I recently stumbled upon an excellent Sydney based site, WeedyConnection.com. It has a ‘useful weeds’ database, and a very pumping blog written in the second person about all things weedy and good. I’m an enthusiastic weed lover myself, and had a great email exchange with Nobody, the site’s keeper, and he’s published an interview with me. Nobody is a self described ‘trouble maker and a media jammer’, and has been involved with some very cool underground art and social projects like SquatSpace, Network of Uncollectable Artists and Unreal Estate (the latter a fake real estate agency set up for squatters in a shop window in Newcastle which ‘advertised’ empty buildings, complete with photographs and tips on getting inside.)

These days one of Nobody’s main interest is weeds; this from the Weedy Connection homepage:

This online resource focuses on Australian flora, giving information and insight into a number of non-indigenous plants commonly known as weeds. It also function as an exchange node for facts and stories.

The aim of this project is to rediscover the traditional knowledge, celebrate the multiplicity of cultures in botanical terms, and learn the legal status of such plants.

The framing of “illegal” and unwanted flora within a cultural context will draw attention to the concept of “permissible species” as a social construct. Weeds are defined by a nation’s law, and what is declared weed in one place may be a precious resource in another. There is a significant metaphorical connection between this definition of “weed” and the arbitrary restriction imposed on human migration by national governments.

I recommend reading Nobody’s Environment Week presentation at the University of Sydney which expands on these ideas and more, which you can also watch online. And check out the Weedkiller art project.

Here’s the interview with me:

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ON INTERVIEWING ADAM

One of the good things coming out of this online presence is that gives you the chance to connect.

Adam Fenderson came in contact with you the other week, suggesting to review some of his radio work, where he interviews various environmental practitioners.

You decided to interview him in return, a person devoted to spread an awakening towards a new environmental sensitivity, so much needed in this point in time..

Adam, could you please talk about yourself, where you come from and what drove you to commit your work to environmental activism?

I was involved in roughly the Melbourne equivalent scenes as the Sydney ones you are involved with (see SquatSpace.com n.d.r.), inc. media activism/prankster activities/warehouse space. Pretty tech focused. After 911 I got more deeply involved in peak oil research. I started energybulletin.net, a peak oil news clearinghouse, and it became quite enveloping, invigorating to help powerful ideas develop, but kind of sad and frightening too. I met David Holmgren who is now a friend, and got into his vision of permaculture. I tried to find useful ways of dealing with my fear, so I started organising self sufficiency gatherings, and learning a few skills.

What about your foraging practice? Why did you start to look at weeds with different eyes?

My interest in weeds and foraging stems from fear, and a desire to be less dependent on the industrial food chain as I learn more about how tenuous and destructive it is.
There are other reasons too:

• when supplementing my diet with fresh greens, seeds and fruit from foraging, I am living with less money, so I can work less.
• gardening becomes less of a battle, as things like chickweed, fat hen, amaranth, purslane, dandelion, milk thistle, fennel and nettle become welcome in my garden. A weed can be defined as ‘a plant that is not valued where it is growing’. A ‘useful weed’ is an oxymoron. There are two ways of weeding — one with your hands, the other with your mind.
• when I forage I am exploring the neglected and wild areas of the city and country, and finding value where others see none. This is a beautiful thing. I love the weedscapes of the merri creek.
  
• I begin to feel like I’m living in my environment, not just on top of it. When you recognise the plants around you, when you eat some of them, and return nutrients to the soil (i compost my shit too) you become integrated as a functional part of an ecosystem. There is a new level of information filling your vision as you walk around.
  
• Seeing weeds as wild nature. This I think I all got from David. Perhaps I was tied up somewhat in the nativist assumptions that we must protect nature’s essentially pristine and static quality. because I felt some liberation when I broadened my view of nature, when I began seeing weeds as most often healing damaged landscapes. (I like that Tim Low lantana quote on your site). Now I see nature as dynamic and self-recreating, not something to be ‘protected’ by locking it up, untouched, like a museum piece. Novel and fascinating new guilds and ecosystems emerge out of indigenous and non-indigenous species (ecosynthesis). Many people hate weeds no doubt because they themselves feel like part of an invasive species. There’s guilt, and an attempt to right wrongs, but the expression of this urge is tragically counterproductive.

We destroy self-healing landscapes and try to impose native-only species using military-industrial machinery and toxins. In fact, conditions have changed: pollutants now enter the system, the soil has been washed away, the climate is changing rapidly, the people that used to live in and manage the system were destroyed by genocide, and the megafauna were lost only a few millenia ago — but we think we can force nature back to an imagined and non-existent past. If instead we can see weeds as part of nature, and value their vigor and productivity, we can continue to identify with them, but change our philosophy about our potential ecological relationship with this damaged country. We are indeed like weeds, and we can heal the land too.

I’m very interested in your foraging tours too, could you please talk more about it?
where do you go? what you looking for? when? (as in do you do your foraging expeditions mainly in spring/autumn or whatever) what you find where?

