Cycles Vicious & Virtuous
by Jason GodeskyI think most prospective rewilders can share my dilemma. We hear about the fabulous adventures of those successful trackers, educators and idols of our movement who’ve found some way to dedicate themselves, full-time, to their passion, usually thanks, at least in part, to a supportive and understanding community (often their own family) who have the means and the will to support those endeavors. Good for them, and we all owe the people who support them a measure of gratitude for giving us those motivating, inspirational icons, but it makes for a model few of us can really emulate. Perhaps our families don’t really understand what we hope and wish for (and given the massive amounts of disinformation and propaganda invested into discouraging such pursuits, we can hardly blame them), or perhaps they simply don’t have the capacity to support our endeavors, as unlikely as they seem to ever net any economic benefit that our society would recognize. We do not have the skills, nor the community support of any kind of tribe, to rely on our earth skills for shelter and sustenance; if we tried to shelter ourselves and feed ourselves with what we know now, we’d only ensure our death, whether by starvation, thirst or exposure.
Yet the daily grind of engaging in the civilized economy to procure our basic needs can make it seem like we have no time (or energy) left to devote towards the future, because everything we have goes towards simply maintaining our dreary present. We hope that we might one day put that daily grind behind us and start living, but as one week after another slips through our fingers, frustration sets in. Rewilding can come to seem like a hopeless Catch 22. At times like that, we have to remember that we can break that cycle.
I haven’t made regular posts here for quite some time, specifically because I’ve made some progress in that regard. For the past several years, I worked for a software start-up, and before that, I went to college studying computer science. In both communities, the same mindset prevailed: total dedication to “the goal” (in the latter, the success of the company, and usually the dream of a big IPO or sale of the company that would give all of us, as stock-holders, early retirements; in the former, graduation), with immensely long hours and generally the burning of our physical health as a sadistic kind of fuel. Long hours meant chronic sleep deprivation; no time to cook meant constantly eating out and relying on junk food for a quick burst of energy. Caffeine substituted for sleep, and junk food substituted for food. That cycle meant constant obesity and poor health.
Dave Pollard’s graph of vicious vs. virtuous cycles.
Dave Pollard helped me put in proper terms what I had gotten myself into, and what I needed to do next.
This false economy leads us to buy what we don’t need, which requires us to work harder to pay for those unnecessary goods and services, leaving us even less time to look after ourselves and our own needs and forcing us, in a vicious cycle to “outsource” even more of the things we might be doing for ourselves. All this phony economic activity is added to the GDP and employment data. Do-it-yourself and other “unpaid” work, and things we make for ourselves, are not considered “economic” activities and hence not included in the statistics that drive our society’s political and economic decisions. No surprise then that the government encourages us to buy what we don’t need and what we could provide for ourselves.
By contrast, the Gift Economy does not value monetized activity more highly than un-monetized activity. It suggests, on the contrary, that our time is invaluable and that therefore we should “spend” it, as much as possible, doing things we love and things that are our personal responsibility, and only buy goods and services we cannot possibly provide for ourselves. In doing these things ourselves, we learn to do them better, more efficiently, more effectively and more economically, saving the cost of outsourcing them to a third party.
Blaming myself for the vicious cycle that had caught me made little sense. A great deal went into creating it, and trying to reverse its outcomes (poor health, obesity, no time for rewilding) without addressing its underlying cause (underestimating the value of my time) made no sense, just as you’ll fail to convince anyone else of rewilding by blaming the symptoms of their vicious cycle (playing video games or lazing about), rather than addressing the causes of that cycle—the things people desperately need, and do not have. What good does blame do, to change the plight of the desperately needy, needy for the most important things of all—connection to family and land, participation in a more-than-human world, and a respect for their own humanity? First, I needed to correct the fundamental problem, and recognize how preciously I should value my time. That changed the balance of the way I lived, and it made the way I had lived suddenly appear exorbitantly expensive in terms of those things that matter most.
The first step came with something as simple as finding a new job, one that allowed for an easier pace. I found that after quite some time, though once I did, it introduced some new problems, as well.
One of the most common perks the software start-up offers comes in the trade-off that, while they may expect absolute dedication of time and energy, they also will accommodate you extensively, as far as dress and manners go. I could wear moccasins to the office, or even go barefoot, and no one (well, aside from the sales team) would complain. In my new job, I have many more options with my time, but I also have to meet certain standards of appearance, particularly in dress. I have to dress in “business casual,” and this made fox walking rather difficult.
My spiffy new shoes: the VivoBarefoot Dharma.
That article sparked some discussions about shoes that do less damage, or do a better job of getting out of the way to let people walk humanly. VivoBarefoot came up several times, so I took a closer look. My recent birthday, and the generosity of my family, put the pair pictured here on my feet. It even came with a “little red book” that repeated some claims that regular readers may find familiar (though here, I’ve finally found a collection of studies, so you might see a new article with more references later on).
They look “ordinary” enough to meet my office dress requirements, but still allow me to fox walk. It has made an enormous difference. The dull, constant pain in my heels returned after just one day in ordinary shoes, and after just one day in my new VivoBarefoot shoes, it left. In the fox-walking article, I quoted a barefoot hiker who compared the shoed experience of stomping upon the earth, to the barefooted experience of stepping into the earth. I can feel that in my stride. It makes walking a tactile experience, and that connection of stepping into the earth really does reverberate. Maybe you can attribute it to my instantly improved posture, or maybe you can attribute it to that feeling of groundedness in the landscape, but the simple act of walking now make me feel strong and confident, and that makes me want to do it more.
Another problem my new job has introduced lies in its location. I lived close to where I once worked, but the new office lies at the end of a very long commute. What extra time I should get to enjoy now, the commute eats entirely, and sometimes it eats some more, besides. To say nothing of the ecological impact of so much driving, or the cost of so much gas, what I feel most acutely, personally, comes from so much lost time! But I have found something useful to fill that time with: learning bird language. Also for my recent birthday, Giuli got me not just the “Birding by Ear” CD set, but also, “More Birding by Ear” and “A Field Guide to Bird Songs.” I keep going over sections again and again, until I get them down, so I haven’t even finished the first set yet, but it allows me to do something productive with all those wasted hours on the parkway.
My urban apartment leaves me precious few options for things like growing herbs, or even finding a decent “secret spot” to go through the Kamana program I tried to start, and ultimately had to put on hold for precisely this reason. This new job will allow me to move out into suburbia, pay less in rent and put more towards saving up for my rewilding endeavors; I’ll have green space close enough to grow my own herbs, and maybe even find a suitable “secret spot” close enough to visit regularly. I’ll have more time, and that will mean I’ll have the chance to progress further with my rewilding. With more time, I’ll have the chance to cook my own meals more often, and that will mean I’ll have the chance to put to use local foods, and perhaps even foraged foods, things I simply didn’t have time for before. Like Dave Pollard pointed out, these cycles reinforce each other; the vicious cycle eats your time, and continues to eat more and more of it as it progresses. The virtuous cycle gives you time, and then gives you more and more as it progresses. I feel like I’ve broken the vicious cycle that began consuming me all the way back in college, and though I haven’t yet reaped all the benefits I hoped for, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel: instead of fading off inexorably into the future, I can begin to see some hope that I might have a chance to really live after all!
I’ve never been a big fan of time management schedules; I find that when I regiment my time, I end up setting myself up to squander it. The idea that my time is valuable and my own is one that has been corrupted by the years of scholastic hazing. This is something that I endeavor to unlearn; rather than look to an institution or society or whatever to tell me how I should be spending my time, I need to look to myself. What do I want to accomplish in the next few years, and in the coming decades? What skills do I wish to develop?
I think that the first step to building community begins with, and always will remain, looking inward and keeping yourself healthy. When the artificial delineations between yourself and the rest of the world begin to fade away, that is when you will have found your tribe.
Comment by Brian J. — 12 February 2008 @ 2:11 PM
glad to hear things are turning around for you!
Comment by jhereg — 12 February 2008 @ 2:48 PM
Hey Jason,
I hear you, dude. I’m in an exploring phase now, and one of my first steps was to get the hell away from NYC. I’m not doing all that I want to just yet, but there are options, and I’m happy not to be producing disvalue. I like the virtuous cycle graph- it helps frame things well/
About fox-walking: I haven’t had much luck doing it. I do have the same sense of stepping into the ground you described, and I have a pair of Vivos I got secondhand that I’ve worn, but it really hasn’t stuck. I don’t notice the sort of constant pain in my own feet that you describe, and most of the time I just feel awkward when fox-walking. Part of it is lack of practice, I imagine, but I’m having a hard time mustering the energy to practice. I know on some level that it’s good, but it just hasn’t translated kinesthetically for me. Any tips?
Comment by Archangel — 12 February 2008 @ 10:50 PM
good to see you posting again, Jason!
and i’m right there with you, man…the 40+ hour work week is soul-killing. but you got it–the direction is the most important thing…are you treading water? drowning? or learning (although slowly) to swim?
every precious moment you reclaim, you win.
you are lucky to have someone like G. who gets it, and can support your efforts.
i’ve periodically toyed with crafting a step-by-step for The Wage Slave, trying to break it all down to the easiest first steps that give the most reward and positive feedback for turning it around (but, wait for it, i can’t find the time to finish it! of course!) i think it is needed, though. we all know more or less where we are now (hell?) and where we want to be…but how to get there? where to begin? it is quite the riddle.
Comment by patricia — 12 February 2008 @ 11:59 PM
I already had an inkling that you were as trapped in civilisation as most first worlders, but this essay was still kind of crushing to read. It also reinforces the impression that the rewilding movement is more theory than practice, more ideas than examples, all talk and no say.
The american psyche is steeped in the myth of redemption and rebirth, but sooner or later you have to face that a lot of the consequences of our prior personal habits and choices (especially poor health) are in many ways permanent. That isnt to saying improving your diet and the way you use your body wont have some benefits over doing more of the same. But being strong and developed to your full potential is something that we each only get one chance at, and the consequences of past poor choices echo across multiple generations.
The world is about to change dramatically and we need to take our choices very seriously. How confident can any of us really be that you are leading us in a useful direction?
Comment by Shane — 13 February 2008 @ 12:50 AM
Shane,
Jason has never made a secret of his being inside of civilization. I found the essay a bit uplifting in that he is finding a way out.
I disagree that we only get one chance, but I will agree that every chance you pass up makes the challenge even harder.
> How confident can any of us really be that you are leading us in a useful direction?
This one actually bugged me. Jason is not some cult leader taking us to the promised land. Jason is “just this guy, you know”. Jason is trying to document his successes and failures in his move toward an uncivilized lifestyle. If you expect some sort of twelve step program from him I don’t think you’re going to be satisifed.
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 13 February 2008 @ 8:20 AM
Archangel,
I’ve been going barefoot since the beginning of last summer, but not so much of late due to the cold. It’s been easier for me since I’m in college and have a programming job also on campus. I have found that I cannot fox walk in shoes at all. My gait changes from toe walking to heel walking the more I wear shoes.
It actually took me a few tries to get fox walking properly. I first tried a few years ago, and it just never stuck until this time. My advice is to just be patient because you are changing very old habits. Take it slow, don’t get mad at yourself, and you’ll get there. Hope that helps.
Jim,
That’s what I like most about this “movement”! No one is in charge, so if I see a promising lead I can follow it. I’m a very independent person, and when my style is restricted by authority figures I go wander off somewhere else.
Comment by William Carrington — 13 February 2008 @ 11:37 AM
Hey J –
Happy Belated Birthday, dude!
I’m glad to hear that this particular travail is coming to a close… I feel you on this one, big time… although the details are different, I too have been stuck in a holding pattern these last months and very much looking forward to May when it will finally be broken. Just have to make it through until then without too much stress or drama or psychosis
(gotta get the f*** out of Denver… I am NOT a city person any more, you know!)
Anyway… good luck with the next phase and remember that whatever the plans, today is important, too.
Janene
Comment by Janene — 13 February 2008 @ 12:10 PM
I’m feeling you Jason. It’s not easy to open yourself up and be vulnerable. You’re an inspiration to me. I think you can do it, just take it one step at a time. Don’t overwhelm yourself.
Comment by DancesWithHolepuncher — 14 February 2008 @ 7:04 PM
Yet the daily grind of engaging in the civilized economy to procure our basic needs can make it seem like we have no time (or energy) left to devote towards the future, because everything we have goes towards simply maintaining our dreary present. We hope that we might one day put that daily grind behind us and start living, but as one week after another slips through our fingers, frustration sets in.
Couldn’t agree more with you Jason. This has been my dilemma for some time now, but am slowly paying off my debt and hopefully soon, will be able to take another step away.
Have you ever thought of doing freelance work? I work freelance most of the time and it provides me with more time than working 40 hours a week at an office does. Just a thought.
Comment by Peter D — 15 February 2008 @ 11:58 AM
I lived in the woods for a year. 6 months trying to be a forager but finding it hard to overcome my addictions, and 6 months gardening and being lonely out in the country, so I went to opposite route and got a job in a city on the other side of the world, in Korea, teaching English (I have loans to repay). The opportunities for rewilding out here are slim, but like you, with a source of income, when I return to the States, I will be able to focus more on what I want to do, and where I can do it. Anyway, I had two silly questions.
1) Do you wear socks in the vivobarefoot shoes? Like for cold days, or so you have something to absorb footsweat? Or do socks defeat the purpose??
2) Is there anyway you can rip a copy of birding by ear to mp3 and make it available on the web? I would love to practice here, but its obviously not sold here, and buying it and shipping it would cost a lot.
Comment by acornrevolution — 15 February 2008 @ 7:30 PM
The Titanic continues to feed us and the band is still playing, even though water is rushing in the lower levels and the engines have about stopped…jumping off into the harsh ocean in a lifeboat with little skills appears daunting, although intellectually it appears to be the only course of action that gives us a chance, but the titanic is still above water, and they are still providing meals, and that damn music certainly is entertaining, guess we will have to wait a little longer…timing is everything
Comment by Bubba — 16 February 2008 @ 8:32 AM
“i’ve periodically toyed with crafting a step-by-step for The Wage Slave, trying to break it all down to the easiest first steps that give the most reward and positive feedback for turning it around…”
Patricia, that would be extremely cool. If you ever do write this I’ll be first in line to read it
“Have you ever thought of doing freelance work? I work freelance most of the time and it provides me with more time than working 40 hours a week at an office does.”
I freelanced for a long time then eventually made it an official small business. I still work 40 hours a week, but the commute from my bedroom to my home office takes about 8 seconds, I have almost eliminated the junk food pressures (so long as I am not lazy about getting real groceries), I make my own schedule, I’ve cut my driving down to just a few short trips per week, and my feet spend more time out of shoes than in them. If it’s a beautiful day I go out for a walk and don’t think twice about it. There’s a lot of paperwork hassle and I have to pay taxes rather than getting a return but these are minor irritants compared to the improvements in my quality of life.
Comment by Anonymous — 16 February 2008 @ 2:46 PM
Archangel: I had some trouble at first, too. Some muscles had atrophied over the past decades, and got very upset when I asked them to pull their weight (rather literally). Once I got past that, I started to enjoy the benefits, first of relieved pain, then better stature, and now soaking through even into my disposition and psychology, as all that sum up to me generally feeling better, stronger and more confident. I suppose for a while, it simply takes some commitment, until you see enough of those benefits that it can sustain itself.
JimFive: Thanks for sparing me having to write a fairly nasty response to Shane. Just to reiterate what you said, I’ve never laid claim to any kind of leadership. How could I, when I want to abolish leadership? I just try to make some headway, and hope that someone out there might benefit from my experiences, whether by considering something I say as a good idea, or just learning from my mistakes. I think we need an “open source” rewilding revolution, and that only happens when we share our ideas and experiences. “How confident can any of us really be that you are leading us in a useful direction?” Not at all; you should never feel confident that anyone leads you. Basically, if you find yourself following someone, you’ve already set off in the wrong direction!
Janene: Thanks! Good to hear from you! Sounds like you might break out at almost the same time I will.
