An Ecological Framework

An ecological framework –

Patrick Jones (participant, local design committee)

Daylesford Streetscape Revitalisation Plan, 15 November 2011 Village Well, Hepburn Shire Council, community participants

Background:

Community food systems designer (Just Free Food, DCFG) Public water activist (Just Free Water) Public art projects (Artist as Family) Ecological poet & essayist (widely published) Ecological artist (art practice as sustainable living model; widely represented) Forager & gardener (daily practice) Permaculturalist (originator of the concept 'permapoesis') Edible & medicinal weed & fungi knowledges (teacher, student) Bush food knowledges (teacher, student) Doctoral scholarship (ecological cultures - current student) Car-free & airplane-free living (practice and advocacy) Daylesford Critical Mass (co-instigator; bike activist) Community health systems advocate (active, anxious-free living) Father, partner, soccer coach & community participant Anti-GM foods advocate (toxic chemical reduction strategy activist) Ecological builder and designer (low carbon/cost dwellings)

Today climate, energy, food, water and population crises combine as an interwelded spearhead aimed right at us. Our local council’s own sustainability strategies – the recently conceived Energy Descent Action Plan (EDAP) especially – represents early stages of planning for uncertain times ahead, uncertainties and horrors that our own technologies have clearly created. How does one therefore design, redesign or revitalise anything – a chicken run, a footbridge, a main street, a transfer station – in an unfolding era of great uncertainty?

As we know, so many of the Earth’s nonrenewable resources are currently peaking or nearing peak. Baby boomer affluence can now be seen as but a brief moment in time and never to be repeated because, so the logic goes, without cheap energy to power it the rate of “progress” must also peak and begin its decline. This is the period we are entering – energetic and (thus) economic powerdown paralleled with destabilising climates.

So the next question is, will this spearhead be absolutely fatal, this interwelded instrument of industrialisation that features the main prongs of our culture’s woes? Or will this spearhead just maim us and allow a gradual recovery, a species living again within economies of local limits? Or perhaps it will completely miss us and our blind faith in technology will be enough to circumvent mass disaster. While this last scenario is the most doubtful given all the climate and fossil energy analysis we now have at hand, we can’t really know of the answer ahead of time, so it might be more productive to ask whether there is a framework in which our design can embrace this uncertainty and turn it towards our advantage regardless of what the future brings?

Can we agree that the default framework for the majority of municipal decisions, that rely on the myth of progress – such as stable climate, endless technological advancement and unlimited resources – looks something like this?

Fig.1 The Wheel of Progress-Capitalism

The Wheel of Progress-Capitalism. This global transportation of resources model requires colossal nonrenewable energy inputs, which in turn relies on continuous resource wars and systemic deprivations of the world’s poor, nonhuman nature and the world’s oceans, land and atmosphere. Here anthropogenic pollution is the most significant output if we view this model from outside the religious-like dogma of progress economics.

Although this model or rather ideology has come to dominance in the West over a number of industrialised centuries, today progress capitalism can be seen as a design framework in retrospect. This ideology is now the unwitting basis on which most design decisions are made in Australia. Thus this ideology responsible for our disposable culture enables vast amounts of public spending to be used for public works with short-lived effects. While committed to this ideology we are a culture of colossal waste and toxicity.

Our shire is currently doused in corporate toxins and chemicals in all manners of its operations, including pesticides, industrialised foods, plastics and exhausts, which are destroying the biota that gives us the opportunity to live.

“The research of hundreds of medical scientists, confirms that children are most at risk to the many serious ailments linked to toxic chemicals. We refer to them as the modern childhood epidemics: asthma, autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obesity, and reproductive disorders, among others. What is even scarier is that exposure to certain chemicals in childhood is now linked to the onset of neurological disease later in life, diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. So the two most vulnerable populations, the young and the old, are being hurt most. And this does not even include the disease that is typically associated with toxic chemicals, cancer.i” I believe there is an opportunity here to not only avoid this, avoid using progress capitalism as a framework to design with, but go one step further and show what an alternative design framework could look like, a framework that is both ecologically and socially intelligent. This simply means we have begun to attend to waste ideology and have began to transition to a shire known for its leadership in real sustainability; known for its intelligent designs in mitigating the effects of peaking resources, climate chaos and globalised greed. A shire that looks something like this from its main street outwards:

Figure 2. The Wheel of Ecological Culture

The Wheel of Ecological Culture. You will see that one of the most notable absences in this cultural wheel is the oil drum. Sure bikes and wind turbines and the like are technologies that require oil, other fossil fuels and mined minerals to manufacture them, however after that it is (renewable) human or wind generated electricity that powers them. The oil drum is thus wholly backgrounded. Good quality bikes show up at the Daylesford tip on a weekly basis. They’re a dollar a dozen in a culture of extreme affluence fundamentally dedicated to immeasurable pollution generation. Bike and foot transport is 100% renewable energy as long as we have good food to fuel our bodies. As we have known for many millennia good food is required to produce good human electricity.

