#permablitz

[justalittlesolarpunk]

Permaculture folks, can you recommend me reading/accounts/tell me more about the field? I’m really keen to know more 💚😊

#solarpunk #permaculture #environmentalism #hopepunk #cottagepunk #social justice #optimism #climate justice #bright future #design #gardening #farming #permablitz

[dipperdesperado]

guerrilla gardening is very cool

I’m really stoked to talk about praxis and solarpunk today. Hopefully, you all know what solarpunk is. I imagine fewer of you know what praxis is. Essentially, praxis is a term, used a lot by leftists, to talk about doing stuff. It’s a practice or activity, informed by theoretical and experiential knowledge. In our goal to create an ecological society informed by appropriate technology, we should think not only about the massive upheavals but the things that we can do right now. That’s where guerrilla gardening comes in.

Gardening in general is activism, but guerrilla gardening is like, super solarpunk. The rundown is essentially when you and/or a group of homies take some love-starved land and turn it into a garden (or just plant stuff there) without permission from the owner of said land. That lack of permission is what makes it guerrilla. This can lead to a better community, and supports abolition (of private property), autonomy, and collective resiliency. Ideally, you can get public support behind ya, and be able to work with the municipality to not get in trouble. The classic asking for forgiveness than permission, until you’re the one that can decide.

Where to Start: X Marks the Spot

When you (and your small-but mighty collective/affinity group) decide that you want to set up a guerrilla garden, the first thing you want to do is find a good spot. It can be that little line of grass that split up two sides of the road, a sidewalk bed, or an empty lot. You want to make sure there’s good sunlight and decent soil. If the soil ain’t good, but you wanna do stuff there, I’d recommend researching how to rehabilitate it. Obviously, that’s more work, though.

Once you have your target spot, you’ll need your tools and plants. Some basic things will be gloves, a trowel, a water source (like a can or hose), and plants/seeds. Some nice-to-haves could be mulch, compost, or soil amendments. It depends on what you’re planting and what your conditions are to know what you’ll need to bring. If you’re in a high visibility area, it could be nice to have some clothing that makes sure you don’t look suspect. That’s probably a good general rule of thumb. Act like you deserve to be in the space because you do! If you look suspect, people will think as much.

Prepping the Garden

Once you have everything you need, you’ll need to get the garden site ready. If you need to clear it out, whether there’s vegetation you’re not interested in, trash, debris, etc., do that. Ideally, you can also improve the soil quality with stuff like compost and organic stuff if you need to.

Time for Plants!

Here’s where the real fun begins. Get some plants going! You want the ones you pick to be a good fit for the target climate and soil. Even better if some of them are edible. When you’re planting, be sure to space the plants out and water them pretty well. If you're planting seeds, be patient! It can take a few weeks for the plants to sprout.

Garden Tending

Now that you have a garden going, it’s time to keep it up. You want to water them regularly and watch out for any invasives or weeds that could crowd out your plants. You might also have to add additional amendments to the soil, to keep the plants happy. Try to make sure to think about and account for issues in the garden. Whether that’s nonhuman neighbors or mean vandals, you want to try to think of ways to uphold the values of the project while protecting its continued existence.

Permablitzing

I also want to touch on some more specific types of guerrilla gardening. Firstly, let’s talk about permablitzing.

Permablitizing is a portmanteau between permaculture and blitzing. Permaculture is a type of gardening and farming that aspires to copy natural ecosystems to create harmonious gardens that are self-sustaining. It generally will include a mix of native, edible, and wildlife-attracting plants. Permablitzing is taking that permaculture idea and rallying the community to create a permaculture garden in a single day.

It looks a little something like this: volunteers collectively design and install the garden. They put in garden beds, plant trees, and shrubs, and install irrigation. There might also be compost systems, raised beds, or accessible walkways through the garden. Permablitzing is great because it’s relatively quick, it’s tangible and immediately garners buy-in. It’s more about finding the space to do this and finding people who are willing to participate.

Seedbombing

If you’re not able to work with a group, or you just want to be able to very quickly deposit new plants in places, you can seedbomb!

Seedbombs are small packages of seeds wrapped in soil that can be thrown or dropped onto the ground. This kinda stuff is great for rewinding and restoring neglected or degraded areas. Just make sure you do research! You don’t wanna introduce invasive or incompatible plants.

The basic seedbomb recipe is:

Soil

Clay or compost

Seeds

You mix them together, roll them into small balls, then let them dry. You can just toss them into your target areas. Seedbombing is great because it’s fun and creative while being a great way to un-neglect neglected areas. You can also do it alone or with the homies. It’s a very flexible guerrilla option.

