Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene by Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene

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Creative Work 1: The Masters Thesis as Living Script (Ilka Nelson, 2012)

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Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

AUTHORSHIP Ilka Blue Nelson published this work as part of her Masters thesis requirements 18 April 2013. Included in the following pages, are original works by collaborating Artists, as attributed. The intention for this work is that it will seed far and wide and help pollinate new imaginaries that create a healthy and eco-dynamic world! You are welcome to use the contents for this purpose.

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

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KEY WORDS Key words: artist; complexity; ecocide; ecological thinking; deep ecology; mythology; practice-led research; Quantum Narratives; relationships; storytelling; transdisciplinarity; transformation.

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Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

ABSTRACT This project is a passionate and sometimes enraged thrust toward a biodiverse future. Weaving stories with deep thinking beyond the limits of the anthropocene, I am trying to recall myself in a more-than-human world. Our planet is suffering human induced ecocide which is a global crisis threatening the existence of multiple life forms. The alchemical mix of storytelling and ecological thinking could be part remedy for humanity’s adaptation: a transformational mix to re-pattern the crisis into an opportunity and shift anthropocentric structures toward networks of dynamic relationships. The purpose of this project is to explore this cultural remedy. This is a quest, a search for tools that can germinate the hypothesis: storytelling in relation to ecological thinking manifests human potential in a more-than-human world. The practice-led research is guided by the philosophy and practice of Mythology, Deep ecology and Transdisciplinarity. Further navigation is sourced from Systems Thinking, Indigenous Methodologies, Biomimicry, and Quantum Physics. The journey unfolds by reawakening the Artist’s function as caretaker of Mythology and pattern inciter for the collective. The resounding discovery of this adventure is Quantum Narratives: a storytelling tool for today’s world, a method to connect multiple ways of knowing and diverse languages with the purpose of engaging, relating and working with living knowledge. Quantum Narratives are used to test the field study research into the Future of Water in context of Coal Seam Gas Mining in the Murray-Darling Basin and to materialise the collaborative results as the Water Stories. This thesis is a Living Script, full of imagination and complexity. Within its folds are strategies for systemic change ready to be adapted by policy and planning brokers and those who hold power for widespread remedial action.

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Statement of Original Authorship ....................................................................................... 2 Key Words ............................................................................................................................... 3 Abstract .................................................................................................................................... 4 Table of Contents...................................................................................................................... 5 List of Figures, Tables and Creative Works ....................................................................... 7 Aspect, Key Terms and Abbreviations ............................................................................... 9 Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................. 11 Dedication .............................................................................................................................. 14 Prologue ................................................................................................................................. 15 SEEKING: TRANSFORMATION Introduction ..................................................................................................... 22 FINDING: RELATIONSHIPS Chapter One: Evolution & Entropy ................................................................ 56 Letter One: On Strategy ................................................................................................ 56 The Roots of Ecocide .................................................................................................... 58 Ecocide Is the Death of Nature Not the Nature of Death .................................... 59 Crisis as Opportunity: Systems Thinking ................................................................... 60 Strategies for Transformation ...................................................................................... 60 From Despair to Empowerment: The Practice of Deep Ecology ......................... 62 Chapter Two: Continuum & Change.............................................................. 64 Letter Two: On Mythology ........................................................................................... 64 The Stories We Tell ........................................................................................................ 66 Power and Potential ....................................................................................................... 67 Stories Told in Wisdom................................................................................................. 68 Quantum Narratives: Thinking like a mountain ....................................................... 70 Chapter Three: Dynamic Connection ............................................................. 73 Letter Three: On Connection ....................................................................................... 73 A Quantum Leap in Pattern Recognition .................................................................. 75 Languages that Connect, Languages that Divide ...................................................... 77 Dialogue: New Networks from Old Webs..................................................................79 The Functioning Artist ....................................................................................................80

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Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

METHODS: PRACTICE Chapter Four: The ‘living pattern’ .................................................................. 86 Types of Knowledge ...................................................................................................... 87 Why Transdisciplinarity: the Art of Complexity ....................................................... 89 Artlab: Methods and Analysis ...................................................................................... 92 Testing the Research: Field Study in the Pilliga Scrub ............................................. 95 New Knowledge: Quantum Narratives ................................................................... 103 WATER: REMBERING Chapter Five: Water - Resource or Relationship? ......................................... 108 The Art of Stories ........................................................................................................ 110 The Water Stories: A Quantum Narratives Model ................................................... 111 LEARNING: LISTENING Conclusion: Seeds & Ripples ......................................................................... 148 Seeds .............................................................................................................................. 149 Growth .......................................................................................................................... 149 Pollination ..................................................................................................................... 150 Epilogue .............................................................................................................................. 153 Appendices ......................................................................................................................... 155 Appendix A: Bat/Human Project (Artlab - Lab 2) .............................................. 155 Appendix B: Water Lab & Deep Ecology workshops (Artlab - Satellite 1)....... 158 References and Bibliography .............................................................................................. 164

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LIST OF FIGURES, TABLES AND CREATIVE WORKS

LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Pilliga picture-dialogue #1 .............................................................................................................20 (Ilka Nelson and More-than-human World of the Pilliga, 2011) Figure 2: Extinct Species Oct 2010 - Mar 2011 ..........................................................................................26 (Chloe ‘Opal’ Pringle, 2012) Figure 3: Pilliga picture-dialogue #2 .............................................................................................................54 (Ilka Nelson and More-than-human World of the Pilliga, 2011) Figure 4: Pilliga picture-dialogue #3 .............................................................................................................84 (Ilka Nelson and More-than-human World of the Pilliga, 2011) Figure 5: Illustrated Field Recording ................................................................................................................87 (Ilka Nelson and More-than-human World of the Pilliga, 2011) Figure 6: Location of the Pilliga Scrub on national map ..................................................................................96 (Google Maps and NASA. 2012) Figure 7: Location of the Pilliga Scrub on regional map ...................................................................................96 (Google Maps and GBRMPA, 2012) Figure 8: Coal Seam Gas Reserves in Australia..............................................................................................97 (Parliament of Australia, 2011, 4) Figure 9: Area zoned for coal seam gas mining in the Pilliga Scrub .................................................................97 (Stop Pilliga Coal Seam Gas, n.d) Figure 10: Field Research photos......................................................................................................................101 (Ilka Nelson and Eva Nelson, 2011) Figure 11: Pilliga picture-dialogue #4 ........................................................................................................ 106 (Ilka Nelson and More-than-human World of the Pilliga, 2011) Figure 12: Pilliga picture-dialogue #5 .......................................................................................................... 146 (Ilka Nelson and More-than-human World of the Pilliga, 2011) Figure13: Bat Council -Photo of Stakeholders Workshop ............................................................................. 156 (James Muller, 2010) Figure 14: Mapping Patterns - Photo of Stakeholders Workshop ................................................................. 157 (James Muller, 2010) Figure 15: Practice-Led Research Photos - Floating Land ............................................................................ 159 (Ilka Nelson, Deep Ecology Participants, Sunshine Coast Council and Keith Armstrong, 2011) Figure 16: Ilka Blue and The Last Tree ...................................................................................................... 180 (Ilka Nelson, 2011)

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Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Comparative - Folklore and Ecological Thinking .................................................................... 60 Table 2: Labs and Satellite events of the Remnant/Emergency Artlab program 2010-2012.......... 93 Table 3: Research methods developed during Remnant/Emergency Artlab events ........................ 93 Table 4: Report on Pilliga field research 2011 ......................................................................................... 98 Table 5: Example of practice-led research at Artlab’s Bat/Human event ....................................... 155 Table 6: Pictorial example of practice-led research at Artlab’s WaterLab event ............................ 158 LIST OF CREATIVE WORK Creative Work 1: The Masters Thesis as Living Script ..................................................................................... 1 (Ilka Nelson, 2012) Creative Work 2: Pilliga Field Recording ....................................................................................................... 87 (Ilka Nelson, 2011) on disc inside back cover Creative Work 3: Water Tablets................................................................................................................. 111 (Bridget Nicholson, Sculpture - Porcelain Clay 19 x 25 x 0.2 cm, 2012) Creative Work 4: Last Witness .................................................................................................................. 113 (Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox, Painting - Oil on linen 50 x 50 cm, 2012) Creative Work 5: Braille pages.....................................................................................................................117 (Printed by Vision Australia, 2012) Creative Work 6: Primal Shades .................................................................................................................119 (Leah Barclay, Sound Piece, 3 minutes, 2012) on disc inside back cover Creative Work 7: Tidal Pulse ..................................................................................................................... 119 (Leah Barclay, Sound Piece, 7:08 minutes, 2012) on disc inside back cover Creative Work 8: Evolution ........................................................................................................................ 119 (Leah Barclay, Sound Piece, 3:24 minutes, 2012) on disc inside back cover Creative Work 9: Bath and Water Vile .....................................................................................................123 (Gayil Nalls, Olfactory Sculpture - Botanical and Photogenic Materials, 2012) and (Treated water from coal seam gas mine emptying into Bohena Creek, Pilliga, 2012) Creative Work 10: Early Morning Harvest ................................................................................................ 132 (Dale Chapman, Food Memory and Recipe - Edible Gold Leaf and Print, 2012) Creative Work 11: Water Story ..................................................................................................................... 139 (Van Thanh Rudd, Installation - Bark, Leaves, Ply Wood, Tissue Paper, PVC Glue, 60 x 70 x 15cm, 2012)

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ASPECT, KEY TERMS AND ABBREVIATIONS I am a western woman who grew up in the Australian bush surrounded by the minds and ways of worldly adults. The words herein are written from this perspective: when I refer to ‘us’, ‘we’ and ‘our’ I am referencing those who like me, grew up in the ‘modern’ paradigm and who would like to realise an ecologically responsive paradigm. I acknowledge there are many different ways of knowing the world and that many of these, especially Indigenous languages, have been refuted, rewritten and ignored in western texts. Thus this thesis has been crafted with respect for all ways of knowing in the awareness that my voice represents one of many languages connected within the greater whole.

KEY TERMS Anthropocentrism - explains “nature as a ‘hyper-separate lower order lacking continuity with [humanity], and stresses those features which make humans different from nature and animals, rather than those they share with them as constitutive of human identity’” (Plumwood quoted in Ferguson, 2009, 300). Awa - Maori word for ‘river’. Biodiversity/ Biodiverse systems - is used in this thesis to reference the many different ecosystems and varying scales of habitat diversity that constitute a larger biome. Culture - is used in this thesis to mean human expression of self and community, to “define the boundary between social system and environment [and how we] control the communication and the exchange between them” (Brocchi, 2008, 29). Dynamic - “pertaining to or characterized by energy or effective action” (Dictionary.com, 2012). Ecocide - “the extensive destruction, damage to or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been severely diminished” (Eradicating Ecocide, 2012). Ecology - “is the study of connection, of the interrelationships among all forms of life and the physical environment” (Conn and Conn, 2008, 54). Ecosystem - “‘any unit that includes all of the organisms (i.e., the ‘community’) in a given area interacting with the physical environment’ in ways that maintain the biodiversity necessary for adequate flows of nourishments in the community” (Odum quoted in Conn and Conn, 2008, 54) Ecologically responsive paradigm/s - suggests a world in relative balance in which living systems (inclusive of humans) are engaged in and routinely practice reciprocal relationships.

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Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

Environment - David Abram says the word ‘environment’ takes all the complexity and multiplicity of the living world and flattens it into a term that separates humans from everything else (Abram quoted in Orion, 2012). I agree and yet continue to use the word as a widely understood term used by government and other institutions to mean natural living places. Language - “any system of formalized symbols, signs, sounds, gestures, or the like used or conceived as a means of communicating thought, emotion, etc.: the language of mathematics; sign language” (Dictionary.com, 2012). Modernity/ Modern - “I use the term ‘modern’ to describe a type of thinking that separates the world into binaries that are places in oppositional relationships, as understood by critics of modernity and modernism” (Weir, 2009, xii). More-than-human - “the term ‘more-than-human world’ was coined by David Abram in his book The Spell of the Sensuous to denote ‘Nature’ while pointedly including human beings within what people call ‘nature’” (Seidenberg, 2006). I use the term to denote all the (interdependent and interconnected) entities, elements and dimensions of the Universe. Rio Abajo Rio - Spanish for ‘the river beneath the river’ as used in Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ text Women Who Run with the Wolves (Estes, 1992). Shaman - “Bearers of Native wisdom and knowledge, from healers and medicinal experts to holy people and other elders as well” (Knudtson and Suzuki, 1992, 1).

ABBREVIATIONS DSEWPaC - Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities IFACCA - International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies n.d. - no date (no date could be sourced for the reference) QUEENSLAND NP&WS - Queensland National Parks and Wildlife Service QUT - Queensland University of Technology RED LIST IUCN - International Union for Conservation of Nature UNESCO - United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A BIG THANKS… To the Collaborators Leah Barclay: for continually inspiring me through your world of sound http://leahbarclay.com/ Bridget Nicholson: for connecting with heart and earthen grains http://touchthisearthlightly.com/ Dale Chapman: for sharing story http://www.thedillybag.com.au/AboutDale.htm Gayil Nalls: for sending me magic potions across the oceans http://gayilnalls.com/ Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox: for tree whispering http://kathrynbrimblecombeart.blogspot.com.au/ Van Thanh Rudd: for solidarity in activism http://www.van-thanh-rudd.net/ Chloe ‘Opal’ Pringle: for reminding me what it is to be human http://www.imaginotions.net/ To the Pilliga The Pilliga Scrub for welcoming and teaching me Maria Rickert & all the Pilliga Pottery Folk Carmel Flint, Prue Bodsworth & the Biologists Merv Sutherland, Bob Sutherland & Michael J Murphy Ron Magann and the Baradine Lands Council Jane Judd & Cas Smit Meg Leathart Jane Kreis & Susan Wilson And an especially warm thanks to Laura Hartley To the Research Crew Tega Brain: for peppering the marathon with humour The original Artlab Team: for crisis and potential Keith Armstrong: for your principal supervision and the opportunity of Artlab Christina Spurgeon: for your thoughtful, open and steady supervision Alice Steiner: for being a superhero librarian Cheryl Stock: for teaching with passion Angela Romano: for the essence of ethics

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Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

To my Ecosystem The Last Tree: for being the best imaginary friend in the whole multiverse Mumps: for being my #1 supporter through this transformation Lissa: for leading the way (with cupcakes in hand) Papa Bear: for introducing me to the pattern of the Blues and the rhythm of Rock n’ Roll The Doughnut and the Roundabout Tree: for keeping the flow Pauline: for your wizardry editing Family & Friends: for your constant lovin’ despite me wearing an invisibility cloak for two years Alex: for your grace Scoutt & Ailsa: for walking in your bodies Jo Tito: for sharing wai wisdom Odette, Kate & Bundjalung Country: for healing magic The Flamenco Crew: for conversing in duende Brunswick River: for regularly restoring my internal peace New Brighton Beach: for all your lessons, patience and water Northern Rivers Rain: for the wet Seals & Eagles: for playfulness and vision from a distance All the birds, lizards & plants who I share a garden with: for connecting me with dazzling life All the inspiring people who work from the heart: Authors, Activists & Artists All the stories and storytellers who fill me with imaginings of potential worlds And a giant-sized thanks to Luke: for being my life buoy (and feeding me your delicious cooking everyday)!

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Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

DEDICATION

I came to realise I was writing about love because that is all Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d witnessed. No stories of place, land, creatures or custom were passed to me so I had to make it all up. I had to fill the void, that space that longs for meaning, and the heart was the best tool I had to create a sense of belonging in the world.

This project is determined by my love of nature and my grief for fellow life forms passing into extinction. The writing is dedicated with heartfelt thanks to Eva, Luke, Lissa and The Last Tree.

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PROLOGUE The Awa & the Rio Abajo Rio1 (The River and the River beneath the River) Once there was and once there was not, a world made of rivers that flowed above and below the earth’s crust. Of them all, the River Awa was revered for stirring the most mysterious waters. One night, an ordinary hero visited Awa, in search of answers to explain why humans “damage the planetary fabric that sustains” them.2

Hero Hello Awa. I have questions that are the tinder of human consumption. Modernity is ready to burn. I remembered some flaking graffiti proffering ‘the solution is the problem’ so I have stolen away from the city tonight to ask you: “River, is my culture lethal to the ecology it depends on?”3 River You seek ‘the’ finite answer but there is no one fix. Everything exists in relationship and thus solutions become part of future equations. There can be no harm here that is not felt there. Hero I don’t understand? River Contamination of wild beauty is painful to witness whether it takes place in the inner or outer world.4 The idea is not to see culture and nature as separate parts or to see life and death as opposites. Hero But the whole world is on a crash course. I can’t bear it. We need to do something! River Dissolve your human arrogance of needing to ‘save the world’. No one individual is the sole architect of this crises, thus you cannot apply remedies in isolation. Live a responsible life because it is the right, moral thing to do – not because it’s going to save the world.5 Hero Perhaps I’m not asking the right questions? River The questions you ask are shaped to the rut you are trying to escape and so you dig deeper. To understand why this is happening try asking heartbreaking questions. Hero Such as? River You could ask “why are humans willing to live with the threat of apocalypse rather than trying to seriously alter a world where consumption, of anything, is seen as unrelieved virtue, production, of anything, is regarded as a social and economic necessity, and more, of anything (like children, cars, chemicals, PhDs, golf courses or recycling centres), is unquestioningly accepted?”6

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Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

Hero Is this about human motivation? River Oh my, you are funny! I forget you are still so young in the world. I am not motivated to be a river. I am a river because of dynamic relationships that work hard to keep the river clear even when it is far easier to let it molder. Let us say keeping the flow clear is a natural challenge we all face. But what if something takes over the flow, making it muddier and muddier? What if we become trapped by that, what if we perversely begin to somehow derive use from it, to not only like it but rely on it, make a living by it, feel alive through it? What if we use it to take us somewhere, to make us somebody in our own minds? Those are the traps that wait for all of us.7 Hero So this is about human relationship to place? River You make it sound impenetrable. It’s actually simple. Take rivers as an example - in the past few centuries due to industrialization, too much of the beauty and poetry of natural river landscapes was lost precisely where people need it most, in cities and other densely populated areas. Humans would be wise to take up their earlier dialogue with rivers and be interested not just in their value in providing resources but also in being able to treat them as places where emotions can be experienced, artistic creativity awakened and where you can feel at one with nature again.8 Hero Is culture part of our remedy? River I observe human culture as a web of creative tales: food, ritual, celebrations, festivals, art, music - all of these are stories. You need to listen to each other’s stories. If you listen, the stories begin to tell you things that are very instructive. Stories reveal that many environmental habits are linked to fears that might be dealt with in some other way.9 Culture plays the role of giving one a sense of possibility and grace, because things are so out of one’s control and so uncertain.10 Hero You say culture and nature can’t be separated, how does this help us write future stories? River The antagonism of nature and culture often makes its presence felt in river areas. How can you transform this antagonism into co-operation? You have to dismantle the dams that are your current strategies calling for progress and orientate toward your identity as another element of nature.11 Hero Set new directions? It took us so long to establish sustainability as a model! River You really are funny. It takes time to love! Anyone asking why sustainability is not attractive as the task of the century will come across the ‘cultural deficit’ inherent in the current model.12 Hero This feels difficult and why have you brought love into the mix?

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River Somehow you have lost the feeling the world is your home. It is only love for your place, and a desire for rich, sensory contact with the beauty of its sounds and smells and textures that will set you in the right direction.13 Hero

I like the potential of belonging, of being a part of the movement of the universe.

River You are. Everything is. Hero I understand it in your language. But how can I explain this connection to my ilk? River Creativity is a shape-changer.14 Creativity is the ability to respond to all that goes on around us, to choose from the hundreds of possibilities of thought, feeling, action and reaction and to put these together in a unique response, expression, or message that carries moment, passion and meaning. In this sense, loss of your creative milieu means finding yourself limited to only one choice, divested of, suppressing, or censoring feelings and thoughts, not acting, not saying, doing or being.15 Hero I didn’t realise creativity was so integral to life. River There’s so much room for art in the practice of living.16 Hero That’s beautiful! River One of your great writers said “Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the arts that have influenced us”. For instance how do you see a river?17 Hero A river is a flowing body of water that snakes to the sea. River You see me through a limited understanding of yourself. My existence is not defined by my substance. The water passing through me now is not the water that passed here 10,000 years ago. The water in me is ephemeral, just as creativity is ephemeral in you. A river is the groove carved in the lands surface, the empty vessel that holds the water, the river beneath the river. Myths are akin to rivers because they channel culture from generation to generation and adapt, like the shell of rivers, to the conditions of time. So we may say rain sustains rivers just as creativity tends the archetypes of culture. Hero

I hadn’t realised we were so similar.

River All assertions about nature are assertions about the nature of humans. Art is a reflection of this dialectic.18 Everything is connected. Creativity is not a solitary movement. That is its power. Whatever is touched by it, whoever hears it, sees it, senses it, knows it, is fed. A single creative act has the potential to feed a continent.19 Hero I came to you tonight seeking a quick resolve but instead I find complexity.

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Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

River Good, you have begun to restore your imagination from which the best life flows. When a river is tainted, everything begins to die off because everything is dependent on everything else. When creativity stagnates in one way or another, there is the same outcome: starving for freshness, no breeding of this idea to that one, no hatch, no new life. You feel ill and want to move on. You wander aimlessly, pretending you can get along without the lush creative life. But the waters have to be made clear and clean again. You have to wade into the sludge, purify the contaminants, reopen the apertures, to protect the flow from future harm.20

The title is adapted from Estes’ Woman Who Run With The Wolves (1992). Similarly, the dialogue adapts quotes and I reference these with the endnotes below (used in this section only for design purposes). 2 (Roszak quoted in Gablik, 1995, 337) 3 (Gablik, 1995, 85) 4 (Estes, 1992, 303) 5 (Sale quoted in Jensen, 2006, 405) 6 (Sale quoted in Jensen, 2006, 405) 7 (Estes, 1992, 303) 8 (González del Tánago and Garcia de Jalón, 2004,188) 9 (Roszak quoted in Gablik, 1995, 342) 10 (Plante quoted in Gablik, 1995, 164) 11 (González del Tánago and Garcia de Jalón, 2004,188) 12 (Kurt, 2004, 238) 13 (Gablik, 1995, 180) 14 (Estes, 1992, 298) 15 (Estes, 1992, 303) 16 (Shusterman quoted in Gablik, 1995, 265) 17 (Wilde, 2006) 18 (Prigann, Strelow and David, 2004, 74) 19 (Estes, 1992, 298) 20 (Estes, 1992, 300)

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Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

SEEKING

“Where my skin stretches, begins the universe and the world, all that and we together and more, are a steady river in exchange, a metamorphosis” (Prigann, 2004, 183).

