Dealing with non-believers

First, I put off replying to this because I had no time. Then, I put it off to gather my thoughts. Then, I simply forgot about it. So, this comes a little late, but…

I just don't think it's about success or failure. I think it's more about realizing that there is more than one way to live a life. I think it's more about values and a person can carry those values anywhere they go.

In some sense, yes. But when you venture forth, saying, “I will go live primitively!” that statement carries a pretty clear fail/succeed proposition. Many people have ventured forth saying that, and none have succeeded. Sure, they expressed their values, and found things of great importance along the way, but as far as succeeding in fulfilling the claim they set out with, no, on that question they clearly failed.

I think the use of phrases like "ease and comfort" and words like "luxury" are problematic. A person has to already have a totally different value system and be very comfortable and solid in it to really feel like these words accurately describe the lifestyle we are talking about.

I could hardly disagree more. The idea that the ease, comfort and luxury of primitive living come from some branch of the enlightened mind unattached to the joys of this world–as Marshall Sahlins put it in “The Original Affluent Society,” following “a Zen road to affluence”–springs at us as the misbegotten bastard from the ill-considered and troubled marriage of primitivism and asceticism. Do you need to have a totally different value system to think that a longer life, a varied diet, feasting and partying with a regularity that only Paris Hilton could keep pace with, dressing always in furs and living entirely by actions that must of us undertake for recreation counts as luxurious? Throughout our own civilization’s history, we have called the class of people most able to emulate the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers elites, nobles and aristocrats. Lescarbot first coined the term “noble savage” in 1609 when he noticed how the Mikmaq enjoyed luxuries restricted only to the nobility in Europe. The lifestyle we talk about, as actually lived (as opposed to as portrayed in our popular imagination), involved preening over hair and clothes, eating a rich and varied diet, living longer and healthier, and yes, ultimately, a life of luxury. It doesn’t require any shift of values. It doesn’t take any “Zen” perspective to worldly goods. Quite the opposite.

In both European and Chinese civilizations, asceticism has a long history as a kind of virtue, and though we may have our issues with the trappings of Western civilization, on the deeper levels–the ones that really matter most–we still keep our domestication near and dear to our hearts, including the value of asceticism. That easily mixes with the Hobbesian image of life beyond civilization as “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.” Why else do so many primitivists and primitive skills enthusiasts talk about solitary “abo-treks,” or running off into the woods alone, despite the centrality of social connectedness in all truly wild societies? I’ve noticed a distinct vitriol in some of the response Giuli’s gotten to the Fabulous Forager, and I strongly believe that it stems in no small part from this message threatening the masculinity of a lot of big, macho primitivists. The connection of asceticism to primitivism makes primitive skills and their mechanical execution manly and hardcore, and by extension, validates their self-image in the domesticated template of the hard-bitten, rugged outdoorsman, all alone in the wilderness. The suggestion that primitive living not only doesn’t have to entail such hardship, but can actually mean a life of luxury, takes away the image of hardships that I think a lot of people use to validate themselves.

But that image comes from some deeply domesticated notions, indeed, from what we might even call the single most domesticated thing of all–the self-contained person, the Roman vir, the impenetrable penetrator. The world as a collection of such objects, each defined by their characteristics, like “hard-bitten” and “rugged.”

I have little interest in such things, myself. I want to rewild, and that means learning from wild cultures, not from domesticated misconceptions of wild cultures. Wild cultures describe themselves as living a luxurious life. It doesn’t take a shift in values to perceive it, it just takes dealing with the ways they actually live, rather than the ways we ascribe to them. Hadza men would spend whole days gambling. Some men never hunted at all, they just gambled and told stories. Haudenosaunee men preened constantly over their luxurious hair and oiled their bodies, to an extent that would likely have gotten them called “dandies” in our society. Hunter-gatherers eat rich diets; your average hunter-gatherer eats more kinds of food in a single day than even a wealthy American today will eat in his entire lifetime. They wear furs, only use fine, hand-crafted tools, and want for nothing. It doesn’t take a shift in values to appreciate the luxury in that.

When dealing with the day to day requirements of a "primitive" lifestyle those words would be highly subjective. Ease and comfort compared to what? Luxury? compared to what? Looking through the lens of a typical modern N. American lifestyle that is a pretty hard sell. The value system has got to change before that kind of language starts to look realistic.

Ease and comfort compared to the way your average Westerner lives now. Luxury compared to the same. Most of us camp, fish or hunt as a recreational activity. That constituted their only work, and only then when they felt like it. A few hours of hunting or fishing compared to 8-10 hours in a cubicle. Wearing genuine animal furs compared to button-down shirts and khakis. Feasting and partying a few times a week compared to maybe going to the movies on Saturday if you’re really well off. Having the time for everyone to dote over their hair or the way they look, compared to just the pampered rich. What part of this do you think makes a hard sell? What part of this requires a change in value system to appreciate?

All that stuff you've been told growing up is only one way. That's only one idea of success. That's only one idea of prosperity.

Sure, that remains as true in our society as in any other, but you’ve gotten a lot deeper than the level I meant to deal with. On the most superficial level, without any reference to different values or perspectives, just from the conventional view of prosperity, hunting and gathering means a life of luxury, comfort and ease.

I do think that a value difference exists, and I think most communes and other groups trying to “get away from it all” implode for a very important value differential-

privacy/anonymity vs. family/support.

Much like small towns, in our indigenous family-style living origins, people knew so much about you, they knew the color of your piss before it hit the ground. you have almost no privacy, unlike the absolute ECSTASY of anonymity we experience in the city. Imagine the Bushman famliy groups of the kalahari, so familiar with each other’s tracks, nobody could steal or have affairs without EVERYONE knowing.

privacy vs. security

All the skills in native life, involve relating to each other, making decisions together, highly social give-support/get-support type stuff.

Although no one can deny the kinesthetic and gustatory rewards (ha! big words) of native life, few people (unless homeless) will cast their lot in with family and friends, sinking or swimming together.

We all know this, too, don’t we? Otherwise we’d have a massive and noisy revival of rewilded small business and tribal organizations, making their living together.

People fear each other, in our culture, and they have the resources to make their urban hermitage work.

For now, of course.

Exactly. My claims about luxury just point out them big words of yours, which I don’t think a lot of people even know. Once you understand that, the question of how emerges, and with it, the central problem of rewilding, the one that gets lost in discussions about primitive skills and what have you: those precious skills of how to relate.

OH yes, very much like small towns! In my childhood, I grew so accustomed to having everybody know my business that I kind of miss it, in the city. I definitely don’t like anonymity. When I lived in a small town, I had an individual identity; everyone did. When people saw me they knew me by name and they knew something of my personal history. In the city, people know nothing of my personal details, and I know nothing of theirs, and this bothers me immensely. (However, small towns still contain civilized problems such as social/economic stratification, non-animist religion, and expectations of conformity. Not to mention domestic abuse, sexism, racism, and other very destructive prejudices.)

People in small towns share extremely cohesive sets of values. I imagine that tribes work in a similar way. But it seems that while small towns have prescriptive social values, hunter-gatherer tribes have permissive social values. It makes sense if you think about it: if you honor nature and permit it to exist on its own terms, then you can (actually, must) extend that permission to the people around you (after all, people belong in nature).

In tribes, these values enjoy an ongoing tradition. And that makes sense, too: it seems crazy that anyone would question any kind of teaching that ensured them group acceptance and a freedom to explore/express their inner nature. In fact I wonder if hunter-gatherers have to be “taught” permissive values at all. If those values match people’s behavior, then the values become an implicit part of culture, just like Billy was talking about – a culture that you can only understand by living it.

