Black and Green Review

BAGR4: Stemming the Tide - Cliff Hayes

2016-12-14T22:40:00.001-06:00

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

The launch of Smarter Planet was not merely the announcement of a new strategy, but an assertion of a new world view.

Amid the global economic crisis of 2008, IBM began a conversation with the world about the promise of a smarter planet and a new strategic agenda for progress and growth.

As the internet grew, so did technology-driven enterprise needs and a truly global workforce. Computational power was being infused into things no one had thought of as computers: phones, cars, roads, power lines, waterways and food crates. A trillion connected and intelligent things were becoming a system of systems — an “internet of things” — and producing oceans of raw data.[1]

This system of systems that we find littering the orbit of the Earth, its environment and down to our immediate surroundings and bodies, is more than just the marketing campaign of a large multi-national tech-based corporation. It certainly has roots going deeper than the 2008 global economic crisis, but as it stands today, it is a system that the majority of civilized humanity has come to depend upon for existence.

Much of the promotional material for such a new world view is centered around the concept of interconnectedness. The promise being that the humans on disparate ends of the unifying system will now be connected, and remain connected, in ways not possible without the development of this so-called smarter planet. Of course, the connection is physically carried out by various apparatus of technology, not humans, and there is a definite qualitative difference between these types of connection. The human connection is reduced to symbolic representations that the technological apparatus can disseminate. As such, those representations of all physical existence become amplified, literally and figuratively, in their importance to such a civilization that depends on them. The message of IBM’s “new world view” is clear enough - if you can’t tread in the “oceans of raw data,” then be prepared to drown.

Those of us unwilling to have life defined by the ability to navigate these digital oceans have other ideas, though. On either side of the stormy seas of technology lies an existence not engulfed by our ephemeral technological aspirations. There are various actors in bringing about such an existence and not all of them are human. In fact, a formidable opponent to the life-blood of such systems, electricity, is the largest benefactor of all life on Earth: the sun.

Geomagnetic Storms and the Carrington Event

Geomagnetic storms are disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field that often occur when coronal mass ejection (CME) or a persistent high speed solar wind stream sweeps past Earth causing the magnetic field to become unsettled for an extended period of time.[2] CME is described as “a giant cloud of solar plasma drenched with magnetic field lines that are blown away from the Sun during strong, long-duration solar flares and filament eruptions.”[3] The effects of such storms on systems dependent on a steady and stable flow of electrons are not hard to imagine. One such event that came in modern times was the Carrington Event of 1859.

On September 2, 1859, one of the largest recorded geomagnetic storms hit the Earth’s atmosphere and wreaked havoc on the communication technology of the day - the cutting edge telegraph system. The system “shorted out in the United States and Europe, igniting widespread fires.”[4] Telegraph operators experienced electric shocks, telegraph pylons sparked and the aurora generated by the storm was seen at locations near the equator, which is extremely rare.[5] This geomagnetic storm of 1859 became known as the Carrington Event based on the solar flare that was observed and recorded by the English amateur astronomer Richard C. Carrington just before noon on the previous day.

Earth’s magnetic field can protect the surface of the planet from smaller solar storms (they are categorized similar to Hurricane strengths),[6] but the storm in 1859 overwhelmed Earth’s magnetic field and penetrated to the surface of the planet. In 1989, there was a similar solar storm that caused a nine-hour power outage across Quebec, Canada.[7] The 1859 Carrington Event was reported to be three times as strong as the 1989 storm that wiped out power in Quebec.[8] If a storm as strong as the Carrington Event were to happen today, it could be a crippling blow to communications systems worldwide that may take multiple years of recovery and, according to U.S. Homeland Security Committee, “could pose the risk of the largest natural disaster that could affect the United States.”[9]

In 2012, another strong solar storm was observed, however this time it came from a section of the Sun that wasn’t pointed directly at the Earth. Our technology was spared the onslaught. "If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces," reported Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado back in 2014.[10]

The solar storm of 2012 wasn’t widely covered in the press and it actually took two more near misses before these events started reaching a wider audience. In March 2014, Michael Snyder published his article, “After Several Near Misses, Experts Warn the Next Carrington Event Will Plunge Us Back Into The Dark Ages,” where he wrote:

Most people have absolutely no idea that the Earth barely missed being fried by a massive [Electromagnetic Pulse] burst from the sun in 2012, in 2013 and just last month. If any of those storms would have directly hit us, the result would have been catastrophic. Electrical transformers would have burst into flames, power grids would have gone down and much of our technology would have been fried. In essence, life as we know it would have ceased to exist – at least for a time. These kinds of solar storms have hit the Earth many times before, and experts tell us that it is inevitable that it will happen again.[11]

Previously in December of 2012, Snyder had warned of the devastation that geomagnetic storms could unleash on our smarter planet:

A single gigantic electromagnetic pulse over the central United States could potentially fry most of the electronics from coast to coast if it was powerful enough. This could occur in a couple of different ways. If a powerful nuclear weapon was exploded at a high enough altitude, it could produce an electromagnetic pulse powerful enough to knock out electronics all over the country. Alternatively, a massive solar storm could potentially cause a similar phenomenon to happen just about anywhere on the planet without much warning. Of course not all EMP events are created equal. An electromagnetic pulse can range from a minor inconvenience to a civilization-killing event. It just depends on how powerful it is. But in the worst case scenario, we could be facing a situation where our electrical grids have been fried, there is no heat for our homes, our computers don’t work, the Internet does not work, our cell phones do not work, there are no more banking records, nobody can use credit cards anymore, hospitals are unable to function, nobody can pump gas, and supermarkets cannot operate because there is no power and no refrigeration. Basically, we would witness the complete and total collapse of the economy. According to a government commission that looked into these things, approximately two-thirds of the U.S. population would die from starvation, disease and societal chaos within one year of a massive EMP attack. It would be a disaster unlike anything we have ever seen before in U.S. history.[12]

Clearly, the administrators of the technological era have taken notice of the potential for destruction that these geomagnetic storms have and they’ve responded.

The UK government announced plans to fund a new space-weather forecasting service in 2013.[13] This was intended to serve as a backup to the US based Space Weather Prediction Center, a laboratory and service center for the US National Weather Service which itself is part of the larger National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).[14] And in September 2016, NOAA announced that they were going to start releasing more accurate forecasts of electromagnetic storms based on a more sophisticated prediction model. In part, this model was to be informed by a NOAA satellite positioned 1.6 million kilometers away from the surface of Earth, known as DSCOVR.[15] The new NOAA model will incorporate three models that describe the solar atmosphere through interplanetary space and into the Earth’s magnetic realm. One model describing the Earth’s entire magnetosphere, another describing the inner magnetosphere and a third model for electrical activity in the upper atmosphere.[16]

As it has been with the history of technological developments, the problems of one form of technological innovation have to be ameliorated through the development of more technology. The vulnerability of techno-addicted life is exposed by its dependence on a stable and steady flow of electricity. If the flow of electricity is affected by events beyond the control of current technology, then the rush is on to create the technology to control those events. Or at least, the rush is on to create yet another ocean of raw data about those events. With the raw data, technocrats can craft a plan of action to minimize the damage to those technological systems of our creation.

So, what about that aforementioned “system of systems” comprised of a trillion interconnected machines? Perhaps it won’t take an external event, such as a geomagnetic storm, to bring the system to a grinding halt. Perhaps it can come from an internal manipulation of the system itself.

The Internet of Vulnerable Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a system of components that traditionally lacked computational power or a means to communicate with each other. The IoT is the result of a push to build computational power into technological devices and enable them to communicate with users, and each other, through the internet. There are many “smart devices” out there filling up that ocean of raw data, but being smart and connected doesn’t make the IoT safe from being deceived and manipulated. In fact, being smart and connected might just be IoT’s biggest vulnerability.

On September 20^th, 2016, the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack was launched against KrebsOnSecurity.com. Engineers at Akamai, a content delivery network service provider who protect the Krebs site from digital attacks, reported that the attack was nearly twice as large as any other attack they had seen and was among the biggest assaults the Internet has ever witnessed.[17] What made the attack so large was the bandwidth of the attack directed at Krebs. It reached 620 Gbps (gigabits per second). The interesting thing here is the way it was carried out:

There are some indications that this attack was launched with the help of a botnet that has enslaved a large number of hacked so-called “Internet of Things,” (IoT) devices — routers, IP cameras and digital video recorders (DVRs) that are exposed to the Internet and protected with weak or hard-coded passwords.

Each botnet spreads to new hosts by scanning for vulnerable devices in order to install the malware. Two primary models for scanning exist. The first instructs bots to port scan for telnet servers and attempts to brute force the username and password to gain access to the device. The other model, which is becoming increasingly common, uses external scanners to find and harvest new bots, in some cases scanning from the [botnet control] servers themselves. The latter model adds a wide variety of infection methods, including brute forcing login credentials on SSH servers and exploiting known security weaknesses in other services.

In this way, one doesn’t need to personally own the hardware and the pipe to the internet big enough to flood it. This method is something like a “zombie army” of IoT devices that are manipulated into blasting data back into the system. The result is a targeted attack from, as IBM states, “a trillion connected and intelligent things.”

On October 1^st, 2016, the following was published on the KrebsOnSecurity blog:

The source code that powers the “Internet of Things” (IoT) botnet responsible for launching the historically large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against KrebsOnSecurity last month has been publicly released, virtually guaranteeing that the Internet will soon be flooded with attacks from many new botnets powered by insecure routers, IP cameras, digital video recorders and other easily hackable devices.

The leak of the source code was announced Friday on the English-language hacking community Hackforums. The malware, dubbed “Mirai,” spreads to vulnerable devices by continuously scanning the Internet for IoT systems protected by factory default or hard-coded usernames and passwords.

Vulnerable devices are then seeded with malicious software that turns them into “bots,” forcing them to report to a central control server that can be used as a staging ground for launching powerful DDoS attacks designed to knock Web sites offline.[18]

But even before this announcement was made on Krebs’s site, the Mirai botnet was implicated in another attack that more than doubled the size of the Krebs attack.

On September 23, 2016, OVH, the France-based Internet Service Provider, was blasted by the same Mirai botnet that hit Krebs. This time to the tune of 1.5Tbps (terabits per second), as tweeted by the founder of OVH, Octave Klaba.[19] His tweet reported, “This botnet with 145607 cameras/dvr (1-30Mbps per IP) is able to send >1.5Tbps DDoS.” To quote Dave Larson, chief technology officer at security form Corero, “The tools and devices used to execute the attacks are readily available to just about anyone; combining this with almost complete anonymity creates a recipe to break the internet.”[20]

Within a month of OVH being targeted, the hacking collective calling itself New World Hackers claimed to be behind a large-scale attack using the Mirai botnet code that targeted Dyn, a Domain Name System (DNS) provider.[21] The attack occurred on October 21, 2016 and came in three waves roughly at 7am, noon and 6pm. Dave Allen, the general counsel at Dyn, reported that “tens of millions of internet addresses” were being used to blast internet traffic at the company’s servers.[22] Dyn is a company that provides internet infrastructure services to large, popular sites including Amazon.com, BBC, Fox News, PayPal, Reddit, Starbucks, Twitter, Visa, Wired and Yelp.[23] Clearly the attacks were coordinated and their target strategically chosen. The IoT devices strung together in such a botnet are at a disadvantage when it comes to security because they are unable to run standard security software intended for commercial operating systems. IoT devices are certainly aiding in the rise of DDoS attacks as evidenced by a report from Verisign that shows a 75% increase year over year in the frequency of such attacks.[24]

Devices built to be controlled over the internet are beginning to proliferate. Business Insider reported, back in 2014, that by 2019 that “the Internet of Things” would be the largest device market in the world – “…more than double the size of the smartphone, PC, tablet, connected car and the wearable market combined.”[25] Clearly, many users of these products leave the default security settings in place, meaning the units are open to being easily manipulated. Many devices are put into service without much thought to their configuration. Plug’n’play for the user is also making it plug’n’play for the hacker. While the Mirai botnet targeted consumer equipment and non-infrastructure websites and systems, the ramifications of a spreading IoT changes when industrial and business devices enter the picture. The National Security Agency’s Tailored Access Operations chief, Rob Joyce, recently said a large-scale attack on more critical infrastructure “…is something that keeps me up at night.”[26]

Sweet Dreams of the NSA

Rob Joyce leads a team that is purported to be the best-resourced group of hackers in the world. They operate to infiltrate computer networks to gather foreign intelligence and they also probe the U.S. government networks to improve their security.[27] In a presentation at the January 2016 Enigma conference in San Francisco, Joyce said he considered IoT as a major boon when his team needs to attack a target. He singled out heating and cooling systems as examples of internet-connected devices that offer national-level hackers a route into organizations that computer network administrators often overlook.

The above quote where Joyce revealed what keeps him up at night was specifically related to SCADA security. SCADA stands for “Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition” which is a system for remote monitoring and control that operates with coded signals over communication channels, typically using one communication channel per remote session.[28] It isn’t just Joyce who acknowledges SCADA security as a source of sleep deprivation. Nicholas Weaver, a computer researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, was quoted as saying, “I don’t do SCADA research because I like to sleep at night.”[29] However, those who do look into SCADA security find evidence of groups looking to infiltrate industrial systems and exploit their vulnerabilities.

At the Black Hat Conference of 2013 in Las Vegas, Kyle Wilhoit, a researcher with security company Trend Micro, gave a talk on what happened when he set up a dummy water control system that could be accessed via the internet. In his talk, he discussed how a Word document hiding malicious software was used to gain full access to his U.S. based decoy system, or “honeypot.” The attack was carried out, allegedly, by a Chinese based hacking group known as Comment Crew, or APT1, and it illustrated the point that there are hacking groups out there that target infrastructure systems. Wilhoit pointed out that between March and June in 2013, 12 honeypots were deployed in 8 different countries and they had attracted 74 international attacks. 10 of the 74 attacks were sophisticated enough that they took complete control of a dummy control system. Wilhoit reported that, while his findings were based on his decoy systems, “these attacks are happening [to real systems] and the engineers likely don’t know.”[30]

In October, 2012, U.S. defense secretary, Leon Panetta, warned that successful attacks have been made on computer control systems of American electricity and water plants, as well as transportation systems. While the details were light in Panetta’s report, it prompted a response from Chris Blask, founder and CEO of ICS Cybersecurity, where he said, “Stability and reliability are more important than anything – you have to keep the lights on.”[31] Because we “have to keep the lights on,” these power and water systems are running on older hardware and software that simply works. As such, systems remain unpatched and vulnerable to known security issues. Also, since some of these systems are located in remote areas, companies, contractors and employees have pushed for remote access to these systems. Thus exposing them to infiltration via the internet.

Roy Campbell, who researches the security of critical-infrastructure systems at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, reported that the pattern of connections between different parts of the electrical grid can create weak spots that would make it relatively easy for a hacker to bring down a wide area, “If you can isolate a power station, for example, it can be difficult to turn it back on because you need power to do that.”[32]

More topics to keep the NSA up at night are discussed at the Black Hat Conference every year. I’m sure they’re listening very closely and building up their defenses, but with the expansion of IoT being so rapid and the network being so dispersed, it would be difficult for them to protect all of it, all of the time. Some demonstrations of hacking attacks covered at the conference in 2013 were:

· Spraying the audience with water from a replica water plant component forced to over-pressurize

· Showing how wireless sensors commonly used to monitor temperatures and pressures of oil pipelines and other industrial equipment can be made to give false readings that trick automatic controllers or human operators into taking damaging action

· Detailing of flaws in wireless technology used in 50 million energy meters across Europe that make it possible to spy on home or corporate energy use and even impose blackouts

· Exploiting a protocol called Dbus that has been used to control industrial equipment since the 1970s and is still in wide use today on devices often connected directly to the internet

It’s been reported that the incentive to update or patch these security flaws is low because current law doesn’t hold energy operators or the manufacturers of control systems liable for the consequences of poor security, such as damage from an explosion or lengthy power outage.[33] So, maybe while the NSA is losing sleep over the possibility of infrastructure hacking attempts causing damage, the private companies don’t feel the same pressure because they aren’t exposed to monetary damages resulting from the failures of their systems.

One final note here related to the sweet dreams of the NSA. In his spare time, HD Moore, decided to carry out a personal census of every device on the internet. Moore’s census involved sending simple, automated messages to each of the 3.7 billion IP addresses assigned to devices connected to the internet around the world. Not even Google has publicly attempted such a census. The result of Moore’s census was that many of the 310 million IPs that responded were vulnerable to well-known flaws, or configured in a way that would let anyone take control of them. Moore was quoted as saying, “There [are] some fundamental problems with how we use the Internet today. We’re sitting on mountains of new vulnerabilities.”[34]

Cutting the Cords

So while the IoT appears vulnerable to celestial and digital attacks, how does it stand up to some good old fashioned and therapeutic physical destruction? The good news is that even though the smarter planet invents a virtual layer for programmers to manipulate in the confines of cyberspace, it has to run on physically existing hardware. And that hardware is certainly available to physical attacks.

In April, 2016, Verizon reported that its equipment was sabotaged in the wake of a strike by its unionized workers. Fiber optic cabling was sliced at facilities in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York, which cut services to customers that included police and fire departments. A Verizon spokesperson reported that during a normal year, they might experience 5 or 6 deliberate cable cuts, but since the strike started, the number of suspected deliberate cable cuts rose to 49.[35] If only humans could recognize the damage done by and for technology extends far beyond their paycheck…

Announced in July, 2015, the FBI began investigating at least 11 physical attacks on high-capacity Internet cables in the northern California. One such attack, which took place near Sacramento, was carried out by the perpetrators breaking into an underground vault and cutting three fiber-optic cables belonging to Internet service providers. In April 2009, underground fiber-optic cables were cut at four sites, knocking out landlines, cell phones and Internet Service for tens of thousands in Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties. Similarly, in Arizona, underground fiber-optic cables were sliced in early 2015 which resulted in tens of thousands of residents being cut off from the Internet. In response, JJ Thompson, CEO of Rook Security said, “When it’s situations that are scattered all in one geography, that raises the possibility that they are testing out capabilities, response times and impact. That is a security person’s nightmare.” Yes, and by the same token, what a nightmare our technological dependence has become! To turn FBI Special Agent Greg Wuthrich’s words around about carrying out attacks on technological infrastructure would be appropriate, “We definitely need the public’s assistance.”[36]

In March, 2015, USA Today published an article entitled, “Bracing for a big power grid attack: One is too many.” In this article, it was revealed that the U.S. power grid is hit by cyber or physical attacks about once every four days. While many of the attacks are small-scale, the analysis carried out by USA Today on federal energy records lists some important facts:

· Transformers and other critical equipment sit in plain sight, often only protected by chain-link fencing and a few security cameras

· Suspects have never been identified in connection with many of the 300-plus attacks on electrical infrastructure since 2011

· In 2011, an intruder gained access to a critical hydro-electric converter station in Vermont by smashing a lock on a door. In 2013, a gunman fired multiple shots at a gas turbine power plant along the Missouri-Kansas border. Also in 2013, four bullets fired from a highway struck a power substation outside Colorado Springs. No suspects were apprehended in any of these incidents.

· The power grid is susceptible to cascading outage due to the reliance on a small number of critical substations and other physical equipment

And here’s a rundown of the “seven bullets theory” from John Axelrod, a former energy security regulator from a presentation at a 2013 security conference in Louisville. He describes how a mass outage could be triggered by a physical attack targeting key pieces of equipment:

The Eastern power grid is highly interconnected and relies on rolling power between different utilities, he said, according to a video of the presentation.

"If you know where to disable certain transformers, you can cause enough frequency and voltage fluctuation in order to disable the grid and cause cascading outages," said Axelrod, who now heads the power and utilities information security practice at Ernst & Young. "You can pick up a hunting rifle at your local sporting goods store … and go do what you need to do."[37]

Sometimes the system doesn’t even need any external push, though. It regularly generates failures of its own. In March, 2016, Lockheed Martin faced months of delivery delays for the first six of eight GPS III satellites when it was discovered that small cracks in ceramic capacitors supplied to them by Harris Corporation were causing failures. Apparently, Lockheed has had so much trouble delivering a working system to the customer, the United States Air Force, that the Air Force was considering opening the troubled program up to multibillion-dollar competition. However, it’s not only the satellite project that is weighed down with technical problems, the ground based system to communicate with those satellites being built by Raytheon is running five years late. The system itself appears to hobble along running on technology it can barely produce well enough to keep up the charade.

John Zerzan has been cataloging the manufacturing defects and recalls from various industries for years on his weekly radio show, Anarchy Radio. One could, and I believe I have on previous shows, point out how entropy continually conspires against the aims of technology to dissolve its systems of control and force. Entropy, in simple terms, is the measure of energy of a system that is unavailable for doing useful work.[38] Somewhat of a loaded definition with the phrase of “useful work,” the point is clear enough that the laws ascribed to nature by science end with all the sound and fury of technological innovation leading to a slow decay away from the order it attempts to impose. As such, entropy can describe, in general, the trajectory of technological systems and components – they will eventually fail to meet their desired operating specifications.

Keeping all this in mind, I suppose one could say the system will eventually cut its own cords, but with a little determination and help, those cords could be severed more readily.

[1] https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/

[2] http://www.northernlighthouse.ca/geomagnetic-storms/

[3] https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/help/what-is-a-coronal-mass-ejection-cme

[4] http://www.space.com/7224-150-years-worst-solar-storm.html

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

[6] http://www.northernlighthouse.ca/geomagnetic-storms/

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm

[8] http://www.space.com/7224-150-years-worst-solar-storm.html

[9] https://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/rma-geomagnetic-storms.pdf

[10] https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/23jul_superstorm/

[11] http://thetruthwins.com/archives/after-several-near-misses-experts-warn-the-next-carrington-event-will-plunge-us-back-into-the-dark-ages

[12] http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/a-massive-electromagnetic-pulse-could-collapse-the-economy-in-a-single-moment

[13] http://www.nature.com/news/uk-bolsters-defences-against-crippling-solar-storms-1.14432

[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Weather_Prediction_Center

[15] http://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/DSCOVR/

[16] http://www.nature.com/news/us-sharpens-surveillance-of-crippling-solar-storms-1.20630

[17] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/09/krebsonsecurity-hit-with-record-ddos/

[18] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/10/source-code-for-iot-botnet-mirai-released/

[19] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37504719

[20] ibid

[21] http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2016/10/cyberattack_disrupts_websites.html

[22] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/22/business/internet-problems-attack.html

[23] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2016_Dyn_cyberattack

And from their own website, https://dyn.com/about/, they describe themselves as – “a cloud-based Internet Performance Management (IPM) company that provides unrivaled visibility and control into cloud and public Internet resources. Dyn’s platform monitors, controls and optimizes applications and infrastructure through Data, Analytics, and Traffic Steering, ensuring traffic gets delivered faster, safer, and more reliably than ever.”

[24] https://www.nab.org/cybersecurity/Verisign-report-ddos-trends-Q22016.pdf

[25] http://uk.businessinsider.com/how-the-internet-of-things-market-will-grow-2014-10?r=US&IR=T

[26] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/546251/nsa-hacking-chief-internet-of-things-security-keeps-me-up-at-night/

[27] ibid

[28] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCADA

[29] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/546251/nsa-hacking-chief-internet-of-things-security-keeps-me-up-at-night/

[30] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/517786/chinese-hacking-team-caught-taking-over-decoy-water-plant/

[31] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/429611/old-fashioned-control-systems-make-us-power-grids-water-plants-a-hacking-target/

[32] ibid

[33] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/517731/hacking-industrial-systems-turns-out-to-be-easy/

[34] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/514066/what-happened-when-one-man-pinged-the-whole-internet/

[35] http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2016/04/28/verizon-claims-sabotage-on-network-and-cables.html

[36] http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/06/30/california-internet-outage/29521335/

[37] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/03/24/power-grid-physical-and-cyber-attacks-concern-security-experts/24892471/

[38] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

BAGR4: Means and Ends - Kevin Tucker

2016-12-14T22:28:00.000-06:00

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.

Updates

2016-12-14T21:49:00.002-06:00

Note that the site is getting a makeover. Everything will be moving to the new blackandgreenreview.org but it's currently in the process of connecting.

BAGR4: Opening Editorial

2016-12-04T18:53:00.000-06:00

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

Unrelenting heat.

That feels like the summation of the world right now: like being in a boiling cauldron and the temperature just keeps escalating.

I’m talking about the climate. I’m talking about society. I’m talking about politics. I’m talking about the economy. I’m talking about ecology. Every facet of the world we face feels like it is on fire. This is literally the case as record-setting wildfires overtake chunks of the map and as constant bombing campaigns continue to devastate others. 2015 was the hottest year on record and 2016 is on track to surpass it.

This is the future unfolding before us: the consequences of industrialized growth and technologized expansion extrapolating the caustic downfall of a globalized civilization. And that is the overwhelming feeling you get every day when you wake up and open your computer or turn on your devices, opening yourself to the flood of seething anger and impotence.

But we do it.

We carry on. We get lost in the sea of reactionary reiterations. We fall into the crushing waves of the mutual assured destruction of our own empathy. We are willing to accept the destruction so long as we are right.

Why? How are we able to do this?

How do we simultaneously bask in the endless cycles of perpetual call-and-response of social media and ignore the world as it becomes only further engulfed in catastrophic and systemic destruction?

We do this because we shut off. The atrocities of civilization are simply too much for our regionally based hunter-gatherer minds to comprehend. This is existence with implications that we were never psychologically prepared for because neither we nor any other being is physically capable of causing them. Not without technology.

This is beyond our realm as empathetic beings, so we stop our minds from going there. This is our mind in survival mode: solely able to address the immediate fight-or-flight impulse, redirected through technological intrusion. We double down. We embody the ethos of accepting reality as it is and fragmenting our experience of life into individual issues. We plant ourselves and we defend that position until the next thing comes along.

We define ourselves by our own acts of active defeatism. We immerse ourselves in the immediacy of technology so we no longer have to keep the totality in our minds. We are just reacting.

Meanwhile, the predictions for the earth are dire. The potential for human extinction looms heavily underneath a perpetual loss of ecosystems and species. The thresholds once considered tipping points for endemic climate shifts are being surpassed.

If we start to unplug, we can see it, but it is no less overwhelming. The New York Times recently released a site that charts the high and low temperatures of 2015 by city against what has been considered the baseline temperatures for each place based on 160-year-old data.[1] It has to be seen to be believed, but, as with nearly every climate change scenario, the worst-case scenario predictions for 2100 are being passed already. Places like Fort Chipeyan in Canada have already had an average temperature increase of 5.8° Celsius.

Methane sinkholes become the new norm. Exaggerated cycles of drought and flooding become the new norm. Increased temperatures have resulted in concentrations of nitrates, hydrogen cyanide, and mycotoxins in cash crops.[2] And have resulted in the thawing of long frozen reindeer carcasses in Russia unleashing anthrax.[3]

Social and political tension is impossible to ignore.

We see in Donald Trump social media personified: exaggerated blasts of reactionary conspiracy, the billionaire acting as the underdog. We see the ignition of the xenophobic and racist underpinnings of civilization come back to the forefront. We see in Hillary Clinton the smiling voracious face of Neoliberal surgical strikes and expansive systemic subjugation sold as policy reform. We see a fanning of flames on liberal blindness to the iron fist of a society built upon violent subjugation of Others. We see people buying into the mythos of democracy: of the notion that any State is sustainable.

We see the blow back as the climate refugees of one nation are corralled in camps, forced back by nations under their own economic and political duress. We see the need for scapegoats and watch as the Westernized identity of the Sacred Individual feels attacked and becomes militarized: as the frustrated and afraid are given access to hyper-technological weaponry and psychological justifications to kill en masse.

Salvation, martyrdom, the elated subjects of a hero’s return, capturing headlines: the suicide bomber, the religious zealot, the soldier, and the mass murderer all share in the flaccid rage of living in a boiling world and feeling as though the promises of civilization have let them down. We are all boiling. And given direction, we will seek revenge on whoever is possible. Be it the ex-military cop gunning down unarmed black people in the streets or the suicide bomber seeking vilification beyond this world by killing as many within it as possible.

When we open ourselves to the depth of this reality, it becomes impossible. It is beyond comprehension, beyond our threshold for pain and empathy. It is easy to opt back in: to get lost on social media, to bury ourselves in our Self.

It is easy to become lost in distraction.

As sad as that option is, it makes sense. Against the reality that we surely face, any bit of hope stands against the most uphill battle imaginable.

The problem we face is that distraction remains an option.

We have no choice here. The reality that is unfolding before us is real. It is our home, this earth, being destroyed. It is those that we love, those we hate, those we wish we could not love being lost in an unrepentant mirage of distraction. It is our own fate intertwined with the fate of all life on this planet.

We started Black and Green Review not because it would be the catalyst to save the world, but because we need to start somewhere. We need to stake our ground and attack from that position. It isn’t enough to continually react and respond while staying prepped for the next round of continual arguments on the same subjects forever through every cycle of the News Feed.

As John Zerzan stated in the Opening Editorial of BAGR 3, we wanted to carry on the debates and discussions that Green Anarchy, Green Anarchist, and Species Traitor had taken part in. Those were discussions that spilled far beyond the microcosm of anarchist debate and circles. They had grown and found their way to filter into society at large.

And in their absence, that trajectory atrophied. Through sites like Anarchist News, it became insular. The cheerleaders for insurrection-for-insurrection’s sake faded as the attention shifted towards the comfort afforded the critics. Anarchism has never been absent of the philosophical hollowness of eternal dissection of lingo, nor strayed far from the politics of negation. But these are the aspects that the internet and social media amplified.

And they grew.

This trajectory has led anarchists into the cul-de-sac of nihilistic terrorism and egoist soul searching. In that trajectory, anarcho-primitivism is a lightning rod for having the audacity to stand for something: to have staked our claim on seeing a world that is worth fighting for and defending. To want to build communities of resistance, support those that are and have been resisting civilization’s advances and to refuse the domestication process as it seeks to tear us from the wildness that runs through all life.

We began BAGR in part to expand and challenge those discussions alongside others. There is merit among them, but the problem is that there is no end point, nothing worth acting upon. The politics of negation are discussion for the sake of discussion. They are about carving out the perfect anti-ideological ideology. To set out the perfect anti-moralistic moralism and to carry out the pure will of the Individual.

Dedicated to finding and chasing out the boogey-men of impure thought, there are only two options: to celebrate in discussion as praxis, as stated by one of its advocates, “to laugh at the futility of it all”, or to embrace the absurdity of unthinking acts of terror under the guise of “eco-extremism” while leaning further and further towards eco-fascism.

If we are to accept that there is no hope, that there isn’t even a sliver of chance that we can divert or lessen the catastrophic conclusion of civilization’s collapse, then we have nothing to offer but another noun to justify our particular brand of online voraciousness.

I have no time for those discussions.

I have two daughters. I have two daughters that I will, above all else, do anything to protect and to provide for. I have two daughters whose fates are intertwined with the fate of all wildness. I have two daughters who have no future on a dead planet.

I have no false assumptions or heroic ambition to save the world, but if I’m not even fucking trying to do anything about all of this, then what am I worth? What am I worth to the world to just waste away finding new ways to demonize the grounds that I am standing upon, the grounds I have placed my stake in: the grounds that I will always fight for?

All of the editors and contributors of this project have poured themselves into this. And we have gotten untold support from others who resonate with our simple call to action: for a wild resistance, for a passionate resistance.

We are not, nor have we ever been, satisfied with vilifying ourselves for a spot within anarchist history. We are driven by a hatred of civilization. Driven by a vile contempt for the consequences of domestication. We are motivated by the nomadic hunter-gatherer within our bodies and minds that yearns to embrace the wildness.

We see that within generations of communities, that there is hope. That there is that sliver of chance that this world will not be destroyed and that life may continue on. We take solace in the world our grandchildren’s grandchildren may one day inhabit where our lives and our struggles are forgotten memories.

