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A CHAPTER ON BOTTLED WATER included in new book of Australian poetry??? If you are in Melbourne on 31 Aug please come to the launch of our book 'How to do Words with Things' (Tree-Elbow) as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival. Our book event with Michael Farrell ('a raiders guide', Giramondo) and guerilla filmmaker Nicholas Hansen (RASH) at ACMI lounge from 6pm, will represent something of the future for Australian poetry. Here, there will be a strong shift away from transformation poetics and towards an ecological poetry, or an ethical materialism in literature and Peter, Michael and Patrick are at the forefront of this activity in Australia.

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Switching off vending machines in public places is very good for the environment.

Buying refrigerated water bottled in plastic is bad.

Find out why, read and watch below and read my blogs (above).

Lalgambook: the Djadja wurrung and Coca-Cola Amatil

Traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed. They also do not willingly allow their landbases to be damaged so that other resources – gold, oil, and so on – can be extracted. It follows that those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities. Derrick Jensen

Lalgambook: the Djadja wurrung and Coca-Cola Amatil is now published in D!SSENT magazine in August 2008.

Some people are fussy about water and think that if they buy bottled water they are being more healthy. This is of course not true. But even if it were true that bottled water is better for us than rain water or tap water we know it is not good for the health of our ecosystems and therefore inevitably our own health will suffer anyway.

Do you know you can get a water filter for your tap or tank water at home and buy a sexy reusable flask (like the one above) to carry around with you, and save about $3,000 - $6,000 per year?

Re-hydrate all you like but do it ethically!

Australians now burn over 500,000 barrels of oil each year just to create the plastic so as some can drink water bottled in plastic. Should the environmental abuse of some be allowed to spoil the lives of others - present and future?

Recent press Just Free Water in The Age newspaper. You can read the article here.

Drink Free Water Manifesto

In a nut shell

Resist buying water bottled in plastic because most likely it has been stolen from a small community, the environmental impact is alarming - 90% of the world's plastic water bottles are not recycled, carry your own water with you, take responsibility for the planet by boycotting big business brands generally, consume less, gratuitous sex is good for you, stop shopping and start fighting back!

The longer version

People who drink water bottled in plastic will suffer any indignity - Derrick Jensen

BRING BACK THE BUBBLER!

A little while ago I called Melbourne City Council and spoke to an environmental officer about free drinking water points in the city. As a regular visitor to Melbourne I wanted a map of the city showing free water points so as I knew where I could refill my stainless steel water flask. He told me there was no such map he could give me, but thought there were about 15 bubblers in non-park areas within the city.

So I decided to map it out for myself. It took me about 7 hours to walk the CBD locating water bubblers. I found 27 of them, 9 of which required repairs, leaving 18 bubblers for an estimated 710,600 people who use the city each day (figure attained from the MCC website).

In real terms this means there is one bubbler for approximately 40,000 people in the city.

The shire of Hepburn where I live, home to Mt Franklin (Lalgambook), is a water-generating region northwest of Melbourne. The cool water from the highlands supplies many lower catchments, including Melbourne's. Coca-Cola Amatil pays the Hepburn Shire $2.05 per million-litres (mega) of water, which equates to about $95 per year for nearly 50 million litres - or about 5 cents per truck load.

Industrial civilisation has an addiction to, among others things, generating waste product. According to Wikipedia 90% of the world's plastic bottles are not recycled, despite most being recyclable. It's alleged most of these are from bottled water.

Seven Ways Over Five Years To Clean Up Our Act. Apply this strategy to your own town or city:

1. Approach your local council to repair existing water fountains and supply new water fountains throughout your city or town.

2. Lobby your council/government to ban drinks bottled in plastic - stop petrochemical products creating more landfill problems than we already have and ask them to assess the health merits of every drink bottled in plastic under production today.

3. Get your local council to advocate ethical water drinking by citizens - thus promoting the carrying of refillable flasks, refilling them at free water fountain points, or from home.

4. Work vehemently to stop companies stealing community assets without understanding the environmental damage and long term effects on your region or neighbouring regions.

5. Lobby companies who have profited from stealing community water to pay back communities by funding independently auspiced environmental renewal programs. They're probably not going to listen to you, but when their production plants are sabotaged and eventually dismantled by an angry citizenry you can say "we asked you nicely awhile back but you just kept on abusing the planet".

6. Lobby local, federal and state governments to become greater watchdogs of unethical corporate practices and stop companies passing environmental responsibility purely onto consumers. Governments must return to a classical model of democracy and give up corporatism as their main thrust for decision-making. They could start by referring to us as "citizens" again and drop the "consumer" bullshit.

7. Biblical YES, but don't go to church! Instead, where possible give up the dependency on churches, governments and corporations altogether. They are all heavy polluters - mental and physical. It's unlikely governments will implement the radical changes necessary to save our species from annihilation over the next 30 years. We have to ask ourselves now to what point will inaction will tolerated? When will you start fighting back?

Read a similar anti-corporatist-government campaign run by Patrick Jones here.

Partisans of Free Examination