I’d like to say first off that I am not a naysayer about rewilding. I’m thrilled that this board exists and that all of you are here discussing the things that get discussed here. I think the general direction that ya’ll are moving is wonderful and I would like to be encouraging and say go for it, start living the life you dream of as soon as you are able, because it is a beautiful dream, not because you have no choice.

It seems that Jason and I are talking about different scenarios. To me he is describing a vision of the future where the rewilding culture has evolved closer to it’s full potential. I am thinking more of what the folks who are on this forum right now, and probably their children, are likely to experience in their lifetimes if they go for the dream.

“The idea that the ease, comfort and luxury of primitive living come from some branch of the enlightened mind unattached to the joys of this world–as Marshall Sahlins put it in “The Original Affluent Society,” following “a Zen road to affluence”–springs at us as the misbegotten bastard from the ill-considered and troubled marriage of primitivism and asceticism.”

I don’t understand what that means. I haven’t read that book. I don’t know much about Zen. If I get what your saying, my point is not to hold onto mainstream values but just deny them. I’m saying, place your value on something different.

“…it just takes dealing with the ways they actually live, rather than the ways we ascribe to them. Hadza men would spend whole days gambling. Some men never hunted at all, they just gambled and told stories. Haudenosaunee men preened constantly over their luxurious hair and oiled their bodies, to an extent that would likely have gotten them called “dandies” in our society. Hunter-gatherers eat rich diets; your average hunter-gatherer eats more kinds of food in a single day than even a wealthy American today will eat in his entire lifetime. They wear furs, only use fine, hand-crafted tools, and want for nothing. It doesn’t take a shift in values to appreciate the luxury in that…
Most of us camp, fish or hunt as a recreational activity. That constituted their only work, and only then when they felt like it. A few hours of hunting or fishing compared to 8-10 hours in a cubicle. Wearing genuine animal furs compared to button-down shirts and khakis. Feasting and partying a few times a week compared to maybe going to the movies on Saturday if you’re really well off. Having the time for everyone to dote over their hair or the way they look, compared to just the pampered rich. What part of this do you think makes a hard sell? What part of this requires a change in value system to appreciate?”

This sounds like a description of an evolved culture that could be down the road for our descendants. Not too likely for us or our own children, even with all the circumstances that we look for. Actually I think this is really a description of the best of times for those “Old growth cultures” as you call them. Not typical day to day life.

I don’t know you Jason. We’ve never met, never corresponded except for here, I’ve never even seen a picture of you, I’d walk right by you on the street. I have no idea what experience you have with the day to day reality of this kind of life. From your comments about asceticism, I get the impression you feel like this applies to me. I’ve lived outside the mainstream most of my adult life, back in the woods, without modern conveniences. But not alone, I have always had a family in this lifestyle(wife and kids) and also lived in communities of people doing the same things. We have been part of work co-operatives with our communities and done community food gathering and preserving. I’ve probably come as close to living the life as anyone on this forum, and done it for decades, not months. I guess since I’m not still doing that exactly I would fall into what you describe as a failure. However I don’t see it that way.

I could probably go through your qoute above sentence by sentence and provide another perspective, but I won’t. Your comment about hunting for a few hours a day and only when they felt like it might be the case somewhere, but not most areas of N. America, except possibly the NW coast. Your description above doesn’t talk about life outside. Most people would not think of walking, with all the possessions that their family needs, for a week or more to get to the next seasonal camp, in any kind of weather, as luxury.
Most people would not consider going outside in the night at 30 below to squat over a hole to shit as luxury.
No matter how luxurious your fur bedding is, waking up in a dwelling with the air temp. below freezing and having every liquid in your house frozen solid since you went to bed last night would not be considered luxury even by most of the people on this forum.
Regardless of how well set up you are, there are times when you have to be outside, maybe all day, maybe for several days, even if it’s pouring down rain for days at a time. I know what this is like. I worked in the woods for 14 years. I know what it’s like to spend all day, from first light until dark, on snowshoes, covering a lot of territory. That’s what running a trap line would entail, (for small game and those furs). And in that situation you might not be getting back home at night. You may be out for a couple of days. Not exactly luxurious by our contemporary standards.

I’ve done a fair bit of research and study of the Native people of this area. I also am friends with people who are holders of oral history for those people. I’ve heard many of the stories. This area was probably one of the most idyllic places on this continent. Rivers full of salmon, every kind of big game, roots, berries, medicines, and a fairly mild climate. It’s still that way to a lesser degree. I collect medicines for elders each year and some of the things that use to be more widely available are only found around here now.
The people here had a large territory. They were hunter gatherers. No cultivation of crops. Distances from one seasonal camp to another were long. And they did not always return to the same place each year. Often it might be two or three years before they returned to a camp. One year they might winter at the northern end of their territory and the next year it might be a winter camp 400 miles to the south. They walked. Every couple of years some people might make the journey to the plains to hunt buffalo. This is hundreds of miles over the Rocky mountains from the Columbia Plateau. They walked, and would return the same year because wintering on the plains would be harsh and very dangerous for them being in another people’s territory.

I’m not trying to discourage or be a naysayer. I just think that emphasizing this idea of a life of leisure, laying around telling stories and feasting while reclining on beds of furs is a fantasy that would set most people up for a rude awakening when confronted with the reality of every day life.

Given all that I have said, I think this is a beautiful dream. I think this is possible. I think it’s a desireable way to live with a family including children. If you have ever read my posts about my kids you will see that even though they have chosen different paths, they have thrived and are grateful for growing up the way they did. Partly because of the values that they grew up with and the way those values translate into their life. I believe they may come back towards this life in the future. Mainstream values do not translate so well into a rewilded life. Which is why I believe a fundamental value shift is required for a person to see a wild life as luxurious.

With all due respect to both you, Billy, and you, Jason, I suspect you’re both speaking past one another.

Consider:

Poverty entails untold misery upon the earth. Life gives nothing at all to countless millions of children that are born and condemns them at the very moment of their birth to live in physical and moral wretchedness. They are born for sorrow and suffering. Life does not hold many happy days for them. The shadow of destitution hangs over their hovels. Fierce and remorseless is their struggle to win their daily bread. Starvation stares in their eyes. From sunrise to sunset they are on their legs for the merest pittance. Soaked in sweat, they toil and moil with their stooped shoulders and shrunken bodies. They have many more mouths to feed than the scanty food they have in the larder. They go to bed hungry on many more nights than filled. They lay on their beds of mattress or on bare floor at night. They snuggle together in a blanket, if they have one and whimper.

The poor in this world of plenty are in perpetual agony. Abject poverty mercilessly grinds down the masses. They have no wherewithal to lodge and clothe and feed and are without the barest means of sustaining life. The starving mothers could not give their breasts to their children. They slave all their lives, yet know not the joys of wholesome existence. The cold wind and frost of poverty withers them. Desperate is their plight and slowly do they starve to death. Condemned to live in the midst of dirt and filth and disease, they die of starvation and they die neglected. Famine and plague kill them like flies. Harrowing are the stories of the destitute. No wonder the poor everywhere are embittered against the whole world.

I think this passage is a reasonable description of “abject poverty”, or what is typically implied by the phrase “living in squalor”. Certainly, there’s little luxury to be found here.

I think the crux of this issue is no more or less than lack of clarity on who gets to decide what constitutes “the good life”. Jason seems to be looking at hunter-gathers and saying, “Yes, they live the good life, 'cause, they say they live the good life, and all the evidence (medical examinations not least among them) point towards them living the good life”. Billy seems to be looking at our current culture/society and saying that our culture at large wouldn’t in the least little bit consider the exact same lifestyle as “living the good life”.

