The Failure of Farming

SUBHEAD: An excerpt from book “The Failures of Farming and the Necessity of Wildtending”

By Kollibri terre Sunnenblume on 6 Dec 2018 for Macska Mosshka -
(http://macskamoksha.com/2018/12/agriculture-as-wrong-turn)


Image above: Contrast between modern agriculture in southern California and wild-tending a meadow in eastern Oregon. From original article and cover of book "The Failure of Farming g and the Necessity of Wildtending".

"The news here is that the lives of most of our progenitors were better than we think. We’re flattering ourselves by believing that their existence was so grim and that our modern, civilized one is, by comparison, so great." —John Lanchester[1]

The “Agricultural Revolution” is lauded as one of the greatest achievements in the history of the human race, proof positive of “Progress” and of our own exalted status “a little lower than angels.” Doubtless, it is among the most momentous changes that our species has experienced, on par with the utilization of fire, the development of language and the splitting of the atom.

However, a closer look, based on research and scholarship, reveals that the adoption of farming led to declines in human health, caused sharp social inequities, started a war on the environment, and put us on a road that’s headed towards extinction.

But wasn’t life before farming miserable? Notoriously “nasty, brutish and short?” Weren’t hunters and gatherers always on the edge of starvation, constantly focused on survival, and never able to enjoy free time? According to experts who study history: No.

Among those who investigate the Agricultural Revolution are archaeologists, anthropologists, paleopathologists, sociologists, geneticists, linguists, primatologists, botanists, climatologists and even economists. A survey of their literature from the last half century exhibits near consensus on the big picture: the Agricultural Revolution caused clear, measurable declines in quality of life, individually, communally and ecologically.

That this knowledge has not filtered out into mainstream culture is hardly surprising since these findings contradict cherished cultural beliefs that have religious origins and political value, to say nothing of personal appeal.

The fossil record reveal that life for agriculturalists was harder than it had been for hunter-gatherers. Their bones show evidence of dietary stress: they were shorter, they were sicker, their mortality rates were higher. Living in close proximity to domesticated animals led to diseases that crossed the species barrier, wreaking havoc in the densely settled communities.[2]

The diets of wildtenders and other gatherer-hunters were very diverse and their lifestyles were highly mobile. The variation in food, in kind and in season, supplied complete nutrition and lessened the chance of going hungry. Living in small, migratory groups virtually guaranteed that individuals were in good physical condition and disallowed certain diseases from becoming widespread.

Of course, gatherer-hunters were themselves diverse, and their diets and lifestyles differed with geography, but altogether they were more like each other than they are like the agricultural societies that largely replaced them.

The Agricultural Revolution radically reoriented the fundamentals of human culture. Some of its inventions were cities, property, writing, taxation and in the Near East, monotheistic religion. The transitions were not immediate.

First, humans settled into sedentary villages based on horticulture (aka, “stick agriculture”), which brought one set of changes. Then, after a few thousand years, agriculture proper emerged, driven by the plow and fed by irrigation, spurring more drastic transformations.

In most gatherer-hunter societies, the majority of the diet was the part that was gathered. Such was comprised of roots, seeds and nuts, berries and fruit, greens, and in some places, grubs and insects. All of these had their own seasons, stages and habitats that varied annually depending on natural cycles, the weather and other circumstances.

But food was not the only thing being gathered; the botanical world also provided fibers for weaving clothes and containers, colors for painting and dyeing, and teemed with medicinals for treating injuries, easing pain, tending to hygiene, improving vigor and—last but certainly not least!—controlling fertility.

Altogether, gatherers had knowledge of hundreds of plants and thousands of factors. This encyclopedic understanding was shared generationally for millennia through an oral tradition that conveyed not merely information but also wisdom. As a result, the practice of gathering was a highly consistent endeavor that dependably provided sustenance, crafting materials and medicines throughout the year.

