a field of damp, warm loving life.

What is so inextricably sexy about taking a heap of gleaned organic biomass, fetid kitchen scraps, sweet smelling forest mulch, and chicken, horse and cow shit, and turning it into dark chocolate compost, rich in microbial life? Well for me, apart from the material goodness it provides for the garden, it also means I don't have to visit supermarkets and other centres of abuse, denial, silencing and avoidance.

It's International Compost Awareness Week this week. So, here at The Garden there'll be a number of compost related posts. But first, a picture of one of mine cooking beneath one of my "prohibition" signs (related to yesterday's post).

The level of denial

2009-05-01T12:18:00.037+10:00

A number of years ago I was a participating artist at a land art event in Queensland. It was called The Floating Land 03. I installed three site-specific signs around Noosa. One along a bike path near to the regional gallery, one among the mangroves that you experienced by timber boardwalk, and one on Main beach.

The work on Main beach (pictured above and below) was gagged, or rather silenced for a short period during the event. Someone took offense and wrapped it up with fabric and gaffer tape. The reason I'm recalling this today is because I just read this quote by comedian Elayne Boosler:

"When women are depressed, they either eat or go shopping. Men invade another country".

The futility of this quote lies with the author's vision. She sees the two different responses to melancholy as being somehow unrelated. One is acceptable behaviour and one not. However the two responses are inextricably related. Man invades another country, justifies the destruction and theft of resources (by creating an enemy monster), makes more products with the resources to be consumed at home, which in turn fuels the illness of aggregate desire specific to modern capitalism. Both the consuming and the warring are acts of violence in modern life, only one is direct and one more mediated.

Unlike most of my friends I was sad to see John Howard go. Yes, I was. It meant an end to this horrible man's smug and mean spirited rule, but it also meant that we were heading back to the more indirect and veiled branch of the same party. As I expected, the Labor party has delivered almost the same government as Howard's, only with more fuzzy rhetoric and more sophisticated greenwash. Early in his office, after the Port Arthur massacre, Howard carried out his only good act as a politician, the disarmament of personal firearms. However, he made up for it later when he followed Bush's phony resource war to the Middle East. His logic: killing fellow Australians is inexcusable, however killing Muslims for fossil fuels is totally cool. Similarly, Rudd early in office, delivering his Sorry Day speech, brought us all to tears by 'fessing up to the brutality of white Australia; the genocides and repeated abuse of Aborigines by our very own colonising forces. The moral force of his words are still to this day just beautiful words, something educated people in positions of power are very good at displaying.

How many more years we have to wait for a politician to act morally is anyone's guess. Here, at the Garden of Self Defence, I generally don't dwell on what the Liberal-Labor party are up to. Many of the solutions to resource war, ecological destruction, male aggression, monotheistic colonisation, aggregate-growth capitalism, carbon emissions, genocide of indigenous cultures, pathologies of industrial agriculture, and abuse committed on non-human nature (by all of the above) can be found in community-based permaculture and heirloom seed gardening.

Photographs by Jonathan Sligh.

Future social and ecological systems

2009-04-30T14:54:00.008+10:00

Hamish Morgan, who works with various community groups in Western Australia, and I are writing a paper on future socio-ecological systems. Here is the first draft abstract:

The Internet and globalisation have created a virtual compression of time-space; networks of interrelation have spread across any possible boundary creating diverse points of connection. The net is expanding from one site of intensity to another, creating webs of interrelation upon which economic, environmental and social survival depends. The extension we want to make in this paper is that this modern digital experience is one that shares its model, at least at a ‘systems’ or epistemological level, with both traditional and contemporary cultural practices from the Central and Western Deserts in Australia.

Far from being ‘primitive’ or ‘no longer possible’ the Aboriginal model is the future. It is a map or blueprint for future social, economic and ecological relations that are taking place now, as they have for thousands of years. The modernisation of Australia can be seen as beginning from the desert out.

European modernisation in Australia is predominantly ecologically disembodied, and in recent times we have experienced further ramifications of this dominant cultural intervention, especially in terms of social and environmental disquietude. In Australia’s urban centres increases in self-harm, mood disorders, chronic illness, violence and obesity proliferate among young people, while their social network systems have never been more advanced. The concentration of populations in cities, and the reliance upon the importation of resources, has placed an unprecedented strain upon the landbase. The generation of heavily processed and synthetic food, derived from a developing culture of “super-farms”, coincide with a digital ecology model for social health and diversity; where the former (industrial agricultures) negates the latter (digital ecologies).