“Dances With Holepuncher”: I don’t know if you meant that sarcastically or not, but I don’t think this really represents anything worth looking up to. I just have some ideas that have helped me move a little bit along, when I might otherwise get caught just standing still. Even in his “Art of Mentoring” classes, Jon Young reminds people that you have to always come up to the boundaries of your comfort zone. If you don’t, you won’t make any progress; if you go much further than that, you push too hard and recoil. I don’t recommend anyone trying to run off into the woods without preparation or community. No one ever said that rewilding would happen overnight. That makes it important to find ways to break away however you can, and with all the ways that the civilized world sinks its hooks in, I think it helps all of us to share what ways we find that work for us, so we can all benefit from that.
Peter: I’ve tried tilting at freelance a few times now, but I’ve never succeeded in building up enough of a pipeline. I’ll probably try again sometime down the road, though, since that really does start to give you enough control over your schedule to really see that virtuous cycle through, so you can scale down the amount you work as you scale down the amount of money you need. I don’t know too many bosses, after all, that would feel terribly pleased when you come in and say, “Hey, chief, I only need half as much money now, so how about you pay me half my salary, and I only come in half as often?” Suggest that, and most places will just give you the boot; you may have reduced your monetary needs by half, but that doesn’t mean you’ve gotten it down to no monetary needs at all! So you wind up working more than you need, to get more money than you really want, simply because you can’t cut it any closer. Freelance gives you the ability to control that flow yourself, so yes, I probably will try again.
Acorn Revolution: I, personally, do not wear socks with these shoes, though I imagine you could, without losing too much of the benefit. It did get me pretty cold recently, with the snow falling and some of it getting into my shoe, but hey, all part of rewilding my feet, right? As for ripping the CD, absolutely not! I would never use a public forum like this to help spread illegal, pirated music. You all know what high regard I have for intellectual property!
Bubba: I think that rather illuminates why metaphors can only get you so far. Every metaphor eventually breaks down. Nobody’s standing still or feeling complacent; really, if you must stick to the metaphor, I’d compare this more to taking the time to lower a lifeboat, first, as opposed to panicking and jumping headlong into the freezing waters. You may recall, but a good number of the people who died from the Titanic froze to death, rather than drowning.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 16 February 2008 @ 9:54 PM
No, Jason, I wasn’t being sarcastic. You are a leader, leading by example, not a cult leader to be blindly followed. Sharing the things you’re going through and the highs and lows helps us all. I’ve thought about rewilding for a long time, but I never set up a website to help others, and I haven’t had the courage of my convictions to really start rewilidng until recently, because I found your website. Reading your blog and thirty thesises lets me know that Im not alone and I’m not crazy. There’s a community out there that sees things the same way I do.
Comment by DancesWithHolepuncher — 16 February 2008 @ 11:01 PM
Sorry for the suspicion; I’ve found myself dogged by some fairly nasty trolls in the past, and it may have made me a bit cynical. I don’t know if I feel comfortable ever having the title of “leader,” but if my experience has helped you, I feel grateful for that. That alone vindicates this whole website and all the effort I’ve put into it. Thanks for letting me know; it feels good to know that my efforts haven’t failed.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 February 2008 @ 10:37 AM
Hey Jason, have you read this yet?
http://www.greenuniversity.net/Green_Economics/jobtrap.htm
Tom Elpel is one of the freest guys I know, and very practical about helping others to freedom. While I haven’t read it myself, I’ve heard his book “Direct Pointing to Real Wealth” is pretty good. Might be worth checking out.
Also, I’d like to respond a bit to Shane’s words about the “rewilding movement” being more theory than practice, by giving some links to a number of very practical rewilders around N. America. In my experience, rewilding is probably the most practice oriented “social movement” America has ever seen (also one of the smallest, but that’s probably just as it should be). I think this is especially true when compared to any of the political or religious movements that have occurred in America. Not even the hippies were as practically oriented as my experience of rewilders. Go to Rabbitstick or Rivercane Rendezvous or Feral Visions and there will be plenty of focus on practice.
Anyway, here are some links to practice-oriented folks (Just realize that the fact that I list a website here doesn’t mean I’m recommending it, rather I’m using it as an example of practice over theory…and btw, for those that know me, I’m no longer working for the Teaching Drum Outdoor School):
http://www.wildroots.org/index.php
http://www.dancinghawk.com/
http://www.ancestralways.net/about-us/
http://www.teachingdrum.org/
http://www.wolfjourney.com/
http://www.earthknack.com/internships.html
http://www.hollowtop.com/
http://www.foragersharvest.com/
http://nativeways.com/
http://www.trackersnw.com/html/pdx/immersion/adult_immersion.php
http://primitivepursuits.net/pp/index.htm
http://www.practicalprimitive.com/
Jason wrote: “Jon Young reminds people that you have to always come up to the boundaries of your comfort zone. If you don’t, you won’t make any progress; if you go much further than that, you push too hard and recoil.” And: “Not at all; you should never feel confident that anyone leads you. Basically, if you find yourself following someone, you’ve already set off in the wrong direction!”
Good points. In my experience it’s best to play with and surf comfort zones, as well as move with those who are going where we want to go and doing what we want to do — which is not the same thing as following a leader. Elders can be helpful, but elders are not leaders, and are best not followed on faith. The times when I’ve forgotten these principles have always (not always right away, but always at some point) caused setbacks in my process.
Comment by RedWolfReturns — 18 February 2008 @ 2:39 AM
Anytime you guys face some serious scrutiny you duck behind a semantic smoke screen. So Jason isnt a “leader” or “authority” because that would be coercive and oppressive and bad. So relabel him as an “advocate” if that is more palatable. Would anyone argue that Jason is advocating a paleolithic lifestyle as an adaptive strategy?
But my basic concern is that his position is based mostly on theory, derived mostly from historic examples, with very little modern day hands-on practice to back it up. Wouldnt it be much more convincing to give accounts of spending weeks or months at the very least subsisting in a real modern-day wilderness area? Or better yet suburban weedscapes? A sprig of foraged dandelion to go with your store bought grass fed steak is pretty unconvincing.
An afternoon of arts and crafts, eating more meat and buying a different brand of shoes is about all I have seen so far other than labyrinthine essays and “ancients did this/we will do this….later” non-sequitors.
You can take this as trolling and wave me away. Or you can take it as a stimulus to get serious, get active and test your theories. With the way the world is going this matter isn’t just an amusing mind-game anymore.
Comment by Shane — 18 February 2008 @ 3:08 AM
Shane, Jason doesn’t generally post about their “nitty-gritty” activities because there are already many websites doing that. In terms of this website, he prefers to focus on aspects of rewilding that don’t get as much attention. That doesn’t mean that Anthropik doesn’t get out for “dirt time”.
Seems to me like you’re making an unnecessary assumption.
Comment by jhereg — 18 February 2008 @ 7:45 AM
You can call it a semantic smokescreen, but the difference between and advocate and a leader is immense. I wouldn’t call Jason a leader, not because that would be “bad”, but because it wouldn’t be true. I, for one, am not a disciple of the church of Godesky (should that be G-desky?, go ahead, laugh, it might even be funny). I’m not convinced that Jason has made the case that Agriculture is impossible in the near(<500yr) term. While Jason certainly advocates in favor of a paleolithic lifestyle, he is much more likely to say to someone “go do that” than “come do this with me”. If many people are going down I-75, is the one in front the leader? Not in the sense that you used the word.
Since I’m feeling aphorstic today: Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. In some sense, you’re right. Jason presents on this website an anthropological, historic, and philosophical argument that a paleolithic lifestyle is:
a) The lifestyle we evolved to live
b) Preferable to our current society
and
c) Going to happen whether anyone likes it or not so be prepared.
Probably not. To show that something is possible is not the same as showing that it is either desirable or necessary.
Doesn’t that depend on what he is trying to convince you of?
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 18 February 2008 @ 12:34 PM
Red Wolf Returns: Sorry, sometimes the spam filter gets carried away. I saved your message here. No, I hadn’t read that link, but it sounds like Elpel says a lot of the same things I’ve told myself. Putting that into practice, getting into that “virtuous cycle” where you can create more time, well, that can present a little more of a challenge. I feel good to see some forward movement, but it’s taken some time to do it.
Shane: Firstly, I feel no reason to respond to this shallow straw man you’ve set up of what I “preach,” since we have a pretty clear record of that. What I actually wrote included things like this:
So why should I defy the things that I have actually said, simply to fulfill the shallow projection you’d care to cast this week? If you don’t mind, I think I’ll stick to the positions I’ve actually espoused, rather than the ones you’d like to shoe-horn me into.
As jhereg pointed out, I don’t talk much here about the practical things we do, because you’ll find no end of places that have already done that better. You may recall, when I began the “Storied Landscape” series, I mentioned that I had finally found something “practical” that you couldn’t get from a whole shelf of field guides and books at the nearest Barnes & Noble. If I tell you how I gathered a meal last weekend, and what foods I gathered, what have I told you that you couldn’t easily have found for yourself from far more reliable and thorough sources? And worse, if I tell you how wonderful fresh Queen Anne’s Lace tastes, and you decide based on that to go chomp on the roots of some Water Hemlock, suddenly I have legal culpability for that. Why would I waltz into that minefield, when I could only hope to reproduce what others have already done so well? Why should I waste my time duplicating that effort, when so much necessary ground remains completely untrod?
I do point out new things I try that might help others, though. Hence, this article. But you presume far too much if you think I write about even a tenth of the things I do in my own rewilding here. And I’ve never seen you there, so how would you know? Did you see my closet full of herbal remedies, that I gathered and prepared myself? Did you see the permaculture designs I’ve started to plant in the Clarion River watershed? Did you ever use my bowdrill? Walk in my moccasins? Tell me, Shane, what makes you think you know anything about me?
But let’s turn the tables. Tell me, Shane, what have you done? I know you have enough time to constantly nit-pick and harass us. I know that no matter how many times we debunk the same tired arguments, you’ll always come around to raise them again, as if we hadn’t already had that discussion a thousand times over. I know you have enough time to pester us over the internet like a gadfly, constantly buzzing about, never contributing anything of value, just doing your level best at all times to drag everything down. Do you honestly think that you offer “serious scrutiny”? You flatter yourself! “Serious scrutiny” would at least raise new points, if not always salient ones. I could understand the points you raised the first time; and then, having those rather easily answered, we could have moved on. I love serious scrutiny. But you don’t offer that, any more than a gadfly offers that. Repeating the same lame argument over and over again does not make it any more “serious.”
And if you think that only a “semantic smokescreen” separates a leader from an advocate, then your attention prior to buzzing about my head, little gadfly, appears even more superficial than I had thought.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 February 2008 @ 12:37 PM
Not quite what you’d asked for, but I’ve uploaded Jon Young’s Seeing Through Native Eyes and Advanced Bird Language to alt.binaires.sounds.mp3.spoken-word.
Enjoy!
Comment by shitbrain — 19 February 2008 @ 1:23 AM
hello,
i do not know if this is the right place to ask this… I am a regular reader of this blog,
and there have been a couple of questions coming to mind after reading so many of Jason’s excellent posts, and thinking about the ideas of the primitivist movement.
- feminism is a trend that soared mostly in Western countries post WWII. It made sense in our civilized, and somehow patriarchal background. Now do you think it will be possible to include ideas about equality of opportunities between men and women in the future rewilded cultures ? Has it been done before, in the examples you know of primitive cultures, past or present ?
- feminine emancipation was largely linked to the “vulgarization” and easier access to contraceptives. Chemical contraceptives might be somewhat dependant on petroleum-synthetized products, or maybe are already present in some plants. Some techniques are relatively “low-tech”, but might still require modern medecine (what we call “sterylet” in French, and “IUD” in English, I think). Anyway, have you heard of, or do you know, contraceptive techniques used by primitive peoples ? And pre-coïtal withdrawal does not count to me…
- have you ever thought of people who have disabilities ? Tom Brown Jr once claimed that one of his best students was blind. Here I am actually thinking of people who have genetic muscular diseases, with fragilized muscles, etc… Or even a hunter who has lost a leg… So have you ever thought of “particular cases” like these ? Have you got some knowledge of existing (past or present) primitive peoples who have handled these cases, with another approach thna bluntly killing the person… I mean, one of the good things about living in first-world countries middle class is that, provided some social care, a disabled person in a wheelchair can have (not always, unfortunately) chances to be somewhat autonomous in being able to eat, or to work (thus contributing to society, and getting money)…
I think that it is possible to keep some of the equalitarian values in the cultures we will create, even if those values never appeared before in previous primitive cultures. Do you think it makes sense to think of these questions ?
Speaking of values, I haven’t grasped the difference between horticulturalists and permaculture. Is there any ? Would you say the Hopi Indians were horticulturalists ? They were growing corn, after all.
Last, but not least, I have a really stupid question : can H-G/horticulturalist people catch a cold ? How do they handle that ?
Thanks for reading (at least)
J.V. maurice
Comment by Jean-Vivien Maurice — 19 February 2008 @ 6:10 AM
i’ll make an attempt to field at least some of these, tho’ Jason will be more able to provide concrete references (what can i say? i’m a poor scholar).
relationships between men & women tend to have a great deal to do with the lifestyle inherent to a culture. hunter/gatherers tend strongly to more egalitarian relationships than many other subsistence methods. horticulturalists tend to be matrilineal, if not entirely egalitarian.
in summary, female roles will inevitably change (as will male roles), but a patriarchal society rarely subsists via horticulture or h/g; they’re almost entirely pastoralist or agriculturalists or some combination thereof.
contraceptives and abortifacients are actually widely available to anyone who has the knowledge to find them. wild carrot, for example, appears to have an excellent track record. for more info, see this article: http://robinrosebennett.com/wild_carrot%20article.htm
NOTE: it’s very important that you be able to identify wild carrot w/ 100% accuracy before using it as there are similar plants that are toxic.
in summary, most “primitive” people have always had free access to birth control as the knowledge of how to use the plants in the area was common knowledge (at least among women).
well, i would think to a certain extent, people are generally healthier living as either h/g’s or horticulturalists, but, as we all know, shit happens. again, i’m a poor scholar, but i believe that we have considerable evidence that the disabled and elderly are generally well taken care of in h/g & horticultural societies. i know that there have been reported instances of senior citizens in such societies voluntarily sacrificing themselves (via ice floe or some such) when times are particularly tough. in the instances of which i’ve heard, these acts are accompanied by pleas of dissuasion from the younger folk.
in summary, h/g’s & horticulturalists tend to take care of their own and value contributions made by others who have different experiences and different insights (two things often associated w/ disabilities).
i wouldn’t call it a stupid question. and since, at the moment, my mom is barely insured and is fighting off an infection, i feel safe in saying that, again, handling it is somewhat different, but not terribly. again, understanding what different plants can do and how to prepare them can be critical. obviously, rest is important, along w/ fluids; but there are also a large number of immune system supporting plants out there, and many of them either grow wild or are easily cultivated as part of horticulture. i eventually convinced my mom to start taking a raw garlic preparation (raw garlic is one source of natural antibiotics). even tho she hasn’t completely recovered yet, it’s helped considerably.
i hope this helps. i apologize again for not providing much in the way of concrete references….
Comment by jhereg — 19 February 2008 @ 9:18 AM
well thank you for taking time to read & answer my post.
I usually agree with what you say, and here I’d like to belive you, the thing is I would be interested in finding references. This way people wont be able to invoke lack of sufficient studies to claim that primitive living was nasty, brutish and short.
I do not know if there are any en-masse studies of life expectancies, since it requires vast amounts of statistical data. Regarding the cold, I wonder if the environment where you lived, and the temperature scales, determined the likeness of succumbing to a cold. Modern studies of Kalahari bushmen are a specific case : I do not think you can catch a cold in the Kalahari (though i may be wrong). On the other hand, I do not know how well my ancestors living in Dordogne fared (south west of France is a temperate climate).
Comment by Jean-Vivien Maurice — 19 February 2008 @ 12:10 PM
Sgëno, Jean-Vivien! Thanks for your comments. If you don’t mind, I’ll just dive right in….
Wild people look out for each other, even as far back as the Neanderthals. Our examples of the deformed or handicapped left to die all come from civilized societies, like the Spartans. Mothers in wild cultures did sometimes commit infanticide, which they reckoned as a kind of abortion, but not on the basis of deformity or handicap. Sure, such members might slow you down in some respects, but in others, they can help greatly. Animists typically define power as a multiplicity of perspectives, so, like jhereg said, the deformed or handicapped may make excellent shamans, since they already have one unique perspective. Someone who can’t walk may have trouble moving from camp to camp, but he also can look after children while everyone else goes out to procure food. Our society has a bad habit of looking for the ways that people drag us down; wild cultures, by and large, look for ways that people can build us up. Maybe that has something to do with population, and how little one human life means when you have 6.5 billion others to choose from?
