By Tracy
I came across a page on Facebook (no, I don't use Facebook, it was something I stumbled across via a search engine) that reproduces a Wikipedia entry (full of inaccuracies anyway) on John, and thereby bears his name.
John loathes Facebook for what it does (me too -- can't stand the utter breakdown of privacy it involves -- not to mention the fact [this bit is me, Tracy, not John] that Facebook addicts cut you off in real life if you're not in their Facebookworld! -- I am excommunicated by those for whom it's too much effort to step outside Facebook for a moment!) and is surprised and irritated that this Facebook page bearing his name should exist. (It reminds me of the line from John Forbes -- "even if we don't choose to join you, we do". Well, we don't.)
John also loathes mobile phones. Are we the only people who don't have them? I hope not. They too are an addiction, and they are environmentally damaging as well as a risk to health.
Some Facebook and mobile phone addicts think it's about snobbery, not deigning to be part of something because it's perceived as "too popular" and therefore uncool. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the case of mobile phones (and other wireless equipment) it's about being conscious of EMR. In the case of Facebook, it's because we don't need it, and because we have a stronger sense of privacy than it allows.
By the way, we managed to keep in touch with others, not get lost, and know where our children were, long before these things became the "norm".
Showing posts with label low-tech living. Show all posts
Showing posts with label low-tech living. Show all posts
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Left of the left in the arid zone
By John
Train across was uneventful, though I managed to get quite a bit of writing work done. I am still disturbed by my encounters and confrontations with shooters the weekend before. As the train passes a relatively short distance from Maralinga, I am reminded why one has no choice but a life of resistance. Travelling less these days, and by land and sea, I am reminded how protest is something best achieved locally. It’s how you eat, how you shop (or don’t), how you live and conduct your life. The most effective form of protest is surely to reduce the hypocrisies of your own terms of existence.
By midday Monday, I’ll be a relatively short distance from Roxby Downs, one of the cores of the uranium mining industry in Australia. One of the factors I find defeating in cadre political gestures is that one is counted out of a protest equation if one is not on the line with others who are defining a moment of protest.
Protest needs to be holistic, ongoing, and reflect in the life-choices we make. Roxby Downs should be the site of an ongoing Greenham Common-type presence of protest, or people should entirely abandon any product, no matter how indirectly, that comes out of that mining source. Exporting uranium for the energy industry (aside from what gets consumed by the arms industry, whether admitted to or not), means that goods from software to computers to clothing and foodstuffs have been produced in countries utilising nuclear power as an energy source, and that in purchasing them one is supporting such usage. It is the most indirect forms of consumption that are the most insidious.
My point about cadre protesting – the confirmation of one’s presence is not enough when the material usages of those making the protest support (however obscurely) the things they’re resisting. A means to an end? I am not convinced, and those who are least consuming the products of marketplace economies (always dictatorships, be it through so-called elected government or so-called single-party states or corporate interests), are those we don’t hear from, unless their action is local, and they are acting on their home space, and we see them incidentally on the media.
For those protesters doing as I am doing (and I promise, will stop doing soon), and using a computer in any way, you are acting neither locally nor with impunity in terms of culpability. Your protest against environmental degradation collapses before it begins; the ravagers of environment hide behind their lies of sustainability and/or brute force or legal and political sinecures -- such protest is hobbled by its irony and feeds into the perpetrators’ hands.
Mobile phones are the biggest irony of all. Consider what goes into the making of them, never mind the implications behind their use. Statements like this make those of the left you have associated with over decades, by way of agreeing in difference regarding tactics and ultimately aims (my aim is for small communities acting on consensus and with an ecological respect rather than larger centralised majority-rules outcomes) – seek to deny you or to separate you off from the left.
Where does that leave you? Not with the right who try to shoot you for being part of the ‘loony left’! As an anarchist, I am happy to be placed outside everything, though the socialist underpinnings of a strand of anarchism I have long been interested in, necessitate my conversing in a spirit of co-operation with the socialist left. But I am as anti-Marxist as I am as anti-fascist. Which is not to say I don’t read and apply Marxist epistemologies to my reading and thinking (and writing), as I do, but doctrines of Marxism are as far from anarchism as anything else.
And it doesn’t suffice for those of the left to separate those in university enclaves from those living in inner city squats. A lot of us have ‘been there’. And if you’re there and starving and drug-addicted, you don’t want to be there. (I do entirely support inner-city squatter culture, though.) Let me make it clear, universities are systems, and all systems need resisting and undoing. And yes, I do believe working from the inside out is effective. And I do have to help feed a family. I have reduced to half-time in order to plant trees, grow vegetables and change the dynamics of my life. Not as some ‘life-change’ scenario – I lived without any amenities and outside all ‘acceptable’ societal conditions for years on end when I was younger – but as a statement of refusal and also to reduce my impact on a very fragile and abused land.