Good food is medicinal and very different produce to transported industrial (supermarket) foods that have had all the earth’s medicines extracted from them in order to turn greater and greater profits. It’s interesting that progress capitalism’s nutritional science era has coincided with so many diet pathologies. (In fact the advent of industrial science’s socalled breakthroughs such as phenomenology in philosophy, nutrition in food science and therapy in psychology has coincided with an increasingly divorced life from direct experience, evermore overweight and unhealthy, and requires greater and greater treatments for mental illnesses. These are the legacies of institutionalised progress capitalism). When we start to eat good food picked directly from unpolluted ground we begin to move from an obese-diabetes-cancer-causing-self-harming-gluttonous culture to one that is of a lean and healthy logic. Ecological systems are inherently lean, efficient, resilient, adaptable – no waste. On the other hand: B we are a culture of make elieveii b oUr odies show our poor health affluence is the woRst kind of poverty b uN urnt fat The worst kind of stealth

whiLe admen prey on our children b And our elders turn a lind eye g we will Never recover lean lo ic to the lanD’s detriment world’S oceans and sky

With oil prices beginning to escalate as global oil reserves become increasingly expensive to extract, publicly available food won’t be left to rot on the streets or in parks but will be valued, protected and nurtured. That is why a growing number of us in the town have set about building a community food system with three community garden spaces already under development and growing. As we know the key ingredient in supermarket food, as with pharmaceutical drugs, is cheap crude oil, which is required at every stage of our food’s production – ploughing, spraying (petro-chemical pesticides), harvesting, packaging, transporting, etc. Pharmaceuticals of course are required in greater and greater quantities when our foods loose their medicinal qualities. This forces us to work more and more in polluting jobs to afford to live in such a ludicrous system.

Expanding our local food commons throughout our streets and parks will move us further from self-interested progress capitalism to networks of dynamic relations with nonhumans and generous neighbours as we begin again to share common land and build ethics of fair exchange at the local level.

Bioregional fuel, food and water resources will need to become increasingly uncapitalised. Not open to exploitation such as is currently being done by Cadbury Schweppes, Coca Cola Amatil and Daylesford & Hepburn Mineral Springs Company (as well as others) in their sucking, trucking and packaging of our precious ground water to make a completely unnecessary polluting product – bottled water. It now takes well over 500,000 barrels of oil a year for Australians to drink bottled water. Making a living may be less about labour and services and more about local wisdoms, especially local ecological knowledges, following the spirit of the Jaara Jaara people, the original

custodians of this land and the only permanently sustainable peoples thus far to live in this area.

There are many households within this community already transitioning to local economies that foreground ecological wisdom and further background progress capitalism’s labour, pollution and technology obsessions. It is this pioneering work that needs greater community support and this design we are about to approach could be one such means of support for such cultural transitioning.

So, if we agree that we need to move from pollution ideology and towards a lean, socially diverse, reduced-waste logic, then these ideas should enable a background ethic or framework for how this incredibly diverse group might begin to design. In other words are we going to design with the default system – progress capitalism – or are we going to design with the future in mind?

With unstable climate and with energy price hikes, economies will have to relocalise their resources and become less dependant on global and interstate trade. This is a tremendous opportunity for local business, local people, local biodiversity and therefore local wellbeing. What are the materials, the feelings, the history, the ethics, the present, the stories, the future of this town? How can we defend these things against the end of progress capitalism’s destructive imperatives? How can these elements, collected from a diverse range of local people, combine to help design for a future that composts the dominant pro-pollution ideology? How can we make our town’s central hub, the main drag and the corollary retail precinct, a place of inspiration, social inclusivity and ecological common sense in an unfolding era of uncertainty? I would suggest that these things are now the critical imperatives in which we must design for the future.

Some suggestions collected from local people include: 1. The creation of a significant car-free space through the central strip including walking, bike-riding and congregational spaces for games such as bocce and chess and community gardening of organic herbs and other edibles.

2. Mature almond trees create a central avenue bringing in more free local public food, shade in summer and beauty of habit and flower to the centre of town. This would be just another stage of a comprehensive public fruit and nut tree planting project undertaken by council and community gardeners in preparation for energy descent and climate change.

3. Mineral water bubblers installed encouraging people to drink with their own reusable containers while celebrating the town’s unique spa waters completely uncapitalised and without waste.

i ii

Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie, Slow Death by Rubber Duck Counterpoint, Berkeley 2009.

Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe, Chelsea Green Publishing 2004.