I think we can at least agree that hunter-gathers didn’t lead lives as described in the above quote, and that’s enough for me. I neither expect, nor want, everything served to me on a silver platter. I just want to take care of my family, and provide a good life for them.

Should anyone think I’m full of shit and oversimplifiying the disagreement, please, by all means say so…

btw, don’t think for a minute that I don’t get the incredible irony of the above quote’s source…

Yeah, You at least have summarized my point correctly.

This thread is titled Dealing with non-believers. I had a bit of a hard time with the use of “ease and comfort” and “luxury” in describing the life of wild cultures to “non-believers” and thought that given modern values it would be a hard sell.

But maybe you are correct and we are speaking past one another, I can see that.

jhereg, billy, jason-

thanks for this back and forth. I hope you enjoy writing it as much as I enjoy reading it. I know sometimes the “speaking past each other” effect can create a bit of tension, but I love seeing the different perspectives and experiences interacting. Everyone seems to have important points that need saying.

and I LOVE hearing your stories Billy.

I really do.

Whatever the overall point of this thread, if it gets more of your satisfying stories out here, I consider it mission accomplished. :slight_smile: Walking, wintertime, snowshoes, Rocky Mountains, hunting buffalo, trap lines. Awesome!

Billy, that’s fair.

Sometimes I get impatient when I see two (or more) people who essentially agree on a positive direction get tangled up in a disagreement that seems trivial to me.

I mean, given how I understand your argument and Jason’s, it’s not as if I could “choose” which one to be swayed by. I fully agree with both of you!

As to which tack is more likely to succeed in “converting” a “non-believer”… I dunno. I guess I figure they’ll either decide to look into it or they won’t…

Remnants of some bad experiences w/ evangelicals, I guess…

ps: I do agree w/ Willem; I find your stories very encouraging, and somedays I need all the encouragement I can find.

Jason seems to be looking at hunter-gathers and saying, "Yes, they live the good life, 'cause, they say they live the good life, and all the evidence (medical examinations not least among them) point towards them living the good life".

No, I say, “They live the good life even according to our standards.” I really have to stress this, especially in the context of “dealing with non-believers” (as much as I may not like that formulation), because the idea that hunting and gathering involves toil and deprivation provides one of the biggest stumbling blocks, but it hasn’t the faintest thing to do with reality–just our preconceptions.

It seems that Jason and I are talking about different scenarios. To me he is describing a vision of the future where the rewilding culture has evolved closer to it's full potential. I am thinking more of what the folks who are on this forum right now, and probably their children, are likely to experience in their lifetimes if they go for the dream.

No, I have in mind my own life, the lives that people typing on this board can look forward to, not a distant ideal. They’ll have something even better, but even in the immediate term, hunting and gathering offers such an immediate advantage over the way we live now that we can only honestly call it luxurious. If not, why have children run off to join the circus for so long? Why did European settlers “go to Croatoan” as soon as possible? Why, if it holds no immediate lure of an easy, luxurious life, do so many people go native? “There must be in the Indians’ social bond something singularly captivating,” J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur wrote in his Letters from an American Farmer, “and far superior to be boasted of among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans!” These things don’t happen for the promise that their grandchildren might have a better life, but because they could recognize a better life laid out before them, right then and there.

I don't understand what that means. I haven't read that book. I don't know much about Zen. If I get what your saying, my point is not to hold onto mainstream values but just deny them. I'm saying, place your value on something different.

The Original Affluent Society,” an essay by Marshall Sahlins, really revolutionized the old view of hunter-gatherers and set off the modern investigation to which primitivism, and rewilding, owe so much. Well worth a read.

But in it, he makes the argument that hunter-gatherers had a life of plenty because of their, as a later book would use as a title, “limited wants, unlimited means.”

here are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be "easily satisfied" either by producing much or desiring little The familiar conception, the Galbraithean way- based on the concept of market economies- states that man's wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although they can be improved. Thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that "urgent goods" become plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to affluence, which states that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty - with a low standard of living. That, I think, describes the hunters. And it helps explain some of their more curious economic behaviour: their "prodigality" for example- the inclination to consume at once all stocks on hand, as if they had it made. Free from market obsessions of scarcity, hunters' economic propensities may be more consistently predicated on abundance than our own.

In other words, we can call hunter-gatherers affluent by changing what we mean by affluence; they don’t have much, but they also don’t want much. A shift in values, as you seem to say.

I don’t mean to judge you by this, but I’ve observed that most of us make unwitting slaves to philosophers. We live according to their ideas, repeating them as unquestionable truth, and as often as not do not even know it. How many people live their lives according to the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes? And how few of them have ever read Leviathan? I’d wager most would not even recognize Hobbes’ name. These ideas float in the cultural ether, and we breathe them in and take them on, usually without probing very deeply into their premises, or how well they hold up. I don’t mean to say that you personally espouse any kind of ascetic philosophy, but what you’ve said very clearly shows a strong ascetic influence. And I wouldn’t ascribe it to just you, either, because you’ve simply elucidated an extremely common point of view about hunter-gatherer life, one that really constitutes the “received wisdom” on the matter.

This sounds like a description of an evolved culture that could be down the road for our descendants. Not too likely for us or our own children, even with all the circumstances that we look for. Actually I think this is really a description of the best of times for those "Old growth cultures" as you call them. Not typical day to day life.

For most hunter-gatherers still alive today, that does describe day-to-day life, at least, as much of it as anthropologists have gotten to observe. I can understand that anthropologists misinterpret a lot of what they observe, but when you watch the man spend most of the day playing lukucuko, it makes it hard to suggest that he somehow hid away eight hours or more of daily work.

I’ve begun rewilding to the Toby River, a.k.a., the Clarion River, marking the south-eastern boundary of the Allegheny National Forest. We have a massively overpopulated deer herd, as many as 10 per square mile. We have enough so that drunk hunters can typically get a buck a year. Our forest faces a lot of problems (the oversized deer herd prominent among them), but I can’t buy the argument that with that kind of abundance, that hunger or want would count among our concerns. We have enough to spend the rest of our lives on thick venison steaks. Yes, my children will need to become better hunters than I; fortunately, they’ll get to hunt from their youth, and as we need better skills from the deer herd returning to a normal size, we’ll also have better skills from spending more time hunting!

I guess since I'm not still doing that exactly I would fall into what you describe as a failure. However I don't see it that way.

No, I wouldn’t call you a failure. Did you start off by charging off into the woods saying, “I will live as a hunter-gatherer!” If so, well, I suppose you did fail at that–you haven’t lived as a hunter-gatherer, it sounds like. But does that make you a failure? Obviously not. It sounds to me like you’ve found something immensely rich and rewarding in your life, and frankly, I would love to live a life more like yours than mine. But if you get into an argument about how feasible hunting and gathering seems, well, the personal rewards don’t mean nearly as much as whether or not you’ve succeeded hunting and gathering, eh?

I would like to point out, though, that the only thing harder than living inside civilization comes when you live next to it. Lots of hunter-gatherers seek out the civilized life after civil wars, deforestation and poison in the air and waters makes their traditional way of life impossible. Ran Prieur writes about the difficulties of homesteading often, but then calls it “primitive.” I don’t see much about homesteading that I’d call primitive, though. Homesteading, agrarianism, co-ops and small farms make for just about the hardest way of life humans have ever known. If you have that in mind, then absolutely, everything you said about needing to shift your values to see any kind of ease or luxury in that would apply. But I don’t mean that lifestyle at all. I mean hunting and gathering, which has always made for a very luxurious life, even in the middle of the world’s most inhospitable deserts. One of the reasons the bushmen have survived lies in the Kalahari itself–water appears so infrequently there that almost no one else can survive there. Only the bushmen have the relationship with water to know where they can find her there.