In this paper we will develop these theses and show which models already exist for a future beyond a disembodied aggregate-growth society. We will discuss Aboriginal social networking modalities in light of online community making; discuss Aboriginal rotational agricultural practices and compare them to modern permacultural practices; and discuss how the disembodied urban experience can be re-embedded into socio-ecological systems.

6 fine-art steps for building a raised bed

2009-04-27T13:31:00.019+10:00

Step 1. Construct a timber coffin-like structure to what ever size you require in what ever manner you like. Remember the timber will flavour your food so don't use timber that has been treated with chemicals. Level off and fix to the ground using stakes or star pickets.

Step 2. Break up and weed existing soil at the base of the bed. If your soil is clay add some river sand and lime, if your soil is sandy add some clay and manure.

Step 3. Using newspaper, cardboard or some twentieth century art, cover the soil in a thin blanket. This barrier will act as a weed mat and help lock in moisture, which also encourages worms. Wet down this layer with water to start the decomposition process and help keep it from blowing away.

Step 4. Add a layer of straw, fallen oak leaves or sugar cane mulch. This organic matter will slowly break down, fixing carbon in the soil. A good soil requires a balance of nutrients, carbon, nitrogen and diverse microbial life, which will mitigate pests. Never use synthetic fertilisers or pesticides, you want your soil to hum loosely, not fear life.

Step 5. Finish the layers with composted soil. I have used part mushroom compost here with my own home-brewed one. Lightly compress or flatten the soil with a board and sow your seeds.

Step 6. Protect your seeds from your free-ranging hens. Now it's time for a well deserved glass of Astrid's dark chocolate stout.

Lucky dip and scratch (or, carbon fixed/carbon smoked)

2009-04-26T14:07:00.023+10:00

I've been up a ladder, building walls to pay bills, and I've spent much of the past month finishing essays, films and funding for WorkmanJones' 2010 US tour. We've been invited and funded to make new work and show it at a non-profit gallery in Richmond, Virginia so we'll be looking to do a number of things while we are there.

In the meantime the garden has been neglected and the frost season has begun, which makes looking at the garden a tad depressing. Every day I have been scheming and planning new raised beds, future composts, fruit and nut tree plantings, canopies over raised bed structures in order to mitigate birds and frost damage, mulch and humus for further water and carbon conservation and more indigenous plantings to encourage greater biodiversity.

Surprisingly we've found that these heirloom toms (Riesentraube) are extremely frost hardy, for tomatoes at least. Because we live in a cold climate (though increasingly less so) toms generally come into abundance just as the first frosts start rolling in. Therefore these hardy toms are ideal in this climate. We've had 2 frosts already and the plants keep producing and ripening fruit.

In my absence the chooks have been guarding the compost. Over the Summer and until the first frost the European wasps had colonised the heap, now the chooks have reclaimed it as their very own lucky dip and scratch zone.

Working to pay bills and planning to fly to the US are obvious hypocrisies in light of what we're aiming to achieve in the garden over the next five years: 90% water self-sufficiency, 70% energy self-sufficiency, 70% food self-sufficiency. I suppose by agreeing to go to the US I participate in what I represent: a privileged late-capitalist citizen who still partakes in the short-term fantasy world of oil-based technologies.

As WorkmanJones' practice involves both disembodiment and re-embodiment, displacement and re-placement these ethical dilemmas are just part and parcel of a cold and rainy 2009 Sunday afternoon milieu.

Roaming Graffiti Wall

2009-04-21T17:52:00.008+10:00

It has taken a number of years but I finally edited Ivor's great footage of our temporary autonomous zone. Thanks again to all the supporters* of this project. At the time The Age ran this article.

Background
It's March 2006 and it's the height of two disparate cultures in Australia – Howardism and stencilism. The City of Melbourne is hosting the Commonwealth Games and the authorities of the city have taken it upon themselves to enforce a zero-tolerance policy towards graffiti. This was our response.

Roaming Graffiti Wall from Patrick Jones on Vimeo.