This resistance, like wildness, exists far beyond us. We aren’t leading the call: we have just seen the cracks and have sought to continue pursuing them.

It would be easy to look at what we have done and to remain cynical: to continue the negation of critics and to wonder what any exploration based in ecology, anthropology, history or questions of technology could possibly have upon the world civilization has created. In the end, it may not matter at all.

But that is where we split.

We want discussion, but if it serves no end, then it serves nothing. With civilization, we have had everything taken from us. We are left with reflections and mirrors of its history. We are left with the scars of our elder’s own subjugation to the false future of empire building. We are left with their emptiness.

But these are tools. They are a part of piecing together and deepening our understanding of how domestication begins, how it functions which, paired with building relationships beyond reification and beyond abstraction, we find the cracks. We find the pressure points, the bottlenecks.

It is through this search that we find what has been taken from us and we take it back.

Without question.

Without hesitation.

For us, there is no other option. There is no appeal to endless discussions that have long ago dismissed the idea of purpose. There is nothing to be gained from that.

This discussion speaks to the soul of every domesticated being. And that is whom we are speaking to. We know our enemy. We have found its weaknesses and we will continue to search for more vulnerabilities.

We aren’t interested in distractions and cycles: for discussions without end.

We seek to do everything within our power to further push civilization beyond the brink. We seek to protect and fight for the world that we love.

And we remain absolutely unapologetic to that end.

We are in one of the most unique moments in history: to be at the end of this dying civilization. We face a world of uncertainty and we have the knowledge of how our ancestors had adapted for that. When distraction no longer remains an option, will you look back and wonder why you didn’t do everything in your power to make the most of it?

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/02/19/us/2015-year-in-weather-temperature-precipitation.html

[2] http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0602/Climate-change-could-trigger-toxic-corn-what-can-be-done

[3] http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/28/health/anthrax-thawed-reindeer-siberia/

Stay updated about Black and Green projects

2016-09-01T11:39:00.003-05:00

Social media has pushed beyond diminishing returns for these projects and I really don't have the interest in logging onto those sites to post. So to stay in the loop on the many Black & Green Press projects, Black and Green Review, and everything else we have coming up, please sign up for our mailing list.
Won't be heavy traffic, but will have all the info about what's going on and I might even bring back the identification for free books giveaways too.

BAGR1: The Ferguson Insurrection

2016-07-09T13:30:00.000-05:00

From Black and Green Review no 1.

The Ferguson Insurrection

The execution of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18 year old, by a white police officer on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, MO, was sadly not an anomaly. The response, however, has been.

Within hours, the streets had filled up and shortly after, businesses were in flames. And every night for weeks, it happened again. Each night spreading wider and farther.

The confluence of systemic racism and the feeble-minded, infantile bullying mentality of those drawn into the police force unsurprisingly creates volatile and deadly situations. Time after time, police murders occur with regularity and largely without consequence. The explosiveness of the murder of Michael Brown doesn’t arise from the particulars, but from the sheer crushing weight of this reality. That fragile boundary between the threat of state power and coercion burst and the rage flooded.

And while that rage has waned, it hasn’t died. Coiled and ready to strike, the rage boils just beneath the surface.

While this unrest has been called many things, it should be referred to by what it has proven itself to be: the Ferguson Insurrection.

The Promise of the Insurrection

The promise of this insurrection lies in the fact that while many groups have tried to own or direct that rage, none has succeeded. Solidarity demonstrations have shut down mass transit in major cities, but attempts to curb property destruction have faltered. Riots have broken out with regularity and fervor in an ephemeral response.

What we have been seeing is pure rage.

We are seeing a crack in the veneer of a proscribed social contract that we were born into. We are seeing mythos that goes back to the origins of property and the external boundaries inherent to sedentary societies amplified as domestication intensifies. States are built on the lie that we cannot exist without their structures and defense. From the armies of Mesopotamia to the police of Ferguson, MO, this is the tie that binds.

The rallying cry throughout this insurrection remains simple: no more. No more will these communities sit idly by as the pigs target, harass and kill. Some seek reform, some seek justice, but the overarching theme is that the attempts to suppress rage will no longer work. Complicity is no longer an option.

It would be an absolute stretch to pretend that there was widespread thinking about the relationship between this insurrection and the nature of domestication. It is not my place nor any one else’s to attempt to own this insurrection through critique and reporting. Nevertheless, the base complicity with the law is an essential part of the domestication process. Conscious or not, the refusal to accept the legitimacy of state power nor to succumb to the mounting threats of an increasingly militarized police force is, on some level, a breakdown in that process.

This insurrection, like all insurrections, doesn’t hold answers. Even if it does not seek them, there can be no divorce from the reality that people need to eat. Societies must not only attack the state, but move beyond it. Until that step is taken, the fate of those attacking is fully interwoven with the very society under fire.

Yet the rage still pours out.
And that’s where the beauty of this insurrection lies: it exemplifies the limits at which the domesticated begin to bite back. Context always matters, but it is the erosion of social control that exposes the possibilities that the infallibility and inevitability of power is a lie. Plain and simple, this is what it looks like when people hit their limits.

It is this rage that has been the final blow to civilizations past, present and future. Anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter famously observed that the apex of collapse is the point of diminishing returns. That’s an economic positioning, but it holds true for all social, ecological and psychological aspects of life. If giving your life to serving civilization has only ever been met with systemic poverty, being antagonized by police and being a talking point for religious and political figure heads, then where is that return? Why take it?

In this case, as in many others, this isn’t a proverbial or rhetorical question. If you’re penned up, bullied, and killed by a state that is doing you no favors, how much worse can it be once they are destroyed? The immediacy is telling. This is the response of the human spirit, the human animal. This is the fox chewing at its leg after being snared in a steel trap.

There’s a part of the mind saying over and over again: we don’t need this. And the façade, fortunately, is flammable.

The Limits of the Insurrection

The problem with this insurrection, as with any really, is that it becomes a reified. Community leaders, that is say the would-be politicians (even the anarchist ones), eagerly champion the perceived cause, often in defiance of the words and anger coming from the streets. Rage is rarely owned by any one position, but that won’t stop the professionals from navigating it.

We see this over and over again.

Liberals want to right the wrongs through reform. Conservatives want to demonize and ghettoize populations. Both will do so while bolstering the overall power of their militarized arm: resulting in military grade weaponry (tanks were a common sight in Ferguson), seeking body cameras (rarely if ever helping victims, but often used to identify and prosecute “suspects”), and allowing space to deflect the “trauma of the job” onto management rather than focusing on the pig mentality and logic itself.

That last point can’t be overstated. Being over 13 years deep into oil wars, we’re talking about a high number of PTSD-fueled jarheads flooding the police and private security sectors (the private security world, by the way, is the refuge of the discharged police). So while it’s easy to look at the increase in police violence simply as documented by an increase in cameras and social networks to share videos, that’s missing the point that this increased hostility can only be a fraction of the interactions and incidences that these former-soldiers were displaying overseas. This is a context that has not only been ignored completely, but one where grievances have been hastily suppressed.

The insurrection at home is a part of the global response to the globalized reign of techno-industrial civilization. It’s just the part that we’re seeing. But to separate this reality from the Arab Spring or uprisings throughout the world is to buy this same lie.

So as the well intentioned try to bring both sides to the table, they’re really only ever-taking one: the furthering of state power and, at best, a relaxation of the barbed-wire fences.

The lack of a cohesive narrative apparent in what is an outpouring of rage lends itself to outside narration. This is especially true as our “user-generated content” society wants a Spectacle. We’re programmed to want a smooth story arch. If anger in the streets is simply saying, “we have had enough”, the sidelines are booming with a way to finish that sentence. The vacuum of power is an implicit presumption that we create to remove that rage and contextualize our external discussions.
The limitation of insurrection is the potential that it will die out through mediation. That is the goal of so many groups, religions, and states. That is the goal of domestication: to control the human being through diversion and redirection of impulses.

This insurrection continues to show its promise in its persistence and instinctuality. We can only hope that the narratives of ownership and compromise fail to take root. So that they won’t die off in textbooks, prison cells, and Twitter feeds. This may not bring the end of civilization in and of itself, but it is a testament to the refusal of complicity necessary to continue its existence.

This may not be the final blow, but it is certainly a death rattle.

Alas, as the ability of civilization to carry on requires complete subservience, may the insurrection never die.

BAGR3: Opening Editorial - John Zerzan

2016-07-06T21:46:00.001-05:00

From Black and Green Review no 3.

Inaugurated only last year, the focus of BAGR seems already in need of adjustment. Kevin Tucker’s “Opening Editorial” announced that the Review would emphasize the promotion of critique and discussion within the anarchist milieu. That milieu, sadly enough, now appears undeserving of much attention.

A few years back, around Occupy time, 2011-2012, various voices proclaimed the ascendancy of anarchism. Its time has come, now is the opening to anarchism, etc. This has not blossomed into anything, and Occupy is one place to explore this failure.

The spontaneous outburst of Occupy energy was aimed at the excesses of capitalism. Even when militant, which was rare, it only amounted to more leftism. Occupy Oakland was its high point and anarchists were quite active there, but, fatally it seems, failed to add content to the Occupy energy. Supposedly post-Left and even anti-civilization, Bay Area anarchists apparently provided no voices along these lines.

A potential turning point of Occupy would have been, for starters, to rechristen it De-Occupy. But that would have constituted an actual turn away from the Left, in favor of waking up to the indigenous dimension, and how very much could be found there. Anarchists largely voted with the (rest of) the Left to reject such a proposed name change, having been easily fronted off by a few identity politics thugs who wanted to be in charge of the De-Occupy (or “De-Colonize”) position. Our post-Left anarchists gave no voice to that outlook overall and when Occupy fizzled out were left with the hangover of their non-presence. Even now, it seems, little insight and even less energy can be seen. A persisting postmodern haze prevails, where egoists and nihilists compete to now even deny that reality is knowable. How this is anarchist at all escapes me. It more resembles the insular scenes of cynical hipsters, offering no analysis, no inspiration.

The very ambitious To Change Everything tour in fall 2015 was a Crimethinc. production, involving speakers from various continents. Civilization, domestication, mass society, industrialism, and other institutions foundational to our immiseration and the systematic environmental devastation were never mentioned.

On the other hand, there certainly are those who confront the nature of things, how we got here. And put such concerns into practice, such as anarchists in British Columbia and Arizona who’ve striven to be “accomplices not allies” to Native people whose ties to the land have not been broken after all they’ve had to endure, who still resist. The DOA (Dine-O’odham-Anarchist) black bloc, Phoenix 2010, was one instance among many of collaboration in Arizona. Others find a helpful challenge in anarcho-primitivist ideas in lots of places, a phenomenon that seems to be steadily gaining ground. An indirect testimony along these lines is the Black Seed zine, which feels the need to call itself the successor to Green Anarchy, even though its overall agenda is egoist-nihilist-postmodern.

Many things are at a low ebb these days and we don’t have a real clear picture of where the anarchist milieu is at. It is clear that everything’s at stake and that we are not interested in in-group parlor games. Anarchy seemed promising pretty recently, but lately too much of it has almost no bearing on what is going down, little interest in that, and not much relevant to offer. The conversation about technology, for example, is apparently ignored by anarchism. We are anarchists and in no way are we shutting the door on anarchists. But a mammoth challenge faces us all, so we haven’t time to waste.

BAGR2: Opening Editorial - Kevin Tucker

2016-07-06T21:41:00.002-05:00

From Black and Green Review no 2.

Sometimes green isn’t always good.

The weather around me has been unpredictable at best throughout the spring and summer of this year. That is unquestionably a part of the larger destabilization of weather patterns that we’ve seen mounting since agriculture and industrialism arose. But we are now in overdrive.

The spring rains barely came. Foliage was both stunted and delayed or, in some cases, seemingly non-existent. Drought like conditions in the Northeastern United States might have missed the headlines, but it was only because they were eclipsed by raging wildfires along the West Coast, a burning boreal forest, and prolonged, epic drought, not surprisingly, preceding the fires. Not making headlines, however, doesn’t change the reality on the ground.

Decreasing winter snow pack, irregular precipitation, storms that are more abrupt and forceful simply run off of parched, denuded lands; bodies of water become isolated and their flows disrupted. Deprived of rain, ponds, creeks, and lakes wane. This spring I witnessed many of them vanish.

Riparian ecology is relatively delicate. The symbiotic relationships surrounding them are tightly wound around what is essentially an ecosystem in fragments: a balance based on movement, on flowing water, on the slow and continual nourishment of constant replenishment at times seeming to go on forever. Stagnancy brings demise.

When you look across the late summer fields, it has become a sea of green and often overheated amber. Cattails are gone. The songs of green frogs are muted. The sight of elder snapping turtles becomes increasingly rare. The water has largely vanished, overgrown with grasses. The landscape where water had spent decades crossing the soil just looks like divots without causation.

The majority of the human body is comprised of water. It is our lifeblood. It allows us to live. But it is more than that. Water, in its existence and movement, is a reflection of ourselves: it thrives in flowing movement. It is the embodiment of resilience: water will always strive to find a way to get where it needs to be. Hurricanes, tsunamis, flooding, and even mold are all evidence of this. Water is a force to be reckoned with.

Like water, our resilience comes from movement. Our patterns leave room for change and degrees of deviation, but there are certainties as well; without rain, the waters stagnate. Patterns can shift, but patterns must remain.

Things are heating up, both literally and figuratively. Water is a resource that we largely take for granted. Yet much of the world wars over water rights without delusion. Drought adds kindling to areas already torn by oil wars. Food scarcity and rising food costs echo into political and social uprisings. Segments of the Earth are torn by increasing political instability and the unilateral response of military force has not nor will not resolve those tensions. This couldn’t be any clearer than the current flood of Syrian refugees as they move through Europe.

These are refugees of an instable and unsustainable climate. As goes the ecological climate, so goes the political and social ones. Tensions will continue to mount. Socio-political infrastructures will tighten their grip to attempt to divert the uncontrollable. The wildness of our body and spirit flows. Like water, it will find a way. Dams will burst. Barriers will fall and paths will divert.

What we have learned from the story of the human being is that our being lies in and was carved by our resiliency. The lifeway of the nomadic hunter-gatherer is etched into our biology, into our minds. Like all wild beings, we are able to adapt, sometimes to a fault. But there are limits. We need movement, we need flow, and we need ecological sanity.

If we can say anything of certainty about the crises that we now face it is that we live in uncertain times. But there’s a catch to that. We still have something. We have knowledge about how humans have thrived, about conditions under which humans have suffered, about the systems that have stilled our movements and built barriers. The wildness that has always guided our paths remains. Even if buried and misdirected, our resiliency still struggles.

The landscape of Modernity leaves little room for optimism. In light of the universality of the crises that we face, hope seems like the last vestige of naivety. And it certainly can be. But the history of civilization has its counter-narratives in struggles against it. As John Zerzan points out in the title essay of his new book, Why Hope? The Stand Against Civilization (out now from Feral House), hope can stand against all reason: “it is possible. Our overcoming the disease of civilization is in no way guaranteed, obviously, but clearly it is possible.” (Pg 134)

In uncertain times, the only certainty is that stagnancy assures death. We need movement. The hyper-domesticated technological vortex that we are continually drawn into bolsters our barrier. It allows us to feel removed from consequence, to feel as though we can have our critiques and that is enough. As society turns further towards technology, using social networks for our interactions, our stagnancy turns into rot. Our continued usage of these predatory platforms confirms our complacency.

Black and Green Review, to me, represents an attempt to reground the green anarchist, anarcho-primitivist, and anti-civilization milieu in movement. We don’t just need the discussions, we need to have them in ways that matter. The reason we focused so heavily on technology in the first issue is that it is the elephant in the room. Until we begin addressing the neurological and social effects of the Interface Revolution, then no discussion can cut through those levels of entrenched domestication. It simply became impossible to address what has happened to this milieu and to further these critiques without drawing that out first.

The response has been good, but the response has been slow. These aren’t the times to get a physical publication up and running as even long-standing publications like Earth First! Journal are finding themselves raising printing costs with every issue. The medium that predominates offers immediate gratification, the ability to just click, like, share and comment on the most radical article of the minute without consequence. And, as we discussed repeatedly in issue one of BAGR, those things are all happening without absorption.

It is the thoughtless integration of technology into our lives that shows its power. We live in the era of overwhelming distraction. It is easy to go along with it. In many ways, to exit the social networks is to cut yourself off from friends and family. But we need to understand that having a critique of technology, of civilization, does not make any of us exempt from its implications.

And so we are trying to rebuild and expand on where things were. Hark back to recent memory when the discussion on pages was followed with campfires and burning infrastructure. We have a hurdle before us, but we have to find our way back to that place.

I have heard that BAGR has helped some of those conversations again. I’ve been part of some great ones myself. I’ve heard from old friends and taken part in long standing arguments. I hear rumblings. Things might be moving slow, but good things often do. It takes a lot of work, it might not lead us to where we need to go, but I know nothing different than to continue that struggle and to push in this direction.

In dismal times like these, it is projects like this, and, more importantly, the conversations and connections that result from them that give me a reason for hope. Given time, civilization will collapse under its own weight. That process has already begun. But every bit of resistance brings that time closer.

And I welcome it with loaded arms.

This issue deals with numerous topics, but what you see in these pages is the result of many of those conversations that I mentioned. The editorial processes behind Black and Green Review are arduous. In order to have these discussions, to push this critique and to develop praxis, we need to continually challenge each other and ourselves. Behind these essays are in depth and often contentious discussion about things like the nature of symbolic thought, the consequences of delayed return in minutiae during the Upper Paleolithic, the depths of interspecies communication, and the biological implications of being a wild being stuck in Modernity.

As an editor, I take pride in the level of energy that the other editors have brought on board. It has taken a lot of work pulling this together, but I hope that you will find something in it that resonates or causes a response. These aren’t easy discussions, but they are necessary ones.

I’d like to formally welcome John Zerzan and Evan Cestari on as editors. Both have been vital since the inception of this project and, in many ways, I see BAGR as the response to discussions that John and I had been having since the last issue of Green Anarchy came out.

In addition, Four Legged Human’s ‘Written in Stone’ is in part a response to Cliff Hayes’ ‘Stone Tools and Symbolic Thought’, but unquestionably belongs in the essays section.

We hope that what we’ve put together for you will inspire and incite. And we thoroughly welcome response.

For wildness and anarchy,

Kevin Tucker

BAGR1: Opening Editorial - Kevin Tucker

2016-07-06T21:38:00.002-05:00

Opening editorial from Black and Green Review no 1.

It’s now been 7 years since the final issue of Green Anarchy (US), roughly a decade since the final Green Anarchist (UK), 10 years since an issue of Species Traitor has come out, and 8 years since the last Black and Green Gathering. While claims that anarcho-primitivism (AP) and radical anti-civilization green anarchism (GA) are dead are wildly false, things have been awfully silent.

Meanwhile the economy has collapsed into multiple recessions. The resource wars that started in the beginning of this millennium are just now starting to “officially” end while new ones ignite. Far worse post-Peak Energy production methods have reigned supreme. The programmers have found untold new means to weave themselves into our pockets and “communities”. Climate instability worsens as storms grow larger and more erratic while droughts stretch longer and farther. Portions of the globe have gone aflame in social upheaval.

The past 9 years have literally been a slew of headlines that would appear to be an AP checklist for the collapse.

So what the happened?

Context always matters.

Just a decade ago, the AP/GA milieu, alongside the wider earth and animal liberation struggles, had a tremendous fire blazing. Even when repression hit home, there were discussions, actions, and a semblance of community forming in the furnace of civilization’s dying flames. Our critiques were unfolding before us as tensions were mounting.

But then came the silence.

Close to 10 years of it. What was building with force was now trickling. Outside of John Zerzan’s steadfast and committed drive (always praiseworthy), the lion’s share of this milieu went quiet. Magazines and collectives folded and events lost their rhythms. Bloggers tried to co-opt and market our critiques in consumable packages. Nihilistic and individualistic strands retook anarchist discussions. Then social networking came in and flooded out the ground to stand on.

Despite everything that had happened from the time of Reclaim the Streets in Eugene, Oregon in 1999 till the mid-2000s, all the repression, all the harassment, all the imprisonment, all the threats; it almost seems as if the Green Scare (a massive government breakdown on earth and animal liberation activists) got the best of us. Prisoner support groups had to abruptly end as our warriors turned into informants. Our friends faced multiple decades of imprisonment either for crimes without injury or tacit agreement that action is required.

The very act of thinking about liberation was increasingly criminalized and targeted. Security culture, it seemed, had failed and we now longer knew where things would fall.

I’m not pointing fingers.

I am one of those who pulled back under the increasing repression. Most of my friends did the same, even those who weren’t legally required to do so. At times it almost felt like paralysis: watching all of the events that we predicted unfold. Seeing the worst of scenarios just playing out in a sea of systemized brutality, seeing children fear the empty skies and the drones they would bring, seeing the fracking and tar sands bubbles destroy places that we loved, seeing the community that we once belonged to fall into faceless squabbles and posturing, seeing eco-liberals discover socialist revolutionary text to try and skim the well-intentioned among us off as cannon fodder. Seeing the seasons wane and the tides rise. Seeing the sixth great extinction loom nearer.
Sometimes being right is the worst feeling in the world.

Many of us became spectators of a world, our world, turning towards the worst end possible.

Nothing has changed.

All of these things are unfolding with speed and the anarchist imagination to understand and challenge it shrinks into obscurity. The plague of social networking removes our ability to recognize experience as we fall into a post-modern place where time becomes an eternal now without presence and the ability of our minds to process information is lost as we offset cognitive functions to increasingly personalized machines.

We are still targets of the state: as we were, as we are, as we will be, but the silence must end. I can’t stomach watching this song and dance and only tossing insults from the balcony any longer.

I know I’m not alone in this, but this publication is a step. Hopefully the first of many to pull ourselves from isolation and to once again be the threat the domesticators so clearly saw us as.

This is not a beginning, but a continuation of old paths, picking up with where we went in the meantime and where we left off before. A lot of us spent that time embracing wildness, trying to stay plugged in within resistance movements, working on land projects, and seeing megalomaniacs try to commodify and reify our principles and beliefs. This is a call to challenge, spread and grow our critiques and praxis.

But the times have changed. The purpose of Black and Green Review (BAGR) is very specific: it is not intended to replace or to revive any previous publications, but to expand these critiques and to bring discussion back into the fold. We intend to draw out old faces and serve as a basis for new ones. Our communities have been torn apart and replaced by facades of connectivity without grounding.

For us to move forward, we must address the increasing disconnect while working towards resolving its consequences. News spreads quickly and fades faster now than before. Speed has become the form and function. One of the function of Green Anarchy through its empowering and steadfast reporting of resistance news and communiqués has arguably been replaced, but the discussion has not. At least not in lasting ways.

We’ve fallen victim to the News Feeds.

That part was intentional. The programmers, the domesticators of this late Modernity, know that regardless of content, context matters the most. Form determines function. While arguments might flare with regularity and an irritating sense of repetition, it might feel as though discussion is now a lost art, their presence into the electronic void only merits integration into the platforms.

To have lasting and impacting discussions, we need to pull attention away from the machines. That is no simple task and the manifestations of techno-addiction inherent in unconsciously swiping screens are no easy enemy. And that is the function that we had in mind behind starting BAGR: how do we have discussions again that matter?

It might not be a solution, but it’s definitely a start.

The format of BAGR is broken down into a five primary sections;

· ESSAYS: Writings intended to challenge and push forward the AP and GA critiques of civilization.

· DEBATES: Moderated discussions evaluating opposing opinions in terms of fighting civilization.

· DISCUSSION: Often open-ended pieces intended to drive discussion of issues, particularly those with no clearly opposing stances or even some that are.

· FIELD NOTES FROM THE PRIMAL WAR: A look at particular actions and movements directed at resistance to civilization.

· REVIEWS: Engaging and drawing on relevant publications.

We’ve forgone the debate for the first issue and expanded the Essays section, but this will be a regular feature. We’re interested in anything pertaining to anti-civilization thought and praxis, but upcoming works will address the relevance or irrelevance of nihilism and egoism, the continued effort to update AP critiques in light of the impact and prevalence of the Digital Age, expanding historical, anthropological, ecological, and social underpinnings of the domestication process, evaluating actions, expressing the relationship of rewilding and resistance, espousing a love for the wild, and looking at current, future, and past land and resistance projects and campaigns.

We aim to simply encourage discussion. We want to hear your voice. We want to encourage you to articulate your understandings and questions. We want to expand and strengthen this critique so that our words, actions, and efforts have more fire, so that our love and rage cannot be suppressed.

So read, get pissed, get excited, and respond, but most importantly, learn from our nomadic hunter-gatherer past and present selves and get moving. The countdown to the end of time ticks on.

Black and Green Review no 3 is out now!

2016-05-15T23:00:00.000-05:00

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BAGR3: Wild Resistance, Insurgent Subsistence: An interview with BC green anarchists on native resistance, building community and undermining civilization.

2016-05-15T21:47:00.000-05:00

This essay is taken from Black and Green Review no 3.

For more information or order a single copy, click here: Black and Green Review no 3 info.

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Fracking, tar sands, sour gas, liquefied natural gas (LNG) conversion stations and pipelines; in all cases, it would appear that our native friends up north have been trail blazing persistent resistance to the new wave of resource extraction and distribution. As they seem to typify it, it’s just the new face of colonization, but an old enemy.

I had the pleasure of speaking to non-native green anarchists from British Columbia who have been involved with and supporting these encampments and have been able to give us some more details about the encampments, the challenges that they expose for anarchists and as non-natives, the contexts of decolonization and effective forms of resistance, and, most importantly, the role of community and subsistence.

This brings out a lot of vital questions and I greatly anticipate the furthering of this discussion and hearing more native voices on the matter (hopefully in BAGR no 4).

- Kevin Tucker

Can you give me an overview of some of the native energy extraction and distribution struggles going on up there?

The area we are talking about is the northwestern portion of so called British Columbia. It is home to many different indigenous nations (Gitxsan, Tsimshian, Wet'suwet'en to name a few) who have been living here for thousands of years before the colonial forces arrived. Most of these territories are "un-ceded" which means the people have never surrendered or signed over their lands to the invaders. There are no treaties here. Part of the ongoing process of colonization in Canada has been the settler state institution of the 1876 Indian Act and with it, the Band Council system. This system was and continues to be used to subvert hereditary systems of governance, ones that existed prior to and in opposition in value to capitalist colonial society. Despite this, hereditary systems and cultures are still largely practised outside of the constraints imposed by the colonial government.
This region has a long history of resistance to resource extraction projects. We are mainly talking about 3 of the more active camps in our area; the Unist'ot'en Camp, Madii Lii and Lax U'u'la. The views expressed here are not representations of the camps but are based on our individual experiences. Also each of these camps is unique and quite different from each other.

The Unist'ot'en Camp

Probably the most well-known of the mounting northern indigenous resistance, the Unist'ot'en define themselves as “a non-violent occupation of Unceded Unist'ot'en territory. FPIC (free, prior and informed consent) protocol is conducted with visitors to show their complete jurisdiction” (unistotencamp.com). This manifestation, as a physical block to industrial encroachment on their territory, began in 2010 with the Pacific Trails Pipeline (PTP) proposing to cross their territory (along with 16 other nations) to connect fracked gas in the north east of the province via a 480 km pipeline with a yet to be approved export terminal on the northern coast.

The support for the Unist'ot'en has grown exponentially over the years due to a variety of factors including their fierce dedication and savvy social media use, but the largest contributing factor in my opinion has been their annual Action Camp which invited and introduces people to their struggle as they define it, and offers an opportunity for people to challenge themselves within a serious experience of decolonization and reconnection with the land.

Although the space is often referred to as the 'Unist'ot'en Camp,' they do not see themselves as a “protest or a demonstration,” but as occupying and using their traditional territory as their clan has for centuries. This point is essential to understanding their approach: it is not activism, these are their lives and they are challenging the entire colonial state of Canada.

Madii Lii

Madii Lii is a traditional territory of the Luutkudziiwus House group which is part of the Gitxsan nation. The Madii Lii camp was setup in August of 2014 to permanently close the territory to industrial resource extraction and to implement their Territorial Management Plan. It is situated in the Suskwa River valley about 35 km's outside the town of Hazelton. A base camp has been established there, consisting of a large permanent cabin with greenhouses and a garden space. A heavy-duty metal gate was installed on the bridge crossing the Suskwa River. This bridge is the only road into the territory and is now fully controlled by family and friends of the house group.

The current proposal that Madii Lii is fighting is the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission project which is owned by TransCanada. It would be a 900km fracked gas (LNG) pipeline stemming from the fracking wells in northeastern BC, which will be powered by the proposed "Site C" dam on the Peace River, and will lead to the proposed LNG terminal on Lelu Island. As of now, the PRGT pipeline has been granted federal approval on the condition that the PNW LNG facility on Lelu Island gets approved.

At the beginning, pipeline surveyors were kicked out of the territory and since then, the camp has been successful at preventing industry from entering or conducting work on the territory. With the absence of industry "knocking at the door", the camp has been able to focus on hunting, trapping, fishing and wild foraging. As well as hosting events aimed at reconnecting youth with their territory. Another focus has been on infrastructure like more cabins, a large smokehouse for processing salmon and moose as well as plans to install a small scale water wheel to generate power for the cabin. Members are currently pursuing a court battle as well by filing a judicial review of the project.

Lax U'u'la

In late August 2015, a crew of women of Tsimshian, Haida, Nisga'a, and Gitxsan bloodlines initiated the defense of Lax U'u'la (Lelu Island) and the Flora Bank from LNG industry destruction. The Gitwilgyoots Tribe Sm'ogyet Yahaan (hereditary chief) and Ligitgyet Gwis Hawaal (hereditary house leader), and their families began a defence camp on Lax U'u'la, which is Gitwilgyoots traditional hunting and fishing territory. They were also joined by various significant hereditary people from other Tsimshian tribes, and a diverse crew of native and non-native outside supporters.

This camp has been set up to prevent any further destruction of their land, as Petronas and Pacific North West LNG (PNW LNG) are planning on building an $11 billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant on Lax U'u'la, which is at the mouth of the Skeena river near Prince Rupert, BC. They have been conducting environmental and archaeological assessments since 2012, which have resulted in over a hundred test hole sites and cut blocks, and have in the process cut down numerous culturally modified trees. This facility would be fed by 3 pipelines, including the recently provincially-approved Prince Rupert Gas Transmission (PRGT), owned by Trans Canada, which crosses through multiple indigenous territories, and which is currently being met with resistance from the Gitxsan people at the Madii Lii camp. This proposed LNG plant has been opposed not only by the Sm'ogyet Yahaan, but was unanimously refused by the 9 allied Tsimshian tribes of Lax Kw'alaams, who turned down a $1.25 billion offer by Petronas at 3 separate meetings in Lax Kw'alaams, Vancouver, and Prince Rupert. Regardless, in preparation for the LNG plant construction, Petronas/PNW LNG have been trying to conduct environmental and engineering assessments around Lax U'u'la, which includes test drilling that are actively destroying habitat essential to all the salmon that run throughout the Skeena Watershed.

The proposed project is still under review by the Federal Government, who have until late June 2016 to make a decision as to whether or not it will be approved. The Lax Kw'alaams band council, without consultation with or approval from any of the Lax Kw'alaams village members, have recently stated their support for the project. In response to this statement of support, the Gitwilgyoots hereditary chief, has said: "We have been betrayed by our elected leader. Elected band councils have no jurisdiction off of reserve land. Legal precedents in the Supreme Court of Canada are all in our favour as hereditary chiefs, and we will fight this to the end, whether the band council is on our side or not.”

To date, the resistance to Petronas/PNW LNG's project has mainly been on the water. In practice, this has primarily taken the form of trying to prevent the workers from performing any work, and disrupting environmental and engineering assessments. This means escorting environmental surveyors off of the Flora and Agnew Banks, preventing the drill ships from entering and anchoring on the banks, and slowing down or turning back charter boats transporting workers to the barges. In early February 2016, the last drilling barges pulled off the Banks, allegedly 7 test holes short of their goal.

