The Concrete Apocalypse-Prelogue-Leave That Gum Alone
The Concrete Apocalypse
Prelogue Leave That Gum Alone
by Wallaby Poors
sustainablesnail@riseup.net
A Soil Liberation Frontyard Publication
Soil Liberation Frontyard Get out the jackhammers and start hammering for the next generation. Leave that Gum alone!
On the day a young gum tree was killed for no good reason
As a million thoughts swamp through my mind, today is the day that I mourn the young gum tree cut down over my back fence. Like the many people being cut down in the prime of their life, so are the young trees planted in places that we eventually don't want them in.
The gum tree would have been planted after the land was sold to property developers probably only a decade ago. Who decided to plant the gum tree in the small backyard and then cut it down as the young healthy tree became established? I am not sure of the species of gum, (which I can't verify now as it has been demolished in the chipper) but I believe it was a lemon-scented gum. The foliage of these gums is high up the trunk, making it too hard to climb up. The high fence between our backyard and the former tree's position a metre away never allowed my treehugging tendencies to eventuate.
Perhaps a pair of honeyeaters relying on the Merri Creek nature corridor for survival could of nested there in the future. That is if the Indian Mynas didn't bully them out like in the oak tree next door this summer. (For a study of modern human behavior, comparisons can be made to that of the Indian Mynas in the bird world.)
The tree gave our backyard a presence of health, joining with the other native trees and our backyard garden and the house and garden next door in creating a semi-oasis on a main road surrounded by blocks of flats, petrol stations and car repair yards. The only saving grace is the tramline for those of us living carless in car culture and the park in front of the commission flats.
The tree is an anti-thesis of the culture surrounding these two houses joined together as an island in Melbourne's gentrified inner city. Our island is surrounded by places now dedicated to car culture. Petrol stations on either side of the road that have no one responsible or knowledgeable about the history of soil contamination. Across the road the majority of business are car repair yards. No community gardens, food
outlets or art or cultural centres, no places for people to gather
Next to us is a cemented car park for the residents of the flats. Telling signs of the people's lifestyle is when it is unsafe to walk your dog off lead past the car park driveways during peak hour traffic times. The
little boxes called flats on impervious concreted areas of land is what they now call home. A fair percentage of the space they rent in these housing developments is their car space.
Gardens, the one thing that can allow people to reconnect to nature and natural cycles are not included in their housing package. Everyone gets a car park but not a garden plot. On one of the minority of roads in
metropolitan Melbourne that gets a decent tram service, the developers deem that it is car parking, not food growing that they need.
Whose fault is it if people believe that all they need is a two or three roomed box and a car park to live in, when they have been immersed only in the technology culture, with 'the office', 'the bar', 'the flat' and 'the road' being the main theatres of life? How can they scratch the earth with their toes and smell the flowers when the trapped in the prison of the Concrete Apocalypse?
The flats behind our house have balconies that were rarely sat on during our long, warm summer. The gum tree killed today provided shade for the residents on the balcony, and no branches of this young gum threatened anyone. How can branches fall on people who don't even spend time in their small backyards anyway? Why are they not thankful for the sunsets they could witness under the shade of this small gum tree on their balcony?
Why do trees get chopped down under the fear of public liability claims when no one even takes the time to sit under them anyway? Why does every description of reality under capitalism sound so ridiculous to common sense? Why did this have tree have to suffer and die due to this bullshit?
Why are the reasons to these questions also responsible for the destruction of life around the globe, epitomised in the destruction of the giantly vast Amazon rainforest, described as the 'lungs of the earth'?
My connection to the Earth feels the loss of the gum tree over my back fence. Likewise the loss of ancient forests all over the planet affects the collective consciousness of humanity everyday.
If you can't feel the loss of the ancient forests, and the ancient landscapes of every ecological variety from deserts to oceans,, and the loss of ancient human cultures that lived in synchronicity with the land, then you have been deadened.
You have cut off yourself from your heart because it hurts too much to face the destruction that surrounds you. You are hiding behind the lies that are presented to you conveniently everyday, because what is being
destroyed, from down the street to around the world is connected to you. Ultimately.
On a sunny day the log trucks are being filled up with log after log, every day of our lives, and now the industry is able to log longer into the winter due to the draught and due to ignoring the health and safety of
workers. The hundreds of football ovals of ancient forest lost every day is a byproduct the same as the thousands of starved to death children living in impoverished nations are everyday. The dominant economic system, capitalism, the pursuit of power dictated by money is the cause.