Ingold, T. 1994. From trust to domination: an alternative history of human-animal relations. In Animals and human society: changing perspectives, eds. A Manning and J Serpell. London: Routledge, pp 1-22.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 February 2008 @ 12:55 PM
I seem to recall that in Turnbull’s “The Forest People” there is some concern about the fate of a disabled girl in the camp. The girl had been treated by the villagers’ magic as well as by Western Medicine, if I recall correctly. A comment is made that the girl would eventually not be able to keep up and would be left to die. I’m not sure how much of that was Turnbull’s bias as opposed to being told to him by the tribe.
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 19 February 2008 @ 3:24 PM
Hey Jason
I do enjoy a good debate. I suspect we generate so much discord because we are actually pretty close in our views and aims compared to the broader human perspective, you for primitivism and me for horticulturalism (with a definite chance of genetic tech revolution changing some basic rules of the game).
Jason-”I think that permaculture, as a modern movement, has largely reinvented the horticultural wheel.”
That reminds me- did you hear the one about the primitivist that called the horticulturalist unoriginal?
I would like to clarify that my criticism was of what you write here, and my disappointment that you didnt discuss more practical experiments and activities in more detail. I didn’t make any deeper assumptions or inferences about what you actually do, just that your writings lack “quantification” (for want of a word with rounded corners). I know what I know about you based on your writings, and my criticisms were directed as such.
I sympathise and agree with the position that total rewilding is virtually impossible while business as usual continues That is one of the reasons I think it is a poor adaptive choice. Of course it is possible in theory, however getting from A to B might be more of a problem for the foreseeable future. Quantitative behavioural experiments in a modern (ie degraded) environment would at least give an indication of how possible rewilding would be when forced. Calories gathered and the human energy and time expended are likely to be the limiting factor to post collapse survival. Your emphasis seems to be on medicinal herbs and primitive technologies, which while useful are only part of the requirements for life. I looked through your “directory” to try and dispell my impression that there isnt much critical evaluation in the rewilding movement. The list seems to be mostly about tracking skills, “feral failure” and discussions on culture and society. Am I missing a resource set here?
I am very interested in the idea of semiwild “permaculture” plantings on abandoned land. I was considering starting a similar thing in my area as a last resort living pantry. Many of my current wind breaks (Canna and Cassava) serve a similar role. “Guerilla gardening” has been bounced around as an idea for a while now but I am yet to see any documented success stories. I suspect there is more to channeling an ecosystems growth to suit your ends than you would expect. Burning seems to play an important part (something I am pretty sure most neighbors would appreciate you experimenting with).
Turning the tables on me is not a problem, so I will summarise my current approach and situation. I have tried to structure my life so that is doesnt depend on a total and continuing collapse to be of value, and that it wont leave me bitter and resentful if the collapse never comes in my lifetime.
Firstly I am 30 years old, living in subtropical eastern Australia, and trained as a research scientist. I gave it up when I judged there was a good chance the conditions supporting such a supply chain dependent career weren’t likely to persist (plus being a researcher is getting more horrid by the year as economies “rationalise”). I considered buying some fertile land with friends, but given the property bubble realised the better option was to facilitate my baby boomer parents moving out of the suburbs and into a rural acreage (they save me from a mortgage and I save them from the retirement home). That way there is no debt vulnerability and the close ties and like mindedness bind us together effectively. My sister lives in the same village with her young family so the family is further extended, giving extra incentive to generate a food supply. I currently walk to the train and work four days a week in the nearby city as a lab administrator, reducing my direct oil dependence. I would classify myself as relatively healthy and physically fit, though my physiology seems reactive to certains foods (additives, unfermented dairy and gluten, high oxalate/salicylate fruit and veg). I keep my health and physical work load at a fairly even keel on the farm and happily loosen soil (never turn) and hoe weeds all weekend long.
The farm itself is 2 acres on relatively fertile decomposed basaltic soil, ~60myo. Not quite the stereotypical depleted aussie soil, but not quite mekong river delta sediment either. We get around 1500-2000 mm of rain a year, traditionally mostly in the summer, so water is more often in excess than deficit. We get the occasional light frost. I have a half acre orchard of fruit and nut trees that I am currently part way through cultivating the rows between the trees to grow field crops. Early trials in the last two season put the yields of grains at around 1 tonne/acre equivalent (basic subsistence level yields for most grains), which means if we cultivated the whole 1 acre paddock we could feed 4 people per year (allowing half the time for fallow). We are trialling muscovy ducks to graze the green manure rotations in this space.
The top acre has a 400 sq m vegetable garden, split between summer and winter ends to allow a 5 month green manure crop at alternating ends. Part of that crop helps feed the chickens, but they still depend on store bought bulk grain for now. The rest of the top acre is under ornamental gardens, some lawn for access, and structures. The ornamental gardens are earmarked for conversion to food production if essential. We have installed 30 000L of rainwater storage capacity that can be gravity fed to the food gardens, but the first crops grew well with no supplementary irrigation in 2007.
In the first year of growing crops in just the 400 sq m veggie garden we produced 5-10% of the family’s calorific needs. Shifting the root crops and grains to the orchards in the next couple of years will increase this to around 50%, but production levels need to be balanced with time required for work and cash flow. In an all out collapse scaling up to 100% shouldnt be too much of a stretch. The gardens are all being prepared with solarising plastic (first up to kill the kikuyu) and hand tools. The veggie garden was done completely with hand tools to give me a sense of the work involved (hard but not too arduous if you are patient). I am adding copra, bran and calcium/magnesium rock dusts to the soil to build up fertility to begin with. Gentle swales and shelter belts are in place to minimise soil and water run off. We are about to install a composting toilet to close the nutrient cycle in future, but already collect urine for the green manure crops (which makes them go off like a rocket). I am convinced by Fukuoka and others experiments (with quantification) that resting land regularly restores much of its fertility. I suspect the energy percolating into the soil acts to bring up deeper nutrient reserves from the subsoil as we know now the microbial community goes down for hundreds of meters. Cultivating soil with sensitivity can increase its fertility over time.
This week I am launching a staple crop gathering initiative with our local permaculture group. The aim is to source enough genetic diversity within suitable staple crops to allow genuine self sufficiency if a future crisis hits (the movements emphasis mostly on low calorie vegetables so far). I have already grown buckwheat, amaranth, barley, wheat, sorghum, kidney beans, cowpeas, kumara, potato, parsnip, pumpkin etc toward this project.
My typical personal diet is something like- Breakfast- bowl of fruit with spoon of cultured plain yoghurt, sourdough fermented oat and buckwheat porridge. Lunch- mashed root vegetables with steamed/fresh veggies, boiled eggs or a legume/rice dish. Dinner-seasonal veg with weekly/biweekly meat (fish, kangaroo, lamb). I have given up on eating out due to the unavoidable additives and low quality ingredients. Of the typical ingredients in a day the fruit is bought (own trees still coming on), red meat is bought (but fish comes from our local lake that has a 100% uncontaminated catchment), vegetables are three quarters home grown, and grains and legumes are bought in bulk from a biodynamic source, and cooked in bulk to save time and energy.
In addition to the farming I have made a mental map of all the areas within a days walk from the farm that have a useful supply of wild root vegetables. Locally we have wild Cannas, Alpinia gingers and a starchy rooted swamp fern. These are of the dig-roast-eat kind so practicing eating them is a fair way down my priority list. Reintroducing wild yams has been an idea, even mass planting Macadamias and Carobs as street trees.
My expectation is that for the foreseeable future we will face more of the same trends, dropping real incomes, increasing price of living (especially food), increasing burden of stress and associated disease, declining job security and infrastructure. A distinct and complete collapse that makes rewilding a viable option may not happen until after we are long gone-the current system does have a lot of momentum and indulgences it can whittle down first. In the mean time we have to survive the steadily increasing mundane stresses, which in my view means successfully covering all bases.
Buying bulk grains is probably going to be possible and economical (or the most economical option) for people for quite some time, but very few people know how to cook with them from scratch. Sharon Astyk is right on the ball with this issue. We have lost the cultural legacy that allowed us to turn relatively inedible plant products into relatively nutritious food. Much of what HGers ate needed extensive careful preparation, so I don’t think it is unreasonable to put fermenting grains in a similar catagory of basic life skills for everyone.
That about sums me up, but feel free to grill me further. I see the most likely future scenario as a crappier version of today, so the answer is only a partial disconnection from the reigning economic system.
1. Reduce discretionary spending (get out of debt)
2. Work less (generate more free time)
3. Cook from scratch (save money, eat better)
4. Reskill (health, repairs, mechanical, etc)
5. Socialise (mutually supportive networks)
6. Garden (if circumstances allow)
Comment by Shane — 20 February 2008 @ 1:06 AM
I have read the Thesis #25, which provides more references. Is there any good (scientific ?) book you would recommend for a starter, on the same subjects (quality of life, social standards, etc…) ?
Do you also know a good book for starters about horticulture as practised by primitive peoples ? With anthropological and practical examples… I have started to read Holmgren’s “Permaculture Principles & Pathways towards sustainability” and find it good on a systemic level, but not on the practical level : it does not give examples of “Guilds”, or does not list plants which have deep roots as opposed to plants which have surface roots, etc… It is also very succinct on soil sciences aspects. And it seems to focus mainly on one type of service you can get from the ecosystem : food. This is what most permaculturists have in mind when they speak, and i understand that, since most of their speech intervenes in the context of energy descent, and by extent of food supply problems. But still it would be nice to have more thorough guidelines on how to manage ecosystems in a permaculture way : include other services (not just food, but medecine, clothing, etc) in permaculture designs.
I think the Bookstore on this website has too many books for me, and the books have no review… I am not a fast reader, this is why I am asking for advice here.
Thank you
Comment by Jean-Vivien Maurice — 20 February 2008 @ 5:33 AM
Jean-Vivien:
I recently started a thread to collect links for perma/horticultural methods & techniques on the rewild.info site. You can find the thread here: http://www.rewild.info/conversations/index.php?topic=741.0
As for books, I would first recomment Toby Hemenway’s “Gaia’s Garden”. As for perma/horticultural handling of more than just food, I’m not aware of any single comprehensive source, however, you may want to visit the Plants For a Future site here: http://www.pfaf.org/
it does a pretty good job of cataloging a wide variety of uses for a wide variety of plants. Bear in mind that not all of the info you find on that site will necessarily be of the kind resulting from direct experience, as that would be quite a tall order indeed!
If you’d like something fairly concrete to start with, you may want to review Emilia Hazelip’s methods here: http://fukuokafarmingol.info/faemilia.html
Shane:
hmm, so, do you necessarily see what you’re currently doing as mutually exclusive of primitivism? It seems as if you do, but, with the exception of the grain fields, I don’t understand why. We speak of foragers and horticulturalists, but it seems to me as if the line between them is more fluid than you imply.
In fact, what you suggest:
really doesn’t seem to me to be mutually inclusive or exclusive of primitivism. For the near term at least, you can start to “opt out” of the system w/ or w/o attempting to rewild. I think primitivists just generally think that rewilding supports and encourages that process.
Also, as something of a side note, you seem to imply that primitivists will become “bitter and resentful” if the collapse never comes in their lifetime. It probably doesn’t need to be said, but, if you really do think that, then I should let you know that many primitivists would pursue this path regardless of collapse.
Comment by jhereg — 20 February 2008 @ 9:53 AM
Jean-Vivien –
I suspect that you will have trouble finding a permaculture resource that tells you explicitly what to plant…. because that is entirely dependent on your immediate ecology. What I have done… here in the US there is a web resource that lists the native ecologies existing(or once existing) throughout the country. I have pulled from there the native plant lists of each ecology in my immediate area. Then I go to another site that lists plants by family and genera and look for edible/medicinal etc plants that are of the same family and combine them in a way that is functional for my my purposes………. it is a long and tedious process, and may or may not actually grow well as I have combined them. But permaculture (fortunately or not) is a very individual process… what does your land need, what does your (micro) climate support and what do you want/need to accomplish with your garden design… and then testing it out to see if it really does work……..
I’d suggest a web search looking for similar resources for your part of the world….
Good Luck!
Janene
Comment by Janene — 20 February 2008 @ 10:28 AM
Janene,
While that seems to be the opinion of the permaculture books that I have read, I disagree. There are countless resources dealing with annual garden plants and how to best interplant and rotate them (See e.g. Square Foot Gardening, Weedless Gardening, etc.). There is no reason that such a resource could not be developed for perennial plants and mixed gardens as well.
Certainly, any generic plan is going to have caveats based on soil type, water availability and other environmental factors. Those types of caveats exist in annual gardening books as well and they are perfectly willing to suggest plants.
It seems to me that there is no legitimate reason for the refusal of permaculture proponents to provide concrete examples of designs and alternatives to give the interested amateur a start in the right direction.
The books and articles I’ve read, though admittedly few in number, have all been long on philosophy and short on specifics. I find that to be terribly unfortunate as it leads to many people who would otherwise try to have a permaculture garden to just give it up and do something else.
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 20 February 2008 @ 11:19 AM
See Above, RE: Emilia Hazelip. Not all encompassing, nor is it completely transferrable, neither is that method of “jump-starting” someone into the field used often enough, but….
It’s a good place to start for temperate areas with relatively mild winters, and a decent place to start in climates not too different.
Comment by jhereg — 20 February 2008 @ 11:27 AM
Greetings folks, the anonymous freelancer post above was from me. Sorry about that, don’t know what happened.
Jean-Vivien: Just wanted to share a link to a book called Hygieia. It’s got nearly anything you’d want to know about women’s herbal reproductive health, including herbal abortions, contraception, and permanently shutting down your body’s reproductive capacity (I can’t think of the word for that at the moment).
A note about permaculture… it’s worth bearing in mind that permaculture is a business, with its own business model that requires practitioners and teachers to complete a certain amount of training before they are allowed to use the word “permaculture” in their materials. The goal of books and the like is not only to share information, but to serve as the primary marketing vehicle promoting permaculture classes and teachers who have invested a ton of money into learning the skill. The permaculture design process may even have some sort of patent. Not that any of this takes away from permaculture’s usefulness, but there may be internal marketing reasons, or even international legal reasons, why permaculture writers can’t be more specific in their writings.
Comment by Paula — 20 February 2008 @ 1:31 PM
Jhereg,
Thanks for the pointer. An interesting plan, very similar to what we have growing (however, we rotate the tomatos) but it doesn’t address the issue of perennial plants and trees. The perennial aspect of permaculture is what interests me.
Also, the author’s claim of perpetual soil health without returning nutrients seems impossible to me. Every leaf or ripened fruit you remove from the garden to eat removes a certain amount of nutrient from the soil. Without returning that in any way the soil is going to degrade. That degradation might be slowed by leaving the roots and plant matter in/on the beds but it will still happen.
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 20 February 2008 @ 2:25 PM
JimFive,
It’s a starting place, that’s all. How are you going to establish perennials, if you’re struggling with the needs of annuals?
Besides which, isn’t one of the principles of permaculture to “get a crop”? So, I say, start with annuals.
In terms of extending it and getting into perennials… I agree with Janene.
There’s a certain amount you can say, like, if you have a site that’s wet, fairly rich and in zones 5-7, you could establish pawpaws, bamboo, willow, meadowsweet, cattails, etc, etc. But, there’s already resources that allow you to get that info w/o requiring someone to compile it for each region.
The Plants For A Future database is a great resource for that. They have quite a few “canned” queries that can help get someone started: http://www.ibiblio.org/pfaf/D_canned.html
With the diversity of situations -soil, climate, water, plant options, native/available wildlife, etc.- I just don’t think anything more comprehensive is all that feasible. The best we can do is try to find some angle from which we can start to see how perma/horticultural principles can be utilized on a given site, then start rolling with it. It’s a creative, living process that requires becoming aware of existing relationships and forming meaningful new ones. Think of it as an ongoing negotiation with the land.
As for soil fertility, sure, eventually. But we’re not going to follow any advice that says to never return nutrients to the soil anyway, right?
