By Jim Green

Nuclear campaigner -Friends of the Earth, Australia.

Over the past year the nuclear industry has once again tried to exploit concern about climate change to reverse its ongoing decline. Nuclear power is being promoted not only as the solution to climate change, but also to water shortages (by desalination), the drought (by John Anderson), and world poverty (too cheap to meter … or too expensive to matter?). You begin to wonder if there's anything nuclear power can't solve.

One positive aspect of this debate is that it has highlighted the need for action to avert the social and environmental impacts associated with climate change. But it's been a limited debate. Only the nuclear 'solution' solution to climate change is being debated. Never mind that nuclear power simply can't do the job. Never mind that the adverse impacts of nuclear power are every bit as alarming as those of climate change. Thus the 'debate' has diverted attention from the range of renewable energy sources and energy efficiency measures that, combined, can avert climate catastrophe.

The 'debate' has been based on several premises - all of them demonstrably false:

• It is not true that nuclear power is enjoying a resurgence - the global picture is one of stagnation and decline. If there is a resurgence of interest in nuclear power, it is only because the manufactured nuclear 'debate' in Australia is being played out elsewhere.

• The media have also made play of alleged divisions within the environment movement over nuclear power - but you could name the pro-nuclear 'environmentalists' on one hand. The loudest of these, Professor James Lovelock, talks absolute nonsense but is still a media star. Lovelock wants high-level nuclear waste in his basement for home heating and food irradiation, and he wants high-level waste to be used to guard fragile ecosystems against human intrusion!

• A third false premise of the debate is the claim that nuclear power is 'greenhouse-free'. Significant emissions arise across the nuclear fuel 'cycle'. Nuclear power can only reduce greenhouse gas emissions if the comparison is with fossil fuels. In comparison with renewables and energy efficiency, nuclear power increases greenhouse gas emissions, in addition to its proliferation, environmental and public health and safety problems. As Professor Ian Lowe says, if nuclear power is the answer, it must have been a pretty stupid question.

The 'debate' has also been almost entirely one-sided, with critics of nuclear power excluded. Even while excluding critical voices, the corporate media have had the gall to frame the nuclear 'debate' in 'free speech' terms. Why can't we at least debate nuclear power, they bleat. The same ploy is used by the corporate politicians who try to score points against environmentalists, and divert attention from their policies, by calling for a debate without lining up directly in support of nuclear power.

If anyone is stopping anyone debating anything, it is the Howard government, which made nuclear power illegal in Australia in the 1998 Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Act. And it's the corporate media, who have excluded critics from the debate.

Nuclear is no solution to climate change

There are significant constraints on the growth of nuclear power, such as its high capital cost and, in many countries, lack of public acceptability. As a method of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, nuclear power is further limited because it is used almost exclusively for electricity generation, which is responsible for less than one third of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Because of these problems, the potential for nuclear power to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by replacing fossil fuels is limited. Few predict a doubling of nuclear power output by 2050, but even if it did eventuate it would still only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 5% – less than one tenth of the reductions required to stabilise atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. And that assumes that nuclear power displaces fossil fuels rather than renewables and energy efficiency measures.

Nuclear power is not a 'renewable' energy source. High-grade, low-cost uranium ores are limited and will be exhausted in about 50 years at the current rate of consumption. The estimated total of all conventional uranium reserves is estimated to be sufficient for about 200 years at the current rate of consumption. But in a scenario of nuclear expansion, these reserves will be depleted more rapidly.

Claims that nuclear power is 'greenhouse free' are incorrect as substantial greenhouse gas emissions are generated across the nuclear fuel cycle. Fossil-fuel generated electricity is more greenhouse intensive than nuclear power, but this comparative benefit will be eroded as higher-grade uranium ores are depleted. Most of the earth's uranium is found in very poor grade ores, and recovery of uranium from these ores is likely to be considerably more greenhouse intensive. Nuclear power emits more greenhouse gases per unit energy than most renewable energy sources, and that comparative deficit will widen as uranium ore grades decline.

The hazards of nuclear power

Nuclear hazards include the risk of accidents, routine releases of radioactive gases and liquids from nuclear plants, the intractible problem of nuclear waste, and the risks of terrorism and sabotage. But there is another hazard which is unique to nuclear power and which is of such concern that alone it must lead to a clear rejection of a nuclear 'solution' to climate change ... even if such a solution were possible. This is the repeated pattern of 'peaceful' nuclear facilities being used for nuclear weapons research and production.

The proliferation problem is profound:

• Of the 60 countries which have built nuclear power or research reactors, over 20 are known to have used their 'peaceful' nuclear facilities for covert weapons research and/or production.

• Four or five countries have produced nuclear arsenals under cover of a 'peaceful' nuclear program – Israel, India, South Africa, Pakistan, and possibly North Korea. Others have come close – most notably Iraq from the 1970s until the 1991 Gulf War.

• Nuclear power programs also provide pools of expertise for weapons programs in the five major nuclear weapons states – the US, Russia, the UK, France, and China. These five countries account for almost 60% of global nuclear power output.

