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Detritus: the Manifesto
- in nature, detritus is dead plant and animal matter that makes new life possible. The very bottom of the food chain, detritus is the rotting leaves in the forest, the silt on the bottom of the pond, the thick dark mud in the salt marsh. It sticks to your shoes, it smells, but someday it will be food for something else, and that something will be food in turn, on and on up the food chain until you pick it up in the supermarket and put it in your mouth.

Our society spends a lot of time telling us that there is some brand new, fresh cultural produce, generated from thin air and sunshine, slick and clean. They package it with pretty plastic & ribbons and then feed it to us. A lot gets thrown away: the ribbons, the wrapping; culture becomes garbage, or it dies, and rots behind the refrigerator. But the new fluffy shiny stuff still gets churned out, and it gets forced between our teeth. And we are told to swallow it.

We will not swallow. We will chew, and then spit. We will play with our food, and create something new and interesting from it.


(the Detritus manifesto video)

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"[A]rt is long, not infinite... One day we will use it up - unless we
		can learn to recycle it like any other finite resource."
		- Spider Robinson, "Melancholy Elephants"

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