Comment by jhereg — 20 February 2008 @ 3:45 PM
Ok,
thank you all…
The Hazelip article is indeed a great starter. Has anyone got a similar article, but for medicinal gardening ? I am actually happy since Hazelip is French (cocorico !). Another (good ?) French specialist of interest for the tribe of Anthropik would be the ethnobotanist François Couplan. I have one of his books about plant recognition at home, which is fairly decent. See http://www.couplan.com/ (in French)
I have done a bit of research today. i have found a technique using raised beds and irrigation channels, called waru warn or waru waru. Have you heard of it in your anthropological studies ? Would it classify as horti/perma-culture ?
And… about the books in the bookstore : has someone from the Tribe of Anthropik already read all of them ? In other words, are there in it books you recommend because you have read them, or are there also books you have added because they are popular ?
It is a bit overwhelming since a lot of them seem to overlap in subjects, and not all of us have time to read all of them. Maybe redividing them into “essentials” and “for digging” categories would be a good thing
Comment by Jean-Vivien Maurice — 20 February 2008 @ 5:26 PM
Hi Jhereg
I got the impression from Jason that he sees primitivism, horticulture and agriculture as catagorically different paths (at least based on sociological characteristics), though I have always maintained that virtually all modern societies seem to engage in all three to different extents. Japan hunts fish, manages forests and cultivates rice. Russians gather mushrooms, manage pastures and cultivate potatos. This is what has been frustrating for me in going head to head with Jason as the difference seems to lie in the balance between the options along the spectrum we think is ideal or achievable or adaptive to future pressures, with us both tending in the same direction away from the current dominant paradigm.
I maintain that eating bulk grains is so ridiculously cheap for now and for the foreseeable future that it is worth doing if the potential health hazards are managed (ie whole grain, avoid rancid oils, fermentation, limited place in diet). The money saved on staples can be redirected into high quality meat (probably the main thing few of us can hunt/produce ourselves in quantity).
Permaculture style home agriculture is my main emphasis beyond that, with a view to it having the potential to provide most of our food on a 5-10 year time scale. The criticisms I have leveled at primitivism for a lack of hard up to date data are identical to those I level at permaculture. I think it has become a bit of a wishy-washy money making cult to some degree and has lost opportunities to do its own hard minded self evaluation (or at least to communicate the results). Writers like Fukuoka are far more useful as they describe what they do in detail and measure the results. Like most modern environmentally related words of the last decade its original meaning has been misappropriated and diluted by the passage of time. Personally I don’t think anything in life should imagine itself to be permanent or sustainable- that is pure hubris. The capacity for transformation and renewal is more vital, and industrial society may yet make another transition to a biotech and renewable energy system in the future, but the medium term outlook for everyday people isnt so rosy.
Primitivism I see as the default last resort strategy, something that agriculturalists/horticulturalists do on the side, for specialty resources like medicinal herbs, and during times of crop failure (a common enough strategy in agricultural societies, carob pods in the mediterranean, burdock roots in Japan for example). Keeping livestock like pigs is a useful buffer as when times get tough you can eat the pig then eat the pigs food. It isnt only HGers who can eat further down the food chain to survive lean times.
Primitivism seems like the option that needs less preparation and investment than agriculture/horticulture, and the option that is less competitive if the conditions remain supportive for other people to continue horticulture/agriculture. In short it relies on a dramatic collapse, which I don’t think we are likely to see in our lifetimes.
So my strategy is-
1. Make the most of industrial agriculture carefully for the short term (re-discover food preparation skills)
2. Invest in self driven low input agriculture for the medium term (rediscover agricultural horticultural skills)
3. Invest a little in primitivism as a final safety net for the long term (rediscover some primitivist skills).
In a related follow up I found an amazing news story. They have discovered that gene copy number differs between so called identical twins. For those that didnt see the earlier post under “hairy cave men” about the emerging understanding of the processes of human evolution. I explained how gene copy number and activity for human salivary amylase varies widely and appears to have shifted rapidly and repeatedly through human expansion in response to diet (eg asians have high copy number (rice), inuit have low (seal), incas have high (corn), despite ancestry of radiation in that order). Anyway the new article shows that identical twins have differing copy number for genes, again showing that generation of genetic diversity is very rapid, allowing rapid evolution. It also fits with the multiple populations where human lactase has been upregulated in response to a dairy rich diet. So in short humans can adapt to their dietary (and other) demands very rapidly.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080215121214.htm
I also found that humans do produce phytase, but at a level around 30 fold less than rats. If phytate was a problem then surely we would have just produced more of it by a similar mechanism.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1375699
Comment by Shane — 20 February 2008 @ 10:47 PM
Hi Shane,
You said:
I think we may have just found a decent chunk, or at least a strong marker, of our “discontent”. Obviously, primitivism is a frightfully broad stroke to generalize about, but, as I understand Jason’s position (and, Jason, if I’m wrong, please tell me! sometimes, I feel like I’m putting words in your mouth, which I don’t really like to do, but esp when I’m worried I’m putting the wrong words in your mouth) primitivism (as practiced by Anthropik specifically, and the rewilding movement generally) encompasses both hunter/gatherer societies and horticultural societies and recognizes that there is a spectrum between the two along which any given “primitive” society could fall. I agree that Anthropik emphasizes the hunter/gatherer end of that spectrum, but I don’t see how the horticultural end is excluded (even if often viewed as an experiment).
My own opinion of which to emphasize is to consult your own, personal situation, with an eye for adaptability. I intend to move towards a fairly balanced strategy (with annual & perennial crops as well as hunting, fishing, trapping, foraging/wildcrafting, etc) and am willing to tilt either way, as needed.
As for “primitive” skills, those are generally common to both types of societies. I’m not aware of any horticultural society that didn’t forage and hunt, and I think I recall Jason supporting that.
Re: Fukuoka
At a broad stroke, I agree. I find much more use in Fukuoka’s methods than I do in Holmgren’s or Mollison’s, but there are exceptions (Hemenway, for example). But, at the brass tack level, I can’t really say there’s this huge enormous difference between the two.
As far as livestock goes, I think there may well be opportunities for semi-domesticated livestock (I’m thinking of pigs in oak/chestnut woods or ducks/geese in many perma/horticultural systems), but I’m much less convinced of full-blown domestication. I’ll admit part of my hesitation is philosophical, rather than practical, but not all of it. Domesticated livestock do require more work, and they make a much nicer target for raiders.
Lastly, have you read Why Words Matter? (http://anthropik.com/2007/06/agriculture-or-permaculture-why-words-matter/)
It seems like you conflate agriculture with horticulture, which, in some ways seems very odd to me, as I’m much more likely to conflate horticulture with hunting & gathering.
Comment by jhereg — 21 February 2008 @ 9:03 AM
Jean-Vivien,
I vaguely remember reading about waru-waru 2-3 years ago, but don’t recall the details. Perhaps I should revist it, as I’ve learned much in that time and I may understand it better now.
Unfortunately, I haven’t found anything similar to Hazelip’s starting beds for medicinals.
btw, I found the Couplan site to be very intriguing, thank you.
Comment by jhereg — 21 February 2008 @ 11:35 AM
Hey –
Jim — Part of the reason I disapprove of extensive ‘permaculture designs’ being provided by book is that, for me, a huge component of utilizing pc is diversity. Last thing we need is a whole community planting the same six guilds throughout their property, neh?
I know that there are a lot of such books for annuals, but perennials add a couple distinct levels of complexity. Not least that perennials need to be considered in terms of where in their life cycle they exist as well as what they are to begin with…. the first year you plant a perennial, a bush or a tree is going to be a far different design than when the same plant is mature or aged…..
But at the same time, working it out for yourself can really teach you a lot about your landbase. When I started researching for my old property I found that within my 3/4 acre I had the arboreal base for three very closely related micro-ecologies from my particular region. So the plan was to allow the property to develop along the lines of all three, with many overlapping edges and then allow the land to decide what works best. I was very excited about it all (Unfortunately I am no longer there, so I am back to square one both on learning and developing…..)
As far as building soil health…. In a well established, healthy system, most of the soil health issues are addressed by microbes. It may take a decade(s) to get there, but once you have firmly established a high percentage of perennials with appropriate wild/self seeding annuals, the soil health *should* take care of itself. After all, animals don’t run around the forest and intentionally fertilize! However, this is remembering that our own digestive cycle needs to be *part of* our lands cycle…….
Shane –
Jason has repeatedly affirmed that HG — Horticulture — Agriculture is a spectrum. With that in mind, agriculture has one *very important* and distinct boundary point — the point where diminishing returns kicks in. As long as one stays below that boundary point, it is (at least in theory) a sustainable system. However, by its very nature, unsustainability is inevitable above that point.
With that in mind, one of the big questions remaining (although I *think* Jason and many others are already convinced)… does growing grains inevitably push a culture/community across that boundary and into diminishing returns? I suspect it probably will in most if not all cases. So if any given food system is based upon grains, so I suspect it won’t be long before any ’sustainable’ practices are pushed aside in response to the needs of grain………
On the flip, when a community literally relies on H-G food stuffs as a significant component of their annual caloric needs (preferably — or perhaps necessarily — in the form of ‘a little every day’ rather than seasonally), that has the mechanistic benefit of creating a literal cap on population and therefore goes a long way toward guaranteeing sustainability… not because what you are doing *today* will always be sustainable, but because the group is absolutely immersed in and responsive too the changing ecology around them.
So a little more than 2c, but hey… you know
Janene
Comment by Janene — 21 February 2008 @ 11:37 AM
Jhereg,
For me, the point of getting into permaculture would be to get away from annuals. I don’t want to have to care for a garden.
So instead you require everyone to compile it for themselves every time. An endless reinvention of the wheel.
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 21 February 2008 @ 12:54 PM
Hey Jim –
But that’s the point… its not “A” wheel… what’s the point of de-industrializing if you want to continue to use industrial thinking?
Sorry… not trying to be snarky, so I hope it does not come out that way……….
Janene
Comment by Janene — 21 February 2008 @ 1:02 PM
Janene,
First, I doubt that neighbors, even working together would end up with the same design.
Secondly, even if the whole community did that would be better than what we have now.
So you have to plan ahead. I think that is an argument in favor of producing those references, not against it.
Part of the reason that I haven’t started a permaculture project is that I don’t have the time, inclination, or knowledge to spend what amounts to a year planning out what are probably meaningless details about the land that I have in order to create some one-off design that may or may not work.
If I could look up, for example, designs centered around apple trees and read specifics about what worked and what didn’t instead of having to wade through a bunch of philosophical rhetoric ro find vague references to deep-rooted and shallow-rooted plants then I would be able to determine if I have a suitable site (which I don’t but that’s beside the point)
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 21 February 2008 @ 1:02 PM
Janene,
If you wish to substitute bow-drill for wheel in the above be my guest.
But, you’re right, it’s worse. It’s more like requiring everyone to discover fire on their own as some sort of initiation ritual.
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 21 February 2008 @ 1:07 PM
JimFive,
I don’t think it’s as bad as that. Janene’s original tack of looking at native plants, then work out from there is entirely doable and comes with a reasonable assurance of success. Neither is it entirely one-off, it’s just not entirely transferrable either.
There certainly are some documented guilds, but their transferability is questionable. Here’s a White Oak/Hazel guild:
This is great stuff, and if you happen to be in PNW, it’s probably just about perfect. But the more you leave those conditions, the more you’ll need to deviate from that specific guild. I just can’t think of a way around that.
Here’s an apple guild that’s probably more transferrable:
But if you live an area with few/no deer, you’re probably better off with something other than daffodils….
There seem to be plenty of places to start.
Comment by jhereg — 21 February 2008 @ 1:35 PM
From my horoscope today:
*sighs*
I thought those weren’t supposed to be accurate!
Comment by jhereg — 21 February 2008 @ 1:49 PM
Shane,
You wrote:
“I would like to clarify that my criticism was of what you write here, and my disappointment that you didnt discuss more practical experiments and activities in more detail. I didn’t make any deeper assumptions or inferences about what you actually do, just that your writings lack “quantification”.”
What you’re doing sounds great, and I think your point of view deserves consideration. And I, for one, don’t disagree with nary a single word you said in defense of horticulture (nor am I sure that Jason does, although I’ve only recently discovered this blog and don’t know his views in great detail). But criticizing someone else because they’re not doing what you’re doing is a little like critiquing a poem for not being a novel or a horror film for not being a romantic comedy. Why the fuck does it matter to you if Jason doesn’t discuss “practical experiments” or that he (in your mind) lacks “quantification”? If you want to read about “practical experiments” and topics with more “quantification”, then find another blog to read. And just because he isn’t writing about the topics YOU think he should be writing about doesn’t mean he’s wrong or that what he’s doing isn’t of any value. That’s not only messed-up and fallacious reasoning, it’s also really fucking rude–and trollish!
YOU can write all you want about “practical experiments”, and I hope you do. But, the harsh reality is that most people are so brainwashed by mainstream culture that they could care less about “practical experiments”. The stuff Jason writes about is likely to find more of an audience. Moreover, not all things boil down to quantifiable proof. If you don’t like theory, then quit reading it. But your personal taste doesn’t determine whether something has truth or value. Some of what you wrote–the defense of horticulture, etc.–is worth reading about, but, frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass about what your personal tastes are, especially when they’re being used to insult someone else’s articulate and well-reasoned opinion. That isn’t criticism; it’s just bitching.
Comment by Shane — 21 February 2008 @ 2:07 PM
hmm, so I guess we’re officially beyond the realm of meaningful dialogue.
that’s a shame.
Comment by jhereg — 21 February 2008 @ 2:36 PM
Jhrereg,
Yeah, it’s a shame. But the dialogue about horticulture is meaningful. Statements like this, however:
“An afternoon of arts and crafts, eating more meat and buying a different brand of shoes is about all I have seen so far other than labyrinthine essays and “ancients did this/we will do this….later” non-sequitors.”
are meaningless, inflammatory, and amount to nothing more than name calling. If you want a meaningful dialogue, why are you defending such statements–if, in fact, you are?
Comment by Shane — 21 February 2008 @ 2:54 PM
Hey guys, more power to Shane. I think it’s legitimate to question whether Jason can “walk the walk.” Lurkers like me are trying to figure out the best survival strategy. It’s fair to question whether Jason’s escape plan is hollow theory. The way he responded to Shane with mocking and ridicule was a disgrace.
Comment by Soulman — 21 February 2008 @ 4:08 PM
I think Shane (the other Shane) started the mocking and ridicule. And, yeah, of course it’s okay to question whether Jason’s escape plan is hollow theory–with legitimate criticism and with rational and articulate thought rather than name-calling. I frankly know very little about Jason’s theories, as I’ve just discovered this blog–so I’m not defending Jason; I’m not taking sides–but I am calling out Shane’s method of discourse as inflammatory and “hollow”. I know very little about Jason’s theories, but I know “hollow” criticism when I see it (and I’m not saying, necessarily, that all of Shane’s criticisms were hollow; his third comment didn’t bother me–was even informative on some levels). If you want to know if Jason can “walk the walk” then ask him, for Christ’s sake; don’t assume he can’t because he’s not writing about that subject and then call him names because of it.
Comment by Shane — 21 February 2008 @ 4:39 PM
Shane was mocking and ridiculing? Where? His basic concern was this:
“But my basic concern is that his position is based mostly on theory, derived mostly from historic examples, with very little modern day hands-on practice to back it up”
That’s spot on. I’ve thought the same thing. It’s a legitimate concern that should be addressed. I think Shane touched a nerve so now he’s being mocked and ridiculed.
But the important thing is to address his concern. Didn’t Jason write not long ago that he had trouble even making a campfire the last time he and his wife went camping? What does he really know about primitive living?
Comment by Soulman — 21 February 2008 @ 5:04 PM
“Shane was mocking and ridiculing? Where?”
I already told you where, Soulman. I gave one specific example and could easily have included most everything he wrote in his first two comments. And implying that someone can’t “walk the walk” (according to your standards, I’m sure), as you’ve done, is equally disrespectful.