• The 'peaceful' nuclear power industry has produced sufficient plutonium to produce about 160,000 nuclear weapons, each with a yield similar to the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If 99% of this plutonium is indefinitely safeguarded against military use - a monumental challenge - the remaining plutonium would suffice to produce 1,600 nuclear weapons. Australian uranium has resulted in the production of over 78 tonnes of plutonium - sufficient for about 7,800 nuclear weapons.

• The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has considered a scenario involving a ten-fold increase in nuclear power over this century, and calculated that this could produce 50-100 thousand tonnes of plutonium. The IPCC concluded that the security threat "would be colossal."

The International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) safeguards system still suffers from flaws and limitations despite improvements over the past decade. Recent statements from the IAEA and US President George W. Bush about the need to limit the spread of enrichment and reprocessing technology, and to establish multinational control over sensitive nuclear facilities, are an effective acknowledgement of the fundamental flaws and limitations of the international non-proliferation system. The NPT enshrines an 'inalienable right' of member states to all 'civil' nuclear technologies, including dual-use technologies with both peaceful and military capabilities. In other words, the NPT enshrines the 'right' to develop a nuclear weapons threshold or breakout capability.

Nuclear smuggling – much of it from civil nuclear programs – presents a significant challenge. The IAEA's Illicit Trafficking Database records over 650 confirmed incidents of trafficking in nuclear or other radioactive materials since 1993. In 2004 alone, almost 100 such incidents occurred. Smuggling can potentially provide fissile material for nuclear weapons or a wider range of radioactive materials for use in 'dirty bombs'.

Civil nuclear plants are potentially "attractive" targets for terrorist attacks because of the importance of the electricity supply system in many societies, because of the large radioactive inventories in many facilities, and because of the potential or actual use of 'civil' nuclear facilities for weapons research or production.

The problem of radioactive waste management is nowhere near resolution. Not a single repository exists anywhere in the world for the disposal of high-level waste from nuclear power. Only a few countries – such as Finland, Sweden, and the US – have identified potential sites for a high-level waste repository.

The legal limit for the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain in the US is less then the projected output of high-level waste from the reactors currently operating in the US. If global nuclear output was increased three-fold, new repository storage capacity equal to the legal limit for Yucca Mountain would have to be created somewhere in the world every 3-4 years. With a ten-fold increase in nuclear power, new repository storage capacity equal to the legal limit for Yucca Mountain would have to be created somewhere in the world every single year.

Attempts to establish international repositories are likely to be as unpopular and unsuccessful as was the attempt by Pangea Resources to win support for such a repository in Australia.

Synroc – the ceramic waste immobilisation technology developed in Australia – seems destined to be a permanently 'promising' technology. As nuclear apologist Leslie Kemeny concedes, Synroc "... showed great early promise but so far its international marketing and commercialisation agendas have failed".

In addition to the hazards posed by catastrophic accidents such as Chernobyl, radioactive emissions are routinely generated across the nuclear fuel cycle. The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation has estimated the collective effective dose to the world population over a 50-year period of operation of nuclear power reactors and associated nuclear facilities to be two million person-Sieverts. Applying the standard risk estimate to that level of radiation exposure gives an alarming total of 80,000 fatal cancers.

Safety concerns are not limited to the ex-Soviet states. For example, the Japanese nuclear power industry has been in turmoil since the August 2002 revelations of 29 cases of false reporting on the inspections of cracks in numerous reactors. There have also been a number of serious accidents, including fatal accidents, at nuclear reactors and other nuclear facilities in Japan in the past decade.

Commercial pressures and inadequate regulation have clearly played some part in the flawed safety standards in Japan. Such pressures are by no means unique to Japan, and they will intensify if privatisation and liberalisation of electricity markets proceeds.

Calculations indicate that the probability of an accident involving damage to the reactor core is about one in 10,000 per reactor per year for current nuclear power reactors. In a world with 1,000 such reactors, accidents resulting in core damage would occur once per decade on average. With a ten-fold nuclear expansion, a reactor core damage accident would occur every 2-3 years on average.

The hype about future reactor designs with supposedly 'passive' safety systems has attracted scepticism and cynicism even from within the nuclear industry, with one industry representative quipping that "the paper-moderated, ink-cooled reactor is the safest of all."

Energy efficiency and renewables

Renewable energy, mostly hydroelectricity, already supplies 19% of world electricity, compared to nuclear's 16%. The share of renewables is increasing, while nuclear's share is decreasing. Wind power and solar power are growing by 20-30% every year. In 2004, renewable energy added nearly three times as much net generating capacity as nuclear power.

But in Australia, only 8% of electricity is from renewable energy – down from 10% in 1999.

The biggest gains are to be made in the field of energy efficiency. Government reports have shown that reductions in energy consumption of up to 70% are cost effective in some sectors of the economy. Energy experts have projected that adopting a national energy efficiency target could reduce the need for investment in new power stations by between 2,500 – 5,000 MW by 2017 in Australia (equal to about 2-5 large nuclear power stations). The energy efficiency investments would pay for themselves in reduced bills before a nuclear power station could generate a single unit of electricity.

The Australian Ministerial Council on Energy has identified that energy consumption in the manufacturing, commercial and residential sectors could be reduced by 20-30% with the adoption of current commercially available technologies with an average payback of four years.