Your comment about hunting for a few hours a day and only when they felt like it might be the case somewhere, but not most areas of N. America, except possibly the NW coast.

That comes from the bushmen. Yes, they rely on an intimate knowledge of their home, but then, I can’t think of too many places in North America with as little life as the Kalahari. As I mentioned before, we have a forest so thick with deer that a drunk can sit on a folding chair, shooting at vague shadows and kill one. The ANF has many, many problems; I would not call it a healthy forest at all. Yet I still cannot imagine under what circumstances a hunter-gatherer there could go hungry.

Your description above doesn't talk about life outside.

How not?

Most people would not think of walking, with all the possessions that their family needs, for a week or more to get to the next seasonal camp, in any kind of weather, as luxury. Most people would not consider going outside in the night at 30 below to squat over a hole to shit as luxury.

Granted, though all your possessions seems a tad disingenuous: that provides precisely the impetus for why hunter-gatherers have so few possessions. Putting it like that makes it sound like we have to push around a U-Haul with all the possessions we keep now.

Though he, too, invokes the idea of “zen” affluence, I very much appreciate Jeff Vail’s take on “Vernacular Zen.” Even in our own society, with the values we have now, we appreciate that the experiential means more than the material. Ask people what they fantasize about, and they’ll start listing experiences, not things. Sure, we pursue things as the way to get those experiences, but even we value the experience more than the thing.

But we have no shortage of people who pack up all their possessions, hoist them on their back, and go walking day in and day out, just for the fun of it, and call it a vacation. We call it backpacking! And your motivated modern backpacker will go on a few trips a year, about as often as a hunter-gatherer band moves between camps!

No matter how luxurious your fur bedding is, waking up in a dwelling with the air temp. below freezing and having every liquid in your house frozen solid since you went to bed last night would not be considered luxury even by most of the people on this forum.

No, it wouldn’t, but most primitive shelters do a heck of a lot better job keeping the heat than any of our modern buildings. Wigwams and longhouses don’t have that problem. Even an igloo keeps you pretty warm comparatively, though admittedly, the Arctic makes almost everything difficult. I’d file that problem under our common misconceptions, actually. You really shouldn’t face that problem very often as a hunter-gatherer. In fact, living in this old, drafty apartment, I find myself often yearning for the warmth and comfort of a good wigwam.

Regardless of how well set up you are, there are times when you have to be outside, maybe all day, maybe for several days, even if it's pouring down rain for days at a time.

Why? I admit I’ve never lived as a hunter-gatherer. I’ve heard of some hunter-gatherers who do go on long hunts. But I know others who never go farther from camp than they can return in the same day. Why would you have to do that? Plenty of hunter-gatherers don’t, so I don’t know what I’ve missed here.

They walked, and would return the same year because wintering on the plains would be harsh and very dangerous for them being in another people's territory.

Yes, I would say that walking comprises the main hunter-gatherer activity. Both hunting and gathering involve, more than anything else, walking. And of course, you have the migrations from one camp to another. Certainly, walking wouldn’t count as a life of luxury. But even that marks a big step up in ease from even the cushiest desk job. Besides…

I just think that emphasizing this idea of a life of leisure, laying around telling stories and feasting while reclining on beds of furs is a fantasy that would set most people up for a rude awakening when confronted with the reality of every day life.

Think about it. Maybe you go out once a week to hunt. Or not. Maybe you go out for a few hours each day to collect wild plants. Or not. Your choice. A few times a year, you go backpacking for a few days to reach your next camp. Compare this to hours of laying around telling stories and feasting while reclining on beds of furs every night. Which element makes up the dominant feature of this way of life? It seems disingenuous to me to call the daily reality of hunter-gatherer life a “fantasy” based on that.

With all due respect to both you, Billy, and you, Jason, I suspect you're both speaking past one another.

Yes, but you always suspect that. :slight_smile: And, having such keen perception, you often get it right. But I don’t think you’ve gotten it on this one. It sounds to me like the connection between primitive life and asceticism remains too strong for a lot of people here to even really understand what I’ve said here. I can certainly understand that, but I maintain that we really must break down that connection.

This thread is titled Dealing with non-believers. I had a bit of a hard time with the use of "ease and comfort" and "luxury" in describing the life of wild cultures to "non-believers" and thought that given modern values it would be a hard sell.

I think it just takes dismantling the misconceptions about hunter-gatherer life. It doesn’t look luxurious from a different set of values or a less materialistic perspective; it looks luxurious from the typical, domesticated, Western point of view, right here, right now. But actual hunting and gathering looks like that, not the common misconceptions and myths about it that get so much circulation. So mainly, we just need to tell people how hunter-gatherers actually live. Break down the misconceptions, and the luxury seems pretty self-evident to me.

Jason,

I don’t really understand where you’re coming from. I can’t believe that in my lifetime I’ll be able to live as a leisurely hunter-gatherer. I think the transition will be very, very hard. I don’t say this because I have misconceptions about the anthropological understanding of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle – I’ve read enough to get that it sounds fantastic. But, at the same time, I look around me at the land, I look at myself, I look at my friends and family, and I look at society as a whole and I don’t see that things are in any shape for me to go to Croatan just as easily as the colonists at Roanoke did.

I don’t think I can because for one, the colonists at Roanoke had teachers – the Croatan people. Those people are gone now – destroyed by civilization. Also, they had lands that had not yet been disturbed by civilization to teach them. In my region, civilization has left nothing untouched. Patches of young woods cut up by highways and suburbs. Waters poisoned by chemicals leaking from who knows where. I learn from books and computers rather than people. What craziness!

So long as civilization functions, I won’t be able to get into the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, not just because it kills lands and indigenous peoples, but because the constant barrage of social and economic pressures on my friends and I would prevent us from forming a tribe, which I see as the critical piece for a successful hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

If, however, civilization collapses (the sooner the better!) that will cause social unrest, massive strife, and who-knows-what-else that could add other obstacles in the way of rewilding.

I guess I just can’t see this as an easy transition to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. I carry a lot of baggage from domestication, as does the land, as does everyone else. I don’t think we can just shed this like the colonists of yore could because we live (or at least I do) in such a damaged earthscape. I don’t think it’s impossible, but I feel like you may be making it out to be too easy, and I’m inclined to listen to Billy on the subject because, from what I’ve gleaned, he seems to have years of experience closer to the kind of life I’d like to have.

I hope this makes sense. I’m trying to examine this situation as realistically as I can, and I hate that our time presents us with so unique a challenge, but still I remain excited about it.

~wildeyes

most primitive shelters do a heck of a lot better job keeping the heat than any of our modern buildings.

I can personally attest to that one, having spent a couple days in wigwams with barely a small fire going and both the door and vent open, and it was quite hot. And these wigwams didn’t even have traditional coverings of mats, bark, or fur, but thin burlap that is far less insulating. Wigwams rock!