You wrote:
“His basic concern was this:
“But my basic concern is that his position is based mostly on theory, derived mostly from historic examples, with very little modern day hands-on practice to back it up”
First of all, I didn’t call that question out as being mocking and ridiculing. Second, saying that something is based mostly on theory AND derived mostly from historic examples is a contradiction. It’s not “spot on”, as you say. Third, primitivism is an extremely vast subject, and you don’t need to have expertise in every facet of it in order to participate in the discussion. I don’t see how knowledge about building a fire qualifies or disqualifies you to write about fox walking or tribal violence or gift economies, etc.. Has Jason ever written a post about how to build a fire? If so, then your criticism might have some merit. On the other hand, writing about patterns of violence within primitive communities, for example, does require some knowledge of historical examples. And writing about fox walking requires first-hand practice, which, as the post indicates, Jason has.
Comment by Shane — 21 February 2008 @ 5:44 PM
I’m sure Shane meant that Jason’s position is based on a combination of theory and historical example. I understood his point. People don’t always express themselves clearly but I’m not gonna quibble over words. The point is Jason’s position is hardly supported by Jason’s experience.
Keep in mind the context. We’re not talking about academic anthropological debates. The context of this debate is the question: what is the best strategy for survival as civilization collapses? We all know Jason’s point of view. But does a guy with so little experience really know what he’s talking about? He could be grossly underestimating the difficulty of living a forager lifestyle. We’re not playing games here. How we answer the question above will mean life or death.
I’m sorry you feel I’m being disrespectful but there’s much at stake here. This is a life or death subject.
Comment by Soulman — 21 February 2008 @ 6:55 PM
If you’re asking me (and, you’re probably not), I’d say “take it or leave it”.
You’ve piqued my curiousity with this question, tho’. I’m wondering what kind of “credentials” or “proof” you would want before being convinced that a hunter/gatherer lifestyle would be an adequate response to collapse? What about for a horticultural lifestyle? Pastoral? Agricultural?
Comment by jhereg — 21 February 2008 @ 7:41 PM
To clarify, we have two Shanes here now. You all know Shane-Who-Voids-Genesis, who posted the earlier comments, and frequently posts here, though usually, as I’ve noted before, with the same questions, regardless of how many times we answer them. He also posts over on Fabulous Forager, where he tries to discourage Giuli from posting much of anything, and that part makes me angry, anger you’ve seen displayed here. The newer Shane, Shane-Who-Undoes-Himself, does not seem to like Shane-Who-Voids-Genesis, and has largely echoed my own opinion of Shane-Who-Voids-Genesis, though I’ll admit, I did a double-take at the name, too. Ironic, but don’t confuse them!
That said, let me address your concerns first, Soulman. No, I did not write any time recently about any difficulties getting a campfire going. You may have recently read a report I made some two years ago, when I had difficulty getting a fire started, largely because we had waited too long, so it got dark, and it had rained all day. But I would not call two years ago recent. But more to the point, you say, “It’s fair to question whether Jason’s escape plan is hollow theory,” and I agree. But how will my behavior tell you whether or not it all amounts to hollow theory? Let me put it this way: let’s assume that Shane-Who-Voids-Genesis pegged me completely. I know nothing of the outdoors. I can’t tell an oak from a pine tree. I’ve never so much as slept on the ground. How would that tell you whether or not what I’ve said has truth to it, or simply amounts to hollow theory? You still have two possibilities: that either the theory holds true and I simply act like a hypocrite, or it doesn’t, and I never even tried. Whether or not I act like an outrageous hypocrite will not change that. By the same token, if I could track mice over bare rock and lived completely off of hunted meat and gathered plants, my only contact with civilization coming from a public library I check into once in a while to post online, would that change anything? I don’t think it would: we all know that people have lived in such ways in the past, and that some continue to do so now. Another example wouldn’t prove anything about the theories I’ve advanced. Does my own fox walking tell you anything whatsoever about the way energy travels up your leg when your foot lands on the ball versus the heel? No, I fear nothing about my lifestyle, one way or the other, will ever help you to know what strategy offers the best chance of survival. The world doesn’t let you off easy like that; you don’t get to abdicate the responsibility to decide for yourself, and simply put that on someone else’s shoulders. Others can make suggestions, offer advice, and even marshal evidence to support their points, but at the end of the day, only the evidence gathered for an argument can tell you whether or not it holds any truth, not what the person telling you that argument does or says or thinks. It always comes down to you: do you find the argument convincing? Do you find the evidence compelling? Do you think it holds truth? What I believe, or what I do, won’t help you in that one bit.
But, I will agree with you on this, Soulman: I let my anger get the better of me, and that disgraces me. I beg apology of Shane-Who-Voids-Genesis, and of everyone who reads this thread. I should not have given in to my anger in such a way. So, by way of apology, I will try to address those concerns here in a more calm and respectful manner.
First, I expect that we can all agree that we should question here how well my behavior fits into my points of view, as I have stated them, and not others’ points of view, however often we may find them projected onto me, or me stereotyped into them. After all, if I fail to live by ideas that I have quite explicitly disavowed, that does not make me a hypocrite; on the contrary, it makes me consistent. It would make me a hypocrite if I did uphold behaviors I had explicitly disavowed! In that vein, I have made no secret of the fact that I believe that full primitivism, at the current moment, lies somewhere between “difficult” and “impossible.” I said this precisely in “Where Have All the Savages Gone?,” an article I wrote almost two years ago, in which I considered the plight of the modern primitivist. I noted there that, because civilization continues growing, life outside of it remains impossible; however, I also noted that civilization will not grow for much longer, which will mean that a window of opportunity will soon open where rewilding will not only become possible, it will become adaptive. Granted, this necessarily means that at present, my contention cannot help but remain purely theoretical: after all, it makes a claim about the future, not the present. It prescribes a course of action—begin rewilding sooner, rather than later—but according to my own, previously-published account, we should not expect present endeavors to really succeed, at least not for very long. Jhereg commented upthread, “many primitivists would pursue this path regardless of collapse.” To this I would add that, in my view, collapse does not provide the impetus for rewilding, it provides the promise that rewilding can succeed. Since civilization cannot coexist with any other form of society, trying to establish another form of society requires the failure of civilization. Collapse opens the window of opportunity for rewilding.
I have also stated my thoughts on hunting and gathering, horticulture and agriculture equally explicitly, in “Agriculture or Permaculture: Why Words Matter.” Though published only last summer, it simply recapitulates a point of view I have advocated here for quite some time. It suggests that horticulture (also known as permaculture) and hunting and gathering exist on a continuum, since no horticultural society subsists without some amount of hunting and gathering, and no hunter-gatherer society subsists without some amount of horticulture. Agriculture, on the other hand, represents a radical departure. I base this on the argument that the usual spectrum of human involvement does not apply. Horticulturalists created the Amazon rain forest; agriculturalists created the Arabian desert. Both show fairly comparable amounts of human impact, but the nature of that impact could hardly strike a more stark contrast. One decimated an old growth cedar forest and left a desert in its wake, while the other created the world’s most vibrant and diverse ecosystem. I dissect the definitions from their technical, etymological and “common sense” meanings to derive the primary distinction: the horticultural-forager spectrum all focuses on promoting succession, while agriculture focuses on inhibiting it.
I have never presented myself as a great outdoorsman. On the contrary, I have made no secret that I started from a significant disadvantage. All the factors that have led to the diminishment of modern youth’s involvement with the outdoors also played on me, and if those factors did not do enough damage, I had allergies to compound them. To complete the triumvirate, I had taken to books quite young, and occupied myself primarily with intellectual pursuits. So, when it came to my relationships and enskillment with regards to the more-than-human world, I started from a distinct disadvantage when, as I neared high school graduation, I read Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, and began to realize how much of my youth I had wasted.
My one advantage laid in my family’s cabin, located adjacent to the Allegheny National Forest, in northwestern Pennsylvania; what our state tourism agency has recently dubbed, not entirely inaccurately, as “the Pennsylvania Wilds.” We went there, every other weekend, every summer, for as long as I can remember. Mostly, we occupied ourselves with making war on the land: mowing the grass, painting the trees, beating back the forest as it continually fought to take back the land and heal it from all the damage we did to it. None of us enjoyed the never-ending war; we did it out of obligation, dripping years of toil in big, heavy drops of sweat. And anything we won, would never last for very long. I loved it. I loved how it defeated us. I loved how it stood, strong and proud, and no matter how we beat at it, it fought us back. I loved its indomitable spirit. I loved that it beat me. It always beat me.
Up there, though we mostly fought the land, I still had some basic experience with things like keeping a fire going, observing how trees and plants and animals relate to one another, and so on. Very basic things, but even that I would not have had otherwise. As I began to appreciate the situation, I turned to that land to teach me. I tracked some deer there. I met black bear there. We began some basic permaculture there.
A few years ago, we discovered the PATHWAYS program at Raccoon Creek, which we’ve attended several of now. We recently took the herbalism class again. Last year, we took the primitive skills course. We’ll take it again this year, as well as the advanced course, and the course on flint-knapping, which we haven’t done yet.
I have…
I have also met with many failures. I failed to stay on the paleo diet; interruptions, lack of time, lack of money, and all the other factors that contribute to the “vicious cycle” of the original article conspired against me to make it impossible. That failure illustrates rather well why I’ve said that we cannot, at present, entirely rewild. While civilization exists, we must keep a foot in it, and while the “virtuous cycle” provides a means to limit that, it keeps pulling us back. I failed to keep up with the Kamana program—I couldn’t find an appropriate sit-spot, living in the city as I do currently.
I suffered my worst failure of all only recently, when my family decided to give away the cabin. I will not write here about the depth of my feelings on that, but suffice to say, what advances we had made with establishing a home and using permaculture to provide for ourselves and heal the land, disappeared in a moment. I have not yet finished grieving for that, but I will not write more of that here.
On the other hand, this now prompts me to find my own land along the Tuppeek-hanne. It may not have the connection to my family that the cabin had (where my grandfather and namesake’s ashes lie; the place where I met my wife; the place that taught me everything I hold dear and live for now), but at least it will sit near the Tuppeek-hanne. And I have long felt frustrated by the slow pace imposed upon me by the rest of my family, who, honestly, do not really understand my impatience, or why I would feel so devastated by this turn of events. Our permacultural plans met with frequent delay. When we managed to get a bow, I agitated to get some hay bales and set up a target, but we kept putting it off. I have no doubt these things would otherwise have eventually happened, but my family didn’t feel any urgency about these things as I did, and so felt we could postpone them with no problem. Now, at least, I have only to acquire my own land, and I can begin planting guilds and setting up targets as quickly as I like. If this cloud has a silver lining, I think it lies there.
But as I said, I have never positioned myself as a great outdoorsman. You won’t hear me talking about the lessons taught to me by Stalking Wolf, or what I learned about the Old Ways from the clan mothers. I only know the things I can provide you evidence for. In terms of skills as an outdoorsman, I started out from even less than average. Today, I still do not consider myself competent, though I think I have achieved a great deal already, especially considering where I started from. I would pit myself against any boy scout, at least, even as I am today. I have a plan for the rest of the journey, one I’ll continue to share, not because I think I provide a grand example for others to follow, but because I believe in an open source rewilding revolution. I think we need to share our experiences, learn from each other, take inspiration from each other’s successes, and learn from each other’s mistakes. I don’t expect anyone to feel awed by my examples. I don’t offer a great outdoor hero’s story. I offer the perspective of a fairly typical first-worlder trying his best to escape that life. I don’t expect anyone to fawn over me; I expect that as I get farther along, people will look back at the trail I’ve left and say to themselves, “Well heck, if he can do it, anybody can!”
Will any of this prove the potential post-collapse carrying capacity of the Allegheny National Forest? Or the long-term sustainability of an organic farm in a post-peak world? Of course not. For those answers, we need to look at historical examples, current data, and other hard evidence. Our personal anecdotes will not prove or disprove those theories in the least.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 21 February 2008 @ 7:53 PM
I agree; as you say: “This is a life or death subject.” But what will my experience tell you about whether or not my points make sense? The only relevant evidence has to come from historical examples and current data. Your logic suffers from some very deep flaws here if you think me living out in the woods, hunting and gathering all my food, would prove or disprove anything about whether or not it makes a viable post-peak strategy.
Think of it: if I did live like that, would it prove that it makes a viable, post-peak strategy? Of course not. It might prove that it makes a viable, pre-peak strategy, but I think the first million years of human existence already proved that, don’t you? But it can’t prove anything about viable post-peak strategies, because we have yet to see the implications of the global energy peak set in. As jhereg started inching towards, you can’t prove anything about the future, because the future hasn’t happened yet.
On the other hand, I do hold that the past offers a very strong guide to the future, and that what worked in the past will, by and large, work in the future, as well. But that brings us back to historical examples and contemporary data as the only relevant evidence to questions like these.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 21 February 2008 @ 8:01 PM
JimFive, mostly, I’d say you need to pick up some different permaculture books. I don’t know what books you’ve read, but they sound like they’d find their best use as compost material. I have Hemenway’s Gaia’s Garden, and Edible Forest Gardens by Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier. I largely agree with Janene, that local, bioregional concerns would make any listing of guilds largely useless, but if your books don’t even provide information on how to design a guild, then I can’t say much nice about your books. Both of the books I just cited offer examples of guilds, and information on how to design guilds. I’ve found the second volume of Edible Forest Gardens particularly helpful. That volume has some serious heft to it, but it uses that prodigious page count to list hundreds of different plants, what they offer a guild, what they need from a guild, where they’ll grow, etc. You really shouldn’t have much trouble designing a guild from that information.
As for the pricing and commercialization of permaculture, I’ve never liked that part, not at all.
At least one of us has read everything in there, yes. If you want the “highlights,” I’d suggest, in no particular order:
And more recently, one I haven’t finished yet but will easily enter my “Top 3″ with Quinn and Abram, Tim Ingold’s The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Actually, I think I should go read that right now!
Comment by Jason Godesky — 21 February 2008 @ 8:17 PM
Okay, Soulman, I think we’re starting to monopolize the discussion, so this will be the last I have to say on the subject. You can have the last word if you want (besides, I’m supposed to be working).
You wrote:
“I’m sure Shane meant that Jason’s position is based on a combination of theory and historical example. I understood his point…. The point is Jason’s position is hardly supported by Jason’s experience.”
I honestly don’t know yet what Jason’s overall point of view is, but there isn’t anything in this post that isn’t supported by his experience, not that I can discern. It seems as if a lot of assumptions are being made about what his experiences are. Plus, as I said before, you don’t need first-hand experience to write about violent/non-violent primitive practices, etc. You need knowledge of historical examples–anthopological evidence, in other words (I’m thinking about the two posts refuting the article in the Economist). My point is that you don’t necessarily need experience to justify your position; you need evidence. Just because someone may, in your mind, lack first-hand experience with a particular subject, doesn’t mean his or her argument about that subject isn’t valid. I can think of plenty of great football coaches who weren’t good players or who never played football at all. But they still win games.
You wrote:
“He could be grossly underestimating the difficulty of living a forager lifestyle.”
Maybe so. And I have no problem with you bringing it up, but, if you believe that’s true, then make your case. Give your evidence. Reason it out. Tell us what you know. And then explain how that underestimation negates his overall viewpoint. You don’t have to resort to being disrespectful. In other words, critique Jason’s argument instead of him.
You wrote:
“I’m sorry you feel I’m being disrespectful but there’s much at stake here. This is a life or death subject.”
I agree there’s a lot at stake, which is why respectful dialogue is so important. As I said, I have no problem with you bringing up criticisms–
and, for the most part, I had no problem with Shane’s third and fourth comments–but, if we’re going to find answers, we have to have a reasonable and focused discussion. I just get a little annoyed when I see people who agree about our fundamental problems, who should be allies, spending a lot of time attacking each other with unproductive, unfair, and unconstructive criticism.
Comment by Anonymous — 21 February 2008 @ 8:25 PM
I didn’t see those other comments before I posted my last statement. Sorry for the redundancy.
Comment by Shane (the newer one) — 21 February 2008 @ 8:30 PM
I don’t expect Jason to completely rewild at this time. I understand the constraints. But he should be putting his beliefs about foraging to the test. For example, on his next vacation he should spend two weeks in wilderness and bring only a small amount of food. Spend the time foraging for edible plants, hunting, fishing, and trapping. Get an idea of how much food you can acquire. Learning from historical examples is valuable. I don’t eschew that. But Jason’s views on foraging as a survival strategy do not have credibility until he starts putting them to the test. I say that to anyone who shares his views. Yes, historical examples are valuable but it’s foolish to rely solely on them. Start putting elements of your escape plan to the test and see what really works. I assume people are honest about their experiences. I think Shane has much more credibility because of what he’s been DOING. He’s in a much better position to develop a realistic and sound escape plan.