A number of studies have considered the relative cost of various means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Replacing fossil fuels with nuclear power does not fare well in these studies. Energy efficiency measures are shown in an American study to deliver almost seven times the greenhouse gas emissions reductions as nuclear power per dollar invested.

The argument that nuclear power could be a "bridging" energy source while renewables are further developed is erroneous. Nuclear expansion would require such vast expenditure that renewables would fall by the wayside. Of the funds spent by 26 OECD member states between 1991 and 2001 on energy R&D, 50% was spent on nuclear power and only 8% on renewable energy.

A July 2002 study by The Australia Institute maps out a plan to achieve a 60% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in Australia by 2050. The study envisages widespread energy efficiency measures, a major expansion of wind power, modest growth of hydroelectricity, significant use of biomass, and niche applications for solar photovoltaic electricity. ()

In 2004, the Clean Energy Future Group – which comprises renewable energy companies and the Worldwide Fund for Nature – produced a report which details how major greenhouse gas emissions reductions can be achieved. It finds that Australia can meet our energy needs and halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2040 using a range of commercially-proven fuels and technologies. The study envisages the following energy mix by 2040: natural gas provides 30%; biomass from agriculture and plantation forestry residues provides 26%; wind provides 20%; photovoltaic and solar thermal systems provide 5%; hydroelectricity provides 7%; and coal and petroleum continue to play a minor role in electricity generation. ()

There are many other studies detailing how major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions can be achieved through a combination of energy efficiency and renewable energy sources. See chapter 13 of the Clean Energy Future Group report for a survey of a number of these studies.

The extent to which renewable energy sources and energy efficiency measures can replace fossil fuels and nuclear power depends to a significant extent on investment in research and development programs. The Howard government provides fossil fuel industries with $9 billion of subsidies annually, according to a 2003 report from the UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures. By contrast, the Howard government:

• Closed the Energy Research and Development Corporation in 1997-98

• Withdrew funding from the Co-operative Research Centre for Renewable Energy in December, 2002

• Introduced the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target but set the target at a measly 2%

• Appointed a Rio Tinto employee as the government's Chief Scientist; and

• Allowed fossil fuel companies to buy their way onto the Australian Bureau of Agricultural Resource Economics panel dealing with climate change issues

(Sundancer by Dakatz)

It's June 2006, London.

A shift was in the making. I’d been staying at the Parallel Youniversity in West Hampstead for a month, while its Dean, Megatripolitan Fraser Clark, had been off on some Saharan adventure. This was hippy, or - as Fraser might have styled it - ‘zippy’, central. The first storey flat had a couple of decades worth of rave-olutionary activity pinned to its walls, the reminders of several East Asian and subcontinental tours adorning the eaves and immeasurable layers of grime and hair worked into its carpets. Apparently most of the hair belonged to Jonty, the dog, who I was tasked to mind, along with the world’s wildest indoor plant. While in the zippy lair, under the Hanging Gardens of Pronoia, I had privilege access to Fraser’s extensive countercultural library. Flying off the shelves was a book called Its Happening: a portrait of the youth scene today by J L Simmons and Barry Winograd (1966), a couple of hipper members of staff in Sociology Dept. at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The book made me curious. As I became worded-up on ‘the hang-loose ethic’ of the ‘swingers’ and their definitive pursuit, ‘tripping out’, I got to thinking about the role of social researchers in making accounts of countercultures, and about why a ‘school’ of counterculture or alternative cultural ethnography had never developed paralleling say the Chicago School and its studies of gangs, or Birmingham’s Centre of Contemporary and Cultural Studies famed research on English working class youth subcultures. I’m sure there are numerous reasons, but perhaps the answers were facing me in the pages of this book. Besides an account of a tripping scene, in which the authors carefully absented themselves from any question of participation, the book was largely unreadable, woeful in parts – destined for obscurity. The sociological investigation of proto-hippies appears to have been constrained by the positivist and distanced discourse of mid-century social science. ‘It’ may have been ‘happening’ in the mid 1960s, but the methodological shift required to capture this, largely wasn’t. Given that ‘swingers’, freaks, anarchists, hippies and other counter-culturalists evinced ‘movements’ more than ‘subcultures’, they would be smothered under the dense theories of new social movement research, dissed by Marxists as middle class kids suffering from ‘affluent alienation’, deficient of historical or subaltern impulse, palmed off in Maslowian terms as those seeking the fulfilment of ‘advanced needs’, and derogated by spokespersons of the ‘monophasic consciousness’ prevailing as absconders, wasters and abusers of the rational mind and disciplined body.

So in my short semester at the Parallel Youniversity, I meditated on the scholarly detritus pre-Summer of Love, knowing that things hadn’t changed much almost ten years after the ostensible Second Summer of Love (1987). But the freakological path was discernable in the lifting fog. Itself owing much to ‘the sixties’ and its habitués commitment to become ‘experienced’, reflexive, to ‘be the revolution’ (both explicitly and implicitly through the wide circulation of consciousness alterants), the introspective and self-critical turn which would become integral to anthropology (by the 1990s) illustrates the kind of methodological ‘turn’ needed. As anthropologists have trained their sights on a range of non-traditional cultural movements, formations and practices, including the contemporary ‘happening’ apparent in a range of countercultural rituals, festivals and dance cultures, an ‘anthropology of experience’ appears to be the route to appropriate research practice.