A WorkmanJones action, 2006. Film and music by Patrick Jones (Peej), 2009. Roaming camera by Ivor Bowen. Wall roamers and supporters*: Jeff Stewart, Cath Davies, Pete O'Mara, Tim O'Sullivan, Jasmine Salomon, Patrick Jones, Laura (the RMIT student we roped in off the street), Tara Gilbee, Jason Workman, Cath Ryan, Ruark Lewis, Petra Beuskans, Peter Tyndall, Adrian Kosky and Nikki Blanch.

WANTED

2009-04-21T08:05:00.004+10:00

Ecological brewer and brewhouse based on steady-state economics.

A fine brewer of natural beer is required to set-up and brew beer in the Daylesford-Hepburn region of Victoria, Australia. The region is home to a transitional-relocalisation culture. The prospective brewer must be a lover of punk-country music, farting around with chooks and of course natural brewing techniques. Only recycled bottles can be used and those who return bottles will recieve credit towards beer and veg.

Applications can be made (in the comments box) below.

Pushkick (or, the artist is dancing with himself)

2009-04-18T22:40:00.005+10:00

An after-work, pre-shower, summer dance to punk rapper Saul Williams' "Act III Scene 2 (Shakespeare)" is slowed and over dubbed with Olivia Newton-John's "Xanadu", 2006.

As posted on Olivia Newton-John's official website.

Melbourne cultural carbon factories (Art Precincts)

2009-04-17T18:29:00.013+10:00

After walking out of ACCA once again befuddled by the director's taste in all things emissions and waste, Meg and I walked back into the city past the "Arts Precinct".

When will the art world pull its weight when it comes to carbon emissions and toxic waste?

Does this picture need any more explanation?

STUFF! We're overcrowded with TOO MUCH stuff, and apparently we need more. And, that's my segue in to an exhibition that opens tomorrow at MUMA called Too Much of Me: 7 Paths Through the Absurd (with Detour). Jason and I have two of our films in it as WorkmanJones. The "detour" is a collaborative film by Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett. Working with another certainly begins a de-centering process. The self has to consider the other and become something else, something less controlling.

The self, as artist, as consumer, or as religious identity is disembodied in modern capitalist culture. The other (nature) is veiled and abstracted as if the material parameters that govern the universe will immaterialise via technological rationalism or religious fervor. Both manifest as monological illogic. There is too much of everything because the self is all consuming. Art is implicit in this picture, a bourgeois obsession. I'm not sure if WorkmanJones is an anti-art anymore. I often call our practice transitional in the way we attempt to ground our carbon in a practice that is of the body, but perhaps it's more aptly post-art.

Regardless, farming food bio-dynamically and living by permacultural methods is the priority now. Art has to re-embed itself in nature, it has to work on its own humus composition.

Incidentally the below pic is from the patron's honour board at ACCA. A cry out to all the Anonymous dudes online. You're legends!

2009-04-17T18:18:00.003+10:00

I think therefore I comment, I comment therefore I think

2009-04-16T07:40:00.023+10:00

I regularly get stupid comments on my blog. I thought for a while I'd filter them, but went back to my original state of no border guard. The most stupid comments generally come from Anonymous, which I've discovered is a collective noun synonymous with gutless.

This morning I did some chance blog surfing and discovered this little line from a blog called Putting God First:

Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.

I thought about this for all of two minutes and left a comment (which of course can be tracked back to this site):

Delight yourself in the soil and it will give you unrelenting honesty about your Christian-capitalist carbon footprint.

But why is a C-c carbon footprint necessarily larger than my own? I'd like to get it measured to be sure, so I'm taking an educated guess that those who invest in desire, hope, fantasy and heaven aren't really thinking about microbial life, and therefore about carbon fixing. If only cops would breathalise us for greenhouse gas and humus depletion and leave drink driving to real chance encounters.

Regardless of where we each stand on the god front (or booze for that matter), sincerity comes from direct engagement, not cowardly, anonymous and indirect commenteering. Here's a comment, albeit analogue, that I posted several years ago in Melbourne on a real-live Christian site - a public footpath.

Click for bigger.

It says (in a slow text):

Christ is the only Christian, become your own Ian.

I have a friend called Ian whom I love to call Ianian, and he is the greatest Ianian of them all.

