I can’t blame my year-long absence entirely on our exile, though. I had intended Anthropik to chronicle the journey of a group of people rewilding, not out of pride or because I thought we set a good example for others to emulate, but because I think we desperately need an open source revolution. We need to share our journeys with each other, so we can see what works and what doesn’t, learn from our mistakes, and take inspiration from our shared struggles. We need to know that when we fail, we don’t do it alone. We need to see the pitfalls that we might avoid. We need to share every little triumph and success we have, because they happen all too rarely.

To do that, though, I had to spend a lot of time explaining why we would even want to do such a thing. I wound up with the Thirty Theses, something some people still find valuable, but it didn’t fill the need I’d set out to fill. And worse, the academic tone I’d set, coming from college and reading academic articles and having a fairly good fluency in academia, intimidated others. Giuli, for instance, told me that her personal stories didn’t seem up to the standards I’d set. She didn’t want to share her experiences because of the precedent I had set. I had succeeded only at defeating the very purpose I’d set out to achieve!

In a post dated February 11, 2006, Ken Deffeyes, a man of some fame in peak oil circles, wrote, “My career as a prophet is over. I’m now an historian.” By the time Anthropik began winding down, those words echoed in my head often. CNN had aired an hour-long documentary about peak oil. I no longer needed to write about civilization’s collapse; The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal had picked up that job for me. I had written nearly everything I could think to write on the subject. Yes, many still commented with misconceptions about the things I’d written, but I’d already written the answers so many times over that once more would do no good.

At about the same time, I’d found a new crop of authors, beginning with David Abram, but later Graham Harvey, Calvin Luther Martin, Rane Willerslev and perhaps most of all, Tim Ingold, who all began from the same bizarre starting point: what if, hypothetically, not every indigenous person that any anthropologist has ever spoken to, lied to him, or suffered from serious, perhaps psychotic, hallucinations? In other words, what if we take animism seriously? Each of them launched an assault on Cartesian dualism from a different angle, reuniting the world. Tim Ingold’s dense, academic prose especially rewarded me with new insight after new insight. He called it all “the dwelling perspective.”

In “the building perspective,” we live in two worlds. First, in the world of ideas, we have plans. Then, we implement those ideas in the world of objects. First the blueprint, then the house. But when can you call the house “finished”? When the builders leave, it might match the plans drawn on the blueprints, but the house continues to change after that. Do we call it complete when the birds move in? When water leaks into the basement? Or when it catches fire and burns to the ground? By the same token, the land and the wood all existed before those builders came to the site, and the architect who drew those plans on the blueprint could only do so because of his earlier experience with skills like planning, design, architecture, and finally drawing blueprints. This doesn’t happen in two worlds, but one; you don’t have plans and then a finished building, you only have dwelling in the land. You have the participation that builds those skills, participation that builds that house, and then more participation that changes the house and eventually makes it no longer recognizable as a house. You can’t truly say that it is a house; rather, that the place houses for a bit. It didn’t house before, and it won’t house later, but for the moment, it houses.

I still don’t think I’ve explained it well, and that gets to the problem itself. I don’t know if I have fully digested this idea. Ingold takes it far, into language and thought, genotype and phenotype, evolution, technology and tools—I find myself very much in agreement, but I don’t know if I can yet express it well.

We’ll find out together. I think I’ve already set a different tone here, and quite purposely. That original need still needs someone to fill it. We still need people to share their rewilding experience openly, with earnestness and authenticity; and here, I’ll keep trying to find a good way to express this dwelling perspective I’ve found.