Figure 1: Pilliga picture-dialogue #1 (Ilka Nelson and More-than-human World of the Pilliga, 2011)

Transformation

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Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

INTRODUCTION Let me establish with the reader from the outset that this thesis is not an orthodox approach to research. It is a coiled piece of tension, howling for dialogue with the dynamic energy of the universe, that resonance between coupled states: inner-outer; cultural-biological; individualcollective. Ringing with the possibility that every boundary that separates also connects, I seek to find the relationships formed at these edges, the mythological domain where life and death occur, patterns breed, where transformation dwells (Brookner, 2004, 100). And though it takes us into challenging terrain, the path of complexity necessarily leads us to the heart of this study transformation. There are three distinct features that set this study on a rogue course: the research approach; the thesis design; and the final outcome. More expressly this is a transdisciplinary, practice-led research project, transcribed into a Living Script that seeds endings rather than solves them. In tune with the teachings of deep ecology, this study aims to “decondition” from anthropocentric systems by unfurling alternative routes of knowledge and recasting old ones (Macy, n.d.). This aim is not intended to pay lip service to academia rather it suggests that traditionally ‘fixed’ models are antithetical with the unpredictable, messy and often non-linear realm of ‘living knowledge’. Further interrogation of the three features will help elucidate why and how they support the objective of the study, which put simply, is to source cultural remedies for transforming the crisis of ecocide into responsive ecological futures. Beginning with the methodology, the approach of the research ‘quest’ (as it will be poetically termed herein) is practice-led. This means the research is pursued through practice and, as defined by QUT higher degree research, “the creative practice leads the research in such a way that its major findings reside in the practice itself, which becomes a central component of the examinable outcome” (QUT, 2012, 34). This mode of research is multi-dimensional, relational, experiential, emergent and idiosyncratic which makes it apt for my exploration into the living complexities of cultural-biological ecologies (Gothe, 2006, 4; Colbert, 2009, 1; Haseman, 2007). My specific study is housed within the Remnant/Emergency Artlab, a 2 year collaborative and practice-led research program “investigating new modes of creative thinking/action…that confront the roots of today’s ecological crisis” (Armstrong, 2011). Supported by the Australia Council for the Arts and QUT, the initial Artlab team comprised of 5 Lead Artists supported by 3 Masters Students (myself included) and was organised as a series of site-specific labs with the Masters interdependent research being performed within and alongside these events. Artlab’s intentionally open, experimental and amorphic form resulted in major changes to the lab

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structures and locations, participating team members and the proposed outcomes of the program (ibid.). While these changes revealed fundamental differences between the Artlab methodology and my own, two main threads have been retained: a lingering, almost subconscious curiosity in Natalie Jeremijenko’s Environmental Health Clinic which I clasp with the terms ‘remedy’ and ‘script’; and most significantly, the assertion that our “environmental crisis is underpinned by a deeper cultural crisis”, which gives cause for positioning creative practice in the front-lines of environmental remediation (Armstrong, et al., 2010). In terms of the research approach there is a further distinction. While in many respects this quest is practice-led, it also harbours an arcane need to go beyond the boundaries which Haseman has demarcated to validate practice-led research within the broader research paradigm (Colbert, 2009, 3; Haseman, 2007). No, when I enter the university gates first I crouch to brush the pavement, so I may peer deeper than the echoes, down to the old river still shadowed by this system. As will soon surface, this quest clambers through diverse ways of knowing, gathering shared realisations with which to mix new patterns from. Thus transdisciplinarity, with its “sensibility to patterns that connect”, instructs the quest and gives it a “methodological framework for the understanding of the world of complexity” (Kagan, 2011, 244 & 200). Transdisciplinary practice, like practice-led research, positions the researcher as an “active participant” in the field of inquiry and so I am able to oscillate fluidly between both methods (Montuori quoted in Kagan, 2011, 200). But to be clear, transdisciplinarity is the overarching methodology. This pronouncement also helps to establish that ecocide transcends disciplinary matters, thus while the study is anchored in creative practice, its primary concern is ecological health. While debates on the ‘truth’ of climate change revolve, ecological decimation is tangibly evident in the increased scale of global deforestation and the accelerating rates of species extinction. The Stockholm Resilience Centre (research for governance of social-ecological systems) has indentified ‘planetary boundaries’ that map out “major natural systems that represent the earth’s ability to sustain life” and subsequently, where “humanity is close to straying beyond every one of these boundaries” (Steffen, 2011, 17). They are: •

Stratospheric ozone layer

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Biodiversity

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Chemicals dispersion

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Climate change

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Ocean acidification

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Freshwater consumption and the global hydrological cycle

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Land system change

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Nitrogen and phosphorus inputs to the biosphere and oceans

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Atmospheric aerosol loading

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Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

These boundaries and humanity’s current abuse of them as identified by the Stockholm Resilience Centre (2009), define ‘ecological crises’ within the scope of this study. Given that human survival is interconnected and dependent on earth’s systems, our collective inaction to remedy these ecological crises can be considered as administering our own death and therefore as an act of ecocide (Jensen, 2006, 127). We are in a global deathroll. “The biological world is approaching the sixth major extinction event in its history” (Thomas et al., quoted in Chen, 2005, 291). It is an inconceivable scale of loss with unknown ramifications. To make it relative, the Red List Unit IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) provided me with a list of the species which became extinct during the 18 month period of my Masters research - probably more have passed unbeknown to us. This is emotional business. Death ruptures the theoretical stage. I take pause here with a requiem and face the gravity of ecocide that drives this study.

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

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Requiem for the Species who became extinct October 2010 - March 2012 To those who have passed, I cannot make sense of our infinite loss and so I pay my respects to you with a nonsensical fable:

“SO… Catch!” calls the Once-ler. He lets something fall. “It’s a Truffula Seed. It’s the last one of all! You’re in charge of the last of the Truffula Seeds. And Truffula Trees are what everyone needs. Plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care. Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air. Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack. Then the Lorax And all of his friends May come back.” (From Dr Seuss’s The Lorax, 2004)

The following illustrations were drawn for this study by my earth friend Opal who commented “a lot of the species were water snails, which suggests something about indicators of water quality, or lack thereof, to me” (Personal Correspondence, May 2012). The illustrations are listed as a collective as Figure 2: Extinct Species Oct 2010 - Mar 2011 in the List of Figures. Some species have vanished without any known photographs of them in the world. In these cases the image of a camera/timer is substituted or illustrations of a closely related species have been duplicated.

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Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

Alasmidonta mccordi

Anabarilius macrolepis

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

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Bythinella gibbosa

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Bythinella limnopsis

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

Bythinella mauritanica

Bythinella microcochlia

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

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Bythinella punica

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Cambarellus alvarezi

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

Cambarellus chihuahuae

Centaurea pseudoleucolepis

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

~30~

Chambardia letourneuxi

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Cyclura onchiopsis

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

Cyprinus yilongensis

Epioblasma personata

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

~32~

Epioblasma propinqua

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Euphrasia mendoncae

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

Graecoanatolica macedonica

Heleobia spinellii

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

~34~

Helicopsis paulhessei

Â ~35~

Hydrobia gracilis

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

Islamia ateni

Leiorhagium solemi

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

~36~

Leistyla lamellose

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Marstonia olivacea

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

Mercuria letourneuxiana

Oeceoclades seychellarum

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

~38~

Ohridohauffenia drimica

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Pacifastacus nigrescens

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

Pennatomys nivalis

Platytropius siamensis

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

~40~

Procambarus angustatus

Â ~41~

Pseudamnicola barratei

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

Pseudamnicola desertorum

Pseudamnicola doumeti

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

~42~

Pseudamnicola globulina

Â ~43~

Pseudamnicola latasteana

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

Pseudamnicola oudrefica

Pseudamnicola ragia

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

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Pseudamnicola singularis

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Pseudocampylaea loweii

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

Somatogyrus crassilabris

Tachybaptus rufolavatus

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

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Vernonia sechellensis

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Viola cryana

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

We are in a death roll. More than a debate over climate change, this ecological crisis is a question of humanity’s potential in reciprocity with a biodiverse world. “Simple polarities can’t work here and a kind of intuitive shadow strategy is called for” (Shaw, 2011, 42). A strategy that takes the crisis of ecocide and transforms it into an opportunity for strengthening multi-system diversity. To know a complex system, Cilliers observes, you cannot reduce it to a static, schematic model separated from yourself, because complexity is relationally involved and always adjusting. If complexity is frozen, it loses its definitive dynamism and ceases to be complexity. So you have to experience a complex circumstance. Which means you have to get inside it, thereby diminishing your critical distance from it (Gibson, 2010, 8). Stories “readily incorporate themselves into our felt experience” and this makes storytelling a formidable tool for handling complex cultural-biological links (Abram, 1996, 120). Storytelling breathes like a shape-shifter, it sends up flares to illuminate tracks that criss-cross like orbiting networks through lands, realms, dimensions. Storytelling steadies the mind, soothes the heart, and gives our existence the richness and tenacity it warrants. And most central to this study, storytelling empowers the imagination, which is a vital remedy when the cultural crisis of ecocide is understood more specifically as a collective “crisis of vision” (Russell, 2011). The marrow of this thesis is soaked with the Water Stories that were written during the culminating peak of my research. After my participation in the Artlab events I embedded myself in the Pilliga Scrub for a month-long field study with the task of re-imaging a critical ecological issue: the future of water in relation to coal seam gas mining in the Murray-Darling Basin. In water more than anything, we see our reflection, we see the health of our relationships with a biodiverse world. In fact our future potential in a more-than-human world will be defined most explicitly by how we relate with water! I used the Water Stories to re-imagine “water as an ecological constituent with which we are entangled rather than one we simply command, distrust or exploit” and then invited several artists to respond to these stories using their own creative language (Potter, 2007, 251). The Water Stories stand independently as penned moments of dialogue with the Pilliga, but in dynamic connection with the sensory responses of collaborating Artists they create Quantum Narratives, as trialled in chapter five. Quantum Narratives is the jewel of the research. It is an ecologically inspired storytelling method that supports ‘living’ knowledge systems. Myths work in this way as do most poetic expressions (Campbell, 1991, 283). Quantum Narratives is an adapted term for explaining a method for conjuring story webs which pull the imagination into living complexity with

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languages other than one’s own cultural idioms. As the critical discovery of my quest, Quantum Narratives can be explained as the cauldron in which I alchemise the two core elements of this study, storytelling and ecological thinking. Could this mix be a cultural remedy for ecocide? Such an experiment requires an equally quixotic vessel to contain it. Thus the thesis is designed ‘poetically’ and this is the second distinctive feature of the study. The ‘exegesis’ as ‘creative supplement’ has been discarded and instead the whole thesis (theory and practice) is presented as a Living Script. The Living Script enables a physical and conceptual response to the complexity pattern central to the field of research, it gives the project the tinder needed to simmer as “a living process” (Kumar, 1995, 137). I looked for evidence of living books in cultures practicing living knowledge and have drawn particular inspiration from the Japanese Ehon, a form of picture book which materialises a “‘potency of life’ and preserves living emotion as well as ‘living intellect’” (Keyes, 2006, 11). When I look at them carefully, they deliberately direct my attention to states of mind that increase my sense of joy, reverence for life, an appreciation, expand my awareness, stretch my intelligence, and deepen my capacity for human feeling (Keyes, 2006, 20). The Living Script adapts elements of the Ehon into its design, namely: commencing each chapter with a picture (recorded in dialogue with the more-than-human world of the Pilliga Scrub) reminiscent of “the world’s first printed books [that] were enchantments directed toward invisible beings that could have a good or bad effect on the human world”; and the format of loose and folded pages to bring a “rhythm to the reading”, a beat that echoes “past and present, real and imaginary, close and far, momentary and eternal” (Keyes, 2006, 40 & 257. The purpose of these design elements is to trigger a relational engagement with the complexities being researched, to imbue the “sympathetic magic” emblematic of storytelling (Estes quoted in MacKinnon, 2012, 211). “It is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it” and permit the imagination to stretch (Walter Benjamin quoted in Goddard, 2007, 119). Thus storytelling can seem somewhat immiscible with academic reporting which requires explicit, quantified or qualified logic. This disjunct is apparent with most if not all creative disciplines, thus the exegesis came into being as a kind of intermediary between creative and academic realities. While there have been significant developments in the “submission structure” of creative research enabling the exegesis to become “a site for radical experimentation”, I found the concept of the exegesis to be limited by its canonical history and thus problematic for working with living processes (Krauth, 2011; Krauth, 2002). For this project, emphasising the distinction between artefact and exegesis, felt to feed a modern way of knowing the world that polarises

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Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

mind and body, art and science, culture and nature. Emphasising a principal language for knowledge ‘reporting’ is a problem not only of (creative) research in academia, but endemic of how we constitutionally report and authorise culture/nature governance. Environmental Impact Assessments hinge on ‘facts and figures’ and this “disembodied data” makes little impact on our senses and limited in-roads into multi-layered complexity (Abram, 2010, 285). To relate with ecologies we need a diversity of languages, we need scripts that pulse with the reality of our existence as “living networks” (Capra quoted in Kagan, 2011, 102). How do we inter-connect multiple ways of knowing so as to strengthen both cultural and biological diversity? My study explores this question by experimenting with the Quantum Narratives method. The Living Script is my instrument for delivering the research, analysis and findings of this experiment. The research approach and thesis design offer alternatives to the modern precept of how “knowledge is revealed, acquired and expressed” (Barrett, 2007, xi). They demonstrate, through creative and transdisciplinary practice, that knowledge is “necessarily unpredictable” because it is “both a body of thought and a lived experience [and] these two aspects are inseparable” (ibid, 3; Nicolescu, 2002, 45). Likewise, the final outcome offers seeds for transformation rather than definitive solutions. The final outcome is the third distinct feature of this study, a deliberate departure from construing a fixed “definitive theory that can be applied at all times and in all places” and movement toward an ecological application of knowledge (Dillard, 2008, 286). Essentially, the outcome allows for a continuation or adaptation of the ‘ecological thinking’ that underpins this research. It creates further opportunities and challenges, post-Masters degree, to disperse and pollinate these ‘seeds of possibility’ as discussed in the conclusion. This mode of thinking, while tinged with systems thinking and quantum physics, is primarily shaped on two intrinsic phenomena of the universe: 1) transformation occurs through cycles of evolution and entropy 2) living systems depend on dynamic relationships (Greer, 2010, 10). Mythology emerged contiguously with world cultures as a language for explaining these phenomena in a way that connected people with their rites and responsibilities in the more-thanhuman world (Bidney, 1950, 19). “It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation” (Campbell, 1968, 3). This quest explores the relationship between ecological thinking and storytelling with the hope of remediating that mythological function which strengthens cultural-biological links. As humanity organises itself as a global society, the modern world navigates unprecedented ecological crises barely equipped with our remnant myths. Due to the critical connection between cultural and ecological health there is acute cause to reposit non-anthropocentric symbolism into our current stories. Artists are well placed to execute this task having been care-takers of mythology throughout the generations. To clarify, this is not the modern artist revered as individual creator but the artist who follows in the wake of the

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

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shaman’s sacrifice, using “vision and imagination” to elicit patterns of cultural-biological connection for the health of the collective (Beuys quoted in Brown, 2008, 155). In summation, the purpose of this study is: to examine storytelling in relation to ecological thinking as a cultural remedy for ecocide; and secondly, to seek the artist’s role in applying this remedial mix. The objective of the research is to understand how this mix can stimulate visions of an ecologically responsive paradigm and therefore help to manifest such a world. To explore this proposition I experiment with Quantum Narratives and feed the results into the Living Script by weaving a web of multiple voices and ways of knowing around the central hypothesis: storytelling in relation to ecological thinking manifests human potential in a more-than-human world. It is a sizeable quest that has been mapped as follows: •

Chapter One: Evolution & Entropy - Asking why is ecological thinking important for a paradigm shift?

•

Chapter Two: Continuum & Change - Understanding why storytelling is important to our survival.

•

Chapter Three: Dynamic Connection - Mixing storytelling and ecological thinking together.

•

Chapter Four: The Living Pattern - The research approach and research methods.

•

Chapter Five: Water - Resource or Relationship? - Experiencing an ecological story.

•

Conclusion: Seeds & Ripples - How to pollinate change.

The first three chapters constitute what is traditionally the literature review and conceptual framework. I commence each of these three chapters with edited pieces of correspondence written during my research because this action of writing is instrumental in how I locate and process knowledge. The letters also reaffirm the research as a deeply personal quest within the bigger ecologies I am exploring. Chapter four explains the research approach and the methods used to discover ‘new’ knowledge - the Quantum Narratives method. A model of this method is tested ‘live’ in Chapter five. The quest is then surmised and conclusions drawn in the final chapter Seeds & Ripples which proposes further applications for the discoveries made. Ultimately this study is about seeding the imagination with ecological patterns. I suggest you approach this script not as a contextual argument but as a story that tells of a quest to source remedies for the collective crisis of ecocide. The path of the ‘quest’ compares to practice-led research in that the seeker can only make discoveries by undertaking the transformational experience of the entire journey. Thus I continue the quest analogy throughout the script by referring to ‘the hero’s journey’ as told by Joseph Campbell in A Hero with a Thousand Faces (1968). The hero’s journey is a ‘monomyth’, a universal story-pattern which has been a prime cultural tool for engaging transformational cycles essential to humans’ growth, adaptation and survival (Campbell, 1968, 4). Echoing the hero’s journey, my quest covers diverse terrain, encounters complex labyrinths, wields dialogue as weaponry and encounters battles with the Modern Artist. So let us begin this imaginative adventure…

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Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

“There is only one way to learn,” the alchemist answered. “It’s through action. Everything you need to know you have learned through your journey. You need to learn only one thing more.” The boy wanted to know what that was, but the alchemist was searching the horizon, looking for the falcon. “Why are you called the alchemist?” “Because that’s what I am.” “And what went wrong when other alchemists tried to make gold and were unable to do so?” “They were looking only for gold,” his companion answered. (Coelho, 1998, 127).

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

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Â ~53~

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

FINDING

“For those of us who grew up with western thinking, the challenge of reconceptualising human relations to the more-than-human world is our most profound and important. It will not occur as a purely cerebral activity, but as a process of engagement with the dilemmas of everyday practice. To undo the destructive practices of modernity, and reconstitute them into something better, we will need everything in the… toolbox, science and arts included. But they will be most effective plunging into the river together, rather than attempting to bridge it” (Head, 2011, 7)

Figure 3: Pilliga picture-dialogue #2 (Ilka Nelson and More-than-human World of the Pilliga, 2011).

Relationships

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

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Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

CHAPTER ONE: EVOLUTION & ENTROPY Why is ecological thinking important for a paradigm shift?

LETTER ONE: ON STRATEGY Dear Lierre Keith, Thanks for your work. I’m reading ‘Deep Green Resistance’ and am sobered by its candour. I’ve had a persisting thought on violence as strategy I’d like to share. Thread One: I asked the Chinese Acupuncturist about the extremely tender point behind my ear – she explained it as the husband to the liver. I think a lot about systems – ecosystems, corporate systems, media systems, cosmological systems, quantum systems – wondering how humans can shunt anthropocentric induced ecocide out of future realities. Or perhaps I observe ‘patterns’ as a language of systems. Thread Two: I have seriously considered the propositions in ‘Deep Green Resistance’ and wrestled with my own politics that are directly challenged in your book. I’ propose that environmental action needs to emulate the power of the place it is protecting - like ecosystems enact adaptation - this strategy of transformation absorbs the system being displaced rather than attacking it head on. The intention is for our behaviour to take an evolutionary leap. As Fritjof Capra elucidates “life did not take over the planet by combat but by cooperation, partnership and networking”. You reference the civil rights movement and activism against oil corporations in Nigeria to example direct resistance as the best weapon against tyrant systems. I make the judgement that civilians fight instinctively when everything has been taken from them bar survival. I concede the human collective is poised to lose everything to the victuals of industrial civilisation but until people feel the threat of survival in their bodies I doubt they will instinctually resist the lure of modernity as a collective. Violence is part of nature and part of our psyche but like the liver – is relates to a much bigger organism – so I wonder how we activate the whole organism into transformation? Thread Three: I am suggesting we transform paradigms by adapting patterns occurring in natural systems. If the global economic system is momentarily understood as my angry liver we can see how the economy becomes capitalism - it sucks power from relative organs that it co-inhabits the body with and the resulting imbalance is toxic. Daoism teaches that all parts of my body connected to the liver need to be activated in the treatment and “based on a particular directional energy flow from one phase to the next, the interaction can be expansive, destructive, or exhaustive”.1 If ecosystems are multiple incarnations of relationships then reciprocally our strategies require 1

(Wikipedia Contributors, n.d.).

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multiple truths, multiple realties and multiple voices organised in a non-linear network. Capitalist systems are not indispensable and can’t flex in complex webs. The liver cannot survive alone and if it continually sucks power it will inevitably collapse albeit at the fate of the body. Modernity is great at isolating and fragmenting. What we need is to connect and join – I fear that violence doesn’t do that, I hope it doesn’t. Being human has long been reflected in dominant cultures as power. Rather than perpetuate the impotence of our species we require deep time perspective, biodiverse infused imaginations and deeper weapons than violence! I want to stop the extinctions and the dissection of life for inane material consumption. I want to do it from this body of a woman which is not violent rather it is angry and strong and willing our evolution. I really appreciate your time, thanks Lierre.

With kind regards, Ilka Blue Nelson

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Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

The Universe flashed into existence approximately 13.7 billion years ago, the Earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago and modern humans appeared only in the last 100,000 years (Seed, McGillis and Rosenhek, n.d.). In this context, modern societies and current climate conditions are a micro phase in the unfolding cosmos. This perspective opens the aperture on the global environment crisis and helps shift the climate change debate to a deeper question of humanity’s potential in reciprocity with a biodiverse world. Without our anthropocentric lens, we are neither saviours nor villains of the world, but a part of a much bigger story. To realise our potential in reciprocity with a more-than-human world it is imperative to understand the threat of ecocide. This will simultaneously explain why ecological thinking is important for a paradigm shift. Environmental authorities concur that ecocide is a collective entanglement as complex as the biological and cultural systems it affects (Hamilton, 2010, 162; Brocchi, 2008, 29). To be clear, ecocide is a cultural crisis. According to Russell (2011) this collapse is compounded by a “crisis of vision” or inability to imagine futures beyond ecocide. This chapter seeks out tools to stimulate a paradigm shift, by exploring: •

The ‘modern’ roots of ecocide

•

Ecocide as the death of nature not the nature of death

•

Crisis as opportunity: systems thinking

•

Strategies for transforming ecocide

•

The despair and empowerment practice of deep ecology

THE ROOTS OF ECOCIDE The two historical taproots of the human/nature divide are the Christian Church and the Scientific Revolution (Knudtson and Suzuki, 1992, 9). The rise of the Church promulgated the “separation of matter and spirit” which effectively “castrated nature” (Campbell, 2001). The Scientific Revolution further engendered an anthropocentric view of the universe in promoting the “Cartesian model, which splits mind from body, thought from feeling, rationality from emotion” and isolates people from the ‘world out there’ (Milton, 2002, 25; Hamilton, 2010, 118). In1852 Chief Seattle wrote “what ever he does to the web he does to himself” (Seattle quoted in Campbell, 1991, 43). Seattle’s warning to American Settlers to stop plundering the environment directly conflicted with the power narratives of modernity. The modern industrial world has been a tale of human dominion over nature in which limitless supply and exponential resource consumption could fuel economic progress (McBay, Keith and Jensen, 2011, 23). This modern narrative induces a system wherein “economics – not community wellbeing, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself – drives social decisions” (Jensen, 2006, XII).

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Our current system perpetuates this legacy as reflected in global politics where the health of a nation equates to its gross domestic product. Worse still, it is a self-protective system. Our institutions “reinforce ideologies [that] encourage individuals to behave in ways that ensure the reproduction of the system” (Hamilton, 2010, 118). Any discussion on ecocide must acknowledge this ‘power’ behind modernity, “the power that breaks hearts and bones, rivers and species” to maintain its existence (McBay, Keith and Jensen, 2011, 74). ECOCIDE IS THE DEATH OF NATURE NOT THE NATURE OF DEATH A story from the Upanishads is used here to introduce a paradox coiled in our predicament (Campbell, 1991, 77). The story is about the God Indra who saves the world from an apocalyptic monster. In realising his own strength, Indra becomes fixated with his power and builds a grand palace on the central mountain of the world to symbolise his supremacy. One day a beautiful blue-black boy visits the palace to remind Indra that his actual power is limited in a multi-dimensional universe: “The boy says ‘Indras before you. I have seen them come and go, come and go. Just think, Vishnu sleeps in the cosmic ocean, and the lotus of the universe grows from his navel. On the lotus sits Brahma, the creator. Brahma opens his eyes, and a world comes into being, governed by an Indra. Brahma closes his eyes, and a world goes out of being. The life of a Brahma is four hundred and thirty-two thousand years. When he dies, the lotus goes back, and another lotus is formed, and another Brahma. Then think of the galaxies beyond galaxies in infinite space, each lotus, with a Brahma sitting on it, opening his eyes, closing his eyes. And Indras? There may be wise men in your court who would volunteer to count the drops of water in the oceans of the world or the grains of sand on the beaches but no one would count those Brahmin, let alone those Indras” (ibid., 78). This story alerts us to the infinite breadth of the universe - billions of years of evolution and entropy transforming “over and over by unfoldment and enfoldment” (Merchant, 2003, 210). The life/death cycle manifests on earth predominantly as eating and killing and is fundamental to our existence (Chalmer quote in Weintraub, 2006, 107). Modernity’s dysfunctional relationship with nature exposes a deep denial of human vulnerability, our own inevitable death. Herein lays the paradox. To shift paradigms we need to accept death (as a phase of transformative cycles) while simultaneously rejecting ecocide (as death resulting from anthropocentric power). Our challenge is to recognise our place in a greater system, to be both present in the temporal and eternal at once, like the monomyth hero “who comes to participate in life courageously and decently, in the way of nature, not in the way of personal rancor” (Campbell, 1991, 82).