I have to say that, aside from my class on hunter gatherer societies a few years ago, one of the things that has made me want to live as one was my experience in high school of constructing an imitation of a Nipmuc village, albeit a cheap one. We had lodging enough for a few dozen kids built easily within two weeks, working only an hour a day each. We even fortified the place with a watchtower and palisade wall. We were able to have a huge feast for all of us plus guests with the work of one hunter’s weekend (teacher’s brother) and a fairly small amount of vegetables. And there were a lot of left-overs. We even bothered to gather a respectable supply of medicinal herbs and weave a handful of nice mats and baskets. And like I said, this was really all done with just an hour or less a day, limited by the length of a class period. This may all have been a pale imitation of a true hunter gatherer life, but it’s still a pretty good testament to what we can get done with a small group in a short time, even by a bunch of untrained kids who spend half the time gossiping or trying to sneak off and get stoned (my wigwam was a particularly favorite place for this).

Yes, but you always suspect that. :slight_smile: And, having such keen perception, you often get it right. But I don’t think you’ve gotten it on this one. It sounds to me like the connection between primitive life and asceticism remains too strong for a lot of people here to even really understand what I’ve said here. I can certainly understand that, but I maintain that we really must break down that connection.[/quote]

:slight_smile: Nah, I don’t always suspect that, it’s just that that’s when i’m mostly likely to crawl out of the woodwork to say something! :wink:

I still think I’m right on this one tho’.

Yep, that’s right. Although, I think it’d be more useful to get right down to the heart of it. I think what you mean is “just our enculturation”.

Another excellent point, but it misses this part:

the colonists at Roanoke had teachers -- the Croatan people. Those people are gone now

I know an awful lot of people that I will never convince to move to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and one of the biggest stumbling blocks (after simple enculturation) is the lack of a nearby, living example that disproves said enculturation & preconceptions.

Again, it’s not as if I’m going to disagree with this :slight_smile: (Although, I do hope you can see where “limited wants” plays into ideas and preconceptions of asceticism)

I think the crux of Billy’s issue is with saying that this is luxury particularly as defined by people outside “the choir”.

According to wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn, luxury could mean any of the following:

1) something that is an indulgence rather than a necessity
  1. lavishness: the quality possessed by something that is excessively expensive

  2. wealth as evidenced by sumptuous living

In terms of hunter-gatherers living luxuriously, I’d say that certainly meets definition 1, but both 2 & 3 imply a couple of things that prevent most folk I know from just accepting the statement “hunter-gatherers lived lives of luxury” (regardless of what some anthropologist says). Those things are: money & status. Neither money nor status are physical needs, yet many Americans want them to the point of thinking they need them. Sure the desire is irrational in the face of how hunter-gatherers live, but… we aren’t rational beings.

I’m less certain of this, but I think Billy’s speaking to the gap we, personally, need to fill to develop the new growth native cultures into old growth native cultures, whereas what you point to in the above quote is more of an old growth culture. But again, I could be very mistaken on this, that’s just how I read it.

I’m quoting this mostly to point out something for later use: that luxurious hunting/gathering living generally requires a close relationship with the land (which we don’t particularly have).

[quote=“jason, post:46, topic:198”][quote=“Billy”]Most people would not think of walking, with all the possessions that their family needs, for a week or more to get to the next seasonal camp, in any kind of weather, as luxury.
Most people would not consider going outside in the night at 30 below to squat over a hole to shit as luxury. [/quote]

Granted, though all your possessions seems a tad disingenuous: that provides precisely the impetus for why hunter-gatherers have so few possessions. Putting it like that makes it sound like we have to push around a U-Haul with all the possessions we keep now.[/quote]

Hmm… So, if, say, “John”, has been enculturated to associate things with luxury, where does this put “John” in terms of understanding the luxury of living as a hunter-gatherer?

Another excellent point, but I wonder, how many of us understand this about ourselves? And, once we stop making a list and start figuring out how to have those experiences, what do we think of then? What have we been taught, deep down, to think of? Granted, ask people this series of questions and that’s generally when they start getting frustrated and grumpy, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence…

Do we have a shortage? No, but, as a nation, we’re spending less time doing these activities. Perhaps fewer people think of hunting, fishing, backpacking, camping, etc as luxurious activities? I understand that that’s hardly the only interpretation, but it’s certainly a viable one.

Which, I really think is the crux of Billy’s point.

Okay, now think about someone who has never: been hunting, fishing, camping, hiking or backpacking. Someone who, when asked to think about nature, conjures up vague tree’s and shrubs and a lot of those cute, funny looking flowers, you know the ones… they’re yellow, sometimes white and they got that cone-sort of thing on them… what are they? oh! yeah Daffodils!

Okay, I’m exaggerating, I admit it, still…

Personally, I completely agree, but, people are most likely to change their preconceptions based on only one thing: direct experience. Want to change someone’s mind? Give them a positive experience. Pure and simple.

And I partially agree with this, in as much as it refers to a sensuous experience, but we have people so crazed with material goods that they bought houses they couldn’t enjoy because they had to spend all their free time cleaning it! Granted, many of them realized their folly, once they experienced it first hand, but…

I think it’s completely safe and fair to say that many, many folk in our modern culture would have difficulty in understanding the association of “luxury” to: having few possessions, walking everywhere, living in close connection to a number of other-than-human animals (esp bugs), having “limited wants”, etc.

Point being that if someone is firmly fixated on things, and there’s more than a few floating around the States, the only way you’ll ever break down their misconceptions is by providing several positive experiences to the contrary. And that’s going to require figuring out how to have a positve experience yourself first.

I think we need to do more than tell people. I think we need to provide positive experiences to people. Experiences that show direct and quickly-realized benefits. It’s the only thing that I have ever seen break down a firmly held, deeply entrenched preconception.

And make no mistake, we’re talking about people with some very firmly held and deeply entrenched preconceptions. Again, as a nation, Americans spend less and less time at these activities, this has created a void in direct experience and a reliance on preconceptions, exactly the kind of situation that leads to firmly held and deeply entrenched preconceptions, the kind of situation that lets Mother Culture, as Quinn would say, have free reign with how situations are perceived. And values tend to follow perceptions.

Jason, you are skilled at arguement. You have re-created me as a “non-believer”.

I firmly believe that a wild life in relationship with the natural world is “the good life” and a far better way to live than being a cog in the mechanism of mainstream society. I believe it can be lived in relative comfort and in a way that doesn’t involve the kind of strife and deprivation that jhereg presented as a contrast for us. When my family lived back in the woods we never felt impoverished or lacking in anything we wanted. Outsiders viewed us as being dirt poor and living a life of deprivation. We had very little money and found our interactions with the mainstream to be difficult at times. The difference is values.

I believe that rewilding is possible, desireable and preferrable, but I don’t spend much effort on trying to convert people.

Here’s a hypothetical situation but realistic.

If I have a family, a wife and two children. We all need clothing suitable for spring/summer/ fall weather.
For leggings you need a deer hide for each leg.
For a shirt you need probably three deer hides. You can probably get mocassins out of the left overs from the other clothes.
So that’s five deer hides per person for one basic set of clothes.
That’s twenty deer to outfit my family.
I also live with two other families that also have four members each.
that makes twelve people to outfit which means sixty deer hides.

Mocassins need to constantly be replaced and there are many other things that hides get used for so lets add another 20 hides per family for miscellaneous uses.
120 deer hides.

Now we all would like to be able to change our clothes once in a while so we all need another set of clothes. That means another 60 deer hides

180 deer hides.

If we are doing all that feasting and partying we will probably want to wear our fancy clothes instead of our everyday stuff so that might mean another 40 hides to make ouselves look presentable for a celebration.

220 deer hides.

We haven’t talked about winter clothing yet.

Things wear out, get ruined; by falling in the fire, getting rained on etc. So we can probably assume that we will need to replace half of those hides annually at least. So we’re looking at 110 deer hides that need to get tanned every year.

