Please Stand Up and Protect Julimar Forest Against the Rapacious Designs of Chalice Gold Mining Company

To understand what is going on in the name of 'clean energy' (a dubious expression that so often distracts from massive environmental damage and exploitation), see this piece of propaganda in the district newspaper.

And here is my poem of protest — feel free to use as suits in resisting this grab for forest and bush in the name of 'protecting climate' (while actually contributing to the damage of climate). This pegging and aim to establish this mine in the region is an appalling ecological travesty and a crime against the biosphere. Write, speak, peacefully resist in all possible ways. This mining project is a great wrong in the making.

Beeliar Wetlands Protest and Enforcing a Police State

This is part of a sequence of poems I've been working on over the last few years. As some of you will have seen in the news, the Western Australian Premier and Minister for Environment (makes me sick writing that absurd title), and other government enforcers, have had the police out in force to ensure the 'progress' of the destruction of the Beeliar bushland. Photos on the ABC website show a few police; today they had a phalanx of hoplites spread out to ward off the protesters so the attack on the bushland could continue. It's that brutal — it is an act of state violence that must be met with committed pacifist resistance. Non-violent action against the violence of state capitalism.


Sweeney Contemplates a Display of Force by the Police State

Distant now, and working out how to make a return, how to embrace

the wetlands and detrack the machines, Sweeney flew low through the rain

of grasshoppers rising up from the denuded plains, late crops shaking

their seed onto the scorched earth. I will return to the coastal plain,

said Sweeney loud to the parrots, loud to the crows, loud to the mulga

snakes, loud to the grasshoppers. I will stand with the protectors against

the troops of the dictator, against the builder of stadia and his wealthy,

uncouth mates. I will stand against their class pretensions, against their

sporting codes which read a little like the bishop leading an army

against the heathen. I am a heathen, Sweeney told the blue sky

stretched to breaking point; I am old as the earth but can’t even perch

on the outstretched branch of a York gum without feeling guilt. But I will fly

down to the marri, to the blackbutt, to the banksia, to the zamias and grass

trees and ask if I might perch temporarily, temporarily to watch over

the souls of those who dwell there, who know the stories, who connect

constellations with earth itself, who can unpick the codes, the fever

of growth, schematics of belonging. Red-tailed black cockatoos

will guide me in, give me strength.  I will ask to join the lines, speaking

my ancient tongue of respect. I will tell the police they must listen

to the ground through their feet, must listen to the whispering

coming out of the bush where there are as many worlds

as night reveals, spreading its sheet, a future unfurled.

            John Kinsella

A Call to Non-Violent Resistance: Save Wildlife NOW!

            by John Kinsella

Too many of us know something is wrong, think it, even say it, but simply do nothing.

I am afraid the placebo of social media campaigns is as much as expression of hubris and vanity as it is a positive act of engagement with vital issues that require change or prevention. It’s simply not enough, and it ‘costs’.

The most positive example of the social media campaign for positive change is the online petition, and this has been used to great effect in Britain for all sorts of local and regional issues (though I don’t think they’d have any chance to halt the horror of racism and bigotry that has been ‘unleashed’ there in recent weeks).

But that, too, is reliant on officials and politicians feeling they have enough to gain from following it up, or, say, once introduced to parliament, that there’s the will to implement change on the various levels of bureaucracy. Government is inevitably self-serving and inevitably compelled by its (bottom) fiscal line. Compromise will always be made.

The so-called will of the people, which is usually measured by ‘numbers’ rather than consensus or even a default understanding or consideration of the needs of ‘minorities’, is a variable which officials and the so-called representatives of the people manipulate, and with which they play with at will.

As a pacifist, I believe in non-violent direct action. I believe that each of us must act in accordance with our consciences, and also in accordance with non-vengeful, non-violent natural justice. Further, I believe that individual action has to be enacted through community on a small scale, and that those communities are rarely quantifiable or definable.

A community does not have to be those who surround us who might hold, say, racist or violent views. Sometimes we have to step outside geography to make communal decisions and implement communal action.

Community might be those who are concerned, for example, about the health of the biosphere. They might hold many different views on many different things, but there’s general consensus on that primary and vital issue. And thus I bring this horrific issue to readers’ attention: 'Threatened species face extinction owing to "God clause", scientists say' (Calla Wahlquist, the Guardian).

