Undergrowth Featured Blogs

The human clock counts down to the end of coal at Climate Camp Australia 2008 in Newcastle. This clip contains footage from a helicopter flying over beautiful Newcastle beaches, the busy harbour and coal terminals, mountains of black coal and finally an inspiring community protest at Climate Camp in a football oval, just over from the Carrington coal loaders.

This presentation addresses the current approach to women's empowerment, fostered by the World Bank. Microcredit programs, seen by the development community as a single package to both tackle poverty and deliver rights to women, are here criticized for subverting the women's movement. Kalyani Menon-Sen gives an analysis of micro-credit that sees it as providing a safety valve for the current world economic system, by providing entry for capital into new decentralized markets, that is, to poor women. It has done this in the name of womens justice, while not actually talking about women's rights. Rather, it sees women as economic actors who are the most cost effective and flexible means to buffer the shocks of reduced social spending. In the process, real changes for women that address social and cultural contexts as well as economic aspects, are ignored and more fundamentally undermined.

Sarawak Gone explores four remote Bidayuh communities accessible by foot within an hour's drive from Kuching, capital city of Sarawak, Malaysia. The Environmental Impact Assessment is visited in "Biomass & Wildlife Losses". We look at the loss of habitat and the inundation of protected and endangered species threatened by the Bengoh Dam.

Dear Foxtel,




“See something. Feel something”. Such touching advice coming from an entourage of coma patients.

Who do you run for? Who’s the old man who changes you’re drip at night?

My advice, since you asked, Br’er Fox, Executive Director – T.V and Marketing: draw a big circle called despair and go stand in it.

Look in the mirror of every morning and repeat: I am defeated. See it. Feel it. In high definition!



Yours fearlessly,


x


The Enterprise of Destruction!

I cant wait for MIFF , mainly because of a film that will be showing called Garbage Warrior that I have seen popping up all over the web for the last year. Essentially its a classic story about rebel vs state, however what makes this story even more pressing is that Michael Reynolds, the eco-architect, is [...]

During the 2008 Camp for Climate Action in Newcastle, a bunch of activists put their positive energy toward kick-starting a proposed community garden at Webb Park on Hanbury Street, Mayfield. This clip captures the spirit and passion nurtured by Climate Camps around the world.

As part of the Climate Camp distributed direct action day, Brett organised a Guerrilla-style working bee to kick-start plans to revitalise the space at Webb Park. Bronwyn swung-by to check out the action.

Every few months or so, I afford the development of another roll of film . There are about two dozen canisters lying about in my room. All in all, that amounts to about 600 images from my past life, from Europe and South America, which I have never seen. Images which mature like wine. In twenty years perhaps, they will be so potent and forgotten that just catching sight of one for the first time might cause my head to explode.

I remember a story Julian Burnside once told, about a middle aged and successful man who one afternoon found a collection of his own teenage poems stuffed between the pages of an old book in his sizable, though not ostentatious library. He gave himself the evening off, which he usually reserved for more serious reading and sat down to revisit his childish ambitions, feeling somewhat jovial, fully expecting as he was to laugh good naturedly at the foolish self he had once been. When his wife came into the study some hours later to say goodnight, she found him crumpled like a child in the corner of the room.

* * * *

"Hello there," said the frog from the ocean.

"Hello there, brother," said the frog from the well. "Welcome to my well. And where, may I ask, are you from?"

"From the Great Ocean," answered the ocean frog.

"I've never heard of that place," said the frog from the well. "But I'm sure you must be thrilled to see my magnificent home. Is your ocean even a quarter this big?"

"Oh, it's bigger than that," said the ocean frog.

"Half as big, then?" asked the well frog.

"No, bigger still."

The well frog could barely believe his ears. "Is it," he continued skeptically, "as big as my well?"

"Your well would not even be a drop in the Great Ocean," answered the visiting frog.

"That's impossible!" cried the frog from the well. "I'll just have to go back with you and see how big this ocean really is."

After a long journey, they finally arrived. And when the frog from the well saw the immensity of the ocean, he simply couldn't take it in. He was so shocked that his head exploded.

from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rimpoche

* * * *

In a vaguely related tangent, Z told me the other day about a love letter a man gave her years ago, written in Finnish. She doesn't speak Finnish, and she has never had it translated.