You will also know that the same thing is attacking you. Greed and money and the corruption of power. The war that dominates the news is over oil, the oil that we need to run our cars and systems. More cars and
less trees make every human lung system sick. Perhaps cars need warnings like packets of cigarettes. Your car harms others, your car harms your unborn baby, your car gives you lung cancer.
There are so many alternatives. Bioregionalism of production, which comes with the knowledge granted through anarchic and consensual debate in a community. Everyone has an ability to voice their needs. That way everyone has a job that the community needs as a whole to have done. Everyone has a job worthy of respect in the community because the community works together and plays together. A community that talks to each other has inbuilt support networks naturally in it. Those who are in the need of care receive it collectively from the community. Asylum seekers are recognised as needing refuge in our community.
The pressures of the outside world that can lead to domestic abuse is eroded by a community of people looking out for each other's health and stresses, and each other's kids. Included in a bioregional community is the recognition of the needs that people have in relation to land and having the need of sanctuary, and the needs to sustainably survive at heir disposal.
Bioregional community co-operation and production reduces the need of transportation. We can also be less reliant on oil by turning to renewable and less ecologically damaging fuels. SUVS taking up people's lives? Make cars smaller to fit on the paths that what would be more dominated by bicycles. Help people who don't have the ability to get around on bikes get around. The sustainable energised mobility of people just takes a little common sense.
Decision making is not fair. The decision making is being done by those who champion the free market, and the decision makers who champion the free market benefit out of the outcomes of the 'free market', which they devised to reflect their interests in money and power.
The departments and authorities are filled with everyday people always (with exception of revolution), answerable to the minister, who is answerable (and related) to the monarch or the president?
Why are the same families in control of everything, with owners of corporations and US presidents related to the European aristocracy, which in turn goes back to the ancient worlds of Egypt and Rome? The evidence is in their palaces.
Why aren't the people that have looked after the land for an ancient amount of time listened to?
Most of us live in this southern continent as descendants of migrants. Why is the same monarch of England in control of this land under the Australian constitution, when she is responsible for all the genocide that occurred in her name here and across the world, just like her relation, the US president is also responsible for?
When someone is said to have supreme power, but does not exercise it, as it is merely symbolic, you know you've been told a wobbly.
Getting people just trying to feed their kids, to implement your false authorita, who never realise the centralised, fascist state they live under. It can be hard to wonder who the fuck gives you queen or president the right to decide who lives and dies at the flick of a switch?, when you're just trying to survive.
How can we avoid the red tape of the system that tangles the youth of today like the young tree cut down? Let there be no illusion to the colour of red in red tape. Red tape as the red blood it spills. It forms a system that cannot deny its' sole purpose is the pursuit of money.
A healthy community requires community decision making, not communitybconsultation by government and its bureaucratic arms. Consulting people aout decisions you have already made to the dictates of those making the oney out of it is not a consultation process. It doesn't work if you on't listen. When no one in this system can hear because their ears are rapped in the bureaucratic red tape of 'what can be achieved under the
current system', it shows that the system we live by is mad.
We live under its control, and we are identified by Centrelinked incomes, taxes and bank accounts as essentially nothing more than worker ants at some point in the chain of command, or as mechanised cogs in the wheels of
capitalism. The market rules because the market forces rule us all.
The controllers of the tyrannical free market do not barter, they erect. bigger and bigger fences and more dangerous weaponries and mind controlsto keep us down. They starve us while they benefit from their planetary destruction. This planetary destruction is personal. This destruction is of our collective homelands and cultures and can be felt at a personal level and on any local and global scale you care to measure it on.
Like any hierarchical structure, those bringing in the New World Order have a hierarchical structure to the top chain of command. Those leading the resistances to the new world order around the world know that they all fight as equals, thus making their success much more likely. It is the kind of equality that is like looking someone in the eye, knowing that they will stand by you, giving you the respect to offer you support and protection if needed.
To break the chains of lies we must speak the truth
We are all sick whether we understand it or not, and are trapped in this system. My liberation is wound up in the people's liberation in the housing commission flats next to the park down from us. At least some of
them hang out in the park sometimes.
