BAGR4: Means and Ends - Kevin Tucker

From Black and Green Review no 4.
Pre-order no 4 here.

Resilience.

         This is what has permitted humans a place in our world. It may be the defining trait of Homo sapiens. We adapt. Ice ages, rising temperatures, changed climates, evolving terrain: for better or for worse, we are exceptionally adaptive beings. And for nearly the entirety of our time on this Earth, there was no reason to believe that it was anything but for the better.

         And yet the very thing that allowed us to live through ice ages, to navigate the oceans in boats built with stone tools, to master fire, is the very thing that permits us such leniency in diet as to find a way to continue sustaining on fast food. It allows us to continue the natural and necessary internal functioning the body of a nomadic hunter-gatherer requires while it spends an average of over 10 hours per day staring at screens. It allows us to celebrate the creation of technologies that may prolong our existence long enough to witness the catastrophe that awaits us.

         The catastrophe that civilization has initiated.

          Against all odds, against all likelihood, in a wave of horrid and vile extinction events, we are still here. We are still killing. Through our active or inactive participation, we remain spectators of a world in the decline of our own making. And we get to enjoy the delusion of pretending that it isn’t even happening or that it doesn’t even matter.

         We have scientists within NASA proclaiming the probability of human extinction and we don’t blink an eye. But why would we? How do you fathom the very real potential for human extinction, the immediate and aggressive alteration and shattering of ecological feedback loops and just erasing the possibility of seeing any kind of stability in weather patterns again?

         To put it mildly, our circumstances were unforeseeable on an evolutionary timeline.

         Our sea faring nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors utilizing stone tipped spears and arrows hadn’t evolved to dominate the world, to create a circumstance where the actions and choices of the individual could impact all life the world over. Like many other species, our minds could grasp and work around the use of tools.

         But that was not true for technology. Technology, driven by its need for complexity, organization, labor and social hierarchies, created and fostered a divorce between action and consequence. Foolishly our adaptive, resilient bodies stuck along for the ride.

         The core principle of technology, echoed infinitely through technological society, is that control is possible, that it is in our hands. It is that belief that made civilization possible. That belief carried civilizations across the Earth, maiming, raping, pillaging, decimating, and dismembering every step of the way. That belief blinded the power hungry, the elites, the priests from being able to see that while the consequences of civilization were very real, their belief in control was not.

         Our belief in control is not.

Resiliency may be the defining trait of humanity, but uncertainty is the defining trait of our future.

         We do not know what will happen. We don’t know the consequences of our actions, of our technology, of its social and ecological warpaths: we have ideas, but we don’t know how civilization will fall apart. All we know is that it will fall apart.

         That it is falling apart.

         It is this reality that has allowed the more individualistic among us to decry any notions of rewilding as fantastical. It is this reality that has allowed the more optimistic among us to cling to the hopes of permaculture as lifeboats for the coming storm. In an honest assessment of our circumstances, it’s hard to not teeter-totter between those two opposing sides. Both reflect some hope for the necessity of control: for our ability to persevere at the helm.

         It can be just as easy to look around and fall in line with the nihilistic embrace of hopelessness. But this itself is another type of control: nihilism dissolves into a belief that control is mine to do away with.

         All of this is about varying degrees of control. About the maintenance or shifting of power: another reiteration of the mythos of technology. Faced with sheer and unrelenting uncertainty, any and all of these reactions are logical.

         The problem is that logical is what got us into this mess.

         I am a proponent of rewilding. I am a proponent of resisting civilization and domestication. I cannot and will not distinguish those approaches as separate. If we are to fight civilization, we must learn to give up our hopes for control, we must give in to uncertainty, to root our lives and our resistance into the struggle, the pain and the loss felt by all wild beings. To embrace our wildness is to trust in our own resiliency.

         It is through building and immersing into the communities of wildness that we find our strength. That we become strategic in learning to target the elements of control that technology requires to perpetuate itself.

         This is illogical, but intentionally so. And it takes work.

The domestication process requires constant upkeep.

         Civilization is so counter-intuitive to who we are that we have to be trained and retrained constantly to ignore our instincts. Unable to defeat the wild urges within us, domesticators have learned to redirect those needs and wants. We are sustained at barely functioning levels and encouraged to indulge our quest for self-worth. We become workers, consumers, and spectators.

         But we also break.

         For the most part, medications and other stimulants/supplements keep pulling us back in. For many, that break is violence. Random or misdirected violence underscores the day-to-day reality of Modernity: spoken, thought or enacted, each of us is boiling over in a pit of rage and confusion or subdued by complicity and hopelessness. So much so that when we do wake up to the reality that we face, we struggle to overcome these hurdles in opening our vision of what can be done.

         And so we default, we back slide. I’m not here to point fingers, I’m no less guilty of this than anyone, but no one ever said breaking the domestication cycle would be easy. It’s ironic how rough it can be learning to listen to our own intuition again.