Final thoughts

One of the most important things to think about when trying to enact social change is aligning your ends (the liberatory future you envision) with your means (the things you do to get to that vision). Guerrilla gardening is great to this end as a form of praxis because it allows for this to be realized in the here and now. It helps us realize that we don’t have to wait until people let us do what we think is right. If you see an issue, you can respond to it. Also, gardening is fun, gets you outside, and allows you to be more connected with the earth, which is just so so so good for you. Be smart, keep each other safe, and good luck with your gardening!

#guerilla gardening #guerrilla gardening #seedbombing #permaculture #permablitzing #solarpunk #solarpunks #social ecology #social revolution

[theoreticallysensible]

The Power and Purpose of Strikes

Simone Weil, the philosopher/anarchist/mystic, describing an ideal political future for France after WW2, lamented that trade unions have become primarily concerned with wages. This might seem strange to us now, when even this activity is so contested by conservatives, but Weil saw it as playing too much into the capitalist spirit.

She saw this as just one of trade unions’, and the worst of the lot, because it encourages workers to think about personal monetary gain rather than justice, solidarity, and even their own needs beyond the material. It also risks the union becoming institutionalised through frequent direct interactions with established economic forces. Again, this will sound weird today, given how unions fighting for wages represent one of the few remaining avenues for working class justice, and yeah Weil was a Catholic with strong convictions about the importance of moralism, but I think fundamentally she had higher hopes than we can easily imagine today.

I think a lot of people sense the truth of what she says today - though unfortunately it’s usually conservatives, who would turn back on it immediately if they recognised what it was they were saying. You see it when they say “Why are train drivers striking? Why are writers striking? Why do they think they deserve more than nurses, or posties, or actors?” And of course, the answer is: “They should strike too!” (As some of them now are 🎉). But it’s true that the narrow focus on wages does foster a sort of competitive individualism which can undermine solidarity with other industries. This means that a more revolutionary conception of unions is needed, which is not what these critics have in mind, but it is what Simone Weil has in mind.

What Weil sees in trade unions is the potential for fostering community, freedom of intellectual and spiritual thought, and a degree of independence from capitalism, all of which amount to a greater degree of what she calls ‘rootedness’ - something involving confidence in truth, having material needs met, security in community, and relative freedom (among other things). She saw them as being able to foster solidarity to meet workers’ need for community, free them from the corrupting influence of monetary concerns, and fight for justice as a group. She also hoped that they could provide a space for freedom of thought, to avoid the fetishisation of community she saw in both the French and Russian revolutions.

Trade unions then should not merely concern themselves with accumulating resources, but also with accumulating time and freedom - with the expansion of what Henri Lefebvre called everyday life, the time in which we are free to do what we want and create new types of experiences. When we have enough of it, we can build our own institutions free from capitalist influence which can form the infrastructure for disruptive situations. This can be mutual aid groups, creative projects, intellectual and spiritual communities, and reimaginings of what it means to work, through permablitzing, learning crafts, and starting co-operatives.

The ideal version of this is the general strike. Walter Benjamin described the general strike as a form of divine violence, violence which acts instantaneously, bloodlessly, without coercion. Rather than sort of blackmailing capitalists, as most strikes do, the general strike is (ideally) a complete disengagement with the entire capitalist system. It asks nothing of it, and simply makes it irrelevant by building entirely new social relations in its place. This is not at all feasible with where we are at the moment, but I like to think that it can be used as an inspiration for incorporating more utopian ideas into our more limited actions, all of which are still so radical in this current climate.

#philosophy #sociology #social theory #anarchism #unions #trade unions #wga strike #sag strike #writers strike #ups strike #actors strike #train strikes #worker solidarity #solidarity #freedom #freedom of thought #intellectual freedom #communism #simone weil #walter benjamin #henri lefebvre #mutual aid #situationism

[bfpnola]

Copied from the transcript:

“Beginning with the first essential concept for a library economy, usufruct refers to the freedom of individuals or groups in a community to access and use, but not destroy, common resources to supply their needs. This is as opposed to the limitation of access based on exclusive ownership.