A portrait of the traveller as biophysical graffitist

2009-04-14T19:59:00.004+10:00

Roadside rural Victoria

Portrait of the poet as a fixed address

2009-04-09T10:15:00.001+10:00

A portrait of the artist as regenerating forest

2009-04-07T08:24:00.003+10:00

Up a tree

2009-04-06T22:10:00.002+10:00

The text is in free-drag

2009-04-05T15:52:00.013+10:00

Free-dragging, slow text and permapoesis: towards a biophysical poetry (an excerpt)

April sketch (with Zeph)

2009-04-04T08:32:00.012+11:00

Jason Workman is returing to Melbourne next month, so I'm looking forward to more WorkmanJones collaborations in the not-too-distant. In the meantime I have spent a few days trying out some things in the forest, a short walk from home. I'm currently developing a practice of biophysical poetry, while at the same time thinking about the physical comedy of Jaques Tati and Buster Keaton. Zephyr came with me one afternoon after school and I started to see the potential for more advanced father and son play too.

April sketch from Patrick Jones on Vimeo.

Father and son free-dragging

2009-04-01T18:45:00.040+11:00

At the local Neighbourhood House there are many great courses you can enroll in, including courses on self-sufficiency, crochet, blogging (taken by my great girlfriend) and Laugh Club. So last night after walking home with cuts and bruises from free-dragging with Zeph I devised a possible course I could run at Neighbourhood House. The ad in the brochure would go something like this:

Laugh Club not working for you? Then wreck yourself in a crash course in Free-dragging. The course tutor is one of the co-originators of this mutant form of Parkour (sometimes carried out in drag). Learn the poetry of hopelessness and the art of physical graffiti from a master free-dragger. Come with your own liability insurance and self-liberty assurance. Guaranteed to make you sore.

Film still from forthcoming video.

Two Fires festival of art and activism

2009-03-30T14:47:00.023+11:00

Uncle Max Harrison lights the fire at the opening ceremony of the Two Fires festival in Braidwood that took place over the weekend. Uncle Max is an elder of the Yuin people, who are the traditional people of the area. Other highlights included a wide ranging discussion concerning the work of Val Plumwood and Judith Wright, exchanging our presentations on "social warming" for hearty response, as well as hanging out with friends.

One thing that struck me while there concerned the design of the Aboriginal flag. Designed by Harold Thomas, a Luritja man from Central Australia, it has an immensely clear symbolism relating to land. And here I would suggest that Aboriginal culture participates in how it represents itself. In contrast the Australian flag is both skywards (Southern Cross) and across the seas (Union Jack), with no clear symbolic relation to land. Here, I would suggest, that Euro-Australian culture participates in how it represents itself. However a dislocated relationship to land is more broadly a corollary of industrial civilisation and is not only prejudiced to young colonies like Australia. In my paper for our Social Warming panel I posited this:

Perhaps why we know so much less about the trillions of microbes in the soil below our feet than we do about the stars and solar systems above our heads is because the "civilised world" is obsessed with transcendence, grandeur, spectacle and escape. And it seems apparent that art and literature are specifically implicated in this skywards obsession, which also concerns the cult of celebrity – a culture of anxiety and hypermediation directly related to food disorders and substance abuse.

Free-dragging, slow text and permapoesis: towards a biophysical poetry (an excerpt)

2009-03-26T17:21:00.025+11:00

The following is the final paragraph of a paper I finished today for UK journal Angelaki, which I am presenting at Two Fires festival this weekend on a panel called Social Warming. The festival's theme is "Coming Together".