There is also resistance by re-asserting that Lax U'u'la is used as a place of healing and ceremony. Infrastructure is continually being constructed and there are other preparations for defense of the island itself (which also serve to maintain and expand water operations). Several structures have been built, and once there is less consistent confrontation, there is the intention to use these spaces as a place to teach youth about ancestral ways of living off of the land, and to heal from the continued traumas of colonization.

Although 100s of kilometres apart, these camps are all part of the same watershed. Madii Lii is defending the headwaters of the Suskwa River on which the camp is situated, as are the Unist'ot'en who are located along the Wedzin Kwa (Morice River). There have also been defense camps set up by the Tahltan people in an area of their territory commonly known as "The Sacred Headwaters" which is where the Skeena river originates. All of these are tributaries that flow into the Skeena River which runs to the coast and meets the ocean at the Lax U'u'la defense camp. Juvenile salmon feed and mature on the Flora Bank and then eventually return to spawn in their place of origin swimming back up stream past these camps.

A common thread at these indigenous defense camps is not only defending a territory, but a way of life and we, as non-native anarchists (who have also been subject to colonization) are invested in learning and creating a nurturing way of life through insurgent subsistence.

What has the non-native anarchist involvement and support looked like?

Anarchist involvement and support has been varied in both its approach and form, from organized groups, to informal crews and individuals to fund raising, solidarity actions, and physical presence at the camps. The location of the camps is remote to many people in Canada, who live close to the 49^th parallel and have little experience outside of urban environments/struggle.

One of the bigger hurdles we are experiencing is in learning how to interact with integrity with people of a social system that challenges some core Anarchist values. For the most part, West Coast Indigenous societies are quite hierarchical, for example historically slave holding was common practice. So our cultural references and understandings are different, yet not, and can be challenging to navigate.

Supporting these camps has created some interesting situations in regards to personal safety and security. Often, as anarchists, we engage in activities or actions with people we know and trust and close affinity is commonly a requirement for carrying out certain plans. However, in the heat of the moment, these personal protocols are sometimes thrown out the window in a sudden conflict that must be dealt with. Gut instinct takes over and you hope for the best. These struggles are not exempt from common debates found in other movements. For example, debating violence vs. non-violence, differences on tactics or long term strategy and disagreements on working with the cops or the legal system are all present at times, but these camps are made up of many different individuals with a variety of ideas and many affinities are discovered through working with folks and building connections and trust.

Can you talk a bit about the methods used in these struggles? In particular, can you speak about the use of encampments and communities literally supporting each other and the land while potentially revitalizing traditional aspects of their societies?

Resistance to resource extraction projects have largely been led by indigenous communities in this region. It is often based on defending a traditional territory that the hereditary system has not treatied or given away. A common method has been to build a camp or a small village directly in the path of the proposed project and then reassert traditional social systems, putting it in the face of the colonial system. When you set your life up around resistance, it is no longer this separate activity that you do in your spare time. It becomes an inseparable part of you.

At the Unis’tot’en camp for example, people have been living there for years now asserting ownership of their traditional lands. The infrastructure that has been built there has allowed for folks to live there year round growing and gathering food. At the same time, industry has been making constant attempts to enter the territory via road or helicopter and only because of the permanent occupation of the camp are folks able to kick out industry at every attempted entry. At Lax U'u'la, folks staying there day and night were able to implement a routine patrol of the island and surrounding waters. The company's attempts were regularly intercepted and delayed if not completely shut down. The companies are unsure of how to proceed with these situations when it is so clearly the traditional home of a group of people. The cops are also uncertain about how to deal with these camps which we talk further about later.

These types of resistance camps also offer opportunities which other struggles don’t necessarily have. The down time in between confrontations with industry offer the potential for focusing on learning traditional and non-traditional skills that folks might not otherwise have the time for, or at least, intentionally, put the time into. At Lax U'u'la, methods involving fishing and setting crab traps have been used to stop industrial drilling operations. At the Unist'ot'en camp, a trap line is in operation on the proposed path of the pipeline. There's also some very interesting opportunities for non-natives as well as natives to learn about the hereditary systems and cultures that colonization has so strongly tried to erase.

What has involvement and support of these struggles taught you about the importance and nature of decolonization as a non-native anarchist?

Basically, show me a colonizing people that hasn't been dispossessed and colonized in the first place. In the fight against resource extraction in BC, I hear a lot of people expressing the idea that it's up to native people to stop these projects because on the one hand they have legal rights to these lands whereas non-natives don't have any say or rights, and on the other hand there's a recognition, especially here up north amongst pipeline opponents, that the indigenous are a sovereign people who can act on their self-determination.

The daily lives and minds of non-natives are so deeply colonized that to talk of self-determination, self-organization, autonomy and freedom for ourselves is seen as an abstraction not worth considering. Fear of consequences reigns.

From my perspective, a movement towards decolonization coming from indigenous people will never succeed if there isn't a parallel thrust on the part of the majority population, i.e.; non-natives.

To think that natives can become free and self determined on the land while the rest of us are kept in a state of obedient wage slaves getting our food and tools at Walmart and Home Depot, buying private property or renting from landlords, being ruled by police, prisons and political parties and swearing allegiance to the Canadian state, is purely delusional.

Now, we are going to have to start sharing in a real way, both the resistance to the industrial onslaught, the shit of repression and the beauty and bounty of subsistence. So in a way we have already begun. We have already been invited to share the salmon, the moose, the berries and we are offering our help on concrete decolonization projects and strategizing and tactical discussions.

But lets not paint a rosy picture of how things are. In leviathanic times, things are always messy and complicated. An enormous amount of healing has to happen before a force can be created with which the state has to contend with. And I mean on both sides of the divide.

The reserves beside where I live have the highest rate of suicide in BC. I think one place where we are most needed is to help in the creation of a welcoming infrastructure (trails, shelter, funds, outdoor equipment, skills workshops, etc.) to get the youth out of the dead end misery that prevails on the res. and back on the land. As non-natives, we need the same.

More than ever we all need to experience situations where we can practice our individual and collective power and have a taste of what an existence outside of and against the state feels like. A rediscovery of our fighting spirit and a capacity for mutual aid.

And, by the way, we do need hope and love and to build respect, understanding and trust. Too many times I find both sides using each other as cannon fodder, media images and legal shields. We've got to stop using each other as objects and commodities and start treating each other as human individuals, as people, each with our own strength and weaknesses, our insights and blind spots, each having different contexts and different stories to share. Smaller scale, face to face, long term interactions enables this in a big way.

Together and separately, both new comers and indigenous can ignite the embers of community and conspire, breathe together, to fan the flames that will eventually reduce civilized ways to cold ashes, blown by the winds of our desires.

What has the response to these encampments been? Can you talk a bit about the repression and backlash?

So far, compared to other situations like Oka and Gustafsen Lake, the repression has been fairly minimal. Confrontations are usually verbal but there is always the threat of escalation. Last summer for example, 2 RCMP officers attempted to enter the Unis’tot’en camp and were strongly turned around by the defenders. Soon after, it was leaked that the RCMP were planning a massive raid of the Camp. Hotels in the nearby towns of Smithers, Houston and Burns Lake were booked up by cops and military vehicles were spotted in numerous areas. The RCMP setup their own roadblock harassing anyone on their way in or out of the Unis’tot’en territory. A huge call out for support went out, the camp swelled with supporters and preparations for defending the camp intensified. Solidarity actions took place across the country and just when folks thought it was going down, the cops fully withdrew. As of now the raid still hasn’t happened and support is only growing.

At Lax U'u'la, the police would threaten to "move in" and make arrests every time conflict heated up on the water but so far no arrests have been made although it has been reported that there are many open files being investigated. Industrial ships and security vessels would frequently use their boats to ram the defenders on the water. Numerous attempts were made on their part to flip defenders canoes and high speed boat chases were a common occurrence. They would essentially be physical defence for the industrial drilling barges. Heavy surveillance is present and comes in the form of people getting followed and having house visits by the RCMP trying to obtain information about individuals or events. This also creates psychological and financial stress like in the case of one participant losing their job for supporting a camp. People have also had visits from authorities out at remote bush camps. They always want to let you know they are watching.

It's common practise now for most industry workers to either be escorted by private security who film and record every interaction, or for the workers themselves to be wearing chest cameras for surveillance purposes. A question that security or industry personnel are using constantly and at multiple camps, is asking if they are in danger or if their personal safety is at risk being on the territory. They are trying to find and to justify a reason to move in with force.

Aside from the mostly positive response from locals, there are a number of people pissed off about these camps. Certain misguided individuals feel entitled to have unobstructed access to these territories because "This is Canada!" or "I pay taxes and its a free country!" Largely, folks are supportive but there have been quite a few aggressive confrontations with locals. At Madii Lii there has been at least one attempt to cut down the gate and a few people threatening to burn the cabin down. At the Unis’tot’en camp a few signs at the bridge checkpoint have been firebombed and just recently someone smashed out the windows in the checkpoint building. At Lax U'u'la, its gone as far as fist fights from pro-industry locals and death threats from an individual armed with a knife. When an area or territory is reclaimed it really puts the colonial situation in peoples face.

What future do you see as intensifications around resource extraction methods are met with this communal resistance?

The infinite demands of civilization require industrial resource extraction to expand to the point of complete domestication of the earth. The potential for an indigenous uprising in Canada has been reported on by the authorities for years now and as industry and development smother more and more traditional lands, we are quickly approaching the boiling point.

In response to similar pipeline projects, this summer we are expecting 2 more resistance camps to emerge in the region. This is something I think we are going to see more frequently. Little pockets of resistance popping up all over the place, eventually saturating an area to the point where resistance camps border other resistance camps. Entire defended territories neighbouring other defended territories effectively become liberated autonomous zones. When you cross the blockade, there is such a clear and inspiring feeling that you aren’t in Canada anymore. The laws and rules of the state are not recognized. You've got folks defending the entry point, ready to stand up to intruding authority. Some folks are building infrastructure, some are out hunting and some are preparing food.

These, and more, are all necessary activities to create and defend a healthy community. It gives you a taste of what freedom might actually feel like in an autonomous pocket of resistance outside of colonial law. The ability to determine your own way of life based on a healthy habitat in which we live and which we defend.

Why do you think these methods haven’t extended beyond native resistance struggles?

The tactic of roadblocking and setting up camps to protect and re-occupy the land has a long rich history in native resistance to the Canadian state. So when direct action is called for, there is a tradition to fall back on. "Hey lets do what Grandma did!", or "Remember when Auntie and Uncle blocked that railroad?". It shows the value of setting precedents. At the time, a lot of these actions were brutally repressed after a few days or weeks of negotiations.

What’s happening now in BC is that there is a legal "grey zone" about who owns this land. Apart from Treaty 8 in northeastern BC, most of the province sits on un-ceded, un-surrendered, un-treatied native land according to British Law. Both The British North America Act and The Royal Proclamation documents, are enshrined in the Canadian Constitution.

For 150 years, the provincial government denied the need for any treaty to legally own the land. BC is officially 92% provincial crown land, 1% Federal Crown land and 7% fee simple private property.

This created a climate of uncertainty for investors who actually want a solid legal deed for their business. In order to create a "climate of certainty" for investors, the BC government created the BC Treaty process in 1992, designed to extinguish legal "aboriginal title", turn the reserves into municipalities and business corporations (the so-called "First Nations") and move on with capitalist resource extraction and development.

Needless to say the process hasn’t been smooth and even across the board. After 23 years of negotiations and millions in legal fees, only a few bands have come to treaty agreements.

Anyway to cut short a long, manipulative, boring legal process, there is now a recognized "Aboriginal Title", similar to the ownership of private property where an "estate", an abstract entity, is owned and the actual real existing land is owned through Allodial Title of the nation state to which is belongs, independent of any superior landlord. Again this interpretation of native title is being challenged by indigenous people in Canadian and International courts.

So as the "First Nations" are invited to dialogue at the table of power as property owners and shareholders, they legally have to be consulted and compensated for any business happening on their traditional territories. That is the official line anyway. The reality on the ground is more about being conned and insulted and given a few thousand bucks per band member in exchange for their land and resources.

Sorry for this long legal and historical background but this is the official reality corner that indigenous people have been pushed into in BC, and apart from the people's own determined stance, it helps to understand why camps like the Unist'ot'en clan have established can still exist 6 years later.

The state is biding its time, negotiating, creating and finding its business partners within the assimilated strata of the native population. Don't we all need jobs? They are working hard on creating an image of support by dangling a financial carrot so they can confuse the population and remove the non-compliant natives who don’t have a price tag.

In regard to non-native roadblocks or camps, there is no legal eggshells or negotiations to be had. It is simply considered trespassing or blocking a public road and the law moves in swiftly. There is more of a self image of the good, law abiding, reasonable citizen in the non-native population and a history of pacifist and civil-disobedience practice in the environmental movement. Add to this an aesthetic and intrinsic value approach to nature (creating parks and protected areas), instead of, or in tandem with, a subsistence approach in which humans have an active relationship to nature, the tactics that are risky and demanding don't gain as much popularity on this side of land defence.

This said, over the years there have been a few non-native tree sits and camps to stop development. Some were removed with SWAT teams armed with automatic weapons and there have been native blockades that were met with heavy repression too.

At this point our approach has been to take advantage of that legal grey zone, to promote decolonization on both sides of the divide, to dig our heels and get ready both socially and tactically to defend the land, our autonomy and our subsistence. We have to set new precedents for non-native resistance.

In advocating “primal war”, it’s been essential for me to emphasize that resistance and rewilding must go hand-in-hand. This seems the way to break out of this philosophical and revolutionary mentality where we take care of one problem (theoretically) and then we go onto the next. That break for me came through understanding why native resistance movements fought to the death and revolutionaries turned to gallows: people kill for ideas, but they are willing to fight to their death for community, for something they know and feel.

This kind of encampment and community-based resistance echoes eternally as indigenous societies are met with civilizations, as they are forced to confront perpetual growth and consumption. Is there a conception or feeling of resistance tied to community here? Are the encampments and the like seen as an extension of community or simply a response to occupation and ecocide?

We must view each of these camps as completely unique from one to the next and the involvement of a community varies quite a bit. I would say that it’s a full spectrum ranging from very limited participation (down to a few individuals), to the full creation of a community. We have seen communities coming together to resist as well as communities being born out of resistance. However this brings the question; "what is community?" We must not idealize native communities or resistance. Colonization has severely impacted natives and non-natives and these movements are far from flawless. They are made up of a wide range of people from all different backgrounds and beliefs.

At most, we hope these struggles will lead to the permanent reclamation and occupation of traditional lands outside of the colonial state. At the very least, we hope these struggles will strengthen certain aspects of local existing communities and promote the fighting spirit necessary for resisting decolonization and civilization. But, the approach of insurgent subsistence is just this, rebuilding/discovering the connection between ourselves and the land. For some people, this was never lost, for others we are beginning from scratch and we are building our confidences and abilities through this struggle.

What can we, as non-native anarchists, learn from this? Is “insurgent subsistence” a necessary part of resistance to civilization?

What these struggles have reinforced for me, as a non-native anarchist, is the importance of having a community connected to such battles. And, although this is not always possible, planting roots with others in a familial way (not necessarily based on blood but based on affinity and connection) can build a resilient foundation for the fight against civilization.

The process of civilization and domestication starts with colonization, dispossession, the annihilation of culture and the eradication of autonomy by removing us from the land and creating dependence through waging war against subsistence. This undeclared war has been going on for centuries and the idea of "insurgent subsistence" is not only resisting this process but reversing it.

When the totality of the land base is private property or state-owned, when berries are sprayed with chemicals by logging companies, when hunting or fishing is policed by armed goons of the government, when every tree is owned by "the Crown", regaining a certain level of freedom and subsistence definitely goes against this state of affairs, an insurgent spirit is inevitable.

We practice subsistence and resistance as one and the same. One cannot sustain itself without the other and through implementing these ideas, we can build a culture of resilience. Also, by embracing and practising these ideas, we frequently find ourselves in situations that build community.

Every region will have different methods of resisting civilization that work best for them. Although the need for autonomy in food, shelter, medicine and tools, including the need to share, is universal, we can only speak about and develop methods for our own context.

Wild subsistence is largely dependent on a healthy undomesticated land base. However it is not only about harvesting food and materials from the wild but about building a deep relationship with our surroundings and this can be done anywhere. The quality of this relationship is most important because it determines how we interact with our surroundings. Without it, materials or food available for harvest, can be seen simply as just resources for exploitation.

Not only do civilization, capitalism and colonization thrive on the lack of nurturing relationships, but they perpetuate and enforce negative and harmful interactions with all surroundings. The continuous implementation of this dynamic and the stifling effects it has on ourselves and our habitats, brings the ever increasing need for a fierce insurgence to put an end to the onslaught against subsistence and freedom.

Do you find elements of hope within these struggles that are missing in the larger anarchist milieu? Not in terms of naivety, but in the sense that removed of community, it seems so much easier to just go with the flow of civilized life, to get entrapped in the hollowness of this hyper-technological non-reality and just feel like giving up?

I've felt fulfilment and inspiration in these struggles that I haven't experienced in other anarchist projects. Being engaged in subsistence practices or conflict at a blockade camp has such a strong feeling of experiencing something "real". Where as returning home, to the dreary routine of our pretend reality, really throws it in your face that, within civilization and capitalism, our existence is meaningless.

The intense feeling of unquestionable purpose behind what you are fighting for creates the experience of finally being alive with actual clarity. Knowing that these battles will go beyond just stopping a pipeline, creates a sense of longevity that is lacking in similar anarchist struggles. Once these industrial projects are defeated, the camps will remain, not only to keep future proposals at bay, but to provide an avenue for people to get back on the land and an opportunity to realize and remember life outside of the colonial system.

I find it incredible that one of the most effective ways of resisting these land destroying, resource extraction projects is by learning or remembering how to live off of these lands again. In order to fight these projects, we need to be living on the land, and in order to live on the land we need to be fighting these projects. Life becomes resistance and resistance becomes life.

So much of the anarchist milieu has embraced rhetoric over struggle, deeming anything that stands for something other than the cherished “Self” as moralistic or delusional. It’s easy to see how that idea prevails within Modernity, but I see no path ahead there and these struggles are a reminder that outside of our own reality that the earth is still here, communities are struggling to exist outside of and along the peripheries of civilization, and that as monumental as civilization’s impact has been, it is still reliant upon acting as though all resources are finite and all actions are without consequence.

Is there a reflection here of what a rooted and grounded resistance to civilization can look like? To what barriers to perception we carry, having been indoctrinated with the rhetoric of individualism?

When I read "outside of and along the peripheries of civilization" I feel, I have to bring minor corrections as to how an outsider might see daily life in those camps. As was pointed out earlier, regular contacts and meetings with state agents are arranged by some of the leaders and most material needs are met by buying stuff at stores, like the rest of us. Decolonization is a complex and messy learning process and we should render ourselves a disservice by creating idealized images (spectacles) which have little to do with the reality on the ground.

Having said this, there is a lot to be inspired from. As was discussed earlier the methods of coupling determined resistance to industrial destruction and the state with the creation of communal relations which had never completely disappeared in their communities, rooted in the history of this land and on the land itself is really powerful.

It is a pleasure to see people who have been stomped on and humiliated by disease, Christianity, schools, racism, alcohol and the British/Canadian empire to empower themselves, to again redefine who they are and where they stand, on their own terms.

As non-natives, this is the question we have to ask ourselves; who are we and where are we? By grounding ourselves in our personal histories and in the history of the land we stand on, on the actual ground, we root ourselves in real space and time. By doing this we multiply our powers of understanding and acting on our predicament. I have a hard time to explain this with words but I feel it and see it in my own life. Although what lies ahead is open ended, we cannot deny that we are our histories.

Which brings me to this individualist polemic. It is easy to build straw men and I want to acknowledge the diverse approaches to the same goal or even different goals, but when you mention the primacy of rhetoric over struggle in some circles, I see an all too familiar pattern where theoretical purity becomes a paralysing agent. So everything becomes morality, activism, vanguardism, causes etc. And, like some are saying, the best thing is to do nothing and point fingers.

My problem with individualist ideology is that it stands, for some people, in opposition and isolation to others. An intellectual vacuum constructed around the self, a wall with a moat built around ones own identity. It is a denial of relationships and contexts which create individual living organisms, and flowing the other way, individual (indivisible) living organisms creating relationship and sometimes contexts.

In a sense (narrow) individualism is similar to modern science which puts life on a chopping block, ready to be dissected. Historically a lot of individualist and nihilists have been enamoured with science and technology and lets be honest, a lot of anarchists too. The flows and swirls of life are way more complex than these reductionist concepts, where the "Self" has become the new spectre.

In one way, we can say that individuals are made up of their relations with others and the world and relations are made up of and by individuals. The point is to remember that living individual organisms are the ones experiencing life. "Relationships" in themselves don't. This is one aspect of anarchist thinking that has always been attractive to me; the centering on the freedom and authenticity of the actual living person, on the free initiative and creativity of individuals and the mutuality it implies.

But it seems that nowadays this point of convergence has become an ingrown toenail. Instead of becoming expansive and generous, it has become narrow and poor, it has adopted a miser attitude that sees others as instruments and tools to be used and discarded like any other commodity on the market. A logical conclusion to an extreme liberal and instrumental ideology of property ownership but totally out of whack from an anarchist perspective which is striving to create a context of freedom for everybody.

I guess a deep feeling of defeat is prevalent in the devastated landscape of modernity. Given the miserable submissive slave mentality of most of my contemporaries surrounding me, sometimes it does feel that I am encircled by enemies, hence the wall built around oneself. But I know that determinism has never done any of us any good. Dream crushing is the main goal of this system and miserabilism, its main industrial output.

For myself a dip in an ice cold creek, putting in my mouth a handful of sweet huckleberries that were picked with friends, or listening to the wind, amongst other things, blows away these feelings of loss. To get the fuck out of our heads and fully into our bodies is really beneficial. And finally, to fight back, to keep the powerful of this world from sleeping peacefully at night, to plot, to conspire, to dream, practising mutual aid as we go, reinvigorates the will to live full lives in spite of and against this freedom, individuality/ community and wildness devouring machine.

Our children are beginning to learn a different way to walk and learn. As an anarchist I strive for my relations to be intentional, deep and honest. These things matter to me so I will fight from where I am standing, by positioning myself to the best advantage. Building these relationships not only with the people but with the spaces, the rivers that flow from the Unist'ot'en past Madii Lii, past where I live to the Flora Banks, we are only getting a glimpse of what this connection and rootedness could be. I am still working out where I fall within this whole thing, but to fight is to have integrity and humbleness for the gifts of the world that my family eats and drinks more and more every day.

There's a tendency to say that anarcho-primitivists and green anarchists both romanticize and overly critique indigenous communities and structures. As you point out, you are working with indigenous societies that do have hierarchy as central elements within them. I see the need to be honest in our assessments about the impacts of domestication, but there's a difference in framing the consequences of domestication to expose the roots and origins of civilization and equating any instance of domestication with civilization. That was never the point.

Having an idea about the societies and communities that we chose to build and foster doesn't mean that sedentary hunter-gatherers in the Pacific Northwest don't deserve support in their struggles and their want to not be killed by civilization. There's a line between critique and condemnation, between personal aspirations and solidarity. As you point out, that certainly applies here. Do you find that a difficult line to walk or does the reality of colonization just keep the perspective pretty clear?

As anarchists we're always dealing with the question of how to work, fight and play with non-anarchists and traditional cultures. I've got to admit that over the years I've found more reciprocity and anarchistic relations with indigenous people who come from a more nomadic, small band, cultural background in the interior than in the more sedentary and slave/commoner/nobility ranked coastal cultures. This is a generalization, as I have met coastal folks who share our desires, but the feeling and experience of a more rigid culture stands.

In any solidarity and decolonization efforts with traditional cultures, we are asking ourselves; are we helping to revive traditions that are diametrically opposed to our desire for free relationships instead of institutionalized, coercive ones? Are we enabling a revamped version of older national liberation schemes, where the mythical golden age of a heavenly past before the devil appeared, is to be re-established, lock, stock, and barrel? I think those are complex questions, given the transformative capacity and diversity of individuals and cultures involved, and the legacy of colonization.

It is a difficult line to walk and at the same time it is really clear that we are guests and/or invaders, that there is an ongoing history of genocide. My approach has been to avoid becoming a servant, and instead to offer solid support and search for affinities with different individuals, some becoming actual friends. At the same time, to stay open, honest, and understanding, to listen to those I disagree with on their approach and practice.

Both we, anarchists and traditionalists, share a disgust and opposition to the poisoning and destruction of the land and both stand for self-determination against the state. This is where we act in solidarity.

But only by being physically present can we start sharing personal aspirations of horizontal relations.

I actually have seen instances of native warriors feeling envious of the anarchist's freedom to act as they see fit, uncontrolled by leadership and traditions but, ideally, still humble and aware of consequences. Subversion takes many forms.

In all human cultures, the question of leadership has always been a thorny one, especially for us as anarchists. I am told by some indigenous folks that in pre-colonial times, the hereditary chiefs were actually close to the ideal of leadership. They didn't boss people around, didn't have command power but had speech power with which they summed up the feelings and desires of the group, convinced through well-reasoned arguments, not through coercion, listened and took into account the diversity of views, were the poorest and the hardest working and were removed or even killed if they became haughty or out of touch with their community.

Now, is this an accurate account of the past? Or is it an ideal construct, like the ones for Progress, Democracy, Civilization? What I see on the ground today is a diversity of individual hereditary leaders, some behaving with the best intentions towards the health and freedom of their people and territory, some are fence-sitters or contradictory, some are being outright sell-outs or dictatorial kings and queens. Are these last instances only a by-product of colonization? I don't think so, but I can imagine that in the past removal and replacement procedures were well established compared to today.

All this reminds me how little I know about the cultures that were born on this land. It is an ongoing learning process and I find it fascinating and exciting. I want to thank you for this interview, as it made us work hard to put on paper what is it exactly that we are thinking and doing.

Want a BAGR 3 shirt?

2016-04-20T13:06:00.001-05:00

So this is going to be a quick deal. Need to move at least 24 of these in total, otherwise I'll refund everyone, but I think we can get there.

From the cover of Black and Green Review no 3, an amazing photo by Sofia Yu of a Hadza child and father. Khaki print on black shirt.

Please note this rate is for US shipping addresses only. If you are interested and outside of those postal boundaries, please email me at feraledge [a) gmail.

ONLY ACCEPTING ORDERS THROUGH APRIL 24TH!!

Anticipated ship date would be mid-May. I am not ordering any extra.

$20 ppd in the US for Small-XL, $21 ppd for XXL.

Help us distribute Black and Green Review!

2016-04-17T16:13:00.001-05:00

We will continue to find ways to reduce the cost and expenses of Black and Green Review and other Black and Green Press titles, but in the meantime, we'll just put them out there as cheap as we possibly can. To keep things moving forward, we're offering Black and Green Review below cost to help get more copies out there.

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BAGR3: The Wind Roars Ferociously - Four Legged Human

2016-04-17T15:52:00.000-05:00

This essay is from Black and Green Review no 3.

To find out more about the issue: click here.

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The Wind Roars Ferociously:

Feral Foundations and the Necessity of Wild Resistance

Four Legged Human

I wondered: how free were we if we’d become so dependent on the comforts produced by industry that we couldn’t do without them? How free was I, that the first thing I wanted and had been craving for weeks was a sweet and fizzy caramel-colored beverage that came in a bottle with a scarlet label and passed itself off as the Real Thing? May the Arrow People never come to know it. As long as they had streams unsullied by mercury and sprawling woodlands rich with animals, they could remain beyond our reach, beyond the swirling vortex of consumer society and the machinery that manufactures our wants, creates our needs….May they never come to know the squalor of their brethren…who have been sucked in, then spat out and left to wander dusty frontier streets or the hopeless, crack-infested subdivisions on the rez, filthy and destitute, the objects of scorn and derision. What they had could never be measured in dollars…they could never be adequately compensated if they were to ever lose their freedom. The Unconquered [1]

A Middle Finger Extended Stiff and Pointed at the Civilized Masses

The wind roars ferociously. Cold rain pelts down. The walls shake. Caribou sheds stacked along the outside wall collapse in a crash. A piece of whale baleen, tacked to the door, shoots across the sky and into the adjacent brush, like a giant leaf, dark black foliage. The stack of spruce poles leaning up against an old tree, the ones I use for a hide stretching rack, fall over. A fish spear propped up against the other wall lands with a thud, its prongs impaling the dirt. “Good thing I decided not to go fishing tonight”, I tell myself.

The phone rings. “You should go running” she says. “You’ve got to run up the mountain, it doesn’t work if it’s flat”.

“Why? It’s too windy and did you see how hard it’s raining?”

“When it rains hard and the wind blows it only makes me want to run more”

For the last several months she’s been sleeping on a hard floor. She says it’s better for her bones, her muscles, her blood.

She lives on a mountain. She stays there, almost always. A part of that mountain. Sometimes I try to call her at night and there will be no answer. “Where were you”? I ask. “Outside looking at the sky”. She’d rather be out even when the temperatures drop below zero than inside under artificial light. “I love being out in the dark” she says. Sometimes she stays out all night, under the stars, with Aurora as her light. She is going feral.

A few years ago, when I was living in a cabin alone, the spirits put one of my arrows through the heart of a moose – a magic Osage bow. I take no responsibility other than some idea of rewilding I had by which my wanderings brought me the gift. But a man without community alone with a moose brought despair, the loneliest I’ve ever been. Now when my wanderings gift me flesh, fur, fat, bones I share. Wildness is sharing rather than hoarding.

I bring her something. She tells me there is nothing she would rather do than carefully dissect a wild being – a feral connection to her ancient woman genes. When I kill I find myself thinking of her, bringing her the meat, the heart, the bones, the skin. I brought her a caribou. She tried to resist. Perhaps because she thought acceptance would mean a contract, an obligation, so used to men trying to manipulate her in the past she was afraid to trust. But I had to share, my spirit, my wildness urges to me to give what I hunt to a strong hearted woman and to others. None of this matters without others. We hung the caribou legs in a tree on the side of her mountain…

One late October I brought her a bear – fat from a fall spent high in the mountains living on blueberries – brown fur, with a tongue dyed blue. She rendered piles of bear fat that we trimmed and fleshed from the skin. We made medicine. Some of the old people say that a woman should never look at a bear, let alone use her knife to cut into a bear’s flesh. I knew it would be powerful medicine but my path to wildness and her feral spirit threw caution aside. We are so far domesticated and wanted to be within wildness so bad, we took the risk. We wanted to make a bearskin robe. She wanted to skin out the skull from the bear, but her knife slipped on the skull. Resistance - a protest from the bear spirit? Or a gift? A lesson? “I think I’m going to faint” she said softly as she clutched her finger and the blood dripped.