Hunting meat, by contrast, yielded erratic results. Even when game was predictable—such as during an annual Salmon run or a Reindeer migration—the pattern of hunting as an activity was “feast-or-famine.” In some cultures, meat was preserved by smoking or drying it, but the amount that could be conveniently stored or carried was finite. In some parts of the world, gatherer-hunters would never have been daily meat eaters, and during particular times of the year, would have had a predominantly vegetarian diet.[3]

According to the archaeological and anthropological evidence, gathering was predominantly the sphere of women and hunting that of men. This division makes sense, since babies or small children could accompany gathering activities, but were likely to disrupt hunting. This division was also voluntary, says Gerda Lerner, author of The Creation of Patriarchy:

“The earliest sexual division of labor by which women chose occupations compatible with their mothering and child-raising activities were functional, hence acceptable to men and women alike”[4] [emphasis in original].

So, since Paleolithic survival depended on the contributions of both sexes, egalitarian societies were the norm. Roles within a group were based on “linking rather than ranking”[5] and relationships focused on cooperation rather than competition. These balanced forms of culture have also been called “partnership societies” as opposed to “dominator societies,” the latter of which are patriarchal.

The image of the caveman dragging his woman around by her hair is a mythical view of the past, although it’s a telling expression of our present day misogyny that this is what we project back in time. Clearly, we are trying to justify what we know is bad behavior.

From the contemporary viewpoint it seems impossible to imagine, but property—besides one’s personal articles—was a concept new to the Agricultural era; no one had owned land, animals or other humans in preceding times. But the first written records (dating to ~5100 years ago)[6] are mostly comprised of lists of property, primarily grains, slaves (tracked by sex) and heads of animals. For its first five centuries, writing’s exclusive use was accounting, not art.[7]

Art, it has often been claimed, flowered with the Agricultural Revolution because of extra leisure time, although, in actuality, such time was actually in shorter supply. Some scholars have suggested that art suffered from the transition. Says John Zerzan:

The pre-Neolithic [pre-Agricutlural] cave paintings, for example, are vivid and bold, a dynamic exaltation of animal grace and freedom. The neolithic art of farmers and pastoralists, however, stiffens into stylized forms; Franz Borkenau typified its pottery as a “narrow, timid botching of materials and forms.”

With agriculture, art lost its variety and became standardized into geometric designs that tended to degenerate into dull, repetitive patterns, a perfect reflection of standardized, confined, rule-patterned life… And where there had been no representation in Paleolithic art of men killing men, an obsession with depicting confrontation between people advanced with the Neolithic period, scenes of battles becoming common.[8]

Deeper still were shifts in how humans looked at themselves in relation to the natural world. James Suzman writes:

Where hunter-gatherers saw themselves simply as part of an inherently productive environment, farmers regarded their environment as something to manipulate, tame and control. But as any farmer will tell you, bending an environment to your will requires a lot of work. The productivity of a patch of land is directly proportional to the amount of energy you put into it. This principle that hard work is a virtue, and its corollary that individual wealth is a reflection of merit, is perhaps the most obvious of the agricultural revolution’s many social, economic and cultural legacies.[9] [my emphasis]

Here, then, are the roots of the “Protestant work ethic” and of the over-production that techno-industrial capitalism has taken to such ecocidal extremes.

No discussion of the Agricultural Revolution in the Near East would be complete without mentioning monotheism, which Gore Vidal called, “easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race.” This religious dogma was a logical expression of the agricultural lifestyle.

The new god was a man, entirely independent of women, with no mother, wife or daughter, a sharp contrast with gods in the existing pantheons. He did not live on the earth and was not present in its life, its form, or its elements, except on special occasions, e.g., when taking the form of a cloud or a fiery shrub. He declared that the planet and everything on it was the “dominion” of humans, for them to treat as they would like.

Clear hierarchies existed: God over humans, human men over human women, all humans over nature. Last but not least, humans themselves were born flawed, inherently unable to find true happiness in living.

By whatever justification, religious or otherwise, and through whatever mechanism, intentionally designed or not, during the Agricultural Revolution, men took the majority of social power from women and it has never been returned or retaken.

Or even honestly acknowledged. Modern liberal feminism has won only very minor reforms; the fundamental mode of oppression remains unshaken. That mode—patriarchy—is the domination not only of men over women but of those characteristics considered masculine over those considered feminine.

