We call Toby home. We have a special relationship with Toby that really defines us. But at present, we find ourselves living in exile. If you follow Toby to where he spills out into the Allegheny River, and then follow the Allegheny down to where it meets the Monongahela, you’ll find Pittsburgh, where we currently live. We yearn to return home one day, but until that happens, we do what we can.

About Toby

People keep asking us, “Who’s Toby?” The Lenni Lenape called him Tuppeek-hanne, a name that means “river that comes from a large spring.” The European settlers had a hard time pronouncing that, so for them, it eventually came out as, “Tobeco Stream.” That became Toby Creek or, after all the logging left the land all around naked and desolate, Stump Creek. In 1817, surveyor Daniel Stanard camped near it and thought it sounded like “a distant clarion,” so he decided to call it “the Clarion River.” People living far away in places like Harrisburg and Pittsburgh thought this sounded classier than “Toby Creek,” the way those hicks living there called it. For a while, it stood as a matter of local pride to keep calling it “Toby,” but as usually happens with these things, the tastes of rich people from far away eventually won out.

We love the name “Toby” for our home. It comes from Europeans trying to understand the native name, just like us trying to understand how to become native. And just like them, it also contains the admission that we’ll screw it up, at least a little bit. And even better, it has such personality to it! The name “Toby” makes you think of the river as a person. Which, of course, we should!

About Us

Right now, just one couple calls itself Toby’s People. But if you want to rewild and you call Toby home, tell us! Maybe you belong to Toby’s People, too!

• Jason Godesky
• Giulianna Lamanna

FAQ

What do you mean by “rewilding”?

Rewilding means reversing domestication. Just like our domestication covers a lot of areas, so does rewilding: from primitive skills, to oral traditions. It means learning to live in human communities, so it includes things like permaculture in its broadest sense, topics like herbalism, non-violent communication, animism, and so on. See also the College of Mythic Cartography.

Do you actually call yourselves animists?

Yes! Christian missionaries have spread a lot of misinformation about animism. In their rush to fit the perspectives of others into their own ontology, they turned animism into a superstition about supernatural creatures inhabiting the physical world. In fact, animism rejects the dualist assumption behind that: they don’t have supernatural creatures for the simple fact that they don’t split the world in two. Animism just means that you recognize other-than-human persons, whether animal persons, plant persons, rock persons, weather persons, or any other kind of person. If it acts like a person, accord it the personhood it deserves. See also the College of Mythic Cartography, David Abram, Graham Harvey, and Tim Ingold.

Do you really expect civilization to end?

I think we covered that topic about as much as we possibly could in the Anthropik Archive. To summarize: complexity pops up as an anomaly in the past 10,000 years. We have no reason to think of it as anything but a “flash in the pan.” The law of diminishing returns applies to increasing complexity, so you can’t just keep increasing complexity forever. The amount of energy you have determines the level of complexity you can sustain. Problems like peak oil and ecological crises poses a major problem that we might not have a solution for, but even if we do, those solutions will boil down to more complexity, which just exacerbates the underlying problem all the more. Collapse generally happens when people realize they can enjoy the same standard of living with less complexity; despite the hand-wringing, romantic view promulgated by the aristocracy that finds itself losing power, collapse happens precisely because it benefits most people. We’ve destroyed our capacity to sustain most of the interrim levels of complexity (like agrarian society, by depleting soils so badly worldwide), which leaves little alternative to some combination of hunting, gathering, fishing and gardening techniques, depending on the region you live in. See also The Thirty Theses.

Doesn’t that mean regressing, instead of progressing, though?

In the Akan language of west Africa, the word sankofa expresses a proverb, meaning, “go back and take,” or “it is not taboo to go back and get what you forgot.” If you go out the door and realize you forgot your keys, do you say, “I can’t go back! I must keep on progressing!” or do you go back to get your keys, because you need them? “Progress” implies a single track of human destiny. We have many more choices than just that. We don’t really believe in this whole “progress” notion. We have more concern about how to find a good place to live in a more-than-human world.