Little by little the things that were once free and uncapitalised are increasingly legislated against, privatised or both – seed, birth, milk, school, water, art, death, etc. While free-dragging on road signs in country Victoria a few years ago Jason Workman and I were booked for “abstracting traffic”, and after challenging the police officer as to why we were being booked he told us “people have concerns when they see people doing things”. The fine was manageable at $120, however it was 100% of the budget for our day of practice. I managed to record the whole conversation I had with him, and have played it back many times to hear those words: “abstracting traffic”. But we were neither abstracting nor obstructing, which is no doubt what the country cop meant to say. Free-dragging developed for both Workman and I out of our own imprisonments. Free-dragging is thus a response to feeling enslaved. Free-dragging is a biophysics for self-liberty, a poetry form synonymous with composting where abstractions do not dominate but rather play their part in a material world. In coming out of these self-imposed sentences we began to understand that to hope was to project something abstract and unreachable upon the future and this caused considerable anxiety. We quickly came to reacquaint ourselves with joy and post-utopian play – non-deluded – our blood oxygenated with the liberty of hopelessness; endorphins as air in an aerobic compost. By becoming unstuck and uprooted we took greater refuge in ourselves as contiguous beings with everything else. Therefore our poetry/graffiti had to become public and participate in social space. We pulled down our garrets and with the materials reclaimed from an age of isolation and anxiety built raised beds for vegetables, chook houses, compost bays and are planning future alehouses based on steady state economics. Food sovereignty has become central to our work, which has developed as part of a broader permaculture community, a community of intensifying "poeverty" (post H D Thoreau and D T Suzuki), and through the development of a personal permapoesis. Thanks to Ian, Meg, Kate F, Jeff, Hamish, Jason and Pete O for your help with this work.

The title of the panel came from this drawing I did a few years ago and was first published in Going Down Swinging No.26 last year.

Click for bigger.

Arnhem mob's songs of regeneration

2009-03-25T17:30:00.005+11:00

Aboriginal elders, including medicine men, song men and traditional dancers, visited our area last weekend and conducted a series of dances relating to each aspect of the land. They were welcomed by local Djadjawurrung elder Aunty Carmel. The dances were conducted to heal the land after the bush-fires. A number of the local boys, including Zeph, were given instructions on how to perform some of the dances.

Making meaning (or, Alan Watts lives)

2009-03-24T10:41:00.004+11:00

I've put together a few words, terms and their (in-progress) meanings here, which I've been developing over the past few years. But first a reminder:

Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything. Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951)

Social warming – A social by-product of global warming, where good things come from horror and tragedy.
Permaplay – Non-delusional play invented by both children and adults within a permaculture.
Pop-fascism – Self-enslavement through debt as a result of aggregate desire and participation in capitalism’s slavery/destruction model. A Pop-fascist state is the private control of trade and industry in collusion with the state to the detriment of the environment and society at large.
Free-dragging – Street art. A mutant form of parkour or free-running (often practiced in drag). Physical graffiti tagged on the retina of the passer-by.
Permapoesis – Permanent meaning-making through active participation with one’s ecology and hence the localising of one's resources.

Mmm, what would free-dying look like?

2009-03-23T11:40:00.003+11:00

Future thought, to be continued...

Free-birthing (friend of Free-dragging)

2009-03-22T19:10:00.020+11:00

Click for bigger. Photo: John Mayger

I read in The Age today about Free-birthing before attending a local gathering to protest draconian new laws attacking the right to home-birth. Free-birthing is unassisted birth – Wow! So hardcore, so great! Zeph was proudly home-birthed and while brewing in his mother's womb was regularly monitored by both his mid-wife and GP, his parents keeping options open all the way to the pop out. Z's face is hidden (in the picture above) by his placard which simply states: I WAS BORN AT HOME.

Risk advisors are a pox on humanity, their work manifests in the form of taking life out of living, which is part and parcel of this continuing age of anxiety. Anxiety is the reason JW and I developed Free-dragging, where self-liberty and resistance to orthodoxy are central to the practice. Today's protest was about exactly these things: self-determination, free-will and resistance to the dominant hegemony.

NB There were 15 dads there today, but most of us hidden at the back (plus one behind the camera).

Single Broken Line Closed Cycle Seagull Ecology

2009-03-21T11:07:00.004+11:00

Perhaps why we know so much less about the trillions of microbes in the soil below our feet than we do about the stars and solar systems above our heads is because the civilised world is obsessed with transcendence, grandeur, spectacle and escape. Art and literature are often specifically implicated in this skywards obsession, which also concerns the cult of celebrity – a culture of anxiety and hypermediation directly related to food disorders and substance abuse. From Free-dragging, Slow Text and Permapoesis: towards a biophysical poetry, Patrick Jones, 2009.