Dualism and domination are two of its hallmarks: the division of everything into opposites and the subsequent subordination of one to the other. On the grand scale, patriarchy is an expression of humanity splitting itself from nature and setting itself counter to it.

As domination over nature was exerted, respect for nature declined. How could it not? You cannot at once lash something and love it. That some people believe you can just shows how far down this “nasty, brutish” road we’ve traveled. But no: respect and domination don’t go together. Can not. They are mutually exclusive.

Ultimately, the breaking of our conscious, intentional connection with nature was the worst outcome of agriculture. Not content to merely abuse ourselves and each other, we extended our desecration to everyone else—animal, vegetable and mineral—and to the planet itself.

Currently, our survival is no less connected to nature and the world than at any other time, but we are now less aware of that connection than ever before. The cost of that break–of over fifty centuries of intense exploitation—is now weighing on us heavily.

Environmentally, the damage done to the planet by agriculture is severe and far-reaching.

First, farming’s footprint is enormous, taking up fully 40% of the earth’s land.[10] Every acre of that started out as wildlife habitat but is now disturbed to one degree or another. On ranchland, many of the original animals and plants might still live there, albeit with limitations. But in a field of corn, a rice paddy, or an almond orchard, nearly all other life has been wiped out, often completely.

City tourists might take a drive to admire the rolling hills of “wine country,” but what they are looking at is a former wilderness that was once home to flora, fauna, fungus and previous human populations, all since decimated. It’s no pretty picture at all. It’s a vision of ecocide.

You can’t farm without soil (hydroponics notwithstanding) but soil is the first casualty of agriculture. For abusing soil, nothing beats the plow, from the original ox-drawn and human-led tool of the Neolithic Era to the contemporary fuel-powered and unmanned GPS-coordinated behemoth of the 21st Century.

As it turns out, forcibly breaking down a soil’s structure with blades and removing the vegetative material that holds it together results in quite a lot of it eroding into waterways and blowing away in the wind.

The remainder rapidly loses its inherent fertility as irrigation washes out minerals and pesticides wipe out vitalizing micro-organisms. Currently, “a third of the planet’s land is severely degraded and fertile soil is being lost at the rate of 24bn tonnes a year.”[11]

Onto the cleared, drained and leveled lands of agriculture are applied poisons, hundreds of kinds, few of them tested and of these none of them thoroughly. Fertilizers taint the water, from aquifer to river to sea. Dead zones expand in the oceans, all over the world. Writes Jonathan Watts, in the Guardian:

The increased use of chemical fertilizers by the industrial agriculture sector over the past several decades… has prompted large-scale run-off of sewage and other byproducts entering ocean waters, causing deoxygenated dead zones to quadruple in size since 1950—now covering an area roughly the size of the European Union…. Low-oxygen dead zones make the ocean less inhabitable for marine life, suffocating creatures and reducing the area where they’re able to thrive.[12]

Pesticides are a nightmare. By dint of their particulate nature when sprayed, they are easily carried away by the wind and end up contaminating soil and water and poisoning other creatures. Only 1% hit their intended target. 1%! Subsequently, at the large scale they are used, they degrade habitat, reduce biodiversity and magnify extinction rates. Ironically, pollinators required for food production are frequent victims.
As with war, one can question whether non-target damage can honestly be described as “collateral”—”being aside from the main subject, target, or goal; tangential”—when it is inevitably, one could even say characteristically, a “subject” of nearly every attack, never truly “tangential.”

But nature can be resilient, and targeted plants can and do develop herbicide resistance over time, meaning they survive being sprayed. Unfortunately, the agriculture industry’s response is to jack up the amount of herbicide and develop new poisons.

Irrigation damages the environment from the points of source to delivery, and the bigger the project, the worse it is. Anytime water is diverted from one place to another, there is always at least one loser: the immediate locale from which it was taken.

Whether it is a spring, river or lake, the effects of use will make their mark, sooner or later. In many cases, the crop being irrigated isn’t even be food. In northern California, rivers have been running too low for the Salmon because of the wine and Cannabis industries.

