Patrick Jones (activist)

Patrick Jones (born 1970) is a public speaker, environmental commentator, and author of Words & Things (2004), A Free-dragging Manifesto (2008) and The Art of Free Travel (2015), which he co-authored with Meg Ulman.
Early life and education
Born in Sydney in 1970 to Anglo-Australian parents, Jones grew up in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. He holds three degrees in the arts including a Doctorate of Creative Arts from Western Sydney University for his thesis Walking for food: regaining permapoesis (2013).
Career
Jones infrequently travels to speak and share his work at festivals, conferences and other events. He is a pioneer of arts practice that participates in what it represents, which he calls "permanent making", or "permapoesis" - an antidote to disposibility culture. Influenced by permaculture ethics and principles, Jones began to merge his biophysical art, performance, land art and poetry with permaculture design principles in 2008. The garden-home Jones and Ulman are making in Daylesford is a performative, social and teaching environment of food and energy production demonstrating the arts and crafts of what they call neopeasant economics. They have built small dwellings to host and mentor what they call SWAPs (social warming artists and permaculturists), their version of WWOOFing. Jones and Ulman are community gardeners who organise events and visiting speakers to Daylesford. In 2015 they co-authored The Art of Free Travel(NewSouth), about their collective, Artist as Family’s, 14 month bicycle trip up the east coast of Australia, guerrilla camping and documenting all the free foods that can be procured by foraging, hunting, fishing, gleaning and bartering. The Art of Free Travel was shortlisted for an ABIA award in 2016. Jones' radical call-to-ecology poem, Step by step, was awarded runner-up of the 2011 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets. Poet-academic, Peter Minter, writing on Jones's poem, states that "Jones forces us to grapple with a specific set of poethical considerations: how does language-use contribute to the violence of colonisation and machineries and economies of ecological destruction?" Jones has been calling for a return to gifting economies and a decoupling from capital food and energy systems since 2011. Ulman and Jones and the inhabitants of their household live only 30% reliant on the global monetary economy, living without cars, white goods, air travel, supermarket food, industrial energy and the plethora of other things that constitute so-called modern essentials. Their blog documents how they have actioned both a household and "community sufficiency" that has been integral to their transition. In 2017 Jones wrote more on how the household operates within their community context in his chapter, Reclaiming accountability from hypertechnocivility, to grow again the flowering earth, as a chapter in Perma/Culture: Imagining Alternatives in an Age of Crisis published by Routledge's Environmental Humanities series.
Personal life
Jones has lived In Dja Dja Wurrung country in central Victoria for the past two decades. He lived in Lyonville, Victoria from 1995-2005 with Mel Ogden to which he shares a son. He has lived in Daylesford, Victoria with Meg Ulman since 2006. Together they have one son.

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