Now we haven’t addressed the need for all those luxurious furs so aside from hunting this number of deer we will need to put some effort into trapping fur bearers, and tanning them.

Hunting that extensively would require changing hunting grounds regularly, which would mean moving the whole camp or having the hunters go on extended trips and bringing the meat and hides back home.

I love deer meat. We eat lots of deer meat. But man, I’d get pretty bored of nothing but deer meat every meal every day. So we are gonna want to spend some time fishing, bird hunting. How about picking berries, digging roots collecting medicines.

There are all of the daily tasks of gathering wood, hauling water, cooking, sewing, repairing, tool making and maintanance, hide preparation, butchering, food preparation and preserving.

The weather is not always co-operative so many of these activities need to be carried out in the pouring down rain, or 30 below, some have to be put off until conditions allow. So timing is very important. “When you feel like it” is an unrealistic attitude. The work needs to be done when the work needs to be done.

This would be typical for the area where I live and I guess probably reasonable for Pennsylvania too. This is just one angle to look at this lifestyle from.

I can’t see being able to lay around telling stories and feasting fitting in here to the extent that you would like us to believe. I don’t see being able to do all this by working two hours a day if you happen to feel like it.

I think that the scenario I presented is possible and would love to live that life. The work is meaningful and further deepens my relationship with Creation. This looks like a beautiful life to me. I doubt if many mainstream folks would call it easy, comfortable or luxurious though without a fundamental shift in their values, which has been my point all along in this discussion.

HeyVictor-

Your estimation for how many deer you would need is way off. First, you’ll notice no one in your family are effectively covering their genitals. You’ll probably want another bit of hide as a loin cloth. Also, unless you’re killing tiny deer or have really big legs you’ll probably have quite a bit of hide left over from making your leggings. In fact, you might have enough for your other leg. If not, you certainly will have enough to cover any “miscellaneous uses.”

Rain does not cause damage to tanned hide. And personally, I’ve managed to be around many fires without accidentally dropping my pants into the flames. So I don’t think I’ll need to replace my clothing as often as you seem to think.

Rabbits make perfectly good moccasins, which were really more for winter anyway. Barefoot is better for the summer months.

Trapping rabbits, beaver, etc is actually very little work. Once the trap is set your job is best summed up as “go away, you’re ruining it.” One of my teachers once said “hunters go hungry, trappers never do.”

I should also mention that linen is surprising accessible and quite usable for fabric. The only reason it isn’t commonly used today is because cotton is cheaper and linen wrinkles. The wrinkles may be a concern in the future, but for now the kids are flappin’ in the breeze and we need to prioritize.

Temperatures of 30 below are really rare throughout most of PA. Even a minus thirty wind chill is awfully uncommon. Pouring rain, at least what I would call pouring rain, lasts minutes. If a job is so urgent that it can’t wait a couple minutes for the rain to ease up I probably don’t care about getting wet at that point.

As far as some of the tasks you mentioned: “gathering wood, hauling water, cooking, sewing, repairing, tool making and maintanance, hide preparation, butchering, food preparation and preserving”

First, these are not everyday tasks. Tool making was generally done during the winter when you were in doors anyway. It was a social task and often involved story telling. Same with sewing. Hauling water around could be an issue, but personally I’m thinking I’ll just set up a cistern and not worry about it so much. Cooking and food prep does take time. Takes time in modern civilization too. Food preservation varies widely depending on technique. Smoking for instance, is mostly waiting once you set it all up. You can go do other things. Hide prep and butchering is for when you catch an animal. Butchering doesn’t take long when you’re practiced at it. But hide tanning is a bitch, no two ways about it. Luckily you can share the job.

But, assuming you are right and we’ll need 110 deer a year for 12 people. That’s nine deer worth a meat per person per year… I don’t know about you, but I might start getting hungry by the time August rolls around.

  • Benjamin Shender

Benjamin,
Thank you for responding. I’ve tanned hides for 25 years. I have brain tanned hides for my living for the last ten years. I teach it and have taught it all over western Canada. I’ve also made quite a bit of buckskin clothing. When I lived in more remote places I’ve worn buckskin for my everyday clothing, day in and day out, as my work clothes not just for a costume at an event.

Here in BC we have deer that are typical in size for deer across most of N. America. I know a lot of tanners across the US and Canada. From conversations I’ve had with other tanners, the hides I tan on average are about the same size as hides from various places around the continent. We all sell our hides by the sq. ft. so size is something we pay attention to.

As far as making leggings goes. You are right that with a large hide there may be enough sq. footage t cut both legs from one hide. However if you work with buckskin much you know that hides that big are often also very thick. Not my preference for leggings. Also deer hides have thick sturdy areas and thin areas and trying to fit your patterns on one hide would not put the sturdy areas in the places they are needed. So I prefer to use a hide for each leg, use the sturdy part of the hide for the front of the leg and save the thinner parts for other projects or fringe. If you look at all the old leggings made by the Native people of this continent you will see they are made the same way.

You also may have noticed that I suggested using left overs from the third shirt hide for mocs. Usable, but not ideal. I was trying to be generous by not saying get another whole hide for that.

I don’t know how many wild rabbits you have killed and skinned but I have probably snared hundreds in my life. The skin on wild rabbits is about like toilet paper with hair on it. Can’t imagine making my mocs out of it. Maybe a rabbit skin sock worn inside a buckskin mocassin. A woven blanket made of rabbit cut into strips would be a better use for rabbit skins. Decoration and disposable hand towels were another common use for those skins in the past.

I think you have a point about bare feet. Often it’s just as well to go bare foot. In fact I have read quite a number of accounts of Native people going bare foot in slushy snow because no footwear that they had was keeping their feet warm anyway so they just went without it, keeping their mocs dry it to put on when they could be back inside. I could look for some of those references if you’d like to see them. This kind of addresses the idea of comfort and luxury and also your assertion that there is no need to be outside in bad weather.

Like I said I’ve snared a lot of rabbits. Maintaining a string of snares actually does take some time, every day. You put out the snares, if you put out two dozen snares, that might cover little bit of territory. Then you need to check them every day or you will find that coyotes and bobcats, hawks, owls have eaten your rabbits. Out of those two dozen you might get two rabbits on a good day or three if you are really kicking ass. Sometimes 0. Then you need to move and reset those snares. Just checking snares might take a couple of hours out of a day. Of course I would try to incorporate looking for deer or grouse or some other task.

Gathering wood, getting water and cooking in a camp situation has always been daily tasks where I’ve been. If we are hunting all the time then butchering and food prep and preservation would also be daily tasks. Maintaining tools and clothes is an ongoing thing too. For some reason even though barefoot is perfectly adequate, Native women were constantly making mocassins for their family. There is a lot of mocassins in museums and the old photographs show people with mocassins on.

Working on hides was something that Native women in the N. part of this continent did virtually every day as part of their daily chores. I do presentations in schools on traditional uses of animal skins (which is why I picked this angle to look at this from) I have travelled around western Canada with this presentation. Not only did I research this subject in literature but I personally interviewed Native elder women from N. BC. who still tan moose hides about what they do and heard stories about their child hood and how their Grandmas did things. Sometimes younger women would translate if the elder didn’t speak English.

All over this region we can get rain that lasts for a week. Longer on the coast. Thirty below is not common but it gets close to that every year for a little while and if you are a bit higher in elevation colder for longer than that.

When I lived in a tipi with my wife and three kids we had 35 below at night for two weeks in December one year. We went through a f’’'ing pile of wood. We had good bedding and were not cold in bed but everything was frozen solid when we woke up in the morning.