Apple workshop

2009-03-16T21:44:00.011+11:00

Today I gave a workshop to design students at RMIT. Before heading to Melbourne Meg, Z and I picked apples at the local library, where nearly ten years ago I planted 18 Fujis as part of a public work (which included public food and poetry). I introduced the students to the methods of WorkmanJones' practice and how we use chance and one prop, word or idea to propel our work on a given day. At the end of the workshop, after introducing the gleaned Fujis to corporatised public space – materially, architectually and as disruption – the students ceremoniously destroyed the remaining apples by throwing them at a wall. After a day in the city the destruction of such precious and nutritious life was somehow apt.

In the play of the everyday

2009-03-15T20:22:00.004+11:00

Harvest Swap Meet

2009-03-14T07:49:00.005+11:00

If we must stop aggregate growth because it is uneconomic, then how do we deal with poverty in the SSE? The simple answer is by redistribution—by limits to the range of permissible inequality, by a minimum income and a maximum income. What is the proper range of inequality—one that rewards real differences and contributions rather than just multiplying privilege? Plato thought it was a factor of four. Universities, civil services and the military seem to manage with a factor of ten to twenty. In the US corporate sector it is over 500. As a first step could we not try to lower the overall range to a factor of, say, one hundred? Remember, we are no longer trying to provide massive incentives to stimulate (uneconomic) growth! Also, since we are not trying to stimulate aggregate growth, we no longer need to spend billions on advertising. Instead of treating advertising as a tax-deductible cost of production we should tax it heavily as a public nuisance. If economistsreally believe that the consumer is sovereign then she should be obeyed rather than manipulated, cajoled, badgered, and lied to. Herman Daly, A Steady-State Economy

My girl rocks!

2009-03-11T18:24:00.008+11:00

Land of Meg

A new dig at liberalism

2009-03-10T19:11:00.004+11:00

Urban environments and indeed their shopping possibilities cannot exist without the destruction of natural ecologies. Everything made for the development of the urban environment has been made possible by destroying a non-urban environment. Every inch of granit paving, every bottle of ground water, every grain of imported rice, every petro-packaged good, every garment for sale that appears in a capitalist paradice of desire – the city – has originated from some form of abuse.

The liberal ideology that has so successfully and civilly implemented this system, and which encases the dominant psychology of the city, probably did originate from a "good" place (in terms of social inclusion), in other words the distribution of wealth to a greater majority. But liberalism's failing, outside of the social construction of the "wage-slave" (David Graeber, among others), has been its exclusion of ecologic functioning for the inclusion (or obsession) of human aspiration. For the past 200 years of liberal idealism we are now beginning to pay the price. And what is ultimately the price of a society based on ever-expanding desires? I believe it will be in the form of the re-distribution of poverty; designed, if we're smart, violent and horrible if we continue to be not.

Steady-State Economy

2009-03-08T19:43:00.007+11:00

Ecological economists have offered empirical evidence that growth is already uneconomic in high consumption countries (see ISEW, GPI, Ecological Footprint, Happy Planet Index). Since neoclassical economists are unable to demonstrate that growth, either in throughput or GDP, is currently making us better off rather than worse off, it is blind arrogance on their part to continue preaching aggregate growth as the solution to our problems. Yes, most of our problems (poverty, unemployment, environmental degradation) would be easier to solve if we were richer-that is not the issue. The issue is: Does growth in GDP any longer really make us richer? Or is it now making us poorer? Herman Daly, A Steady-State Economy, 2008

The re-distribution of poverty that will happen over the next century will either occur as a deliberate and considered mass movement predicated on a collective understanding of what the landbase will actually support, or if we do nothing the re-distrution of poverty will be violent and horrible. Either way, the fat years are most probably over.

Permaplay 2

2009-03-05T20:50:00.004+11:00

Happy Birthday Zeph!

Related posts: Permaplay 1 and All rights relinquished (or 'Copyright Nothing' after the Fugs).

Fire ball extinguished

2009-03-04T14:47:00.002+11:00

Uprooted status (and, Peej unearthed)

2009-03-03T21:11:00.011+11:00

To avoid panic we rendered ourselves enviro-refugees last night and headed to Melbourne ahead of extreme forecasted weather. We stayed with a friend in Brunswick and woke to a light drizzle and little wind. School was cancelled so today we've been climbing trees outside the State Library, skating in St Kilda, taking Zeph to hidden coffee palaces, introducing him to the world of bright sneakers and a general culture of resistance to the desires of intense consumerism, while intermittently tuning into the ABC, CFA, BoM and DSE. We've now just heard it's raining at home and widely throughout the state! Yip-a-de-dee.