         This brings us back to the unthinkable uncertainty that lies ahead and one particularly difficult part of the pathway ahead: land projects.

         I want to be clear that largely speaking I have nothing against land projects. Considering the primary alternatives are renting and living in cities, it’s not a hard argument to say that any element of self-sufficiency and, ideally, lesser impact living isn’t a better alternative. If you can bolster wildness on that land by creating refuges then all the better.

         There are arguments against owning property. As a landowner myself, I’m only more familiar with them. There are compelling arguments against being in situations where you are paying land taxes or buying leases from national agencies, all of which are completely valid. But in practical terms, they can often be the same kind of problems that we’re stuck with in all aspects of life until civilization is gone.

         Fortunately that time is coming.

         Which brings me to my point on the matter: the problem that I see with land projects is that they can become an oasis for logical thought. With homesteading, with off-grid living, with the influx and rise of survivalist projects; land projects can slide back into that realm of control where we want to hold on to the delusion that civilization has given us.

         That delusion is the idea that self-sufficiency in off-grid living is resiliency.

         What we have seen throughout history is that it most definitely isn’t.

Now it is easy to say that my steadfast insistence upon focusing on nomadic immediate-return hunter-gatherer life is simply ideological. Some have even accused me of moralism. I see it as pragmatic.

         But that pragmatism comes with benefits.

         The reality is that nomadic immediate-return hunter-gatherer life is our most ancestral, primordial and instinctual way of being. This is how we, as humans, have evolved. Our senses, movements, sight, and intuition arise from this mode of subsistence. And it is the community that arises from it that has created and bolstered our resiliency. It has allowed us to move. To switch gears when hunting or foraging while a particular species of fauna or flora was in ebb and flow. It has given us the chance to respond to long-term and short-term ecological change.

         And I believe that this is also our best chance for surviving the current and on-coming ecological crisis.

         The problem with land projects is that they are, by and large, fixed. Sedentary. Permaculturalists have set out to create food-forests (a very civilized projection) that are meant to sustain communities with or without civilization. They can be far more diverse and far more resilient than gardens, certainly far more ecologically sane than farms. They may be more set to withstand the unprecedented cycles of heat and freezing, of drought and flooding that this destabilized climate may bring, but it is far more likely that they won’t.

         What we are currently seeing in the world is the new era of refugees. Climate refugees are now joining the ranks of political and economic refugees. As Story Teller discussed in Black and Green Review no 3, grid refugees are likely to arise. While Syrians have become the face of climate refugees, we overlook those who have and will continue to lose their homes to rampant and unchecked wildfires as they blaze through the boreal forests and the parched regions throughout the entirety of western North America. It is likely that the fuel being added to the fire by overwhelmed and hastily repurposed pipelines that are flooded with natural gases and fracking supply lines or as the number of train derailments continues to escalate carrying that thick, heavy crude from tar sands will cause those wildfires to spread into central and eastern North America forcing evacuations.

         This is our certainty: instability will feed abrupt and unpredictable change.

         Land projects are not fail-safes.

         In times of uncertainty, the very sense of self-sufficiency that they have sought to offer is the very thing that could make them targets from dislodged survivalists (current or future) or it could weaken the potential of any community on them to prepare for the coming era of refugees: the new nomadism of a world of shifting climates.

        

For me, this all comes down to a question of means and ends.

         Is the purpose of a land project to create self-sufficient communities through off-grid, smaller-scale living, possibly even emulating horticulture? If so, it may do well. It may thrive. I don’t doubt that life there would be infinitely more fulfilling than edging out a living and trying to stay sane through any other civilized “options”.

         Or is the purpose of the land project a means of fostering community, rebuilding ties, creating a basin for rewilding? Is the land project the ends or the means? This may be a simple question, but it’s a framework and perception that can be a threshold for our own resiliency.

         On the ground, it may not even look any different.

         Seeing a land project as a place to build community capable of nomadism doesn’t mean that the land itself shouldn’t be respected or that the return of wild beings and fauna shouldn’t be a priority. The purpose of rooting is that we should be respecting and partaking with the wild community and helping it heal and regrow regardless of what may lie ahead for us.

         That is another part of the uncertainty: we have to realize that having trained and rooted all the resilient, nomadic hunter-gatherer parts of our bodies and minds doesn’t give us any more certainty that we are equipped or given a free pass to weather the coming storms. It certainly helps. But we don’t know what is coming ahead; we just know that it is coming.

         It is easy to see this as a cop-out, as a chance to give in to nihilistic urges and shrug off any effort as idealistic play. But that’s the thing about community, the part that gets lost when we allow our understandings to be based in the all-loving trap of a hippie or liberal commune or to maintain that it is a relic of sub/urban neighborhoods: building community isn’t easy.