“Oh Fuck” I let slip, because it looked bad. “I think it’s really deep” she said. Her middle finger cut to the bone, barely hanging on. ”I need you to stitch it for me”. “I don’t think I can” I replied, “I’m taking you to the hospital”. “No”. She hates the system, industry, synthetic places and synthetic drugs. She desperately does not want to leave her mountain. But I could not do it. Could not stomach sewing up her raw skin with a sewing needle and thread. She tried her best to insist. I insisted we drive to civilization, an emergency room door on a Saturday night. Victims of alcohol related accidents from the city streets and one woman there because of her being overruled by the spirit of the skull of a bear. The doctors sewed her up and gave her some drugs. Severed tendons and heavy nerve damage was the diagnosis. The function of the finger may never return they told her. For the last year sweet bear fat has been one of her staple foods, and everywhere she goes her middle finger has been stuck in one place; elongated, unbendable, and straight…

The Process of Hominid Domestication

We stopped to visit some ruins of the Hohokam, the ruins of a long defunct civilization based upon irrigation agriculture. Upon approach I tried to envision what might have went on in the minds of the Hohokam, what motivated them to embark on such a path of attempted ecological control, and what kept them desperately clinging to the system they had initiated, despite its obviously diminishing material, social, and spiritual returns. I entered a brick-walled shelter of over a thousand years in age, I sat down inside, the coolness of the shaded sandstone comforting and relieving from the one hundred-degree desert sun. I pondered the structure, the masonry of the ancients; their presence once here in the place I sit, I look to the stone lined food storage pit to my left and wonder about the socioeconomic situations that were spawned from that storage pit; the sharing? The conflict?The hierarchy that evolved as a result of the necessary control of food and nature. The abandonment and the collapse, the disbursement into smaller semi-nomadic bands, the return to living as gatherer hunters and small scale horticulturists, as the Hohokam system of irrigation and production agriculture failed. The realization that the experiment had failed and that it most likely had taken willing individuals to make the choice to break free from the pack and abandon it, rather than continue to be coopted by its grip. Journal Entry, Band Tour, 2007

Domestication is a particularly contagious disease. Fire and Ice [2]

Domestication is a far-reaching topic. Most broadly discussed in relation to the anthropogenic control of non-human flora and fauna, here we speak instead of human domestication, particularly its breaking of an original place-rooted human wildness and liberty, and the resulting material and psychological condition which now holds us captive[3].

The influence of human domestication on world history has been profound and reveals a reality that the vast majority of once land-based, self-sufficient indigenous peoples have been coopted into mass dependence on power relationships oriented to production and wealth growing psychoses.^{^[4]} Whether culturally self-inflicted or conquered via enculturation, human domestication particularly tends to progressively annihilate a peoples capacity to effectively resist its all-engulfing, tyrannically debilitating forces, including alienation from nature and community, the division of labor, feudalism, militarism[5], technology, and global capitalism: the overall totality of civilization.

At the non-colonial, and thus indigenous level we witness the process of self-domestication occurring among the more sedentary and high-density resource oriented wild food foraging peoples, often those who specialize in fish and/or marine resources, and/or those who domesticate animals and plants, in their employment of wealth generating control of surplus, hereditary nobility, and slavery^{^[6]}. Here, not only do oppressive sociopolitical environments result, increasing population densities generally lead to inevitable ecological complications and social conflicts, further increasing a need for societal control and military adventures, thus continually enhancing and reinforcing both ecological and cultural domestication. From here we move towards production agriculture and even deeper and insidious levels of culturally-induced domestication, an example being the Hohokam (cited above), among countless others which have been heavily documented and discussed by scholars of various backgrounds^{^[7]}

In general, once settlement and bondage to elite classes occurs, in order to stay alive, domesticated life for the non-elite masses is essentially one of either slavery or indebtedness and payments of tribute and taxes to the rich. So disempowered and separated from a free life within intact social and ecological communities, the domesticated mind often can no longer envision life outside the shackles of the totality. By about 2,000 years ago this was the predicament for the vast majority of humans in all of the civilized regions of the world. For example, for the Ch’in Dynasty peasantry in 1^st century AD China:

Livelihood came from farming their individual plots and they could not afford to leave them for more than a short period of time…those who stayed on their land might dream of a better world, without toil, hardship and famine. But they depended on the state administrators when it came to irrigation and flood control, the provision of iron tools, and access to the goods which they could not grow themselves. They could conceive of a world in which the administrators behaved better and the landowners did not squeeze them. But they could not conceive of a completely different society run by themselves.^{^[8]}

This total loss of self-reliance and the concomitant failure to conceive of any alternative is a highly accurate description of the conditions of human domestication within the totality of civilization, not only for the poor but also for the elite programmers of civilization themselves. Enslavement was, in many cases, a necessity for the surplus production which fed the elites. For example, in 5^th century BC Athens the only value of the peasantry for the elites was in “how important they were to producing the surplus, for without this there could be no life of idleness for the ruling class…the ruling class owed its position to the control of land cultivated mainly by slaves, to such an extent that the classic Greek writers and philosophers saw the ownership of slaves as essential to civilised life.”^{^[9]}

Within civilization, survival for the ultra-alienated lifeways of the controllers and programmers depends entirely upon a deliberately developed hierarchy and a continuously self-reinforced domestication. During the 10^th century, for example, so enslaved by such arrangements were the citizens of the Byzantium Empire that tax collectors travelled the countryside accompanied by soldiers. Those who could not pay were jailed or tortured, and in some cases had hungry dogs sent on them.^{^[10]} During the 2^nd millennium AD, the arrangements of European feudalism, which ultimately spawned global colonialism and industrialism, were essentially the same – as domesticated dependents there was no freedom for a commoner to leave the farm, the village, or the authority of the lords. The domesticated lords could do nothing on their own, and were dependent on the peasants they held in bondage for food and on middle-tier specialists for wine, silk, spices, and iron weapons and tools.^{^[11]}

In Western Europe, 1000-1300 AD, the production of excess surplus, and growth in trade with the Far-East, in tandem with the lords’ increasing need for trade goods allowed some from the lower rungs to break-free from the destitution of the fields and establish themselves as middle-class traders. In order to facilitate this, these merchants relocated to settlements, initiating a further domestication of the populace as increasing numbers of people became oriented to life inside of cities.^{^[12]} In this manner “the humble bagman could transform himself into a respectable trader, and the respectable trader into a wealthy merchant”.^{^[13]}

As the colonial activities of kings and empires expanded and the kings and lords became more and more dependent upon the merchants for goods, the merchants became increasingly wealthy. All the while, “to obtain money to buy luxuries and arms, lords [needed to] encourage serfs to produce cash crops”.^{^[14]} With the establishment of these arrangements arose the increasing emphasis on international trade which fueled European colonialism for centuries.

Throughout this time, as more and more markets emerged, the demand for labor in the non-agricultural sectors continued to grow thus further transforming, across many parts of the world, once self-sufficient land based peoples into members of a new working class who increasingly immigrated to cities.[15] The dream for a new life has always remained elusive for many of these emigrants. Vagabondage emerged early-on among city dwellers who could not obtain employment. In 1570s Britain, King Henry VIII made the persecution of vagabonds’ official policy, whipping and imprisoning them due to their being viewed as a threat to order.

All-in-all, mercantilism and its resulting middle-class consciousness spawned the so-called economically independent, free-willed average-joe capitalist trader attitudes and arrangements which have shaped much of how the domesticated masses perceive and live in the world today.

Expanding globalization is often portrayed as solely originating in the west, neglecting the significance of the rise and influence of non-globalist indigenous capitalists around the world as colonial capitalism spread.Countless populations of 3^rd world poor peoples have been victimized by clever and manipulative members of their own cultures who learned how to play the games of domestication, exploitation, and overall tyranny.

Throughout this history and continuing into this century, wild and free peoples were crudely subjugated via their initial experiences with wealth and modern technology, marking “the beginning of a gradual seduction, a growing dependence on the manufactured goods that invariably bedazzle technologically primitive aboriginals”.^{^[16]} For example, the Huitoto Indians of the Putumayo River region of the Amazon “[who] initially venerated steel axes as divine objects that conferred fertility and abundance”, once entranced and dependent, “willingly swapped orphans or low-status members of their clans to obtain the goods from slave traders”.^{^[17]} Another example comes from Australia, where “the introduction of steel axes by missionaries among Yir Yoront aborigines led to the complete collapse of their ancient culture within a generation. Trade relations disrupted, taboos violated, myths shattered, age and gender roles overturned”.^{^[18]}

As a means to conquer and subjugate the remaining wild peoples in the Amazon jungles “the allure of…magical objects – mirrors, machetes, phonographs, cameras – lay at the strategic core of campaigns waged over decades to attract countless tribes…from the bush….by [government agencies], missionaries, oil companies, road builders, adventurers”.^{^[19]}In some cases, such as with the Yanomami groups of the Orinoco River region in Venezuela, this led to relocating themselves away from their traditional homes in the highlands to mission posts along the rivers in the lowlands simply to obtain access to trade goods. In other cases, the results were even more deleterious, such as with “some isolated tribesmen [who] were…known to launch attacks to gain access to manufactured goods [which] they…developed a taste for but could acquire by no other means”.^{^[20]} In Brazil this included the Kayapo, who “raided settlers time and time again during the 1950s with the express purpose of taking their guns and ammunition, which they used in turn to gain an upper hand on their traditional tribal enemies”, and also the…

Arara and the Parintintin who made off with knives, machetes, and axes from the tapiri de brindis[21] [having] no idea what taking the bait would immediately lead to. Epidemics were just the beginning. Once they were crippled by demographic shock, their lands were easily overrun. They often lacked the will or the strength even to feed themselves, let alone resist. The survivors were soon corralled on marginal parcels, bereft of the traditions and know-how that had sustained them for thousands of years, despised by the society that hoodwinked them with a boundless flow of gifts and promises of a better life.^{^[22]}

There were also the Kanamari, who “reduced to utter dependence on [government agency] paternalism for manufactured necessities, such as shotguns and shells” ended up “caught between the ancient ways they were forgetting and a world of fast-moving boats, planes, and commerce that was passing them by [and thus] no longer knew how to hunt with bow and arrow, much less to make them.”^{^[23]} For the Marubo “only the…elders still knew how to make the stiff but supple long bow and the fletched cane arrows tribesmen had hunted with for eons” and shotgun shells thus became a commodity essential to a Marubo man’s ability to provide for his family.^{^[24]}

All of the above represent examples of an essentially global event throughout history since the beginnings of domestication, as virtually all land based peoples have become dependent upon the world system, leading generally to the enhancement of ever more hideous levels of human domestication. In their manifesto, Marx and Engels summarized the societal shifts associated with global capitalism as leading to the masses becoming merely “a class of labourers who live only so long as they can find work”.^{^[25]} Certainly, for the vast majority of humanity, survival is now entirely dependent upon involvement with the forces of technology and production, and along with that, survival is now dependent upon furthering our alienation from the natural world and maintaining our own state of domestication – this is the ruling paradigm. Self-domestication continues to reign over us all as most of the lower and middle classes the world over, rather than reject the growth of markets, urge them on, further domesticating themselves, separating communities, driving thousands of wild species to extinction, and deepening overall human estrangement from direct relations with the real world. Furthering these processes offers no semblance of a way out, and any modicum of a future socioecological restoration and sustainability continues to be utterly annihilated.

Domestication: The Culprit in a Persistently Failed Leftist Resistance

The sense of shock had gone by the 20^th century. People could still be amazed by individual innovations, like the motorcar or electric light. But they were not shocked any more by a society built on competition, timekeeping and greed. Capitalist society was all that people knew. Its characteristic forms of behavior seemed to be ‘human nature’. People no longer realised how bizarre their behavior would have seemed to their forebears. A People’s History of the World [26]

I’ve wasted too much time being motivated by shame and guilt. I know now who my enemy is…it’s not the cops, not the feds, not the president, not corporate CEOs, though I’m not trying to say they aren’t worth pushing off a cliff. My enemy is civilization and the collective insanity it stems from. My enemy is domestication. Fire and Ice [27]

At all costs, the vast majority of us seem to be highly contented with a continuation of the domestication process. Those who question domestication are often labeled as radicals and activists of all stripes seems to have great difficulty in coming to terms with the fact that, when compared to the vast majority of human history lived in wildness, it is domestication which is actually ”bizarre” and “radical”. Yet the long history of failed attempts at resistance and defeat by the totality, the failure to change our circumstances any decisive degree, has resulted to a large magnitude from living within a state of both physical and psychological domestication^{^[28]}.

World history, since the dawn of civilization, can be characterized as both continuous bondage and continuous class struggle against resource theft and hierarchical power, which, over the course of time, not one entity has ever successfully risen to overthrow. Nowhere on the planet today does the totality not exist. Its overall long-term trajectory continues and propagates daily largely because our domestication amounts to physical and psychological dependency. World history shows that the maintenance of the totality requires that the common masses are continuously swindled into becoming dependent on landowners, successful traders, religious elites, and the state. Moreover the role of the middle-class, including those who identify as anti-capitalist pro-environment leftists, has been fundamental in the effort to maintain domestication in the form of privileged lifestyles associated with progress, industry, and overall techno industrial expansion. Civilized humans, both Left and Right, will do just about anything to maintain their domestication.

Domestication is so immensely powerful it has kept billions of humans timid and enslaved throughout known history. Local, small-scale native people are not exempt as they have often proven just as gullible in their desires for wealth[29]. At whatever cultural scale, wealth has always been generated by, an often willing, mass of commoners in service to an elite. Depraved and shameless, capitalism is essentially a deception of the masses into a reified need for a product or a service that can be extracted or produced by one group and sold back to another group by the trading and owner classes who benefit. Once obtained, the benefactors have always viewed the preservation of their privilege and profit as primary; no matter how compassionate, caring, and liberal, whenever they are backed against a wall they have chosen to side with domestication.

A review of all the great revolts against tyranny in history reveals either movements which were crushed by the more powerful, or victorious ones which promised a new society but simply ended up reproducing all of the destructive tendencies and oppressions of civilization[30]. This trend will continue, no matter how hard those who resist fight back, as long as the wealth and power of the elitist domesticators and programmers depends entirely on our direct compulsion in the game of wage slavery, production, commodification, mercantilism, and technology.

The risks involved with authentically breaking this pattern and thus doing away with our domestication run deep. Civilizations have a long history of using strong handed tactics, including police and military violence, against those who threaten mass compulsion in their domestication scheme. And ever since the programmers of surplus production coaxed us away from dependence on immediate return wildness, the domesticated elitists have generally always controlled the food, albeit in an acknowledged state of paranoia and vulnerability.

With the almost total dependence on mass produced cereal grains for survival, both elites and commoners became keenly aware that any social or ecological glitch which caused a substantial harvest failure would equal starvation[31]. For this reason European feudal kings were constantly worried about peasant revolt or any rejection of exploitation by the masses of common farmers – not only did their power, but also their lives, depended on peasants playing the game. They capitalized on the fact that the poor masses were domesticated, unable to fend for themselves, and chained to the fields and used this bondage to redirect any despair, anger, and revolt. For instance, in 12th century Constantinople, the rulers of the Byzantium Empire, “afraid of any class emerging whose closeness to production might lead to it diverting some of the surplus into its own pockets”^{^[32]} found security in the fact that “lacking an independent base, the poor could not act as an independent force. They could cause brief mayhem by rioting. But even their bitterness was all too easily manipulated…utilised by aristocratic forces”^{^[33]}. Throughout history, in their own self-imposed desperation, constantly terrified of any unrest which might result in forcing them down into destitution, mid-level aristocrats have always played along.

Moreover, in order to oppose any radical shifts which might undermine their positions on the ladder, the propertied liberal classes have always, when then the system is faced with any threat, tended to unite with fascistic right-wing forces.

Typical of the fantasies and psychoses of middle-class liberals everywhere today, was the cowardice of the liberal bourgeois social democrat leaders of pre-WWII Nazi Germany, whose ultra-domesticated fear of economic collapse contributed greatly to the rise of Adolf Hitler. “Nazisim…was the product of an already mature industrial capitalism. The German ruling class saw the only way to escape from a deep economic crisis was to hand political power to a totalitarian movement based on the irrational fantasies of a middle class driven mad by the crisis”^{^[34]}. The evolved comfortable dependence of the liberal bourgeois on the domesticated order has always meant that they shall never put their careers at risk, even if, thoroughly enlightened of the actual problems via their privileged educations.

As a result of their own enslavement to the arrangements of production and their personal comforts resulting from their position within the totality, middle class intellectuals, including university professors and civil servants of all stripes, even if keenly aware of these patterns in history, generally always seem more than willing to toe the line for the totality. The contemporary postmodernist surrender of left wing intellectuals is entirely rooted in their own domestication and fear of breaking free of it. It should be clear, at this stage, that allowing the forces of passive and comfortable bourgeois liberalism to be a guide in any manner means certain defeat for humanity and for the planet.

For their part, the lower-level urban working classes are almost equal enemies to planetary ecology, wildness, and self-reliant indigenous lifeways. As the blue collars struggle for their piece of the pie, and thereby internalize the struggle for income equality and ‘economic justice’ as a priori, they position themselves as willing exploiters and decimators of both ecosystems and non-capitalistic land-based lifeways[35]. Particularly disheartening is the witness of increasing numbers of indigenous peoples with the most direct connections to free and wild ancestors of any populace on the planet willing to sell away everything while claiming allegiance to an indigenous culture, in an effort to somehow separate themselves from the overall imperial ideology, a measure to comfort them in their cognitive dissonance and overall psychological despair[36].

For the domesticated, rather than step away from the totality and attempt a return to a stable social and ecological lifeway, belief in a better future via technology and shifting societal consciousness becomes a fundamental guiding force. The idealization of progress has always been fundamental to leftist thinking – ‘some day we can get there, we just need to keep pushing on and the dreams of advancement for all can finally be fulfilled’. Total faith in science and reason continues as a product of all this, as most, rather than come to terms with the reality of human domestication, cling to faith in the future as if it were a god, marching onward down the pavement staring into and poking away at their screens passively chanting ‘the future can only ever be better than the present – modernity can only mean improvement’.

The entire notion of a progressive movement to a finally just world has been a massive failure for all of its believers, but has worked well as another scheme of the cunning for growing their wealth and power – from the long ago incubation of the first indigenous civilizations through till now. This forward march to progress has given rise to all the devastation which has occurred, and thus, now, any true resistance movement must first and foremost reject solutions that involve ‘progress’ in any shape or form[37].

Through its history of fits and starts over the last few millennia’s, the momentum of leftist oriented resistance is picking up in this second decade of the 21^st century: Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Climate Change, Anti-fracking, Anti-Pipeline– yet none of this is fundamentally different than left style resistance of past centuries[38]. In fact, by necessity against the most powerful state paramilitary police forces in known history, it is fundamentally more passive than any of the more forthright armed leftist revolutions of the past. Ultimately, hemmed in by domestication - dependency on the industrial supply chain, digital communication, and corporate health care - none of what is occurring now will bring us or the planet out of annihilation by the totality, as long as the primary agitation in such activism is a fight to be more of an equal part of the system rather than a call for the disenfranchised to voluntarily cease acting out their traditional roles as surplus producers for the domesticators. As time plays out, the revolts of the 21^st century will continue and even expand, but as the historical track record shows, such movements will always be co-opted unless those revolting choose to abandon the industrial system itself and develop a new world of actualized community self-reliance[39].

Do they owe us a living? Why keep producing for them? What compels it? Domestication.

What if rather than fighting for equal treatment, just wages, and better working conditions the producers instead just stopped playing the game? Is it really a matter of survival? Or is it actually a matter of reified dependencies?

One of the fundamentals of liberal intellectual theory regarding the obviously approaching dark times for modern civilization is the notion that it is the poor who will continue to suffer and the rich who will prosper and survive. For all classes who rely on producing inputs for the global machine this will certainly be a reality, yet the impotence of the ultra-domesticated who now live the most privileged lifestyles should not be underestimated.

As the belt on the dominant economy and culture continues to tighten and the numbers of disenfranchised grow, the elite shall find themselves at their most vulnerable. In the face of their frantic paranoia and their access to police and military enforcers our challenges will remain extremely formidable, no doubt. But there is a fighting chance if rather than remaining in bondage to technology and capital we can build self-reliance while simultaneously resisting and attacking these supposedly inviolable institutions.

During the 1930s when the US stock market collapsed, igniting the Great Depression, the implications were felt worldwide. US and European banks collapsed and world industrial output fell almost by half, devastating 3^rd world countries and peasants across the planet “whose economies had been tailored to produce food and raw materials” for the colonial world markets:

Suddenly there was no market for their output. People only recently pulled into the world of money were deprived of access to it, yet they no longer had any other means of obtaining a livelihood…those who were least ‘advanced’ in capitalist terms – subsistence farmers still barely integrated into the cash economy – survived best. Those who relied on selling their labor power had nothing to fall back on.^{^[40]}

Obliterating our dependency on selling our labor power, whatever it is we produce, is an absolutely key element in resistance.

Civilization is life lived off the production of otherness – as long as we remain domesticated we all ultimately live off the backs of otherness –this is where your smartphone comes from. The history of civilization is not simply class struggle; it is essentially the sapping of communal self-sufficiency by self-domesticated elitists and, in many cases, the simultaneous surrender of communal self-sufficiency by commoners who end up in a state of desire for their own piece of the pie. This is the actual dialectic – surrender of our wildness and liberty in exchange for dependency on reified needs and desires represents the opposing forces annihilating us through time via self-domestication. As a first step a once primal wild and free peoples fell prey to the promise of an easier life via surplus production – an initially innocent human impulse that has ultimately become the undoing of our species and the global ecology which supports us.

Taken as a whole, and in proper temporal context, the 21^st century can be described as an episode of impending confusion and socioecological destruction resulting from the continuing surge of mass capitalism, colonialism, and industrial technology with the masses generally following along and/or coming up with untenable solutions as result of their own domestication . We witness the momentum of this psychology today, but confidence is waning and the ridiculousness of the proposed solutions is apparent as time and space for their implementation quickly runs out.

All of the upheavals of socialist oriented rebellion across Europe, Asia, and Latin America during both the 19^th and 20^th centuries are representative of the same very confused attempt to make correct what went so wrong. Both then and now the ideologies which drive most efforts of resistance have been without the necessary historical, anthropological, ecological, and psychological context – self-domestication so deeply entrenched that all of this effort at resistance and revolt has simply been banging fruitlessly on an impenetrable wall – billions of people dying all in desperation to find security in industry, technology, government, military force, agriculture, economics – in sum – to find security in our domestication.

The only hope forward is feral, a return from our captivity to a state of wildness – the middle-ground compromises of past and present resistors take us nowhere but further into enslavement and ecological despair – further into domestication. Rewilding is the antithesis. Only a feral return to self-reliant non-technological community will be adequate. The crucial calling is for the masses is to discontinue producing, stop trading, to band together on land and as a communities, Occupy farms and forests – not city streets: to grow[41], steal, scavenge, forage and procure the necessities, begin to unhinge domestication, to stop playing the game[42].

Indigenous Wildness, Self-Reliance, and Resistance

I shared the evening campfire with men who in this lifetime had believed jet aircraft to be supernatural beings. But they had evolved a way of life perfectly suited to this harsh realm. They’d known how to survive in it, even to thrive in it, with nothing of our complicated technology. Every one of them at one point or another had stood face-to-face with a jaguar in the forest, armed with only an arrow or a stick, and come out on top. Did the bearer of a SAM-7 missile, who with a squeeze of a finger could shoot one of those ancestral spirits out of the sky, possess any greater intelligence than a flecheiro who knew how to stalk prey silently in the forests and whose people had managed to arrive at the third millennium still free from civilization’s relentless efforts to subjugate them, dispossess them, and have at their resources? The Unconquered [43]

They are a reminder that it’s possible to live another way. They are the last free people on this planet. Brazillian National Indian Foundation agent Jose’ Carlos Meirelles to a BBC journalist on being shot at in an airplane with a fusillade of arrows from the bows of the Indios Bravos when flying low over an encampment in 2008.

Recognizing the reality of our debilitating domestication requires that we now must define its opposing condition; a feral world of wildness and self-reliance, inspired by examples of actualized wild liberty and resistance.

It has been estimated that today in the last primal vestiges of the Brazilian Amazon exist up to 43 uncontacted indigenous tribes, Indios Bravos or The Arrow People. Often characterized as ‘uncontacted’, the more likely reality is that these Amazonian bands consciously choose to live in isolation and evade interaction precisely due to a deep intergenerational knowledge of the calamitous consequences associated with their ancestors and their neighboring indigenous brethren becoming domesticated and civilized:

Willful determination, or rather self-determination…seems to attend all the isolated tribes still roaming the forests of the Amazon…Indigenous groups living in isolation are isolated because they choose to be. It’s not for complete lack of contact, but precisely because previous experiences of contact with the outside world proved so negative.^{^[44]}

Not only have The Arrow People been refugees fleeing from the violence and conquest of European and mestico colonialism and the associated global economy for 500 years, many of them likely originate from small scale cultures which were effectively evading the evolving tyranny of South American indigenous groups which began to settle and domesticate the region around 2,000 years ago^{^[45]}. As these indigenous empires and foreign resource extractors invaded further and further into the depths of the Amazon, The Arrow People developed a successful lifeway which incorporated continuous evasion from the turmoil of civilization, effectively keeping their cultures and their wildness intact up until today[46]. They have voluntarily isolated themselves and “developed a heightened resistance to contact – refusing all gifts, spurning all overtures, fleeing deeper and deeper into the jungle”^{^[47]}. With a legacy of two millennia’s of successful resistance against the forces of domestication and five centuries of successful resistance against enslavement by the modern industrial world, “everything they [do suggests] a deliberate decision, an act of self-determination, to shut themselves off from the rest of us.”^{^[48]}

There are many other examples of such attempts at resistance and evasion by indigenous nomads, hunters, and foragers across the world, but it seems that none have held on to the degree The Arrow People have. One of the deepest and most enduring examples of tremendous persistence in fighting the dominant order is the fact that, for entire decades during the European conquest of the American West in the nineteenth century, groups such as the Apache, Cheyenne, and Lakota were defeating the US Army day-in-day-out in various battles and skirmishes while simultaneously continuing to feed themselves and their children via wild food hunting and gathering. This capability is an immense testament to the strength and resilience of such people, whose enemies were meanwhile being fed, sheltered, clothed, and armed primarily through organized supply chains. With some access to firearms, these near victors of the Indian Wars also continued to maintain heavy reliance on primitive technology, annihilating hundreds of cavalrymen with handmade bows and arrows, among other traditional weaponry. The only way these groups were defeated was through the implementation of a military strategy to destroy their food-base and by hemming them in on limited parcels of land. Perhaps, in the face of such a powerful leviathan, defeat was sadly inevitable. Nonetheless our current cultures of resistance should draw on this history for inspiration.

Through this we should also continue to make note of the destructive consequences for the indigenous groups who have initially welcomed domestication and then continued to blindly make concessions to it, effectively allowing themselves to become dependents of the industrial system as a result.[49] For example, in contemporary Alaska many native people continue to survive to a large degree by hunting, fishing, and gathering but only accomplish this with modern technology and fossil energy. So much direct knowledge of ancient skills has been lost that any long-term glitch in the long supply chain which impedes receipt of now necessary goods and services into remote Alaska would likely become a humanitarian crisis. This situation can be contrasted with the far greater level of self-reliance and traditional skills retained by some Siberian indigenous peoples whom have had much less opportunity to tinker with industrial consumption and technology over the course of both Soviet and Russian Federation history. Compared to the Alaskans, the Siberians are well-posed to endure upcoming supply chain collapses.

None of this is to be taken lightly however. Primitive survival in Artic and Subarctic environs presents formidable challenges which few of the domesticated masses would ever be willing to confront. Although, examples throughout the ethnographic record do inform us what our species is capable of, especially in cases where we are born and raised outside of domestication. For instance, at the tip of the Southern Hemisphere in Tierra Del Fuego, in a much harsher climate than exists in today’s last stronghold of wild indigenousness in the Amazon, the Yahghan people lived for thousands of years “practically naked” without shoes in the winter snows^{^[50]}. They were expert swimmers in the cold waters of the southern Pacific near Cape Horn. Further into the interior existed the Ona who, rather than having the woven grass skirts occasionally worn by the Yaghan, survived the mountain winters clothed by a one-piece un-tanned guanaco skin robe. “Ona men cared nothing for being clothed”. Their single sheet guanaco skin was not sewn and was “never fastened in any way, but was held in a position with the left hand in which the hunter also carried his bow and quiver”^{^[51]}. Once in range of game, or in preparation to encounter an enemy, “the hunter discarded his robe before using his bow and arrows”^{^[52]}. The legacy of these bands of Tierra Tel Fuego Indians is one of hardness and resilience for multiple thousands of years. Today, as a result of the effects of European colonization, they are extinct. Not a single language speaker or full-blooded Yaghan or Ona remains. In the necessity to procure food, their attempts to resist the colonization of their lands proved futile. “These unfortunate natives, though, as a rule, vastly superior physically…to their enemies, were hopelessly handicapped by having to provide for their numerous families”^{^[53]}.

This is the unfortunate story for thousands of wild cultures who have become victimized by the onslaught of domestication and civilization across the globe over the course of the last two thousand years. Yet The Arrow People have maintained their wildness and capacity to endure and they provide all of us and the planet with a sliver of hope.

Nevertheless, in face of this grand reality, the domesticated cry out “it is hopeless!” And why? Because the picture is clear. In order for The Arrow People to accomplish wildness and true liberty continuously over the course of at least five centuries they have needed to maintain an extremely high threshold for psychical discomfort[54]. Yet they are humans just as we are and they had the resilience of our forebears deep inside their minds and bodies. Not only this, they also had to maintain a great capacity for mobility and it is surmised that the ancestors of some of these bands were also once sedentary farmers but that “to stay a step ahead of the invaders, they abandoned their crops and villages to forage in the forest”^{^[55]}.

This is what victory looked like: The Arrow People, holding forth in the Parallel Realm. Uncontacted. Untamed. Unconquered.^{^[56]}

For us, is it hopeless? In the face of overwhelming odds (too many people, not enough land, mass extinction – are all common reproaches) it very well may be. But we have no choice. The only way forward is to somehow develop a capacity not to be dependent on the Leviathan. Unhinge our domestication. The task before us is immense. It is undoubtedly multigenerational, yet not unreachable and not pushing forward with it means failure for all that is decent about humanity and means utter destruction for the ecology of this sacred wild planet.

Forward into Rewilding Realities: Risk, Hardship, Humility, Community

Out of these [21^st century] struggles will emerge new attempts to remould society around the values of solidarity, mutual support, egalitarianism, collective cooperation and a democratically planned use of resources. The ruling classes of the world, like their predecessors for 5,000 years, will do their utmost to thwart these attempts and will, if necessary, unleash endless barbarities so as to hang on to what they regard as their sacred right to power and to property. They will defend the existing capitalist order to the end – even if it is the end of organized human life. A Peoples History of the World [57]

I just know I want out. And I don’t know what my limitations are, but I’m ready to find out. The Black Wolf Woman –Anonymous Alaskan Rewilder

Every day is a physical toil, but never before have I felt such undaunted enthusiasm for my scope and freedom. On the Run in Siberia [58]

We have clearly established that a rewilding component is a necessary foundation for any effective and enduring resistance against, and liberation from, the shackles of civilizational tyranny. This is not meant to discredit the efforts of others or to disrespect or reduce the value of the countless acts of self-sacrifice in the long history of action and resistance against the totality, in one form or another, around the world. Rather, the point is to identify the critical missing element – a concurrent pathway to undomesticate and rewild. For any suite of actions to have long-term beneficial outcomes for humans and the planet, this is mandatory. It is the only way forward; action without wildness as a foundation can only result in domestication, no matter what victory comes of it. Any modicum of authentic resistance now depends on shedding domestication[59].

Those of us involved in the many forms of resistance occurring today, especially those of us who were born and now reside in the westernized regions of the world, including many of us who have come to reject civilization, have been raised as humans in the most comfortable conditions ever know to our species. We are domesticated. This provides us perspective on both the advantages and limitations of domesticated lifeways which those ‘less fortunate’ do not have. But since our domestication tends to be our primary foundational life experience, we are left at a great disadvantage in gaining the capability to disembark from the complexsystems which now prop us up.

If there was to be a great victory over the totality what would we be left with, without the physical and psychological ability to exist outside of its grip? We would be left with little ground to stand on and the situation would turn back to tyranny, unless rewilding occurs within our every physical, mental, emotional, sensory, and social faculty. Without this there is nothing. Yet the challenges to shift are immense. We need an authentically feral resistance but to go feral we need to cross boundaries, both physical and spiritual, throw caution to the wind, and embark full-throttle into wildness.