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Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

CRISIS AS OPPORTUNITY: SYSTEMS THINKING In systems thinking the notion of diversity is inseparable from another notion: resilience. Resilience refers to the capacity to adapt to change from the ‘outside’. The term is used in ecology, referring to the limits of a systems capacity to be perturbed; once limits are reached, the system either collapses or finds a new state of equilibrium (Kagan, 2011, 108). Systems are interdependent thus a singular trauma at one point (such as the extinction of a species) can cause perturbation across multiple systems (Garmestani, Allen, and Gunderson, 2009). For example, Albrecht (2005) identifies ‘solastalgia’ as the psychological distress experienced by humans due to destructive environmental change: this is perturbation from environment systems into social systems. However, not all system-to-system impacts conclude negatively. Systems theory suggests crises are catalysts for opportunities. As Gunderson and Holling indicate, ‘collapse’ is one of four transformational functions in an ecosystems adaptive cycle (Rees, 2010, 33). In regards to ecocide there are conditions in which “social-ecological systems are resilient but undesirable” and collapse is “a necessary step for the construction of new configurations of systems” (Kagan, 2011, 109). There are many traditions and practices with their own language for describing the interdependency between systems, such as Hermetic philosophy, Alchemy and the Ecological Restoration movement (Waite, 1999; Higgs, 2003). The folklore saying ‘as above, so below’ articulates it well (Burns, 2008, 228). In fact, folklore is a good tool for simplifying ecological complexity as demonstrated in the Table 1 below: Folklore

Ecological Application

as above so below

if ecocide has cultural roots it also has cultural remedies

the solution is the problem

the crisis of ecocide is an opportunity for a paradigm shift

Table 1: Comparative Table - Folklore and Ecological Thinking STRATEGIES FOR TRANSFORMATION The axiom ‘as above so below’ helps explain ecological thinking as a strategy for transforming ecocide: ecocide is the widespread crises of interdependent and diverse ecologies, therefore the remedial strategies need also be widespread, diverse and interdependent. The main strategies for transforming ecocide can be grouped into “four broad categories of action: legal remedies, direct action, withdrawal, and spirituality” (McBay, Keith and Jensen, 2011, 74). There is mixed opinion and dispute over which strategy is the most efficacious. Whilst I concede direct action as the best course for expedient and

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visible change, my practice tends more toward the spiritual. This is a point of conflict. Laudable texts like Deep Green Resistance fight ecocide with an unequivocal insight that includes denouncing non-resistance strategies (such as this thesis) (ibid.). Quoting Derrick Jensen (ibid., 12) from Deep Green Resistance: We must put our bodies and our lives between the industrial system and life on this planet. We must start to fight back. Those who come after, who inherit whatever’s left of the world once this culture has been stopped - whether through peak oil, economic collapse, ecological collapse, or the efforts of brave women and men resisting in alliance with the natural world - are going to judge us by the health of the landbase, by what we leave behind. They are not going to care how you or I lived our lives [...] They’re not going to care whether we grieved the murder of the planet. They’re not going to care if we were enlightened or not…They’re not going to care if we became the change we wish to see [...] They’re not going to care if we wrote really big books about it [...] They’re going to care if they can breathe the air and drink the water. The debate over which strategy works best inadvertently exposes the machination of the quest. Direct action and cultural resistance are both effective strategies for change but they only constitute one of the transformational stages of the bigger journey. Mythology says the evolution from “psychological immaturity to the courage of self-responsibility and assurance requires a death and a resurrection. That is the basic motif of the universal hero’s journey “leaving one condition and finding the source of life to bring you forth into a richer or mature condition” (Campbell, 1991, 152). In terms of ecocide we need to evolve a more ‘mature condition’ and the opportunity for systemic change is missed if we fix on resisting power systems rather than adapting them. There are often historical, political or ideological reasons that preclude organisations from networking strategically; this divide reinforces the independent ‘silo’ model endemic to modernity. I frequently observe how this divide adversely affects the leverage of environmental groups. For example Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, despite their shared objective to stop whaling, do not strategise interdependently (Watson, 2008). Ecologically, “less diversity in a system means a lower resilience” (Kagan, 2011, 109). By strengthening collective resilience through interconnected diversity, we can optimise the niche potential of individual/groups. Furthermore, sharing resources as a whole decreases the need for duplicating resources within individual silos. In this sense, if all the methods (that Jensen renounces) were interdependently connected they would create a resilient strategy for transforming ecocide. As a strategy, interdependent networking only contributes part of a complex remedy. We need also address our current reliance on policies and sustainability plans that have been developed in the modern paradigm (for example the triple bottom line model). These plans ideologically

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position economic concerns on an equal or higher footing than cultural and environmental issues (Hamilton, 2010, 219). Thus we stagnate because modern economics relies on consumption but “we can’t consume our way out of environmental collapse; consumption is the problem” (McBay, Keith and Jensen, 2011, 27/25). As long as we are governed by meeting predetermined economic outcomes, the consequence will be “a policy paradigm incapable of dealing with the scope of the overlapping problems” (Haley, 2008, 203; Russell, 2011). Current environmental policies demand that those seeking to undertake major industrial, resource harvesting, construction or other major projects must undertake and make available to scrutiny an ‘independent’ environmental impact assessment. This sets up a process where scientists are expected to provide ‘answers’ to any questions about the environmental impact of the project concerned. This is indeed a problematic policy. First, the emphasis is upon ‘answers’ rather than defining the many questions that demand continuing inquiry throughout the life of the project (Feinsinger quoted in Parnaby and Hamilton-Smith, 2004, 86). Ecological thinking is a much deeper process than implementing sustainability models. It requires functioning with the knowledge that “everything is a dance of evolution and entropy” (Prigann, 2004, 181). Imagine policies modelled on continual feedback loops; they would be a departure from static reporting and a move toward working with living knowledge. I have begun materialising this vision by developing the thesis as a Living Script. Following the Biomimicry principle “nature recycles everything”, the Living Script is designed with multiple connection points and the facility to transform its function as you will glean over the coming chapters and be reminded of again in the conclusion (Benyus, 2002, 7). FROM DESPAIR TO EMPOWERMENT: THE PRACTICE OF DEEP ECOLOGY Deep ecology is a key source of ecological thinking for the research. It is articulated by Joanna Macy (n.d.) as a practice that “helps to decondition us from centuries of culturally induced anthropocentrism, and to heal our broken relationship with the natural world”. As a philosophy it identifies with nature and considers human systems to be part of a greater ecological web (Milton, 2002, 74). “In deep ecology, particularly as it is described in the work of Arne Naess (1985, 1988, 1989), [this] identification with nature and natural things makes moral rules redundant” (ibid.). Applying this non-anthropocentric reasoning in the remediation of ecocide helps shift the focus from regressive recrimination to liberating the individual to identify their own path in the greater “cosmological” transformation (Fox quoted in Milton, 2002, 78). The concepts of deep ecology are consistently grounded in an embodied practice of dialogue with the more-than-human world. Acting like a kind of consciousness anchor, the physical practice of this dialogue keeps deep ecology from becoming a theory that “gets all tangled up in concepts” (Campbell, 1991, 205). As demonstrated in my own research, deep ecology practice does not give

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precedence to the rational mind over other languages or dimensions of knowledge (see Appendix A and Appendix B for examples of deep ecology practice used in my research). With the objective of transforming crisis into opportunity, my research focuses on the deep ecology practice of Despair and Empowerment (Macy, 1995, 250). Despair and Empowerment practice helps participants confront the mass desecration of our environment through a process of working denial and grief into action (Seed et al., 1988, 7). “Denial is one of the key psychological undercurrents in the dominant culture that is preventing widespread acknowledgement of the scope of the ecological crisis and keeping the apocalypse suspended in surreal slow motion” (Reinsborough and Canning, 2011). I support Clive Hamilton’s (2010) opinion that to overcome this state of denial we first need to grieve the permanent environmental loss already experienced on a global scale and I feel Despair and Empowerment offers a channel for this immense grieving process. The practice of transforming despair into empowerment is the act of the hero who undertakes the journey in order to face death and thus realise her/his potential. Joseph Campbell says the message of the myth is “you as you know yourself are not the final term of your being and you must die to that” (Campbell, 2001). Correspondingly, “’self-realization’ is seen by Naess as the natural destiny of every maturing human being” (Naess in Milton, 2002, 83). I have drawn this parallel to highlight the connection between mythology and deep ecology; the principles of transformation found in both Despair and Empowerment practice and mythological rituals, foster growth through personal maturation from ego to social self, and from social self to metaphysical self (Macy n.d.). The difference between ‘personal growth’ as referred to here and ‘individual potential’ as characterised by modernity, is the difference between self-enhancement and self-transcendence (Hamilton, 2010, 156). Put ecologically, “our individuality is real but no more separable from the world than a whirlpool is from water” (Dizerega quoted in Milton, 2002, 58). In this chapter I have seeded the idea of transforming ecocide by realising our potential in relation to the more-than-human world. Central to this discussion is an ecological understanding that: •

a point of crisis is also a point of opportunity

•

systemic change depends on diverse interdependent strategies and systems

•

potential in a biodiverse world is based on the life/death cycle of transformation

I have also made connections between mythology and ecological thinking as a method for activating transformation, expressly through deep ecology and Despair and Empowerment practice. The next chapter elaborates on this connection by exploring the realm of storytelling as a fundamental tool for human survival and a potent method for imagining and manifesting an ecologically responsive paradigm.

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CHAPTER TWO: CONTINUUM & CHANGE Why is storytelling critical to our survival?

LETTER TWO: ON MYTHOLOGY Dear Robert Bly, This week I came upon your piece ‘What Stories Do We Need’ and my soul was quenched quite unexpectedly. In this fragmented world, with idle connections between place and people, it is a deeply nourishing gift that you and your fellow storytellers offer us, thank you. This morning I visited the beach at sunrise. I have a passion for sticks and since listening to your stories I thought to go stick hunting with the Dwarfs. Ironically there was no drift-wood to be found but I picked up lots of plastic which made me smile because as you said ‘Dwarfs hate plastic’. I am curious about one thing. After you tell a story, you unravel the myths to explain how the symbology and story translates between worlds. Do you suppose, long, long ago in the days when myths were common tongue, the stories would have been explained then too? Or do you think myths were familiar language and people understood their layered meanings? I’m really curious about how non-storytellers learn from mythologies. I like knowing that Myths hold true our darkest aspects. And I like that Myths are plural akin to Nature! It saddens me deeply that our myths have been untended for so long. At this time in chronological history when paradigms appear to be transforming, do you think myths will be victim to extinction? I took note when you said new myths cannot be created in a lifetime, that they take tens of thousands of years to evolve (like Nature!). When I hear stories like the ones you shared, it reminds me to be a River and flow. In awe of a River I once wrote: “I have an image of you passing over rocks - no hesitation, no thought, just a dance with gravity.” I’m very grateful there are Elders in the world like you!

With much kindness, Ilka Blue Nelson

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Dear Ilka Nelson, I'm glad that the stories were able to make the journey to your soul. My guess is that even in the good days of myths, some stories still needed explanation. A good story is simply such a complicated inter-weaving of thoughts that one needs to take a hold of the end of the string somewhere. There are so many myths that pass over our heads like clouds that I think there will always have to be someone who reaches up and pulls one of them down and confesses it to be a blueprint in understanding his or her life. I am glad that myth still has so much to say to those of us who run with the coyotes instead of with the wolves.

With fond wishes, Robert Bly (Personal correspondence, January 28, 2012).

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The universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything (Berry quoted in Environment and Ecology, 2007). Storytelling is a ubiquitous sense-making tool, used by cultures since the beginning of time to warn and to guide (Edgecomb, 2011). Cognitive science ascertains that “stories are vital to us because the primary way we process information is through induction. Induction is essentially reasoning by pattern recognition” (Beinhocker, 2006, 126). Humans are highly proficient pattern recognisers and pattern completers (ibid., 127). We instinctively navigate the uncertainty of the present moment by metaphorically relating it to past experiences. Similarly, we predict the future by matching and superimposing previously learnt patterns. This is a unique human survival tool. “In the continually evolving world of complexity, the survival of any complex adaptive system depends on its ability to recognise current conditions and implement behaviours that enable it to adapt appropriately […] for human beings, this capability arises largely from the ability to tell stories” (Baskin, 2005, 333). Why are we facing ecocide when humans are highly adept pattern recognisers with the ability to adapt and even orientate our futures through storytelling? This chapter considers storytelling as a cultural remedy for ecocide by exploring: •

The types of stories we tell

•

The power and potential of storytelling

•

Mythological wisdom

•

Quantum narratives as an ecological patterning method

THE STORIES WE TELL In narrative theory there are three main types of stories: antenarrative, narrative and mythology (ibid.). Antenarrative is a relatively new term that describes the dynamic unfolding or pre-birth of a story (Boje, 2008). This type of story is “dialogical, fragmented, plural, spontaneous and emergent” (Jørgensen, 2011). It is the story we tell “in-the-moment-of-Beingness”, speculatively and we source its contents from the “collective memory” (Bakhtin quoted in Boje, 2012; Boje, 2012). Antenarrative stories are not fixed and can thus be interpreted as ‘living’ stories. In contrast, narratives are understood as fixed stories that we deem advantageous to our current reality (Baskin, 2005, 335). We tell narratives “retrospectively” as established knowledge (Boje, 2012). Myths are also understood in narrative theory as fixed stories but they address the larger scale of our existence, they are stories or truths told about the world and the “way things are” (Baskin, 2005, 335).

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The third function of storytelling next to sense-making and adaptation is manifestation. Manifestation through storytelling is the process of repeating a pattern in order to make that pattern reality. This change-making capacity, based on pattern recognition, is a powerful instrument that strongly influences how humanity’s future unfolds (Baskin, 2005, 335). We are imprinted with knowing just by listening to the tale (Estes, 1992, 387). By consistently repeating the tale/pattern/narrative we are able to ‘imprint’ a sense of actuality and understanding this power inherent in storytelling explains how dominant narratives are formed. It also reveals a way of manifesting sustainable futures by flourishing imaginations with new patterns informed by ecological thinking. POWER AND POTENTIAL In What Stories Do We Need Robert Bly (1991) explains how the birth of the modern paradigm reflects an ideological shift from the plural to the singular, from a mythological view to a psychological grasp of the world. Unlike mythology, psychology celebrates the ‘individual’ as being the saviour, ruler and villain of both internal and external worlds. Placing such immense responsibility on the individual is deeply conflicting for a social-species or “individual-societyspecies” and problematic for democratic pluralism (Morin quoted in Kagan, 2011, 155). The advantage of promoting individual power is that it shifts the attention away from collective egalitarianism: which is what the modern narrative has largely enacted as commonly seen in “institutional narratives [that] become hegemonic in their dominance of living story diversity” (Boje, 2012). Fixed narratives help to propagate authoritarianism and threaten our survival in a complex world because they “prevent adaptability” (Czarniawska quoted in Boje, 2012). I am not implying that fixed narratives are used for indoctrination, rather I am making note that dominating patterns often become habitual. Chimamanda Adichie (2009) says “it is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. How they are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power”. Carolyn Merchant agrees that ideology comes from the narratives “told by people in power” but says if we recognise this than “by rewriting the story, we can begin to challenge the structures of power” (Merchant, 2003, 241). As raised in the previous chapter, there is debate over which strategies best engender change and this argument extends to storytelling and it’s agency to transform power: So often when people talk about creating new stories what they are pretending is that you can simply make new stories and they will supplant the old ones without actually destroying the infrastructure that allows those in power to maintain their power […] As long as those in power still have an oil economy, still have guns and tanks and aeroplanes and prisons, our new stories are not sufficient. The Tolowa had wonderful stories that taught them how to live sustainably and they were slaughtered. The point is that telling new stories is necessary but not sufficient (Jensen, 2011).

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Here I begin looking at defusing the power of the single story with a story-web, one that could help adapt current institutional systems into a new policy paradigm. Cracks appear in the script and we take first glimpses of a curled green sprout. I start unfurling Quantum Narratives as an ecologically inspired method for connecting multiple stories and thus stimulating the imagination to recognise diverse patterns. This method alone cannot transform paradigms but as a tool it can assist us in developing more-than-human perspectives. We are then in a position to balance the power of a story with its ecological potential. To illustrate this idea I consider two stories from the Northern Territory, Australia. The first belongs to Aboriginal custodians who say their Country is “the sleeping place of the leader of the giant green ants” (Minmia, 2007, 24). The Green Ant story is woven into ceremonies to engage the responsibility of keeping the sleeping place undisturbed. It is told that if the green ant wakes, death will sweep across the land and its inhabitants (ibid., 23). The second story comes from mining companies in the same area who tell of uranium deposits instead of green ant sleeping places. The uranium story is threaded through company operations and organisational reports to ensure the deposits are excavated (TUC Resources, 2010, 1). They are conflicting stories but the collective are poised to adapt beyond ecocide if they can consult diverse stories, especially those that connect us to a morethan-human world, when asking of any situation “what it takes, what it makes, what it wastes” (Hawken, 2005, 21).In this regard, myths have long been the stories told with the purpose of maintaining a sustainable presence in a biodiverse world (Campbell, 1991, 38). STORIES TOLD IN WISDOM I refer to mythology as Rio Abajo Rio - the river beneath the river - and during the course of this study have come to feel mythology is as inseparable from human cognition as bones are from our anatomy.2 My view contrasts with narrative theory for I do not perceive myth as ‘fixed’ but as ‘fluid’ albeit glacial-slow to unfold. Just as bones have evolved ever so slowly, so have myths evolved as part of the collective human psyche; cycling metaphors, symbols and characters throughout the changing eras. Mythology, in a very real sense, is our species language for explaining the complexity, change and wonder in the universe (Campbell, 2001). According to Campbell (1991, 38) myths serve four functions:

•

The Metaphysical Function: Awakening a sense of awe before the mystery of being

•

The Cosmological Function: Explaining the shape of the universe

•

The Sociological Function: Validating and supporting the existing social order

•

The Psychological Function: Guiding the individual through the stages of life

The term Rio Abajo Rio is inspired by Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ (1992) tales in Women Who Run With the Wolves.

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Robert Bly (1991) describes mythology as the language of the internal world which corresponds with a cosmological reading of the external universe. Bly (1991) says mythology feeds our soul in the same manner as science feeds our brain. In Occidental cultures these disciplines developed in tandem and gave us an unprecedented understanding of the world and our place in it. However the dialogue between myth and science ceased at the time monotheism took hold and from 800AD the mythological era collapsed (ibid.). This is a significant point in seeking to remediate ecocide - mythology has been ‘frozen’ in the West while science has been advancing since the time of Galileo: We are now in a state in which the advances of the nuclear physicists and the subatomic physicists have given entirely new views of what is going on and the church refuses to open the mythologies. It can be said that the cosmology is going faster and faster and the mythology is falling farther and farther behind […] it means the soul is falling farther and farther behind. The brain is picking up the new cosmology and the soul is being given old texts which have not been rewritten (ibid.). Possessing active mythologies is vital to our evolving relationship with the more-than-human world. Myths connect us with our psychological, spiritual and physical potential by cultivating interwoven networks between biological and cultural systems. A prime example of this active connection is found in ‘the forest’: Since ancient times the near impenetrable forest in which we get lost has symbolized the dark, hidden, near-impenetrable world of our unconscious. If we have lost the framework which gave structure to our past life and must now find our way to become ourselves, and have entered this wilderness with an as yet undeveloped personality, when we succeed in finding our way out we shall emerge with a much more highly developed humanity (Bettelheim quoted in Fraim, 2001). In mythology (especially European myths) the forest is where we encounter the dark underworld. This is the place the hero must journey in order to undergo transformation from innocence to maturity. "Entering the Dark Forest or the Enchanted Forest is a threshold symbol; the soul entering the perils of the unknown; the realm of death; the secrets of nature, or the spiritual world which man must penetrate to find the meaning” (Cooper quoted in Fraim, 2001). The link between mythology and natural ecology is a cultural method for triggering each stage of our growth and thus sustaining our evolution in a more-than-human world. Consequently, this means physical deforestation heralds extreme environmental/biological loss AND the permanent loss of mythological portals for our imagination and psyche. Ecocide threatens diversity of both external and internal realms. In the previous chapter I avowed that death is essential for transformation. Mythology helps us connect with this primal reality by shining light into the darkness that is summoned by death (Campbell, 1968, 388). Because mythological figures (such as the witch) represent aspects of our psyche, the stories that feature these figures, affirm our own lived experience (Bly, 1991). They

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affirm the thoughts we cannot readily or rationally justify including the ugly, violent and shadowy feelings that dwell in us all. So it is important to acknowledge that in the absence of active mythologies, modern narratives have rewritten ‘darkness’ as evil, demonising all that we once called the sublime (Campbell, 1991, 278).Occidental mythology has lost most of its figures and those which persist like witches, thanks mostly to fairytales, have undergone severe social persecution (Bly, 1991). Bly (1991) says the “mythological world would have collapsed for [the Church] when they started burning living women” in an attempt to eradicate the ‘witch’ aspect of the psyche. With mythology frozen out of modernity we have no myths that can “address the realities of contemporary life, particularly with regard to the changing cosmological and sociological realities of each new era” (Campbell quoted in Wikipedia, n.d.). How then do we remediate mythology? QUANTUM NARRATIVES: THINKING LIKE A MOUNTAIN Remember the story told between the River Awa and the ordinary Hero? In this instance the River Awa would suggest ‘the question is not how to remediate mythology but how to reimagine current narratives in line with disrupted cultural and biological systems’. The green sprout shoots its tiny tip toward the sky. This is where I expose Quantum Narratives and make the critical discovery of my research quest. In making this discovery I uncover a way for contemporary societies to supplement the mythological function that connects us with the more-than-human world. The simple definition of Quantum Narratives as used in this thesis is: an ecologically inspired storytelling method that supports ‘living’ knowledge systems. The term was devised for its connections to quantum physics, narrative theory and the more complex concept of “levels of Reality” central to transdisciplinarity (Nicolescu, 2002, 22). This means Quantum Narratives is a functional, subjective method (a story-web supporting multiple ways of knowing) located within “trans-subjective” or “multidimensional” universe (a dynamic web of relationships). There are other definitions of quantum narratives used in the broader study of knowledge systems, for example Goranson and Cardier use quantum narratives as a concept to explore ‘Agent Systems’ (the intelligent agents within computers, robots and machines) and their applications: In the context of knowledge systems, the term ‘narrative’ often refers to an interface that enables a human to interact with a machine. The field of narrative intelligence presently encompasses storytelling systems, story support services, even agents that use narrative structures to make their behavior more comprehensible to users” (Beth Cardier, The Story Molecule: Narrative as Information, 2007, 21). However in the context of this study, Quantum Narratives describes a specific method used in the absence of mythology, to remedy ecocide. It is important to note that I borrowed the term

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from storyteller Mike Bonifer who says a quantum narrative is a type of antenarrative because it is “in a continual state of becoming” (Personal correspondence, September, 5, 2011). The personal dialogue I engaged with Bonifer supports my ‘relational’ practice of locating and gathering knowledge. 3 The distinction between Bonifer’s term and my own adaptation is that a quantum narrative is a type of story (an antenarrative) whereas the capitalised plural Quantum Narratives is a method (that connects multiple stories in a way that stimulates ecological thinking). At night, while I’m weaving poetry to stitch up earthly wounds, Luke lays on the moon-side of our bed-ship using technology as a telescope into the quantum world. I read him a poem: It’s said the Myths were left behind And with them The darkness that feeds our souls, Keeps them watered So they may also Drink the light. We cannot tell new tales So we mine For the deepest drop, That bottom plate of life’s thirst. In reply Luke tells me that his treasure find for the evening is a quantum discovery.4 Holding up his hand he asks me to imagine it as a leaf and that sunlight is entering through his skin at multiple places at once. Luke tells me the sunlight travels multiple paths, searching out the shortest route to photosynthesise. Once the light has sourced it, that path becomes the only path the light has ever travelled. It is quantum physics. I remember a story about a mountain. The mountain is called Mount Bauple and it is a tale about different ways of knowing as told by Tamsin Kerr. It begins with the Aboriginal stories about Mount Bauple that say it is a place to be “very careful [of] - requiring permission to use resources - if not to avoid entirely” (Steele quoted in Kerr, 2007, 109). When the European settlers heard this story they did not respect the knowledge or heed the Aboriginal counsel to avoid the mountain. The tale jumps forward a hundred odd years to when scientists discover the “original strain of the bauple nut (or

I wrote to Mike Bonifer and asked to borrow his term quantum narrative. He replied: “Yes, you may use the phrase 'quantum narrative' if it helps with your research. I made a connection between Viola Spolin's work with improvisation and Fritjof Capra's book The Tao of Physics. I solved the mystery by coining the phrase ‘quantum narrative’ to define what improvisation, quantum physics and Eastern mysticism have in common. As you know, Ilka, this is where the discussion can get pretty deep, so let's just say that a quantum narrative is in a continual state of becoming (Personal Correspondence Monday 5 September 2011). 4 “Research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggests that the marvellous speed and efficiency with which green plants transfer solar energy from surface receptors to molecular centres that convert it into chemical energy is the result of a process of “quantum beating”. In the presence of light, oscillations are triggered in the plant that explore all possible paths between receptor and converter simultaneously and reversibly (meaning they can retreat without penalty from a wrong path). These many wavelike probes collapse into a single movement, observable only through electronic spectroscopy that can measure events in femtoseconds (millionths of a billionth of a second)” (Moss,n.d; Fleming et al, 2007). 3

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macadamia) trees” on the mountain (Kerr, 2007, 109). This time the scientific evidence was considered the ‘right’ type of knowledge needed to restrict access and people now require “special Queensland NP&WS [National Parks and Wildlife Service] permission to enter” the mountain (ibid.). This is my favourite analogy for explaining Quantum Narratives as ‘multiple paths of knowledge, expressed through diverse languages in variant space and time, but within a unified whole’. Diversity means many different relationships, many different approaches to the same problem (Capra, 1996, 295). Like the sunlight travels through a leaf on multiple paths which have only ever been one path, I see the Aboriginal story and the scientific knowledge as multiple narratives of the one mountain. In terms of storytelling these narratives are shaped by different ways of recognising patterns (knowledge) and they are unique expressions (language) of a shared world transpiring shared realisations though not necessarily in the same dimension. Our carnal immersion in the depths of the Mysterious thus ensures an inherent and inescapable pluralism. And yet - and yet: although there is no single way to tell it, it is the same Tale that is unfurling itself through our gazillion and one gestures. It remains the same Earth whose life-giving breath we all inhabit, the very same mystery that we each experience from our own place within its depths (Abram, 2010, 272). Our reliance on stories for sense-making, adaptation and manifesting the future makes storytelling a vital tool for survival. I now use the concept and action of the ‘dynamic’ to mix storytelling with ecological thinking. Ecologically, a dynamic connection of at least two distinct elements will activate transformation (Graham, 2012). Applying this principle, I seek to germinate a remedy. Could the result strengthen the complex network linking human and natural systems? In the next chapter I explore this possibility as my quest begins to carve an opening (or fill a research niche) by using Quantum Narratives as a method of manifesting an ecological paradigm.