Such preoccupations coincided with the imminent resumption of my ethnographic research on global dance culture – with a specific attention to trance (or psy-trance).

And this leads me to ‘Life’. That is, Life the festival in the Republic of Ireland. What better place to begin my summer research adventures, and to re-boot my life, after a depressing London winter. You see, in January I’d made the intercontinental cross-hemispherical shift from languid sub-tropical Brisbane and plugged directly into the Matrix: a 6th floor office in a steel, concrete and glass edifice known as the Social Science building at City University. I was a research assistant in the Sociology Department, and for three months I lived in a confined loft above an Indian dentist who, from his ground floor clinic, was drilling a serious hole in my bank account while volunteering for Iskcon in his spare time.

Perhaps I should have followed the lead of my Polish neighbours and fellow tenants, who wrought a split-cell apartment out of their shoebox, each with space for bunk beds and a TV. Or – and I’m nearly capitulating to a mounting cynicism here - I might have followed through with my original plans and moved in above a Pakistani operated youth fashion outlet north of The Angel: ‘Roughcut Casuals (Incorporating Young Folk)’. But like I said, it was early June, and the mist was lifting. My good mate Damo put me up in the basement room of his communist run share house in Stoke Newington - my base of operations for the next three months. No rent, no worries.

Life

I approached Life from the Hill of Tara on the road from Dublin towards Kells. And from the vantage of its mysterious earthen mounds regarded as the seat of the ancient High Kings, I scanned the horizon all around – for what it wasn’t clear: My Irish ancestors? A clear direction? A meaningful incorporation?

It felt good to be free of City (where I’d quit my job) and most excellent to be out of London – a monumental rat-cage in a burgeoning police state crumbling under the weight of resources funnelled into an infernal terror machine – a state apparatus which produces (they would argue ‘identifies’ and/or ‘eliminates’) terror/ists. I’d been suffocating. And so, with the benefit of the fresh air taken on these heights, I chose the SW route to Life – a psy-trance festival organised by Neutronix at Charleville Forest Castle near Tullamore for the full moon weekend of June 9-11 2006.

Charleville is a model gothic castle situated in a primordial oak wood. Built in the early 19th century, and undergoing restoration since the 1970s the castle is complete with dungeon, towers and parapets. The main sound stages (psychedelic vibes and world beats) were positioned on opposite sides of the castle each facing the immediate grounds, with the structure a remarkable context for sharp hued and psychedelic designs. Disappointingly, both stages were shut down as a result of sound complaints on the main night of the event, a circumstance which saw a small sound system operated by Kris Beckett (aka Acid Casualty) serve the morning fare in an alcove nearby.

The festival was especially marked by a Salvia Divinorum event, superceding previous experiences with this ‘teacher plant’ used for millennia by the Mazatec Indians of Oaxaca, Mexico, to divine spiritual truths. Observing my identity, memories, secrets, and body unfold and expand into my furniture, become undifferentiated from my surroundings, or recombine in a random tumble of the psyche, prior encounters were the ultimate in ludic experience: uncertain, turbulent, hilarious. Yet remarkably insightful for the cartoon-like Salvia spin cycle enables brief witness to the unconscious, exposing a world of mysteries beyond the rational (Salvia inspired art). While I regularly dived behind the reality curtain amidst the turbulence, consciousness always seemd to prevail. But with one bowl of Salvia 20x at Life, the game changed, and it changed dramatically. I went under …… for how long I wasn’t sure. Was I screaming? Was ‘I’ present at all? For how long had I been holding my breath?

Zipped inside my tent-womb in the shadow of Charleville, I finally remembered to breath. This surfacing was concurrent with a Category Five realisation that everything I had known, all my memories, my identity, the history of the world as I knew it, and my own physical body, was design, all code. In a duration where organic ‘time’ had receded and at a place where the veils were lifting this was acutely understood as a significant breach in the known. I understood the insight to be the exposure and collapse of a grand deceit - and there were those (coders perhaps) who wanted me to know it, who had been willing me out of the deception for a long time, to join the party, to roll with the momentum. Given the apparent unprecedented scale of the breach, the moment was critical. Awesome. The wild screams and clamour of the festival all around appeared like the confused and conflictual response of the coders to the awakening.

I heard many female voices during this episode, coming from around the festival site, seeming to will me out of my ‘life’ coma, ‘the great lie’.While the precise meaning of this deception was unclear, the sensation of immortality was overwhelming. And it was terrifying, as while an eternity was exposed –it was one in which I was absent. My being was not destined to comfortably terminate (with ‘death’) even though ‘I’ was. I had a glimpse across the Great Frontier – and I wasn’t there.

