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Category: ecological crises

Law and lore (at the Bentley blockade)

Apr 24, 2014 | Bentley blockade, ecological crises | 0 comments
The situation unfolding here at Bentley is as much to do with language as it is to do with environment. We all recognise ourselves as protectors of the land, protectors under a common lore held by the people.

This is a very different point of view for government (and others) who see us as ‘protesting persons’ under a Roman legal system. But we are free people, working together, helping to protect the land from damage. This is our home for now.

While it is well understood that fracking pollutes land and water directly, few people understand that carcinogens and other toxins are also released into the atmosphere by the fracking process, only to be inhaled by us and other organisms, or end up settling on our roofs, ponds and watercatchments, and eventually consumed through our food and water supplies. The elders here know what damage is, know its form and its hatred, and they know it is time to move from law that permits extractive damage and return to lore that enacts generative and generational succession of all things.

It’s about the food we eat,

and how we produce and prepare it.

It’s about the way we converse,

and the reconciliation we walk.

It’s about what remnants of the old world we recycle and reuse to build the new,

and it’s about what energies we use to power it,

energies that don’t cause damage.

We remain commited to our all night vigils here at Bentley because this place is every place.

Damage only prevails when good men and women do nothing.

Welcome to Bentley!

Why we do what we do

Jul 27, 2010 | ecological crises, Vandana Shiva | 4 comments
1. Vandana Shiva

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.