When the topic of physical discomfort and toil comes up, and when some primitivists and rewilders such as I promote embracing these things as virtuous, we are often accused of being arrogant and macho. We make no romanticized attempts at machismo associated with the trials and errors involved with our attempts to endure inside of wildness. Arrogance is our enemy. It is civilization talking. Above all else, rewilding shall teach us a humility which the civilized lack and which we must embrace wholeheartedly. An atmosphere of tougher-man, smarter-man arrogance is countered when a person with real on-the-ground experience displays some personal humility in regards to the situation^{^[60]}. And when it comes to gender, I am continuously humbled by the women I have spent time with in pursuit of rewilding.

Let us also, once and for all, set straight the notion that anarcho-primitivists romanticize, and thus do not take seriously, the realities of dispensing with civilization. We fully recognize the complete package of consequence involved with doing away with civilization and make no attempt to avoid the harsh physical and psychological realities which accompanies a feral return; hard work, discomfort, pain, danger, risk, lack of outside support to fall back on[61]. I hold no illusions regarding what befalls us and I say this all with a deep humility based on my own feeble attempts at rewilding, experiences which have often left me retreating back into the comforts of civilization. Again, in the face of all this, constant humility is the overarching perspective and state of being. The reality is that going feral requires physical and mental toughness. This is not a macho thing. It is a human thing. Domestication has softened us immensely. And thus we also need to be realistic about the overall legitimacy of training and physical fitness – swimming, climbing, jumping, running, travelling long distances on foot, carrying heavy weight, self-defense – and castoff any labeling of physical fitness activities as macho or militarist by lethargic anarchists and passive leftist activists. There is no easy way out – domestication debilitates physically into decrepitude and it has evolved our necessity for civilized comforts which ultimately destroy wildness and annihilate the planet. The overall physical alienation and feebleness of the most powerful elitist programmers, technologists, domesticators, and capitalists is perhaps one of the primary weaknesses in the totality that we ourselves should be capitalizing on. Even the hardiest of them ends up worthless without technology, motors, grocery stores, and guns.

I witness each day the end result of this alienation, insistence upon the virtues of domestication by the vast majority of humans around me. A fear of the natural world, a fear of the dark, the cold, of being dirty, of being outdoors, of being human, of being an animal, and the natural world continues to suffer concomitantly. Feral pathways inevitably come with personal risks and require a mental, and often physical, crossing of the threshold of domestication. As a Tanana Athabascan activist once told me, “well-being was widespread before contact, but we cannot romanticize it, being hungry, which the elders have caught a glimpse of”. Danger certainly lurks here. I am aware of the risk. And in situations without civilized control I am not without fear.

We have always heard from the domesticated the inaccurate assessment that life for primitive people was “nasty, brutish, and short”. Life expectancy at birth for hunting and gathering peoples was lower than in modernity not because no one survived into old age but because less children survived in proportion to the population as a whole. Healthy seventy-plus year old elders from hunting and gathering cultures have been well documented in the anthropological record[62]. If a person survived to adulthood, mortality was related mostly to accidents and violence. In the case of an accident there was no modern medicine, surgery, or life-support. This is perhaps one of the most difficult realities for us to face. It certainly was for me when I cut myself deep while butchering a deer while in a very remote camp on an island for several weeks and became paranoid that I was getting an infection. This humble reality became even more critical for me when I stared directly at my friend’s finger hanging lopsided and barely attached to the bone while she begged me to sew it for her so that she could avoid going to a hospital. And these little incidents are relatively minor in comparison to the medical situations we will inevitably face one day no longer linked to the matrix, in full reliance only on one and other, in wildness, where anything can happen[63].

As domesticates we often find ourselves distressed by elements of unpredictability, accident, and chance, yet an embrace of these is one important element which builds the adaptability and resilience of the feral, wild and free human. Our domestication of animals and plants was essentially an unprecedented psychological transition “from unpredictability to reliability”.^{^[64]} Yet, dependence upon “reliability” ultimately initiates a psychological dependence on control, and thus a control logic which originates from a fear of uncertainty.^{^[65]} I get frustrated with uncertainty personally, and I can see how a culture would make efforts to reduce it via domestication. As such it may be that this psychology has played a massive role in our own domestication and its comprehensive impacts to wildness and the planet. The unpredictability of wildness offers both risk and award. Some who have found boundless healing, meaning, purpose, hope and spiritual solace in rewilding have disappeared on vision quests into wildness, as a result of chance or simple mistakes, or both, never to be seen again. I do not valorize this.

Prior to domestication, if a lone hunter crashed through the ice and could not start a fire then there was no cell-phone to call in a heli-vac, there was no airplane to search for them when family became concerned. Thus, there must have been a much greater acceptance of death in those wild cultures than we have in ours. Such are the risks that we take, especially when we travel solo in remote locations. We are realistic about the risks and we strive to develop the courage and honor to accept our predicaments and their consequences. In those cases, we should prefer to become a bear or part of a river, rather to go on with civilization. This would be more along the lines of the spirituality of the old hunters where humans and wildness are one and where the spirits of people do not die but instead only change forms. Better to die in the wild than in car wreck, better to eat the dirt than to eat the pavement, better to be eaten by a beautiful wild creature than to be shot apart by bullets and thus eaten away for nothing by a domesticated and lost predator in our nation’s ongoing epidemic of mass-murder public shootings (a perfect example of the ever escalating civilized psychosis occurring in our obviously crumbling society).

There exists a fine line between just wanting out of the system, or the ability to survive the collapse, and an actualized feral anarchy movement. Anarcho-primitivists do not attempt to go feral and rewild just because we want out – we do so because we see it as a vital component in the package of resistance actually necessary to bring the totality crashing down.

Rewilding is not a survival course and any machismo survivalist cultural baggage that people incite regarding it should be done away with. Survivalists see wildness as an enemy which they must overcome to survive. Rewilding requires an in-depth focus on rethinking our ways of being and our ways of perceiving ourselves as human beings on planet earth. It is the learning of LIVING skills, both the material and the psychological. Authentic rewilding requires just as much focus on healthy social skills, community building, and mental awareness as it does on the practical elements needed for the establishment of small-scale, localized, self-reliant, primitive-technology based societies. Rewilding goes beyond survival, and into deep relationship with the ecology of the planet and thereby fosters long-term resilience, deep personal character, and community self-reliance: developing a new sense of what it means to be a successful human being on planet earth based upon the actual 2 million year evolutionary legacy of ecologically adapted human lifeways and psychologies.

Practical skills are critical not because they are needed to “survive” in the here-and-now but because practicing them develops mental awareness and strength of character; these skills build a foundation for dismantling our domestication by teaching the essence of self-reliance within an ecosystem through intimately knowing that ecosystem with no technological mediation. All of this is easily romanticized on paper and we should not underestimate its complexity and challenges while nonetheless not losing sight of the fact that it is all necessary to an actualized resistance against civilization, and a future without it.

The challenges and complexity mean that what needs to be accomplished cannot be accomplished entirely by any group of us any time soon and not likely within our own lifetimes. By necessity the pathway needs to be multigenerational and anyone who embarks upon it should have as a priority passing on the spirit of rewilding to children.

Prior to global industrialism people were generally only a step or two away from a return to wildness – yet today domestication runs so deep that several steps are likely required for our return . We need to come to terms with the fact that no one can do it all and release ourselves from the politically correct guilty burdens which cause so many of us hopeless despair. Reality means certain levels of compromise with domestication, but settling at these stages certainly means failure. In this sense, rewilding can realistically be viewed as occurring across tiers. Any small step away from domestication has merit and value in the spectrum of resistance but each step should take us further and deeper into wildness and not domestication. Leftist strides for better or equal treatment from within the totality do not fall into this category. This has become highly apparent to me in my work with disenfranchised indigenous peoples whom have lost their wildness and self-sufficiency as a result of being coopted into dependence on the totality. For instance, a Suqpiaq elder recently said to me:

As long as the government is giving away free money, Medicaid, and food stamps, and other welfare checks its gonna keep going like we see it here in the villages, no matter what the prices are like. Gas has been going up. Its way over $6 a gallon but these kids and people, they can afford it and we wonder where they are getting all that money? It’s easy to figure that out. It’s good old government money. Too much handouts. So if that stops, that might take care of everything, we might go back to our own tradition.

This is just one of dozens of comments I have from interviews with indigenous elders on how dependency destroys self-sufficient land-based cultures. What these elders have witnessed constantly makes clear to me that as long as we remain dependent upon the totality for survival we will increasingly revert to collaboration with it. Moreover, because evolved dependence on technology and the need to pay for it represents for these elders a primary driver of the problem, the situation also makes clear to me that viewing technology as liberatory or neutral is a critical mistake, and not in any way a solution. This reality should cause those who claim to be anti-civilization or pro-indigenous but who are simultaneously uncritical of the contemporary obsession/addiction to digital technology to think more critically about their stances on the matter.

Today we have the historical and anthropological knowledge to lead us out of the despair created by 10,000 years of domestication. It is not the time for a ‘sit-in’, it is the time to stand up and walk into the forest, leaving behind all of our domesticated baggage. We must now ultimately become The Arrow People. A feral future represents our only pathway forward. I posit that the resilient feralist rewilders will be the last one’s standing after the massive upheavals to come, able to do so purely because of the strides made on a multigenerational level to undomesticate. I envision the formation of tight-knit feral bands (bandits!) not chained by circumstance but instead fleet-footed occupiers of forests, mountains, and brush impenetrable by the domestic – inhabitants of our own ‘grizzly maze’ in which the domesticated dare not enter^{^[66]}. Not only this, but bandits also effective at striking the infrastructure of civilization, doing irreparable damage, and readily disappearing into the shadows only to emerge to strike again and again.

…and through her the bear’s spirit of wild resistance lives on.

Sometimes, when she drives a car through town, random paranoid ego and violence obsessed people catch a glimpse of her middle finger stretched straight over the top of the steering wheel –pointed directly at them and their way of life. They have trouble understanding what they have done to deserve such a greeting from such a seemingly innocent young woman. But somehow, in their hearts, they know it. Her presence there on the road is a reminder to their souls that this way of life is failing, a reminder of its destruction and hopelessness. “I sorta see it as a mirror pointed directly back at them” she says.

In their frustration they react. Some just return the gesture and peel out. Others have tried to chase her down, screaming and yelling obscenities, flashing their guns. She just keeps driving slow and waves that finger with a smile. Stumped and confused the perpetrators thus far have all eventually just put the pedal to the metal and sped onward down their roadways to nowhere. Her middle finger will not bend. Neither will her spirit. Her wildness just grows.

She tells me she that she often gets messages from birds, from eagles, from mountain sheep, and continuing messages from bears, messages of encouragement to never give in and to continue spreading to any human who will listen the spirit of feral wildness and unrelenting resistance to civilization. Perhaps some of those people who catch a glimpse of that middle finger stuck straight will get the message and rather than attack and threaten her will become infected with her mother bear spirit, as have I.

In order to grow into wildness we must release ourselves into constant opportunity to experience all that is wild within us and around us and forgo dogmatic, elitist etiquette and politeness to the domesticators, and their reified notions of what it means to be human. I must admit that sometimes going feral seems like a hopeless cause, but no matter how hard I get my ass kicked every single hopeless, painful, and depressing moment has ended up paying off for me psychically, mentally, socially, and in strengthening my understanding of what it will actually take for humans to stop civilization. As long as we stay domesticated in mind, body, and culture we will never be free, the earth will suffer, and the takers will win. Like her, it is time to use every fragment of spirit we have to overturn this predicament.

This essay has made an attempt to say much within little space. Readers will undoubtedly be left with questions and critique. How is it even possible? What should I do? What are the steps? In BAGR #4 I will attempt to answer some of those questions by providing some detailed and specific Feral Prescriptions and Pathways for moving forward. Stay tuned.

[1] S. Wallace, The unconquered: in search of the Amazon’s last uncontacted tribes. Crown Publishers, 2011. Pg. 391

[2] L. Luddite and M. Skunkly, Fire and ice: disturbing the comfortable and comforting the disturbed while tracking our wildest dreams. Apeshit Press. 2004. Pg. 31

[3] There are biological aspects to domestication, easily discernable in domesticated species of flora and fauna. Views of any mutation in human biology resulting from our domestication are conflicted. A complex discussion/argument can be had regarding the possible long-range effects of human domestication on certain aspects of our biology. For example, does not a few thousand more years of daily life engaged in digital technology present the potential to initiate mutations in our eyes, hands, and brains? This article is not the place for such a discussion. The sole focus here is on the material and psychological aspects of our domestication.

[4] Here ‘indigenous’ is used and defined as all local once self-sufficient land based peoples and includes not only groups that todays civilized masses would consider indigenous but also the forbears of those civilized masses themselves. There was a time when all of our ancestors were land-based, self-sufficient and not dominated by division of labor, production for trade, a time when we were not domesticated.

[5] A category which rightly should include the conquest and domination of other species, in many cases leading to their extinction.

[6] E.A. Smith et al., Wealth Transmission and Inequality among Hunter-Gatherers. Current Anthropology. Volume 51, Number 1, February 2010.

[7] In BAGR issues 1 and 2 I have previously written about other aspects of what I see as the process of our domestication. This essay is a necessary further elaboration. See The commodification of wildness and its consequencesin Black and Green Review, Issue #1, Spring 2015 and Written in stone: maladaptive symbolic alienation vs. functional liberty and temporal continuity in stone tool design in Black and Green Review, Issue #2, Fall 2015. There are dozens of references on this topic. For example see P. Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene. Island Press: Washington DC, 1998., P. Shepard. The tender carnivore and the sacred game. Scribners, New York, 1973. P. Shepard,Nature and madness. University of Georgia Press, Athens, 1998, J. Zerzan, Origins: a John Zerzan reader. FC Press/Black and Green Press, Milwaukee and Greensburg. 2010, K. Tucker, For wildness and anarchy. FC Press/Black and Green Press, Milwaukee and Greensburg. 2010. For a non-technical story book narrative which aptly describes much about the process and consequences of human domestication see D. Quinn, Ishmael: an adventure of the mind and spirit. Penguin Random House, 1995. For the story of the Hohokam see Crown, P.L. and J.W. Judge, eds. Chaco and Hohokam: prehistoric regional systems in the American Southwest. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1991.

[8] C. Harman, A people’s history of the world: from the Stone Age to the new millennium. Verso, London and New York, 2008, Pg. 61.

[9] Ibid, Pg. 65. Also see To produce or not to produce? (Pg. 179-185) and Revolution and/or insurrection (Pg. 186-200) in Tucker, 2010.

[10] Harman, 2008

[11] Ibid

[12] Ibid. The emergence of Islam in 7^th century Mecca resulted from nomadic herding families who began to settle as they acquired wealth through trading. Trading seems to be a major impetus for all former nomads who have chosen to settle and organized religion an associated manipulation tool used by the elite classes for social control. For further analysis on the necessity of organized religion and priests in maintaining these arrangements see Toproduce or not to produce? (Pg. 179-185) in Tucker, 2010.

[13] Harman 2008, Pg. 144

[14] Ibid, Pg. 144

[15] As continues around the world today.

[16] Wallace, 2011, Pg. 226

[17] Ibid, Pg. 226-227. Also see C.M. Mann, 1491: New revelations of the Americas before Columbus. Vintage Books. 2006 who notes that when missionaries and anthropologists provided steel tools violence increased amongst Amazonian tribes. Prior to steel axes many forest dwelling Amazonian groups did not bother to clear forest and plants gardens because it was impractical to cut down large trees with stone tools. For these groups steel axes allowed agriculture and they became highly prized by those groups who desired to settle. Some became warlike in order to obtain these axes. Also see endnote xlvi.

[18] Wallace, 2011, Pg. 252

[19] Ibid, Pg. 226

[20] Ibid, Pg. 232

[21] Rubber tappers

[22] Wallace, 2011, Pg. 299

[23] Ibid, Pg. 337

[24] Ibid, Pg. 363

[25] K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifest der Kommunistschen Partei. London, 1848.

[26] Harman, 2008, Pg. 384

[27] Luddite and Skunkly, 2004.

[28] Some of the BAGR editors were recently accused of being “anti-action”. We take none of this lightly. Each and every detailed analysis the BAGR editors embark upon and relay has a core purpose of cultivating and maintaining effective cultures of resistance against civilization with the long term stability of resilient AP communities in mind. We ask our accusers to communicate more clearly and specifically the level of analysis and action they are embarked on (?), so that we might better understand our supposed shortcomings.

[29] This is not to deny whatsoever the fact that domestication has been forced and not voluntary for thousands of indigenous cultures. But a major problem is that once the process sets in, all of us, no matter what our backgrounds, seem to end up more than willing to surrender to it and help it along in our daily decisions.

[30] I’m not going to take space up going through the litany of examples here. Review Harman 2008 for a very clear picture of this reality. Also see To produce or not to produce (Pg. 179-185) and The failure of revolution (Pg. 201-210) in Tucker, 2010.

[31] For more on the consequences of dependency on storehouses see To produce or not to produce?, Tucker, 2010.

[32] Harman, 2008, Pg. 121

[33] Ibid, Pg. 212

[34] Ibid, Pg. 511. Reference to the global economic crisis of the 1930s. A similar situation is faced in the US today as the number of right wing militias grows, right wing illusions regarding the actual causes of impending collapse remain prolific, and right wing 2^nd Amerikkkan Revolution fantasies are leading to fascistic political candidacies with totalitarian mindsets. Take heed of the looming threat of enhanced totalitarianism in the 21^st century.

[35] See Class struggle, commodification, and modernized society (Pg. 166-178) in Tucker, 2010 for more in-depth analysis on class-struggle ideologies being barriers to actual resistance.

[36] This observation is by no means meant to overlook the role that colonialism, governments, and corporations have played in these events, nor is it meant to discount indigenous efforts at resistance. The point here is to focus on how we self-domesticate and how this softens us and thwarts effective resistance. I do not include mention of the indigenous role here lightly. My position stems from years of on-the-ground observation in some of these cultures. The main point here is that, at this stage, very few of us are exempt from the process and that activists need to dig deeper and stop blaming only the western empires ect. for the problem and start paying attention to other primary factors such as domestication and technology.

[37] See The failure of revolution (Pg. 201-219) in Tucker, 2010, which points out that many anarchists are certainly not exempt from such faith in progress and that, in fact, the historical leftist and anarchist belief in progress has been a major factor in failed revolutions of the past.

[38] I have refrained from discussing resistance in the forms of various types of direct actions here, including attacks against the infrastructure of civilization. For various reasons, this article is not meant to be particularly about those forms of resistance.

[39] For more on the leftist obsession with redistribution and failed leftist resistance as a result of reliance on production and thus the need to reject our roles as producers and begin building communities in order to mount effective resistance see To produce or not to produce (Pg. 179-185) and The failure of revolution (Pg. 201-210) in Tucker, 2010.

[40] Harman, 2008, Pg. 469-470. In the impending 21^st century crisis, most wage workers around the world will face similar circumstances, including those in the more industrialized ‘prosperous’ nations.

[41] As will be explained in more detail below, even while ‘growing’ is domestication, in specific contexts it is a valid strategy providing it does not become a baseline but that instead it is done as a tiered step to get further and further away from domestication and into wildness. Also see endnote xlvi.

[42] This is not to be mistaken as a call for isolation and simply escaping, even if that was actually possible. This is a call for all resistors to incorporate into their pathways relentless actions towards community self-reliance and rewilding and to reject dependence on the machine to the furthest extent possible.

[43] Wallace, 2011, Pg. 233

[44] Ibid, Pg. 225

[45] Mann. 2006 (Pg. 319). In 1542 when the Spaniard Carvajal travelled down the Amazon River his party reported to have encountered complex agriculturally based native settlements extending for hundreds of miles at a time and that “there could even be seen some large cities”. The was disputed by early archaeological work done in the Amazon which concluded that due to the bioregion’s poor soil it would be too difficult to produce the surplus necessary for complex culture. However, later archaeological work took notice of large tracts of terra pretta a highly fertile soil which was often filled with pottery shards and was determined to be established through anthropogenic composting methods. This discovery suggested that the Amazon basin was densely populated long before the time of Carvajal and that Amazonian agricultural practices were likely as intensive and complex as those in Mesoamerica. Cultural groups identified include the Arawak, who migrated into the southern and central Amazon basin around 2,000 years ago and subsequently pushed further into more remote areas of the basin. In some areas highly elaborate built environments, including large plazas and defensive ditches have been identified. The Arawak speaking peoples likely represent an expansion out of the Andes region, home to the earliest known complex cultures in the Americas – where domestication was being practiced around 5,000 BP. As is well known, there was a succession of imperial Andean empires, including Wari, Tiwanaku, Chimor, and Moche, all leading up to the time of the Inca, followed by Spanish conquest. So there is little doubt that, wherever they originate from, The Arrow People have indeed been successfully evading civilization for a very long time.

[46] At least some of The Arrow People are not exclusively hunter-gatherers and are known to maintain orchards. Because of the difficulty of clearing forests with stone tools, there has likely been a long tradition of permaculture style forest gardening in the Amazon forests, cultivated by semi-nomads who combine this tactic with hunting, fishing, and gathering. Mann 2006 suggests many of these Amazonian forest gardens are hundreds of years old and that various groups of people moving through the region have probably used them for subsistence temporarily before moving on. This type of small-scale agroforestry cannot yield enough food on its own to support large populations or complex cultures. A semi-nomadic hunting, fishing, gathering, forest garden mixed subsistence strategy has worked well for these groups of Arrow People as a method of both survival and evasion from civilization and technology for at least centuries. This should not be overlooked by anarcho-primitivists.

[47] Wallace, 2011, Pg. 257

[48] Ibid, Pg. 299

[49] There are certainly many who have resisted conquest by domestication, until the bitter end, and there are also those who have been much more passive in surrendering to it, even desiring it and urging it on while failing to recognize the long-term costs.

[50] E.L. Bridges, Uttermost Part of the Earth: History of the Tierra Del Fuego Indians. Overlook/Rookery, New York, 2007, Pg. 64.

[51] Ibid. Pg. 368

[52] Ibid, Pg. 379

[53] Ibid, Pg. 265. Some may think it is the destiny of all such wild and free peoples to ultimately become annihilated through such Social Darwinist forces. My view, however, is that all remaining wild and free peoples, and those of us striving to get there, should push forward and bide our time, being that, taken as a whole, socioecological evolutionary history is actually much more on the side of small-scale, self-sufficient communities than it is on the side civilized of adaptations.

[54] Meaning physical discomfort as it would be experienced and defined by domesticated people. ‘Discomfort’ is relative to cultural and material upbringing. Much of what we find uncomfortable would not be perceived as such by hunter gatherers.

[55] Wallace, 2011, Pg. 211. The ability to flee and reestablish nomadic hunting and gathering lifeways has likely been operationalized by thousands of indigenous peoples when the complex societies they were temporary members of faced collapse or when oppressive forces became overwhelming.

[56] Ibid, Pg. 423

[57] Harman, 2008, Pg. 620

[58] R. Willerslev, On the run in Siberia. University of Minnesota Press, 2012, Pg. 115.

[59] This includes addiction to digital technology, among multiple other things.

[60] Bridges (2007:359) recollected “I never heard an Ona brag of his strength or prowess”. Also see E.M. Thomas. The old way: a story of the first people. Picador, New York, 2006. The ethnographic record shows that hunter gatherers generally always respond to bragging and displays of arrogance by putting the perpetrators in-check.

[61] By ‘hard work’ I do not imply work under the guise of production and regimentation, rather this is to acknowledge the reality that wild survival sometimes requires nose-to-the-grindstone physical effort for hours on end. Also See Pg. 215 of The failure of revolution in Tucker, 2010.

[62] For example see M. Gurven and H. Kaplan. Longevity among hunter-gatherers: a cross cultural examination. Population and Development Review, 33(2) pages 321-365, June 2007. Average worldwide lifespan in the 21^stcentury is 66 years and for hunter gatherers “the data show that modal adult life span is 68-78 years and that it was not uncommon for individuals to reach these ages.” Meanwhile, in the most ‘advanced’ country in the modern civilized world, the supposed model of ‘progress’ for all, exists the highest infant mortality rate of all industrialized nations. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/29/our-infant-mortality-rate-is-a-national-embarrassment/, accessed January 26^th 2016.

[63] Most importantly, hunter gatherers certainly do provide us with concrete examples of both medical self-sufficiency and entirely accurate knowledge of the biological functions of the human body. For example Thomas (2006:250) recounted witnessing a Gwi/ bushman “dissect a springbok…naming the various parts, including its internal organs and accurately describing their functions, pointing out that the blood was moved around the body by the heart and that the lungs were for taking in breath…but he didn’t confuse the antelope body with the human body, as he understood the different functions of the stomach and the rumen.”

[64] R. Willerslev et al, Sacrifice as the ideal hunt: a cosmological explanation for the origin of reindeer domestication. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 2014, Pg. 19.

[65] Fear of uncertainty should be recognized as a “a prime mover in the development of new subsistence forms” and thus may very well have been an important factor in the development of plant and animal domestication (Willerslev et al. 2014:19)

[66] This is how the rebel squatters of the Kalalau Valley and other Hawaiian jungles have evaded compliance with the system to a large degree for decades now. However, at Kalalau, which previously never had motorized access, outside black market entities found a new market among some of the squatter population for alcohol, drugs, and other goods and began smuggling these items in at night by motorboat. The squatters with a taste for these goods fell sway to the allure of what the traders were offering and once these new market relations were established the community fell apart and the primal spirit of that forested valley was severely diminished.

A look inside Black and Green Review no 3!

2016-04-10T20:42:00.002-05:00

Black and Green Review no 3 is press-bound. More info coming very soon, but here's what we're looking at: 216 pages of top notch anti-civilization discussions, essays, and bravado.

Here's a quick run through:

The Wind Roars Ferociously: Feral Foundations and the Necessity of Wild Resistance by Four Legged Human. No other essay embodies "wild existence, passionate resistance" more than this.
The Sacred Sunrise by Ian Smith. Finding the sacredness of the wild in the beauty of everyday experiences.
Green Light of Life by Charly Aurelia. A short piece on Resurrection in the digital age.
Decadence and the Machine by John Zerzan: A look at the Decadent movement of the late 19th century and its correlations to contemporary malaise.
Hooked on a Feeling: The Loss of Community and the Rise of Addiction by Kevin Tucker. An in-depth overview and analysis of the role of community in mitigating tension and celebrating the wild and how it becomes supplanted in the domestication process leading to a rise of intoxication and how civilization is built upon addiction.
Adding to the Noise by Ian Smith. Are we merely creating content for the machine?
Some Thoughts on Civilization and Collapse by Jeriah Bowser.
Zero Chill by Cliff Hayes. A look at the AI blunder of Microsoft's Tay and what it says about the world that technology is creating.
Over the Barrel: An Interview with Richard Heinberg. An interview regarding peak oil, unconventional oil production and what $30 per barrel crude oil means about the collapse of civilization.
True Crime Case Files: Sabotage Against the Natural Gas Industry. A look at Wiebo Ludwig's war against sour gas as well as pipeline and well sabotage.
Stop Waiting: An Interview with Josh Harper. Absolutely crucial interview with long time animal liberation activist Josh Harper on surviving prison and the Green Scare.
Informants and Information: An Interview with Lauren Regan. Necessary reading on how the role of informants and snitches within the Green Scare by its most notorious attorney and activist-advocate, Lauren Regan. Exposes the role of informants, the failure of security culture and how social media is a playground for government agencies and corporate spies.
Wild Resistance, Insurgent Subsistence: an Interview with BC green anarchists. An in depth interview with green anarchists in British Columbia focusing on native pipeline resistance, its strengths over typical eco-activist campaigns, and the importance of community and wild subsistence in anti-civilization resistance.
Field Work in the End Times, Part 3: An Anthropologist's View of the Collapse. The last part of our interview with our anonymous anarcho-primitivist anthropologist friend on how collapse is playing out on the ground throughout the world and what it means to be an anthropologist during the collapse.
A review of Ted Koppel's Lights Out by Story Teller. A lengthy examination of tips that Ted Koppel may have not intended on giving.

More info and essays to be posted very soon.

Important note regarding subscriptions!

2016-03-02T13:49:00.000-06:00

Please be aware that subscriptions through paypal are a one time purchase. We have no auto-renew option and I don't have the time to mail out letters reminding people to renew. So if you got one and two, you like what you see, then you should consider subscribing again.
Number three will be out in April and it's going to be a mammoth issue. More info to come on that as we're in the process of finalizing it right now. But the project continues to grow and we have plenty more coming on the horizon.
That said, it's a costly venture and not wanting to cater to the social media trends means that promotion is a slow process. If you like what you see, please help us spread the word. Push on your favorite and/or local distros, bookshops, and tablers to pick up copies. If you want to sell or give them out yourself, it doesn't hurt to write. We will gladly push books at reduced cost to those in need. Our interests are in promoting discussion, not making money.
In reality, that means using our own cash. Any donations are greatly appreciated and reciprocated, getting donations allow us to pass on books for free or at a reduced cost. Purchasing books or subscriptions for others is also very doable.
I'm really opposed to doing further funding campaigns and I'm not one to ask for money, so I post this here as a reminder of what we do and what it takes to keep it going.
Just want to make sure that if you like the project, that you continue to get it.
To renew subscriptions, see the subscription page on the BAGR site.
If you feel inclined to donate, you can use the link below.
For wildness and anarchy,
KT

Updates! BAGR 3 coming soon, 4 deadlines, and recent interviews.

2016-03-01T15:25:00.000-06:00

Black and Green Review no 3 is in its final stages and will be out in April. Cover shot is an amazing photo of the Hadza by Sofia Yu. Will be announcing more in the coming weeks. This issue is a mammoth.

The deadline for number 4 is tentatively August 2016. For more on that, check out the 'contact and submissions' page.

On Friday March 4th, there will be a "Black and Green Review" panel at the ELAW conference in Eugene, OR. Hosted by BAGR editor, John Zerzan, with BAGR3 contributors, Ian Smith and Jeriah Bowser.

A lot of interviews recently too.
Disinfo interview with John Zerzan
It's Going Down interview with Kevin Tucker
Fifth Column interview with Kevin Tucker

BAGR1: Action and Response

2015-11-16T10:26:00.003-06:00

This is an essay from Black and Green Review no 1.

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Action and Response

There has been an uproar, stemming from the logical and important critique of activism, that fears the reemergence of a civil disobedience ethic. On the other side of action, theoretically, sits ITS. The Individualists Tending Towards the Wild (ITS) are individuals who have sent bombs to numerous universities, professors, researchers, as well as journalists and non-profits in the name of wild human nature. ITS has its cut throat communiqués stylized to provoke anger and wrought with strands of logic pulled harshly and quickly together, making arguments that seem pointless to engage with. In its communiqués ITS, though contradictory at times, aims to be another theoretical bullet (as opposed to the actual bombs) against the plague of pointless property destruction and “sentimental environmentalism”. Swallowed in is indeed civil disobedience and all other actions that would seem trivial (including non-human targeted arson as they have specifically named ELF as a sentimental “group”) in the face of a bomb.

But how real are the differences from a strategical perspective? ITS has not aimed to disable areas of the grid or take out large swaths of data (no matter who they kill the cloud holds all). Though they have taken the most serious actions in terms of prosecution and state punishment have they nevertheless been culled by the plague of sentimentalism? Surely only the sentimental would play into the cultural idea of murder being the worst and most effective crime when there may be more effective non-murder focused tactics?

The answer seems obvious enough, of course they are drawn into a sentimental and fundamentally emotional reality when confronted with the daunting question of “what to do” in the face of a civilization gripping at the final fuels, the final predators, caught in the last series of pushes before a cascading and dynamic shift that will be more horrific than any mail bomb.