Upon reflection, and indeed this required much reflection, I recognised that this was an opening, an awakening, as incomplete as it was. The awakening enabling the played avatar of The Truman Show to become aware of ‘the game’ resonates here – not least since Truman's revelation precipitated the realisation that all he knew and believed in was about to end while life beyond ‘the show’ continued. And perhaps this awakening can be understood as something of the numinous experience characterised by Rudolf Otto as the Mysterium Tremendum. The problem with such episodes is that while we recognise them as awe-inspiring events, remarkable experiences, how do we assimilate such into our daily lives, when our culture (including ‘psychedelic culture’, as Eric Davis divines) does not provide us with such means? Perhaps it is this absence of incorporation which impels participants to revisit the awesome event, or attempt to re-live it, over and again, in order to ‘get the message’. The truth is that the significance of the experience, and most importantly, the thirst for further inquiry, will likely only arrive if one: a) is at a transitional moment in their life, and; b) performs requisite post-event work: debriefing, writing, relating the experience with fellow ‘travellers’. This is the entheogenic process. Herbs like Salvia will not orchestrate a transition. The response to its effects might.

What was previously understood to be an impenetrable frontier, an impossible crossing, was revealed as a fabrication maintained and defended against hacking. Despite the confusion discovered in the fjording, my Salvia assisted journey alerted me to a design. But this wasn’t just a revelation about death, but about life – that indeed the whole of my being was a construct (was designed). The mystery remains – who/what are the designers? What was the nature of the afterlife glimpsed? Will my life be lived out repeatedly? Were the celebrants those who had awakened before me? And perhaps most importantly, how does my experience compare with those of others encountered in this or similar liminal environments?

Fusion

While Life contextualised the reception of profound truths ‘now screening’ in the theatre of my mind, the next leg (following the Sunrise festival in Somerset) of this edge ethnography saw me land north of Berlin amidst an evolved off-planetary carnival. Thus, late June / early July and I found myself at the tenth anniversary of that jewel in the German counterculture, the Fusion festival. Reclaiming the former Soviet air base at Lärz, Fusion is a sprawling and ‘synergistic melting pot’ complete with twelve camouflaged hangars each used as performance, music and dance zones. Self-identified as ‘holiday communism’, the event doesn’t take itself too seriously. With 30,000 people, a black gyrocopter buzzing overhead from Fusion’s private airfield, Mad Maxian security vehicles with no two-way radios in sight and this is possibly the most unregulated event I’ve known. Verrückt!

Together with my friend Joe (who was calling himself Hans at this time), I’d been escorted here by Mattias, Simona and Natali, knowledgable, accommodating and delightful locals, guides to Deutchland’s recurrent freak city.

It’s Saturday night, the final night of the festival and it’s a definitive good vibe. The Turmbuhne (main floor) and the crew, organisers and other culture cosmonauts are launching into orbit. Hamburg pioneer Sven Dohse’s overseeing the show. It’s a different atmosphere from other floors and previous nights. Perhaps this is how a revolution is translated to a dance floor : the revolutionary excitement of reunification, when East Germany joined the democractic West and embraced capitalism with its assumed (and real) freedoms. Tonight, the party, which had begun all those years ago, continues. If the 1990s resembled the 1960s for Germany (especially East Germany), then is Fusion its Woodstock? It’s worth exploring. But whereas Woodstock and related events were an expression of rising disenchantment with Amerikkka, emerging in the wake of the momentous events of its time and accommodating machines of pleasure in the place of technologies of war and destruction, Fusion dramatises the folly of Germany’s past. Furthermore, it inherits more of the annual seasonal/festal tradition, perhaps akin to the Rainbow Gathering which emerged following the cultural struggles of the 1960s. But Rainbow is a socially and politically alternative event steeped in anarcho-social history (free festivals, alternative economy, permaculture, collectivism etc) and thus not an obvious influence on Fusion, which is very much a 1990s phenomenon – an expression of the techno music, performance and alternative theatre scenes flourishing in Berlin. Moreover, as a vast experimental site enabling the performance of innovative and exploratory techniques and art there is a professional amateurism to Fusion which has a charm all of its own.

Following Fusion I travelled into the west past Frankfurt. In the wake of the kindness shown to me by Natali, and the volunteers (Aleks, Danny and Emanuel) of the Alice Project who hosted me (Alice is a drug awareness group initiated by Wolfgang Sterneck) I headed towards a trance party close to Frieburg near the Schwartzwald (Black Forest) where the ISS (possible translation - Institute for Subliminal Schwartzwald) were holding ground against police to pull off their event despite the enforcement of massive sound restrictions. A small party and a close-knit trance tribe doing what they love: making dance party. Here I witnessed two practices entwined in the dance of the ages: the Dionysian impulse to make party, or as the Spiral Tribe had it, to make ‘a public new sense’, and; the Apollonian commitment to reign it in, to identify the ‘public nuisance’ and regulate it out of existence. Transgression thus has two sides. But the regulatory effort, the domestication of the night, and the attempt to purge transgression inspires feral sounds, enthuses the perennial noise from the margins, and even centres at the margins.

Boom

And speaking of such marginal centres, it wasn’t long before I found my way to Boom. On lake Idanha-a-Nova in the mountainous Beira Baixa region of NW Portugal, Boom is the world's premiere psy-trance festival. This year (from August 3-9) the biennial event expanded its scope to include a world music stage with a 'sacred fire' a la Rainbow Gathering style.

