It was absolutely worthwhile and in listening to it these days, I’m amazed at how much insight was packed into one ‘segment.’ It’s actually one of the projects I’m most proud of. If you like it, please spread the word. It’s up on archive.org now — http is:

http://www.archive.org/details/TheEmergencyWormcastingNetwork-Segment0-Part1

The agribiz nexus has been busily at work over the last 20 years trying to make it illegal to grow your own food, or for individuals to sell or trade food. They are coming at it along multiple attack vectors simultaneously: contaminating the genomes of common cultivars with “patented” genes so as to assert ownership and extort tribute; medicalising herbal remedies and supplements to as to pull them into the legal realm of controlled pharmaceuticals; prohibiting any food processing or packaging outside huge overcapitalised, central industrial plants (dairy, meat, preserved foods); spreading scare stories (at least one per year) about “bad organic food making people sick”; buying up organic/local companies and folding them into transnational brands (Coke bought Odwalla years ago and has just acquired the yuppie ‘vitamin water’ brand Glaceau) under centralised management; adulterating/weakening the organic certification to permit industrial practises, so as to underprice and outproduce susti producers but still fool the public into thinking they are “eating organic”; RFID tagging every single livestock animal in the industrialised nations and driving out of business any farmer who refuses or cannot afford to comply; and so on.

Their goal is nothing less than the complete Enclosure of food production, processing, and transport under centralised control by finance capitalists. And this suits authoritarian governments just fine, because factory food and long supply lines mean that hunger becomes a ready and easy weapon of state control against the people. Permaculture folks are vulnerable — much as the population of Iraq was vulnerable — to this Ag Mafia war against small producers, heirloom cultivars, and sustainable polyculture. They are — by their very lifestyle — resisting a totalising agenda. The more that agenda succeeds, the more their small resistance will become intolerable to it and the closer the jackboots (or the lawyers) will get to their little enclaves.

In the meantime, those who talk about (sub)urban resistance while still relying on WalMart or Safeway for their daily bread, have to be kidding. No strike committee can get people to hold out while their kids are literally starving. You can’t effectively resist an authority that controls your food and water supply (we might in our day add your electricity supply, since so much that we do requires light and power tools). Resistance without local, physical autarky is just hifalutin rhetoric — too much like those silly Post Apocalyptic movies where a buncha macho guys are roaring around a desert in souped up ATVs killing each other over gasoline, never a living plant or animal nor an oasis in sight, yet somehow they are all well fed and never dehydrated. Where’s the food? where’s the water?

The link between food security and resistance is intimate and very well known to conquerors since imperialism began. Western invaders in Hawai’i diverted streams away from indigenous villages to starve the people and their animals and crops. The Conquistadores burned the traditional crops of the people they enslaved and prohibited them from replanting. And the Americans are trying to replace the traditional dryland adapted crops of Iraq with “superior” patented GMO wheat and corn. They know what they’re doing — and we should, too.

1. A real permaculture community is off the grid, meaning that it gets its energy largely through solar panels. If it rains or is cloudy for a day or two, people must check the energy storage level before turning on the computer. That limits audience unless back podcasts are stored.

2. Many people in the permaculture movement are putting their energy into building a parallel society, and holding a space open for other people to explore their addiction to the consumer lifestyle and their ambivalence about losing it.
Permaculture folks are generally not into resistance. Perhaps, realistically, they should be, but they are not. On the other hand, it is doubtful that they could create their new social reality if they were into resistance.

Here what one of the Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary postings looks like:
[October 22 2007] Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: Jock Culture… It’s No Accident That Sports Metaphors & Political Pundits Go Together

http://www.archive.org/details/tth_071022

I’ll work on the EWN main page, add future topic ideas, and invite readers to drop by this thread to ask questions and suggest more topics. At present we have three new segments in mind:

1) a sample of the provocative essays of Ran Prieur, feral philosopher and downshifter (in progress)

2) vermicomposting and humanure: politics, practicality, how-to
(in fairly imminent prospect)

3) local currencies: how they work, what’s the big idea, where are they already working today (being mulled over)

I would like to do a segment on industrialism and gender, loosely based on (a) Jensen’s Strangely Like War, (b) Whisnant’s essay on Nauru and sovereignty, and (c) Mies’ Patriarchy and Accumulation; but it’s a huge topic and might need to be broken down into subtopics…

pls suggest more topics! I’d prefer to stay away from “current events” except insofar as they illustrate perennial themes (like using Stan’s HOA vs Vegetables case as a springboard into issues of permaculture, autarky, resistance); it would be nice if the EWN recordings maintained their value over time instead of becoming “yesterday’s news.”

we’re also tossing around some more “personality” interview ideas, and looking at other online radio formats with an eye to understanding what works, what doesn’t, what attracts listeners, etc. would be interested to know what podcasts or audio downloads readers are fond of and what is attractive about them… and what the EWN can offer that is not already out there in quantity.

we have a couple of basic format variants: 1) a hosted interview with one or more guests, 2) a conversation on a specific topic between “regulars” (a la Radiolab or My Dinner with Andre), 3) audiobook-esque spoken text, i.e. medium-lengthy texts read aloud.

I am tempted to add “lengthy texts read aloud and then discussed or critiqued” but that could get really loooong. an unexplored option is fiction or even audio theatre; no one involved has any acting chops so we haven’t gone there.

question: would anyone be excited about, say, selected chapters of Stan’s books read by the author? sounds kinda neat to me… but it’s a lot of hours of work. would anyone be excited enough to pay a few bucks for an iPod-ready version of a PDF that they could download for free? is audio a value-added extra that might generate some income to pay IA’s hosting bills?

other question: are there essays of particular wit, relevance and charm that our readers feel would make great mp3 offerings, which are not so commercially successful as to involve us in copyright nightmares with corporadoes? I have blanket permission from P Linebaugh to record any of his historical essays that appear at Counterpunch, for example, and I find his style and his insights very appropriate for reading aloud — he’s a storyteller. Ran P is also a natural storyteller. Dmitry Orlov’s essay about collapse of the USSR would be a great mp3 series… OTOH, pace Charles, I doubt that the Grundrisse would make riveting listening

Looking forward to De Anander’s discussion of vermicomposting human waste.

We moved to our farm 9 years ago to fulfill my dream since first grade of growing my own food organically.

We grow most of our food, save spices, condiments and grains. Before our move we lived in a row house, with a tiny yard in which we grew tomatoes, pole beans, chard, basil and butternut squash. We trained the squash vines on the stockade fence and told the neighbor to take the fruits that grew on her side. That was good for one year, after which she asked us to refrain from the practice. So we let the vines take over the postage stamp lawn.

Now, with nine years’ experience of organic growing in raised beds (clay soil) I realize we could have grown much more in that tiny yard.

We have red worms in our compost, and bring a bunch indoors for the winter, keeping them in the basement, just in case the winter is too severe. We hadn’t before considered feeding them our own excrement. As it is, we flush only a couple times a day, and our raspberries grow atop the drain field of our septic tank.

I eagerly look forward to listening to EWM Network.

While I’m no expert, I spend a lot of time puttering around with mp3′s – ripping, converting, burning, etc., as I’m a total music lover, but I do know for sure that you can get away with a much smaller file size with speaking voice. If you have any questions or need help, feel free to email me and I’ll help as best I can with suggestions for software, all of it free.

Gotta go pack for tomorrow’s journey… sorry to post-n-run.

PS Hi DoS, can you send URL to B’s mention of EWN release?