In other words, we are prioritizing getting drunk and high over the lives of other creatures. Such trade-offs are emblematic of agriculture. That these acts are not considered theft or assault is demonstrative of mere cultural creed, not the honest administration of logic.

Dams built for agriculture are their own disasters. They drown entire areas, block fish migration, and interrupt previous patterns of seasonal flooding that brought fertility to the soil.

Agriculture is a major contributor to Climate Change due to the significant amount of greenhouse gases it produces. The majority of these gases come from four different sources:[13]

• Deforestation for land-clearing. Forests are “carbon sinks”—that is, they store carbon dioxide (CO₂)—so when the trees are cut down, much of the CO₂ dissipates into the atmosphere. Tilling cleared land produces additional CO₂, which the soil releases when it is disturbed.
• Rice cultivation. The customary flooding of fields causes anaerobic decomposition, which produces methane (CH₄). CH₄ produces about 20 times more warming in the atmosphere than CO₂ in the short term (a timeline of less than a century).
• Enteric fermentation by cattle. CH₄ is a natural byproduct of the digestive process of ruminant animals such as cows, who number in the millions.
• Fertilizer application. Nitrous oxide (N₂0) is created when synthetic fertilizers react with the soil. 60-80% of all anthropogenic N₂0 emissions are agriculturally sourced. N₂0 is about 300 times more warming than CO₂.

Farming is killing us. That’s no exaggeration. And we must stop doing it. That’s undeniable.

Of course that means drastic collective changes on a global scale, but in the service of survival, we must do what’s necessary. Drastic is not the same as “impossible.”

Unsurprisingly, the agricultural mind rejects the idea of ending agriculture, but its arguments deserve no hearing. The track record of the last 11,500 years is clear. Farming has been a failure.

“What else are we supposed to do?” is the wrong question. It’s not even a question, really. It’s a statement of insistence disguised with interrogatory punctuation.

The false claim being made is that “there is no alternative.” But without supporting evidence, this assertion of dogma has to hide behind a question mark. Beware those who speak this way. If you hear yourself saying it, stop and give yourself a sharp look.

The real question is: “What can we offer?”

What we have forgotten in agricultural societies is that life is all about reciprocity.

In an interview included in my new book, Jayesh Bear said: “It’s two different worldviews. One that is in fear of the natural world and one that strives to understand it and respect it and live in symbiosis with it.”

Inherent in wildtending, and in other gathering-hunting lifestyles, was such striving. Wildtending is reciprocal. Its actions, collectivity, and scope all exist as endless exchange.

Agriculture is the opposite: extractive; taking without giving. There’s only so long that can go on, and if the Americas hadn’t existed, it might very well have ended already. As it is, the monster was able to feed itself for another 500+ years, and has swollen into a bloated mess of tremendous size and ugliness. We’ll see how much longer it goes if left unattended. At some point it either runs out of fuel or is suffocated by its own toxic excretions.

Which returns us to the question: “What can we offer?”

Ultimately, reciprocity must again be our collective way of life, and by “ultimately” I mean today. Isolated, individual choices will not suffice. While there is nothing else to do, we will make them, and should make them as consciously as possible, of course.

But what that means, in part, is never forgetting that lifestyle choices are made primarily for ourselves, and the best they can do is to help us see and live more clearly. Gaining clarity is essential, of course, but we should not mistake it for significant material change. It is not.

Living in reciprocity with the other beings on this planet—human and non-human—is a necessity regardless of planetary outcome. The act of nurturing is a salve for all parties involved, even if we are merely comforting the dying.