It was an innovative effort all round. The dj line-up was intentionally low key - in that they decided to go with artists who are largely non big ticket acts. There were approx 25,000 people in attendance, from 63 different countries. It was thus perhaps the most populated yet arguably least commercial trance festival on the planet. The Boom organisation is an evolved and sophisticated unit aware of their lineage (see for instance this chronology on their website) and keen to accommodate the breadth of styles (electronic and non electronic) identiying as ‘trance’. The various hard compromises and inclusions made for this event did not appear to detract from quality and experience. The main floor featured the Funktion One sound system, amplifying incredibly sharp sounds. Along with the entire assemblage of sound, visuals and performances, the primary Funktion of this ‘system’ was to engender an othering of the self, a process constituting an oscillating blend of self-annihilation and self-expression – right there in the primal real estate between the sound stacks, a landscape of becoming which, in the case of Boom extended well beyond the immaculate 2500m2 main floor shaded area with its irrigated water spray system, to the entire grounds of the week-long festival, a psyoasis in Portugal’s arid summer interior.

Event occupants clung to lake Idanha-a-Nova overlooked some 15 kms distant by the ancient mountain village of Monsanto. The lake was almost essential given the 40+ degree temperatures every day for the 7 day event. I only recall Outback Eclipse festival in Australia in 2002 reaching similar temperatures. Quite an ordeal really, especially when you consider many participants had to queue up on the first day in their cars for up to 17 hours in that kind of heat! But most people weren’t too pissed about it, or soon got over it - indeed it occasioned something of a collective endurance, a kind of extreme dance festival experience. At one of the most arduous dance pilgrimage sites on the planet - no pain, no gain, or something like that.

And there were many impressive elements to the festival, including an Eco Village promoting sustainability, using successful bio-tiolets and site wide recycling; the use of Balinese bamboo architectural designs for all the main structures (including the great Ambient floor tower structure which will remain as a permanent structure); a striking array of performances and land art installations; and many independent sound systems. But one of the more fascinating sites in this pilgrimage destination was the Liminal Village. Inaugurated in

2004 by Naasko, and the culmination of a vast global network of visionary groups, the space offers something rare in the world of psy-trance: an official forum for the exchange of ideas. A cerebral zone in a culture where the body has always taken precedence. As the name indicates, with its workshops, presentations and metacine cinema zone, the Liminal Village was an area devoted to the transmission of principal trance-culture sacra: ecology, shamanism, the 13 Moon Calendar and 2012, crop circles, psychedelic consciousness and ‘visionary culture’. The village was complimented by the Innervisions Gallery, the 13 Moon Temple, the Nectar Temple, the Solar Matrix Healing Zone, and a permaculture design garden.

I've an attraction to liminality, ‘the realm of pure possibility’ as maverick cultural anthropologist Victor Turner would have it. The term is derived from limen, Latin for ‘threshold’, and from ‘liminal’, which Arnold van Gennep understood as the central phase in a rite of passage. It is no surprise that the concept is attractive to anthropologists of dance such as my colleague Luis Vasconcelos, a PhD student of Portuguese trance culture, who is enthused by his countercultural Argonauts of Western Europe. The logic of the liminal phase, space or condition is that its occupants are temporarily between everyday rules and routines, a removed and licentious situation which potentiates subversive behaviour and new ways of living, a very attractive heuristic to those in pursuit of alternative futures, and thus a logic recognised by enablers like Naasko. At Boom, symbolic and stylistic recombinations flourish, core values are communicated and strangers commune in spontaneous conclaves. In a fashion, ‘magic happens’. This could be said to be true of the entire demarcated space of the festival, but here was a space for which its designers intended magic to happen.

Let me explain. This is a power spot. A space where neophytes and experienced habitués can meet fellow travellers, intergalactic missionaries, and seekers of alternate realities - of other (improved, enlightened) selves. In this primal real estate destinies collide, quirks of fate unravel, novelty events transpire. It might be said that the ‘magic’ element involves synchronicities, strange coincidences and other extraordinary events which are potentiated by an event design compelling like minded global participants to congress. If we can say that ‘coincidences’ appear to be enabled by the intelligent design of the space (into which many elements contribute), a purpose built storehouse of potential, a strange attractor, then we could say that ‘happenings’ (derided in line with the general derogation of hippies/the sixties by mainstream corporate culture as ‘weak’, ‘feminine’ or even ‘sold out’, or by other subcultures as non ‘hardcore’) are ‘magical’. Of course, ‘magic’, denotes circumstances and practices not explicable via positivism, nor replicated via the scientific method and thus not accorded ‘truth’ status. But time and again, one experiences phenomena inexplicable via rational lenses but from which significant personal ‘truths’ derive. Perhaps the rationalist approach to this is to suggest that with the evolved preparations of events (parties) the greater likelihood for extraordinary experience, visions, encounters etc, which might explain why the trance party is such a popular global experience to which participants repeatedly return – seeking enlightenment, awareness, meaning, belonging, love, truth.

My thinking about this was stimulated by an experience which effectively knocked me sideways. It happened about mid Boom, in the heat of the day, and it happened in the Liminal Village. Days before I’d had my galactic signature read by the exotic, vivacious and articulate Kwali. I had been reminded that I was a yellow planetary seed. As with 6 years before, when I first had my ‘galactic signature’ read, I guess I didn’t give it a great deal of credence – I was more interested in the flourishing of the Mayan calender/13 Moon movement, as a movement which develops independently from my own biography – as a rational observer of cultural movements.

