Seven days of recuperation

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

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