[1] Lanchester, John. “The Case Against Civilization: Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors have it better?” New Yorker, September 18, 2017.
[2] ibid.
[3] Sahlins, Marshall. Stone Age Economics (Chicago and New York: Aldine·Atherton, 1972), p. 27.
[4] Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy (New York Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 42.
[5] Eisler, Rian. The Chalice and the Blade (New York: HarperCollins, 1987), p. 27.
[6] Wikipedia “History of Writing”
[7] Lanchester.
[8] Zerzan, John. “Agriculture.”
[9] Suzman, James. “How Neolithic farming sowed the seeds of modern inequality 10,000 years ago” Guardian, 5 December 2017.
[10] Owen, James. “Farming Claims Almost Half Earth’s Land, New Maps Show” National Geographic (Dec. 9, 2005).
[11] Conley, Julia. “New Study: Big Ag, Climate Crisis Key Drivers of Ocean ‘Dead Zones’ Quadrupling in Size Over Last 60 Years” Common Dreams, January 05, 2018.
[12] Watts, Jonathan. “Third of Earth’s soil is acutely degraded due to agriculture” Guardian, 12 September 2017.
[13] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios” section 3.5. “Agriculture and Land-Use Emissions,” 2000. | International Union for Conservation of Nature and World Business Council for Sustainable Development. “Ecosystems Facts and Trends,” 2008, p. 6. | Earth Journalism Network. “Climate Change and Agriculture” (9 June 2016).
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Rewilding Your Lawn

SUBHEAD: Now that we've entered the Anthropocene you need to do your part in supporting the living environment.

By Amy Brady on 28 July 2018 for Orion Magazine -
(https://orionmagazine.org/2018/07/rewilding-your-lawn-in-the-anthropocene-an-interview-with-author-jeff-vandermeer/)


Image above: Photographs of a yard gone wild. From original article.

Jeff VanderMeer, award-winning author of Borne and the Southern Reach Trilogy, is also an avid environmentalist. 

As part of his desire to make outdoor spaces more habitable for birds and insects, he’s embarked on a yard rewilding project that involves letting native grasses and plants (many of them deemed “weeds” by some less-than-pleased neighbors) take over his lawn.

If you follow the author on Twitter, you may have read his amusing—and educational—anecdotes about the project. Here, we discuss the yard project in more depth, including the benefits a wild yard provides for local wildlife and what others can do to improve their own neighborhood ecosystems.

AB: What inspired you to re-wild your yard?
JV: I was the writer-in-residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York in 2016 and lived in a house with a very lively bird population. I started putting out feeders. 

Then Trump was elected president and my stress level went through the roof. We returned to our home in Florida and, to distract myself from the news, I put up a lot of bird feeders and tried to emulate the things that we’d loved about upstate New York.

We got several more birds than in the past, although I’d always been an avid birdwatcher. The feeders made me feel like I could help semi-urban wildlife and migrating birds in the moment, which was important at a time when I felt useless and worn down by the news.

I then began investigating how to make the yard more bird and bee and butterfly friendly. Given that our attempts at a “normal” lawn had always led to bare dirt, I figured nothing would grow. 

But as soon as we gave the yard over to whatever would naturally grow there, we had a great burgeoning of 
plant, insect, and animal life. We even have, ironically enough, a fair amount of grass in the yard now.

AB: What do you hope to achieve by doing this? Do you anticipate an environmental impact?
JV: I already know we’re creating a safe haven for migratory birds. We’re also helping to cement a corner of an unacknowledged greenway for raccoons and possums and other nocturnal animals, none of which have been a bother. They also eat insects and are beneficial in other ways. 

I’ve also seen more toads and frogs and in general a healthy little ecosystem quietly building up. Contrary to the generalizations people make about non-traditional yards, we’ve not seen any ticks. Either the possum eats those or they just aren’t present.

In addition, we’ve had some exciting finds, like Florida lupine growing in one part of the yard. Florida lupine is rare these days and should be encouraged.

Does all this mean much in the grand scheme of things? I don’t know. But it acknowledges that in addition to dealing with things on the macro level, you can support the environment in your own backyard by not using pesticides and, while not letting things look totally unkempt, support life rather than a mono-lawn that nothing else can thrive on.

AB: You’ve said on Twitter that your neighbors are less than thrilled. How would you sum up their response to your yard?
JV: I think it’s accurate to say that the “neighbor complaint” has become in my mind an existential threat from The Neighbor. By that I mean I feel like I need to anticipate the possible objections to what I’m doing, and thus The Neighbor is always on my mind. 