“Libraries allow you to access and use books when you need them and encourage all of us to be good stewards of the books we borrow, taking care of it when we have it and returning it when we’re done, because it belongs to all of us and should be readily available for use. Imagine this principle applied to libraries of decor, libraries of furniture, or libraries of tools. Perhaps you would borrow cushions, couches, and paintings to suit one interior design taste for a few months before switching it out and trying a new style. You might borrow a shovel from the tool library to get a permablitz done one weekend and return it when you’re done so someone else can use it when they need it. Alternatively, you can keep it for as long as you want to use it. All without having to produce excessively or leave stuff wasting away in storage.

“If we want to live sustainably, we need a library economy. We need an economy based on usufruct that incentivizes producing enough lasting, durable stuff that everyone can share and use when they need it, instead of producing around planned obsolescence and excess, wasting crucial time, energy and resources. A library economy would be an essential component in a move towards degrowth.

“The second essential concept for a library economy is the irreducible minimum, which is the guaranteed provision of the means necessary to sustain life, the level of living that no one should ever fall below, regardless of the size of their individual contribution to the community. This includes access to adequate food, water, shelter, clothing, education, and healthcare.

“Libraries as they exist now provide free access to knowledge, but knowledge is only one component of an individual’s and a community’s self-actualisation, which a library economy should be organised to help reach. Libraries of consumables like food, drugs, and toiletries may be difficult to imagine, which is why in addition to libraries of things, a library economy should also have dispensaries of necessities. Farming cooperatives, in collaboration with cooking collectives, could work to ensure the entire community is provided with a range of healthy food options from the local and regional gardens, farms, and food forests. The popular assembly could organise with building cooperatives to establish a range of housing options to accommodate the needs of each and every member of the community. An emphasis on slow fashion, by a broad and diverse network of designers and tailors, as opposed to fast fashion, would ensure that everyone’s wearing clothing that lasts in the styles that they like.

“A library economy would require a vast reorientation of our priorities from the centrality of capital and competition to the centrality of humanity and cooperation, which brings us to the final core concept for a library economy: complementarity.

“Some people are abled, some people are disabled. Some people are bakers, some people are shoemakers. Some people will farm and some people will sing. People will have a say in how they labour and how they leisure. None of them need to be defined by or limited to the things that they do, but all should find joy or satisfaction or accomplishment in the things that they do for the sake of doing them.

“Together, we will have all the bread, shoes, veggies, and songs we could ask for. And for the things that no one enjoys, as I said in my video on a post-work society, we can find ways to rotate, gamify, or transform the tasks that need doing to make the drudge less drudgerous.

“A library economy should be based upon a complex social ecosystem that fulfills the many necessary roles a society needs filling. Complementarity is a way of looking at non-hierarchical differences within a society as something generative, where each person contributes a small part to an outcome greater than the sum of its parts. Complementarity can be found within communities, ecologies, technologies, and even typical libraries, both in the relationship between libraries and their patrons and in the roles that libraries fulfill, such as research, information architecture, and collection management. Our approach to nature must similarly be based in complementarity. Rather than maintaining an antagonistic, dominating relationship with first nature, we should strive to find a complementary melding of first and second nature, generating a third nature that is reciprocal and sustainable."

...

“Now imagine what a world based on a library economy would look like. Perhaps it would draw some inspiration from the  5 Laws of Library Science, first conceived by Indian librarian S. R. Ranganathan in 1931.

“The first law is that books are for use. Things are meant to be used, not hoarded. Made accessible, not shut away. Preservation and storage are important, Ranganathan himself noted, but more important than that is that consideration is paid to access-related issues, such as location, hours of operation, comfort, and the quality of service.

“The second law states that every person has their book and the third law declares that every book has its reader. Applied more broadly, this means that we should strive to develop a broad collection of things, whether furniture, decor, books, vehicles, or housing that would serve a wide variety of needs and wants, no matter how niche, understanding that those sorts of accommodations are generative of abundant life.

“The fourth law says that we should try to save the time of the user. Libraries require a lot of coordination and effort to maintain, even more so if we intend to apply their concepts upon broader society. Thus, it is vital that we develop systems, services, applications, workflows,  guides, and frameworks that allow us to most efficiently manage the resources of the libraries, allowing us to do more with less. 

“Lastly, the fifth law reminds us that a library is a growing organism. The aim of a library economy should never be to rigidly establish itself and continue as is. A library economy must be dynamic, ever growing, and evolving in both the quality of  the collections held and services provided and in the quantity of those who are effectively served. The project is never complete.”

#Youtube #library #library economy #socialism #communism #anarchism #private property #biopic #theory #resources #reaux speaks #educational equity

[revscarecrow]

Rev have you ever gone permablitz ing?