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CHAPTER THREE: DYNAMIC CONNECTION Mixing storytelling and ecological thinking together. LETTER THREE: ON CONNECTING Dear Paul Kingsnorth, I read your article ‘Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist’ and tears climbed inside my chest. Thanks for your words, for your truth in them and also for their poetics. Sometimes I blanket the global environmental issue as a human species matter because it affects everyone. But this thinking ignores the intelligence of people who lived and live on earth with nature very well! I say it’s a human issue because I don’t want to snag on cultural divide, politics and religion. I want to soar in a more-than-human world. However being born in Australia, the Aboriginal People and their connection to Country is a great source of inspiration and learning for me. I want to share it with you in terms of patterns. As you’ll know, storytelling on the cognitive level is about pattern recognition. If people are repeatedly fed story patterns (like the 7 standard plots of Hollywood) they manifest those stories. Some call it programming, I understand it as ecosystem functioning where resilience is determined by multi-pattern diversity, by the relationships that evolve dependant on environmental conditions. One dark night, driving up the West Australian Coast, the driver stopped the car and we piled on to a deserted road. It’s so empty of humans that land, penetrating. The driver, also a seafarer, pointed to the sky – it was star laden. The most incredible shift happened for me as he began to unravel the stars from their western language. He showed us patterns that Aboriginal friends had shown him. They weren’t connect-the-dots like white folk do, they were formed by shapes amid the stars – this is a completely different way of seeing and knowing! It’s different pattern recognition. You and I and those like us are in-between. So then, we must work in-between. I say this in response to your words “What am I to do with feelings like these? Useless feelings in a world in which everything must be made useful. Sensibilities in a world of utility. Feelings like this provide no ‘solutions’”. We are pattern makers and rhythm writers! It is quite possible human evolution is locked on a collision course but its also possible humans are staggering toward another paradigm, a colossal shift. It is hard work to scribe new patterns, fraught with danger and failure (like all good adventures) but people need them, else how will we manifest our way to a world temporarily forgotten but stirring in our primal depths? Time is not linear. That’s really hard to accept when extinction rates are gravely accelerating. I met with a Gomeroi Elder to ask permission to perform field research in his Country. He spoke with me for 3 hours before addressing my request. I took it as a lesson! Us white folk rush. Changing the patterns needs to take as long as it takes to scribe them. This is not about the individual - this

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is about the species. Its complex - like biodiversity - there is neither one answer nor one truth so at some point you have to believe in your own way alongside the ways of others. I temper my rage and grief for species extinction by accepting I’m slow - that’s how I am as animal - I am slow and deep, two good qualities for planting seeds. To manifest what we envision for this world requires deep strong roots that live long after we’re dead. This isn’t about now, it is about always.

With kind regards, Ilka Blue Nelson

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Ecological systems are complex, multidimensional patterns. The geographical correlations between “biodiversity hot spots and linguistically rich cultural areas” give an insight into this complexity and suggest the existence of untold, potent links in cultural-biological diversity (Nabhan, 1997, 38). These links are recognised by UNESCO (2008) “as key elements in achieving sustainable development” but are directly threatened by ecocide. Professor Deborah Rose sees this peril as “multi species ethnography on the edge of extinction” (Workshop notes, November 19, 2010). I concur with Rose, we need to “disrupt, disassemble and re-imagine” our narratives in order to strengthen multiplicity (Workshop notes, November 19, 2010). Thus I use this chapter to mix storytelling with ecological thinking to ascertain how stories adapt complex ecological patterns. I am specifically interested in how this dynamic connection can make a remedy of Quantum Narratives and how the artist applies this mix, so I investigate: •

The possibilities of pattern recognition

•

How languages divide and connect

•

Adaptation through dialogue

•

The function of the artist in a ‘living system’

A QUANTUM LEAP IN PATTERN RECOGNITION The dominating stories of modernity, which we are bathed in daily, resound on a “patterning principle” that fastens the universe in a linear, deductive narrative (Rozik, 2006, 552). Thankfully, our collective imagination is not limited to these patterns and new sciences such as quantum physics, offer a means to stimulate our imaginations beyond the anthropocene. Quantum physics is an evolutionary leap in recognising pattern complexity and thus thrusts open opportunities for re-imagining our narrative structures using “complex, non-linear plots” (Merchant, 2003, 208). Quantum physics intimates the universe is fluid (and not fixed) at a subatomic level. Scientists have observed solid matter turn into “wave-like patterns of probability” and they make a case that nothing can be understood as an “isolated entity” but only as a process of “interconnections and correlations” (Capra, 1996, 30). Quantum physics disrupts previous scientific ideas about the universe by suggesting: a) parts can influence each other without interacting; b) parts behave differently when they are observed or measured. This quantum observation tells us patterns are continually changing within and beyond their field of relationships (Rae, 2004, xi). Ultimately - as quantum physics has showed so dramatically - there are no parts at all. What we call a part is merely a pattern in an inseparable web of relationships. Therefore, the shift from the parts to the whole can also be seen as a shift from objects to relationships (Capra, 1996, 37-39).

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The quantum discoveries of the universe are not unique to science. Many cultures and some disciplines (like deep ecology) have their own languages for understanding the universe as a dynamic web of “interconnected and interdependent” phenomena (Capra, 1996, 7; Ntuli, 2002, 56). What all these different languages have in common is an ecological view of the world that conjures a paradigm of the relational (Pattern quoted in Capra, 1996, 35). This ecological view disassembles modernity’s literal translation of myths and what is revealed beneath is a living system: Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history, mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives becomes dissolved (Campbell, 1991, 249). A connection can be drawn here between mythology, quantum physics and transdisciplinarity in terms of the quantum revolution challenging the foundation of Modernity which is based on a single level of Reality (Nicolescu, 2002, 20). “The emergence of at least two different levels of Reality in the study of natural systems is a major event in the history of knowledge. It can lead us to reconsider our individual and social lives, to give us new interpretations to old knowledge, to explore the knowledge of ourselves in a different way, here and now” (ibid., 22). Storytelling is ubiquitous to our species however the details of ‘what’ and ‘how’ a story are unique cultural patterns. Thinking ecologically we can associate the narrative with a long history of repeated cultural patterns and then distinguish mythology as our species tool for pattern recognition. To make an analogy: narrative is the content and mythology is the vessel; narrative is the water of the river and mythology is Rio Abajo Rio - the river beneath the river. Currently we rely on a handful of “basic plots” to inform modern narratives and these are regurgitated throughout mainstream media, politics, films, gaming and fiction (Booker, 2004). Considering that narratives manifest the “truth” of our reality, then these basic patterns afford basic potential (Hartley, 2008, 12). We are highly proficient pattern recognisers and it therefore seems limiting to me to entrust our potential to only a few patterns. I propose we experiment with pattern structures that evolve our narratives and thus manifest new experiences of ourselves and our world.5 I feel the magic of possibility in imagining futures seeded from dynamic patterns when I make synchronistic discoveries such as the word ‘paradigm’ being a derivative of the Greek word ‘

’ which means ‘pattern’ (Dictionary.com, 2012).

I like the example of Donnie Darko, a film that experiments with non-linear narratives to create the ‘reality’ of a “tangent universe” (Kelly, 2001). 5

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LANGUAGES THAT CONNECT, LANGUAGES THAT DIVIDE The etymological roots of the ‘human/nature divide’ in modern language can be traced to the Greek Alphabet (Abram, 1996, 100). I see how this has shaped the evolution of Western language and unwittingly contributed to the modern individual’s illiteracy in ‘cultural-biological interdependency’. To develop the mechanics of Quantum Narratives it is therefore important to examine how languages divide and/or connect. The birth of the Greek Alphabet was the first time human language “served only to designate the human-made letter itself” (Abram, 1996, 100). Previous to this ‘new’ language system, humans used pictographs and ideographs which symbolically referenced the external environment and thus nurtured a connection with the natural world (ibid.). With the inception of written language, western minds soon became spellbound in an anthropocentric gaze (ibid., 102). Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient associations with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air (ibid., 252). The ‘civilisation versus wild nature’ story evolved through this human-centred-language (Heike, 2004, 11). Told for centuries by the dominating storytellers of the time, first the Church, then Science and now popular culture, the repetition of this narrative has manifested an anthropocentric way of knowing and relating to the world. The following quotes demonstrate this recurrence; the first is from Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and the second William Shakespeare: This is going to be a very difficult night, and to the people of Far North Queensland, I say to them as they face what is probably the worst cyclone that our nation has ever seen, this is a powerful natural force, but the courage of the people of Far North Queensland is an even stronger force again (Gillard, 2011). Wind, rain and thunder, remember earthly man Is but a substance that must yield to you (Shakespeare quoted in Hamilton, 2010, 219) The shift from oral language systems to the written word has rewritten our relationships with each other and the more-than-human world. At its inception, the elite and educated embraced writing and relegated other language systems which effectively ostracised the majority population (Merchant, 2003, 199). Mythology was also dismissed, deemed by Plato as “the passing down of stories orally, a mere repetition of words without knowledge” (ibid., 200). It pleases me to disagree with Plato on this point. I am a writer who is necessarily aware of the divisive power and prohibitive nature of my craft. I realise my language comes from the

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paradigm I am seeking to transform and have seen the armour of text revealed by literacy and linguistic barriers. But I too am spellbound and taste words on my tongue before they fall, eternally to the page. With Quantum Narratives I seek to dislodge the human/nature narrative and dissolve writing into a ‘living’ knowledge system formed by diverse languages (creative, sensory and linguistic for example). This is not a new concept but one inspired by existing knowledge systems that sustain such complexity. Connection between different ways of knowing is described here by Palyku Elder Gladys Milroy and her daughter Jill Milroy in Heartsick for Country: Aboriginal people collectively have the oldest living knowledge system in the world […] Aboriginal people are culturally and linguistically diverse, but share a holistic, animate, interconnected system of knowledge that knows the stories for country, the spirit in the land and the relationship between all living things (Milroy and Milroy, 2008, 40). The spoken languages of Aboriginal Australians, like those of numerous Indigenous cultures, have a living, dynamic relationship with the environment. The following two quotes demonstrate languages that connect ecologically: the first is from Nyungar/Indjarbandi man Noel Nannup and the second Jo Tito whose turangawaewae is in the Taranaki:6 So the water that comes this way, then runs into what they call the Avon River, but in the old way it is called ‘gugleyar’, which means laughing water. This is because when it runs over the rocks it celebrates; it wants you to hear it, so you hear it laughing (Nannup, 2008, 109). Wai means water. Ko wai au? means Who am I? So water is very much the central part of who am I. This word, this concept, this part of nature which is deeply embedded in our beautiful language and who we are. Waiata is song, music [...] waiora is life giving waters and because our language is so conceptual, every word tells a story and is not exclusive to itself, always connected to something else somewhere (Personal Correspondence August 30, 2011). Palawa man Greg Lehman says “words like mountain, tree and wind are no invitation for them to show us their presence” (2008, 137). Lehman’s statement contains me. I would rather he questioned if our knowledge of Western words has faded just as our relationship with mythology has? David Abram’s (1996) book Spell of the Sensuous provokes this possibility in digging up the remnant word Mem (Abram, 1996, 102) The modern letter ‘M’ evolved from the Semitic letter ‘mem’ which is written as a series of water-like waves and can be linked to the Hebrew word for “water” which is ‘Mem’ (ibid.). Abram’s example affirms my belief that our words do have ecological connections; we need only dig to the aquifers of our language to find them. Perhaps Quantum Narratives can coax a memory of this connection by placing the written word in dialogue with a multiplicity of languages? “Turangawaewae is a Maori word meaning - ‘place to stand’ - where a persons roots are, the land they come from, their land” (Tito, Personal correspondence, March 3, 2012). 6

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DIALOGUE: NEW NETWORKS FROM OLD WEBS Considering the global predominance of Western language and then that language influences our relationship with the more-than-human world, it equates that we need ways to adapt Western language into ecological paradigms (Steffan, 2008, 375). Dialogue has much to offer this task because its very subsistence depends on “interactions and relationships” and as quantum physics recognises the universe, this is “the basic pattern of life” (Capra, 1996, 290). In terms of pattern recognition, a whole web of dialogues spun from multiple languages can begin to resemble patterns of diversity - this is the reasoning for weaving Quantum Narratives with multi-language dialogues - to grow diversity. A diverse community is a resilient community capable of adapting to changing situations (ibid., 295). I have put together the following example of ‘species adaptation to crisis conditions’ to suggest through analogy, the possibility of adapting our language: The Australian Government recognises cane toads as an invasive pest and a "key threatening process” to native ecosystems (DSEWPaC, n.d.). Due to their extremely high reproductive rate and lack of natural predators here, the cane toad population is considered to be uncontrollable. The cane toad is “toxic at all stages of their lifecycle” however recent studies have identified certain native animal adaptations (Reynolds, 2010, 6). “Crows and magpies have been observed to flip cane toads onto their backs and peck at their bellies, thereby avoiding poisoning” (Marchant quoted in Reynolds, 2010, 6). The Keelback Snake and the Black-bellied Swamp Snake have evolved morphologically to having “a larger body size and smaller gape size, thus increasing individual snake’s ability to survive cane toad ingestion while decreasing in ability to ingest larger cane toads” (Phillips quoted in Reynolds, 2010, 7). In a separate study, scientists identified “a remarkable example of evolution over a relatively short period of some 20 to 40 generations of [Bluetongue] lizards” where those lizards feeding on the invasive mother-of-millions plant, were “pre-adapted” to cane toad poisoning (Price-Rees, Brown and Shine, 2012). We now live in a global era which unfurled alongside widespread cultural and biological disruption and displacement. If we can adapt our imaginations to the emerging conditions, as magpies and bluetongues have adapted, we could redirect ecocide toward ecologically responsive futures. What I am suggesting is a shift from a paradigm of ‘simplicity’ to a paradigm of ‘complexity’ and it is possible if we embrace a ‘dialogic’ way of being as Morin explains: Humans are obviously biological beings. At the same time, they are obviously cultural and metabiological. They live in a universe of language, ideas and awareness. But in the paradigm of simplification, these two realities, [biological and cultural], are either disjoined or the more complex is reduced to the least complex (Morin, 2008, 39). On the fundamental level of phenomena, complexity can hold the contradiction inherent in life and death, literal and metaphoric (ibid., 42). “The dialogic principle allows us to maintain duality at the heart of unity. It associates two terms that are at the same time complementary and

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antagonistic” (ibid, 49). Thus dialogue is a good method to help us adapt Western language from the pattern of the “linear narrative” toward a “web of narratives” that emulates ecological patterns “such as weather, turbulence, the shapes of coastlines, and the arrhythmic fibrillations of the human heart (Merchant, 2003, 203/208). THE FUNCTIONING ARTIST Modern narratives are proving to be “too simplistic for living in the present global order”, a world that is starting to show itself as the complex inter-connected network that it ecologically is (Gare quoted in Merchant, 2003, 202). At the same time, we are undergoing an explosion of social media use and “the fundamentals of storytelling are beginning to change and we’re just at the tip of the ice berg now” (Jansen, 2010). What does this mean for Artist as Storyteller? The Storyteller has traditionally held great responsibility to safely transport the listener between worlds, as Estes says “in dealing with stories, we are handling archetypal energy, which we could metaphorically describe as being like electricity” (Bly, 1991; Estes, 1992, 470). This is healing business, not entertainment. As we undergo an explosion of social media use, the function of storytelling is dramatically changing and “we’re seeing a world where almost anyone can create a story and get it out to a potentially unlimited audience” (Jansen, 2010). While this could prove advantageous for nourishing collective diversity, “the explosive developments of computer sciences does not [necessarily] equate with a revolution in intelligence” (Nicolescu, 2002, 89). If our narratives remain predominantly anthropocentric and the customary knowledge of storytelling is forgotten, then the exponential rise in storytelling could help manifest ecocide rather than remedy it. As artists, if we truly want to strengthen cultural dialogue with the more-than-human world, so as not to “address environmental issues” but to open to “the potential of ecology”, then we need to comprehensively understand the practice of storytelling in the wisdom of mythology and not simply as a sociological tool 155; (Haley, 2011, 3; Campbell, 1991, 122). This commitment requires that we:

•

Tell ecological stories about plants and animals because we are loosing this knowledge as “rapidly as we are loosing endangered species” (Nabhan, 1997, 70).

•

Know languages, both ancient and emerging, that connect us with a more-than-human world such as: biomimicry, deep ecology, quantum physics and mythology.

•

Reveal patterns and their enfolding and unfolding relationships.

•

Work with “the three fundamental characteristics of transdisciplinary attitude” which are: rigor; opening; and tolerance (Nicolescu, 2002, 119).

•

Be a responsible storyteller.

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Returning to the river analogy, Rio Abajo Rio, I am beginning to see that the artist’s responsibility is to make the waters “clean and clear”, again and again, through each generational cycle (Estes, 1992, 300). For today’s artists, I see our responsibility is to adapt storytelling into our emerging global and technological era, to keep stirring the waters to ensure no one story settles and there is a constant flow of human and more-than-human stories reflecting “the soul in the body of the world, the anima mundi” (Campbell, 1991, 107; Gablik, 1995, 142). On my quest so far, I have uncovered Quantum Narratives as a source of vision for the imagination and as an ecologically inspired method for connecting diverse languages. Different voices, styles, and ideas expressing a plurality of logics in different ways, but not always in the same place and time” (Boje, 2008, 2). I have also come to understand how the artist tends stories in respect of a more-than-human world. My challenge now is to materialise these discoveries for the collective use and I take up this final stage of my adventure in the next chapter The Living Pattern. When the hero-quest has been accomplished, through penetration to the source […] the adventurer still must return with his [/her] life-transmuting trophy. The full round, the norm of the monomyth, requires that the hero shall now begin the labor of bringing the runes of wisdom […] back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds (Campbell, 1968, 193).

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METHODS

If you are going to challenge the old Cartesian dualisms – like the one that separates art from life – with more participatory and engaged forms of consciousness, then you will also need a whole new language; one that expresses interdependence and reciprocity, so that the creative imagination can meet its new task. Changing paradigms is more than just a conceptual challenge. (Gablik quoted in Carruthers, 2006, 12). Figure 4: Pilliga picture-dialogue #3 (Ilka Nelson and More-than-human World of the Pilliga, 2011).

Practice

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CHAPTER FOUR: THE ‘LIVING PATTERN’ The research approach and research methods. During the early stages of the study I ventured to fit my research practice within orthodox frameworks, partly to demonstrate a proficiency in academic language. Though terms such as ‘bricolage’, ‘praxis’ and ‘reflexive’ are apt for my form of research, when I handle them my chest enflames and my throat constricts, a warning that these nomenclatures are not my language. I experience similar reactions when handling academic texts that might authorise my feminist standing - I feel out of context. My knowledge of the world has grown in the body of a living woman and this is not knowledge to be justified but gifted. My feminist roots are not covered and bound in books but grow from embodied experience. As a girl I lived on ‘wimmins lands’ and watched Amazon warriors ride amongst 500 horses, over mountains, through rivers, past tepees, hours from ‘civilisation’. These experiences gave me keen knowledge that is not academically sourced. Consequently I question: can all types of knowledge be applied to academic research? I believe so. Scholarly research is critical in developing methodological rigour but it is not the arbiter of universal knowledge - our life source is. I am trying to remember myself in a more-than-human world and whilst deeply stimulated by ‘thinking’, an imbalance toward the cerebral realm feels dangerously anthropocentric for me. My sensory approach to the research creates an active feedback loop between the practice (exploring and experimenting with the research questions) and the Living Script (which alchemises the experiments into remedial seeds).This ‘feedback’ process is not dissimilar to the methods of Action Research or Participant Observation where the practice-led researcher uses “interviews, reflective dialogue techniques, journals, observation methods, practice trails [and] personal experience” to interrogate the research question (Haseman and Mafe, 2009, 212; Haseman, 2006, 8). But while my research is “initiated in practice” it is not a creative inquiry “formed by the needs of practice” but one seeking an ecological approach to learning (Gray quoted in Haseman, 2006, 8). As I dig toward the mantle, in search of a lost song, a grain of sand, a river bend, a weave of fabric, a beat of a drum, a snap of a twig, a flash of memory, something of a seed that I can plant in your imagination, these disciplinary framed methods don’t feel primal enough for my needs. So instead my practice is led by my heart. To further extrapolate, this chapter explains how I approached the research and why, the methods I used, how I applied these methods to create ‘new’ knowledge and finally, what this ‘new’ knowledge is. These explanations are sectioned respectively as follows: • • • • •

Types of Knowledge: The Research Approach Why Transdisciplinarity: The Art of Complexity Artlab: Methods and Analysis Testing the Research: Field Study in the Pilliga Scrub New Knowledge: Quantum Narratives

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TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE I remember being deep in the bush, my gut frothing in thrill and panic. For miles no human neared. I walked the old fire trail as if it were a clean, sharp edge between chance and fear, clung to it like a lifeline to somewhere. Here I was immersed, soaked in a place bigger than my species. Sounds crunched under foot, scent arrows fired across my path and always the chant of birds to strike my gait upon. My heart aperture exposed in such wilderness, not the bush but the wilds of primal emptiness.

Figure 5: The field recording (illustrated) is the inspiration for the script above. To listen, play the disc inside back cover or visit this site http://ps3beta.com/story/21999 (Creative Work 2: Pilliga Field Recording (Ilka Nelson, 2011).