This is probably very unfair to the actual neighbor in question, which is why I keep everything very anonymous [on Twitter] and try to acknowledge that it’s the system and our assumptions at the neighborhood association and city government level that are flawed.

We also have lots of lovely neighbors, and even the neighbor who complained is not automatically not-lovely. But the system is crap. 

The fact that I can grow weeds only so long as they’re in a straight line and look like a garden—or put up a white fence around a part of the mayhem to ritualistically create a “lawn”—is hilarious and also a bit depressing to me. 

A traditional “lawn” is really about signs and symbols and status. What we’re really talking about is whether you admit life onto your property or decide to kill it off.


Image above: Photographs of a yard gone wild. From original article.

AB: What kinds of wildlife have entered your yard since starting this project?
JV: In addition to a regular polite possum and raccoon, we have many more bats out at night. We also have a wealth of birds that we didn’t have before. For example, the thrashers are out in force and very comfortable. 

We’ve had migrating grosbeaks, a first, and we have almost all of the Florida woodpeckers in our yard: downy, hairy, red bellied, flickers, and pileated. They used to be much rarer sightings. We also have a resurgence of snakes and tree frogs and toads of all kinds. 

We used to have a few skinks, pretty big ones, and now we have a lot more. And more bees. And tons of different kinds of plants—too many for me really to go into. Except, of course, the famous one, Fred the Weed, a giant wild lettuce.

Fred blew down in a storm, but is currently convalescing and plotting his return. I’m only just learning more about the plants in our yard, and some are likely invasive, but I must admit that paying attention to what’s growing in the yard has made landscapes so different for me in general. I used to think of plants as the backdrop for animals, but now I see acutely the plant life and how it’s growing. 

I feel like when we visit other people’s houses I can tell a lot about them just from the yard. I’m grateful to Jenn Benner, an Orlando friend, who helped me identify a lot of these plants.

AB: Have any of these lifeforms inspired new characters or settings in your writing?  
JV: This sense of plants being in the foreground will definitely seep into my fiction. The fact that I know individual cardinals and individual downy woodpeckers—that I can see them interacting with other individual birds—is also something that will influence my work. 

Somehow the whole world is now more alive than before, which is, to be honest, also painful, because suddenly I’m aware that even yards that seem green and healthy are actually sterile spaces. 

That’s hard to take. It’s also quite frankly hard to take when I find a vole dead in the yard, a victim of some passing cat. 

Luckily, we don’t get cats much—I chase them away and sometimes squirt them with orange juice, which they hate. In a sense, I feel very connected to this little piece of land and I feel it in my body when something goes wrong.


Image above: Photographs of a yard gone wild. From original article.

AB: Do you have any tips for readers who’d like to do something similar with their yards?
JV: I’d say let the space speak to you and really observe what’s going on. Go with the flow of what seems to grow well—don’t try too hard to push back against what nature tells you needs to happen. 

And before uprooting a plant, make sure you know what you’re doing. Early on I wound up taking out some beneficial plants and leaving some that weren’t from pure ignorance. And be aware that herbicides aren’t really any better than pesticides in many cases.

Bring in a local specialist for a consult, even if you don’t want them to do any actual landscaping. 

Finally, where possible, do leave some dead leaves around, especially in places in shade, where they’ll help form good habitats for toads and worms. These are really beneficial creatures that will only add to the richness of the place.

AB: Do you have any suggestions for people living in urban and suburban areas who want to have a positive environmental impact but who can’t let their yards grow wild?
JV: You can always do something. Even a few potted plants that your local nursery says are good for butterflies or birds can be of use. 

Even a small bird feeder can be of use, too. 

In that case, I’d learn what migratory birds pass through your area, what they tend to eat, and when they tend to appear. 

Keep in mind that birds might take as long as a month to find a new feeder and deem it safe. 

Finally, and this is controversial in some areas, keep in mind that outdoor cats do kill lots of birds. There’s no two ways about it. 

So keep your cat inside if at all possible. If your cat seems too energetic for that, all apologies, but you may need to increase your efforts in engaging and playing with your cat inside.

