Walking for food : regaining permapoesis

Abstract

Walking for food: regaining permapoesis represents the author's household transition from fossil fuel dependency. The thesis attempts to identify the root causes of ecological damage, demonstrates energy availability as the primary shaper of all human societies, and sets out to illustrate an example of low-carbon living and making by enacting principles of permaculture. The thesis documents both the imagining and working towards a permaculture poetic; a poetic the author has termed permapoesis - an ethic of permanent making. Jones argues that an over reliance on technology and the backgrounding of local knowledges are at the heart of such uncontroversial systemic planetary damage, where life (its subjects and its objects) is made disposable by the imperatives of industry. The aggregating and interrelated problems caused by fossil fuels, money markets, industry science, pollution idolatry, civil colonisations, arts mediatisation and ecological amnesia are described by the author using a collective noun: hypertechnocivility. Jones argues that in order to transition to just, sane and sustainable societies, such as those found in pre-colonial Australia, people must take seriously their transitions from hypertechnocivility in an era of energy descent. The author argues that over the coming century energy descent, alongside climate change, will radically destabilise the affluent and aspiring polluting economies - the dominant cultures of hypertechnocivility. The author argues that we have already entered a new era of expensive crude oil as we begin to deplete the last half of global oil reserves. Cheap oil has been at the centre of affluent societies for nearly a century and has driven so-called developments in food, education, art, science, sport, politics, medicine, transport, clothing, building and so forth. Cheap oil has enabled an extreme abstraction from earth wealth, processes and spirit. The author argues we must anticipate and prepare for the ramifications of energy decline and calls for an immediate transition to low-energy, low-carbon modes of life making. The author walks and talks such transition within his own household and community economies and demonstrates the possibility for living with little money. Money and the imperative for growing it, he argues, are the main drivers of ecological damage. However in making these arguments, the author avoids relying on statistics and graphs, percentages and pie charts and instead attempts to create a series of poethical wagers, to cite Joan Retallack (2003). These wagers are the biophysical works he employs to demonstrate the possibilities for transition to a moneyless poethical bioregionalism.

Date of Award	2013
Original language	English