A selection of our writings from 2009 to the present. If you'd like to keep up to date with our latest posts, please subscribe below.
2. No matter how a person tries to frame or revise our culture there’s no getting away from it – wealth delivers pollution.
3. Researchers tell us that the level of happiness peaks just above the poverty line, but we already knew this. Any accumulation of wealth after this point disables the adequate distribution of resources in order for local populations and ecologies to self-renew.
4. 32,000 people were treated last year in Australian hospitals for self-harming. The mental health of the country is flailing. An increasingly toxic food supply system is in part responsible. For a culture whose dominant ideology is based on a growth profit-pollution paradigm, figures like this will only increase.
5. The social and ecological costs of liberal growth economics should now be accounted. The world’s elite impoverish life for everyone, especially the world’s poor. An elite few are currently privatising the atmosphere to create the world’s biggest commodity market – capitalising on pollution. This is sold as a solution – emissions trading and offsetting schemes – just as the Green Revolution was sold as a solution – privatised seeds and chemicals – for world hunger.
6. With ecological economics, community sovereignty of food, water and energy resources, and with permaculture principals you don’t have to wait around for outmoded governments to reenter the real world; to understand soil microbes; to understand a just and sane way; to understand the profit-pollution paradigm; to understand the relationship between biodiversity and collective social health.
Food Forest on ABC TV from Patrick Jones on Vimeo.
There are a few mistakes in this reportage, namely the exclusion of the entire Artist as Family (Meg Ulman, Patrick Jones and Zephyr Ogden Jones); they spoke to Patrick and labelled him “Patrick White, Garden Artist”; and the church grounds where the forest is planted is St Michael’s not St Stephen’s, as reported.
We visited the kitchen this morning and shared a meal with the local residents who are all very excited about their community’s new asset. This is the hall after we helped pack up, before we headed next door to the garden.
We still had a few more things to do such as finish off mulching and say goodbye to our microbial friends in the soil, who it’s been a privilege getting to know.
We then hammered stakes around the Forest’s circumference and secured the bunting, which we won’t remove until late August when the MCA show opens.
We then went round and drew a mud map of exactly what plants are where, which we will have engraved on a plaque to be displayed in the grounds, and available here online.
We then dilly dallied. We took some more photos. We chatted to a few more passing residents about their hopes for the work. We sat down. We stood up. We chatted to the church congregation as they left their Sunday service.
And then it was time to go.
Thank you so much to everyone who helped in making this work come about.
And thank you to those whose enthusiasm and stewardship will ensure its future abundance.