Comment by Soulman — 21 February 2008 @ 9:45 PM
Jason,
Thank you for sharing your experiences- it inspires me, however modest, and I value it. And thank you too for your humility in apologizing. I value this too.
Comment by Archangel — 21 February 2008 @ 10:07 PM
That seems extremely foolish to me. I know how that would end: my death. I don’t know how to acquire all of my food from wild sources yet. Like I said in the first paragraph on this page, “if we tried to shelter ourselves and feed ourselves with what we know now, we’d only ensure our death, whether by starvation, thirst or exposure.” That won’t prove the viability of hunting and gathering, it will simply prove that I grew up domesticated. I don’t think anyone debates that part.
I could spend my next vacation practicing those skills and getting better at them, though. But that would just mean doing more of the same, as I have for the past few years.
Besides, plenty of people live like that, right now. So what would my experience prove, that all those other people haven’t already proven? I fail to understand what my experience would prove that hunter-gatherers haven’t already proven. Ecologies far more productive than, say, the Kalahari, already cover most of North America—including the area I come from. Yet hunter-gatherers not only get by in the Kalahari (even today), they thrive there. So, in what way does my personal incompetence prove that a region far more productive than those that already support thriving hunter-gatherer populations, can’t possibly support hunting and gathering?
I don’t see how that makes sense. If my experience makes the idea credible, then why doesn’t the experience of all the people living this way right now, or in the past, make it credible? What makes me so special, that only my experience can give credibility to hunting and gathering?
I don’t see how that makes sense. Sure, his experience shows that it works for him, on his land, right now, with lots of oil around as we have now and a civilization dominating the planet, but what does that tell us about realistic or sound escape plans?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 21 February 2008 @ 10:44 PM
I’ll give that a hearty Amen!
First, of all, did you even read Jason’s most recent posts?
Secondly, who says they aren’t doing very similar activities? (Not sure about the 2 week bit, I know I’d have a real hard time doing that, if only because I’ve got a day job to maintain, at least for now).
Thirdly, it’s NOT their responsibility to do that for you! If you want to know how much you can forage in your area, pick up some knowledge, get out and figure it out!
Finally, if you’d like a blog that does try to quanitify this kind of information for their area, you can check this one out: http://torjusgaaren.blogspot.com/
Any chance we can work on not making an ASS of U and ME? I really don’t think it’s necessary….
Comment by jhereg — 21 February 2008 @ 10:52 PM
Wow! I’m disappointed in how defensive you guys are.
By putting your plan to the test you find out what works well for you in your particular environment and what does not work well. Then you re-evaluate your plan and open up to ideas you might have been reluctant to consider before. You don’t know what the best plan will be until you start experimenting. If you fail miserably the first few days of the two week trial then go home. But you will have learned something. The only way to learn is to put your ideas to the test. Maybe you’ll find out that you need to grow some of your own food. How much? You can’t answer such questions until you put your plan to the test. If you want to wait until you bone up on your skills a little that’s fine.
I am a student of primitive skills. I don’t need Jason to do anything for me. My point is Jason’s or anyone’s survival plan has no credibility until at least some elements of it are put to the test. Who would be so foolish to bank their life on a plan that hasn’t been tested? My concern is that people will come to this site and think Jason knows more about living as a forager than he actually does.
Comment by Soulman — 21 February 2008 @ 11:31 PM
It’s not necessary to put hunting and gathering to the test. But it is necessary to start putting your particular survival plan to the test in order for it to be credible. Yes, people have demonstrated that hunting and gathering works. But a credible survival plan has to be more specific than “we’re gonna hunt and gather like the indians.” You have to do much experimenting in the field in order to come up with a specific plan.
Comment by Soulman — 22 February 2008 @ 12:02 AM
Jason is just one individual speaker in a whole body of people rewilding all accross N. America right now. He has his particular gifts and challenges to overcome, and I think he is doing this “movement” a great service with his gifts while being refreshingly honest about the rest. However, lots of people have been putting “his” plan to the test all around the country since long before he even thought of it. I posted some links up above of people all along this trajectory who offer a wealth of practical knowledge and experience.
I can also speak from my own experience of having had the opportunity to put many of the same ideas and plans as Jason talks about to the test. I’ve been rewilding fairly intensively off and on for the past 10 years, including many months living in earth-lodges and wigwams, lean-to’s and snow-caves. I’ve called fire more times than I can possibly remember (and yet I still have trouble from time to time!). I’ve harvested and eaten many hundreds of pounds of wild foods and have a complete set of buckskins I tanned myself.
From what I’ve read from Jason, his words consistently ring true well beyond his personal experience (because he is pretty rigorous with the evidence he uses). Does that mean there aren’t things I might dissagree with Jason on from my experience? Of course not, but all in all I would say Jason’s perspective rings true to my experience.
Yet what does that mean? Does my “veteran” experience “prove” anything? Not really.
Jason is rigorous in evaluating and presenting accounts of first and second hand experience from the anthropological record that put my paltry personal experiements to shame. By comparison to the writings of indigenous people and anthopologists in direct contact with indigenous people, my “veteran rewilding experience” looks pretty damned pathetic. In comparison to other “veteran rewilders” I could name at least a dozen who put me to shame.
The written record of hunter gatherer experience is extensive and the written record of rewilding experience is steadilly growing. The hunter gatherer life is by far the most tested way of life on planet earth, with countless examples. Is it easy? By middle class american standards, my experience would say “hell no.” Not by a long shot.
But nothing about what we are facing in the long term is going to be easy, including maintaining the status quo.
If people here want to present and compare future scenarios and potential strategies for dealing with those scenarios, I think that would be a welcome and productive addition to the dialogue. If you don’t like Jason’s plan, present your own. We all stand to benefit from seeing and evaluating our various options.
If some folks here have particular questions about the feasablilty of particular points in Jason’s plan, please state them. Maybe I or others have some experience that could shed some light.
But if a few people here just want to dismiss Jason’s perspective because his gift is one of being a speaker, writer and analytical thinker rather than a hunter and berry picker, then I’d say that’s just not very helpful. Jason is honest about who he is and what he’s done, and as I see it that deserves respect.
How about we move things in a more productive direction eh?
Comment by RedWolfReturns — 22 February 2008 @ 3:25 AM
Here is another web resource for real-world rewilding experience:
http://thedrum.hubraincor.net/
Comment by RedWolfReturns — 22 February 2008 @ 3:42 AM
Soulman,
I think you have missed the point in here somewhere. Jason’s blog is not about HOW to rewild. It is about WHY to rewild. The credibility of Jason’s “HOW” (plan) is completely irrelevant to the credibility of Jason’s “WHY” (Theses).
Certainly there is an amount of How being included, and Jason has said that now that he has concluded the theoretical basis that there will be more of them. The success or failure of any particular project neither validates nor invalidates that basis.
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 22 February 2008 @ 9:41 AM
Jason,
I have been trying to get my hands on either or both of those books for a while.
As an aside, whenever someone says “You can find them at any local library”, my library doesn’t have it and probably won’t get it.
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 22 February 2008 @ 9:42 AM
Soulman said:
then, later, Soulman said:
Fee, fie, foh, fum, I smell the blood of… a troll…?
Whatever, life’s too short….
Comment by jhereg — 22 February 2008 @ 9:48 AM
JimFive,
You can find a little bit of guild info here: http://www.helpfulgardener.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1094
And Toby’s site has some excerpts of “Gaia’s Garden” related to guilds & guild design: http://www.patternliteracy.com/index.html
Also, you may want to try looking for information on food forests instead of permaculture guilds. This is a site that you may find interesting in this regard: http://www.nofa.org/tnf/sp02/supplement/edible.php
And here is a similar site geared for Ohio (my area): http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/1000/1256.html
Both of those last 2 sites have a list of additional books and sources.
btw, if you don’t mind me asking, what area are you looking at?
Comment by jhereg — 22 February 2008 @ 10:02 AM
I’ve been looking at food forests since this area (Mid Michigan, around the southern bits of the AuSable National Forest) is fairly wooded and our lot is very shaded (we have one spot about 15 sq ft that gets 3hrs of sun/day in the summer)
Thanks for the links.
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 22 February 2008 @ 10:18 AM
I personally have the HG’s vs. Horticulture argument with a friend of mine. He was trained in survival via the military and has continued to learn the basics of primitive living over the years. My focus has been on what I would call stop-gap strategies. I suppose it depends on your guesses about the future, a slow transitional collapse versus a somewhat quicker and ‘crazier’ collapse. I view collapse as a personal process at least initially, likely with the majority of folks continuing to have modernity supporting them (for some unknown period of time) while more of the industrialized world falls into 3rd world living conditions.
For me, learning to make a fire may be useful, but in the short-term learning to grow/collect/identify my local food seems a better use of my energy.
The one thing I’ve seen from all these blogs is that debating the future of such a complicated system, be it man-made or natural often is a dead end road. I commend anyone who is taking any steps to become more self-sufficient and skillful, be it with ‘Stop-gap measures’ or the ancient HG’er methods, either way the blending of the two will likely be needed, the question for me is really just a matter of when.
2008 and counting….
“I will accept the rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.” Robert A. Heinlein
Comment by Bubba — 22 February 2008 @ 11:11 AM
JimFive,
I recently received an ethnobotany of the Potawatomi that you might be interested in. If so, email me, my address is jhereg9333 you know waht gmail you know what com
Deep shade can be a real challenge, but you might be surprised. The PFAF database I linked above has a “Deep Shade” canned query that lists nearly 400 plants of various uses (and usefulness). Obviously, you would still need to find which ones are suitable to climate, etc.
Also, if it’s an option (and I realize that it may not be) you may want to consider selectively thinning some of the trees on your lot. It may or may not be a good idea for you, just thought I’d bring it up. I have a lot that has some sections of impenetrable thicket that I intend to thin and open somewhat.
Btw, if you’d prefer to take this into email (or, equally likely, you just want me to shut up
), let me know, I’m happy to oblige.
Comment by jhereg — 22 February 2008 @ 11:37 AM
Jhereg,
In the spirit of the opensource movement we can leave it here unless Jason objects.
The problem with our shade is that the trees aren’t on our lot. We are surrounded on the South and East by landlocked, non-developable land (some sort of deed restriction). For the most part, that’s a good thing. We won’t have some moron with a double-wide moving in and cutting down all the trees. But on the other side it makes planting an issue.
On the bright side, we have identified quite a variety of foods in the immediate area.
In the yard: Dandelion, wood-sorrel, Oak trees, maple trees, plantain, that ugly sprawling succulent that pops up between sidewalk cracks and is actually quite tasty but whose name I forget right now.
Within a few minutes walk: hickory, sassafras, mulberry, wild strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, wild grapes, and queen anne’s lace.
Slightly further: Cattails, may-apples, crab apples (the little bitty ornamental ones that the city planted everywhere.)
Gardening: We have successfully grown cucumbers, lettuce, potatoes, beans, peas, garlic, and chives in raised beds. Also, Grape tomatoes, and with less success larger tomatoes. We planted a strawberry bed with reasonable success and last year we planted some blueberries. I’m not sure they’ll take but we’ll see. Peas and beans generally worked but with a smaller crop than I’d like. Carrots were iffy, short fat roots. The zucchini and hot peppers fruited slightly and very late. Corn didn’t work out probably due to the sunlight problem. Melons have such a long growing season that we haven’t tried yet.
We also regularly see deer and turkeys.
To top it all off this is all within the city limits and on our own or city property.
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 22 February 2008 @ 12:08 PM
Probably true, I’ve only been able to get a couple from the local library and haven’t been impressed so far. Lest anyone think I’m picking on the permaculture writers, though, I want to mention that worthless books and articles on any topic abound. I think one of the big problems that has come with the power of the internet is that it is easier to “publish” drivel and each time someone does it makes it that much harder to find the useful bits. I am working toward getting back in shape and as part of that have made a goal of participating in a triathlon (sprint, not ironman). Trying to find good training advice and pointers is very difficult. Most online articles are terrible. Either they have no point or the point they have isn’t worth making. And the articles in Triathlon magazine aren’t that much better (though it is easier to find a gem in the magazine).
Or maybe I’m just too picky.
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 22 February 2008 @ 12:22 PM
purslane. tasty plant. there’s a huge patch not too far away from us, but the soil… i really don’t trust it. i’m in the process of cultivating a closer patch in healthier soil.
have you heard of Apios Americana (aka ground nut)?
it’s a native perennial vining legume that has edible pods and roots. i’m not certain about it’s light requirements, but it grows in woodlands, so i would expect it do alright with what you describe. i haven’t yet eaten any, so i can’t speak as to it’s enjoyability
re: books: Hemenway’s is really the best Permaculture (TM) book i’ve seen. but permaculture is funny in that it utilizes so many different techniques that are also in differently named methods (aka, Food Forests, Fukuoka’s Natural Farming, etc). i find that i often have an easier time finding the info i’m after by going after those similar but different methods.
Comment by jhereg — 22 February 2008 @ 1:30 PM
Purslane, that’s the one.
I’ve heard of the ground nut, but I haven’t found any yet.
Hemenway is the one I keep hearing. I may end up ordering it, but I don’t like to buy things sight-unseen. Usually I abide by the rule of three: I must pick up and look at an item on three separate occasions before I allow myself to buy it. (For music, I must like at least 3 songs on a CD)
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 22 February 2008 @ 2:15 PM
Hey Jim (and anyone else who may want to buy permaculture books),
I do wholesale orders for permaculture-related books and audio, and sell them with a tiny markup, generally cheaper than anywhere else I see online. I have Gaia’s Garden and 1 more copy of volume 2 of Jacke’s Edible Forest Gardens. Plus lots more, but several people in this thread specifically recommended those (and rightly so!)
You can see a list of items & prices at: http://discountpermaculture.com (Note that I list plants for pickup only; I don’t ship them.)
Hopefully this makes it through the spam filter!
Scrub
Comment by Scrub — 22 February 2008 @ 8:42 PM
Hey Everyone
I am not sure whether or not to feel happy that there is so much discussion going on or guilty that I have stirred everything up so much. It seems to be more productive idea bouncing than slanging, which for an internet responses section is probably well above the average level of decorum.
Firstly I want to make a complementary apology to Jason. I was guilty of using a degree of vitriol in my replies as well, and while it kept things lively it probably wasnt really necessary. The more we interact the more it seems like we are just a semi-tone apart in the pitch of our ideas. I guess that is why the combination comes out a bit screeching sometimes.
I consistently return to this site to eagerly read Jason’s big-picture writing precisely because it is what he does best. From my perspective the ideas discussed range from deeply thought provoking to eyebrow raising, but with enough good stuff to make it all worth while. I am particularly sorry for my snarky response to Guili’s early contributions. If it is any consolation I often found myself editing down my base reactions to something at least carefully worded if not supportive. In retrospect it would have been more helpful to just wonder if the attempt at glamorising HGing was productive.
We have probably all grown up from childhoods that burdened us with disadvantages for the challenges ahead. I suffered constant colds and sinus/allergies as a kid (since connected with industrial dairy intake) and turned out weedier and weaker than I might have with more physical activity. I applaud Jason for admitting his own problems and limitations (especially when it makes him vulnerable to criticism from hard-nosed types like me).
But I think questions and criticism are valuable to the movement to prepare for the probable downturn in industrial society. My own take is that it is dangerous to plan for a single scenario. Overcommit to one threat and you may leave yourself unprepared for another. Societies have gone through many different types of collapse. But often societies faced with great crises come up with completely unanticipated solutions. Genetic engineering and alternative energy are the positive wild cards in the game. Perhaps the notion of progress spreading ever west will come full circle as the hard working and unsqueamish asian nations transform their societies once again. Humans currently capture a tiny percentage of the raw energy coursing through the planet. And we relate to the world through organisms that are burdened by the happenstance of a billion years of spontaneous progress. What would the implications be of doubling the efficiency of photosynthesis? What if humans could digest cellulose? What if we could power our machines with heat and light from any source? We have to anticipate the possibility that industrial society wont go anywhere soon, or will merely transform to make life similar but crappier for anyone not insulated by massive wealth.