So, days later, after my friend Paris introduced me to Chiara, an Italian whose conducting independent research on trance culture, something extraordinary happened. Chiara conveyed her interest in the 2012 movement and her Mayan Calendar galactic signature. It’s not something I've had revealed often, especially so enthusiastically, but of the 260 combinations, hers was identical to mine! Like traffic colliding at a cosmic intersection.... Boom! ... there you are careering through the windscreen into a newly coloured reality. Down at the village crossways, betwixt and between, a special belongingness was discovered, and it made sense. Did someone say It's happening?

So my fellow ‘expander’, Chiara Baldini, spoke of trancers of ages past, of the Maenads and the Rites of Eleusis with which she holds psy-trance parties to be continuous. From all that I’ve experienced of the genre, of the pilgrimage, of the ordeal, of the othering of the self, the revelatory experience, there is much to this interpretation.

For one thing, while many European sonic pilots cruising the theta waves take recourse to ‘tribal’ cultures (e.g Aboriginal, Mayan, Native American etc) or Eastern religions (Hinduism, Buddhism) to frame or articulate their flight paths, this perspective demonstrates that their othering is perhaps rooted in a cultural heritage closer to home.

Boom was a fitting end to a long hot European summer of experiential ethnography. From Ireland to Portugal, I had transcended impossible frontiers and experienced encounters extraordinary. And as I had privileged meetings with a multitude of inspirational artists, producers, enablers and participants of psy-trance culture in a range of countries, friendships formed and my ‘field’ expanded in ways I hadn't foreseen.

Many thanks to Magnetrixx, Sergio, Spacedracula, Birthmarkleg for images used here.

REWILDING

“The wilderness that has come to us from the eternity of the past we have the boldness to project into the eternity of the future.”
—Howard Zahniser,
author of the 1964 Wilderness Act.

When veteran environmental activist and founder of Earth First! Dave Foreman looks into the future, he sees a wild and green North America. A continent where grizzly bears, wolves and mountain lions roam free, where native plants and insects flourish.

First published in Undergrowth #3: Tales of the Simulacrum. Sept, 2004.

Listening to Indymedia radio streaming live from the Republication National Convention protests in New York City, I hear people calling from outside the jailhouse as their fellow activists are released. The crowds cheer and chant, updates are given, stories are fed back into a massive communications web, bypassing the corporate media who are ignoring the 500,000 people protesting the Bush administration and the more than 2,000 people arrested. On the other side of the planet I listen and tap my keyboard, adding a feature to Melbourne Indymedia about federal police harassing a local anarchist at the request of the FBI. “Our resistance is as global as capital” has been a popular slogan amongst the global justice movements; it’s also as nearly as well connected.

The inter-connectedness of social movements via online media production has exploded massively since Indymedia launched itself onto the psychosphere in November 1999 at the WTO protests in Seattle. Of course this interconnection is limited to those with net access, yet Indymedias continue to come online at the edges of empire and many produce offline media such as newspapers, radio and video. After nearly 5 years there are close to 200 local Indymedia collectives across the planet and a new Indymedia has come online on average every 11 days. In the midst of the Republican National Convention the New York Indymedia site is receiving about 5 million hits a day and there are more than 600 Indymedia “embedded journalists” covering the action.

In Melbourne last July Indymedia activists from Dunedin, Auckland, the Philippines, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Hobart, Vancouver, Sydney, London and San Francisco gathered to further develop these networks, assess the effectiveness of the Indymedia project and work out where to from here. What are the challenges and how does Indymedia weigh up to what it was originally meant to be? Some of the major themes were the role of open publishing, building networks of solidarity throughout the Asia-Pacific and the new forms of collaborative media production that are becoming possible via communications technologies.

Indy Futures

At the Oceania Indymedia conference there were a host of responses to the question of where to? for the network. For some, Indymedia has reached a plateau and needs to make a leap beyond its current simple weblog format. San Francisco Indymedia believe “the network-at-large needs to be less about small clubs of friends running a weblog and tackle the challenges of being a global, non-commercial media network. We want to kick start a shift towards maturing into a real media network that can compete with any of the best wire services in the world.”

For others, the shift is towards more open editing systems. One of Indymedia’s core functions - open publishing - means anyone with net access can upload audio, video, photos or text to the website. This exposes Indymedia to constant abuse from people who disagree or are outright hostile to the Indymedia project; it also opens up to some amazingly passionate story telling. One of the constant contradictions of Indymedia has been how to harness the power of open publishing without the destruction it often wreaks.

Proposed solutions that crystallise around the idea of open editing. In the words of Maffew, one of the original programmers of the Indymedia code, “open editing would help to clear the current closed bottleneck on editorial functions in Indymedia and involve a new wave of people in media democracy.” Open editing would entail users having the ability to highlight stories to a personalised page, re-edit their own story, rate stories up or down on various criteria and provide more filtering tools, enabling users to find the stories they like without having to search for hours. Indymedia has generally privileged speakers over listeners making it difficult for user to find the information they’re looking for. Most importantly, open editing is about setting in motion the collective intelligence of the users of Indymedia rather than leaving it up to one small, over worked group.