I sit writing this in a hotel on the edge of the desert – a lot of those staying here come from the mines and secret weapons facilities. The room probably glows. My hosts asked if I’d fly over Roxby Downs in a small plane – I said not only have I given up flying, but I would never go near a uranium mine. Poem after poem against the nuclear industry, anti-nuclear protest after anti-nuclear protest (including one of my arrests which was conducted by an old school-colleague from Geraldton), and belief that all large-scale mining is wrong (my father worked on mines and my great-grandfather on my mother’s side died of dust-on-the lungs managing the South Champion gold mine at the now-ghost-town of Kookynie); all this is a life’s protest.
Protest has many faces: none should be denied, the implications of all should be considered. None is more ‘pure’ than the others, but the most effective is when we make least use of the ‘benefits’ of what we’re protesting against. Travel makes use of so many 'resources' (that most deceptive of words).
Train across was uneventful, though I managed to get quite a bit of writing work done. I am still disturbed by my encounters and confrontations with shooters the weekend before. As the train passes a relatively short distance from Maralinga, I am reminded why one has no choice but a life of resistance. Travelling less these days, and by land and sea, I am reminded how protest is something best achieved locally. It’s how you eat, how you shop (or don’t), how you live and conduct your life. The most effective form of protest is surely to reduce the hypocrisies of your own terms of existence.
By midday Monday, I’ll be a relatively short distance from Roxby Downs, one of the cores of the uranium mining industry in Australia. One of the factors I find defeating in cadre political gestures is that one is counted out of a protest equation if one is not on the line with others who are defining a moment of protest.
Protest needs to be holistic, ongoing, and reflect in the life-choices we make. Roxby Downs should be the site of an ongoing Greenham Common-type presence of protest, or people should entirely abandon any product, no matter how indirectly, that comes out of that mining source. Exporting uranium for the energy industry (aside from what gets consumed by the arms industry, whether admitted to or not), means that goods from software to computers to clothing and foodstuffs have been produced in countries utilising nuclear power as an energy source, and that in purchasing them one is supporting such usage. It is the most indirect forms of consumption that are the most insidious.
My point about cadre protesting – the confirmation of one’s presence is not enough when the material usages of those making the protest support (however obscurely) the things they’re resisting. A means to an end? I am not convinced, and those who are least consuming the products of marketplace economies (always dictatorships, be it through so-called elected government or so-called single-party states or corporate interests), are those we don’t hear from, unless their action is local, and they are acting on their home space, and we see them incidentally on the media.
For those protesters doing as I am doing (and I promise, will stop doing soon), and using a computer in any way, you are acting neither locally nor with impunity in terms of culpability. Your protest against environmental degradation collapses before it begins; the ravagers of environment hide behind their lies of sustainability and/or brute force or legal and political sinecures -- such protest is hobbled by its irony and feeds into the perpetrators’ hands.
Mobile phones are the biggest irony of all. Consider what goes into the making of them, never mind the implications behind their use. Statements like this make those of the left you have associated with over decades, by way of agreeing in difference regarding tactics and ultimately aims (my aim is for small communities acting on consensus and with an ecological respect rather than larger centralised majority-rules outcomes) – seek to deny you or to separate you off from the left.
Where does that leave you? Not with the right who try to shoot you for being part of the ‘loony left’! As an anarchist, I am happy to be placed outside everything, though the socialist underpinnings of a strand of anarchism I have long been interested in, necessitate my conversing in a spirit of co-operation with the socialist left. But I am as anti-Marxist as I am as anti-fascist. Which is not to say I don’t read and apply Marxist epistemologies to my reading and thinking (and writing), as I do, but doctrines of Marxism are as far from anarchism as anything else.
And it doesn’t suffice for those of the left to separate those in university enclaves from those living in inner city squats. A lot of us have ‘been there’. And if you’re there and starving and drug-addicted, you don’t want to be there. (I do entirely support inner-city squatter culture, though.) Let me make it clear, universities are systems, and all systems need resisting and undoing. And yes, I do believe working from the inside out is effective. And I do have to help feed a family. I have reduced to half-time in order to plant trees, grow vegetables and change the dynamics of my life. Not as some ‘life-change’ scenario – I lived without any amenities and outside all ‘acceptable’ societal conditions for years on end when I was younger – but as a statement of refusal and also to reduce my impact on a very fragile and abused land.