AB: What has been the most rewarding thing about this project?
JV: Rewilding the yard has largely saved me from situational depression, which means I can be more effective in my other, wider environmental efforts. 

Also rewarding has been the daily connection, in some form, to our environment. It is so important to our health in general to understand what it is we’re losing and what we need to save and why.

.

Taking Rewilding Seriously

SUBHEAD: Apache leader Geronimo could shout that most appropriate battle cry: ‘Live wild or die!’

By John Jabobi on 31 July 2017 for Dark Mountain -
(http://dark-mountain.net/blog/taking-rewilding-seriously/)


Image above: Illustration of "Rewilding" From (http://www.stufftoblowyourmind.com/podcasts/how-rewilding-works.htm).

It is, it seems, our civilisation’s turn to experience the inrush of the savage and the unseen; our turn to be brought up short by contact with untamed reality.
— Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto

Wildness is the Focus
Rewilding has become something of a fad. The internet and libraries are chock full of instruction manuals for using primitive medicine, making primitive tools, adopting primitive religious thought… Often attached are calls to ‘awaken our inner primal spirit.’ This seems like rewilding, right?

Wrong. Rewilding, when applied to human beings, cannot only be about lifestyle changes. Of course, you can’t live in nature if you don’t know how to build a shelter or identify plants. You can’t immerse yourself in the wild without basic navigation skills.

But the rewilding fad has got it mostly wrong: it isn’t about selling a way to become independent of civilisation; it is about selling an aesthetic, an appearance of authenticity, much like Whole Foods stores are designed to look like local farmer’s markets.

For example, on the issue of navigation: would it be more useful for people to start with a compass, or to start with the stars?

Obviously, most industrial humans, who can name at most a handful of constellations, would not want to navigate by the stars. But the rewilding trend is to start with the stars because that’s what our primitive ancestors did.

And on the issue of plant identification: would it be more useful for people to l

earn our more-than-adequate scientific classification system, or to learn an indigenous taxonomy? The answer is clear, yet I’ve spoken to a handful of people who have explicitly avoided learning scientific taxonomy because it’s scientific, and, therefore, unnatural.

Eventually, we have to ask ourselves: are we trying to rewild — to increase our autonomy from artificial systems — or are we trying to look interesting?

The Land Comes First
There’s a worse side-effect. Rewilding, originally, had little to do with human lifestyles at all. It came from the Earth First! movement, when the founders — particularly Dave Foreman and Howie Wolke — outlined their vision of a vast ecological reserve system in North America.

Unlike previous reserve systems, this one included presently non-wild land, because Earth First!ers believed that wildness could be restored by removing artificial systems and edifices, like dams.

Foreman writes, ‘We must … reclaim the roads and the plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers, and return to wilderness millions and tens of millions of [acres of] presently settled land.’

It was a radical vision, and although controversial at first, it is now fairly well accepted within conservation biology. In fact, connecting wildlands is one of the foremost concerns of the current conservation movement.

Doing so provides a large enough habitat for predators and large mammals, and it reduces species extinctions, which tend to increase as wild areas become isolated ‘islands’.

Much of the popularity of these concepts is due to the work of the Wildlands Network, also founded by Dave Foreman after he left the Earth First! movement in the mid-’80s.

Now, it could be that conservationist rewilding and personal rewilding are simply two different kinds of rewilding. In fact, Wikipedia currently has an entry for ‘Rewilding (conservation biology)’ and ‘Rewilding (anarchism)’.

But I suspect that the two have too much in common to be considered entirely separate concepts.

If someone were to ask me why I am interested in rewilding, I would explain that I do not want to be constrained by the artificial systems of civilisation; that I would much rather live in nature and put in the work required to survive.

In other words, it would appear as though my vision of rewilding is included under the ‘Rewilding (anarchism)’ entry. But I also believe that Foreman got it right: land must come first. Part of the whole philosophy behind rewilding is an acknowledgement that humans are not as important as civilised culture believes them to be.

We are largely the product of our environment and our relationship to our environment, just like animals. This is why you can’t rewild an animal in a zoo. It needs a wild habitat first. In the same way, we can’t teach humans skills to rewild and then tell them it’s fine to keep living in civilised conditions.