Civil disobedience, in particular Earth First! has been condemned in this supposed resurrection of demonized tactics, is not evil. The discussion between these two tactics, though I don't think they are adequately described as “ends of the spectrum”, is vital. ITS has made numerous dubious claims about the legitimacy of its targets, which have included establishment journalists and Greenpeace. They refuse to acknowledge when an attack goes awry, saying that an unintended casualty does nothing to deter their struggle for ego driven wildness. ITS opens themselves up for maximum prosecution but their obsession with Ted Kaczynksi makes them zealots for the killing of humans with no desire to understand the inherent limitations of their tactic. This is not to make an argument that “they have become like that which they fight”. My point here is to engage with our biases. Because something is more extreme does not make it more effective. We seem perfectly capable of criticizing civil disobedience, and I understand how easy that critique rolls off the tongue, but other tactics become immune from engagement, even more so as we turn to an egoist and radically subjective view of the world

In this egoist turn away from our inherent sense of connectedness we see each action as existing in a bubble and the analysis of ITS among some, including the fine folks at Free Radical radio, has boiled down to ITS “destroying something that is ugly to them”. This hollow and pointless analysis leaves us in a vacuous space filled with ambiguous meandering. The subjective nature of “destroying something ugly” can only lead to an ultimately moralistic view of the world where purged and un-purged egos sit apart from each other. Always purge your ego of every perceivable reified notion or that ego will be “tainted” by something or possibly, if you are a nihilist, everything. The ugly can become anything. With no grounding, no analysis, action departs from effectiveness. The analysis of civilization is left by the wayside as we search down pathways of logic devoid of the material culture which constructs our daily behavior. The struggle is isolated and subjectiveness takes the reigns as community becomes more and more irrelevant to our analysis.

Our self is a manifestation of experience and neurosis as well as conscious and unconscious absorption of ideas, senses, and communication. That this blurry matrix of self-realization or ego-actualization is a starting point for action seems, at best, unhelpful. Destroying something ugly is meaningless in and of itself, the world driven by ego is manifested in countless ways and the end point is left purposely undefined to such a degree that no one, not even the ones taking action, have any idea what sort of world they want. The contradictions develop quickly as the hyper consciousness of our “self” spins into an idea of subjectiveness that can only be described as pointless and, ultimately, if we are to believe the premise, completely unrelatable. If it is true that our subjective experience is all that matters then we can just turn to transhumanism to fulfill the goal of realizing our true self.

Analysis matters. Infrastructure matters. For action to be effective we must simply look at implications not divinate for one truth. There is no precedent for an ego driven world yet anarchists seem to think they can open up a portal to liberation through a convoluted notion of a perceivable self that is a manifestation of a multitude of inputs both known and unknown, those in our consciousness and those not.

All actions are open to discussion. We can decide amongst ourselves which seem worthwhile and respect a large array. It isn't about drawing lines, it's about understanding where we are and where we want to go.

One could easily posit that me making such claims, or calling into question ITS tactics, is heretical and that to denounce such “productive” actions, while seemingly defending remnants of petty and “outdated” tactics, does nothing to enhance our level of praxis. All this is under the deluded supposition that one day we may just happen to stumble upon an answer of “what to do?” There is no shortage of prophets on the left and right spending countless hours trying to articulate a “rational strategy” that changes the world. The baseline lunacy of this claim is self-evident and, historically, easy to rebuke. Success stories of theory and tightly woven praxis are not in ample supply

To intellectually beat down the one asking the question, or the one with the U lock, does not create or clarify our praxis. The negation of strategical techniques once and for all is simply about purity. This goes both ways.

There is of course plenty of room for debate and questions addressing these issues, particularly around the notions of violence, property destruction, and moralistic pacifism. But discussion and critiques cannot, by a matter of necessity and actuality, exist apart from action. This is why discussion on ITS is important, at least tactically. Addressing the philosophical musings of ITS is tantamount to addressing Ted K's take on anthropology, forever frustrating and never satisfying. What this says about the psychology of those who see humans as the only legitimate targets is something worth thinking about.

However, ITS is presenting a praxis of some sort and they are forthright about their immediate goals. We can dig into their formulations, we can actually discuss the implications of it from the perspective of what is currently happening. It would be easy to construct numerous ways to knock it down, feel as though we had philosophically kicked its ass and put the final word on “murder” as a tactic. As I read Black Seed I wonder what the reaction to an article titled “Two Steps Back: the Return of Murder in Ecological Resistance” would be. Didn't FC show us the abundant failure of a few (or one) murderous earth avengers mailing bombs? But for some reason, mostly aesthetic, there is a hesitation to make those claims. I see that as a good thing, we shouldn't be making blanket claims about tactics. But that hesitation does not extend, for reasons that are, again, mostly aesthetic, to civil disobedience. This is despite the fact that Earth First! has had some, albeit quite small in the scale of global civilization, successes protecting isolated areas. Of course there are serious strategical problems with saving isolated areas but it does not follow that those areas are irrelevant or that I am not personally happy that they still exist in some less mediated state of wildness. All wild places matter. With 75% of the surface area of the earth under human control, influence or habitation it seems relevant to stop new areas from being taken over. If we want a future primitive, this may be one of the most important things happening. Wild spaces re-appear fast but healthy ecosystems take time. Overall, however, this is a large scale failure, more is destroyed daily. While I appreciate the spaces “saved” there are several missing pieces and each Earth First! campaign can be looked at individually, something Black Seed does do. They make a blanket assertion in the article but truthfully it is a critique of select campaigns.

The point here is to address the way we view debating tactics and strategy in a largely theoretical vacuum. Theory and practice may very well be tied together but words, much like a sanctioned march, are ineffective at actualizing action in the here and now. The words may be more important than the march but to say that our theory can firmly define our praxis verges on a neo-Marxist argument that the people just need a rational argument, upon the perfect articulation revolution happens. The likes of Deep Green Resistance and the Revolutionary Communist Party have already found their perfect articulation in Derrick Jensen and Bob Avakian respectively, and look how far they have come! Action is tantamount to existing as a human, an agreement I share with the ITS articulation of being human, but there is often a chain of evasiveness in how we, as anti-civilization anarchists, address action. There are some decent and grounded reasons for this, prison among them, but the evasiveness needs to be acknowledged.

A program is hardly needed, a look to DGR solidifies this point. No one needs another “above ground” political apparatus dictating ideology with a “below ground” (that no one, in any circumstance, should ever admit to knowing about) committing actions which the “above ground” may or may not take credit for. This party-action structure has shown itself historically to be not only authoritarian but ineffective. Nonetheless, we can be more instructive about action when we talk, discuss, and confront. The discussion usually shifts around issues of legality and or violence. It may be more important to clarify what we want from actions and think about our goals.

I do not think ITS (or its contemporaries, Wild Reaction, Obsidian Point to name a couple) is harboring an effective strategy. This is less to say about the moral affect of those participating and more about the obviousness of their failure. Civilization still exists, the universities still exist, the papers, the environmental groups, even nanotechnology still exists. Worse off, they are expanding. So where are we left with this “destroy what is ugly to you” strategy? In the same place as the revolutionary as we can only possibly hope, in order for total destruction of the reified world, that there is a mass rising of egos motivated to destroy, in a nihilistic fashion, all possible impediments to the ego. The self at the center of actions seems increasingly bizarre in cases of meticulous planning, particularly when that planning involves conspiracy to commit an act which may lead to significant, if not permanent, prison time.

Somewhere in the middle of this we have black bloc and other supposedly radical tactics loosely associated with the idea of “insurrection”. While helpful in many ways, and more often than not worth supporting, the idea of effectiveness hinges upon mass participation. While a move to lawlessness creates more opportunities for individuals and small groups the setting is exceedingly important and what we can say for ITS is that at least some planning is necessary to reach your short-term goal. Is that goal embedded in an overall strategy? A question worth asking, though the answer need not only be yes.

Liberating your individual person is a tiresome job and our concentration upon the fulfillment of our egos, even in their supposed and likely “union”, leads us to a strategy or pure self-determination destroying manifestations of ideas, with our very own idea that liberation will come from their destruction. The institutions will have their illusion shattered and then something will happen. The exciting nature of this seemingly unexplored space is liberating for a moment but does this radical strategy of waiting for the theoretical hammer to drop do anything?

I do believe there is an effective strategy, I know that it cannot be fully articulated for reasons that go beyond law. We can create massive disruptions and heed the destruction of wildness, both internal and external to ourselves and our families. The answers are far less complex than we would like to believe. Continuing to hype an insurrection coming any day, or supporting actions because of their ego liberating bent, as well as demonizing any of these actions including all civil disobedience is not generally helpful. We may harbor the day of insurrection and I do believe that the unexpected is possible, even likely in the face of our ultra-domesticated day to day, but ultimately the collapse of global civilization will not have its primary driver be an insurrection or mass revolt. The infrastructure and armies cannot continue if we wish for a world of wildness. This is undeniable. It may be necessary that consciousness shift but that does not mean that civilization will fall. To put it bluntly: I do not mourn the nano-tech scientist, I celebrate wild lands, and insurrection in the streets brings us each and collectively closer to touching experience, but civilization will exist as long as the material structure exists with the fuel to run it. The reality is simple, the implications are striking, but we are stuck celebrating ineffectiveness, rallying the masses, and diminishing any victories not deemed radical enough in methodology. The implications of a critique of civilization are widespread and in front of our faces. Let's not forget them.

BAGR2: Losing Ground: Syria's Climate Nomads - Evan Cestari

2015-11-16T09:33:00.000-06:00

This is an essay from Black and Green Review no 2.
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Losing Ground: Syria’s Climate Refugees
Evan Cestari

The climate wars have already begun. In the parlance of the State, climate change has proven to be a “threat multiplier” that has become typified by, among other conflicts, a war in Syria that to date has killed more than 300,000 people and displaced over 9 million.[1] With people throughout the Middle East escaping the ongoing resource wars and desperate for some semblance of stability, Europe now faces its greatest refugee influx since World War II and fears over a reactionary fascist backlash loom in the background.
All this when we’ve only just scratched the surface of climate change. With a 0.85°C increase in global average temperature over since the Industrial Revolution, the United Nations estimates that 60 million people have been forced to flee their homes.[2] Meanwhile, as global average temperature is widely expected to climb past a catastrophic 2°C limit, analysts predict that number to more than double to 150 million in the next 35 years. Ten times that figure, or nearly 10 percent of the world’s population, are at direct risk of displacement due to climate change.[3] What an increasingly probable 6°C or higher global temperature increase may bring becomes a frightening proposition.

The Syria-Climate Connection

The haunting image of a refugee Syrian toddler’s corpse washed up on a Turkish beach is now weaved into our nightmarish cultural subconscious. But sadly, such a tragedy had been long predicted in a part of the world where water was scarce, populations growing, and pressures to develop advanced agricultural economies reached new levels. At least since the 1970s, Syria, Iraq and Turkey were locked in tense standoffs, and even “undeclared wars” over access to the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates.[4] By 1999, Turkey, a NATO member and European Union candidate nation, succeeded in quelling Kurdish resistance and wasted little time in advancing a series of dams and irrigation projects that left Syrian farmers with a trickle of their former flows. Meanwhile, population growth surged in all three countries at a rate that would double the number of inhabitants in mere decades. As analyst Michael T. Klare stated in 2001, “The stage is being set for a series of recurring crises over water supplies in the Tigris-Euphrates basin.”[5]
Enter the threat multiplier, climate change. From 2006 to 2010, as moist Mediterranean winds weakened and surface temperatures spiked to new highs, an epic drought plagued the region. It was reputed to be the worst in Syria’s recorded history and at least two to three times more likely to occur due to climate change. In an area already short on water, 1.5 million starving villagers fled to overcrowded city centers. With a crippled domestic agricultural industry also came a catastrophic loss of imports as Russia, a main supplier of grain, halted all exports in 2010 after a “once in a century” heatwave triggered wildfires, destroyed crops and claimed the lives of over 50,000 Russian people. Food riots erupted throughout the Middle East, eventually cascading into the Arab Spring. The Bashar al-Assad regime reacted swiftly and violently to the desperate migrants while brutal ISIS gangs, dependent on an economy of pillaging and slavery, stepped in to fill the void. As the conflict escalated throughout both the cities and countryside, both sides didn’t hesitate to deploy chemical weapons, barrel bombs, and other indiscriminate weapons causing the casualty figure to surpass 250,000. Determined to escape what can only be called a living hell, 3 million Syrians sought refuge abroad, including 150,000 who treked to parts of Europe by the Autumn of 2015. It is currently uncertain exactly how welcoming the European nations will be. Some states, such as Germany, have pledged to take in tens of thousands; others, such as Hungary, have actively resisted the influx.
Syrian economist Samir Aita notes the historical irony of the disaster’s location: “State and government was invented in this part of the world, in ancient Mesopotamia, precisely to manage irrigation and crop growing,” said Aita, “and Assad failed in that basic task.”[6] However, considering the rising climate pressures, it is doubtful that any political leader, democratic or authoritarian, could have ever succeed. Despite attempts to obfuscate the crisis as the result of mismanagement, the truth is that it is more structurally rooted in a globalized industrial economy that is both perpetrator and victim of its own catastrophe.

Climate Migrations in Past Collapses

Like every other symptom and driver of a collapsing civilization, what is new here is the global scale rather than the crises themselves. Mass migrations due to climate change have been repeatedly pointed out as a culprit in the sequence of events leading to the collapse of complex societies. In his sweeping history of the role of climate change as a “serial killer” of civilizations, Eugene Linden convincingly portrays the Mongolian barbarian intruders that overwhelmed the Roman Empire in the 6th century as exiles of a conflict catalyzed by sudden global cooling around 536 A.D.[7] Ethnic Avar horsemen, who increasingly lost economic and political influence to their rival Turkic herders after a severe drought decimated their primary equine resources, moved west gathering other disaffected groups on the edges of the Empire. Few historians point to barbarian invasions as the sole cause for the collapse of the Roman Empire, yet combined with other factors including food shortages, disease, and population overshoot, Rome became progressively overburdened by a series of related and ruinous catastrophes.
Jared Diamond illustrates another example of such a process in his book Collapse while discussing the last stages of Greenland Norse society shortly after the start of the Little Ice Age between 1400 and 1800. While Greenland’s Western settlements experienced the worst effects and became unable to grow hay for livestock, the Gardar settlement in the East was located in a more resilient area that could still support cows, the preferred source of protein among the settlers. Diamond suggests how the final breakdown unfolded:

[A]t the end, Gardar was like an overcrowded lifeboat. When hay production was failing and the livestock had all died or been eaten at the poorer farms of Eastern Settlement, their settlers would have tried to push their way onto the best farms that still had some animals: Brattahlid, Hvalsey, Herjolfsnes, and last of all Gardar. The authority of the church officials at Gardar Cathedral, or of the landowning chief there, would have been acknowledged as long as they and the power of God were visibly protecting their parishioners and followers. But famine and associated disease would have caused a breakdown of respect for authority, much as the Greek historian Thucydides described in his terrifying account of the plague of Athens 2,000 years earlier. Starving people would have poured into Gardar, and the outnumbered chiefs and church officials could no longer prevent them from slaughtering the last cattle and sheep.[8]

In both Linden’s and Diamond’s accounts, developed states over time became overpowered by hungry people. And in both cases, climate change fueled that hunger.

Migration and the Collapse Forecast

What remains clear, even to those in power, is that the Syrian situation is a mere drop in the bucket compared to the displacement that is in store. Tesla CEO Elon Musk publicly called Europe’s refugee crisis a “small indication of what the world will be like” adding that the tens of millions of refugees today will increase exponentially. Indeed, all this was forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its very first report on climate change in 1990 which foretold “millions of people displaced by shoreline erosion, coastal flooding and severe drought.”[9] As the effects of climate change continue to be felt more directly in the First World, we become more and more likely to see conflict. John Gray wrote in his 2003 book Al Qaeda and What it Means to Be Modern that “global warming may well overtake scarcity in energy supplies as a source of geopolitical conflict.”[10] Gray foresaw major disruptions in food production leading to mass migrations that would eventually be blocked by both autocratic and democratic regimes.

Echoing such a proscription, in 2008 journalist Mark Lynas painted a dismal prognosis in his book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet:

With structural famine gripping much of the subtropics, hundreds of millions of people will have only one choice left other than death for themselves and their families: They will have to pack up their belongings and leave. The resulting population transfers could dwarf those that have historically taken place owing to wars or crop failures.

...Conflicts will inevitably erupt as these numerous climate refugees spill into already densely populated areas….Tens of millions more will flee north from Africa towards Europe, where a warm welcome is unlikely to await them; new fascist parties may make sweeping electoral gains by promising to keep the starving African hordes out. Undaunted, many of these new climate refugees will make the journey on foot, carrying what they can, with children and old people trailing behind. Many of them will die by the wayside. Uprooted, stateless, and without hope, these will be the first generation of a new type of people; climate nomads, constantly moving in search of food, their varied cultures forgotten, ancestral ties to ancient lands cut forever. But these people may not be content to remain passive victims, for they will surely know that the world they inherit is not one that they have created. The resentment felt by Muslims towards Westerners will be tame by comparison. As social collapse accelerates, new political philosophies may emerge, philosophies that seek to lay blame where it truly belongs- on the rich countries that lit the fire that has now begun to consume the world.[11]

Today, Lynas seems incorrect only in terms of exactly who would be the first to experience such climate change induced famine. Certainly, it is not difficult to find parallels between the ideology Lynas describes and the bloodthirsty quest for revenge espoused by ISIS.
Of course, the blame of the rich nations that Lynas describes only scratches the surface; anarcho-primitivism digs deeper to lay the finger on domestication and civilization itself. As Tim Garrett, professor of Atmospheric Studies at the University of Utah explains, civilization is fundamentally a “heat engine” programmed for climate change as it “consumes energy and does 'work' in the form of economic production, which then spurs it to consume more energy.”[12] The task facing anarcho-primitivists then becomes engaging the crisis and the “climate nomads” in ways that expose the underlying culprit while resisting emerging fascist and xenophobic tendencies. Simultaneously, we can lead attempts to reconnect with wild places that may be on the margins for agriculture, but which may allow a more flexible resource base through foraging. The solutions to foraging in dry environments will undoubtedly vary from area to area, but any attempts to do so can draw hope from contemporary foragers. As !Kung elder Moloreng states in James Workman’s important book Heart of Dryness: How the Last Bushmen Can Help Us Endure the Coming Age of Permanent Drought; “The old...They know how to live without the water.”[13]
Perhaps the most hopeful vision we can draw upon is that of the Greenland Inuit during the course of the Norse civilization’s decline. While not immune to the effects of climatic variations in an already marginal environment, with large fluctuations in the populations of prey species meaning sporadic community starvations, Inuit culture as a whole was able to draw upon a wider variety of food resources to adapt through the Little Ice Age that starved out the Western Settlements and eventually even the rich Gardar. Amidst social collapse the Norse were unable to overcome their ingrained contempt for Inuit culture and could therefore not seek assistance from those who most knew how to persist. It is now our duty to not repeat their mistake.

[1] http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/science/earth/study-links-syria-conflict-to-drought-caused-by-climate-change.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=2&referrer=
[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/06/refugees-global-peace-index/396122/
[3] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/nov/03/global-warming-climate-refugees
[4] Diane Raines Ward, Water Wars. New York: Riverhead Books, 2002. Pp. 192-196
[5] Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2001. P. 181.
[6] Quoted in Thomas Friedman “Without Water, Revolution.” New York Times, May 18, 2013.
[7] Eugene Linden, The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather and the Destruction of Civilizations. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006. Pp 56-67.
[8] Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking, 2006. P. 275.
[9] IPCC (1990) First Assessment Report, P. 103, para. 5.0.10.
[10] New York: New Press, 2003. P. 69.
[11] Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. Washington DC: National Geographic, pp.180-181.
[12] http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705346695/University-of-Utah-professor-Tim-Garrett-says-conservation-is-futile.html?pg=all#22v2uYzDHFZ6gdx5.01
[13] New York: Walker & Company, 2009. P. 238

BAGR2: To Speak of Wildness - Kevin Tucker

2015-10-19T10:26:00.000-05:00

This is an essay from Black and Green Review no 2.

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To Speak of Wildness

Kevin Tucker

“He says that woman speaks with nature. That she hears voices from under the earth. That wind blows in her ears and trees whisper to her. That the dead sing through her mouth and the cries of infants are clear to her. But for him this dialogue is over. He says he is not part of this world, that he was set on this world as a stranger.”[1]

- Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature

“It is not inherently in the nature of the world that it should consist of things that may or may not be appropriated by people.”[2]

- Tim Ingold

The memory is vivid.

It was nighttime and the sky had been dark for hours. My wife and I were driving on a stretch of road, cars were clustered, but it was neither busy nor desolate. There was some space between the cars ahead of us, but a good number of cars following. And then there was a sudden, unmistakable flash of white dotted with brown. It moved quickly and it was gone. Had we blinked, we could have easily missed it entirely.

Neither of us blinked. We knew immediately that what had flown feet in front of our windshield was a Great Horned Owl. There was a stillness to it, as if it all happened in slow motion. Even with a decent amount of traffic, that owl had flown in front of our car only.

And this wasn’t the only time. It wasn’t the first and it certainly wouldn’t be the last, yet this time there was no question: the owl wanted to be seen.

Owls are often solitary animals. As someone who has dedicated a fair amount of time to tracking them, I can assure you of this. There are some variations to that. Barred Owls can be downright social. We have had them swoop in over fires just to inspect.

This, however, is far from the norm.

Owls are as excellent at camouflage as they are hunting carried out with a nearly imperceptible hush to their flight. Even expert owl trackers who literally wrote the book on the subject, Patricia and Clay Sutton, observed that “it is amazing how [owls] can seem to simply not exist until the perfect angle makes one visible.” This doesn’t change the fact that despite their invisibility, owls “are all around us.”[3]

When an owl wants to be seen, it is awe-inspiring. An extremely different feeling than the joy of finding Great Horned Nestlings or catching the flash of Screech Owl eyes as light crosses thickets at night. For us, that flood of feeling is always eclipsed by one thought in particular: confirmation. The Great Horned Owl is our messenger of death.

When death comes for a relative, a friend, an acquaintance of those close to us, there can be heaviness in the air that is inexplicable otherwise. Things feel off. My wife and I have regrettably become accustomed to it over the years. We start doing a mental inventory of whom we know that might be going through some turmoil or difficulty. But when the Great Horned Owl shows themself, little doubt remains: something has happened.

The night that stood out so clearly in my memory stands out because it was the time when the rational, domesticated part of my brain broke down. When the probability of coincidence was worn too thin and the veneer cracked. There is something here. Sure enough, we found out fairly quickly that there had been an accident. A family member had been involved in a fatal collision. While he was revived on the scene, the driver was not. That happened nearly 1,000 miles away and at the same time the owl came.

This was nearly 12 years ago now. Circumstances changed, but the Great Horned has come numerous times. As grandparents passed, as relatives took their own lives or succumb to cancer or diabetes, as family and their acquaintances overdosed; every time, we get the news from this majestic winged hunter.

The silent flier speaks up.

That night opened a door of perception that I had only casually noticed before. The Great Horned was a messenger of death, but there were many others. There was a distinct air of familiarity and comfort in the Mockingbird that sat on my grandfather’s casket during his funeral and watched silently. A Rattlesnake made themselves known to indicate that a family member had died from heroin overdose, a fitting messenger for having injected too much venom. A calming White Tailed Deer that stood before me as I nervously wondered about my as-yet-unborn daughter. And there was a Flycatcher screeching outside of our home to warn us about an instigator amongst us.

These messengers were there all along; I just hadn’t put the pieces together. I still feel discomfort even speaking of them openly, but I cannot deny them. And I am only scratching at the surface here.

Seeking council from the wild isn’t a matter of being fully integrated into the world around you. These messengers don’t come because you seek them; it is not their purpose to serve you. They are simply doing what they do: responding with empathy to impulses that are more apparent to them than to us. That we are continually missing such messages is on us, our own aloof non-presence in the world.

This isn’t meant to downplay the breach of any civilized social contract that is happening when wild beings are bringing news, warnings and offering direction. Considering our sanitized sense of intellectual superiority and deadening of senses, it’s not surprising to know that something like Laurens van der Post’s account of a hunter-gatherer of the Kalahari telling him: “We Bushman have a wire here,’ he tapped his chest, ‘that brings us news’”[4] is interpreted as evidence of telepathy. Anything other than pure supernatural power is unthinkable.

That the world speaks to us shouldn’t be news. The Lakota-Sioux Lame Deer echoes the word of indigenous peoples the world over with statements like this: “You have to listen to all these creatures, listen with your mind. They have secrets to tell. Even a kind of cricket, called ptewoyake, a wingless hopper, is used to tell us where to find buffalo.”[5]

The writing is in the thickets and the cracks in the wall, yet this isn’t the headline. To get messages from wild beings is tantamount to pleading insanity in this society. But those messages are always there. What keeps us from receiving them is our own ability to perceive that they exist.

Perception and the Better Angles of our (Human) Nature

“In spite of our precious rational process and in spite of our cherished scientific objectivity, we continue to maintain an absolute and unchallengeable distinction between man and the nonhuman. It has occurred that the firmness of this insistence may be one measure of the need we may perceive for justification of our overwhelmingly antibiotic actions.”[6]

- John Livingston, The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation

And here lies the root of our problem: the process of domestication, the taming of our wild souls through constant programming, can only exist in a dead world. The world that makes our existence possible is flattened, dissected and reassembled as a sum of all parts.

Our compliance is built upon an uprooted lack of place. We are aliens in our own home. Our virtues and pride are built around artificial replacements for community, for a sense of being, for a sense of belonging, and an amplified sense of self. Domestication is the process of stunting the growth and relationships that our hunter-gatherer minds and bodies require and redirecting those impulses to productivity. Our entire sense of identity is built upon neotony, an incomplete process of personal development within the greater community against a backdrop of living remembrance and myth.[7] Psychologically speaking, we are runts.

Our senses are dulled, the instincts that we possess as children are subdued. Our world is flattened. As the anthropologist Colin Turnbull observed in comparing the stages of “the human cycle” between hunter-gatherers and Modernized consumers: “if in our childhood and adolescence we have not learned other modes of awareness, if we have not become fully integrated beings, and if we persist in dissociating reason from these other faculties, these other modes of knowing and understanding, then we remain fettered by the limitations of reason and cease to grow.”[8]

We absorb the fears of the farmer, politician, priest, and industrialist. We regurgitate them so that we can find some solace in their hollow promises. We build cities, countrysides, nuclear power plants, and open pit mines upon that foundation. We volunteer in the war against our own animality.

And all the while, these wild beings are constantly reminding, warning and telling us what our bodies and hearts know: we are connected. There is something here. A message lost as owl carcasses pile up on the sides of highways: we are born wild. And to our would-be messengers, we still are. We just aren’t recognizing it.

This is wildness. Yearning. Reaching. Crying out and carrying on.

And the blood of the messengers is on our hands.

Our perception of the world is fickle. Our subjective experiences can turn into self-sustaining feedback loops that only serve our own ideological biases. Biases crafted and sold to us by programmers, priests, and salespersons. But the world is more than that.

The world, to put it simply, exists.

Wildness exists.

It exists in its own right, comprised of billions upon billions of living beings. Physical separation may be real, but the stoic independence that the domesticated uphold is a fragment of our own fractured minds. A blinder: a limitation.

We look into a mirror of the isolated soul of a civilized being, a consumer of life, and subject the world to the distortions that we carry. We unload our burdens onto that barren soil, onto “nature”. It too must feel our loneliness, our isolation. Our wanting.

There is much to be said about the importance of critique. My short sell on anarcho-primitivism (AP) is that it is a critique with implications. And those implications are things that I don’t take lightly.

The AP critique is a short hand way of saying that civilization is killing the earth and that the domestication process is perpetually taking its toll on our lives in every sense of the word. Most importantly, the AP critique is saying that civilization, the culture of cities, doesn’t arrive out of thin air. There are roots here. To understand how we’ve gotten to this point, we must dig.

And so we dig.

The crisis we face is an old crisis, going back in some places nearly 12,000 years. That is literally to the beginning of History. In ecological time, that’s a drop in the bucket. Fortunately, as wild beings, our roots lie in ecological cycles, not linear time. Our roots go deep. Infinitely deep. We, human beings, are the slow outgrowth of millions of years of wild existence. It would be easy to regurgitate the narrative of Progress that our presence indicates a tooth-and-nail conquest of a world that is both Social Darwinian and Hobbesian in nature.

But we know this isn’t the case. Our development as a species has been relatively slow and stable. Our timeline for the antiquity of stone tools pushes back continually and is largely fogged by the inability to admire the ingenuity of our grounded ancestors and cousins. We want to believe that things have gotten better, that we have improved. Yet this isn’t true. All of the psychological and physical breakdowns of the human body and mind are an indicator that as adaptive as humans are, we can’t tolerate the domestication process and the reality it has created. This only becomes more increasingly apparent.

In short, the implication here is that we are not starting from scratch.

We are not born with the Tabula Rasa, the “clean slate”, that Plato and his predecessors had described. Philosophy, an indicator of our trained disconnect with the world around us, has always been a crucial tool of programmers and specialists alike. We are wild beings: each and every one of us. The AP critique is about understanding how changes in circumstance (specialization, surplus orientation, agriculture and pastoralism, sedentism; to name the primary culprits) created the vestiges of social power that have ultimately held our world, the wild community, hostage. Our mythos is cracking.

Human nature may historically have a lot of baggage, but from an ecological and biological perspective, it’s pretty impossible to dismiss. We are born hunter-gatherers, everything that domesticators have sought to impose is working against that basis. And they are failing as much now as they always have. “Wildness”, ecologist Paul Shepard was known to remind us, “is a genetic state.”[9]

Wildness is our genetic state.

The Nature of Language and Language of Nature

“Reification, the tendency to take the conceptual as the perceived and to treat concepts as tangible, is as basic to language as it is to ideology. Language represents the mind’s reification of its experience, that is, an analysis into parts which, as concepts, can be manipulated as if they were objects.”[10]

- John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal

Wildness is a complicated concept.

Its critics have conflated wildness with Nature, a move that obscures intentionality with conventional shorthand. From the very start, proponents of wildness have made a decisive choice in this language. What is being lost in the shuffle is that if you hold an ecological perspective, that the presence of wildness is hardly a means to supplant god/s, but indicative of the connections that we, as wild beings, share with the world. It’s an exploration of empathy, not an apathetic move to remain enthusiastic by-standers like conservationists.

The purpose isn’t to evoke wildness as an aesthetic, but as continuity, as our baseline: this is the ground that we are standing upon and it is worth defending. That the word is indefinable speaks to its complexity, it demands engagement.

So why use it?

There are many reasons not to use a word or to avoid naming altogether. Wildness, at least how I experience and conceptualize it, is sacred: that word is an indicator, not an encapsulation. That would be a good argument for leaving it even more obscure. But the problem then comes down to intentions. If I want to discuss civilization with anyone, this is my baseline, my reference point: wildness is the attainable and lurking reminder that we were not meant to live civilized lives.

Wildness, as the term is often used, transcends space and time: unlike wilderness it is not a place and unlike nature it is not external. Wildness is reflective of a continuum. Sure enough, hippies and New Agers may have tried touching on it and self-help gurus might delve into the term,[11] but there’s a degree of inescapability to that. Words travel. As recent attempts to completely own and market rewilding have highlighted, you can’t control the usage, but you can contribute to the context.

That is not a minor point. Anthropologist Hugh Brody saw it as a more practical observation in terms of the age old question as to whether language shapes the mind or mind shapes language: “a person can explain how a word is used and what it refers to, but the word’s meaning depends on knowing a web of contexts and concealed related meanings.”[12]

That the term wildness can be written off isn’t an indication of how the word itself is reification, our abstract representation, because all words are arguably reifications. The difference is in the context. Should wildness be defined and corralled into a trap of stagnancy, then the context, that flowing, organic, struggling and ever-presence that defies reflection, would be another matter altogether.

Like domestication, it’s easier to know it when you see it.

The problem is that we aren’t seeing it.