What of the neighbours in the 'yuppie flats'? Are they really selfish yuppies that deserve to go to hell or are they disconnected to the nature of life? Neighbours looking after each other's kids is an example that
community still occurs, if briefly in this kind of modern living.
Why can't we have a gate in our backyard fences, so they could have access to our vegie patch, and sow a crop of beans or broccoli of their own? Why is even the dismantling of fences tied in bureaucratic red tape?
Property boundary disputes.
What of the property disputes that have never seen any justice, the original property dispute of this land, between the property LAWed English army and the environmentalist Indigenous nations of this continent? Who ever asked them about whether these fences should be erected? Who stole their land and erected these fences that continually encapsulate smaller and smaller areas?
Why did the Mabo judgement recognise the lie of Terra Nulius (making the Australian constitution invalid under international law) but was based on the fences that were put up by the Indigenous people of Mabo Island near the beginning of the European invasion of their land?, and can't be applied in the same way on mainland Australia.
Why as Robby Thorpe (Gunai) argues, is this finding of law, (the Mabo case) then liquidated down by the Howard government to be under the jurisdiction of pastoral leases, which is for the white man's cattle and sheep? Why are the most ancient cultures on the planet disrespected so much?
With this re-understanding of the significance of what land is to us, comes the recognition of the Indigenous people's connection and sovereignty of land. Indigenous people's families are the longest locals in town by an eon of time. Why do we not even grant them the average spoils of the average white person in society, on the land stolen from them?
We didn’t even ask if we could come here, it was a colonial invasion. Why don't we recognise that we live in a Western first world enclave in the southern Hemisphere, usurping cultures of people that were mass murdered by the English army, beginning in the 18th century, by both biological terrorism (small pox, plaster of paris, poisoned waterholes) and the gun.
It is time to learn the laws of genocide. It is time to break down the fences that fence people and nature away from each other. It is time to reconnect. We can make a difference in this world. To begin with is requires listening. Respect is the word shouted in hip-hop for due reason.
The eucalypt need not be chopped down because of branches falling on places we no longer sit
Respecting yourself and all that is outside of yourself will lead to "the interconnectedness of all being the protection of all"
Sustainable Snail Archives 2004 Deprogram and Avoid Microchipping Productions 2004
Prelogue Leave That Gum Alone
by Wallaby Poors
sustainablesnail@riseup.net
A Soil Liberation Frontyard Publication
Soil Liberation Frontyard Get out the jackhammers and start hammering for the next generation. Leave that Gum alone!
On the day a young gum tree was killed for no good reason
As a million thoughts swamp through my mind, today is the day that I mourn the young gum tree cut down over my back fence. Like the many people being cut down in the prime of their life, so are the young trees planted in places that we eventually don't want them in.
The gum tree would have been planted after the land was sold to property developers probably only a decade ago. Who decided to plant the gum tree in the small backyard and then cut it down as the young healthy tree became established? I am not sure of the species of gum, (which I can't verify now as it has been demolished in the chipper) but I believe it was a lemon-scented gum. The foliage of these gums is high up the trunk, making it too hard to climb up. The high fence between our backyard and the former tree's position a metre away never allowed my treehugging tendencies to eventuate.
Perhaps a pair of honeyeaters relying on the Merri Creek nature corridor for survival could of nested there in the future. That is if the Indian Mynas didn't bully them out like in the oak tree next door this summer. (For a study of modern human behavior, comparisons can be made to that of the Indian Mynas in the bird world.)
The tree gave our backyard a presence of health, joining with the other native trees and our backyard garden and the house and garden next door in creating a semi-oasis on a main road surrounded by blocks of flats, petrol stations and car repair yards. The only saving grace is the tramline for those of us living carless in car culture and the park in front of the commission flats.
The tree is an anti-thesis of the culture surrounding these two houses joined together as an island in Melbourne's gentrified inner city. Our island is surrounded by places now dedicated to car culture. Petrol stations on either side of the road that have no one responsible or knowledgeable about the history of soil contamination. Across the road the majority of business are car repair yards. No community gardens, food
outlets or art or cultural centres, no places for people to gather
Next to us is a cemented car park for the residents of the flats. Telling signs of the people's lifestyle is when it is unsafe to walk your dog off lead past the car park driveways during peak hour traffic times. The
little boxes called flats on impervious concreted areas of land is what they now call home. A fair percentage of the space they rent in these housing developments is their car space.
