SLOW

All in a Day's Walk

A month-long slow food walking performance

December 12, 2012 at 3:37 pm · Filed under Activism, Food, Home and tagged: food miles, local food, tracktivism, water

In the caravan, my water is frozen today. (Picture’s from two years ago, but you get the idea.) Even though this only means walking to the very nearby showerblock to fill up buckets, bottles and kettle, I don’t have the mental capacity or calories to deal with this. I don’t walk today, any further than around the fields to break the ice on the three water troughs for the horses. Rough Patch – Banky Field – Rough Patch – Tacklizer – Rough Patch.

Cold, I am slowed down in every sense.

I expend my energy instead on the domestic: making bread, refreshing leaven, fetching and heating water, washing up, fetching wood, sweeping. It takes all my energy. I make a stew and feel better.

My s l o w n e s s makes me think how much I’ve read the term ‘slow’ in various contexts in recent times.

Slow food ‘a global, grassroots organisation with supporters in 150 countries around the world that links the pleasure of food with a commitment to the community and the environment. We work to reconnect people with where their food comes from and how it is produced so they can understand the implications of the choices they make about the food they put on their plates. We encourage people to choose nutritious food, from sustainable, local sources which tastes great.’

Slow pedagogy from Phillip Payne and Brian Whattchow (2008) ‘Slow Pedagogy and Placing Environmental Education in Post-Traditional Outdoor Education’ Australian Journal of Outdoor Education 12 (1): 25-38 ‘Time, and our experiences of it, warrants attention in ‘place’ pedagogies in outdoor education. Place typically involves the experience of a geographical location, a locale for interacting socially and/or with nature, and the subjective meanings we attach over time to the experience. Place, however, cannot be severed from the concept and practice of time, as seems to be occurring in the discourse of outdoor education. The way outdoor educators carefully conceive of, plan for, manage and pedagogically practice time may, in our view, positively facilitate an introductory ‘sense’ of place. We illustrate the under-theorised relationship of time and place in outdoor and experiential education via a case study of a semester-long undergraduate unit, Experiencing the Australian Landscape. It reflexively describes how two post-traditional outdoor educators working in the higher education sector have assisted pre-service experiential and outdoor educators to sense, explore, conceptualise and examine how ‘slow’ time is important in ‘placing’ education in nature.‘

Slow activism from Wallace Heim’s beautiful chapter ‘Slow Activism: Homelands, Love and the Lightbulb’ in B. Szerszynski, W. Heim and C. Waterton (eds.) (2003) Nature Performed: Environment, Culture and Performance Oxford: Blackwell 183-202

‘Other, more social methods [of effecting change] are through conversation and the spoken exchanges of narratives. These, too, have imaginative and heuristic force, the capacity to open up new dimensions of reality, to allow for new values and subjectivities to be tried out. The ‘doing’ of conversation, the give and take of questioning and listening influenced by the directed content, can be an experience approximating the democratizing, moral conversation described by communicative and dialogic ethics. As a form of rhetorical argument, conversation can be a practice of collective reasoning, contingent and fallible, in situations of uncertainty. For the conversations to persuade, they need also to be occasions of character, in which the phenomena of an ethics of character or virtue can be experienced. Following Hans-Georg Gadamer (1989), the process of conversation is analogous to that of coming to an understanding, or of interpreting a work of art; in these events, conversation is the ‘work’ of art, an understanding mutually created. Attributes of performance apply to these works: ephemeral, ambiguous, improvisatory, risky. They are also a form of social reason, occasions for talking together, in public, about nature-human relations. They are also a form of activism, politicized interventions advancing an idea, but proceeding in the time it takes to engage in conversation. Some works continue to have effect beyond the event, reverberating in the stories about it, passed along like a slow contagion.’

Slow = good Slow = better Slow = the answer?