No idea what this means but I kinda wanna try it

[bluesandemperor]

Why You Need to Permablitz Right Now (Ft. @Andrewism)

#youtube

[green-and-grey-solarpunk]

As an aspiring writer and artist, I love the idea of Solarpunk becoming more prominent in artistic mediums, both for entertainment and to spread the ideals of Solarpunk. That being said, here are a few tips for creators making Solarpunk work:

1. remember that not every Solarpunk work needs to be set in a far off, utopian future. You are allowed to show people building a Solarpunk world, planting gardens under the cover of night and protesting in the streets. You can even set it in a dystopian, cyberpunk future where Solarpunk are trying to take it back.

2. don’t forget the people. A lot of Solarpunk accidentally falls into a sanitized and lifeless modern landscape with clean white lines and a few plants. Solarpunk isn’t Solarpunk without people. Show generations gathering around a solar oven, planting new seeds together, and having skill shares. Half the beauty of the aesthetic and the movement is the people.

3. don’t shy away from the dirty bits. Show people working to build earthships, searching junkyards for materials, permablitzing and helping each other through extreme weather from climate crisis. After all, “Solarpunk is a future with a human face and dirt behind its ears"

4. don’t be afraid to include conflict. A Solarpunk future shouldn’t be bleak or dystopia, but it also shouldn’t be boring and can’t be perfect. Show people fighting against a resurgence of capitalist ideals, trying to deal with the extreme weather caused by our lack of action today. Or even put in personal drama, or conflict in a community on a decision. Just don’t make it bland.

#solarpunk #fuck capitalism #ecofriendly #nature #writers #writing #art

[winstoncontinental]

#useful for me specifically #i really don't know what to tag this with because it's just SO COOL #solarpunk action week #community gardening #making the world a better place #climate activism #gardening #melbourne organisations #SPAW has really kicked me into gear and I'm doing my best to find all these cool things #and sign up for them and take part!!! #made the switch to organic local groceries #reached out to some friends I haven't spoken to in a while #set up a fortnightly dinner night with a friend!! #focusing on community and outreach #and connectedness

[studios55]

Encuentro de Equinoccio Placeres Vitales REPESEI - 23, 24 y 25 de Marzo 2018 - La casa de Piedra, Caravaca, Murcia

Encuentro de Equinoccio Placeres Vitales REPESEI – 23, 24 y 25 de Marzo 2018 – La casa de Piedra, Caravaca, Murcia

  ​ ​23, 24 y 25 de Marzo 2018

  Sobre el Proyecto

Deconstruyamos el amor y reinventemos nuevos cuentos, nuevas relaciones que aprecien la vida, la felicidades  y el placer de mujeres y hombres, niñas y niños.

Dejemos a un lado la soledad, multipliquemos la gente a la que queremos y hagámoslo desde el lado de la vida, desde la cultura de lo permanente. ¡Descubramos nuestro hermoso y noble…

View On WordPress

#biodanza #Caravaca #diseño #ecosistemas coperativos #encuentro #FairCoop #fuegovisión #huerta #invierno #jardinecos #kati #Murcia #permablitz #placeres vitales #plantar árboles #REPESEI #swing #vitales #YOGA

[cultchakitchen]

Don from the permaculture Albany group helping with our Perma-blitz to get the yard looking pretty for our initial mobile kitchen inspection. Fantastic work everyone! #permaculture #permablitz #chopanddrop #growyourown #abundance #organic #organicfood #amazingalbany (at Albany, Western Australia)

#organicfood #permablitz #growyourown #organic #chopanddrop #amazingalbany #permaculture #abundance

[how-to-best]

GREEN MATTERS: DIY Permablitz in your garden

GREEN MATTERS: DIY Permablitz in your garden

[ad_1]

MY article in March invited anyone interested in a permaculture makeover to contact the Transition Worcester Permablitz group.

It is not possible right now to get a team of volunteers to come over and blitz a garden together right now, but instead many people now have much more time available to make changes to their gardens themselves.

Observation and understanding your garden…

View On WordPress

[differentcomputerfestival]

Scarborough residents get down to earth for Permablitz <b>event</b>

From left, Kent Redford, Joshua Foley and Davy Wiltse work on a grape arbor Aug. 31 at 277 Broadturn Road in Scarborough at a Permablitz ... from Google Alert - event https://ift.tt/2HLSu8J

#IFTTT #Google Alert - event

[bigfiregoddess]

Permablitz – a volunteer fuelled backyard working bee