Others have taken Indymedia to an intensely regional level. For example: two years ago Indymedia UK was essentially a single collective working out of London. Now the United Kollectives are made of over a dozen local groups, building local roots in a global network. The Indymedia Estrecho project goes one step further, combining Indymedia collectives from southern Spain, the Canary Islands and Morocco to cover one of the great migration routes from Africa to Europe. The aim is to challenge the divisions of the nation state and the racism of the Spanish government by erasing the bordering through communications cooperation.

Beyond Borders – Counter Empires

“I am calling from Port Hedland Detention Centre” a voice crackles over computer speakers. A phone call received from inside the centre by a detainee, the message is uploaded automatically onto the Indymedia newswire. The Phone Indymedia Patch (http://www.melbourne.indymedia.org/pimp.php) is a system that allows anyone with a phone to upload an audio report to Indymedia like leaving a message on an answering machine. It has been used most effectively to breach the borders that divide during the Woomera 2002 protests. Similarly at the Baxter detention centre protests in 2003, a micro radio station was set up to breach the fences by radio waves and “penetrate the silence that permeates the area of the camp.” Media is a tool to breach all kinds of borders and enclosures that the state and capital would like to confine us to. Similarly the Oceania Indymedia project aims to be a “media hub that defies national borders.”

Capital has thrown up a great challenge to the nation state, pummelling its borders in the pursuit of profit in disregard for national frontiers. The nation-state has far from disappeared, it instead has transformed itself to also blur the boundaries between where the corporation ends and the nation-state begins while at the same time building new enclosures, whether its gated communities, detention centres or patents and copyrights.

The terrain of politics has shifted, power is increasingly constituted on a post-national level. Indymedia therefore posits a model that like capital, seeks to go beyond the nation state as the terrain of rule. This contrasts to the approaches of social democrats or state socialists who desire the re-strengthening of the nation state to protect against the ravages of globalisation. This overflowing of national boundaries by media networks aims to transcend the nation states in the interests of the self-organisation of social movements, for them to recognise their commonality and diversity beyond the divisions erected by governments, creating new forms of networked cooperation from below. It pushes through Empire, utilising the decay of boundaries by capital, migration and information networks to build a post-statist public sphere. It is an exodus from the (national) terrain upon which governments dictate politics must take place, and where less and less decisions are actually being made.

The Oceania Indymedia project

Oceania Indymedia is one example of this logic. A “media hub that defies national borders,” Oceania Indymedia is a project linking Independent media centres in what is actually the South East Asia and Pacific region. It has various permutations; the most obvious is a website that uses a syndication system to aggregate features from Indymedias in the region, providing a model of collective, decentralised and autonomous networking. A video project collating stories from the region and distributed online and on VCD acts in a similar vain.

The network also functions as a network of mutual aid and solidarity where the common project of social change is more important than the national boundary. It acts in the here and now to erase the borders between us, to swap stories and circulate struggles. A number of stories were told throughout the Oceania conference; tales of media monopolies in New Zealand, of police repression in Miami, of people’s resistance to neo-liberalism in the Phillipines, of forest defence in Western Australia; collaborative storytelling.

New Forms of Collaboration

All these projects take advantage of new technologies that give rise to a gamut of ways in which communications can be collectively constructed to create a new commons that engenders both access and participation, opening spaces that have been appropriated by capital. A few of the collaborative tools that are being increasingly employed in the Indymedia network are wikis, rss/rdf syndication, peer to peer systems and creative commons.

Wikis are WebPages that can easily be edited simply by numerous people, enabling documents to be collectively created and edited. Rich Site Summary (RSS) is a syndication system used by Indymedia to create a feed containing information of latest posts or features. Oceania Indymedia for example aggregates these feeds from IMCs in the region to create the site, allowing a networked form of collaboration that is decentralised and autonomous. Peer to Peer (p2p) networks similarly work in a decentralised manner. A way of sharing large files, p2p systems limit the need to have a centralised server. Instead the information is downloaded from a web of peers.

Creative Commonsis a project created to deal with licensing of media and other creations in the digital age. Its most salient feature is the idea of share-alike; i.e. I share if you share. If provides a legal basis for the sharing of creations that resists attempts of corporations to profit from cultural works and simultaneously create a communications commons where works can be shared and remixed at will, recognising that culture is always a collective creation and a common good.

The key relation that all these tools carry is the harnessing of collective intelligence, breaking the passivity of the consumer/producer divide allowing for a horizontal networks of collaboration that build common spaces based on singularities: a commonality without homogeneity.

Conclusion

The domination of the mainstream media over our lives is continuing to increase. Despite the fact that more than 500,000 people protested at the Republican National convention -the biggest demonstrations ever against such an event - it hardly rated a mention in the corporate media. In many ways, more than the construction of consensus, media regimes occupy attention. Drawing people away is a challenge that is not just about the information they produce or the way they produce it, it is something that requires guerrilla tactics that can intervene, block, stop, derail, divert and detourne the media messages that flood our brains. Cracks are everywhere. How can a machine of networked organs be set in motion against this Empire that would condemn us all to work, consumption, ecological catastrophe and war?