Any potential rewilding environment may well be relatively productive in terms of total biomass, but it doesnt automatically translate that it will make a suitable human habitat, even if it did so historically. Comparing a disturbed forest and an undisturbed desert is misleading. And often the environment that brings the most opportunities also brings the most threats (violence, competition, predation, diseases). Semi-arid regions in some ways seem to be ideal for HGing because they get the balance between threats and opportunities right.
The most basic question to ask about rewilding in your region is “Can I collect enough calories within a reasonable walkable area, consistently enough over the year, to sustain me?”. If your current environment fails that test then questions of hunting protein, herbal medicines and primitive tools become moot. Historical records of HGers in the area may be misleading if the ecology has changed significantly since they left the land, hence my reluctance to place too much emphasis on historical records.
Many historical HGers maintained large growths of grasses, tubers and nut trees to base their society on. For those of you averse to eating any grains that means get a physical measure of the abundance of nuts and root crops on hand. If they come up short then you have a sense of how much you need to grow for yourself, making the questions of protein/medicine/tools etc meaningful. Growing starchy roots is so incredibly simple in so many climates. Get that right and you leave yourself time for all the other essential stuff, which in most situations is more easily met by HGing. Grains have the immense advantage of durability, portability and scaleability, but require more careful preparation.
Last weekend I was winnowing a large basket of buckwheat I grew earlier on. Perhaps I am projecting but there is something about harvesting, threshing and winnowing grains that turns on a light somewhere in my brain. Only the planting part seems less spontaneous (the love of a good hoe helps enormously). For the record I got ~15kg from 35m2, equivalent to 50 days of calories. I spent all up about three days labor that would have been five without the plastic. The space was in the row between new fruit and nut trees, weeds were killed with solarising plastic, a few litres of copra and lime applied, never watered and rarely weeded, and a crop of spelt or quinoa will follow, then a mixed green manure/fallow rotation will follow for a year before restarting the cycle.
Comment by Shane — 25 February 2008 @ 4:15 AM
A few tidbits to share if you are interested. Let me know if you want me to track down the original article for you. I would have emailed this directly but can’t find your address.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080220161704.htm
Most Detailed Global Study Of Genetic Variation Completed
ScienceDaily (Feb. 21, 2008) — University of Michigan scientists and their colleagues at the National Institute on Aging have produced the largest and most detailed worldwide study of human genetic variation, a treasure trove offering new insights into early migrations out of Africa and across the globe.
and
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080216175953.htm
Human Culture Subject To Natural Selection, Study Shows
ScienceDaily (Feb. 20, 2008) — The process of natural selection can act on human culture as well as on genes, a new study finds. Scientists at Stanford University have shown for the first time that cultural traits affecting survival and reproduction evolve at a different rate than other cultural attributes. Speeded or slowed rates of evolution typically indicate the action of natural selection in analyses of the human genome.
Comment by Shane — 26 February 2008 @ 2:48 AM
Hello,
I wanted to answer Shane’s last post, which was fairly interesting, since it helped me order my ideas.
Any potential rewilding environment may well be relatively productive in terms of total biomass, but it doesnt automatically translate that it will make a suitable human habitat, even if it did so historically. Comparing a disturbed forest and an undisturbed desert is misleading. And often the environment that brings the most opportunities also brings the most threats (violence, competition, predation, diseases). Semi-arid regions in some ways seem to be ideal for HGing because they get the balance between threats and opportunities right.
The most basic question to ask about rewilding in your region is “Can I collect enough calories within a reasonable walkable area, consistently enough over the year, to sustain me?”. If your current environment fails that test then questions of hunting protein, herbal medicines and primitive tools become moot. Historical records of HGers in the area may be misleading if the ecology has changed significantly since they left the land, hence my reluctance to place too much emphasis on historical records.
Well, I think that this is what horti/perma-culture is about in the rewilding movement : permaculture is the means by which individuals, armed with enough knowledge, can help restore previously dameged environments into functioning ecosystems.
So yes, it will not be viable to immediately focus only on hunting-gathering in the short term, since there will have to be some work to be done on the land first. But the very nature of the work (permaculture) implies rewilding, and some plant gathering. It is also likely that the collapse of civilization and the process of reopening niches for wildlife will be fast enough that hunting becomes quickly possible. At least this is my view of things in light of the situation here in France. Besides, hunting will be necessary in the first place in a damaged ecosystem : having perturbated ecosystems usually means you have one predator species ut of control - this is already happening in many Western countrysides and here too. So we humans will have to help regulate those species, while famine due to agricultural failure deals with regulating our own species’ population. This is another reason for rewilding minds : having a rewilded mind will be a critical factor of success in your regulating your own ecosystem, both through permaculture and H-G activities. If we have been wise enough, then it is likely our children will “reap” the rewards of our work. After all, the rewilding movement is not just about rewilding yourself by walking barefoot and stop buying bread; it is also about rewilding the land through improving your knowledge of the ecosystem’s inner workings and how to work on damaged ecosystems (look up “Terra Preta” in Wikipedia, and you will see what I mean by rewilding the land : turning a concrete suburbian desert into something as rich as a rainforest).
It brings me to the 2nd point : in light of my recent failure to present the primitivists ideas to my parents and sister, I would like to point out that we need to think of how to introduce rewilding concepts to other people.
The core ideas of primitivism are way too complex to just introduce them by saying “hey, we should all live as cavemen again”. This is why the H-G aspect should not be too much emphazised against the permaculture aspect. After all, the people living with us also come from a civilized background, which means that to them, it is more natural to grow food than to collect it from nature. On the other hand, hunting was fairly common in our parents’ grandparents’ generation, but not as main means of providing food. Therefore it is critical, I think, to begin with presenting permaculture, then explain how the ecological knowledge acquired through experimenting with permaculture enables one to rewilding. Hunting and gathering can then be prezsented as the natural outcome of rewilded cultures living in rewilded ecosystems.
The main caveat with presenting H-G as the best strategy is to be accused of wanting to regress. My mother went as far as to tell me “primitivism, ceationism, it is the same bunch”. Even if you give people more arguments than they give you, they just have these epidermic reactions.
The other caveat is that presenting H-G as a viable strategy involves talking about the collapse of civilization. And that’s something too emotionally striking for people to grasp in the first place. So I recommend presenting permaculture first, since you can label it “transition” more easily than you can label exclusively H-G living as “transition”. If you start talking about collapse, people will label you as utterly pessimistic - in fact you are optimistic about mankind, but the end of civilization seems inherently pessimistic to most civilized people because they view human history as progress. And indeed permaculture IS the beginning of civilization collapse - people choosing a lower level of complexity, and adapting to a viable strategy.
So yes we ll have to focus mostly on permaculture first, if our ecologies are too damaged. But being able to make a living from H/G-ing comes as a logical consequence of permaculture’s success.
And it is likely that hunting and gathering will constitute a fair part of your food supply, if you live in the USA near some natural reservation. On the other hand, in a country like France, you might end up closer to the perma/horti-culture end of the rewilding spectrum. It will be a long-term work anyhow, and we’ll have to embed the principles and processes of PC into the oral culture we transmit to our descendancy.
Regarding the possibility of basing your society’s food supply upon grains, I think you have to be careful to avoid monoculture.
Jean-Vivien Maurice
Comment by Jean-Vivien Maurice — 26 February 2008 @ 7:19 AM
Jean-Vivien, you bring up some excellent points. I don’t think I disagree with any of them, but there are a few things I’d like to expand upon.
This is certainly a part of horti/perma’s role in rewilding. For my part, I also think of horti/perma’s role as one of realigning ourselves with our ecology. In other words, I see it as an important part of becoming native to our land by reforging our relationships with the land. It’s a subtle concept, I think, but at least for myself, it seems to help a great deal.
Yes, this is tough. I wouldn’t claim any amazing successes on this topic, but I can certainly briefly discuss how I approach such things.
First, I don’t discuss ideology. At all. In other words, I don’t use the words “primitivism”, “rewild”, “Stone Age”, “native”, etc. Instead, I try to focus on a good rewilding solution for a problem someone has. So, if they’re struggling with high gas prices, and not gardening, I’ll try to convince them to try a little bit of gardening, to help cut down food costs and help make up for the extra gas costs. If they’re not interested in gardening, I might suggest some other alternative, such as making their own coffee cut w/ roasted dandelion or chicory roots instead of buying their morning coffee from Starbucks on the way to work in the morning. Or if they’re already gardening, I’ll ask them about various techniques that might help. If they’re using their car to go reasonably short distances, I might ask if they’ve ever thought about using a bike instead. In other words, I try to focus on concrete, practical steps that are:
* “Ideology Independent”
* Tailored to the person, as best I know them
* Presented in an open and honest manner (no accusations!)
* Not completely outside the persons comfort zone
It seems like people respond better to that approach.
And I think that ultimately, this is the bottom line for the HG vs Horti debate. It’s a personal choice that really needs to be informed by the persons location. After all, “primitive” cultures were/are quite diverse, and I honestly expect the rewilding cultures of the future to have every bit as much diversity.
Comment by jhereg — 26 February 2008 @ 9:17 AM
One thing to keep in mind here is that H/Gs are usually nomadic or semi-nomadic. Meaning that they either move frequently or at very least between two or more camps per year. The more arid and sparse the landscape, the more camps they tended to establish and the farther people tended to range throughout the year. Also, walking was/is not the only means of transportation available to “primitive” foraging peoples. Boats are an excellent example of a primitive technology that dramatically increases a people’s nomadic range (and potentially a good one for modern rewilders as well).
We get into trouble sometimes if we try to make hunting and gathering fit into our lives yet don’t make the necessary holistic adjustments to actually make things work for us. In my experience this is usually why we get so many failures and negative-sounding reports about how “impossible” primitive living is today. People often try to fit a round peg into a square hole. Attempts at sedentary h/ging are one example among many of us agricultural people attempting to adopt h/ging yet still holding onto an essentially agricultural or civilized mindset (other examples include “solo survivalist” excursions such as are popular on TV right now, “naked into the wild” stories, and the “abo-trek” approach popular in many primitive skills circles). The tendancy to think rewilding must involve “buying land” is another potential pitfall here, since for most people the thought of buying land just reinforces the sedentary mindset all the more.
The main reason most of us more easily connect to rewilding on the gardening/horticulture end of the spectrum is because we come from a sedentary culture. If we want to maintain our sedentariness (and we live in a bioregion where sedentism is feasable), then horticulture certainly makes more sense. Perhaps h/ging is more likely to be embraced by those in our culture who already display nomadic tendencies. There are already whole subcultures in american society which do this right now (and are often romanticized by mainstream culture because of it).
Comment by RedWolfReturns — 27 February 2008 @ 3:07 AM
How do you imagine this differs from what we do? To me, it sounds like precisely what we do.
That might make sense, except that we’ve seen all the elements of it tested, over the past million years, by everyone on earth up until about 10,000 years ago, and just most people on earth in the intervening period. No more tested plan exists. The only test that remains, tests whether we can do it, here and now. But of course, that won’t tell you anything about whether or not you can do it, where you live, will it?
Heh; my sentiments, exactly.
Red Wolf Returns, thank you–that meant a lot to me.
Generally a wise strategy, and one I usually use myself. In this case, though, I ended up buying them on faith. It worked out OK for me this time, but yeah, I’ve gotten burned that way before.
Jhereg and Jim, seeing that discussion getting so nitty-gritty really sets a stark contrast. On the one hand, we have this thread rehashing all the basics yet again; and then we have your discussion really moving us forward. Awesome! I just wish I had more to contribute on that account.
I think so. We should try to keep that in check from now on; we’d probably make better friends than enemies, eh? With the way the world keeps going, can we really afford to waste our energy on this kind of bickering?
But some more salient points did crop up in the course of it, and while the vitriol doesn’t get us anywhere, good, solid disagreements do, so let me respond to some of the points you made.
We can certainly have that discussion, though I don’t think the Fabulous Forager would make the right venue for it. This thread can host that discussion much more nicely.
I would turn this on its head. I don’t think we glamorize hunter-gatherers at all. Rather, I think we merely correct the general view which so disparages them. Our society has a completely mythical view of primitive life as “nasty, brutish and short” born not from any honest view point of hunter-gatherer life, but from not viewing hunter-gatherer life at all. Instead, we substitute our imagination in the place of evidence, and come to the idea that hunting and gathering must amount to a miserable, impoverished life, based not on evidence, but on our own myths, thought experiments, and ultimately, the stories by which we define ourselves, rather than them (Jehuda, 1998). I find it more than coincidental that Hobbes, who based his assertion of “nasty, brutish and short” entirely on thought experiment and rejected the suggestion that he might want to consider accounts of explorers who actually encountered such people, “was contemptuous of much empirical experimentation—though not of all experiment—and seems to have had no conception of inductive inference at all.” (Rogers & Ryan, 1988:85) For Hobbes, only the thought experiment had validity; evidence had no place in an academic discussion. Note that all we have to do to “glamorize” hunter-gatherers comes down to just listing known, established facts of how they live.
Does such a correction have “value”? I would say it may present one of the most valuable things anyone today can do. Though utterly baseless and possible only in a carefully cultivated environment of absolute ignorance, the myth of the impoverished hunter-gatherer who struggles for survival plays a crucial part in our civilized self-image. It reminds us that, even though our civilization kills us, our family, our land, and everything around us, we have no alternative, because however hellish our current existence seems, we need to remember how much worse off we lived without it. Smashing that myth means assaulting one of the main buttresses that keeps civilization going. If people understood what hunter-gatherer life really entailed, that living primitively doesn’t just mean bare survival but positively thriving, living in luxury the likes of which only our most pampered elites can afford (remember, this fact of hunter-gatherer life provided the original meaning of the phrase “noble savage,” as used by Marc Lescarbot in his 1609 Histoire de la Nouvelle France, not nobility of character), people would finally see the history of civilization in its proper perspective.
Just like our image of “the savage,” in the Western imagination we have romanticized primitive life as a form of asceticism; the mountain man has become a secular hermit, a kind of latter-day flagellant for the eschatology of the left. This has as much basis as the view of tribal peoples as oversexed, brutish and violent (Jehuda, 1998); both have nothing to do with any kind of lived reality, and everything to do with our own mythology (though I imagine the “lone mountain man,” trying to live primitively without a community, might experience quite a bit of privation). Breaking this dire mismatch of primitivism and asceticism presents us with one of our most crucial and urgent challenges. We need to make people realize that primitive life does not mean privation, but luxury; that living in a human manner does not require sacrifice, but a demand for more. So long as we demand people to give up things, no one will want to change anything; not even us. But when you turn it around, and put it in a more truthful context of what you’ve already given up, and more importantly, what you need to take back, well, that perspective gives us the things we desperately need, the things we’ve raged about destroying ourselves and the planet in search of: a future.
Agreed, but that merely underlines the importance of hunting and gathering. If things work out, permaculture (and really, shouldn’t we speak more accurately of permacultures, in the plural?) could work in many places. But if you rely on that, you will find many other places where it will not work. Horticulture (as far as I can tell, a synonym) only worked in the past in a fairly narrow equatorial zone.
Yes, we have Geoff Lawton’s inspiring permacultural example of greening the desert, but listen to Lawton’s account critically. Listen to how much mulch—made from trash—he needed for that project. Yes, we make a lot of trash, but the Middle East has a lot of land, too. In 2006, the U.S., the world’s largest trash producer, produced 251 million tons of it. 1 Now, to translate this into area units, think of a dirty construction site. You’ll generally find about a pound of drywall waste per square foot.2 Now, the Arabian peninsula only accounts for a fairly small portion of the Middle East, but it still covers 900,0003 square miles, or about 2.5 × 1013 square feet, so even if you could turn trash into mulch with 100% efficiency, it would take the U.S.’s entire trash-making capacity almost 100,000 years just to cover the Arabian peninsula in mulch no thicker than you’d get from drywall at a construction site. We can’t deny the massive ecological impacts landfills have on their surroundings, but even with as much garbage as we make, they still take up a tiny, tiny percentage of our land area. So, I find Lawton’s exclamations a little premature; we really can’t green the whole Middle East. As impressive as the experiment’s results become, it can only work in isolated places, not for the whole Middle East, much less the whole world.
Which comes back to the picture that the past million years of human experience has already painted: permaculture can work wonderfully, sometimes, in some places, but only hunting and gathering works everywhere. We can’t predict the future. Ultimately, we don’t know what will happen. Some people will undoubtedly succeed with permaculture; in other places, permaculture enthusiasts will find that way of life becoming impossible. Only hunting and gathering works everywhere, from the Congo to the Arctic, from the Kalahari to Tierra del Fuego.
