✎ transition_town_nomad [the libarynth]

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=== Transition Town Nomad ===

A [[transition town]] group that searches and manages vagrant urban zones that for some reason have been left to fallow.

We go around by bike and we scrutinize google.earth for local crypto-forests and other potential climax vegetational rejects in all stages of sucession. see: http://socialfiction.org/?tag=ttnomad

We are in Utrecht, the Netherlands, but we could be anywhere. We are a Transition Town group taking part in many local activities and initiatives but we are also psychogeographers on a rampage, Ethno-Eco-Poetic retweeting distant voices, Tupi-Surrealists on a desire-war-path, fighting the google-jugend!

http://www.guerrillagardening.org/ is one inspiration with street-cred and currency but the real motivation for us is the rich field of Amazonian anthropology from classic ethnography to modern ethnobotany to future excavations of the lost garden cities of Xingu.

Nomadic people, contrary to popular misconception, do not roam free. The Yanomami, the Waorani, the Koruba are not surrealists navigators, they are not tossing a coin at every turn to decide where to go next. Trails are not desire paths, they are not deviations. The nomad instead follows cyclic paths. These paths are their 'home' for as long as the their trek reaffirms them as part of their collective heritage. Over time the nomad can create or amplify (actively, accidentally, serendipitously) useful resources along the trail, aka [[Nomadic Agriculture]].

TT Nomad cultivates metaphors not gardens, we add pressure to self-willed ecosystems no matter how small. [[forest gardening]] is perhaps a misleading term; gardening is a buzz word, a artistic fashion that underestimates the skill and long term commitment to the land. Gardening is about productivity and yields; these are not the terms on which TT Nomad is facing the rejected: forests are where the whiches live.

The rainforest, according to cliche, is the wildest of all possible wildernesses. But of course, being the end-stage of ecological succession, the rainforest is not the most wild but the most ordered and crystallized of all possible ecosystems, self-sustaining and self-perpeptuating: it only appears wild to us mere humans because there is so much texture to its order that we mistake the trees for the forest. In a fully balanced eco-system no leaf, not a single dead ant, shall gone to waste. Every properly drained sandy field will, over time, bootstrap itself into a forest with a self-confident finalty that is absolute. But, textbook knowledge apart, this crucial fundamental power of biology, is an unexperienced phenomena for most of us. It would acquire us to do nothing, but do-nothingness is the antithesis to the need for growth - that divine purpose op proper society in need of its atheism. The power of biological succession, from weeds to plants to bushes to trees however has so much self-willed determinancy that we are keenly aware of its power, even if its first visible sight, the weeds, are despised by all gardeners. The first stages of succession are always on the look-out for an oppurtunity to grow, between the cracks. A plant needs little to grow.

The Effects of deforestation (of the Amazon and all other (rain)forests that remain) are of direct consequence to every place on earth. Loss of biodiversity is tragic for many reasons but it is a local event, global warming however is a global event and deforestation is one of it's most important components. Not because the Amazon are the lungs of the world (a persistent myth, the Amazon is carbon neutral) but because deforestation releases a staggering amount of CO2: in 24 hours deforestation will release as much CO2 into the atmosphere as 8 million people flying from London to New York. The most amazing thing is about the speed of deforestation worldwide is that there are still rainforests at all. The rate of deforestation in Brazil has risen for at least the last decade. 2009, due to the economic low is the only exception. We are live, in a sense, in the Amazon, just as we all, in a sense, live on the North-Pole. Rain forest protection is not just about short-term benefits; rainforests are millions of years old, trees are strangers from a different world, and a clear cut area may take 10.000 years to regrow. And that is an optimistic estimate.

We have been reading about Colonel Fawcett's search for the City of Z in what is now Xingu Park. He went looking for a city that could not exist in the rainforest, TT Nomad goes looking for (and create) the forest that cannot exit in the city. An alternative name would be Transition Town -z (negative zee)
     
Possessions slow the nomad down, anthropologists witnessed tribes slowing down from nomadism to village live in the space of a decade, a process due to the gravitational genus loci of commerce. To be part of a larger economy people need to be able to find you. However, as anthropologists joining tribes on their treks, the nomadic spectacle, the holidays of a former peripatetic people, they have so much more fun while on the road! And not just because it loosens up the relationships between the sexes.

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