In the Masters Coursework unit Approaches to Enquiry in the Creative Industries it was recommended that students frame their research approach by outlining their ontological, epistemological and methodological position. As stated, I am trying to remember myself in a more-than-human world, to hold dialogue with the pulse of the universe, to source some thing deeper than a fix. So I have opened this section with poetic script and field recording to affirm the types of knowledge I resonate with: the action of experience; intuition; and visceral emergence. These types of knowledge are not methods of orthodox research but have been instrumental in developing my practice as I go on to explain. Everything is changeable - that is what I know of existence. Storytelling is a direct response to this rolling transformation. Stories turn information “into the knowledge we need to survive in our continually changing world. This is the power of storytelling” (Baskin, 2005, 335). From this perspective, knowledge is a story so familiar and trusted, it has become belief. However despite cultivating profound human knowledge throughout our evolution, in context we are recent arrivals on the world stage relative to the universe’s 13.7 billion year existence. Thus, willing dialogue with the universe, my ontological perspective is informed primarily by natural systems. Observing nature affords me constancy even as everything changes. I gauge the world by constellating three prime notions: •

transformational cycles of evolution and entropy are fundamental to our universe

•

living systems depend on dynamic relationships

•

‘the Sacred’

‘The Sacred’ weaves loosely through this thesis. Kagan discusses the “sacred” relative to transdisciplinarity and the work of Bateson, Nicolescu and Morin as a feeling of “infinite solidarity” and “that which connects” (Morin quoted in Kagan, 2011, 245; Nicolescu quoted in

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Kagan, 2011, 245). Though I make several connections with Kagan’s work I do not share this view of the “sacred”. For me ‘the Sacred’ suggests deep faith and respect for the mysterious, an affirmation that parts of life are to remain unknown, like death, cultural business and places off limits to humans. ‘The Sacred’ gives space to the other and in doing so creates diversity. The instinctive rapport with an enigmatic cosmos at once both nourishing and dangerous lies at the ancient heart of all that we have come to call ‘the Sacred’. Temporarily forgotten, paved over yet never eradicated, this old reciprocity with the breathing earth was here long before all our formal religions… nourishing them from below like a subterranean river. (Abram, 2010, 277). This study nests in the ideology of being present to “the breathing earth”, in all its mythical guises (ibid.). Deep ecology supports this view which orientates toward indigenous perspectives of “a deeper and more spiritual approach to nature resulting from a more sensitive openness to ourselves and non-human life around us” (Devall and Sessions quoted in Fatnowna and Pickett, 2002, 214). This approach relegates anthropocentric beliefs and elicits knowledge of the ecological self. Indigenous methodologies validate this way of knowing in expressions of “unconditional love, compassion, reciprocity, ritual and gratitude” (Dillard, 2008, 287). Hawaiian scholar Manulani Aluli Meyer explains this type of knowledge as “a real idea that allows us to ritualise ways to collect medicine, read a text, prepare a meal, or communicate with family” (Meyer, 2008, 219). These actions may not ostensibly appear as academic research but are in fact the root of wisdom having been “refined through many thousands of years of experience” to nurture self in relation to ones people, place and ‘creator’ (LaChapelle quoted in Devall and Sessions, 1985, 247-248). The action of relating to the other “edges towards a universal epistemology”, in which knowledge grows through the individual’s response-ability to the greater whole (Meyer, 2008, 221). I take this approach to my research so I can ask questions that ignite and “strengthen relationships” (ibid.). Haley calls this ‘question based learning’, a “‘whole systems’ seeing and thinking to promote wider, deeper learning, rather than solutions” (Haley, 2011, 6). He suggests that “this is potentially an ecological approach to learning” (ibid.). Taking this ‘ecological’ approach enables my research to shift from solution-based enquiry to a practice that acquires “knowing and understanding […] not in terms of analytical or theoretical knowledge or practical information, but in terms of symbolic meaning, metaphors, visions or images and experiences, integrating cognitive knowing, emotions and values (Dieleman quoted in Haley, 2011, 4-5). This approach focuses on growing knowledge that is “a rich and mature response to life’s diversity and brilliance” (Meyer, 2008, 218). Eco-philosopher Patsy Hallen (2009) often quotes Germaine Greer’s saying “if your struggle is one without joy you are in the wrong struggle”. This is a vital

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statement that encapsulates the relational dynamics of an ecological paradigm I am seeking, which I reinterpret as: a) we have a responsibility to serve the well-being of the greater collective which includes the more-than-human world b) our service needs to deeply nourish self Imagine a world in which each individual ‘followed their bliss’, not to satiate desire but to quell the soul’s thirst (Campbell, 1991, 147): The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there’s no doubt about it. The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find your case where the life is and become alive yourself (ibid., 183-184). Transdisciplinarity is about being “an active participant, a being-in-the-world” (Montuori quoted in Kagan, 2011, 200). As a methodology, transdisciplinary “does not focus exclusively on knowing, but on the inter-relationship between knowing, doing and relating” (ibid., 210). It therefore complements the types of knowledge that inform my research because it disrupts a world built on classical thought by re-imagining space for the sacred and the other. It does this by sensing complexity, recognising unity in diversity, and opening to multidimensional and multireferential realities (Nicolescu, 2002, 89). WHY TRANSDISCIPLINARITY: THE ART OF COMPLEXITY Transdisciplinarity allows me to explore complexity through an ecology of ideas. I am searching for cultural remedies and use diverse knowledge to generate, uncover and connect ecological patterns, including diverse reference materials such as Wikipedia and popular films which may be questioned as ‘credible sources’ in traditional research terms. This risks the study being undisciplined and too broad and I have definitely touched the exponential at times however the “approach to complexity posits that there can be no singular Master Concepts (‘pas de Maîtres Mots’) in an understanding of complexity, but rather macro-concepts made of complex (i.e. simultaneously complementary, concurrent and antagonistic) interactions between a number of concepts” (Morin quoted in Kagan, 2011, 154-155). My pursuit is not about making something original, nor is it utopian or gazing romantically to the past - it sees we have this big set of problems and this rich knowledge which has been sidelined and/or not used in relationship to other knowledge. Transdisciplinarity is my research methodology precisely because it “alerts us to something more - it invites us to comprehend the world by looking again, and reinterpreting existing knowledge” (Johnston quoted in Kagan, 2011, 245).

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Civilisations have typically amassed power through one dominant story, such as a religious or political narrative. In the case of the modern narrative, separating the whole into isolated parts has fostered a cultural paradigm where hierarchical distinctions can easily be made between species, people and disciplines of knowledge. In contrast, an ecological view recognises that every part is essentially the function of a greater ecosystem. Darwin observed “there is no such thing as hierarchy, or advance, or progress, in nature” and this supports the ecological perspective that “there is no single theory, definitive practice or primary authorship” (Mannes quoted in Gablik, 1995, 92; Collins, 2004, 172). To effectively connect knowledge diversity, a transdisciplinary practitioner needs to work across and “beyond disciplines” and this includes anthropocentric boundaries so she/he may come into “contact and conviviality with what is not human” (Strelow, 2004, 10; Abram, 1996, ix). This type of practice is a “sensibility to patterns that connect” and as research, transdisciplinarity is not “floating purely freely, but is based on rigorous attention to complexity” (Kagan, 2011, 244). In The known world delivered at the 2010 Creative and Practice-led Research Symposium - University of Canberra, Ross Gibson highlights the application of creative practice in complexity research: “In short, complexity needs to be investigated by means of a special, doubled mentality—a means of being fully attentive both inside and outside the unfolding phenomena - and Artists are potential leaders of research concerning this paradoxical capability” (Gibson, 2010, 7). The ability of creative practice to experience complexity directly is the same poetic valve that opens through mythology (ibid.). This is also observed from a transdisciplinary perspective as Nicolescu (2002, 37) notes, “the development of complexity is particularly striking in the arts”. Thus the transdisciplinary artist and the traditional storyteller share a practice of illuminating the world and this is quite distinct from creating artefacts (Prigann, Personal Conversation, 2004). Here again is the differentiation between artist as shaman and artist as creator; not to imply that the artist wields the shamans skill but that they fulfil a similar function in the community of shifting perception from “an art of ecology” (in which we render culture on nature) to “an ecology of art” (in which we open cultural dialogue with nature) (Haley, 2011, 3). Ecological art is a transdisciplinary practice “informed by ecology and natural systems” that “had its genesis in the late 1960s through mid-1970s with the work of such innovators as Hans Haacke, Helen and Newton Harrison, Patricia Johanson, Alan Sonfist, Joseph Beuys, Nancy Holt, Mierle Ukeles, Bonnie Sherk and Agnes Denes” (Collins, 2008, 162; Wallen, 2012). Being “flexible and adaptive in form with no fidelity to particular mediums” ecological artists can “cross disciplinary boundaries with abandon” in pursuit of new patterns and networks (Carruthers, 2009, 1). The Harrisons exemplify transdisciplinary practice in that they aim for a “dual transformation” of the environmental and cultural ills by working with natural systems to engage belief systems that perpetuate ecocide (Schwendenwien, 2011, 44 & 45). This is achieved

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by “identifying large-scale patterns, which they describe in terms of potent metaphors” and from these they create “larger narratives that recommend actions to foster ecological wellbeing” (Wallen, 2012). The use of narrative by the Harrisons is particularly relevant to my study in that it supports the transcendent vein that connects mythology with transdisciplinarity: Poetry is to Literature, which deals with connotation as well as denotation, as math is to science. It’s a language of condensation. If you try to unpack these poems you would open about a thousand pages. So we use the poetic form as a form of compression (H. Harrison quoted in Schläpfer-Miller, 2011, 49). My own practice emulates the contours of ecological art in being: transformative; dialogic; ultimately functional; multi-layered and most importantly because it is “shaped by multiple hands, and as a result has multiple advocates” (Collins, 2008, 162; Brown, 2008, 143). As well as ecological art, my transdisciplinary orbit curves through the ‘uncivilised writing’ of The Dark Mountain Project. Links to my work are easily identified in the Eight Principles of Uncivilisation, particularly principles 4 and 7 (Kingsnorth and Hine, 2009, 20): 4. We will reassert the role of story-telling as more than entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality. 7. We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories and ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails. I look to these unfurling practices, both ecological art and uncivilised writing, as spikes of cultural adaptation that are strengthening connection between humans and the more-thanhuman world. I like to imagine ‘mountaineers’ out in the wilds, courageously severing ties with modernity, then bringing the freed threads safely back to ecological artists who tenderly weave them into emerging paradigms. Research in the ‘elemental sphere’ (e.g., quantum physics, mythology, creative practice) cannot be conclusively described with the “numbers (quantitative) and words (qualitative)[…] preferred by traditional research paradigms (Campbell, 1991, 162; Haseman, 2007, 148). Further to this, practice-led research based within an Arts discipline or Performative research paradigm, while instrumental in challenging “traditional ways of representing knowledge claims” is still operating within a disciplinary context which derives from classical thought (Haseman, 2006, 4; Nicolescu, 2002; 44). As stated previously, ecocide transcends disciplinary matters and thus why transdisciplinarity is the overarching methodology for this research. As the prefix trans indicates, transdisciplinarity concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all discipline. Its goal is the understanding of the present world, of which one of the imperatives in the unity of knowledge (Nicolescu, 2002, 44). So my research asks from a transdisciplinary perspective, how can I create remedies for ecocide from a mix that not only delves deep into the elemental, complex and unknown, but is also relevant for cultures emerging today?

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ARTLAB: METHODS AND ANALYSIS The Remnant/Emergency Artlab team was composed as a new ‘change community’ who recognised “the roots of today’s ecological crisis” as cultural, and who sought to develop “new imaginaries that question deeply-ingrained, unsustainable ways of thinking and acting” (Armstrong, 2011). Our brief was to “experiment with radical creative processes” over a series of site-specific labs that responded to local ecological issues (ibid.). Over 2 years and 7 events, the Artlab program engaged a wide diversity of people, disciplines, places, issues and ideas - the details are too big to capture here so I refer you to the official website for information on collaborators, events, project aims and outputs http://www.remnantartlab.com/. As a practiceled creative research process, Artlab assigned 3 Masters students to design individual research programs that could be “documented and analysed alongside reflection on the broader processes” and presented as an Artlab outcome (ibid.). Therefore, in conjunction with working my own thesis, I fulfilled a variety of roles to support the lab developments including: conception, administration, publicity, production, documentation and critical discourse. This section outlines the research methods I developed through my involvement with the Artlab events and gives a brief analysis of how I adapted these methods for my field study in the Pilliga. My research project was inspired by the initial premise of Artlab and an urge to create powerful ‘new imaginaries’. The quest to source cultural remedies for ecocide and to learn how the artist best applies this remedial mix, is my adaptation of the Artlab objective. Throughout my quest I maintained a line of investigation to reflect three goals adapted from the Artlab briefing paper (Armstrong, 2011): •

The labs examine the cultural values that drive destruction and desecration of place and then reciprocally, how to develop complex, relational and reflective processes

•

The labs are an effort to move away from the Western penchant for creating the ‘original’ and rather to reconnect with our remnant ‘tools’

•

The labs have an emphasis on dialogues rather than highly polished outcomes or ‘solutions’

The Artlab events worked for me as ‘nodes’ or gathering spaces for practicing ecologically based dialogue with humans and the more-than-human world. Having exposure to a diversity of creative methods for engaging ecological issues allowed me to continually test and experiment with my own thinking and practice. The labs and satellite events are listed in Table 2 and I have indicated which of these events I participated in:

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Lab

Title

Lab 1

The Urmadic City

Lab 2

Bat/Human Project

Lab 3

Ecosapiens

Lab 4

Refocus - Tony Fry

Sat 1

Bat Human Event

Sat 2

Water Lab

Lab 5

South India

Lab 6

Artlab debrief

Location Brisbane, Australia Sydney, Australia New Plymouth, New Zealand Brisbane, Australia Sydney, Australia Lake Cootharaba, Australia Kerala, India Brisbane, Australia

Date Mid 2010

Participated

Nov 2010



Jan 2011

(virtual)

Feb 2011



Apr 2011

Feb 2011

Workshop design & facilitation Story-box Presentation to Artlab team

Workshops & Symposium Facilitation



May 2011 Nov 2011

Specific Practice



Debrief with Artlab team

Table 2: Table of Labs and Satellite events of the Remnant/Emergency Artlab program 2010-2012 Artlab was an extremely full program that delved into a range of critical ecological issues including cross-species relationships, urban biodiversity and water culture. A lifetime of study could be dedicated to any one of these issues, so I took a broad approach of trialling methods of dialogue, deep ecology practice and pattern recognition, which could harness the imagination as a tool for transforming an ecological crisis into an opportunity for manifesting a responsive ecological future. Two detailed examples of this preliminary undertaking have been included in the appendices: an account of designing and facilitating the workshop for the Bat/Human lab is attached as Appendix A; and documentation of facilitating the Water Lab symposium and deep ecology workshops is provided as Appendix B. These events afforded me the opportunity to acquire a suite of methods to locate, gather, process and present research material as Table 3 shows: Methods

Practice

Locating

Dialogue (human and more-than-human); intuition; collaboration; walking; mythological texts; observation and participation (deep listening and questioning)

Gathering

Dialogue; intuition; deep ecology workshops; letters and field notes; collecting patterns, sound, images, words, textures, smells, feelings; observation and participation (deep listening and questioning)

Processing

Dialogue; collaboration; deep ecology exercises; ecological thinking; pattern recognition; letters/correspondence; comparative literature; observation and participation (deep listening and questioning); pattern connecting/mapping; ecological systems thinking

Presenting

Dialogue; intuition; collaboration; storytelling (poetry, creative writing, film; photography; sketching; sound recording); pattern connecting; ecological thinking

Table 3: Table of research methods developed during Remnant/Emergency Artlab events Artlab was designed to be “open and experimental” and was not intended to “maintain a distinct structure at each stage or set unequivocal long-term goals” (ibid.). As such, there were dramatic changes to the program, participating team members, lab structures and locations, and proposed outcomes. These ‘radical’ metamorphoses resulted in a methodological watershed between Artlab and my own practice, notably:

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•

I regard the artist to be shaman rather than ‘change-agent’ - the former practices in recognition of ‘the Sacred’

•

I engage transformation through despair and empowerment rather than “redirection” (Fry, 2011, 77).

•

I understand practice as a function not as a process

I make note of Artlab’s shift and my corresponding divergence because it was the impetus for devising my own field study. The changes in Artlab raised critical questions for me in respect of: the structure and organisation of collaborative projects; whether transient creative projects can effectively support long-term visions; the requirements of accountability; and how institutions governing our ecological communities can gain ongoing benefit from these important creative inquiries. I came to feel that developing ‘new imaginaries’ accounted for the initial stages of transformation but the subsequent stages of the cycle - conversion, diversification, adaptation into the larger cultural system - were remiss. In many facets of modern life we have not been adept in closing the loop and for me this reflects a much larger imbalance - our desire for life and equally potent denial of death. It’s as though modern culture is lost in the thrill of creation, dizzying, addictive, surreptitious. Drunk on the triumphant discovery of the source, we neglect to “render back into lightworld language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark” (Campbell, 1968, 218). This is the most difficult work, turning illumination into long prosaic periods of practical action, going the “full round” of the life-death cycle so that the renewal offered in one’s return can initiate the cycle once more (ibid., 193). In Martin Shaw’s words “I believe that the ground of real peril in a contemporary initiation is not the Threshold, but the Return Journey. In fact, without the return, the alchemy is half undone, the spell of making unuttered” (Shaw, 2011, 6). My understanding of systemic change equates to remediating the ‘whole’ so the cycle of transformation flows fluidly across and through all networks of cultural-biological systems, just as mythology facilitates. I recognise retrospectively that my concern is about the connection points of these systems, ensuring they are robust, active and support dynamic transactions. You have to dismantle the dams that are your current strategies calling for progress and orientate toward your identity as another element of nature (González del Tánago and Garcia de Jalón, 2004, 188). Artlab was radically re-imagining critical aspects of our cultural malaise, but unable to shake the urgency and imminent scale of ecocide I deduced from an ecological perspective that it would be far more efficient to prioritise a feedback loop between these ‘radical’ artist experiments and policy makers/planners who manage widespread systems. As a strategy model this would be establishing the “right balance between design and emergence” (Capra quoted in Kagan, 2011, 128). However, actualising this macro strategy was not Artlab’s goal and nor can such a proposition be realised within the scope of a Masters degree, which brings me back to the purposeful design of the Living Script and the emergence of Quantum Narratives. In a world of

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complexity, strategies for remediating system networks will get traction if we can hold dialogue between diverse ways of knowing - through connection not translation. Transforming ecocide is very much about how well we relate and having the tools to strengthen diverse relationships. This became clear whilst facilitating the Water Lab symposium. It was a prophetic awakening when a participant commented that Water Lab was run with the same ignorance as the Queensland Water Boards consultation process with Indigenous Custodians. Despite my intention to create an ‘open’ symposium I actually bound it in my way of knowing. The participant’s comparison highlighted how ‘collective-change-making’ processes marginalise distinct groups when there is an absence of language systems to connect multiple ways of knowing. With this epiphany my research crystallised and I discovered the source of my quest - Quantum Narratives. TESTING THE RESEARCH: FIELD STUDY IN THE PILLIGA SCRUB As the final stage of my research journey I wanted to seed Quantum Narratives as a method to connect multiple ways of knowing that strengthens both cultural and biological diversity. This meant I needed to test Quantum Narratives on an ecological crisis in the field. By reflecting on the quest thus far and distilling the essential elements, I became aware that Water surfaced as a predominant pattern in my research and this brought the subsequent realisation that our future potential in a more-than-human world will be defined most explicitly by how we relate with water! The field study that emerged was an intuitive and at times serendipitous exercise. I searched for a water crisis that I could re-imagine using Quantum Narratives. Due to the widespread threat of coal seam gas mining to Australian water sources the choice was obvious. Thus my field study took form as The Future of Water in relation to Coal Seam Gas Mining in the Murray Darling Basin. I triangulated a location in the Murray Darling Basin to perform my testing by identifying an area zoned for coal seam gas mining that held significant ecological value: the Pilliga Scrub in Gomeroi Country. The Pilliga Scrub, colloquially known as ‘A Million Wild Acres’, is “the largest continuous remnant of semi-arid woodland in temperate New South Wales, Australia” making it a significant habitat for creatures and plants (including endemic and threatened species) (Rolls, 1984; Habitat Advocate, 2011). In terms of water the Pilliga is “the southern recharge area for the Great Artesian Basin [and] its surface waters flow into the Murray-Darling Basin” (Flint, 2011). The four maps below locate the Pilliga on national and regional scales as well as the areas zoned for coal seam gas mining in Australia and the Pilliga.

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Figure 6: The Pilliga Scrub is located at marker A (Google Maps and NASA. 2012).

Figure 7: The Pilliga Scrub can be seen from space satellite shots as it is such a vast uncleared area. This image shows how the Pilliga feeds into the Darling River system to the West (Google Maps and GBRMPA, 2012).

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Figure 8: Coal Seam Gas Reserves in Australia (Parliament of Australia, 2011, 4).

Figure 9: The yellow border marks the zoning for coal seam gas mining in the Pilliga Scrub (Stop Pilliga Coal Seam Gas, n.d.).

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I travelled to the Pilliga and spent a month in dialogue with community and stakeholders, both human and non-human, on the future of water. I conducted my practice-led research in deeptime: intensely alert and porous to the ideas and realities cycling through the research and now materialising in place in the Pilliga Scrub. I documented this period of my research by writing the Water Stories which are presented in the framework of Quantum Narratives in chapter five. The Water Stories were my method for re-imaging patterns in line with disrupted cultural and biological systems. The re-imagining was drawn from a comprehensive, transdisciplinary research of place, issue and being, as I have outlined in Table 4. The table connects the main concepts of the thesis with the practice-led research in the Pilliga and is composed as a foundation report which in conjunction with chapter five, I will extrapolate into a submission to State and Federal Government post-Masters as discussed in the conclusion.

Project Title: The future of water in relation to coal seam gas mining in the Murray Darling Basin (interdependent field study) Brief: Dialogue with Pilliga community and stakeholders, both human and non-human, in response to coal seam gas mining in the Pilliga Scrub. Tags/ Keywords: Murray-Darling Basin; Pilliga; Coal Seam Gas Mining; Water; Ecological Networks; Storytelling; Creative Research; Ecological Art; Cross-Species Dialogue. Materials: Writing; Film & Stills; Sound; Sketches; Online Social Media Official Website: http://ps3beta.com/project/8062 Summary: There is increasing global recognition of the ‘interdependencies’ between cultural, biological and ecological systems (UNESCO, 2012, 2). Subsequently, there is an escalating need for government policies to manage these complex networks. Our proficiency to manage complex information is due largely to the human skill of storytelling. In the continually evolving world of complexity, the survival of any complex adaptive system depends on its ability to recognise current conditions and implement behaviours that enable it to adapt appropriately…for human beings, this capability arises largely from the ability to tell stories (Baskin, 2005, 333). Thus regulatory agencies might better sense how policies will affect multiple networks if they refer to stories that dovetail the supporting science. This research mixes stories and deep imaginings from the cultural and biological systems dependent on the water cycles of the Pilliga. It is an atypical account of the interdependent systems vulnerable to Coal Seam Gas (CSG) mining in the Murray Darling Basin. Aim: This research aims to stir your imagination. Traditionally, storytelling serves three key functions: sense-making, adaptation and future planning. These three functions are extremely pertinent to policy development:

•

Sense-making: stories can translate complex issues to diverse audiences. The Pilliga water stories unfold an array of interdependencies between cultural and ecological systems.

•

Adaptation: stories (NOT data) are humans’ prime language for pattern recognition. The Pilliga water stories are designed to assist future policy decisions in conjunction WITH the science.

•

Manifestation: stories bring to life the hurdles and visions for the future which are vital for shaping a dynamic world. The Pilliga water stories stimulate ideas which are balanced by objective science.

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Method: Transdisciplinary, practice-led research was conducted in the Pilliga during the month of October 2011 and then developed into collaborative investigations with Artists from around the globe. Primary methods: •

Dialogue with Pilliga Stakeholders: Gomeroi Custodians; Community Members and Groups; Baradine Lands Council; National Parks and Wildlife Service; Regional Arts NSW; Northern Inland Council for the Environment; The Wilderness Society; Murray-Darling Basin Authority; and State Government.

•

Dialogue with Biologists: team of individual researchers conducting on-ground flora and fauna surveys of areas in the Pilliga that have existing or proposed mining operations.

•

Dialogue with Place: daily site explorations and observations: sketches; recordings and writing.

•

Dialogue with Artists: creative analyses of interdependent network paths.

Results: The results are ‘dynamic’ - they avail you the opportunity to see/hear/smell/taste/feel critical paths of the Murray-Darling water network and connect with system branches distressed by CSG mining in the Pilliga. Main conclusions: I was invited by representatives of the Pilliga Community and Environment Organisations to meet with NSW Shadow Ministers Steve Whan and Luke Foley during their 2011 Pilliga visit.7 At the close of our discussion Mr Whan said he would meet with Mining stakeholders the following day to hear ‘the other side of the story’. This statement alarmed me. The complex ‘interdependencies’ of our ecological networks can not be separated or reduced down to two sides and it is therefore “impossible to engage properly with a place…without engaging with all of the stories of that place” which includes more-than-human stories.(Adichie, 2009). Furthermore, this binary perspective “leads to problems in all sorts of reportage, and is a particular obstruction to transmitting the scientific information which informs environmentalism” (Ferguson, 2009, 294). By assuming governance of ecological networks we have accepted responsibility for the well-being of all life. “Water is the foundations of life…therefore sustaining the water systems must be the foundation of planning and development” (Damon quoted in Keepers of the Waters, 2011). Water: In WATER more than anything else we see our reflection - we see how well or how badly we manage our habitats, our communities and our survival. As Chief Seattle spoke over a century ago “whatever he does to the web he does to himself” and “nothing conveys this mutuality and connectivity as vividly as water” (Campbell, 2001; Rose, 2007, 16). •

Water is transformation: always moving, water cycles through air, flows across land and soaks deep underground - constantly spinning a wet web of life around the planet. “Hydrological connectivity maintains a diversity of connected ecological zones over time and space” (Weir, 2009, 47).