I sit writing this in a hotel on the edge of the desert – a lot of those staying here come from the mines and secret weapons facilities. The room probably glows. My hosts asked if I’d fly over Roxby Downs in a small plane – I said not only have I given up flying, but I would never go near a uranium mine. Poem after poem against the nuclear industry, anti-nuclear protest after anti-nuclear protest (including one of my arrests which was conducted by an old school-colleague from Geraldton), and belief that all large-scale mining is wrong (my father worked on mines and my great-grandfather on my mother’s side died of dust-on-the lungs managing the South Champion gold mine at the now-ghost-town of Kookynie); all this is a life’s protest.
Protest has many faces: none should be denied, the implications of all should be considered. None is more ‘pure’ than the others, but the most effective is when we make least use of the ‘benefits’ of what we’re protesting against. Travel makes use of so many 'resources' (that most deceptive of words).
Friday, March 20, 2009
Not-so-low-tech (after all)
By Tracy
When we were living in Ohio, USA, just over four years ago, there was a severe ice storm just before Christmas and about 9000 homes in our area were left without electricity. (Ours was out for five days.)
Many of us who had no alternative heating spent that Christmas displaced. Especially bizarre was the fact that on any one street, some had power and some did not, depending on which company you were hooked up through. This meant that while some families had to sleep on the floor at the YMCA, others had their houses ablaze with decorative lighting.
The people who, from the outside, seemed least affected were the Amish, who had never relied on the grid in the first place.
During our time there, I had been with our daughter on a trip (organised by the college’s Jewish student group; anyone could go along) to nearby Holmes County to experience Amish diplomacy/hospitality. The aim was to increase understanding, to give a little insight into how Amish people live, with a “host” well accustomed to explaining and interacting at the interface between his culture and the wider world. There’s much to admire in the Amish emphasis on community and small-scale living.
(As vegans, Katherine and I were a little adrift in the Amish restaurant, sticking to the side salads in an incredibly meat-heavy environment; while veganism was an unfamiliar idea to our Amish host, he had – of course! – no problem with the idea of strong principles that might put you at odds with your surroundings...)
It’s easy to romanticise the notion of Amish living, especially when it’s portrayed with the kind of moral idealism of a film like Peter Weir’s Witness. But the reality is always more complex.
There’s a fascinating investigation of Amish attitudes to technology on Kevin Kelly's site The Technium. Many of the responses posted below his article are also interesting.
Particularly disturbing is the readiness to take up GM technology in a kind of functional-utilitarian manner, as it’s depicted there. Of course, as Kelly shows, the Amish are not homogeneous. What happens in one group may not happen in another.
When we were living in Ohio, USA, just over four years ago, there was a severe ice storm just before Christmas and about 9000 homes in our area were left without electricity. (Ours was out for five days.)
Many of us who had no alternative heating spent that Christmas displaced. Especially bizarre was the fact that on any one street, some had power and some did not, depending on which company you were hooked up through. This meant that while some families had to sleep on the floor at the YMCA, others had their houses ablaze with decorative lighting.
The people who, from the outside, seemed least affected were the Amish, who had never relied on the grid in the first place.
During our time there, I had been with our daughter on a trip (organised by the college’s Jewish student group; anyone could go along) to nearby Holmes County to experience Amish diplomacy/hospitality. The aim was to increase understanding, to give a little insight into how Amish people live, with a “host” well accustomed to explaining and interacting at the interface between his culture and the wider world. There’s much to admire in the Amish emphasis on community and small-scale living.
(As vegans, Katherine and I were a little adrift in the Amish restaurant, sticking to the side salads in an incredibly meat-heavy environment; while veganism was an unfamiliar idea to our Amish host, he had – of course! – no problem with the idea of strong principles that might put you at odds with your surroundings...)
It’s easy to romanticise the notion of Amish living, especially when it’s portrayed with the kind of moral idealism of a film like Peter Weir’s Witness. But the reality is always more complex.
There’s a fascinating investigation of Amish attitudes to technology on Kevin Kelly's site The Technium. Many of the responses posted below his article are also interesting.
Particularly disturbing is the readiness to take up GM technology in a kind of functional-utilitarian manner, as it’s depicted there. Of course, as Kelly shows, the Amish are not homogeneous. What happens in one group may not happen in another.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Low-tech browsing
By Tracy
Thinking about those items on my low-tech wishlist, I've been looking for more information on the topic, and have been browsing the website of Low-tech Magazine.