Ecologist David Abram in his landmark book on perception, The Spell of the Sensuous, echoes a trajectory of philosophy in pointing out that: “the perceptual style of any community is both reflected in, and profoundly shaped by, the common language of the community.” For our rooted hunting and gathering relatives, that language includes “the speech of birds, of wolves, and even of the wind”. Contrast that against the world of the civilized, the world we’ve all been raised in, where “we now experience language as an exclusively human property or possession”.[13]

For all of our narcissistic obsessions with technological development, we have completely disregarded that the counterpoint to the self-applied badge of Progress is our increased our dependency upon stimulation overload on one side and complete sensory depravation on the rest.[14] Building upon civilization’s foundation of hierarchy and complacency, we externalize our frustrations to (and often beyond) the point of self-destruction. I’ll allow an anthropologist to state it lightly:

“if our species really did evolve in the context of social relationships approximating those in current immediate-return societies, then our current delayed-return societies may be requiring us to behave in ways that are discordant with our natural tendencies”[15]

Put bluntly: removed of our own wild context, we are out of balance.

Nature, the bandage we apply on the externalized wild world that we are actively destroying, is our counterpoint. It is our Other.[16] “Nature” as sociologist Peter Dwyer aptly points out, “is an invention, an artifact.” [17] Not one to mince words, anthropologist Tim Ingold gets down to it: “the world can only be ‘nature’ for a being that does not belong there”.[18] As we will elaborate, this is yet another civilized disease which hunter-gatherers have not suffered:

“[Hunter-gatherers] do not see themselves as mindful subjects having to contend with an alien world of physical objects; indeed, the separation of mind and nature has no place in their thought and practice.”[19]

The obedience required by the domesticated demands a world of binary dualisms: of innately oppositional forces. In turn, it created those dichotomies. Nature versus civilization, wild versus domesticated, developed versus undeveloped: there are many iterations of an increasingly antagonized division between the individual and the world that surrounds them. We can say this is a problem of linguistics, we can use philosophy and theory to try to perfect the language and have an asterisk on every word we utter, but none of this escapes the fact that the reality domestication has created is one of binary opposition.

Civilization doesn’t just oppose nature; it created it so that it could stand against it. This is what we have conquered. This is what we have crawled out from to stand on our feet with pride.

Wildness vs Wilderness

“The idea of wilderness, both as a realm of purification outside civilization and as a special place with beneficial qualities, has strong antecedents in the High Culture of the Western world. The ideas that wilderness offers us solace, naturalness, nearness to a kind of literary, spiritual esthetic, or to unspecified metaphysical forces, escape from urban stench, access to ruminative solitude, and locus of test, trial, and special visions—all of these extend prior traditions. True, wilderness is something we can escape to, a departure into a kind of therapeutic land or sea, release from our crowded and overbuilt environment, healing to those who sense the presence of the disease of tameness. We think of wilderness as a place, a vast uninhabited home of wild things. It is also another kind of place. It is that genetic aspect of ourselves that spatially occupies every body and every cell.”[20]

- Paul Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene.

This realization about the limitations of nature can stupefy any attempt to use that history as a foundation. It can be easy and, at times, soothing to get lost in a metaphysical escape and quandary. But to look back to the observations brought up by Brody, language isn’t our problem, context is. And our context is a frightening one.

We live in an era of great disruption and unprecedented change: weather patterns have destabilized, blind desperation and a complete lack of foresight allows us to drill deeper and clear-cut mountains, economies respond, those who have the least to gain from this hyper-Modernized global economy stand to suffer the most impact of ecological consequence.

Our problem ends in catastrophe if a change in perception doesn’t turn into action on its behalf. And this is why we speak of wildness. It is not the externalized passive matter that may constitute nature.

It surges. It pulses.

It is your heart beating.

It is your lungs taking in air and your throat exhaling breath.

Wildness is beyond matter. It ties and connects. In moments of growth and destruction, beauty and carnage, wildness is the functioning whole: in a sum-of-all-parts scientific approach, it is the unsolvable equation. Reiterated through the worldview of rooted hunter-gatherer and horticultural communities, what has been called traditional ecological knowledge “goes well beyond noting the interrelatedness of specific organisms; it embraces an all-encompassing world-view of total relationship.”[21] Furthermore, this enacted knowledge “is generally holistic, and not easily subject to fragmentation. To deconstruct it and arrange its features in analytic categories, and then to discuss them cross-culturally, is to Westernize them”.[22]

Much of what can be said of wildness in defiance of nature echoes into the discussion about wilderness.

Following up on his observations about wildness as a “genetic state”, Paul Shepard contrasts wilderness as the place we have dedicated for wildness to exist. An extolling of demons, a soothing of lingering desires: the playground and museum to engage our senses through voyeurism. But the cost of entry here isn’t just complacency, it’s far more malicious. The narrative offered is a reiteration of our distancing, but the trip is courtesy of your local tour agent: our leisure is another purchase.

In Shepard’s words: “Wilderness sanctuaries presuppose our acceptance of the corporate takeover of everything else. Privatizing is celebrated as part of the ideal of the politics of the state, masked as individualism and freedom.”[23] The experience of wilderness is far from an expression of wildness. The terms may only differ by a mere two letters, but the implications couldn’t be greater.

That adventures in wilderness have become a basis for actual dispossession and displacement for those hunter-gatherers, who lacked a context for nature as a removed place, is no coincidence. Exemplifying the point, the Hadza of Tanzania were threatened with forced removal from ancestral lands by a hunting safari company based out of the United Arab Emirates.[24] A fate that resonates amongst the !Kung of Botswana and Namibia who are arrested for poaching and trespass within reserves that bear their names.[25]

These are stories that repeat and play out constantly throughout history, which is since civilized people began recording time instead of living within it. These are the footnotes to the autobiographical legacy of colonizers and conquerors. While we have been ingrained with their perceptions and narratives, they still must constantly be positioned to work against our own wild state: the hunter-gatherer inside your mind, your being.

To awaken those senses, it is helpful to understand how those rooted peoples see their world. Our world.

Perception and the Living Earth

“I was born in the forest. My forefathers came from here. We are the Wanniyala-aetto and I want to live and die here. Even if I were to be reborn as only a fly or as an ant, I would still be happy as long as I knew I would come back to live here in the forest.”[26]

- Kotabakinne (Veddah) chief, Uru Warige Tissahamy.

The abolition of nature is not an uncommon theme amongst post-modern philosophers. Their impulse is born of Modernity and interacts with the world as they have been trained to see it. They are correct in their assessments that the world is constantly in flux and that stagnancy stands in the way, but they continue on the legacy of the ungrounded, the uprooted. Their sense of entitlement to a present without bounds neglects the consequence of the world as we know it: the world where our actions impact life across the planet and beyond our generation.

They carry on without context.

To see the past, present and future as evident in all life is an ability that we should have, but that perception comes only with living in a way that is not detrimental towards the past, present and future. Rooted indigenous societies have notoriously lacked any sense of linear time. Like nature, they lack the separation necessary to create it.

In living with the hunter-gatherer Pirahã of Brazil, missionary turned agnostic Daniel Everett observed that the inability to “spread the word” was attributed in part to the fact that Pirahã “only make statements that are anchored to the moment when they are speaking, rather than to any other point in time.”[27] Their world lacked a need to speak in historic terms and, subsequently, their language lacks anything beyond a simple form of tense.

A world without presence was unthinkable.

That is the world in which wildness runs rampant. It is the place where language has never been solely attributed to humans. This is the place where the messages of animals, plants, and weather are taken at face value and understood. The ability to read the language of birds is a given. The ability to read bodies and movement are not separated from the definitiveness that we attribute only to speech. This isn’t the world beyond nature; it is the world where it is unnecessary.

The connectivity that New Agers and their ilk have sought to be proponents of is a by-product of our own limits to perception. Our glass is fogged over. Those connections are within reach, but we have to be prepared for the humility of breaking down the domesticator in our minds.

For the hunter-gatherer, no such obstructions exist until they have been forced upon them. Their perception minces no words on the matter of matter. In the words of Ilarion Merculieff, an Aluet native, speaking of the world of the hunter-gatherer;

“Theirs is a world in which the interdependence of humans, animals, plants, water, and earth – the total picture – is always immediate, always present. And the total picture – every day, every season, every year – is seen as a circle. Everything is connected: the marshlands to the beaver, the beaver dams to altered conditions, the new conditions to the moose herd, the moose herd to the marshlands. Each affects the other, and it is in this intimate knowledge of the environment (all the curves in the circle) that has allowed these people to survive for hundreds of generations.”[28]

The ability to externalize “the Other” is demolished through proximity and familiarity. Anthropologist William Laughlin observes a common theme amongst the development of children in hunter-gatherer societies: the passing on of the world of the hunter as a trade in and of itself. The wholeness of climate, growth patterns, migration movements, the knowledge of track, sign and bird language, the detailed knowledge of anatomy that comes from butchering and stalking; all of these elements are integral to life in the wild.

This is not particular to humans, but in using language to reflect upon it, Laughlin observes: “Their conversations often sound like a classroom discussion of ecology, of food chains, and trophic levels.”[29] This is not lost on the children, whose growing knowledge of animals is “prominently based upon familiarity with animal behavior and includes ways of living peacefully with animals, of maintaining a discourse with them”.[30]

Philosophy is not an adequate replacement for proximity without separation. Wildness here needs no interpretation, but is often subject to exaltation. “I suggest”, observes Mathias Guenther of the timeless rock art of the !Kung, “that animals are beguiling and interesting to man prima facie, in and of themselves, without any mediation through social structure.”[31]

The relationships in question bare more resemblance to symbiosis than the symbolic. The case of the Honey Guide bird in the Kalahari is one oft-cited example. The Honey Guide leads a more physically able being towards beehives to harvest honey. It matters not if that being is a human or a honey badger so long as the harvester sets honeycomb aside for the willing and patient guide.[32]

And yet the language of wildness here maintains a circumstantial definition. Little more is needed.

The participants in this world need no terminology and, in light of solid context, the terms may be translated into a placeless language like English, but without having relative experiences, the meaning is lost. I feel the weight of the words used by the Mbuti, whom Colin Turnbull lived amongst, as they spoke of ndura or “forestness” represented by the symbols of fire, water, air and earth, which they “cannot move, eat, or breathe without being conscious of one or all of these symbols, and all are treated with respect, consciously recognized as integral parts of the ultimate giver of life, the forest.”[33] What resonates further within me is that the wind is upheld as pepo nde ndura, or, “the breath of the forest itself.”[34] Amongst the Nayaka of southern India, the forest is similarly referred to as “the giving environment”.[35]

It is important to note that while my emphasis so far has been on animals, the same notions and connections extend to plants themselves. They too can serve both as messengers and healers. Herbalist and natural veterinarian Dr. Randy Kidd shares a story of having attempted to grow mullein in his own rock garden to no avail. He decided to ask his neighbor about the beautiful stalks of it growing in their yard. The neighbors had paid little to no attention to the sage-like green stalks and their tiny yellow flowers protruding amongst the rocks, but they happened to mention that one of the residents was currently hospitalized for asthma – a disease which mullein is known to treat.[36]

Our ability to forget that our connections extend beyond other animals has led equally to the facilitation and “the loss of plant species, the loss of health in ecosystems and our bodies, and the loss of the sense of who we ourselves, are.”[37]

The tragedy that we face arises both from our distancing from that timeless world and the ways in which our rooted hunter-gatherer minds are physically incapable of thinking on a global scale.[38]

We are trapped by circumstance.

Our escape demands a realization of the world as it has been and will be, but remains hindered by the obstructions, the sheer physicality and devastation that civilization has created. The urge is there to delve completely into the world of the hunter-gatherer, a place both rooted and unbound. It is the place where we belong and it lurks within us and struggles to stand its ground on the periphery. But ignorance is not our path there.

Empathy is.

By seeking to immerse ourselves in the wildness that surrounds us, we can’t expect the spiritual salvation offered by Gurus on weekend retreats. This place is sacred, but it is not a safe place. It is under assault. As are we. As are all living beings.

It is through connection, through grounding, that we understand what is at stake, what is lost and forgotten, buried and removed. When we begin to prod our constant process of pains inflicted upon our being, when the Self and Other fade, when we identify that source of agony: only then will we fight with passion and meaning for what is known.

Wild Existence, Passionate Resistance

“An-archic and pantheistic dancers no longer sense the artifice and its linear His-Story as All, but merely one cycle, one long night, a stormy night that left Earth wounded, but a night that ends, as all nights end, when the sun rises.”[39]

- Fredy Perlman, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan.

The term rewilding has had its share of false Gurus and snake oil salespersons attempting to derail the process and turn it into consumable fodder.[40] False hopes and rewilding “Ninja Camps”[41] aside, the rewilding process, like the anarcho-primitivist critique, carries with it an innate understanding of human nature as rooted in nomadic hunter-gatherer life. To re-wild is to acknowledge that wildness is our baseline.

Rewilding, to put it simply, is about stopping and undoing the separation created through the domestication process. As programs may try to sway towards a singular emphasis on primal skills or may tiptoe around with the voyeuristic tourism of a hiker, this underlying principle remains. As the consequences of domestication continue to unfold and assault the world we live in, the radicalism of that sentiment stands.

What separates rewilding from any other form of naturalist and ecophilosophical inquiry is that the end point is integration. The path overlaps in terms of observation, but the “leave only footprints” Nature fan has no interest in undoing the dichotomy that civilization requires. Their quest is one of indulgence, not subsistence and substance. It is akin to meditation.

To embrace the wild, we have to undergo the process of allowing wildness to help us evaluate our baggage. To remove our separation requires a transformation of thought that erodes the scientific taxonomy that seeks to understand the world through a microscope. As naturalist Jon Young points out, native knowledge and scientific knowledge are “two ways of paying supremely close attention.”[42] Native knowledge, or “science without all of the trappings”, is riddled with empathy, itself “a dangerous word in science” as it stands in complete opposition to the necessary removal implicit in the intent cloak of objectivity.[43] Young argues that his primary focuses, bird language/communication and tracking, rooted at first in observation inevitably lead those who take the time to “not just show up, but really tune in”, to build relationships and experience the community of wildness on its own terms will experience what can only be called a primal awakening.[44]

That is a spiritual awakening.

Echoed by tracking instructor Paul Rezendes, what I call the “radical humility” of having your ass handed to you by the wild in terms of thought and physicality is no easy process. As having been raised with the redirected impulses of a wild being towards consumable traits, we have much work to do. It is only “when the self becomes tired and weak and pride languishes can the awareness that is wildness step in.”[45]

The salvaging of scientifically understood connections through biology, ecology, psychology, as well as anthropology and sociology, requires a difference in perception. That the methods used to gain knowledge are flawed doesn’t change that they can still glean elements of reality; they just took the long way there. The pride of achievement domestication awards us can quickly fade in light of, as Young states, “what the robin already knows.”

The teachings of the robin are not far off from those of our hunter-gatherer relatives. They remind us of the timeless place where history is lived rather than charted. “Both humans and non-humans, in short,” Tim Ingold observes, “figure as fellow-participants in an ongoing process of remembering.”[46] Wildness is within us. Wildness surrounds us. It suffers alongside and through us, its wounds still being inflicted.

Yet it does not give up.

No amount of concrete, steel, ideology, or distancing has succeeded in its conquest. None will. Civilization measures its victories in temporal measures that within a historic timeline appear significant. Removed of linear time, removed of our forgetting, our disconnect, their significance wanes into collections of dusty books and obsolete technology.

Civilization is both a complex and volatile target. Its ideology and mechanics are built upon regurgitated narratives built upon the false belief that our future, as humans, will take us from the dreaded earth. That our history will show a gruesome conquest of animality, ours included, moving from the reflection of gods to a god status.

And yet each of us, every single one of us, is falling apart along the way.

We are testaments to the failures of domestication. Our bodies, built to withstand the extremes of climate, movement, famine and feast, succumb to diseases of the sedentary, the undernourished, the overfed, the toxins, and the meaningless wanderings. Blind to the catastrophe unfolding through us, we miss the connectivity hiding in plain sight: the wildness creeping through the cracks. Turnbull, contrasting the emptiness of civilization against the grounded life exhibited amongst the Mbuti, noted that having “never learned to employ our whole being as a tool of awareness” has kept us from “that essence of life which cannot be learned except through direct awareness, which is total, not merely rational.” Encounters with the Spirit, the wildness, in “our form of social organization merely allows it to happen as an accident, if at all, whereas the Mbuti writes it into the charter from the outset, at conception.”[47]

The structure of Mbuti life embraces the pepo nde ndura, the breath of the forest, whereas the structure of our world is built around avoiding or diverting it at all costs. If another way of being were seen as possible, the sanctity of the Freedom to Consume would fade. The burden of work would collapse.

And it is through the reconnection with the wild, through the erosion of our stagnant sense of removal, that the weaknesses of civilization become apparent. The struggle of the wild becomes real. The impact of climate instability and ecological devastation become our battle cry. The exacerbated feedback loops of drought and flood, the fires of thirsty and embattled forests ignite our animalistic urges.

When we remove the distance between the destruction of the earth and bear the scars of wildness, we will know not only what the robin has told us, but what our indigenous and lost relatives and ancestors have told us: when you know what it means to be wild, you will know what it means to fight.

To struggle.

To resist.

Around the time that I began to acknowledge the messages I had been getting from wild messengers, I began to push myself further into the woods. I tried to escape the sounds of the designed world. But valleys carried the echo of distant engines. Power lines and radio towers carried the news of conquest.

There was much to be found in those forests, but perhaps what I found the most was within myself. I had much to learn. I have much to learn. As my love and empathy grew, my rage burned deeper. The sheer simplicity of symbiosis tears at my soul. How many messages had I missed? Why, in light of my own complicity with ecocide, were the wild ones willing to recognize me, a descendent of colonizers walking on stolen land?

But it wasn’t me they were after.

Just as hunter-gatherers lack a conceptual basis for nature or wilderness, the wild lacks the framework for vengeance. The language of birds will immediately ring the alarm over our indifferent, yet aloof demeanor whether we chose to recognize that or not. Their communication has nothing to hide and they share their trepidations widely. Hunter-gatherers and anyone willing to acknowledge this can act accordingly. Strange though our behaviors might be, the birds recognize what we have been trained not to see: the wildness that we carry in our being.

We belong here.

Their songs, their alarms, these messages; all of these are an unquestioned part of their world. Of our world.

And they await our return.

I often wish that Nature was real. That vengeance was within her. That she would undo civilization. No doubt she possesses the might. But it doesn’t work that way: the sheer weight of inevitability errs on her side, yet I am left with nothing to transpose my own helplessness onto. There is no escape.

Wild beings under attack simply respond. They bite. They claw. They tear. It is instinctual and instant, not prolonged and devoid of responsibility. Our playing field is not level. Planners and programmers play chess with our fates. The potential of our own demise is the footnote to blueprints for a Future that will never come on a planet that was never meant to support it.

There is no easy salvation here. Wildness is not a retreat.

When we overcome our rational minds and embrace it in our souls, we will do as our wild relatives, human and nonhuman, have done: stand our ground.

Bite, claw, and tear.

And we will fight until the wound is no longer inflicted.

The power of the known, the meaning of context, the power of wildness lies in their ambiguity. The inability to define wildness attests to its enduring strength. It refuses constraint.

You will simply know it when you feel it.

And I can think of no greater end to aspire to.

[1] Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature. Harper and Row: New York, 1978. Pg. 1

[2] Tim Ingold, ‘Time, Memory, and Property’ in Widlok and Tadesse, Property and Equality Volume 1: Ritualisation, Sharing, Egalitarianism. Berghahn: New York, 2007. Pg 165.

[3] Patricia and Clay Sutton, How to Spot an Owl. Chapters Publishing: Shelburne, VT, 1994. Pg. 18.

[4] Laurens van der Post, The Lost World of the Kalahari. Harvest: San Diego, 1958. Pg 260.

[5] John (Fire) Lame Deer and Richard Erodes, Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions. Washington Square Press: New York, 1994. Pg. 136.

[6] John Livingston, The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation in The John A. Livingston Reader. McClelland and Stewart: Toronto, 2007. Pg 89.

[7] This is a point Paul Shepard did not miss. It is a common theme amongst his work, but most notable in Nature and Madness. Sierra Club Books: San Francisco, 1982.

[8] Colin Turnbull, The Human Cycle. Simon and Schuster: New York, 1983. Pg 129.

[9] Paul Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene. Island Press: Washington DC, 1998. Pg 138.

[10] John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (2^nd Edition). CAL Press: Columbia, MO, 1999. Pg 34.

[11] Radicals are not to be dismissed from this as well. The prime example being Derrick Jensen who tried appropriating the “language older than words” as he believed indigenous peoples have reiterated it. This, however, ends tragically after he began calling himself Tecumseh, talking about domestic animals offering their bodies to his axe, having his dogs eat feces from his source, or having sex with trees. Needless to say, his “conversations” with nature, lacking in any and all humility, bare little resemblance to those reiterated otherwise here.

[12] Hugh Brody, The Other Side of Eden. North Point Press: New York, 2000. Pg 47.

[13] David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous. Vintage: New York, 1997. Pg 91.

[14] For more on this see my essay ‘The Suffocating Void’ in Black and Green Review number 1. Black and Green Press: Ephrata, PA, 2015.

[15] Leonard Martin and Steven Shirk, “Immediate-Return Societies: What Can They Tell Us About the Self and Social Relationships in Our Society” in Wood, Tesser, and Holmes (eds), The Self and Social Relationships. Psychology Press: New York, 2008. Pg 178.

[16] For more on this subject, see my essay “Egocide” in Kevin Tucker, For Wildness and Anarchy. Black and Green Press: Greensburg, PA, 2009. Also pretty widely available online.

[17] Peter Dwyer, “The Invention of Nature” in Ellen and Fukui (eds), Redefining Nature: Ecology, Culture and Domestication. Berg: Oxford, 1996. Pg 157.

[18] Tim Ingold, “Hunting and Gathering as Ways of Perceiving the Environment” in Ellen and Fukui, 1996. Pg 117.

[19] Ibid, pg 120.

[20] Shepard, 1998. Pg 132.

[21] Catherine Fowler and Nancy Turner, “Ecological/cosmological knowledge and land management among hunter-gatherers” in Lee and Daly, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers. Cambridge UP: Cambridge, 1999. Pg 421.

[22] Ibid, 419.

[23] Shepard, 1998. Pg 138.

[24] Survival International, “Safari concession threatens Hadza tribe”, June 28, 2007. Online: http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/2467. Accessed July 8, 2015.

[25] See Rupert Isaacson, The Healing Land. Grove Press: New York, 2001.

[26] Cited in Lee and Daly, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers. Cambridge UP: Cambridge, 1999. Pg 271.

[27] Daniel Everett, Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes. Pantheon Books: New York, 2008. Pg 132.

[28] Ilarion Merculieff, “Weston Society’s Linear Systems and Aboriginal Cultures: The Need for Two-Way Exchanges for the Sake of Survival” in Burch and Ellanna, Key Issues in Hunter-Gatherer Research. Berg: Oxford, 1994. Pg 409.

[29] William Laughlin “Hunting: An Integrating Biobehavior System and Its Evolutionary Importance” in Lee and Devore (eds), Man the Hunter. Aldine De Gruyter: New York, 1968. Pg 314.

[30] Ibid, pg 305.

[31] Mathias Guenther, “Animals in Bushman Thought, Myth and Art” in Ingold, Riches, and Woodburn, Hunters and Gatherers Volume 2: Property, Power and Ideology. Berg: Oxford, 1988. Pg 202.

[32] Just one great reason to look into Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Old Way. Sarah Crichton Books: New York, 2006. Pg 167.

[33] Colin Turnbull, The Human Cycle. Simon and Schuster: New York, 1983. Pgs 50-51.

[34] Colin Turnbull, Wayward Servants. Natural History Press: New York, 1965. Pg 249.

[35] Nurit Bird-David, “The Giving Environment: Another Perspective on the Economic System of Gatherer-Hunters”. Current Anthropology, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Apr., 1990), pgs 189-196.

[36] Randy Kidd, DVM, Dr. Kidd’s Guide to Herbal Dog Care. Storey: Pownal, VT, 2000. Pg 32.

[37] Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Lost Language of Plants. Chelsea Green: White River Junction, VT, 2002. Pg 229.

[38] For more discussion of this, see “Everywhere and Nowhere” in Tucker, 2009.

[39] Fredy Perlman, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan. Detroit: Black and Red, 1983. Pg 302.

[40] See Four Legged Human, “The Commodification of Wildness and Its Consequences” in Black and Green Review no 1, spring 2015.

[41] This joke is sadly true. Brought to you by the douche bags of “ReWild University” at rewildu.com.

[42] Jon Young, What the Robin Knows. Mariner Books: Boston, 2012. Pg xxi.

[43] Ibid, Pg xxvi.

[44] Ibid, Pg xxviii. This point is really driven home in his excellent 8 CD set with the underwhelming title of Advanced Bird Language. I can’t recommend it enough to reiterate and elaborate points I’ve made throughout this essay.

[45] Paul Rezendes, The Wild Within. Berkeley Books: New York, 1999. Pg 204.

[46] Tim Ingold, ‘Time, Memory, and Property’ in Widlok and Tadesse, Property and Equality Volume 1: Ritualisation, Sharing, Egalitarianism. Berghahn: New York, 2007. Pg 166.

[47] Turnbull, 1983. Pg 77.

Here's what's headed your way.

2015-10-07T23:58:00.000-05:00

A little glimpse into what is in BAGR 2. We're stoked, hope you feel the same.

BAGR2: Coming soon.

2015-08-18T11:08:00.002-05:00

Black and Green Review no 2 is nearing its deadline, but we're still open to getting some shorter pieces for the following sections: For Discussion, Field Notes from the Primal War, and Letters. Letters especially are encouraged. If you felt inspired, angered, or anything from the content of issue one, feel free to write us.
We have some really awesome content and are deep in the editing stage. Our working deadline is August 31 and will be press bound in mid-late September.
Keep a look out here, I'm going over our numbers to see if I can reduce the cost of subscriptions before the issue goes to press, but we'll have more info coming this way. If you're looking for bulk copies, please write as well.
Single issues will be available through Oldowan Distribution.

Also, take a look on the Black and Green Press site for BAGR shirts in the making!

BAGR1: The Commodification of Wildness and its Consequences - Four Legged Human

2015-06-02T08:57:00.001-05:00

From Black and Green Review no 1.

By: Four-Legged Human

PASTORALISTS, MARKETS, ‘GREEN’ CAPITALISM, AND SPECIES EXTINCTION

We had been tracking the rhinoceros since the day before. The plan was to walk into the mopani, roughly following the course of the river so as to maintain proximity to a source of water, letting the animal tracks guide us wherever they took us. We camped in a meadow, home to an elder baobab tree, and in the morning resumed tracking our rhino. Ian is an expert tracker and every time it seemed we had lost the track in the grass, or the smudge of more recent impala or buffalo tracks, he would carefully make his readings and pick up the rhino again. Excitement ran through our minds and bodies in anticipation of our coming encounter with her.

“Don’t move” whispered Ian suddenly. We stood in silence, eyes wide, intently listening to the sounds of the veld. Satisfied we weren’t being watched, Ian motioned us over to see what had caused his abrupt attentiveness. There, perfectly clear in the red dirt, was a fresh track made by a tennis shoe. Somebody else was on the trail of our rhino. We all knew who this person was; a dangerous and hostile enemy of rhino and, equally, a great threat to us; rhino poachers, those who kill for horns to be sold in the Asian black market.

If these hostiles were to find the rhino it would surely be killed, stripped of its horns and left to rot in the hot sun of the African veld. If the poachers discovered us on their trail they would either run, or if feeling cornered, attempt to kill us as well. So our rhino tracking ended and we retreated back to the shelter of the river bank. Ian pulled out his satellite phone and made a call. “I’ve got fresh human tracks on top of fresh rhino tracks here” he reported. At dusk that night we went down to the river for water. In the distance I could see silhouettes of men with rifles slowly and quietly stalking up the river corridor towards our camp. Soon a group of men fully outfitted in military tactical assault gear were in our camp talking with Ian, getting all of the information he could provide them on the whereabouts, age, and direction of the tracks. Then this anti-poaching squad armed with assault rifles and grenades disappeared silently into the night, on the hunt for rhino poachers.

The next morning, as we moved away from the area in order to lessen our exposure to any hostilities, we heard gunfire in the distance. I still don’t know what actually happened. But I like to think that it was the poachers who got shot up and not the rhino. In fact, I like to think that us venturing across the veld at the time saved that rhino from being slaughtered for profit, at least for the time being.

Most experts agree that, in the face of a powerful poaching network administered by such entities as the Chinese and Vietnamese mafias, the remaining species of wild rhinoceros have little chance of not going extinct within the coming few decades[1]. Although the anti-poaching squads have received millions of dollars in funding from various conservation interests they can’t keep up with the poachers and many speculate that the war against rhino poaching will prove futile, that the myth of rhino horn being an effective aphrodisiac in Chinese medicine has become irrefutable dogma for elite classes of Asian males, that the market is just too powerful, that the lure of a few hundred dollars for local ex-military riflemen come poacher for the horn cartels is just too strong[2]. After all, a military trained African peasant could make $300 a year as a farmer/herder, but could pocket $3000 a year as a rhino poacher. A few successful rhino kills means the poacher becomes the wealthiest man in his village and along with that power, prestige, cars, and a smartphone.

Who could argue? We’re all just fighting for an equal piece of the pie. Occupy Wall-Streeters’ are fighting for the same things: a share of the wealth, the ability to purchase industrial food, buy plastic consumer goods, pay a monthly smartphone bill, and obtain whatever else has been deemed necessary for ‘survival’ in the 21^st century.

But the rhino poacher in Africa lays a lot more on the line than does the American leftist struggling for his piece of the pie against capitalists on Wall Street. Officially poachers are supposed to be captured and put on trial but, as it was explained to me, behind the scenes a decision has been made to initiate a shoot-to-kill policy on rhino poachers as it is now believed by officials that the only hope of saving the rhino from extinction is to instill in every poacher a fear that they will surely be killed themselves if they happen to be caught trying to poach a rhinoceros.

Which side are you on? The side of wild nature? Or the side of civilized humanity? I myself am on the side of preserving what is left of wild nature and defending what is left of human wildness at all costs[3]. And it seems at this point the logical conclusion of the agendas of both the political left and right are purely humanist and futurist. Either agenda, if seen to fruition, can only lead to the complete totalitarian domestication of the planet and the human species. And, at this stage, without totalitarian annihilation of wildness it does not seem that we can keep eight billion capitalists and wanna-be capitalists alive on this planet.

Most of those who care about the rhino will argue that we need to incentivize its protection by making it valuable as a source of local ecotourism income. This isn’t the only ‘green’ capitalism strategy proposed to save the rhino. A second market-based approach is to domesticate a population of rhinos and farm them in order to produce rhino horn for the Asian market and thus reduce pressure on wild rhinos. This may allow elite Asian men eternal access to rhino horn potion, but it is nonetheless a repeat of the same old story of domestication and commodification which creates wealth for a select few and wreaks havoc on planet earth. These are microcosms of the fundamental status quo argument that the market is the only useful tool for saving the planet.

Let’s just say that these proposed measures did save the rhino. This would mean that somewhere else a growth-oriented industrial-tech society must exist, a society which has the wealth to travel to Africa to view rhinos in the wild and/or to pay a premium price for rhino horn products. For such a society to afford to participate in this their source of wealth must come from some other high impact activity, decimating some other bioregion. To become an eco-tourist one needs to be paid, and to be paid, someone somewhere needs to be developing capital. Thus conservationists who promote these ‘green’ capitalism schemes are simply externalizing the impacts of commodification to elsewhere. Either of these measures amount to externalizations of costs and either way wild species will continue to go extinct.