•

Water is culture: our lives are shaped by “hydrosocial cycles” - the physical, metaphoric and spiritual qualities of water that enable our cultural practices: religious, sport and recreation to name a few (Linton, 2010, 67). “Water sources have sustained human life and deep cultural traditions for centuries. As these waters dry up, so do entire communities, along with their traditions, culture, and ways of life” (Keepers of the Waters, 2011)

•

Water is life: water is essential for the well-being of biological and cultural systems (which includes economics). In actuality, we do not manage water, water manages us! In our wisdom we would “register water as an ecological constituent with which we are entangled, rather than one we simple command, distrust or exploit” (Potter, 2007, 251).

The Hon. Steve Whan, MLC. New South Wales Shadow Minister for Resources and Primary Industries, Shadow Minister for Tourism Major Events Hospitality and Racing and The Hon. Luke Foley, MLC. Shadow Minister for the Environment and Climate Change, Shadow Minister for Water, Shadow Minister for Energy 7

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Throughout history water was “honoured with rites of worship, propitiation and offerings” (Linton, 2010, 89). This reciprocal relationship no longer exists if we fix our focus on how Government “manages, measures, plans for, prices, and trades water” (National Water Commission, 2011). This “disenchantment of the world” can be surmised as the difference between holy wells and gas wells (Weber quoted in Linton, 2010, 88). Governing bodies would be wise to adapt the Aboriginal perspective that “healthy water is interrelated with healthy people, healthy country and healthy culture” (Moggridge, 2010). She said ‘We’re standing on the same bank.’ I watched the river rage before us Frothing milky blue and Freezing to touch, Big rocks round and wet Hardened to the years But forever yielding. ‘Yes we are’ I smiled. Interdependent Systems: The Pilliga is the last sizeable refuge island in a sea of cleared and cultivated land parcels west of the Great Dividing Range. This makes the Pilliga highly significant because it can support diversified ecosystems. Precisely because of its size, biological value and relationship to a critical river system (the Murray-Darling) the Pilliga is a great demonstration of how trauma at one point in a system can cause perturbation across interdependent ecosystems cycling at local, bioregional and global scales. For example, tests of ‘treated’ CSG water discharged in the Pilliga “found that Bohena Creek had high levels of ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, lithium, cyanide, bromide and boron” with the ammonia levels “at three times drinking water standards” (Cubby, 2012; Flint quoted in Duffy, 2011). The dispersion of this toxic water could cause ecological trauma across interdependent systems: • -

• • -

Local “Major impact on aquatic life” (Flint quoted in Dufy, 2012). “Such discharge has the potential both to substantially reduce water quality and to dramatically alter the ecological nature of the creek from ephemeral to permanently saturated (Northern Inland Council for the Environment et al., 2011, 3). Bioregional Flows into Murray-Darling Basin system which is severely stressed and “on the ‘top ten’ list of endangered rivers of the world” (Moore, 2007, 386). Global “The Pilliga is the southern-recharge area for the Great Artesian Basin” (the largest basin in the world) and it is being traumatised “principally by the enormous water usage by the mining and coal seam gas industries, which are depleting and polluting the stressed GAB even further” (Great Artesian Protection Group, 2012).

The Stockholm Resilience Centre (research for governance of social-ecological systems) have indentified “major natural systems that represent the earth’s ability to sustain life” and subsequently, where “humanity is close to straying beyond every one of these boundaries” (Steffen, 2011, 17). During my field study I had cause to feel CSG mining was penetrating at least four of these boundaries in the Pilliga:

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• •

Biodiversity Chemicals Dispersion

•

Freshwater Consumption and Global Hydrological Cycle

•

Land System Change

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

I witnessed destruction and future threats as detailed: Swathes of trees poisoned to death by ingesting the saline water overflow from mining ponds Inadequate fencing around the water impoundments and drill ponds resulting in animal deaths. As naturally occurring water sources are seasonal in the Pilliga, animals will flock to artificial supplies: appropriate fencing is critical for birds, bats and smaller creatures like lizards and frogs. ‘Treated’ CSG water being discharged into Bohena Creek where it is publically accessible and without signage (which would only help humans). A sample is in one of the vials within this report. Clearing and fragmentation of land causing weed invasion. Noise pollution from mining operations which may impact on audio acute creatures.

Figure 10: Field Research photos (Ilka Nelson and Eva Nelson, 2011) Top to Bottom: Dead frog in mining pond; tree-kill from saline water overflow; and collecting ‘treated’ discharge water emptying into Bohena Creek. “It is in the nature of all ecosystems to have some capacity to absorb change, but once that capacity is exceeded, the system will change rapidly and irrevocably” (Walker, Puckridge and Blanch quoted in Rose, 2007, 17). As Russell (2011) explains, if we continue to deny the requirements of interdependent systems the result will be “a policy paradigm incapable of dealing with the scope of the overlapping problems”. We need to “shift from the perspective of water as molecular matter that can be regulated, controlled, and manipulated by humans to a view of water as the prime mover in ecological and social systems” (Magowan, 2010).

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The Pilliga: is regarded as “the single most important biodiversity refuge area remaining in the NSW Wheat-Sheep Belt” (Habitat Advocate, 2011). As “ the largest surviving woodland area within the lowland catchment of the Darling River system [and] despite the frequent scarcity of surface water and limited freshwater habitats” the Pilliga Scrub supports (Murphy, 2011, 103): • •

“A rich aquatic macro-invertebrate community” (ibid.) “A high diversity of aquatic molluscs” (including species rare in NSW) (ibid.)

•

“The largest Koala population in inland NSW” (Northern Inland Council for the Environment et al., 2011, 5)

•

“The only known population of the endemic and nationally vulnerable Pilliga Mouse” (ibid.)

•

“The only known Black-striped Wallaby population in inland NSW” (ibid.)

•

“The recognised population stronghold for the nationally-vulnerable South-eastern Long-eared Bat” (ibid.)

•

“The recognised population stronghold for the Barking Owl” (ibid.).

My field study coincided with a fauna and flora field survey of the Pilliga area under threat by CSG mining, organised by the Northern Inland Council for the Environment. During their research the team of biologists identified:

•

“20 species which are listed under the Federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act or the State Threatened Species Conservation Act” (Milledge quoted in Ingall, 2011). “1 species listed as ‘migratory’ under the Federal Act” (ibid.).

•

“130-140 odd other species of protected fauna in that area” (ibid.).

•

The threat posed by CSG mining to the Pilliga Scrub is a qualifier of how well we understand our dependency on healthy water systems. Our policies will demonstrate how well we collectively organise around nurturing these systems we depend on. The ecological crisis facing the Pilliga will be our endorsement of ecocide or a leap toward fulfilling our potential as stewards of a living planet. Water breaks, Not like bones (or hearts) Water breaks elementary. Fading, as mists do With the swelling sun of morning. Water breaks At the tip of saturation Lost to a shadow liquid That’s all spike and dust, Poison and sharp. Water breaks When it is forgotten, Bottled and bled For life.

Table 4: Report on Pilliga field research 2011

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NEW KNOWLEDGE: QUANTUM NARRATIVES The outcome of the practice-led research in the Pilliga is a model of Quantum Narratives, a storytelling remedy for transforming ecocide by connecting diverse languages. It works on the premise “if a story is a seed, then we are its soil” (Estes, 1992, 387). To reiterate, Quantum Narratives is not the production of new knowledge, it is an adaptation of mythological functions for an emerging paradigm. Perhaps the Water Stories could be assessed as ‘new’ knowledge however I must state that I am wary of any (academic) inquiry that has “as its basic intellectual aim, to improve knowledge” especially when we have a plethora of remnant knowledge, lost knowledge and neglected knowledge which can help us “improve wisdom” which I regard as the root task of ecological transformation (Maxwell quoted in Fatnowna and Pickett, 2002, 211). I have been blessed to have two extraordinary teachers in my life who have had a lasting impact on my heart not least because they expanded my view into the world - my High School Art Teacher Mr Piggott and Environmental Artist Herman Prigann. Both men engaged art as continuum and connection, teaching me that each generation comes after and before the next, and how art tends this cycle by reflecting the cultural tips of the universe, the grace and dearth and all that spirals between. In respect of their wisdom, my practice does not create ‘new’ knowledge but contributes to the continuum of the work laid before my arrival (Katish, 1995, 143). My quest is an uncovering, a rediscovery, a remembering of old knowledge adapted and connected into contemporary culture for the purpose of cultural-biological regeneration. The next chapter presents the results of this quest; it is the heart of the Living Script and designed to bring into chorus: •

The resolving chapter of the research detailing the findings dialogically not explicitly

•

The creative component of the practice-led research for examination

•

A model of the Quantum Narratives method

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Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

WATER

“You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and liveable acreage. Occasionally the river floods those places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is a remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory - what the nerves and skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our ‘flooding’” (Toni Morrison quoted in Kidner, 2008, 82).

Figure 11: Pilliga picture-dialogue #4 (Ilka Nelson and More-than-human World of the Pilliga, 2011)

Remembering

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Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

CHAPTER FIVE: WATER - RESOURCE OR RELATIONSHIP? Experiencing an ecological story. Water moves in many subtle, unseen ways, as it does in each of the Water Stories. These are not the stories I expected to write, they are raw words, birthed in dialogue with the more-thanhuman world. I wrote them in the field as a daily response to the issues, people and place I came in contact with and this is how the Water Stories became my medium to practice ecological thinking in relationship with storytelling. I used the Water Stories as a beginning place for reimaging patterns in line with disrupted cultural and biological systems; they were intuitive, passionate and at times enraged pleas, for a collective reawakening to an ecological paradigm. On their own the Water Stories are antenarrative ink traces of fragmented and spontaneous writing, intended to reflect the complexity of our ecological crisis. In dynamic connection with multiple ways of knowing they become Quantum Narratives. What I mean to say is, to become remedy the stories must alchemise into Quantum Narratives, which I attempt here in this chapter, by connecting them with diverse languages. After the field study I invited several Artists, each representing one of the five senses, to engage dialogue with one or more of my Water Stories. The Artists brief was to explore being human in a more-than-human world by imagining water as relationships not resource. [T]he decline of Australia’s river systems is the death of water beyond it’s material presence - it’s the death of water in the human imagination, a forgetting of our own watery composition and a misunderstanding of water ‘in its living complexity’” (Rose quoted in Potter et al., 2007, 4). The Artists were given 2 months to respond to the Water Stories which were delivered to them along with images and sounds collected in the field and background information on coal seam gas mining in the Pilliga (all available online at http://ps3beta.com/project/8062#!v=stories ). Each Artist works with a distinct language (smell, sight, sound, touch, taste) which means our collaboration if connected dynamically, will materialise Quantum Narratives: multiple paths of knowledge, expressed through diverse languages in variant space and time, but within a unified whole. The collaboration is valuable because it agitates a ‘silo’ practice into an interdependent project, creating resiliency through diverse voices and networked resources. These new relationships open opportunities for further collaborations and are a catalyst for exploring Quantum Narratives as a creative practice method in the future. However the collaboration is most important to this study as a junction of antenarratives that respond to a specific ecological issue; a connection point with complexity made through the living stories of an ecosystem. The sensory languages of the Artists synthesise this study, they seed a re-patterning by triggering the body’s non-rational responses to an ecological crisis. The collaborative pieces allow me to present a model of

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Quantum Narratives as dialogic research results. By enlisting multiple languages I have tempered the stronghold of written text, an aspiration further achieved by printing the Water Stories in Braille as a way to connect my writing with broader expressions of language. I give a brief introduction to the creative dialogues here. Further information on the Artists can be sourced at their websites for which the URL’s are included in the acknowledgements. •

Bridget Nicholson created the porcelain pieces that cover the Living Script. These pieces echo time: the long relationship between water and the sandstone plains of the Pilliga as well the ancient beginnings of script found in Babylonian clay tablets. They are fragile reminders.

•

There are three sound pieces created by Leah Barclay. They are direct intuitive responses: Primal Shades responds to the story Survival; Tidal Pulse responds to the story Time; and the final piece is Evolution.

•

Dale Chapman is a Bush Tucker Chef making the connection between traditional Indigenous teachings, food, sustainable land and waterways. Dale’s piece is printed with edible gold leaf to make a further connection to mining and consumption.

•

Gayil Nalls work is an Olfactory Sculpture called Bath. It is a complex of botanical and phytogenic materials inherent in the flora identified for this project. Inhaling the aroma can recover good memories. The piece is based on traditions and practices of Forest Bathing as health therapy.

•

The activist Van Than Rudd shares my passion for transforming ecocide which he targets with a view against capitalist systems of modernity. Van’s piece is a suburban installation of water connectivity as he explains: Further inland, one can't ignore, now, the immense danger that coal seam gas mining is inflicting upon our environment. The companies involved abuse fresh water as though it is an infinite resource, and the chemicals released will find their way to the open ocean. These companies assume that this fresh inland water is disconnected from all the water, animals and vegetation that surrounds. They compartmentalize it. And, of course they commodify something that should be free, fresh and abundant to everybody. The artwork I have made is an attempt to show how water cannot be confined to boxed-in, separate components. It suggests the power of water and its universality - its all-pervasiveness. In the photos, I have left hints of the surroundings to show that water is a part of everyday life, physically and emotionally, and of course in our stories (Van Rudd personal correspondence, March, 1, 2012).

•

Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox has painted many works on the coal seam gas crisis. Kathryn created Last Witness for our dialogue on water as transformation as she describes: The red tree, representing the age-old transcultural/religious tree-of- life symbol, stands as the last witness to humankind’s prosaic mutation of the alchemic myth of transformation. At its most profound the myth can be understood as a transformation into transcendence. Humankind’s frantic desire to transform nature’s gifts into commodities, where the most significant value is economic, shatters the alchemic myth’s potential to reveal, and revel in, the many dimensions of the meaning of ‘value’. The tree, as the tree-of-life, represents the vigour of life with its vascular like branches and its pulsating red. It beckons us to ask better questions. It provokes us into conversations where new perspectives are illuminated. It reminds us of the beauty we lose if one dimensional interpretations of value erode the fulsome capacities of transformation (Kathryn BrimblecombeFox personal correspondence, February 26, 2012).

~109~

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

THE ART OF STORIES Some knowledge, beyond words, must be buried very deep (Hartley, 1995, 67). There has been an imbalance between the data set (science/economics/technology) and the humanities but like many forces in our world these opposing but complementary elements form a whole way of knowing, focal to an ecological paradigm (Knudtson and Suzuki, 1992, 47). “Government policy approaches often position science, economics and management as the main factors shaping the implementation of sustainable natural resource management in the Murray-Darling Basin” (Weir, 2009, 19). Our collective over-reliance on this data now means “market values have come to dominate imaginings of a global water future” and this does little to nurture the living complexities of water: our prime life source. (Bolitho, 2003, vi). The Water Stories, in dialogue with the collaborative pieces, work toward re-balancing the data with creative knowledge that questions the future of water in relation to coal seam gas mining in the MurrayDarling Basin. Our dialogues orientate towards an ecological future by offering imaginings of water “as an ecological constituent with which we are entangled rather than one we simply command, distrust or exploit” (Potter, 2007, 251). We have engaged the “inter-relationships” between biological and cultural systems as Artists who notice “broad patterns that others may overlook” (Lipton and Watts, 2004, 94). This is a specific practice using distinct types of knowledge to understand and relate with complexity. I have chosen a beautiful excerpt from David Abram’s book Spell of the Sensuous to introduce the Water Stories because it alludes to the embodied knowledge we now bring to the ‘reader’ (Abram, 1996). Stories, like rhymed poems or songs, readily incorporate themselves into our felt experience; the shifts of action echo and resonate our own encounters – in hearing or telling the story we vicariously live it, and the travails of its characters embed themselves into our own flesh. The sensuous, breathing body is, as we have seen, a dynamic, ever unfolding form, more a process than a fixed or unchanging object. As such, it cannot readily appropriate inert “facts” or “data” (static nuggets of “information” abstracted from the lived situations in which they arise). Yet the living body can easily assimilate other dynamic or eventful processes, like the unfolding of a story, appropriating each episode or event as a variation of its own unfolding (Abram, 1996, 120).

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

~110~

THE WATER STORIES: A QUANTUM NARRATIVES MODEL

Creative Work 3: Water Tablets (Bridget Nicholson, Sculpture - Porcelain Clay 19 x 25 x 0.2 cm, 2012).

Â ~111~

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

Ecocide How do you write about Ecocide? There are so many layers to death. The shallow parts are tight, like spring storms rolling touch-less across this old drought. Witness. Who is a witness? Down it pours that storm. Hard and heavy, fearsome and without shelter. Control - is the great human mask. Limbs are awkward when they bare witness. Crying is hidden in fickle corners. Where has the connection gone? “Was it ever present?” asks the girl in white thoughts. What is this violence - a ravine of death? This is unimaginable and well conceived. It rains harder still. Thunder is a calling card. Misunderstood. Too hasty, too hasty. Fear of the dark. We worked to revolt against our control; we then strived to regain it. And from this crack and flame place, the crowd built an imaginary dominion that became. Now the sides of our world are slipping with tectonic twist. This great nature-culture divide is threaded by the web, visible in the early fog. Imagine again.

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

~112~

Creative Work 4: Last Witness (Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox, Painting - Oil on linen 50 x 50 cm, 2012).

Last Witness - detail.

Â ~113~

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

In A Dream My arms are clutching groceries. I’ve bought more than I can hold. This makes me uneasy, pulls to mind a dream I dream repeatedly. I am unable to get all my luggage on the train before it leaves the station. I am unable to get all my luggage off the train before it leaves the station. Looking down at my new boots gives me cause for distraction. Fashion is the tool forging good and evil in this shopping centre. I come upon a silent escalator. I am travelling downstream, high to low not north to south. A pram is parked half way down the escalator; it will block my access with all these groceries in my grip. I curse, this is a thoroughfare, public land. Once upon the pram I see it is occupied with a small baby. Reactively, I look around for the owner, the mother, who is responsible for this? Two women upstream on this silent escalator, inform me the pram has been abandoned for some time. I don’t question how they know this. They look like twins, not of blood and flesh, their hair and makeup are standard issue masks. Something is welling in me. Instinctively I move the pram down the remaining steps and clear of the dismount area. I no longer carry my groceries. I look around again, nervous, expecting. I now look to the baby. He is smiling back at me. His eyes tell me he is aware but still too young for judgement. This is not my baby. I bend down beside the pram so I may look at him on the same eye level. Do animals do this? He is hungry, soiled, happy to be recognised. What do I do? I want to hold him safely. There is a woman at the supermarket check out only meters away. Flagging her attention, she crosses the floor toward me. I explain the situation of this baby and the pram. She is sympathetic, tells me the child has been there “on the escalator” since yesterday. She returns to her check out position. I stand stunned, then rage finds me. Where am I? Who are these empty people? They move without touching the living world. I am scared. Check-Out calls to me across the void, she yells I should take the baby to the police. The system is self perpetuated. This baby needs to be cared for, not processed. I look for an exit, for me and the baby in the pram.

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

~114~

Between Two Sides The old farmer stopped his truck just short of our camp. He’d arrived long before us with his bloodshot eyes and a body heavy from longing. “I don’t know who you are” he said, “but thank you.” It was stunning. He travelled a paradigm from his truck door to where we stood. There was an awkward exchange between us, hearts trying to connect but just managing to clear the layers of defence to spark a moment.

~115~

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

A Tale Of Two Frogs Inside a sealed plastic bag, the little frog jumps. The day is warm enough for condensation to lightly mist the bag. The frog is red and roughly 4cm long. There is great excitement among the biologists: with their collective expertise, reference materials and online resources, they are unable to identify this little frog. Is it the discovery of a new species? What strange creatures we are. With a mythical reliance on data while our hearts flare in truthful and often disparate directions to the myths. Inside a sealed plastic bag, the little frog jumps. That familiar arrow hits its target again - in my chest. I taste the survival I am witnessing. The frog is red, roughly 4cm in length and cannot be identified by book, biologist or internet. I am looking at the potential discovery of a new species. This is the reason for the frogâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s plastic cage. It will be killed. It is dying now. This little frog will be killed and sent to the museum in Sydney. There it will be dissected for the public record. This little frog could stop the mining proposed for its habitat. What strange creatures we are.

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

~116~

Creative Work 5: Braille pages (Printed by Vision Australia, 2012).

Braille Pages - detail.

Â ~117~

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

Black Women, White Men And Blue Water This is a rural housing commission. The pattern repeats: house-fence, house-fence. I am with a mother, she is both black and white. We drive slowly along the street reading the pattern ‘housefence, house-fence’ to know when we’ve arrived. Today I am here because I am white. As well as this dirty skin of mine, I am also invisible and here to bare witness. The mother wants to take back a child. We are standing at the Foster Father’s house, me at the door, she on the grass holding reins. I knock. He opens the door with a smile, alert. He is all white though he paints fallow stripes on his skin. The Father motions me to a place good for talking. We begin by speaking names. I tell him mine is becoming more popular, that my name means happiness. We circle. We hit the core. We discuss the child returning with the mother, “not today” he says, “tomorrow”. I believe him. The mother masks her despair whilst breast feeding her new born. Now that the Father has set the rules, perpetuated control, the situation enters his house. In the lounge room the natural light refrains, the mood is glass and shows the cracks in the Father’s lacquered smile. I see his palm accidently swipe a girl’s bottom or was it the mother’s? Three Aboriginal women march in. They move as one force, arms kneading the air around them. I cannot understand their words but I recognise the will of their arms. The Father now reveals, red flesh, spitting venom and ugly. He calls the women names that are not theirs. Names that don’t exist. Names that don’t call anything but push, hard and viciously, push the three women from the house. The Father’s wife, who has been seated in the shadows, stands for the first time. The wife is split between love for a man and esteem for women who share her blood. She says with perfect symmetry “husband, you’ll be swallowed by the mud flats one day. That blue water’s gonna roll in over you”. I tell the man the Mother will be back for the child tomorrow.

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

~118~

Creative Work 6, 7 & 8: Primal Shades, Tidal Pulse & Evolution (Leah Barclay, Sound Pieces, 2012).

Primal Shades, Tidal Pulse & Evolution - detail.

Â ~119~

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

Survival I read in one of Laura’s papers that you feel it in your gut first, you feel the moment before you find its point of reference. Today, walking in the bush I am senselessly in terror. Defending my panic I spit “the Australian bush is savage!” I shock myself with speaking the word ‘savage’. It’s a repulsive term that I handled in fear whilst swiping for a point of reference. ‘Savage’ is a colonial branding iron, pushed into people and place. I have to remember. “The Australian bush is alive!” Yes. And being alive the bush brims with survival and survival naturally envelops violence. This is what my body senses, the primal shades of life and death. Survival is electric but the story of its charge is not spoken within the western gates. Inside those industrial enforced bars they do not speak of death.

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

~120~

Rocks She said “it’s hard for people to be interested in rocks”. She said “people aren’t likely to be interested in rocks”. Later in the evening came the television show about American Youth and their addiction to celebrity fame. The statistics flashed. Most American kids would favour being an assistant to a celebrity than being a high profile lawyer or a politician in service to their community. The sentinels are disenchanted.

Sentinels are positioned to protect, cultivate, ensure. This is how it has been around the world. Oceans and rocks separate us physically but they do not omit our responsibility to each other. Our kids are your kids, all reflected in electronic mirrors. These are the first children to live with seductive technology, cooed by the slick touch of nonattachment. It’s a swell rising. The television claims ‘acknowledgement’ is a species exclusive need. The television says no other creature needs to be acknowledged as humans do and this is the reason for our celebrity fetish. I switch channels.

~121~

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

There are two stories to be told about a child needing acknowledgement. Story One: A child is born to a family whom have known only poverty, oppression and abuse for the past 130 years of its history. For 5 generations this family has been assailed and so its spirit reacted and survived. Following his family way, the child learned to react to the world. His main weapon became stealing. He would steal anything to engineer a little control amidst the rage. He had never known his mother and his father escaped the family pain by assuming an alcoholic’s life. The child was alone in the world. Instinctively, the child had tried a few times to build things like stories, knowledge and objects, things he could show his family that might connect them. But nothing he did sparked any acknowledgement. The child could never have known it was because the spark was taken from his family long ago. All the boy could imagine from the height of a child was no-one existed in the world to affirm him. And he was right. Story Two: A child is born into a family that has been aspiring, ignorantly, to be acknowledged by the world. This family is cookie cut. They assume a constant turnover of appliances, gadgets and automobiles. They move from house and street to house and street, which are all equally barren of community but plenty full of shapes and angles that make good fashion. The spark in this family has dampened and despite its excessive consumption the sprit is starved. The family has no memory of where it came from, who brought it here, no stories of how to care for itself. The child begins to take photos of people. He becomes obsessed with finding his own reflection in the face of others. He stares at screens for hours, as if an animal trapped in a cage, with sad eyes staring in confusion and loneliness. He craves contact so he tries harder, taking more photos, watching more screens, more screams, more profiles. But with his climb, his sight dims, till he no longer sees his parents just the hypnotic glow of illusion. People need acknowledgement. I suggested connecting with rocks. She said “people aren’t likely to be interested in rocks”. A man from the Nation of Parks told me a good way to learn the rhythms of connection and reaction. “Look at the relationship between rock and water” he said, “violence is reaction and water is a good measure of reaction. Sometimes we call it ‘the perturbation scale’. The first pattern to observe, stirs in an estuary. An estuary is slow water. Still, certainly. Here in a place of calm, the water’s movement is distilled. Sediment rests beneath the surface - sand, soil, grain connect with time-long conversations. There is no hurry here. Reaction is amiss. The next pattern to see is at the ocean’s edge, where cliffs thrust sharp into the sky and boulders are cut and spat out by roaring waves. The more violent and disturbed the waters movement is, the bigger the chunk of rock that can be torn from cliff and eternally displaced. An estuary with its quiet language could never move a boulder. A thrashing ocean will never feel the stability of time. Both are patterns and so it is.” Is it equitable to ask children ‘how much of your fate is learnt behaviour’? A bird wakes in a nest.