  

This ‘God clause’, a coinage by Western Australian scientists in the context of legislation being debated in the Western Australian parliament, seeks to give the government and the minister for the environment the power essentially to exploit an ecology that might see the extinction of an endangered animal.

As is pointed out by those opposing this on the level of policy, to give rights for clearing land where an endangered species lives kills the creatures, regardless. Further, the qualification of which species should be able to live, and which will (through the actions of companies or individuals) perish, is not only speciesist, but literally an act akin to genocide in human terms.

That humans destroy on a massive scale is obvious; that humans feel remorse is evident yet paradoxical; but that humans would wish to legalise and legitimise their death-acts is so criminal it should be looked at as a form of war-crime. If one believes, as I do, that all creatures deserve the right to exist, this is one of the basest pieces of legislation ever placed in front of a governing body.

So what do we do? Social-media our angst and forget about it until the next piece of propaganda comes through from the Taylor Swift camp to keep us all distracted? No, we write more than a few lines; we write our lives into our opposition. We change our interactions with the state on every level so the state can no longer act in our names. We point out that even majorities can be tyrannies, and that no one can represent animals, and that even the most dedicated pro-animal campaigner will waver at the edges due to the pressures ‘of life’.

It has to be individual collective action. Let’s not allow this one to happen. As we watch more and more land-clearing of less and less native vegetation; as we all sit back stunned and let it happen, participating in the crime with our every consumer act on the planet, let’s pause, slow down at least one consumer ‘necessity’; let’s not leave it purely to advocate groups of ‘scientists’ or ‘prominent people’ or volunteer or paid members of environmental advocacy groups, but rather make our own decisions, communicate in real ways where we speak to people — not to avatars and numbers of followers. Speak individually, converse, dialogue, exchange.

This legislation is symptomatic of a greed so great, of an exploitation in what they are turning into an endgame, of a mass extinction made by the cronies of developers, miners, agricultural interests, and anyone who thinks they can make a buck to buy themselves better material goods, that it is much more than a local concern. It’s the hand that signs the paper. Its synecdoche reaches every part of the planet. It is the ultimate form of terror.

Acts of Extinction

Don’t let the small unseen things

mess up a project. Project your desires

for profit (sorry, ‘jobs jobs jobs!’).

Don’t let hopping cridders the screen-

watchers don’t know much about

mess up a project. Buildings are life.

Don’t let fauna interfere with the molecular

integrity of construction — the guys who offer

to chop down to clear literally as you’re planting a tree.

Don’t let direct speech put you off the figurative —

there are still plenty of metaphors to hide behind,

long after the creatures are gone we can fantasize.

Don’t let the minister and the governor

scare you with their magic wands — they’ll

wave them over the earth with largesse. CEOs will cheer.

Don’t let any of this bother you watching

your favourite sport or watching your favourite

arts film. Think of what was done making Fitzcarraldo.

Don’t let someone with knowledge of land —

knowledge of what can’t be seen even with electronics —

distract you from your purpose. Your metals. Your living space.

Don’t let conjecture (bright light!) on how many

new species are left to be discovered upset your

ontological balance. There’s always the vacuum of space.

Don’t let me waste your valuable time for life

and all it can offer while the legislators sign off

on what doesn’t live on your clean, radiant screens.

            John Kinsella

21st Anniversary Poem for Tracy

Night Parrot Privacy

            for Tracy

They say if enough are found

we might be able to take

a look — imagine

how much they'd be worth

to a thief! a scientist conjectures.

Scientist: networked being

of authority, autonomous

from the non-scientist.

But the excitement of the small

live bird in the hand, he says.

The dusk-into-night shrill flights,

the bowers on ranging land,

a giant cattle spread.

Secret location — weirding

form of bio-security,

memory refound but lost

to the grooves worn by cattle,

the privations of science

& the business

of survival.

           love,

           John

Conversation with John Kinsella -- questions by Roberto Mussapi

This interview recently appeared in an Italian newspaper, in the Italian language.


Why is poetry necessary?