         It is not a coincidence that the immediate-return hunter-gatherer communities that were based on nomadism were also the most egalitarian societies to have ever existed. That is the added benefit of embracing the coming nomadism and the direction of building land projects around movement instead of stagnancy. When we break down those antiquated notions of community and start to really understand resiliency through movement, even just the ability to trek, to understand what it can be like to live without civilization or how to build a society without state infrastructure, then we begin to really root ourselves in our own animality. We build self-sufficiency that transcends place and circumstance.

         The truth is that we don’t always get along.

         Nature isn’t a passive reality; it’s just a bandage term we apply to the wilderness we see around us. Wildness is an active reality; we ignore it because the domestication process has taught us to. But wildness is within us and surrounds us. And it impacts us just as we impact and interact with it.

         Nothing about this is to imply notions of perfection or angelic life ways where we magically co-exist with everything.

         That simply isn’t what is going to happen.

        

Wildness, to borrow a term from Tamarack Song, is a state of dynamic tension. It requires awareness, grounding, perception, intuition, and, above all, a readiness to move and react abruptly at any time.

         This may sound overwhelming, but that’s because we look at it as outsiders. We don’t recognize the stimulation overload and complete lack of empathy that Modernity provides. We are deadened to the world by technology, numb to our need to constantly assess and respond to the massive killing machines surrounding us, such as cars. We are deadened to each other as we are drowned in sheer numbers of equally wounded, damaged and breaking people all around us. Even if we hate the State we can get too used to the presence of overarching structures that corral some of the violent among us while bolstering and empowering others.

         Rewilding is not surrender to the world: rewilding is embracing it. It’s about becoming an active participant rather than a spectator or passive participant. It means undoing the delusions that make domestication possible. The delusions that permit civilizations to exist.

         When we open our awareness, when we learn to walk through wild communities and to hear their warnings and communication, we begin to see the cracks in the Empire of civilization more clearly. We see the weak points that an anti-ecological system holds and how delusions serve to bridge the gaps.

         And we feel it.

         We feel the pain that is inflicted. We feel the loss that comes with feeding civilization, especially a hyper-modern technological one. We see the weakness in its infrastructure and its philosophical underpinning. We awaken our own empathy to that unthinkable, unquantifiable pain and loss in the context of community and we build a platform for resistance in our own resiliency.

         And we learn to stop relying on someone or something else to take care of our problems for us.

         We learn to act without mediation.

         None of this is easy. None of this is simple. None of us have allowed ourselves to really get there.

         But if we are willing to make that perceptional change, to learn to embrace the coming age of nomadism, to see beyond ourselves and to empower ourselves through taking part in something much larger and more magnificent than our own lives, then we have the world to gain from it.

         And this is where land projects can focus.

         I interviewed Andrew Badenoch of Feralculture in Black and Green Review no 1 to discuss the idea of land projects being built around nodes. The idea that he has pushed and now others have been pursuing is to build up networks of smaller properties that embrace the nomadic spirit. Nodes can have a particular draw to them: a better spot for hunting, a better spot for fishing, a better spot for foraging berries, nuts, tubers, or whatever. Embracing the original means of conflict resolution: they give a network for individuals or families to disperse and move.

         A large enough network also gives the ability to explore and become accustomed to different bioregions. It allows us to become familiar with different climates and to understand their challenges and promises. It gives us the chance to meet others seeking the same, to build connections with them.

         The community we will be building now, if we walk this path, is a disjointed one. It spans large spaces and focuses of ebb and flow, but it is an innately different conception of land projects than that of homesteading, even if homesteads remain a part of the larger network. What it can offer is a slow shift back to our nomadic minds: to become rooted in places so we can think, act and move as will likely be necessary to both prepare for the shifting climate on the horizon and to actively take part in the fracturing of civilization’s infrastructure.

         We have a lot of work to do in terms of undoing domestication in our own lives, but we can foster circumstances that will help us take larger steps. Ones that bring us further into that dynamic tension without leaving us feeling lost and isolated there. Moves that can undo the survivalist mentality that life within civilization requires.

         And it is a process.

         We will likely continue to live between two worlds: of wildness and of civilization, until the end. We have to get over notions of puritanism. Of thinking that we will shed all civilization from our lives so long as it continues existing. Saving ourselves from civilization means nothing so long as civilization continues to pull itself along and destroy the potential for all life.

         We get no guarantees. We have no certainties here.

         But we have no certainties anywhere beyond one: uncertainty is here. Uncertainty is growing more erratic as it gains speed.

         Is our end to continue to survive: to hold on to some semblance of civilized normality through turbulence? Or is our end to move beyond domestication entirely? This won’t happen quickly. It likely will take generations. We simply don’t know.

         But that is all the more reason to embrace uncertainty rather than to give in. We are participants in this reality whether we chose to acknowledge that or not. But we can embrace our wildness. We can become resilient again.

         We can rebuild communities of sustenance: communities of resistance.

         We have seen the world we want to live in and it is struggling. It is resisting and striving to outlast civilization. It exists within us and around us.

         And it is worth fighting for.