So what I am saying all through this conversation comes largely from actually living it and sometimes extrapolating from there, personal conversations with elders, and some from literature. This kind of stuff has been my life for almost thirty years in addition to living communally and in remote back woods communities with others doing the same kind of things. And spending a lot of time with Native people here in the Columbia plateau region and on the N. plains. My experience working in the woods comes in there too. What an anthropologist saw the bushmen doing in Africa is kind of neither here nor there as far as my life goes.

Anyway best of luck to ya’ll, I hope things work out the way you plan.

I guess I have a problem with this thread name. I have a problem with the word believing in general. I just don’t like it, it doesn’t make sense. Believing seems folly to me in comparison to experience and trust. I’d say rewilding comes to experiences and trusting in those experiences, and trusting, not just believing, one can live a better life this way. Sure anyone can read a book and believe it, just like someone can read the bible and believe in God. I think just telling people, trying to ‘convert’ them from what ones read and all, while it can have some points, I don’t think it closely comes from just actual experience living that way. But sure, we have two situations, one an established situation of the indigenous peoples and the other an establishing situation. Obviously the establishing might take more work but… still.

I think Billy makes a good point about a value shift being required to see the luxury in primitive living. I don’t dispute that primitive people live comfortable lives, but I don’t know any Americans who would consider life without electricity and running water luxurious. Many people do go backpacking, camping, etc. for recreation, others do not. What would you say, Jason to those people whose idea of luxury involves a climate controlled building, a sterile swimming pool, servants, and tiny little umbrellas for their drinks? Personally, I’d much rather have the luxury of primitive life, but I think some “non- believers” would consider it a hard sell.

Ben, linen does make great fabric, but spinning and weaving by hand takes a lot work and time. Spinning wheels and complicated looms make things easier, but I don’t think I’d want to haul them around several times a year. I don’t know how the work compares with butchering and tanning, though.

Sgëno, all,

Wow! This has really blown up! I’ll have to respond to this in parts, and no, I can’t promise to respond to it all at once–you’ve all come up with some things that I have a lot to say about, but typing it all out takes some time, so forgive me if I don’t get to your point first. I’ll try to take this in order as much as possible.

Wildeyes-

I don't really understand where you're coming from. I can't believe that in my lifetime I'll be able to live as a leisurely hunter-gatherer. I think the transition will be very, very hard. I don't say this because I have misconceptions about the anthropological understanding of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle -- I've read enough to get that it sounds fantastic. But, at the same time, I look around me at the land, I look at myself, I look at my friends and family, and I look at society as a whole and I don't see that things are in any shape for me to go to Croatan just as easily as the colonists at Roanoke did.

Scott raised this issue on the Fabulous Forager a while back (though in not nearly such pleasant terms), so I’ll largely just repeat the argument I offered to him.

Yes, looking at the condition of our environment today, we have a lot of reason to feel trepidation. If you want an example of a depleted ecology, you’ll hardly find a better example on earth than my own home along the banks of Tuppeek-hanne. Some have called the Allegheny National Forest the most endangered forest in the United States. And yet, look at the places where hunter-gatherers live today: the Kalahari, the Congo, the Arctic. Can anyone really make the claim that the Allegheny has less life today than the Kalahari desert? Finding water in the Allegheny represents little problem. We have deer so abundant that it really constitutes a major ecological problem, one of our most prominent, right up with so much oil drilling. I have often fed myself simply on the wild edibles I could casually pick from the forest floor.

Yes, we face a lot of challenges, and a lot of healing has to take place. But hunting & gathering succeeds–nay, flourishes, with all the luxury I described above–in the world’s most marginal ecologies to this day. And even in our diminished state, a second-growth forest still provides a far more abundant habitat for the would-be hunter-gatherer than the Kalahari ever will.

So what does that say about the luxury our own future holds? Well, yes, the Kalahari presents some enormous challenges, challenges so dire that only a long time of living natively can overcome. That presents the key as to why the bushmen still live there: because only they can. First the Bantu, and then European colonists, have tried to wipe them out, but they remain because only they know how to live in the Kalahari. Our ecologies do not have such dire conditions, so we don’t need to have such detailed knowledge just to get by. We still need to become native, absolutely, but that process can unfold very quickly, if you use your culture to speed it up rather than hold it back.

I don't think I can because for one, the colonists at Roanoke had teachers -- the Croatan people. Those people are gone now -- destroyed by civilization.

Plenty of American Indians would beg to differ. In fact, Native Rights activists frequently cite that argument as one of the biggest hurdles they have to overcome. People think of them as gone, the genocide against them as something past, the “real Indians” now utterly extinct. They haven’t gone anywhere. In my own home, along the northern banks of Tuppeek-hanne, I look often to the example of the Seneca who once extended there. They haven’t gone anywhere. The Allegany Reservation lies just over the border in New York, and still plays a role in what goes on there.

n my region, civilization has left nothing untouched. Patches of young woods cut up by highways and suburbs. Waters poisoned by chemicals leaking from who knows where. I learn from books and computers rather than people. What craziness!

Absolutely! But then again, how could civilization leave anything untouched, when none of us, individually, can even do that? Untouched means something very different from destroyed. “Untouched” arises from the myth that humans sit apart from “nature,” and thus that we spoil nature by our touch, transforming it from “natural” to “artificial.” We do have an impact, though, just like any other living thing. Ecologies change–constantly. Nothing could define an ecology better than change, and every living thing in it contributes to that. The question of whether or not we leave something untouched doesn’t matter; we touch everything around us. We should, rather, ask what kind of touch we have. Neither the deserts of the “Fertile Crescent” nor the rain forests of the Amazon qualify as “untouched.” Both emerged because of human impact. But you could hardly ask for a more stark example that “zero impact” means nothing. We can have a good impact for the world around us, or a devastating impact.

Yes, civilization has had a devastating impact. That might make so much focus seem semantic, but think of this–if we worry about what we’ve left “untouched,” then we’ve left the world forever spoiled. What you’ve touched, you cannot untouch. What you have deflowered cannot become virgin again. Virgin soils, virgin forests, a virgin world–and now, we’ve stripped away that virginity in a violent act that we can only compare to rape.

But the rest of the world does not share our puritanical preoccupation with sex and virginity. Purity does not appear in “nature.” Those forests had lost their “virginity” long before Europeans came. Here, the Seneca cleared forests with fire, planted the Three Sisters, and had major impacts on their ecology. When we talk about the kind of impact we have, rather than what we’ve left “untouched,” we immediately refocus not on our mythology of how things have happened, but the real ecological history of our places. Then we can see that yes, civilization has had a devastating impact, but a devastating impact does not mean a virginity forever lost. It invites us to heal that with our own impact. It immediately implies not only that we can, but that we must move to rectify those wrongs.

It also removes the black and white duality of those impacts. Civilization can leave a place touched or untouched, but if we talk about its impact, we also have to consider how much of an impact, which immediately belies the ridiculous logic that would call the “untouched” Kalahari more ecologically abundance than the ever-so “touched” Allegheny. Yes, we can see civilization’s impacts everywhere. But life endures. The impact has never reached a total eradication of life, and even our diminished world holds an extraordinary, breath-taking abundance.

