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.