Gardens, the one thing that can allow people to reconnect to nature and natural cycles are not included in their housing package. Everyone gets a car park but not a garden plot. On one of the minority of roads in
metropolitan Melbourne that gets a decent tram service, the developers deem that it is car parking, not food growing that they need.
Whose fault is it if people believe that all they need is a two or three roomed box and a car park to live in, when they have been immersed only in the technology culture, with 'the office', 'the bar', 'the flat' and 'the road' being the main theatres of life? How can they scratch the earth with their toes and smell the flowers when the trapped in the prison of the Concrete Apocalypse?
The flats behind our house have balconies that were rarely sat on during our long, warm summer. The gum tree killed today provided shade for the residents on the balcony, and no branches of this young gum threatened anyone. How can branches fall on people who don't even spend time in their small backyards anyway? Why are they not thankful for the sunsets they could witness under the shade of this small gum tree on their balcony?
Why do trees get chopped down under the fear of public liability claims when no one even takes the time to sit under them anyway? Why does every description of reality under capitalism sound so ridiculous to common sense? Why did this have tree have to suffer and die due to this bullshit?
Why are the reasons to these questions also responsible for the destruction of life around the globe, epitomised in the destruction of the giantly vast Amazon rainforest, described as the 'lungs of the earth'?
My connection to the Earth feels the loss of the gum tree over my back fence. Likewise the loss of ancient forests all over the planet affects the collective consciousness of humanity everyday.
If you can't feel the loss of the ancient forests, and the ancient landscapes of every ecological variety from deserts to oceans,, and the loss of ancient human cultures that lived in synchronicity with the land, then you have been deadened.
You have cut off yourself from your heart because it hurts too much to face the destruction that surrounds you. You are hiding behind the lies that are presented to you conveniently everyday, because what is being
destroyed, from down the street to around the world is connected to you. Ultimately.
On a sunny day the log trucks are being filled up with log after log, every day of our lives, and now the industry is able to log longer into the winter due to the draught and due to ignoring the health and safety of
workers. The hundreds of football ovals of ancient forest lost every day is a byproduct the same as the thousands of starved to death children living in impoverished nations are everyday. The dominant economic system, capitalism, the pursuit of power dictated by money is the cause.
You will also know that the same thing is attacking you. Greed and money and the corruption of power. The war that dominates the news is over oil, the oil that we need to run our cars and systems. More cars and
less trees make every human lung system sick. Perhaps cars need warnings like packets of cigarettes. Your car harms others, your car harms your unborn baby, your car gives you lung cancer.
There are so many alternatives. Bioregionalism of production, which comes with the knowledge granted through anarchic and consensual debate in a community. Everyone has an ability to voice their needs. That way everyone has a job that the community needs as a whole to have done. Everyone has a job worthy of respect in the community because the community works together and plays together. A community that talks to each other has inbuilt support networks naturally in it. Those who are in the need of care receive it collectively from the community. Asylum seekers are recognised as needing refuge in our community.
The pressures of the outside world that can lead to domestic abuse is eroded by a community of people looking out for each other's health and stresses, and each other's kids. Included in a bioregional community is the recognition of the needs that people have in relation to land and having the need of sanctuary, and the needs to sustainably survive at heir disposal.
Bioregional community co-operation and production reduces the need of transportation. We can also be less reliant on oil by turning to renewable and less ecologically damaging fuels. SUVS taking up people's lives? Make cars smaller to fit on the paths that what would be more dominated by bicycles. Help people who don't have the ability to get around on bikes get around. The sustainable energised mobility of people just takes a little common sense.
Decision making is not fair. The decision making is being done by those who champion the free market, and the decision makers who champion the free market benefit out of the outcomes of the 'free market', which they devised to reflect their interests in money and power.
The departments and authorities are filled with everyday people always (with exception of revolution), answerable to the minister, who is answerable (and related) to the monarch or the president?
Why are the same families in control of everything, with owners of corporations and US presidents related to the European aristocracy, which in turn goes back to the ancient worlds of Egypt and Rome? The evidence is in their palaces.
Why aren't the people that have looked after the land for an ancient amount of time listened to?
Most of us live in this southern continent as descendants of migrants. Why is the same monarch of England in control of this land under the Australian constitution, when she is responsible for all the genocide that occurred in her name here and across the world, just like her relation, the US president is also responsible for?