Apart from the odd article that suggests humans revert to (ab)using animals (like the idea of going back to horses instead of tractors -- why is it always this binary?), which obviously presents problems from a vegan/animal-rights perspective, the site is full of good ideas and very useful background material.
It even provides links to an amazing place in Belgium called The Museum for Old Techniques that is a repository of past tools, methods and texts, a kind of education centre too.
But back to the original site, Low-tech Magazine: there are unexpected features such as "The Ugly Side of Solar Panels" which raises (incorporating its own corrected errors with strikeout!) some of the issues we have often worried about, e.g. the energy-use and pollution generated by the production of solar panels themselves. The article reminds us that "solar cells are far from a zero emission technology"... but I'll leave you to read it for yourself if you're interested.
Thinking about those items on my low-tech wishlist, I've been looking for more information on the topic, and have been browsing the website of Low-tech Magazine.
Apart from the odd article that suggests humans revert to (ab)using animals (like the idea of going back to horses instead of tractors -- why is it always this binary?), which obviously presents problems from a vegan/animal-rights perspective, the site is full of good ideas and very useful background material.
It even provides links to an amazing place in Belgium called The Museum for Old Techniques that is a repository of past tools, methods and texts, a kind of education centre too.
But back to the original site, Low-tech Magazine: there are unexpected features such as "The Ugly Side of Solar Panels" which raises (incorporating its own corrected errors with strikeout!) some of the issues we have often worried about, e.g. the energy-use and pollution generated by the production of solar panels themselves. The article reminds us that "solar cells are far from a zero emission technology"... but I'll leave you to read it for yourself if you're interested.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Low-tech wish-list
By Tracy
I’m not one to covet objects, but there are a few useful items that seem to have disappeared, or are at least quite hard to get now.
These are things I’ve had in the past (or my parents had) that I’d love to get hold of again – not for nostalgia’s sake, but because you can use them unplugged, and they work so well...
1. Mouli-grater, hand-operated.
2. Jaffle iron, the sort you can use in a woodstove. No Teflon lining (Teflon is ubiquitous these days, and nobody seems to care whether it’s good for you).
3. Bread crock. In the hot weather our bread (because low on additives) goes mouldy quickly; if I put it in the fridge, it goes stale. It can be composted, of course, but better to avoid waste altogether... (I don't want a crock with lead anywhere in its glaze or paint, so this makes it harder.)
4. Wooden hand-held coffee grinder*, the sort you place between your knees, that has a little drawer. Ditto for nut and/or spice grinder. In the back of my mind I know I must one day give up drinking coffee. But while I do, I’d rather have this low-tech device than an electric one.
5. Soap dish that drains; also soap cage, for not wasting little pieces of soap (strictly speaking it was my grandmother who had this, much further back).
6. Washboard. Very useful for what must be handwashed, at the very least.
7. Ordinary stainless steel cookware. Here in the wheatbelt, it's very hard to find. Teflon is everywhere...
*Image of coffee grinder is File:Mlynek.jpg, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Source: en:Mlynek.jpg Originally uploaded to en-wiki by en:User:Mohylek, GFDL
(Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
Subject to disclaimers.)
I’m not one to covet objects, but there are a few useful items that seem to have disappeared, or are at least quite hard to get now.
These are things I’ve had in the past (or my parents had) that I’d love to get hold of again – not for nostalgia’s sake, but because you can use them unplugged, and they work so well...
1. Mouli-grater, hand-operated.
2. Jaffle iron, the sort you can use in a woodstove. No Teflon lining (Teflon is ubiquitous these days, and nobody seems to care whether it’s good for you).
3. Bread crock. In the hot weather our bread (because low on additives) goes mouldy quickly; if I put it in the fridge, it goes stale. It can be composted, of course, but better to avoid waste altogether... (I don't want a crock with lead anywhere in its glaze or paint, so this makes it harder.)
4. Wooden hand-held coffee grinder*, the sort you place between your knees, that has a little drawer. Ditto for nut and/or spice grinder. In the back of my mind I know I must one day give up drinking coffee. But while I do, I’d rather have this low-tech device than an electric one.5. Soap dish that drains; also soap cage, for not wasting little pieces of soap (strictly speaking it was my grandmother who had this, much further back).
6. Washboard. Very useful for what must be handwashed, at the very least.
7. Ordinary stainless steel cookware. Here in the wheatbelt, it's very hard to find. Teflon is everywhere...
*Image of coffee grinder is File:Mlynek.jpg, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Source: en:Mlynek.jpg Originally uploaded to en-wiki by en:User:Mohylek, GFDL
(Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
Subject to disclaimers.)
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