I’ve only taken 3 formal weed walks so far. one along the Merri creek from Ceres in Brunswick, one in a community garden at a housing estate, and one at a backyard ‘permablitz’ (see here n.d.r.)
I haven’t prepared any notes for them, but have sometimes emailed participants a list of plants we’ve seen afterwards. They have been at different times of the year, with different species in each walk. Normally I bring reference books and hand them out. I can recognise most things we see, and people look up their medicinal uses (I can never remember much of this). There is a great out-of-print book by Gai Stern called Australian Weeds about useful weeds (there’s a link to a relatively cheap copy if you don’t have it yet) and one by Pat Collins, Useful Weeds at our Doorstep, and I also bring along with me some identification books, and herbal books. I have a North American produced urban foraging book too which has many useful garden species. Recently then I’ve found a Merri Creek re-vegetation book which mentions bush tucker uses of all the natives which have been planted. I have been experimenting with some of them and getting into edible fungi this year too. Also preserving fruit from wild trees – I bottled about 50 kilos worth of apples and quinces I think!

Adam produced a couple of great interviews of David Holmgren (here) and Pat Collins (here), where he drives the topics towards the lowly plants we usually dismiss in our gardens.

Weedy thanks Adam!

EMPTY shelves in Caracas. Food riots in West Bengal and Mexico. Warnings of hunger in Jamaica, Nepal, the Philippines and sub-Saharan Africa. Soaring prices for basic foods are beginning to lead to political instability, with governments being forced to step in to artificially control the cost of bread, maize, rice and dairy products.

…The price rises were a result of record oil prices, US farmers switching from cereals to grow biofuel crops, extreme weather, and growing demand from India and China, the UN said.

“There is no one cause but a lot of things are coming together to lead to this,” the head of the FAO’s Food Outlook program, Ali Gurkan, said.

He said cereal stocks had been declining for more than a decade but were now about 57 days, which made global food supplies vulnerable to an international crisis or disaster such as a drought or flood.

That’s right. We’ve been consuming more grain than we’ve been producing as a globe for most of the last decade. You can track it yourself in the FAO’s biannual Food Outlook reports. Are Australians, with our rising dollar, immune to the implications of this? Can’t we buy the food we need? The troubling question of who would miss out aside, I wouldn’t count on it. In The Age today:

THE man responsible for investing $41 billion of the State’s money has warned mum-and-dad investors to prepare for a massive sharemarket crash.

He says a dramatic downturn is inevitable as the rapid rate of investment is unsustainable, and the repercussions of the $300 billion subprime lending crisis in the US are yet to be felt fully.

State Treasury has revealed that Victoria looks set to lose just $1.9 million directly from the subprime fiasco.

But the chief investment officer of the Victorian Funds Management Corporation, Leo de Bever, is taking no chances, telling The Sunday Age that he is managing the risk of further losses “as best as humanly possible” by shifting investments to safer options.

Mr Baillieu warned that millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money was at risk and accused the Premier of failing to come clean about potential losses.

“We know hospitals and local governments have been exposed, we know there is a level of exposure to the VFMC, and John Brumby won’t even provide a basic reporting process,” Mr Baillieu told The Sunday Age.

However, Mr de Bever — who oversees the investment of money from entities including the Royal Children’s Hospital, the Royal Women’s Hospital, the National Gallery of Victoria, the University of Melbourne and the Transport Accident Commission — described the subprime debacle as being “the least of our concerns”. It was the “roaring bull” market that kept him awake at night, he said.

The boom of the past five years could not be sustained and mum-and-dad investors stood to lose if they did not act now.

So even state assets are exposed to the collapse of the US subprime lending scams.

Note also that Australians have more personal debt in history, worse even than before the Great Depression.

I updated the Energy Bulletin Peak Oil Primer this week, adding this paragraph:

Already peaked? As of writing, there is mounting evidence that we have past not only the all time peak in regular conventional oil in May 2005, but also the peak of all-liquids in July 2006. A study by the German Government sponsored Energy Watch Group, oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens, and the former head of exploration and production at Saudi Aramco, Sadad al-Huseini have all recently supported this view.

Ie. oil very well may have peaked already, some very reasonable and influencial people think so. This is an example of the type situation which has James Howard Kunstler using the word ‘clusterfuck’ for a reason. Greater competition for scare food, meets global and local financial bubbles, meets an already declining energy base. Food security aside, did I mention there is more than one reason to Grow Your Own?

Community Emergency Respoonce Team (CERT) is a federally sponsored program, by Citizen Corps, to increase emergency preparedness in any and all US communities. It's a fabulous and little-known organizing tool. Any community can start up a CERT program. A good way to maximize the effectiveness of the program is for the city or community to hire a coordinator or director to implement the CERT program. Individual CERTS can expand to include all kinds of preparedness measures.

See: CERT national website

From the Ashland Daily Tidings via Energy Bulletin:

The CERT team, the City of Ashland’s Community Emergency Response Team, typically concentrates on being prepared for an emergency situation such as a flood or a fire.

But at a meeting open to the public on Wednesday night at 7 p.m. in the council chambers at 1175 East Main Street, the volunteer emergency response organization will look into what it should be doing to prepare for an emergency situation of a different kind.

With the help of Ashland’s energy conservation guru Dick Wanderscheid, the group plans to discuss to what extent it may want to prepare for Peak Oil, or a similar-style event that could leave not only Ashland but perhaps the entire region or country without power or worse.

In Australia, the concept of CERTs seem to have been adopted by the Ambulance service, with a first aid emphasis, with the Victorian state government funding five such projects in rural Vic.

However there may be scope for broadening the concept here also.   There are probably some legal obligations of government to properly prepare for potential emergencies such as food shortages for instance, a legislative angle someone might want to pursue?