When I was in Bulgaria briefly, C and I found a series of black and white family photographs, which had been hurriedly ripped in half and thrown into a bin on the street corner.

The last image is a double exposure from Berlin, if I remember correctly. Whilst searching for something Sebald had written, by way of an explanation, I stumbled upon a passage of even less relation, which I now consider preferable. It has something to do with a life lead in such a way that "one might aquire the art of hearing 'wood rotting over long distances'".

I remember being pursued, so to speak, a couple years ago, by the recurring image of a spirit hovering above a stricken body.

An old lady found a collection of unusual water colour paintings lying in an attic. Not thinking much about it, she sold them to an antique dealer, for quite a bit more than she expected, who then sold them onto someone who knew that he was looking at a collection of original William Blake's. He made about ten million pounds, give or take a few million, by selling them to the auction house where I worked. One of the paintings, which I cannot find an image of, showed a prone body, above which another figure, a spirit of some sort hovered. It was one amongst a host of similarly themed images, which came before me while I was living in London. I can't remember the rest, but I was reminded of that work, and of Blake's work in general, looking at the work of the Japanese artist Leiko Shiga recently.

"The photographic paper becomes evidence. The printed image appears before me, smelling strongly as though it were some kind of raw food.

Confronting the inevitability of my own death and the passage of time, the act of creating frozen time resembles that of prayer.

The body is the empty vessel and the medium through which the images pass. What is memory? These people and situations have been sacrificed by the photograph. Look at what they have offered to that world. "

- words and installation by Leiko Shiga, at MOCA, Shanghai.

The human clock counts down to the end of coal at Climate Camp Australia 2008 in Newcastle. This is a silent video, with footage from a helicopter flying over beautiful Newcastle beaches, the busy harbour and coal terminals, mountains of black coal and finally an inspiring community protest at Climate Camp in a football oval, just over from the Carrington coal loaders.

This video shows the day of action in Newcastle to halt coal trains, protesting the continued export of coal from one of the largest coal ports in the world.

Participants of Camp for Climate Action engaged a mass action on Sunday 13th of July. Many participants broke through the police blockade with ease and proceded to climb onto the coal train.

Participants in the Camp for Climate Action and other concerned citizens came together on Sunday 13th of July to blockade the coal train lines. Non-Violent Direct Action was taken to highlight the need for renewable energy and stop the polluting coal industry. An interview with Pete, one of the many arrested after the mass action blocking Newcastle's coal trains.

Peaceful direct action blocking the coal trains in Newcastle. This video shows protesters on the train lines in Newcastle. Many groups of activists prevented the coal trains from running all day, in one of Australia's biggest displays of direct action against the destructive export of coal which is fueling climate change.

There seems to be no shortage of edible gardening initiatives worldwide , in fact , I think its becoming a strong trend , possibly trendy and quite possibly very trendy. Edible Estates This guy Fritz Haeg rocks the world. He not only has great design sense he understands how to actually work with ‘humans’ , yes ‘humans’. [...]

Praful Bidwai, noted journalist, political analyst, and activist, indicts the World Bank in this testimony on two issues. First, he charges the World Bank with India's deforestation. Secondly, and at greater length, he exposes the "carbon credit" market for what it is: a market which attempts to deal with global warming by moving around pollution.

Praful Bidwai, noted journalist, political analyst, and activist, indicts the World Bank in this testimony on two issues. First, he charges the World Bank with India's deforestation. Secondly, and at greater length, he exposes the "carbon credit" market for what it is: a market which attempts to deal with global warming by moving around pollution. This presentation is an excellent introduction for those not familiar with how carbon credits work, and who may have heard the rhetoric, and assumed in good faith that it has something to do with reducing green house gas emissions in a significant way. Unfortunately, this is not true, and the World Bank has a large role in fostering this myth that not only does not solve the problem, but gets in the way of any serious solutions.

Graham Brown, ex-coal worker and now climate change activist speaking at the Climate Camp in Newcastle (11th of July 2008) in a session on making a socially just transition from coal-powered communities to a renewable economy in Australia.