The drive to exploit and destroy wildness in exchange for wealth, status, and prestige is nothing new. In fact it is inherent to the mindset of the African pastoralist cultures from which the modern poachers originate. Farmers and their pastoral trading partners have always been the enemies of wildness. The African peasants who have been recruited by the poaching cartels originate inside of cultures that in all of their known history have maintained heavy-handed regimes of domestication, expansion, and war, rooted in long standing trajectories of resource commodification for the purposes of producing a surplus of goods to be used for enhancing the power and wealth of elite tribal headman and their direct kin[4].

The Bantu pastoralist tribes were at war with wildness when they began invading southern Africa from the north three thousand years ago[5]. Lions, leopards, elephants, anything which got in the way of their expanding pastoralism, anything that might eat their cattle, were viewed as savage enemies. Viewed equally as enemies standing in the way of pastoralist progress were the San hunting cultures whom had made home in the region for at least seventy thousand years[6]. Never before encountering a domesticated animal, if a San hunter came across a cow he would very likely hunt the cow and kill it for food, with no concept that the cow was the property of the Bantu tribes. In retaliation the Bantu began hunting down the San[7]. For thousands of years prior to the current rhino crises the descendants of the modern poachers were capitalizing and expanding by domesticating, doing away violently with any wild human or beast which got in the way.

THE ROOTS OF COMMODIFICATION

No matter what form, the entire paradigm of resource commodification is connected to delayed return economics (here defined as production and utilization of a surplus for purposes of storage and trade), as opposed to immediate return economics (the utilization of resources for immediate and direct use by the producers) [8]. Delayed return economics can be viewed as a spectrum of resource utilization, with subsistence oriented food and material storage at one end, and storage oriented towards commodification and wealth accumulation at the opposite end. Activities at either end of this spectrum have the potential to evolve into an undesirable set of circumstances. The particular focus of this essay, however, is the consequences of the latter more advanced and expansive mode of delayed return activity^{^[9]}.

Utilization of a surplus for commodification is representative of a dangerous evolution for any socioecological system. Commodification is a trigger point for expanding authoritarianism, mass-ecological alienation, the reification of physical and psychological needs, and socioecological overshoot. I argue that realization of the above consequences does not necessarily require domestication or agriculture, as many anti-civilization activists have posited, but only requires commodification at relatively rudimentary levels for the potential to evolve towards socio-ecological crisis. Several factors are likely at play regarding a society’s evolution towards practicing a mode of commodification but for our discussion here I propose we look to specialization and associated division of labor as critical starting points on a liner trajectory towards the practice of commodification^{^[10]}, the premise being that when a specialist of any type becomes the only person within a group who can provide a necessary good or service, a foundation is developed for class division and incentives comes to exist for specialists to grow wealth and power.^{^[11]} Specialization in a craft has the potential to create oppressive power dynamics if common people become dependent on specialists that utilize specialization as a means to build power through commodification of the goods being produced. Here we find a strong possibility for the rise of primitive forms of accumulation, occurring at the point where a wild resource is stored and commodified for use in trade practices meant to grow the wealth of an individual. Egalitarianism fades with increasing accumulation, because in this practice some person or group always gets the upper hand.

Various arguments have been made that spiritual specialization could be one of the earliest forms of evolving hierarchy, with shamans representing the original hucksters^{^[12]}. With a realization that economic advantage could be gained from specializing in various rituals which professed a power to control the forces of nature and the spirits of the animals which the people relied upon to live, it is logical to grasp how the spiritual specialist easily could become too powerful if people came to believe that this person had real influence over the natural world. In this process the shaman learns how to turn supposed spiritual influence into a commodity that can be exchanged for both political and material capital[13]. As the shaman’s power grows he receives tidings from the producing class (the hunters and foragers). Eventually through this process the shaman commodifies the performance of healing ceremonies and rituals and thus begins amassing power and wealth.

This is not to say that manipulation and commodification is the case in every occurrence of spiritual specialization. Certainly there are cases where a gifted person practiced shamanism and healing within an egalitarian context. Likely reminiscent of the primal human spiritual praxis are cases such as the Siberian Yukaghir animists for whom “shamanic specialization is a question of degree…the shaman’s activity and experience, rather than being some kind of mysticism at the disposal of a particular religious elite, is a specialized form of what any other member of society is capable of doing^{^[14]}”. For Yukaghir hunters “concrete bodily processes of perception and experience” at the individual level are seen as primary “rather than exaggerated or enhanced control of abstract religious representations, signs, and symbols^{^[15]}”. Concomitantly, Yukaghir hunters maintain a direct and unmediated connection with the living wildness they inhabit alongside animals and spirits, “all of whom are understood to be mimetic doubles of one and other^{^[16]}.” The deep participatory spiritualties entirely rooted in place cultivated by these circumstances are atrophied by increasing specialization, the reduction of the healer to the far more pervasive role of a commodifier channeling spirituality toward imperial ambitions, a few generations of shamans evolving into a powerful family that controls access to resources and spiritual realms without ever physically domesticating them.

Based on historical knowledge of various indigenous peoples, it is likely that among the earliest humans small trades or gifting occurred for simple negotiation of peace with a neighboring band, for example. But an evolved dependency on accumulation for trade – both at the inter-band and intra-band levels, may be representative of a point where surplus production, commodification, and trade become necessary for the actual survival of a people. Here a group of people or an individual person becomes physically and/or psychologically dependent upon some type of hierarchy for survival, dependent for some type of good or service that can only be provided by a specialist, or dependent on a previously unneeded resource that can only be supplied through trade.

As this process plays out in a society, not only does it drastically shift relationships between humans and wildness, it also drastically shifts relationships among individuals within human communities. Here specialists, no longer generalist producers with direct on-the-ground full-spectrum holistic relationships with wildness, have domesticated themselves and the once free hunters have been duped into becoming dependent on elitist commodification specialists. This may well have been the beginning of our social and ecological crisis: one person in the group figures out how to specialize in a specific trade, divides the labor, tricks the common people into becoming his dependents, thereby amassing power and wealth through commodification. Endangered rhinos, 50+% biodiversity loss, the Anthropocene, the sixth great extinction - all to follow.

THE CATASTROPHIC FEEDBACK LOOP OF DELAYED RETURN DEPENDENCY

“The commodification of wildness is the beginning and the end of civilization”. Kevin Tucker

Indigenous Native America is riddled with examples of social and ecological devastation occurring as a result of resource harvest patterns shifting from subsistence orientations to trade orientations, in both the colonial and pre-colonial contexts. Not too long after the Plains Indian bison hunting cultures obtained horses through the Spaniards, countless Great Plains bison were killed for the purposes of trading their tongues and their hides for European goods[17]. Plains Indians simultaneously became dependent upon equestrian domestication and dependent upon trade for European goods, rifles becoming a particularly desired commodity. Inter- and intra-tribal conflicts increased as a result. Warfare and raids became more numerous as equestrians were able to cover vast areas in competition for resources and control of territory. Violence increased dramatically as native peoples experienced the surge of mass commodification moving west[18].

Fur trapping is another important example of the heavy impacts to traditional social relations and traditional approaches to economics initiated by commodification[19]. During the eighteenth century when Russian traders invaded the Aleutian Islands off the Alaska Peninsula, the Aleut people were forced into sea otter hunting on a massive scale for the Russian fur trade. The Aluets were expert sea otter hunters and had used sea otters for fur and food for centuries prior to the Russian arrival. Skilled as the Aleuts were, the Russians forced them into servitude in sea otter pelt production by holding their wives and children hostage, raping the women regardless, and threatening to kill them if the men did not produce enough fur[20]. As a result of their settled, delayed return orientation the Northwest Coast tribes maintained strong traditions of warfare, slave raiding, head hunting, and ritualized violence well prior to conquest. Nonetheless, involvement in the colonial fur trade seems to have greatly exacerbated such practices by these groups. According to anthropologist Joan Lovisek:

Slaves were always important to Northwest Coast cultures prior to and after contact, but the economic importance of slaves escalated after 1830, as warfare changed to opportunistic, individualistic predatory raiding. Slaves were ransomed for trade goods or sold to other groups for furs, which could then be exchanged for trade goods. For many groups…it was easier to obtain trade goods by predatory raiding than by trading, trapping, or hunting animals for furs[21].

When Euro-American authorities began to round up the remaining free Indians and confine them to reservations part of the deal for the surrender of their hunting grounds was a guarantee to an allocation of “commodities” by the US government, industrial food products to replace the wild foods that, without access to land, would no longer be available to Indians. Today “commodities” are still distributed by the BIA to Native Americans in Indian country. Indians mention commodity foods with ire and disgust, because of the debilitating health effects of these foods and because of the history of forced dependence on them for survival.

Just prior to the formation of Indian reservations, as Native American self-sufficiency was being annihilated by the effects of colonization and increasing numbers of Indians were becoming dependent upon European industrial goods, those who gave up on resistance were referred to as “loaf about the forts” by the bands who continued to hunt and gatherer for their food while simultaneously waging an armed resistance against the US military. The “loaf about the forts” were those Indians who stopped hunting and resisting and surrendered themselves as dependents to Uncle Sam and thus spent their days groveling about the Cavalry forts in search of commodity hand-outs[22]. These are but few examples of the circumstances which led to a near total dependence on world-system industrial goods now defining the economies of all of the remaining northern Native American peoples.

We know that many pre-colonial indigenous peoples fully embraced delayed return and commodification, with hierarchy, property ownership, territorial warfaring, and slavery as the corollary[23]. The maintenance of trading alliances likely made some groups more secure from outside threats and more resilient in the face of scarcity and/or ecological change, by providing a safety net to fall back on for obtaining an actually necessary good in the case of an inability to obtain that good independently. However, here we start walking on shaky ground because the differences between psychological wants and actual needs end up falling into very murky cultural grey areas. If a band of ancient hunters happened to kill a large mammal they may very well have given a portion to another band in exchange for something else, so it is not unlikely that small scales of exchange have existed among humans for hundreds of thousands of years. However, sharing or exchanging at this level does not mean that a group becomes dependent upon killing animals as a means to produce commodities to exchange for other goods necessary to their actual survival. Consequently, a people becoming dependent upon trade for survival seems to represent one critical non-grey-area shifting point from subsistence to delayed return orientations.

The process by which thousands of years of indigenous self-sufficiency comes to be annihilated by contact with industrial goods and ensuing dependence upon commodification can be clearly viewed throughout the global ethnographic record. The record makes clear that when societies become oriented to commodification a positive feedback loop is initiated which forces dependence upon increasing commodification for survival. In that process, as people became dependent upon, say a firearm for hunting, the skills to make hunting weapons from local materials are often lost and game can no longer be harvested without access to industrially manufactured firearms and ammunition. In order for such hunters to survive on the land, they have no choice but to participate in commodification in order to produce a surplus to exchange for whatever world-system goods they have become dependent upon. An important conservation mechanism exists here because when actual needs are not reified, and the production of a surplus for trade is thus not required, impacts to surrounding wildness are minimized[24]. However, when surplus production becomes the mode, a positive feedback loop is initiated where self-sufficient cultures and the wildness they depend on must ultimately be shattered in order to maintain the inputs stemming from increasing dependence upon outside goods, technology, and market economics.

As societies cross the threshold from immediate return to trade oriented delayed return a hard boundary is crossed between socio-ecological sustainability and eventual overshoot[25]. Less advanced forms of delayed return dependency ultimately evolved into agriculture. The record clearly shows that surplus production oriented farming models with a propertied class of large producers whom control surplus and rely on market models to exchange surplus for wealth accumulation tend to evolve unsustainably and eventually lead to both ecological and social overshoot. The Central American corn growing civilizations are one example among many^{^[26]}.

In the agrarian and industrial worlds, the process by which capitalists suck up small producers and turn them into dependent serfs has been ongoing throughout known history. Elites prey on the production of surplus by commoners and accumulated surplus ends up being controlled by a select class. Wealth accumulation by elites continuously drives directives for increased production because continuous production of surplus is necessary for wealth production. Social overshoot originates with the debilitating psychological effects that this trajectory inevitably has on all sectors of society. The need for excess production forces commoners to labor harder and harder, suffering immensely both emotionally and physically as a result. A lack of engagement in production by elites translates to extreme alienation from social and ecological reality leading to burgeoning sociopathic tendencies and a deepening reification of needs. Because wealth accumulation and its concomitant growth mentality eventually necessitates overshoot, gains in security and power by elite classes are temporary, through time they dig their own graves in a paranoid, hyper-domesticated obsession for control.

In summary, the long-term results are generally socially and ecologically catastrophic whenever a group of people becomes reliant on trade for their survival. Anytime a self-sufficient foraging and hunting peoples have fallen into this trap it has led down a path to hell both for them and the wildness they once thrived within. Evolved physical and psychological reliance on commodification results in a loss of traditional skills and ultimately domestication. People devolve to a trance state, extending all of their life’s mental and physical effort in an effort to fulfill reified needs. This process has occurred throughout all known civilized history and defines the point where most of us are today – ultra-domesticated and 100% dependent on commodification for our survival.

TRANSITIONERS, PERMACULTURALISTS, AND OTHER ‘GREEN’ HUCKSTERS

“It seems that we still need to learn that the problem is not who the capitalist is, the problem is that there is a capitalist at all”. Richard Wolff

The crisis which confronts us and the earth today is rooted in the commodification of wildness proliferated across nearly the entire planet, and the rewilding, locavores are not exempt. Every last remaining ecologically adapted and balanced wild and free thing on earth now risks the threat of commodification. From carbon trading schemes, to ‘green’ products, to eco-tourism, to rhino farming etc., many on the environmental left believe that commodifying wildness in one way or another is the only way forward to save us and the planet. They find it far less threatening to play the shaman’s game, rather than fight it, because they too are under its spells of dependence, its fear mongering that they shall never survive without its blessings. Not only are many of these folks in the business of commodifying physical wildness into products for sale or products for viewing/experiencing, they also work hard to commodify what’s left of human wildness. Wild experiences within the body are sold to be guided by recreational experts. Wilderness therapy, as necessary as it is, is now commodified and sold by the industrialized mental health care system, more guru huckstering, capitalizing off the ultra-domesticated masses.

The fact is that virtually all of us are entirely dependent on commodification for our survival at this point, that none of us now have the ability to be fully self-sufficient. Folks have children to raise and families to support and playing the game is somewhat unavoidable for the time being. As a result a portion of our future resilience now partly depends upon our involvement, but shall we just accept this as an inevitable facet of reality and go on designing the future pathways of our children around the tyranny of commodification?

Within the ever growing ecological/economic-reality movement people are recognizing that we must absolutely transition to a different way of living. Yet, dominant across the spectrum of these movements is a general refusal to recognize the roots of the problem. Virtually every proposed solution to the crisis involves some form of commodification. Amongst the ‘small-green-enterprise’ minded transitioners, there appears to be unquestionable support for commodification in the face of a history which informs us that the likelihood that a privileged, wealth amassing, expansionist class is bound to grow within these ‘small-green’ enterprises – a demon in our midst.

While parts of the permaculture movement are based in small-scale immediate return thinking[27], much of it seems to be riddled with delayed return aspirations. Permaculturalists continuously refer to their projects as business ideas. “Financial Permaculture” is the buzzword and it generally revolves around entrepreneurship within the context of capitalism. One of the permaculture principles is to “obtain a yield”. Just how large of a yield? Are their limits? What do you plan to do with that yield? As your business/food producing monopoly grows and wildness gets in the way, what then? At what point does the integrity of permaculture Zone 5 take precedence?

Today with some landholding ‘permaculture’ farmers turning their large yields into big organic produce business we can see where this is going – a leftist propertied class that controls food production and who could theoretically enslave into debt bondage their constituents who have no land with which to produce their own food. As the leviathan continues to crumble and the ‘transition’ occurs are the successful local growers going to relinquish positions of power and assist with bringing on food production in a collective manner? I have spent a fair amount of time within permaculture circles and based upon my experiences I see this as highly unlikely. All-in-all, we find most of the folks involved with today’s various transitionary movements idealizing the agrarian societies of the pre-industrial era simply because they existed at smaller more locally self-sufficient scales, while forgetting how alienating, feudal, and socially unsustainable these agrarian arrangements actually were. After all, these arrangements ultimately brought us to the terrifying global state of affairs we are in now.

Sadly, I now hear that even amongst so-called primitivists, rewilders, and green anarchists’ schemes are being designed to sell wildness.

In my area there is a burn-site which consistently produced an abundance of wild morel mushrooms over the years since the fire. Local foragers would make an annual pilgrimage to the spot and harvest morels for personal use and there were always plenty to go around. Then non-local commercial pickers got word of the location, ‘back-to-nature’ people from Washington and Oregon. On the 11 mile bike ride into the burn my companions and I came across several strangers of the commercial picker type on their way out carrying backpacks, obviously filled with morels harvested for the market. When we arrived at the burn and began looking around all we found were hundreds of broken hollow stems in the dirt. Because these noble back-to-the-landers are earning an independently generated income through being closer to wild nature shall I celebrate them? Absolutely not. They are nothing but Takers, not ultimately cultivating dependence on wildness for their survival but further dependence upon industrialism and the market. They will exchange their harvest for cash to buy what? The burn could easily have handled subsistence foraging by a few more small local groups. Yet as soon as the delayed return folks showed up the resources were gone. In the spirit of our prehistoric immediate return ancestors, our band of subsistence foragers would do well to drive them out if they show up again at the burn.

I hunt for much of my food and I have several friends who do the same. But it is not difficult at all to find people who originate from formerly immediate return hunting cultures, or who originally became interested in hunting for the purposes of becoming more self-sufficient and developing deeper relations with wild nature, falling into commodification traps in their hunting practices. I often hear of native hunters selling animal parts for cash, trading polar bear hides for weapons, drugs, and alcohol is one example that comes to mind, as well as the killing of walrus only to sell their ivory tusks, and the selling of bear gall bladders in the Asian black market. Recently a friend of mine killed a mountain goat and called me boasting about how he sold its hide to a taxidermist for a thousand bucks and said that with such a prosperous return he plans to now always sell his hides to taxidermists to pay for his future hunting expenses. But where does this mentality lead? To a dependence upon harvesting animals for cash and the commodification of wildness. Once this dependency is forged, first due to a love of the hunting life and the closeness to wild nature it brings, some hunters turn to guiding wealthy trophy hunters as a source of income. This creates a dependency on maintaining a certain number of kills in order to keep clients happy. Guides battle for territory and attempt to monopolize whatever resources are there. Dentists from Chicago go home with heads to put on their walls. Local subsistence hunters go another year without food to feed their families.

The above examples of modern wild resource commodification can be described as relatively small-scale when compared to other modern occurrences. It would be helpful to look at the cultural and economic evolution of commercial fishing for a view of the consequences of bumping the small-scale commodification of wildness up to larger-scale global market levels. Marine biologists assert that 90% of world’s large species ocean fishery stocks have been depleted since industrialism[28]. Commercial fisherman are generally steadfast to proclaim their spiritual connection to the seas and label their practices “sustainable”, but they need massive amounts of cash and fuel to keep their operations up and running. Today in Alaska a commercial fishing community is battling heavily against the proposed development of the world’s largest open pit gold and copper mine at the headwaters of the world’s largest remaining unaltered wild salmon river. Northern Dynasty Minerals, a Canadian company with links to the global mega-mining-corporation Rio Tinto, has developed a marketing campaign for their development of the mine centered around the fact that commercial fisherman need access to industrial metals too, if they wish to maintain the equipment necessary to stay in business at global market scales[29]. Northern Dynasty certainly has a point, one to which the commercial fisherman have no viable response. Yet, the ancestors of many of these commercial fishermen, Yup’ik Eskimo peoples, lived for thousands of years from non-industrial technology dependent salmon fishing. It seems that at this point, to mount a truly effective fight against the mine and all that it symbolizes, these fishermen need renounce industrialism outright, including industrial fishing and move back towards fishing at the subsistence level and into a wildness centered future. However, because in the last 50 years these communities have become so heavily dependent upon commodification and the industrial goods it provides in trade, their ability to shift back to a localized subsistence orientation, both physically and psychological, may likely be gone.

Are any of the above so-called conscious activists merely pursuing the commodification pathway temporarily, as a bridge to a different future? This is a question that must be asked. But let’s face it: specialization, the division of labor, and commodification ultimately brought us to this point (fossil energy and digital-tech are latecomers in the game) and without commodification there would be no industrialism as we know it today. So as commodification fails us, and fails the planet, we need to be much more critical about how we attempt to organize in the future. Unless a conscious effort is made to organize in alternative ways, we can only expect repetition of debilitating commodification feedback loops to occur in whatever new societies formulate from the ruins of this one.

IN ETERNAL DEFENSE OF WILDNESS: AN ANARCHO-PRIMITIVIST PLEDGE OF RESISTANCE AGAINST COMMODIFICATION

“They become ‘wealthier’ by enlarging the number of individuals they have reciprocal relationships with. It is a wonderfully sensible way for the individual to ensure there is always someone to look after his or her interests, and so might be seen as the primal key to unlocking our human potential”. Stephan Corry, former Survival International director, speaking about his observations of indigenous peoples gifting as opposed to hoarding.

I think the people who survive the coming bottleneck will organize in various ways. As the world-system implodes there is no doubt that some communities and entire cultures will remain embedded in trade oriented delayed return and thus remain continually at war with wildness. I think it will be very difficult for most to shed themselves of this mentality and it is not unrealistic to assume that there will always be large groups of Takers roaming about. There will inevitably be societies organized around classes of conquerors, elites, and peasants. Societies that decide do pursue large-scale sedentary agricultural production will likely attempt to organize under either of the two opposing models of socialism or capitalism. Regardless of which way these are organized, they will be based upon specialization, hierarchy, and trade surplus production and therefore they will not be socially or ecologically resilient. As an anarchist, I say it is best to stay as far away from any of these arrangements as possible.

Richard Heinberg recently alluded to the potential for serfdom by maintaining division of labor in post-collapse agricultural production:

You know, high energy returns on energy investment is what made the Industrial Revolution happen. It is what made the middle class, it is what made urbanization and all the rest…if we go all the way back to the average energy profits of agrarian times, which were maybe three or four, five to one…virtually three-quarters of the population would have to be involved in producing energy in order to produce enough surplus for the other 25% to live in towns and specialize in being bankers or mayors…stamp collectors, who knows. But that is the path we are on[30].

Is this a desirable path to be on? We need to take an honest look at where commodification takes us, how it distresses our relationships with one and other and our relationships with wildness. It is a dangerous oversight to brush off the importance of delayed return/immediate return analysis. No matter what type of strategy you plan to use to obtain the basic necessities of life; food, clothes, shelter, water, heat, it appears critical that specialization and trade oriented surplus production are done away with to the furthest extent possible.

With cognizance of the long-term effects of commodification on human societies, wildness, and the planet, the only way forward is for us to scale back and forge pathways that move towards total immediate dependence on local ecology, not as a commodity, but as our source of life and spirit. Anarcho-primitivists should stand against ‘rewilding’/transitionary/local foods movements that perceive, promote, and utilize commodification as a solution to our crisis. When designing the future, when thinking about how we might try to build community, commodification oriented thinking needs to be heavily scrutinized and not just taken as inevitable, particularly when it comes to land projects and rewilding activities. Rather than obsessing about financial security (whatever that means) we should set as a priority efforts to redefine our relationships with one and other and with the natural world. Surely commodification will continue to occur in our surrounds but we should reject it, on principle. Through this we will become the truly adaptable and resilient, the fleet footed, silent, untraceable, independent, unconquerable ones: the last defenders of a wild earth.

[1] For example see http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141020-rhinoceros-death-suni-kenya-science-world-endangered-animals/ and http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/2013/11/13/western-black-rhino-extinct/.

[2] Many of the rhino poachers are veterans of the Angolan wars and other armed conflicts.

[3] It is logical to anticipate accusations of ecofascism as a reaction to the stance I have framed here. In response, perhaps we should inform our accusers that accusing us of being ecofascists because of our total allegiance to wildness over civilized humanity simply amounts to our accusers being full-fledged Manifest Destiny anthrofascists.

[4] It is probably important to note here that many African chieftains were highly complicit middle-men in the European slave trade, selling off their own slaves won by war, and raiding less powerful groups to round up more. In the process, these elite headmen became increasingly wealthy and powerful. For a brief example see Stern, S.M. 2007. It’s time to face the whole truth about the Atlantic slave trade. George Mason University.

[5] Clark, J. D. and S. A. Brandt. 1984. From Hunters to Farmers: The Causes and Consequences of Food Production in Africa. University of California Press.

[6] Newman J.L.1995. The Peopling of Africa: A Geographic Interpretation, Yale University Press.

[7] Later, but for the same reasons, ‘bushman hunting’ became a favorite sporting pastime of the Dutch Afrikaner colonists. Much has been written on this history. A quick read on the plight of the San is National Geographic’s ‘Bushman’ overview by P. Godwin: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0102/feature6/fulltext.html. Also see: Wells, S. 2002. The journey of man: a genetic odyssey. Princeton University Press.

[8] I want to make clear that in this essay I am not referring to delayed return in the context of storing food for later direct consumption by a community. In the context of our modern sedentary predicament, as well as in the context of differing regional climatic conditions, it is my assertion that there is a distinct difference in outcomes between storing food for direct consumption at the household level and storing a surplus to be used for commerce.

[9] James Woodburn brilliantly developed the concept of immediate return/delayed return analysis and defined delayed return as a system where “people hold rights over valued assets of some sort, which either present a yield, a return for labour applied over time or, if not, are held and managed in a way which resembles and has similar social implications to delayed yields on labour”. Woodburn assigned delayed return as being responsible for the evolution of “load bearing relationships” in a society and posited that hierarchy is a natural corollary to situations where people are required to “build up, secure, protect, manage and transmit delayed yields on labour”. (Pages 32-33, Woodburn, J. 1988. African hunter gatherer social organization: is it best understood as a product of encapsulation?. In Hunters and Gatherers Volume 1: history, evolution, and social change. Eds. Ingold, T., Riches, D., and J. Woodburn. Berg Publishers.) I posit that storage is more complex than being a simple delayed return to commodification trigger and that it is possible for long term storage to occur at egalitarian levels, especially in regards to nomadic hunting and foraging in cold climates. Nomadically accessed winter caches were abundant in the indigenous arctic and sub-arctic. Small bands stored dried salmon in underground pits for the winter, caribou, seals, walrus, and whale were cached in stone pits and permafrost dug-outs, berries and plants were stored overwinter in seal skin pokes filled with seal oil. Hunters and fishers would know the location of distant caches and would revisit them for food during nomadic travels or in the spring during “starvation time”. As such, it seems logically possible to store food and not trigger commodification as a result. If we view delayed return on a sliding scale, storage for trade and wealth accumulation is the more extreme and consequential version.

[10] The evolution of symbolic thought is also an important factor always worth consideration, but for the sake of brevity it will not be considered to any depth here.

[11] There is an argument that commodification only occurred with the rise of domestication and the ownership of property. I believe in certain cases there is validity to this analysis. For my purposes here I want to explore the possibility that, when specialization is allowed to run amuck, commodification can just as easily occur within culture’s that have not developed domestication.

[12] For example, the eminent human ecologist Paul Shepard lamented that in some cases “shamanism tended to diminish individual self-reliance, the significance of the personal fast, vision, and guardian animal…” and that as shamanism evolved into more complex forms it initiated “an ego-centered shift from the old, egalitarian band existence, with its mood of accommodation to the natural world, toward the centralized magic of the shaman, with a concomitant rise in his political power”. (Shepard P. and B. Sanders. 1985. The sacred paw: the bear in nature, myth, and literature. Viking. Pg 96, 124). Such views remain controversial however, especially due to the persecution of Siberian shamans by the Soviet Union, as a result of an analysis by Soviet scholars that an original ‘primitive communism’ was destroyed by the shaman who “purposely deceived and cheated his fellow men in order to live luxuriously at their expense” (Willerslev, R. 2007. Soul hunters: hunting, animism, and personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs. University of California Press) (see also: Shamanism in Siberia. 1978. Edited by V. Dioszegi and M. Hoppal and Forsyth, J. 1992. A History of the peoples of Siberia: Russia’s North Asian colony. Cambridge University Press, and Vitebsky, P. 2005. The reindeer people: living with animals and spirits in Siberia. Mariner Books). Despite the controversy, specific cases of spiritual specialization in indigenous society should be viewed individually on their own merits. My analysis leads me to believe that the rise of spiritual specialization in hunter-gatherer societies should remain subject to scrutiny by people concerned with the foundations of both power and commodification. At the very least I see a strong case for rejecting spiritual specialization of any kind within our contemporary movements. All 21^st century new age spiritual gurus should be viewed as suspect.

[13] The supposed medical benefits of rhino horn stem back to this type of huckster spiritual specialization. Rhino horn was being sold for a premium by Asian Silk Road traders one thousand years ago and the origins of the trade are likely rooted in a more ancient practice of rhino horn commodification. Today certain practitioners of Chinese medicine continue to profit immensely from rhino horn huckstering.

[14] Willerslev. Pg. 124

[15] Ibid, Pg. 124

[16] Ibid

[17] For example see: Isenberg, A.C. 2000. The destruction of the bison. Cambridge University Press.

[18] There is also amble evidence that in certain cases access to industrial goods and markets decreased the occurrence of sometimes incessant pre-colonial Native American warfare. While these are certainly legitimate historical accounts, manifest destiny oriented political interests often use this as an argument that life becomes easier and more peaceful within civilization, because with access to industrial goods incentives for tribal raiding no longer exist. Nevertheless, almost all documented cases of post-colonial Native American warfare are related in some way to increasing involvement in commodification. For numerous accounts of both pre-colonial and post-colonial Native American warfare see: R.J. Chacon, and R.G. Mendoza. 2007. North American indigenous warfare and ritual violence. The University of Arizona Press. Also see: C.G. Calloway, 2006. One vast winter count: the Native American west before Lewis and Clark. Bison Books.

[19]. For example see: Sandoz, M. 1978. The beaver men: spearheads of empire. Bison Books.)

[20] Gross, J.J. and S. Khera. 1980. Ethnohistory of the Aleuts. Department of Anthropology University of Alaska Fairbanks.

[21] Lovisek, J.A. 2007. Aboriginal warfare on the Northwest Coast: did the potlatch replace warfare?’ Pages 59-73 in Chacon and Mendoza.

[22] Sandoz, M. 1992. Crazy Horse: the strange man of the Oglalas. Bison Books.

[23] Examples can be found in Chacon, R.J., and R.G. Mendoza. 2007 and Calloway, C.G. 2006, as well as Adams, E.W.A. 1991. Prehistoric Mesoamerica. Third Edition. University of Oklahoma Press, among many other works.

[24] There may be situations where dependence upon outside goods lessens ecological impacts at the local scale for a period of time, but as discussed above, earth is essentially a closed loop system and the requirement for goods at larger than local scales implies externalizations of impacts to other localities.

[25] The onset of overshoot occurs at varying temporal scales, spanning decades to thousands of years. Nonetheless, once the boundary is crossed socioecological collapse is inevitable.

[26] See: Adams, E.W.A. 1991.

[27] Archaeological and ethnographic research has shown it likely that various forms of immediate return oriented permaculture/food forest cultivation were practiced by some indigenous groups well before and long after the establishment of large scale domestication and agriculture. Nevertheless, peoples who practiced horticulture and did not eventually commoditize the produce in some manner are the minority. Also, I want to make clear that my critique here does not apply to all those who practice permaculture. There are certainly people involved with permaculture who understand the consequences of commodification and who are striving to enact alternative models. Part of the problem is that permaculture as a concept has grown to the point where it has been coopted by status quo leftists and environmentalists, groups of people who have a general track record of failing to acknowledge critical realities which force them to think and act outside their comfort zones.

[28] For example see: Pauly, D. et al. 2002. Towards Sustainability in World Fisheries. Pages 689-695, Nature 418.

[29] See: http://www.adn.com/article/20110813/pebble-advertising-wars-heat-sides-seek-support

[30] http://richardheinberg.com/museletter-262-the-oil-revolution-story-is-dead-wrong

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2015-04-20T22:36:00.001-05:00

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2015-04-16T23:29:00.000-05:00

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