From apocalypse to permapoesis

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.

Suck and truck

"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.

The city fakes, the landbase bakes

Gifts of civilisation (or, how did we get here?)

In my Free-dragging Manifesto I talk about de-civilising activities aimed at mitigating civilisation's brutality. Composting plays a big part, as does the dispersal of cities (the word 'civilisation' comes from the Latin word civilis meaning centre or city). Derrick Jensen's massive two-volume tome Endgame: The Problem of Civilisation played a large role in the forming of my manifesto, especially his idea that any centre large enough to rely upon the importation of resources can never be sustainable. If you haven't got time to read Jensen's or my work then this little film, that I found today, is a micro-summary.



I close the screen and pick up David Graeber's book Possibilities, and the first thing I read is:

This leads to the interesting suggestion that, from the perspective of Medieval psychological theory, our entire civilization...is really a form of clinical depression. p67.

What we build

There are children swimming in the ocean. Many are what health specialists would, no doubt, call unhealthily overweight. Their parents have seen to it that they are covered up with sunscreen and that they wear long shorts, hats and arm length body tops to keep the harmful radiation off their skin. While most of us become increasingly aware of the science, we continue to burn our wages preparing the sun for its increasing assault on our skin and our soil. Our bodies are also products of industrialised agriculture – we eat food that is overly-refined, sugar rich and highly processed, we pass this on to our children. 

The interrelation between intensifying radiation from the sun on our skin and increased levels of unburnt fat in our bodies is obvious enough – oil-based economics based on profit growth. What is less discussed is that our society is an impermanent culture, not possible of ever being sustainable. We have lived a deluded, perma-boom existence, and our high levels of skin cancer and diabetes are the physical corollaries of this Australian life.

We have taught our children how to protect themselves from the sun (from nature), and how to eat (from supermarkets), we have introduced them to a global culture of progress. We have told our children that transporting resources, investing in economic growth and producing immeasurable waste is progressive. We have not told them that progress is killing us. We'd prefer to veil our kids from the inevitable horrors that await us, and the horrors that we've allowed to endorse our way of life.

Why is this? It is easy for us to attack nature – the sun is enemy, and therefore we can defend ourselves against enemies. But how do we defend ourselves from ourselves? How do we cease to participate in the great global toxiculture our elders have built for us?

Mashup with Ian Robertson

From The Garden as Collective Offensive: 

a postscript to A Free-Dragging Manifesto

Industrial civilisation functions in a broken cycle: product is separated from process, production and consumption are geographically dislocated, cause is distanced from eventual (deferred) effect. The production of waste is unavoidable in this modality. There is no ecology of commerce in place, nor is capitalism capable of implementing one.