That said, hunting, gathering, fishing, permaculture, all these exist on a spectrum of related strategies, so if you begin hunting and gathering in a context well-suited for permaculture, you’ll have an easy time simply escalating the amount of peramculture you do, just like shore-dwellers will likely do more fishing, equatorial hunter-gatherers will do more gathering, and Arctic bands will do more hunting.
From studying the crisis points of past societies, both when they collapsed and when they didn’t, I can’t say I agree with this statement. Yes, civilizations have at times narrowly avoided collapse, like the timber crisis in Europe in the 1600s that resulted in the rise of coal, or the end of the Bronze Age, but I wouldn’t call the solutions “completely unanticipated.” In fact, the solutions followed a clear pattern: some alternative existed, but for one reason or another did not have the appeal of the preferred option. As the preferred option ran out, people turned to the less appealing option. People in the 1600s objected to the foul odors and smoke from coal, but as wood began to run out, they had little choice. Ancient societies far preferred bronze, but as they destroyed the forests to smelt it, they figured out how to make better use of iron. If we expect this pattern to apply to our current crisis, then we need to have some tenable, but less preferred, option available. Various people have proposed various candidates; nuclear power, for instance, would fit the pattern quite well. Except, uranium has already peaked, and when we account for the amount of energy it takes to obtain uranium, its EROEI drops to something in line with windmills and water wheels. Blacksmiths used coal before the timber crisis (the carbon helped in the production of steel), and everyone knew it presented an option, though most people preferred timber. But they all knew that as timber ran out, they could always simply begin burning coal. Metalsmiths knew about iron, and knew something about working it; they just preferred bronze. But as disappearing forests made smelting increasingly difficult, driving up the cost of bronze, they began to use iron more. Today, we have no equivalent options. We have no less preferred alternative waiting in the wings, something we all know could work, if we didn’t have something better on hand at the moment.
I disagree; I don’t see anything particularly “wild” about either one. None of the alternative energy possibilities currently offered, alone or in combination, can even come close to substituting our energy usage, even temporarily. The “Dei ex Machinis” series went into this in detail. As for genetic engineering, that phrase can mean one of two things: either it means (1) custom-made life, which appears in science fiction and nowhere else (even when presented as otherwise), or (2) a more recent version of husbandry. Even the much-reviled “terminator seeds” do not differ all that much from, say, what ancient farmers already did to Zea mays, which humans must hand-pollinate.
The current boom of China and India has little ecological basis, and more resembles a global, fiscal version of three card monte: their ecological poverty, translated into financial poverty, makes them key targets for exploitation by those who do have some ecological wealth (or at least, the ability to mass produce it and lay it out on Iowa’s fields). All financial wealth ultimately springs from ecological wealth, but the idea of coming full-circle simply contradicts the very nature of the process in question.
When you say “raw energy coursing through the planet,” you must not mean the planet’s primary production. Humans capture 40% of that all for ourselves, and I don’t think anyone could call 40% a “tiny percentage,” much less when considering that we must share that production with all of the other millions of species on earth. Yet I cannot guess what else you could mean by that.
I think this reveals a fundamental difference of axiom between us. You seem to take as given the founding axiom of our civilization, that we can do it better. I agree with Daniel Quinn’s assessment that “Nothing evolution brings forth is perfect, it’s just damnably hard to improve upon.” I see very little evidence of our ability to improve upon the systems that billions of years of evolution has already optimized. What if we could double the efficiency of photosynthesis? I imagine a great deal (and none of it good, given Jevons’ Paradox), but why should we believe that we can accomplish something like that? We have no precedent for such breakthroughs; on the scale of an achievement like that, our petty scientific achievements amount to very little. Consider: possibly the greatest moment in medical science came when we simply recognized the efficacy of mold, something indigenous peoples had already known for millennia (many cultures stuck moldy bread, etc. into wounds to help them heal). When you step back for a moment and put aside our superlative self-praise, it seems to me that we really stand just a half-step beyond leeches still.
We could speculate endlessly about all the “what if’s” that have no precedence or rationale. What if aliens invade? What if we all achieve enlightenment? What if the stars align, and dread Cthulhu rises from the sunken city of R’yleh? Any of these things could change everything, but we really have no reason to expect any of them.
Again, I disagree. Let’s put aside the reasons above, and simply posit that the mysterious X factor comes to pass. We find some magic, heretofore unknown solution, some fuel nobody’s ever tried before in a complete reversal of all historical precedence. That still won’t allow industrial society to survive. It won’t allow the soil to go fallow. It won’t stop climate change. It won’t stop mass extinction. It won’t provide us with new cultures to absorb to keep from cultural stagnation. Most importantly, more complexity (as any such solution would have to become) will never solve the most fundamental problem of diminishing returns on complexity. Our current crises simply represent the most immediate facets of the underlying crisis of diminishing returns on complexity. We might overcome those immediate problems with some fancy new invention, but only by further aggrevating the ultimate problem.
Consider this metaphor. You take an empty, six-shot pistol, spin the chamber, point it to your head and pull the trigger. Nothing happens, so you put a bullet in the chamber, spin it, put it to your head and pull the trigger. Nothing happens. If, every time, you put one more bullet in the gun, put it to your head and squeeze the trigger, would it make sense to say, “We have to anticipate the possibility that I can keep doing this without getting shot?”
Collapse presents the only thing we can say for certain about industrial society’s future. How, when, where, these things remain up in the air, just like we don’t know which try in the metaphor above will kill you; we only know that you won’t do it seven times. You might walk away from it, or you might shoot yourself. You might only shoot yourself on the very last attempt; or you might shoot yourself with the first bullet. We can’t predict that. We only know that you won’t do it seven times. We don’t know if “Powerdown” might work; we don’t know if Peak Oil, or climate change, or some as-yet unimagined crisis will seal civilization’s fate. Really, those details don’t matter much. We know only that things cannot continue the way they have.
I think that statement requires some evidence. The percentage of biomass that humans can consume hasn’t really changed very much, so available biomass does translate into how much human habitat one has available.
Well, to make sense of that, we would first need to find an undisturbed desert. Even the deserts on Mars do not qualify, since huge storms and winds constantly disturb them. But I suspect that by “disturbed,” you mean “disturbed by humans.” I do not think that humans disturb our environments in such unique ways as to warrant this qualification. Our scale may seem unprecedented, but the fundamental effect of, say, a plow does not differ from the effect of a flood or some other natural disaster. The term “climax ecology” has fallen from use in ecological circles precisely because of its implications of a static state that your claim here seems to rely upon as a premise. The “undisturbed ecology” does not exist. I would go so far as to say that the very word “ecology” means a particular system of constant disturbance, with each disturbance both caused by and causing the other disturbances around it. Beavers disturb streams by building dams; trees disturb rocks by breaking them up with their roots; bees disturb flowers by moving pollen from one to the next, et cetera ad infinitum. Even agriculture, as catastrophic as it seems, operates within the normal ecological process of succession. Agriculture simply sets succession back, while horticulture encourages it along. But neither of these invent any new process, such that we might call one “disturbed” and the other not. I reject, whole-heartedly, the notion of human uniqueness in the world, and with it the notion that our participation in the world, and ours alone, counts as ecological disturbance.
That said, I agree that comparing a disturbed forest and an undisturbed desert misleads. It misleads us to think that a disturbed forest might have as little to offer as an undisturbed desert, like the Kalahari or the Arctic. I dwell in the Allegheny National Forest, perhaps the most “disturbed” forest on earth. It does not exist as any kind of ecological anomoly. The black cherry provides the natural second-growth species for this forest; its seeds survive for a long time in the shade, and they spring up in the sunlight. They live a short time compared to the longer-lived, shade-tolerant species that make up the old growth forest, and thus provide shade for those older trees to begin their lives, and eventually take their place forming the ultimate canopy. When “disturbances” invariably happened in the past, from storms, fire, or other natural disasters that had the very same impact as humans, this happened. After humans turned the Allegheny into the “Pennsylvania Desert,” this very same process unfolded. Today’s problems have little to do with the forest itself, and everything to do with its human mismanagement. But the forest struggles to heal itself, and would do so, quickly, if we did not restrain it so vigorously.
Yet even in its current state, food comes very, very easily. I know several local springs for fresh water. One of the forest’s biggest problems actually lies with the large deer herd; the forest has 10 deer per square mile, far in excess of a healthy population for the ecology. Wild edibles proliferate throughout the forest. In all honesty, I cannot with a straight face entertain the notion that such readily apparent bounty can seriously compare to the harsh realities of, say, the Kalahari, where only ancient oral traditions even allow them to find water, much less the hidden and scarce food available. Your suggestion that the Kalahari Desert, perhaps the cruelest environment on the planet, could somehow present a greater challenge to make a living presents something I simply cannot take seriously. I have to demand a good deal of evidence; as it stands, I find the very suggestion absolutely ridiculous.
This argument seems very anachronistic to me. Contrary to popular imagery, I see little actual evidence that humans have suffered much from predation in a very long time. Even in Africa, where humans evolved the longest and would thus have more integration into the food chain, while a hungry lion will eat just about anything, humans still do not make for regular game.
For the remaining threats, we must ask who does the threatening? Wherever horticulturalists dwell, you find hunter-gatherers dwelling among them: in the Amazon, New Guinea, the Congo, and so on, horticulture, hunting and gathering forms a continuum of activity, with neighboring tribes emphasizing one or another activity over the others. Those that garden more do not threaten those that hunt and gather any more than they threaten each other. Competition does not define their relationship, since they largely complement each other. In permacultural terms, hunter-gatherer neighbors cultivate and maintain the “zone 5″ area of the horticultural village.
Obviously, we can see that hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists dwell as easily with one another as they do with neighbors who follow the same subsistence pattern; in fact, better, since neighboring horticultural villages often do compete with one another, unlike hunter-gatherers, leading to a great deal of violence.
So, your statement seems more than a little dishonest: the environments do not threaten hunter-gatherers at all. Nor do they even face unusual threats from most human societies in those environments. Rather, they specifically face threats in any productive environment from civilization. Yet to say that hunter-gatherers face a threat from civilization any more keen than any other society again seems more than a little dishonest. Every other society faces such threats.
Now, you could pursue the old argument that the current dominance of civilization proves its superior adaptability, and that all other societies must have some unsustainable flaw, as evidenced by their failure to stand up against civilization, but I would disagree with that argument strongly. Civilization optimizes society for conquest. Societies can allocate their resources in many myriad ways, betweens concerns like making a living, providing for the general welfare, military defense, and so on. Civilization optimizes for conquest by stripping all other social capacities to the barest essentials. The modern United States might provide the most stark example of this, but even such a liberal beacon as Denmark pales in comparison to a horticultural village or a hunter-gatherer band. This optimization for conquest has meant that, wherever civilization could define the conflict in terms of conquest (by, say, invading and beginning a genocide), it has won. In conflict with such an enemy, you have one of two choices. Since your enemy has committed everything to conquest, anything less than your own total commitment to military defense will mean defeat and conquest. So in the first option, you decide to keep parts of your society dedicated to living in a sustainable manner, and as a result, you cannot mount an effective resistance to civilization’s total war, and you fall to their invasion and genocide. We have ample examples of this. In the second option, you do devote yourself utterly to military defense, and manage to repulse civilization, but only by voluntarily becoming a nearly identical civilization yourself. One could argue that the Germanic tribes who sacked Rome exemplify this possibility, or the Mongols who conquered China.
So the case that hunter-gatherers, who currently dwell in tropical rainforests, the Arctic, arid grasslands, and some of the world’s most inhospitable deserts, seem somehow especially suited to arid grasslands simply does not hold up to critical analysis.
Agreed, that would seem like a fallacious use of historical records. But we haven’t used historical records in such ways. We have compared how hunter-gatherers do, today, in far less productive areas (like the Kalahari), to far more ecologically productive areas (like the Allegheny National Forest). As noted above, this critically underestimates how easy rewilding will seem, but I don’t think that really bears out your skepticism.
I see permaculture in part as a means of becoming native, as jhereg mentioned, as well as restoring some of civilization’s damage and in part helping to rewild species we domesticated. Lisa Rayner wrote an excellent article, “Ecological Collapse, Trauma Theory and Permaculture.”
I hear this sentiment often repeated, but on what basis? Hunter-gatherers succeed everywhere; horticulturalists only in some places. Wherever horticulturalists dwell, you’ll find hunter-gatherers doing quite well in their midst, but some areas support so little ecological activity that only hunting and gathering will work there. So how can we continue perpetuating the logic that, in the face of severe ecological crisis, we will have a better chance following a strategy that requires a significantly abundant ecological basis, than that which works in areas so ecologically unproductive that only it can work?
Permaculture, hunting and gathering do not oppose one another; on the contrary, they complement one another. In some areas, permaculture will undoubtedly succeed, alongside hunter-gatherers; in others, only hunter-gatherers will succeed. But if we want to consider which strategies have the best chance of success, then this common refrain puts the situation exactly, and perilously, backwards. After all, it encourages us to invest our time in permaculture, where few (if any) practitioners give much time to hunting or gathering, instead of hunting and gathering, where permaculture frequently recieves attention. If you only focus on permaculture, you have only a (rather slim) chance of success; if you learn hunting, gathering and permaculture, your chance of success explodes, regardless of whether you end up emphasizing hunting, gathering, or gardening.
You’ll find my latest attempt at that in the Thirty Theses. I can’t say I feel like I’ve really succeeded yet. The Fifth World might accomplish a good deal of this, too. But I don’t think an emphasis on permaculture necessarily helps introduce people to rewilding; it introduces people to permaculture. Permaculture doesn’t necessarily—in fact, almost never—involves rewilding.
I’ve found few things as difficult to accept as the fact that no more than 1% or so of us will ever “get it.” Tim Ingold’s writing about the “building perspective” vs. the “dwelling perspective” really puts this into a new paradigm. The very fact that you face the notion of “going back” implies the notion of “going forward,” and the idea that society progresses only along a single line, moving us towards the ultimate fulfillment of our “nature” or “purpose.” I would say that the fundamental problem here lies not in how you present the issue, but in how we can break down the building perspective and build up the dwelling perspective in its place. In other words, the need to replace the logic and psychodynamics of literacy with the logic and psychodynamics of orality, or, as David Abram put it, come back to our senses.
I largely agree, but for the caveat mentioned above, that we should learn all of these strategies (which, after all, intermingle freely in actual practice); the pursuit of permaculture in particular could easily come at the exclusion of hunting and gathering, whereas I don’t hear too many rewilders talking about hunting and gathering without also advocating permaculture.
Hear, hear. Yet, can we really make those holistic changes in today’s world? I can certainly see the potential, even in the near future, but today, this moment? I don’t know if the space really exists for that.
Well, the description of hunter-gatherers as “nomadic” may require some elaboration. “Nomadism” does not mean aimless wandering. Rather, nomadic bands fissioned and fused in irregular, seasonal cycles, often coming back to common campsites. They still use permacultural techniques along those routes and at those campsites, so that they will find those areas even more abundant when they come back next time. Today, one of the greater impediments to those holistic changes, comes from land ownership and federal land usage laws. I intend to make the whole ANF our range, but I want to buy land to have a core campsite where we don’t have to worry about the rangers cracking down on us for camping more than 14 days at a time.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 March 2008 @ 6:24 PM
Man, just imagine if you had taken all the energy and time spent reading these comments and responding to them and instead used it trying to catch that elusive first fish!
Go for it!
Comment by Commenter — 8 May 2008 @ 9:11 AM
Please contact me at adam22681@yahoo.com. I’m glad the skills aspect is on your mind. I want to start a group that has 2 key elements:
1: starting a tradition of equipping people with natural skills (not trying to do it all at once, but starting a TRADITION) and
2: using the system against itself (especially in the area of land ownership — you can’t own the land, but if power is going to insist you can, let the primitivists be the one to “own it”)
Please contact me so we can put our heads together. I’m sick of being alone in this viewpoint.
Adam
Comment by Anonymous — 13 September 2008 @ 12:40 PM
Hi Adam!
You might enjoy visiting http://www.rewild.info
Comment by jhereg — 15 September 2008 @ 7:37 AM