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

~122~

Creative Work 9: Bath and Water Vile (Gayil Nalls, Olfactory Sculpture - Botanical and Photogenic Materials, 2012) and (Treated water from coal seam gas mine emptying into Bohena Creek, Pilliga, 2012).

Bath - detail.

Â ~123~

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

Love Here is a slow love. A coincidental strike, as lighting will but anchored deep in the place of wombat dreams. A place of dark soil, dark sand, where waters creep and songs of the selkie are sung. Here is a slow love. Where time is magnified, exposing the scented trail of rhythms that reveal a world of unending connections. Pollen spores the size of brooches, spitting nectar like sea urchins breathe water. The legs of ants befit giant paddles, splashing through each grain of sand. Your ears tune to the sound of unfurling epochs. It is the space in between that is alive. Time is not accelerated here, it expands. In this place of slow love, minds are mesmerised by the shadow light and the ethereal flow of whispered air. There are no feathers here. No cause for flight. It is safe to listen, to be heard, to become enchanted. You move just as water seeps, perhaps it will take years but your movement wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be measured. This is the way of slow love.

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

~124~

Familia Who is your family? Those housing blood as thick as yours or with skin that burns as bright when lit by fire? Who is your family? Those who have suffered alongside you or who have suffered even worse? Who is your family? Those whom you aspire to become? Can you create your family or are you dealt it? Is your family accidental or deliberate? Are pets considered your family? And did your family change when death arrived? Is your family an organisation with a constitution like a Nation? Do you elect family members? What rights do your family members have? Can you kill for your family? Are there rules in your family? Is your family answerable to the law, whose law, Natureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s? What sustains your family and ensures their survival? Does water? Does your family need other families? Does your family need biodiversity? Does your family need water?

Â ~125~

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

Remembering Softly, softly, he crouches down. Finds an armchair big enough to hold his shadow and he crawls behind it. Some limbs require his handling, he wants his body tucked away good so it is flanked by wall and chair. The smell of moth balls unleashes from the hessian webbing of his newly appointed guard. He feels safe enough here, tucked and wedged and hidden. There is a gap the height of a small china vase, between the floorboards and the base of the armchair. The cold air fills it like water does a creek bed. No-one will find him here and no-one is looking. He hides because he wants to feel what it is to become silent - like the chair, the floor, the tree outside the window, the birds in the tree, the place the birds fly to when they disappear from view - all these things are silenced in the realm revolving around humans and he wants to be part of a bigger world - the one he sees but cannot sense or express - so he hides in hope. Many minutes pass, many moments too. The hiding man slowly remembers his body which is not so pleased to be crouching, tucked and wedged and hidden here. His body is talking with tingling and numbness. The numb he recognises. He begins to consider what is animal about numbing. How little he understands of being animal, neither his mind nor body are able to identify their own source. Desperate to reconnect these forgotten veins, memories and knowledge, he comes out of hiding. It is a step into a much bigger world.

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

~126~

Time “Maybe what I learnt is that I am not a writer.” The tin box is taken down from the window ledge by two hands that ache to be doves. When the lid is open, a strange odour becomes the room. The walls are removed by dream makers and replaced with a concertinaed glow. The two hands agree this would be a good time to take flight. The tin remains, made from the earth. Not all on this planet use time. For one, the tin is indifferent to tick tocks. The tin did not always look as it does now. Nothing that wrought the tin’s existence, the metal or art or effort, is as it was when the tin looked not like it does. Saying this, means to tell a story of particles washing through space - colliding, reacting, becoming, slipping, tiring, fading, dying a telling of time that is not a linear measurement but a tidal pulse. When energy is all there is, in any direction for as far or as close as you choose to look, then like the tin you are always, whether you are here or there, a tin or a rock, hands or doves, walls or light, dreaming or asleep, dead or unborn - there is nothing to calculate. Like water.

~127~

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

Power Why do my ilk labour so much in preparation? You are meeting a figure of power but this is no cause for submission. The powerful are no more lava than you or I. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s only a salute that differentiates us. A hand waving to a flailing system that limps on crutched ruins. Still, you busily prepare, packing away injustice and rage, positioning flowers, replacing your water clear eyes with spectacles. Will you see the paradox with your newly adorned vision; power is a constructed reality. The rapid fire - who-has-power-who-wants-power - is a human shot at controlling large swathes of particles, be those particles people or dirt or fluid water. What do you name power? Do not name power as strength nor substitute it for force. Those deep planet skies beneath us will testify there is no power in galactic winds though they churn star froth and spit flame. Power is magic. It is the illusion that invites will. Power is balance - the moment between falling and staying. It is the energy of lovers before time has transcended their scent. Power is the curve of a river - direction, gravity and surrender all at once! Remember, there is no-one powerful who does not await emptying. This is the way of all floods.

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

~128~

Connection Flight - wings and air, before that, feathers. Sun - on my skin warm. Energy. Toward trees. Broken - in a way that shall not be named. Chocolate - sugar springboards: up-down, up-down. Lighthouse - they put two together for seafaring men, mermaids didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t need this connection. Water - conduit, slippery little sucker. Grass Tree - an apology from the mind, not connected to the heart. River - a connection point for the sky and animals. Love - questions and answers, holes and rope. Nest - sticks, sticks, sticks, a new home for sticks. Revenge - reaction, a result of connection. Life - sperm and egg (sometimes) Health - the big world Health - Nature Falling - anticipating connection. Reconnection - it was always there. Concrete - city: buffer/wall/mute/absorb/ricochet Bird Song - bird song Frog Call - frog call Dark - quieter and better for hearing that which is silenced by sight Food - energy/gift Senses - languages for living in connection with all that you are.

Â ~129~

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

Responsibility Where there were strangers there was silence and silence was everywhere. Noise still prevailed, the sound of voices talking, talking and screaming like motor cars down a highway. But though they talked, the truth was silent. Not that there was one truth nor that there was no truth. It was that the people would not speak from their heart, their gut, their bones. In defence, as in a defensive state, a lot was said, many of the same words often and they were pawn words, sheep words, words from the shallow not from the deep. Those among us who were not in service to the State, who were not elected to serve each other, we grew angry in the silent world. Some would pry open conversations with the skill of heart surgeons but the babbling puppeteers forgot how to speak with us for they had already been strapped and subdued. When the rain came, there was hope it would end the drought. Water had a way of soaking through, touching where nothing else could. With sorrow, we realised the great floods would not dissolve the cages. Water only diluted the spell. Saturated, we watched our speakers fall again, under an engulfing silence. There is no dialogue without the ability to respond. If we do not listen then all we can do is react. In a state of reaction no wild flowers grow, birds disappear and people become slaves. Stories are lost too, but extinction is immaterial when the heart has forgotten its response ability. The stories were overlooked when the State drew up its ‘threatened species’ list. With their shallow, sheep-pawned words, the politicians forgot to mouth the magic words, ‘abracadabra’, ‘gali gali baari bagaay’. Many animals disappeared, many plants too. We yelled at our speakers, our representatives but they continued dancing in automated trance between the community and the company, dressed in sheep’s clothing one day and then wolves’ the next. We dreamed of when politicians would dress as marsupials and begin to know this country. Then we dreamed the end of the dress rehearsal. If you knew the stories you could quantum travel, choose your paths as light does. Light enters a leaf hunting photosynthesis and travels several paths simultaneously, gunning for the tip. With the light filling the leaf it soon finds the shortest path to its goal and this path then becomes the only path the light has ever travelled. The other paths were never taken. I went searching for the stories. Angry, sad, reactive to the state I found myself in. My response ability arrived post mortem and overhead the black cockatoos screeched “after the last flight - is too late”. Even then they were called ‘the living dead’. Is this my responsibility to explain all this to you? I’ll make you work to find the connection between the words. You have to remember the patterns, they grow like trees, like your veins, as a river does. This is the clue, don’t search for answers in a box, on a page or anywhere straight lines cross. The stories don’t live in straight lines for nothing living ever grew from square sides. This is not about knowing. This is all about feeling, it is being able to respond to that which you cannot measure and do not understand. Until you can dialogue with paradox, not as a reactive politician but as a wise storyteller, the wildflowers will not seed and your heart will remain silently wet

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

~130~

Death And Food These pine needles in my hand, still green turning to a still green. They will become brown. Brown will become them. Is this how it works, death? When I die will fire become me or I the earth? This past month has been silent of news. No poster pasted flicker bumping in, bumped out. No fickle urgency. No red hair winding. There is no news in the bush. Instead, there are layers of time, lashings of time, death of time. The birds around me are sweet, not to taste, to befriend. They fill a space with their perfect twitter song and perfect little flight. Colour darts, from the splash of wing. Gentle, reflective, peaceful, am I patronising? One small one, lands on the tree near me. She is perfect. She is small, smooth, dusty yellow. We commence a gaze into each other. I wonder if she reads me as I am attempting, tempting her? Something shifts. Lift, wings, swoop, catch, return. An insect sliced between beaks. Her eyes are not so innocent in mine, after eating, after death.

Â ~131~

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

Creative Work 10: Early Morning Harvest (Dale Chapman, Food Memory and Recipe - Edible Gold Leaf and Print, 2012).

Early Morning Harvest - detail.

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

~132~

Evolution What an exquisite merry-go-round this is. The lights are dazzling. Up and down, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re lurching around and around and around. Bright colours! Whirling discordant music chiming louder and louder. The stiff horses swirl and churn the stage beneath us. We clutch them in dizzy hope will they wake soon and take us deeper into this promise of a dream? Mirrors catch me in shards. Faces stream past like cars in the night, lights blur, mouths blend into one unified scream. My gut feels uneasy but I ignore my sense by gripping the reigns even tighter. Soon I clasp the pole that pumps my steed, my ride, my kind. I am trying to steady the build, find an anchor. A terror seeds that I cannot exit this spin but I mask my panic with the sedation of choice. The moment turns, as all moments do. Now I am lost in this sickly maze revolving within and without. Do I surrender? This illusion I am beholden to echoes a new breed of prey. Am I spiralling these people or are they predators circling me? I am the Water Buffalo bitten by Komodo Dragons, insensible to my approaching death. When I call to evolution I must find another place to be.

Â ~133~

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

The Last Tree Colleagues warned against naming you with the clarity of my tongue. But I understood with your help, that we are playing a much bigger game than what they enacted on Boards in Rooms. I wanted to tell the story of meeting you so I drew pictures of the sky, deeper than the clouds, a place where stars land. Only a doctor (dressed in a pointed hat) knew of what I told. Some secrets were locked in plants and the keys to these vaults dissolved. Water is good for many things. So we danced a peculiar dance you and I. Me as plain as day, you like the night, hidden and distant. As the face of two, mine cracked. But even when the judgement clouded our work, misted my eyes, your bark soothed my breathless skin. It is good being friends with you, being welcomed into your family. It is good knowing a language beyond my own. It is good to learn your ways in the world that is more than ours. To witness how you survive. It is good to share a truth with you and call you The Last Tree.

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

~134~

Sealing Language Deep from sleep I woke, to a thought of sealants. It all seemed obvious as I stared into the night’s abyss; nothing could be manufactured that couldn’t be penetrated! There are no distinct lines in nature. Everything is always moving from one state to another like water does: it permeates, precipitates, flows, runs, saturates, soaks, floods, rains, evaporates continuous movement. Even at the slowest pace, nature is cycling. In the depth of night I came to consider: if nothing can be fixed eternal then synthetic sealants are not safeguards against penetration. Perhaps then, sealants are designed to act more like repellents - like oil and water, opposing magnets, ex-lovers - maybe it is that sealants are manufactured as reactive agents but sold as certified gate keepers (as the name ‘sealant’ suggests). It’s all in the language. The lies are in the language. As I lay in that midnight room, my breathing for a ticking clock, thoughts of sealants turned to other forms of secure barriers. I imagined hearts, which soon morphed to castle walls littered with soldiers, then I slipped again into visions of barbed wire fences till finally resting my thoughts on the caps used to seal coal seam gas wells. Language creates illusion. The word ‘cap’ hooks images of fabric hats. Easily worn! Then a rumbling emerges from within these silent thoughts. Here in the pitch of dark I’m aware of underground voices. What happens beneath the earth, between those layers of time, where tectonic plates slide and erupt volcanically from seismic pressure? Can we know how the earth beneath us moves when most of us don’t understand how each other behaves? The arrogance of caps! If I were a leviathan underground basin I would not treat those well who capped my breath.

~135~

Storytelling Beyond the Anthropocene: a quest through the crises of ecocide toward new ecological paradigms

A Species Sent. A Species Scent. This is the hardest feeling to pen. Some say the joy of love is the hardest to hook whereas the lyrics of loss are drawn without effort. We are creatures with a taste for suffering. We nest in communal pain. What fools! Look there, the Neochmia temporalis’ are building homes in perfume laden trellises. I want to write of love and loss at once. This is not immediate, not my own furrowed story. No prince or maiden feature, there’s no wicked witch or evil king. I am trying to tell you of a violence that’s acidic to the flesh. And of a mask that covets your umbilical cord to the world. This means your survival. You convince yourself that you can reveal because, like me, you are struck by the complexity of expressing truth. Our mouths can’t find the shapes anymore. To be clear, this is about survival as a whole species, this is the telling of evolution. We turn on each other. The broken pieces we are, smashed from a whole. We turn on each other, abuse our children and rape our birth givers. There is no collective protection. Some fight, some spin, some willingly wear the mask. This is no one’s responsibility, it is a species! This is no one’s responsibility - it is a species. Can I break away from you? Can I take myself to another kind? No! I am part of you and it is my choice to love, loathe or lie. This is the hardest feeling to write about, that I am responsible for killing that which gives me life. I am killing you and you are killing me. Don’t deflect. Don’t refer me to others in costume dress. Reveal your weapons. Your tongue is a sword. We are dying by it. My tongue is also sharp and I have been willing it. You may not see it now, given time, this species is about to fall.

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Hell 4 Water “They would not let me have a toaster. I had to grill my bread! The gas nearly blew up in my face!” I could direct the focus two ways, both are convincing. First, let me bring your attention to the danger of exploding gas fires. I know explosions intimately having been burned in one. But to the point, if you drop this match in the Australian bush then coal seam gas wells are no longer a needle in a hay stack (if you get my drift). Yes sir, those gas flames vouch for one hell of a bushfire which is mighty ironic when the issue at hand is the future of water. Another angle I could take, it’s a topical delight, is the assumption of goods. A woman with an 18 year old cat whined and whinged her way back to the city because she did not find the convenience of a toaster in the bush. I say learn to cope, sort it out! This world is not 13 billion years of perfect evolution just so you can purchase white goods (oh the pun) for a pillow soft life. Survival people, it’s elemental, it’s work, it hurts and it requires community. Endgame.

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This Is How I Make My Choice Part 1 The garden needs a bird bath. Up here on this salty hill, the wind grabs all moisture on its merry dance skywards. The birds are parched and don’t lift with the same invisible ease as water on wind. I am presented with 3 choices of water troughs for my feathered friends. The first one is cast in white concrete, it is a naked boy with a bowl atop his head. This is my least favourite. To me, cupid is an icon of the renaissance that surreptitiously represents sexual repression and (ironically) the arrested development of civilisation incurred through enlightenment. How are these motifs relevant to a bird’s history? The second choice of bird bath is a simple ceramic dish with a thick scalloped edge and centre that rises to form a ring of water in the middle like a donut (which are not so good for swimming in). This piece comes with a ceramic bird figurine. I’m fascinated to repulsion. I stare at the little clay bird and try to shift my sight from human to bird’s eye. If I were a bird would I recognise this sculpture as a representation of myself? Would I feel more at home in this bath because the clay bird signals to me that this water is designated for my use? My human eyes snap a blink. I see through an anthropocentric veil. I decide on the third available choice. Unlike its competition, this bird bath has a thin lip and I consider this is much more suitable for little talons. This is how I make my choice, based on how the object best relates with the bird’s physiological needs. The aesthetics are irrelevant.

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Creative Work 11: Water Story (Van Thanh Rudd, Installation - Bark, Leaves, Ply Wood, Tissue Paper, PVC Glue, 60 x 70 x 15cm, 2012).

Water Story - detail.

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Part 2 In my garden there is an empty bath tub, white and waiting. I put it there, ready to hold soil and vegetable seedlings to turn into food. I pass the tub on my way to present the new bird bath to this dry hill I live upon. Baked dead in that white sun-bright coffin is a young water dragon. This dry hill. This dry hill and the death it brings. Tomorrow a lorikeet will also die. Racked by the guilt of enlightenment (what else is a bath tub in my garden but a replica of innovative agriculture) and the death its ignorance has caused (when I rush with self ego I overlook my surroundings and those I live with) I call to a man to dispose of the body - it’s what men can do. He comes. He throws the body away with apparent ease. I don’t hear his heart crack. Men hide their fragile feelings - it’s what men can do. A lorikeet flies into our glass house, looking for water not reflections. The man buries this creature too. My garden is not feeling so plentiful despite all my baths, my artificial water holes, my imaginary wells. It feels like a garden of death. I’m struck by the difference between a human’s death and an animal’s. The enormous ritual undertaken to honour a person passing compared to the awkward flinch of witnessing an animal’s death. I wonder if animals are untangled from self and can therefore pass over more easily. Do they leave less residue? For a moment I consider spiritual hierarchy as believed by some religious orders. Religions that believe humans are higher up the chain than other creatures. This might explain why a human death is viewed with more significance. Then I question body mass and the weight of a spirit in this context. A thought of a rhinoceros makes me laugh out loud. Do creatures grieve the loss of loved ones as we do? Pee Wee birds who are also known as Magpie Larks, partner for life. When their mate dies they will sail solo for the remainder of their days. I think of Pee Wee road kill and all those lonely Larks adrift. What is it to know death non-anthropocentrically?

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Shallow Rooms The desperation of this place, full as an ashtray with that spent ash scent. Millie was someone I knew before the clouds disappeared. She had an accent that stole my focus and carried me to foreign lands, islands of sand before the planes appeared. I was enchanted by her tales of living the way magic folk do simply and awake to the mosaic of the world. Not a matrix, a mosaic. Millie took time to be in the bush. Some years, she would take a month of time. I saw the conflict in her eyes when she’d return from those tall trees, the juxtaposition of modern human habitat against soul spaces remote and quiet. I recognised the question in her brow, her distant look. “How did we split this severely? How can we interlace again now we have all this concrete mass to weave?” Those initial days when Millie returned from her time outback, she’d glow like an autumn sun, all apricot and warm. Ease slipped through her, it was infectious and the world around us seemed to flow and slide. Happiness was raw and abundant. Pain came hand in hand with calming tears and release. Then slowly as time expanded, reactive behaviour swallowed all that naturalness, took our absent fear and our dwarfed egos. Millie tried to hold on through artificial measures but the soul does not recognise representation. We knew the fate of butterflies. We knew dissolve. We knew social stimulation was an incoming tide forcibly stronger than our own will. We could direct our passage but not halt it. The more we reacted the deeper we sunk. I began to see the edges as a place to work. If seeds took root there then I could mould the banks. The last time I saw Millie was on one of those edges. Like a cloud, she disappeared deep into the bush. Now when I swim I reflect on my Millie daze. I’m still asking her questions. She was right to think feeding on social bites keep us hungry. It’s the difference between shallow rooms and deep corridors. We enter shallow rooms, find them empty, admire the wall colour, shrug our shoulders and move on to the next. And on it goes with minimal sustenance and a blistering acceptance of this normalised emptiness. The other extreme is the deep corridors of nature which throw surprise, danger and the unknown along our path. The deep corridor is a survival adventure dependent on our senses to navigate. When I sleep, I dream of Millie and the lessons learned with her… What do we lose? Without regular contact with nature what do we lose? Loved ones? Nature gives us poetics, poetics give us rhythm and tempo, the swing of shade and light. I’ve been watching you and you’re flapping on the shore, gasping for air but you still need water, are made of it and now you’re beached, drawn by the lights. I watched you skim along the surface, all shiny and ignorant of where you were going and the waves you have made. You judge publically on technical merit, the thrill that affords you. You are indifferent to relationships and the content they craft. You take a story shaped in a war zone and flatten it so that you can play the role of a soldier on screen. So that you can kill effortlessly and without blood. You believe you are plugged in but you are disassociated. You do not embody the pain of the people you kill nor that of their mothers who carry ravaged wombs. You are responsible because you reside in shallow rooms and cannot cry. You judge and crave more, more quick thrills to line your mortal fate. You can only break a precious thing so many times…

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Responsibility Pt2 What do we allow to take place, so we may uphold our shadows? We hide behind this ephemeral system that has no spine, no scent or breath and yet it deflowers life, exposing each of us a bruised petal. The acts that cut, break, sting, they are delivered from our flesh and flesh is not ephemeral. Flesh is perhaps our most certain friend second to death. We mount groups - political, cultural, sexual, economic, spiritual and environmental - to redeem the acts of our flesh, inside-out, clear of responsibility. What ensues is a species unable to evolve, expand perhaps, but not grow.

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Skin I am white. What a disastrous classification. My skin wishes this meant something like feathers do.

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Promises What are promises? I have known lovers who wrapped sentiments in a promise delicate as rice paper. I believed blindly that I was in union because of these gifts called promises. I discovered I was wrong. Is a promise a precursor to pain? Or a leaking vessel to hold truth in? Promises break more than they build in matters of love and politics. I was never the lover I was promised I was. The awa never made me a promise and I love that river deeply!

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LEARNING

“The change process to sustainability is ‘more than rationale’. It is about emotions, desires and fears, lifestyles, identities and intuitive notions. It is equally about visions and expectations of the future or multiple futures” (Dieleman quoted in Kagan and Kirchberg, 2008, 109).