When someone is said to have supreme power, but does not exercise it, as it is merely symbolic, you know you've been told a wobbly.
Getting people just trying to feed their kids, to implement your false authorita, who never realise the centralised, fascist state they live under. It can be hard to wonder who the fuck gives you queen or president the right to decide who lives and dies at the flick of a switch?, when you're just trying to survive.
How can we avoid the red tape of the system that tangles the youth of today like the young tree cut down? Let there be no illusion to the colour of red in red tape. Red tape as the red blood it spills. It forms a system that cannot deny its' sole purpose is the pursuit of money.
A healthy community requires community decision making, not communitybconsultation by government and its bureaucratic arms. Consulting people aout decisions you have already made to the dictates of those making the oney out of it is not a consultation process. It doesn't work if you on't listen. When no one in this system can hear because their ears are rapped in the bureaucratic red tape of 'what can be achieved under the
current system', it shows that the system we live by is mad.
We live under its control, and we are identified by Centrelinked incomes, taxes and bank accounts as essentially nothing more than worker ants at some point in the chain of command, or as mechanised cogs in the wheels of
capitalism. The market rules because the market forces rule us all.
The controllers of the tyrannical free market do not barter, they erect. bigger and bigger fences and more dangerous weaponries and mind controlsto keep us down. They starve us while they benefit from their planetary destruction. This planetary destruction is personal. This destruction is of our collective homelands and cultures and can be felt at a personal level and on any local and global scale you care to measure it on.
Like any hierarchical structure, those bringing in the New World Order have a hierarchical structure to the top chain of command. Those leading the resistances to the new world order around the world know that they all fight as equals, thus making their success much more likely. It is the kind of equality that is like looking someone in the eye, knowing that they will stand by you, giving you the respect to offer you support and protection if needed.
To break the chains of lies we must speak the truth
We are all sick whether we understand it or not, and are trapped in this system. My liberation is wound up in the people's liberation in the housing commission flats next to the park down from us. At least some of
them hang out in the park sometimes.
What of the neighbours in the 'yuppie flats'? Are they really selfish yuppies that deserve to go to hell or are they disconnected to the nature of life? Neighbours looking after each other's kids is an example that
community still occurs, if briefly in this kind of modern living.
Why can't we have a gate in our backyard fences, so they could have access to our vegie patch, and sow a crop of beans or broccoli of their own? Why is even the dismantling of fences tied in bureaucratic red tape?
Property boundary disputes.
What of the property disputes that have never seen any justice, the original property dispute of this land, between the property LAWed English army and the environmentalist Indigenous nations of this continent? Who ever asked them about whether these fences should be erected? Who stole their land and erected these fences that continually encapsulate smaller and smaller areas?
Why did the Mabo judgement recognise the lie of Terra Nulius (making the Australian constitution invalid under international law) but was based on the fences that were put up by the Indigenous people of Mabo Island near the beginning of the European invasion of their land?, and can't be applied in the same way on mainland Australia.
Why as Robby Thorpe (Gunai) argues, is this finding of law, (the Mabo case) then liquidated down by the Howard government to be under the jurisdiction of pastoral leases, which is for the white man's cattle and sheep? Why are the most ancient cultures on the planet disrespected so much?
With this re-understanding of the significance of what land is to us, comes the recognition of the Indigenous people's connection and sovereignty of land. Indigenous people's families are the longest locals in town by an eon of time. Why do we not even grant them the average spoils of the average white person in society, on the land stolen from them?
We didn’t even ask if we could come here, it was a colonial invasion. Why don't we recognise that we live in a Western first world enclave in the southern Hemisphere, usurping cultures of people that were mass murdered by the English army, beginning in the 18th century, by both biological terrorism (small pox, plaster of paris, poisoned waterholes) and the gun.
It is time to learn the laws of genocide. It is time to break down the fences that fence people and nature away from each other. It is time to reconnect. We can make a difference in this world. To begin with is requires listening. Respect is the word shouted in hip-hop for due reason.
The eucalypt need not be chopped down because of branches falling on places we no longer sit
Respecting yourself and all that is outside of yourself will lead to "the interconnectedness of all being the protection of all"
Sustainable Snail Archives 2004 Deprogram and Avoid Microchipping Productions 2004
posted by Wallaby Poors @ 3:12 AM
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