I believe all poetry is political at one level or another, and as such, poetry for me is a form of activism. As an environmentalist, when I write of the natural world I hope that my insights and ‘ways of seeing’ will contribute to the respect for and protection of ecologies. I am not interested in creating poems that hang as artefacts in museums, but in a living, breathing poetry that engages with the environmental crisis that the world faces. As a poet of landscape who is interested in exploring ‘up close’ the particular characteristics and qualities of a place, I hope to act as witness, to prevent damage being done, to preserve. So poetry is entirely necessary as a means of resisting, for example, the horrors of capitalist exploitation of land, of the pollution and exploitation of industrialisation, and other such examples of greed. My poems see the damage being done, and bring it to the attention of readers. Yet it’s not a case of propaganda, but of letting the images and language of the poems stimulate awareness, curiosity, and investigation. As a vegan-anarchist-pacifist, I have very strong feelings and ideas about how we might respect, conserve and experience the world we live in, especially the natural world, and I find poetry a more effective means of articulating these positions than the process of constantly being arrested and locked up, as I was when I was a young activist. Peaceful resistance still has an important place in my life, but I find poetry has been a truly effective means of communication.


Is there a relation between poetry and hope?

For me, poetry is entirely about hope. I actually once contributed poems to an anthology published by an Icelandic poet, which I think was called something like The Book of Hope. When I draw attention to what I have called ‘the damage done’ — to the exploitations, cruelties, and greed of humanity — it is because I believe that there’s another way, that people don’t have to be those things, and are very often not. Poetry becomes a superb ‘lens’, a way of focussing concern for positive change. I am strongly supportive of indigenous land rights around the world, and I come from a place where the indigenous people have had their land stolen with little if any compensation. Indigenous and non-indigenous poets who draw attention to this wrong (doing so in a variety of ways), have formed an essential part of broader community discourses that raise awareness about these wrongs. All nations want a literary ‘tradition’, and want literature they can show the world: if that literature (and for me, especially poetry), constantly speaks of the wrongs of theft of land, dispossession, inequality and exploitation, as well as speaking of the strength and cultural richness of dispossessed and disempowered communities, then external pressure can bring positive change. No country likes to feel embarrassed by what its writers are saying to the rest of the world. Poetry is all about hope to me. I have seen it stop bulldozers (I wrote an article about this once), and I have used it to help stop developments that would have put rare species of plants at risk. Poetry, for me, is an extension of how we live, and projects into how we might live better.


Can poetry contribute to a renaissance of humankind?

Of course — it always has. In doing my ‘distractions’ of Dante’s Divine Comedy, I tried to connect with one kind of eruption of insight into the torments and delights of the human soul with a need for another such eruption of awareness about the impacts humans have had on the planet. There are criticisms in there, of course, but also celebrations. For me, a new renaissance is an environmental one: if we do not act now to lessen the damage being done, there will be no planet, and no people to renew. Really, we are on the verge of needing a New Classicism which is about a more harmonic relationship with the natural world, and taking as models for art and existence, those from ‘nature’ that have persisted so effectively for so long. Which is not to deny there should be change or ‘development’, but rather, that this change might be more organic and less damaging, more in keeping with the ‘natural’ progress and changes of the biosphere, rather than those being forced at a rapid pace by humans. In this New Classicism is an acceptance that the rapid climate change we are now experiencing is in large part because of human industry and behaviour, and that less industrialisation, less reliance on energy for fuelling devices and other commercial fetishes, will mean a better life for all living things.


Do you think there is a relation between the poetic and the sacred spheres?

For me, poetry always contains a spiritual aspect. I write about spirituality, but I do not belong to any religion. I believe in all religions, and in no religions. I do not think a religious administration can conduct the workings of the human soul — if anything, I think it can take away and diminish the spirit. I have known many good people in various positions of religious authority — people whom I respect — but I cannot respect any edifices of power. As a non-violent anarchist, I am against centralisation and concentrations of power, and too often religion becomes these. Interestingly, many of my favourite poets, from Dante to Milton, have had ‘religion’ as a core concern, so it’s something about which I think and write, but I am always arguing that the human (or animal) spirit needs to find its own direction and its own freedom. Enlightenment can come about in many ways, and most often outside doctrine. Observing the natural world, listening to an old local farmer tell his life, watching the sun rise or set, are for me far more informative than rituals which have become hollow through being enforced and being offered as the ‘right’ way. Sometimes the ‘wrong’ way is more enriching! Poems are rarely perfect, and their ‘wrongs’ are sometimes as informative and spiritual as their ‘rights’. An imperfection in rhythm or prosody in general, something ‘misdescribed’, something misheard or misunderstood, can come across in a poem as a revelation, a new insight. The errors are as important as the ‘correct’ ways of doing things. No structure is perfect; all are worth pulling to bits and rebuilding as long as no living thing is hurt in the process. Vive la différence!