So long as civilization functions, I won't be able to get into the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, not just because it kills lands and indigenous peoples, but because the constant barrage of social and economic pressures on my friends and I would prevent us from forming a tribe, which I see as the critical piece for a successful hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

I agree. See my old article, “Where Have All the Savages Gone?” But by the same token, as civilizations collapse, they do not do so all at once, overnight. The map opens, in a direct reversal of what Hakim Bey called the closure of the map. Some places simply take too much energy to maintain, or lie too far from the centers of power to bother with. I have no doubt that long before the last light in New York City goes out, you’ll see the last tax return filed from Elk Co., PA. The same thing happened when Rome fell. No official proclamation came forth that Rome had fallen, and even long after, the Roman Empire claimed control of a vast territory. But what do such claims mean if you lack the energy you need to enforce it? When the tax revenue from Elk Co., PA drops below the price it would take to send IRS agents to collect it, the United States will still claim to control it, but that control will become meaningless and theoretical. The map will have opened.

Yes, we’ll probably have to wait until civilization has left before we can become fully hunter-gatherers, but we don’t need to wait for it to leave the world entirely–we just need it to leave our bioregions. I have no doubt that we will have hunted and gathered for many years, maybe even many generations, before the last city falls. Such a process would have occasional reversals, too, but the overall trend–the opening of the map–will proceed with all the same inevitability as its initial closure.

If, however, civilization collapses (the sooner the better!) that will cause social unrest, massive strife, and who-knows-what-else that could add other obstacles in the way of rewilding.

In a movie, perhaps. Real collapses never work that way. The energy that society needs doesn’t shut off all at once; it slows to a trickle, first. You have recession, and then deepening recession, then depression, and then the depression go on and on, and then, finally, you collapse. The economy tightens into a strangling grip as the map opens. As that process takes place, most people flee to the core. They abandon the countryside and the opening spaces of the map, seeking jobs and prosperity in the urban centers that continue to focus civilization’s resources. We see this already–reports of fewer hunting licenses, fewer people going visiting national forests, and more people moving closer to the cities (though the “exurb” phenomenon somewhat contradicts this, I think it makes more sense to interpret that as the high-water mark of cheap energy). Yes, social unrest, massive strife and such do eventually happen, but before they do, as if driven by some strange kind of ecological consideration, civilized populations confine themselves to ever-more concentrated quarters. No collapsing civilization in history, big or small, has ever sent the devastating waves of hungry mobs out into the wilderness that I find so often in movies, books, and the nightmares of rewilders. Civilizations large and small, everywhere around the world, do not explode like that; they implode.

Will the collapse of a global civilization unfold differently? Anything can happen, but why would we expect that? Scale has never made a difference before, nor location, nor the type of civilization. Our most recent form does not differ from the past by all that much. I cannot find any foundation for this fear aside from fictional accounts, and that tells me we simply worry ourselves over nothing with this. I think we do like to scare ourselves; after all, we have generally painted collapse as something horrifying and terrifying. Straying too far from that myth makes us doubt ourselves. After all, civilization always told us that collapse would hold terrible horrors. So we invent such horrors to keep us appropriately frightened, regardless of whether or not we have any foundation in history or precedent to do so.

I guess I just can't see this as an easy transition to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Of course not. We’ve learned our whole lives about how much difficulty such a thing would entail. We know how much difficulty we’ve encountered becoming part of this complex society, wouldn’t a simple society involve just as much difficulty? But we also spent the whole time adapting to this society swimming upstream, defying ourselves, and while we did it, mastered an immensely complex way of life. Humans evolved as hunter-gatherers. The greatest challenge in rewilding lies not in picking up how to live wildly–that came to us naturally, and we often had to specifically train ourselves not to–but rather, in undoing so much of our development up to this point.

I don’t want to make this transition seem overly simply, but by the same token, I don’t want to see others exaggerate its difficulty, either. I’ve had alternating epiphanies for some time now about how much we’ve lost on the one hand, and how easily we can get it back on the other. I think we can rewild and become native to our places in a single lifetime. In another sense, becoming traditional sets a goal that we all strives towards and never fully realize. As Quinn wrote in the Tales of Adam about the “Law of Life,” ask me again on my death bed, and I’ll tell you, “I’m beginning to know it.”

Dan–

Thanks! My own experience sounds very much like yours. I went from knowing nothing about wild edibles, to knowing the ones I still look to as my most essential core friends, and more importantly, how to learn more, in just a weekend. I’ve spent a few nights in a wigwam, started fires with a bowdrill, and so on. Again, a far cry from living the life of a hunter-gatherer, but enough to show me just how quickly we can learn these things. Admittedly, I need a lot of practice to master these skills, but we need to distinguish between learning and mastering. We need to learn in order to begin rewilding; but living a rewilding life means spending the rest of your life mastering them!

Which raises an important point that wildeyes mentioned at the end of his post:

'm inclined to listen to Billy on the subject because, from what I've gleaned, he seems to have years of experience closer to the kind of life I'd like to have.

Absolutely. I would definitely agree that Billy really has a lot of experience with living outdoors, and has done a lot to not only learn, but to master the skills we need to learn and master. That said, I believe the point of contention here revolves around whether or not we can really call primitive life a life of luxury, no? On that note, the relevant field of experience would seem to lie in experience as a hunter-gatherer, not just living outdoors, right? Mountain men, outdoorsmen, pioneers, settlers and all kinds of folk live outdoors, but that means something quite different from living as a hunter-gatherer. I really respect Billy’s perspective and experience, but as far as experience living as a hunter-gatherer, I’d say he and I have exactly the same amount of experience: zero.

Neither one of us has ever lived in a community that supported itself in such a way. We’ve never had the human relations there to support us. We’ve never lived with 25-50 other people living like this. As much as I respect Billy’s experience, it also doesn’t surprise me at all to hear that he would think that the hunter-gatherer life would not involve much that we could really call luxury. It sounds like he’s found a really incredible way to live, and I can’t honor that enough, but it also sounds to me like a fairly hard way to live. It also sounds to me nothing like a hunter-gatherer way of life.

Let me try to illustrate this with a story. I went to a primitive skills class last summer, and I’ll tell you, it kicked my butt! Not just me, though; a lot of people felt the same, and made a lot of comments about how hard primitive people lived. I spoke up and reminded them, “We made a bowdrill yesterday; how often would you make a new bowdrill in a primitive life? Once a year, maybe? And then we started a fire. Of course, most of the time, you’d start the day’s fire like we did this morning, from the embers left over from the night before. So how often would you start a fire like that? Once a week? Once a month? And living primitively, we’re talking about one of the primary tasks right here, starting a fire. Sure, it took a lot, but do you realize that you just put in the hardest day of work a person living primitively puts in all year long?” Once they put it into perspective, and realized you wouldn’t make a new fire, let alone a new bowdrill, every day, it started to dawn on them that as difficult as a class makes it seem, living primitively really meant a lot less work.

We can often start to think that our experiences out of doors mirror the hunter-gatherer experience, when in fact we’ve exaggerated its hardest parts, perhaps by focusing on skills and repeating over and over again the “work” of primitive life without any of the play or by making a new bowdrill and a new fire every day. We might try homesteading, and transfer the admittedly grueling and back-breaking labor of agrarian life to the similarly “primitive” hunter-gatherer. I’ve seen this happen so many times, it makes me a little crazy. Unless we have some bushmen hiding out on this forum, none of us have lived as hunter-gatherers. We can try to creep towards that with our experience, but we need to keep in mind the ways in which that experience falls short. That also means that we need to remember sometimes to bracket our own experiences, and listen to the accounts of those who have lived that life. No, I haven’t lived as a hunter-gatherer, but then, neither has anyone else here. So instead, I’ve pulled from the experiences of those who have lived that life, and what stories they share. My experiences of how easily rewilding comes, and Billy’s experiences of how hard living outdoors can become, both have their place. But if we want to ask what kind of life hunting and gathering offers, then we can’t speak very much to that. We have to ask those who have lived that life.