Figure 12: Pilliga picture-dialogue #5 (Ilka Nelson and More-than-human World of the Pilliga, 2011)

Listening

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CONCLUSION: SEEDS & RIPPLES How to pollinate change. If you participate in a complex system and you want to understand what is happening within it, then instead of producing a schematised blueprint or a critically distanced snapshot that freezes and distorts experience into static representation, you need to generate an involved set of narratives that account for the changes and encourage speculations about the endless dynamics of the system. Infiltrating the experience in this way you become not only a witnessing participant but also a diviner, someone who begins to distil some brittle definitions about the tendencies that are pushing through the system. Never actually predicting what will happen, never proclaiming that you have modelled any permanent templates underlying the system, you learn to propose ‘what if’ scenarios about the imminent and volatile future [...] Such an account of experience is a kind of research report leading to knowledge and wisdom but never to certainty or prediction (Gibson, 2010, 8-9). Does ecocide present an opportunity for our species to collectively re-imagine and re-pattern our potential future? Asking this question, indeed asking for a sustainable future, ensues the responsibility of listening to the response - this is the pattern of dynamic connection, of relationships, of dialogue - even when the response challenges us. I see a web of systems when I look at the scale and complexity of our ecological crisis - both living and flailing - and the only remedy I can imagine is a profound metamorphosis of the modern system into an ecological paradigm. This vision is serious and it ripples through every institution, sector and network we are interconnected by. Imagining a paradigm shift into being is an almost mythical transformation. But so too is the realisation of ecocide! “The loss of species is ‘the extinction of experience’” (Pyle quoted in Weir, 2007, 52). “As the environment suffers from the narratives we have imposed, so does our community. There becomes no possibility of the continual approaches and reinventions that a dynamic community requires” (Potter, 2007, 25). I write this as a poet, moist with tongue. These stories I tell keep the river clear, they draw the exhale from modernity. As birds fly overhead days from extinction, I fear there is no remedy, just the blood and rage on my doorstep. The breath of the living universe - unfolding/enfolding - determines that change is certain. However, we have a hand in how that change manifests and can choose to forget or remember a future of diversity by the stories we tell. This is why ecological thinking and storytelling are instrumental in manifesting a diverse cultural/biological future as I have resolved through my research. I now conclude the study with an outline of the seeds, growth and pollination opportunities this research has produced:

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The seeds: knowledge created through the research

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The growth: why this knowledge is beneficial

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The pollination: how this knowledge instigates further research

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SEEDS The purpose of this study has been to examine storytelling in context of ecological thinking in order to source a cultural remedy for ecocide and then to learn how the artist applies this remedial mix. With the objective of remediating our collective ‘crisis of vision’ by seeding the imagination with ‘ecological’ patterns, the research has been stimulated by the hypothesis: storytelling in relation to ecological thinking manifests human potential in a more-than-human world. To explore this proposition I experimented with transdisciplinarity and practice-led research and I discovered Quantum Narratives: an ecologically inspired storytelling method that supports ‘living’ knowledge systems. My quest has not functioned in the traditional manner of ‘resolving the research problem’ rather it sought ways of deepening, re-imagining and disrupting modern narratives in order to trigger a re-patterning responsive to the complexity of our ecological world. Throughout the study I have maintained the view that our world is formed by transformation and relationships, and that working with ‘living knowledge’ puts us in dialogue with this universal language. To alchemise these elements into an elixir, I sourced a wellspring of ecological knowledge from Deep Ecology, Systems Thinking, Indigenous Methodologies, Biomimicry, and Quantum Physics; and then mixed this knowledge together with the poetic wisdom of Mythology and ‘survival’ functions of storytelling. The result is a heady brew, a storytelling remedy that supplements mythological functions for an emerging paradigm; Quantum Narratives is a seed for the imagination and when engaged, has the potential to strengthen cultural/biological diversity. I have succeeded in my quest if I have listened to the Alchemist and rather than looking only for gold I have embodied the experience of mixing such magic (Coelho, 1998, 127). This is the essence of practice-led research - to participate - it is also the path of the hero’s journey, known most commonly as taking on the risk of being alive by facing the constant presence of death. And this is the outcome of my research journey, an experience of being connected to the intelligent, living, more-than-human world, through the discovery of Quantum Narratives. GROWTH Quantum Narratives is a seed we need to tend if change is going to ripple from its growth. Treat it with care (Seuss, 2004). Like all seeds, biological or metaphoric, ours depends on water. Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air (ibid.). Fortuitously WATER seeps through this entire study. Water is the central metaphor in a tale of two paths that lead toward our future. One tells of “water as a web of relations within which life, spirit and law are connected” and the other tells a “far narrower vision of water as a resource to be stored, regulated and allocated for human consumption and economic production (Weir, 2009, 14). The Pilliga field study the future of water

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in relation to coal seam gas mining was not approached as an inquiry into the perils of coal seam gas mining but as an opportunity to research methods for disrupting the prevailing narrative. This was achieved by re-imagining the modern resource narratives (that separates economy from environment), as relationship narratives (to reflect the complexities of a living world). The research resulted in the Water Stories. Inclusive of the Artists collaborations, these stories are traces of a vast entangled web weaved by water, they are “speculations about the endless dynamics of the system” (Gibson, 2010, 9). Thus the research findings, which are dialogic not explicit, implicate there is great need to ask more questions and consult diverse ways of thinking, rather than depending on solutions-based-management for governing “ecological and social relations” (Scott quoted in Weir, 2009, 14). The knowledge created through this research profits a way of thinking, experiencing and remembering ourselves in a more-than-human world. Gregory Bateson said “the most important task today is, perhaps, to learn to think in a new way” (Bateson, 1987, 327). I hope also, we can learn to relate in a new way. This is what Quantum Narratives contributes, a method for relating to the diversity in ourselves, the other and ‘the Sacred’. It is an opportunity for opening cultural dialogue with nature, so as not to “address environmental issues” but to open to “the potential of ecology” (Haley, 2011, 3). POLLINATION This study was conceived as a ‘seed of possibility’, a strong inkling, a “what if” scenario (Gibson, 2010, 9). I approached the research sober to a world being ecologically decimated and I now present research findings that confront this ‘crisis of vision’ by stating that the crisis of ecocide will be our extinction or our opportunity for transformation. If we are to genuinely work toward rebalancing the inter-relationships between biological and cultural systems, then we need leaders who are able to truly dialogue between disciplines, states and species (Nicolescu, 2002. 41). In the absence of mythology as our instructing living knowledge, society would do wise to equip top-level policy and decision management with advisors who are Transdisciplinary Artists; and I propose this as an area for further research and implementation- the pollination phase. In the shadow of mythology, transdisciplinarity is good remedy for the future because it links culture, ‘nature’, “beings and things, at the deepest level” (ibid., 89). Ours is a world buckling with knowledge - human and more-than-human - and we are looking in the wrong direction if we are unable to see “a terrain filled with imagination” to combat our ‘crisis of vision’ (Abram, 2010, 270-271). Like many, I have long held the knowing, though incongruent to modern society, that the artist’s role is significant to collective decision making because it gives us a direct line into this buckling knowledge.

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Contending with daily issues, the individual is often uninterested, unaware, or unable to enact large scale change and so we entrust the task of governing the social-ecological systems we live in to the elected government. Of course it is not this simple, but my point is that people shift according to government regulations and I see this as one of the most effective strategies for realising collective change - it harnesses the function of the government which is to work for peoples needs. Thus for systemic change, I recognise an opportunity for government, funding bodies and other economic power brokers to be more than administrators - to be guiding councils who measure projects based on their ecological efficiency and ecosystem function. For this adaptation “there must be a certain openness within the organization, a willingness to be disturbed, in order to set the process in motion” (Capra quoted in Kagan, 2011, 128). In social organisation this ‘disturbance’ can be attained with a diverse mix of “formal structures” and “informal structures” typically associated with creative practice (ibid.). There are numerous examples where “reporting research through the outcomes and material forms of practice, challenges traditional ways of representing knowledge claims” and can thus help us orientate toward the future (Haseman, 2007). One such example is Skuplturenwald Rheinelbe. Led by a government-business partnership and managed by artist Herman Prigann (who was “without a previous set planning concept but [was] with a vision”), this project (1997-2000) remediated a former coal mine into a public sculpture wood through the “transformation of the industrial wasteland into a fascinating landscape of experience (Prigann, 2004, 132). More recently the IFACCA published the discussion paper Creative Partnerships: Intersections between the arts, culture and other sectors that looks at: “the ways that artists are working in diverse settings (from communities through to the commercial sector)”; “the nature of partnerships (‘intersections’) that exist between the arts and other sectors”; and “the ways that governments at all levels (local, national, international) initiate, support or influence such relationships through policies or programmes” (Laaksonen, 2011, 1). While this discussion paper outlines many examples of creative partnerships and invaluably addresses the challenges and opportunities for further partnerships, I must specify that I am proposing the Artist for an advisory role to practice “‘an ecology of art’ whereby the potential of ecology becomes a ‘catalytic feedback loop’ that potentially takes art to a new level of understanding in Culture and Nature, and from this understanding new patterns (forms) of practice may emerge” that can be cycled back into the partnership-dialogue (Haley, 2011, 3). My concern is ecological governance and I feel it imperative that modern systems come to grips with creative knowledge expressed in ‘story-form’. Such is the case with the inquiries into coal seam gas mining where “we must acknowledge the artificial boundaries in these debates in order to open up space for dialogue, create new grounds for policy-making, and expand our capacity to address water mismanagement” (Weir, 2009, xi). The wisdom in storytelling finds resistance

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from modern systems and this is where Quantum Narratives is useful - to connect distinct ways of knowing. This method of dialogue is not a “schematised blueprint” or a “permanent template” but a ‘remembering’ of working with living knowledge (Gibson, 2007, 9). The adaptation of policy into living knowledge is also an issue for further research and implementation. I have begun the process in my own way with the creation of the Living Script. The Living Script is a thesis modelled on the premise that “the junction between knowledge and experience is tight, continuous, and dynamic, giving rise to ‘truths’ that are likely to be correspondingly intelligent, fluid and vibrantly ‘alive’” (Knudtson and Suzuki, 1992, 16). Post Masters examination I have arranged to send four copies of the Living Script to strategically chosen recipients around the world. Recipients will be invited to contribute their language, comments and narratives to the Living Script with the only stipulation being that the Living Script is always passed on ‘strategically’ once it has been ‘read’. It will be a whole new adventure for the Living Script in which it will transform from my Masters thesis into something yet to emerge, just as the Biomimicry principle says “nature recycles everything” (Benyus, 2002, 7). For now the Living Script is my offering of something analogously mythic and functional, offered to help envision a path to ecological paradigms and strengthen our connection with the more-thanhuman world. Quantum Narratives is the treasure discovered on my quest which I have now brought back to the collective, the “kingdom of humanity” (Campbell, 1968, 193). It is a storytelling tool for today’s world, a method to connect multiple paths of knowledge, expressed through diverse languages in variant space and time, and it has the express purpose of engaging, relating and working with living knowledge. I use this discovery to seed the possibility that the crisis of ecocide is an opportunity for our species to collectively re-imagine and re-pattern a more complex potential for our existence within the ecology of our universe. The seeds whirl and spin their way to the ground. Ninety-five percent of them will never germinate, falling on rock, into water, or onto barren soil. Ninety-five percent of the rest will die within the first year, from lack of nutrients, too much shade, or the appetites of enterprising creatures. But nature’s extravagance ensures a few – enough – will land on moist, mineral soil that will stimulate germination (Suzuki, 2004, 15).

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EPILOGUE

Dear Reader, There was a time and there was not a time, billions of years ago, when existence flashed into being from a single sound. Some say storytelling comes from this very time, when creation began. Many years later, when the sky was green and the earth was a thick stew, spiders were chosen to be the keepers of primordial language. They passed this knowledge to humans, teaching them how to write phonetic pictographs. This wise way of making language strengthened relationships between humans and the larger web of life. Time past and as happens, a great mist began to shroud the world. This was the age of Ancient Greece. In this time a terrible divide was raised. Language was re-shaped into the ‘alphabet’, a new system to reflect human supremacy and without reference to nature. Thus a vital connection to the more-thanhuman world was severed. By chance there lived at this time, a great Magician, who could see deep into the future. When the Greeks canvassed for fresh names to explain the mechanics of their new alphabet, the Magician gifted them ‘spell’ and ‘spelling’. The Magician hoped the riddle of these words would one day be discovered, when it could serve to remind people they were enchanted by their own reflection. Thus came an age of great human reign. The rise of western civilisation signalled a separation from nature and an end to wise ways of knowing. This denial of the interconnectedness of all life, manifested as a culture who denied limits, the penultimate being their own death. The more they denied their connection and the responsibility this entailed, the more they ached to belong. Throughout these dark times, a wise and ancient clan looked on patiently, a clan who knew better than any about belonging to place. These were the trees, the mighty giants who take root and forge symbiotic relationships from the ground they stand on. And this is where I enter the tale. I’d not been passed any stories of place, land, creatures or custom, so I had to make it all up. I had to fill the void and the heart was the best tool I had to gain a sense of belonging in the world. The old women of my village were always muttering ‘as within, so without’. Living with this daily chant, I began to see the rivers, forests and creatures were dying because my culture was sick. The future was our responsibility. So I set off on a quest to recover cultural remedies to help vitalise a living world. I passed many great Rivers and on the third day of my journey I came to the foot of a Dark Mountain, a strange and curious place. A voice called from the Underworld “Why are you here?” I cried back “To help the disappearing ones and fill this hole inside me”.

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Then with howling tone the voice spoke “This is an era of great unravelling. Climb this mountain if you wish to join the dream-led masses whom walk down the other side but know this, the sacred treasure is not buried with them. Ask a wooded giant to help you on your way as they know the myths well having seen all civilisations rise and fall and your task is to find a storyteller for it is through stories the future is weaved”. I continued on my way, around the base of the Dark Mountain. On the third night of my journey, whilst walking through a dark forest, I tripped on the trunk of a magical Tree. Me and that great giant lay together, sideways in the sky, staring at the Earth below. It seemed quite clear in that moment that everything was connected and moved as one fantastical rhythm. It is told, that the first forest evolved 335 million years ago. So you can imagine, having existed far longer than dragons that trees are much more knowledgeable than their fire breathing foe. Unfortunately this also means that a magical tree will grant you only one question rather than the three that dragons usually allow. Having learnt from the River Awa the art of questions, I turned to the magical tree and asked “Where can I find stories to manifest human potential in the more-than-human world?” The wooded giant, rustling leaves, offered the following wisdom; “Turn to those among you who practice a kinship with the earth and its waters, People of Country, Collaborating Artists, Myth Makers, and Pattern Revellers. We are all storytellers - it’s a memory hidden deep in your body - you will find your treasure when you recall the language older than your tongue. And always remember that for humans, minds and fingertips are two good places for seeding connection”. And so it was I became part of the great turning and I set off once again to find scholars, soothsayers and shepherds with whom I could tell my tale.

With Warm Regards, Ilka Blue Nelson

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APPENDICES

APPENDIX A The following table, Table 5, gives a detailed example of how the practice-led research was performed during the Artlab event the Bat/Human Project.

Project Title: Bat/Human Project (Remnant Emergency Artlab - Lab 2) Brief: ‘Community Health’ building project in response to proposed removal of Flying Fox from Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney, Australia. Tags: art & environment; ecological art; flying fox; bats; cross-species dialogue; ecological systems; remediation; Environmental Health Clinic Materials: Film; Visuals; Sound; Workshops; Online Social Media Official Website: http://www.remnantartlab.com/lab-2/ Overview: In November 2010, as a rapid response team of international ‘ecological health’ workers, the Artlab crew travelled to Sydney to engage in the planned removal of the Flying Foxes from the Royal Botanic Garden. While our position was clearly against the proposed removal, we did not want to react and further polarise the debate (though we acknowledge the bats weren’t able to take part in the ‘human’ decision-making process). Instead, we wanted to redirect the issue toward previously unimagined opportunities for all concerned. In doing so we worked toward re-imagining our potential in a morethan-human world. We began by situating the issue in a much bigger story (and thus dispersing the concentrated pressure). Our big picture became the future of urban biodiversity. What might a heightened reciprocity between us and the Flying Fox teach us about the future of interspecies relationships, improved environmental health and the importance of ecologically thinking about urban habitats for Australian wildlife?(Armstrong et al., 2011). Our strategy as outlined in the briefing paper was: draw upon Jeremijenko’s X-Clinic methods to actively involve a range of stakeholders (e.g. the gardens staff, bat conservation groups, artists, architects, academics, designers and anyone from the public expressing their interest/concern). Our particular focus is Sydney’s ‘impatients’ – those too impatient to wait for others to tackle the ‘bat-human problem’. We will work with these citizens to creatively ‘discuss’ this pressing ‘ecological health’ concern at a mobile ‘clinic’ located in the Sydney CBD so these concerned citizens can then self-prescribe alleviating preparations and prescriptions. This ‘community health’ building process will be supported through a range of social networking strategies, blogs and mobile formats as well as live, projected and sonic elements. The outcomes should ideally contribute to both local environmental health and cross species understanding (ibid.). Unfortunately the strategy didn’t work according to plan and the X-Clinic was not realised. My focus became the adaptation of the stakeholder workshop as an alternative platform for participatory action and using the ‘prescription’ method to activate Artlab’s broader purpose to produce ‘images’ of what a sustainable ‘citizen-led’ world might be (ibid.). My Practice: Keith Armstrong assembled a potent mix of experts and participants for a 3 day stakeholder workshop. My contribution to the collaborative project was the design and facilitation of the workshop. This gave me the opening to engage participants in a mix-method process of: ecological thinking; deep ecology; despair and empowerment; pattern mapping and storytelling. The following are specific examples of these methods in action:

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Deep Ecology workshops are typically practiced in spaces rich with natural ecologies. Addressing the bigger issue of urban diversity I decided to adapt deep ecology methods for an urban context - a city room. Like traditional storytelling, deep ecology involves powerful exercises that haul up uncomfortable feelings both personal and collective. I initiated my practice by sleeping in the workshop room the night before Day 1 of the workshop. Sleeping in the space was a ritual action of grounding my responsibility of working with ‘the Sacred’.

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To open the workshop I asked each participant to introduce themselves ecologically. This is a deep ecology exercise that asks the group to activate connection outside social identities (such as mother, lawyer, surfer etc). An example would be ‘today I am a gemstone vein, my beauty comes from the extreme forces bearing down on me’. The dynamics change by opening an ecological space where unconscious memories can be accessed. This is what John Seed calls “evolutionary remembering” and it triggers new patterns of thinking (Seed quoted in Milton, 2002, 77).

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The Council of All Beings is a “re-Earthing ritual” created by John Seed and Joanna Macy (Seed and Rosenhek 2001). Participants walk by themselves in the surrounding environs with an openness to being found by a non-human “ally” who they will represent at the Council of All Beings (ibid.). Once the participant meets their ally (for example a tree, old log, hydrogen atom) the next step is to make a mask which represents their ally and which they will wear to enter the Council (Seed, Macy and Brown quoted in Conn and Conn, 2008, 67). The Council is a circle without human representation, in this space issues are discussed from a more-than-human perspective. Because of the structure and location of the stakeholder workshop I adapted the exercise into a Bat Council and provided participants with ready-made bat masks. The collective experience of the Bat Council was a depressing one. I was quite nervous facilitating this space and this was reflected in the feedback in which I was told the experience didn’t feel sacred enough to be handling such heavy energy. I recognised the steps I omitted (participants meeting their own ally and making their own mask) are fundamental to the exercise.

Figure13: Bat Council -Photo of Stakeholders Workshop (James Muller, 2010) •

I led the group through an ecological mapping exercise to connect patterns between the issues associated with the Bat/Human problem and the larger urban diversity issue. Participants were asked to scribe all the ecological concerns they recognised with urban diversity on to small pieces of paper. The exercise was then repeated but this time participants were asked to scribe all the possibilities they could imagine through a bat/human partnership. The next step was to stick all the pieces on a large scroll of paper and draw lines between connected issues/possibilities till we made a complete network. The final stage asked participants to match each issue/possibility with an existing deed: it could be a resource, a project, a person, anything that grounded the ideas in the

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present/physical realm. This last step was the most challenging for the group and I think it reflects a critical void in approaching ecological complexity from the Cartesian model ‘I think therefore I am’. “Conservation biologist Michael Soule… claims that we know enough to be able to protect 95 per cent of the flora and fauna of Australia or North America right now” and we aren’t acting on this knowledge (Rose, 2008). We are great at conceptualising ideas, I don’t think ecocide derives from lack of knowledge or lack of will to change, rather, I think it is the absence of functional synthesis, literally and metaphysically. Biomimicry Guild co- founder Janine Benyus concurs that modern systems do not work “for lack of information, it is a lack of integration” (TEDTalks Director, 2007).

Figure 14: Mapping Patterns - Photo of Stakeholders Workshop (James Muller, 2010) Artlab Outcomes: •

Barangaroo Xtension Video http://vimeo.com/17506825

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Xtension Website http://www.xtension.cc/

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Participatory Design Conference Lecture http://www.pdc2010.org/art-of-pd/

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UTS Gallery Exhibition http://www.utsgallery.uts.edu.au/gallery/past/2010/XNatalieJeremijenko.html

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Bat-Human Project Event http://vimeo.com/29341700

Georgie Meagher (2010) describes the Artlab Bat/Human project in her article for The Brag Magazine: “The paralysis that often comes with the crisis of “What to do?!” is gently eroded by this speculative project. It’s almost like they are screaming back “We don’t know!” – but with more excitement than exasperation”. Research Outcomes: Most importantly for my research, facilitating the stakeholder’s workshop for the Bat/Human Lab gave me the opportunity to trial creative thinking as a framework for tackling complex ecological issues. I took a practice-led approach and re-patterned the design of the workshop to open with “experiential starting points” so the group was not bound by the “constraints of narrow problem setting” and therefore allowed the root problem to “emerge during the [creative] research” (Haseman, 2007). This strategy germinated remedies that “explicitly connect the problem with the trajectory” that our creative thinking shaped (ibid.). We redirected ourselves from ‘asking for answers’ to ‘listening to questions’. Observing the group take this approach uncovered a pattern that shares similarities with occurrences in quantum physics and serendipitous experiences. The creative and deep ecology exercises on day one of the workshop inspired a ‘thinking’ that dovetailed almost seamlessly with the expert seminars on day two. The group had created a script/prescription/remedy on day one which only became evident to them as it was mixed with the expert voices on day two. This is what I mean by dynamic connection where the seed contains the instructions but needs the water/smoke/soil to activate germination. The group uncovered the seed on day one and then watched it germinate on day two. Many of the participants and experts expressed feeling a ‘transcendental’ energy in the room toward the end of day two. I imagine that feeling to be the potential experience of ‘living knowledge’.

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APPENDIX B The following, Table 6, is a pictorial example of the practice-led research performed during Artlab satellite event WaterLab.

Project Title: Floating Land: Water Lab & Deep Ecology workshops (Remnant Emergency Artlab Satellite 1) Brief: An ongoing conversation about creativity, the environment and culture: on the theme of ‘Water Culture’ Tags: water; Deep Ecology; creative environmentalism; cross-species dialogue; site sustainability; intuitive navigation Materials: Sound, Photography, Sticks, Seeds, Walking, Talking, Stories; Dialogues; Social Media (PlaceStories) Official Website: http://floatingland.com.au/2011/Water Lab-interactive-symposium http://floatingland.com.au/2011/workshops-opportunities Overview: Floating Land is one of Australia’s leading Green Art events held biannually at Lake Cootharaba in the UNESCO-listed biosphere of Noosa. The 10-day program is curated to re-engage the community with nature through events and workshops by writers, performance artists, musicians, photographers, academics and scientists from across the Asia-Pacific.

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Water Lab: Together with fellow Artlab student Tega Brain and with support from Artlab lead artist Leah Barclay, we designed and facilitated Water Lab for Floating Land: a 2 day laboratorystyle symposium with leading thinkers, scientists, artists, designers, sociologists and participants in creative dialogue on a spectrum of water issues. The Lab collectively explored new creativecultural-ecological hybrids and developed initiatives to flow into the future. Keynote speakers included scientist Ramon Guardans, interdisciplinary artist Dr Ros Bandt and academic Dr Claudia Baldwin. Please refer to http://ps3beta.com/story/19852 for symposium program which outlines how we designed the event.

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Deep Ecology Workshops: I facilitated 2 x 3 hour public workshops and a 1 x 1.5 hour school workshop for Floating Land. This involved mixing the water culture theme with deep ecology exercises, cross-species dialogue, intuitive navigation and recording patterns with sound and photography equipment provided (and mask-making materials for the school group). In preparation I made a set of 4 ‘walking talking sticks’ in a ritual practice with Opal my shaman friend: we adorned each beautiful wooden carved hiking stick with feathers and beads, then attached a leather pouch to hold the sound recorder. The walking-talking sticks are an adaption of the message stick and were also used during the Water Lab to acknowledge ‘the Sacred’. I also provided hydrophones for participants to record sounds of/in the lake.

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Cosmic Walk Installation: The cosmic walk was developed by Sister Miriam Therese McGillis and has been adapted by many people around the world including Deep Ecology practitioners. It is a physical spiral made of rope or something similar, laid out on the earth to represent “the entire story of the unfolding and gradual differentiation of the Universe and the Earth from the beginning to the present” (Coelho, n.d.). Along the spiral, major cosmological occurrences are marked at distances proportional to chronological time, with humans appearing on Earth in the last few centimetres of an 80 meter rope, thus it is an interactive installation that gives people a measurable experience of the more-than-human world. I adapted the cosmic walk from John Seed’s version and installed my interpretation with a tree at the centre of the universe (refer to pictures below).

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My practice: Below is a collage of images of my practice-led research at Floating Land: the public and school deep ecology workshops, the Cosmic Walk tree installation and the Water Lab symposium. As a collection I refer to the following images as Figure 15: Practice-Led Research Photos - Floating Land (Ilka Nelson, Deep Ecology Participants, Sunshine Coast Council and Keith Armstrong, 2011).

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Research Outcomes: I had overwhelming feedback from people who attended both the Water Lab and the deep ecology workshops. I note 2 considerable outcomes: At the end of the first deep ecology workshop I asked each participant to share with the group the story they had arrived with and also the story they were leaving with: these may be the same story. The group were all adults except for one teenage girl. I had been concerned the girl might find the 3 hour workshop either boring or weird. To my absolute amazement the girl shared with the group that she had come to the workshop feeling the world was doomed and there was no hope for people or the environment, now at the close of the workshop she felt there was more than one possibility for the future of the world. Hearing her sentiments was the best evidence to support the methods I work with. Tamsin Kerr said during the Water Lab â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;maybe rather than managing water, we should let water manage usâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. This was a standout comment for me that still held resonance months after Floating Land and I used it to inform my practice during the Pilliga field study.

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Figure 16: Ilka Blue and The Last Tree

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