In sync with these unfamiliar times I've earthed 'Michel Deguy Compost Tea', a poem by French poet Michel Deguy that I sing, set to cheap effects and have uploaded (plus others) to the mainstream – triplej – to see what sprouts in that particular soil.

You can listen here.

Peej, according to urbandictionary.com, has 6 definitions beginning with a term of affection and ending with a toilet bowl. Perfect for Peej radio. Enjoy the unsound!

Excess is killing us

2009-02-26T17:49:00.010+11:00

I'm not sure if it is helpful to be thinking of re-distributing wealth. The idea is very capitalist in its thinking: 'that as long as there is ever-expanding growth we can curb poverty...', etc. Perhaps instead we should be thinking of redistributing poverty. Doing without stuff. Making the world safe for mass poverty (John Cage), time-rich, thing-poor, that sort of poverty.

And now, for something relatively...

A few meaning-beatings

Xbox – the naturalisation of avoidance in young males.
capitalism – the naturalisation of destruction and slavery (David Graeber).
hatred – the externalisation of internal loathing.
mass hatred – the collective externalisation of internal loathing developed by a mutual ideology.
hunger – the experience of internal longing.

more M-Bs later...

then, expect nothing

2009-02-25T10:50:00.002+11:00

Embers On

2009-02-24T21:30:00.012+11:00

firE ball

public kM/h

another’s Brilliance

(roadsidE reflection)

buRnt out prohibitions

Shoulder leg neck wing

rack woOd red ring (80km/h)

double=white=Australia=liNe

2009-02-24T15:20:00.001+11:00

Compost Tea

2009-02-22T12:27:00.000+11:00

Disarm the religious

2009-02-21T18:44:00.000+11:00

Gift ecology (or, towards a biophysical economics)

2009-02-20T18:52:00.005+11:00

click for bigger.

Peddle, gather, cook, bottle (food activity alphabetised by return)

2009-02-20T18:10:00.001+11:00

Our community has a local benefit concert and fundraiser for the survivors of the fires this coming Sunday and I spent the early part of the week thinking what I could contribute that didn't mean burning cash or burning carbon. We both have no work at present, which makes us time-rich and extremely productive in all manner of non-capitalist activity, while at the same time shitting ourselves with mounting bills.

I borrowed Meg's bike, which has a handy detachable front basket, and trawled the town for street fruit. I asked the local librarian, Janet, if I could harvest the rhubarb from the small community garden at the back of the library and she happily agreed, and I found some feral apples and pears ripe and delicious. I also noted other varieties of apples, nectarines and pears that would be ripe over the next few weeks and noted that many of the feral trees which had a substantial build up of humus at their base had disease-free apples. I cooked all the fruit together and added local honey.

I then peddled to O's to exchange some of our old glass jars for his larger, uniformed, black-lidded ones. I stayed for lunch, talked about brewing beer and gathered more apples and a branch of red-flowering eucalypt for my gal on the way home.

These small bottled gifts are for the organisers of the event – friends – folk who have worked hard over the past few weeks to organise the forthcoming day. As a child my folks had a successful cottage industry manufacturing jellies, mustards, chutneys and jams and this week I felt the spirit of that familial activity return.

The future of food and social relations

2009-02-19T11:39:00.003+11:00

3g

2009-02-18T17:09:00.008+11:00

gathering
gleaning
growing

What else is intelligence but adapting to one's continuously changing environment? And when environments change, no longer providing the conditions for life as we know it, new life, new thought and new activity flourish; remixing ancient modes of survival with new social and technological phenomena.

A young boy is alone in his room, feeding himself industrialised chips, drinking plastic-coated junk, playing with his Xbox. He represents an old dying world.

The technologies that fail us are the one's that help construct relations of avoidance, wholly attached to capitalism's cult of the individual. The technologies for a new world are those that will help us remain connected and supported as collectives of common substance.

F

2009-02-18T11:31:00.000+11:00

E

2009-02-17T13:23:00.002+11:00