They need a habitat to rewild. To believe otherwise is an error called lifestylism.

Again, while my motivation for rewilding is a personal desire to live outside the bounds of civilisation, in practice rewilding must prioritise the land. This isn’t to suggest a chronology for rewilding.

I’m not saying ‘preserve land, then learn skills.’ I’m saying that while we do both, our emphasis must be on habitat.

Start from the Present
Outside of the culture of the fad, people despair: rewilding is impossible, a pipe-dream, they say. I call this nihilism (not the same as philosophical nihilism), and it, too, results from a faulty conceptual framework.

For example, nihilists tend to assume that successful rewilding always achieves its ideal, or that successful rewilding must achieve its ideal immediately.

But if I want to live a life less controlled by artificial systems, any decrease in those systems’ power is a step on the ladder of rewilding. And, in regards to land, rewilding practices have been profoundly successful.

The trick is to conceive of rewilding as a practical project to decrease the influence of artificial systems over nature (including human nature). Consider Yellowstone. When wolves were eradicated, the whole ecosystem suffered.

Elk overpopulated the area, and their grazing led to a decrease in the beaver populations.

When wolves were reintroduced, they preyed on the elk and artificial impacts decreased, eventually washing out of the landscape to a profound degree. Of course, Yellowstone isn’t the wildest place on Earth, but wolf reintroduction shielded it from the impact of artificial systems, so made it wilder.

Similarly, zoos frequently preserve populations of animals that they later reintroduce to the wild. They do this by dealing with the situation practically: teach the captive animals the skills they need to live in the wild, then slowly reintroduce them. Keep tabs on them, fix any problems that come up, and try again.

We should take the same approach when rewilding our own lives. Start with outlining all the most important skills you need to learn: how to build shelters, how to identify plants… In every case, be sure to limit your efforts to a tractable problem.

Don’t learn how to identify every plant, only the plants in regions you will be testing your skills in. And don’t try to solve every problem. Some things just aren’t going to fall into place until nature, not civilisation, becomes your tutor.

None of this is to say that we can achieve everything we would like to. Extinct species are a permanent problem. And no 21-year-old who was raised in a highly populated city is going to live an entirely wild life — ever.

In addition to recognising that we have real, achievable goals, we also need to recognise the proper place for mourning. The move from conservation to rewilding has been touted as a positive vision, a way to move away from the dourness of old environmentalism and conservation. In a certain sense this is true.

But the necessity of rewilding is a sad fact about modern life: civilisation has destroyed so many wild areas that we need to restore some before we can fully live by our values.

Sophisticated nihilists will admit that short-term rewilding efforts may very well achieve their goals, but that in the long term, civilisation is bound to destroy wild nature. I do not think this is true, but even if it was it would not be enough to put an end to all rewilding efforts.

If the situation is utterly hopeless, with no chance of successful long-term conservation, no chance of rewilding, no chance of industrial decline or collapse, this is only enough to convince lukewarm wills to abandon action.

The indomitable spirit, typified by his inability to live without the wild and his frankly reckless willingness to make huge sacrifices for it, would not be able to stomach stillness in captivity.

Consider Geronimo, who led natives in battles against colonial powers for 36 years, evading capture and escaping captivity several times. After being detained by General Nelson Miles as a prisoner of war, Geronimo eventually acquiesced to civilisation, allowing himself to be an exotic attraction at fairs.

Yet on his deathbed he proclaimed to his nephew, ‘I should have never surrendered. I should have fought until I was the last man alive.’

I write, then, for individuals like Geronimo — individuals who can earnestly and without reservation shout that most appropriate battle cry: ‘Live wild or die!’


Image above: Retouched photo of Apache leader Geronimo taken by Frank Rinehart from the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska in 1898. From (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Geronimo_(Guiyatle),_Apache.jpg). A variation of photo in original article.

Rebuke the Idols of Civilisation

And I will destroy your high places, and cut down your images, and cast your carcases upon the carcases of your idols, and my soul shall abhor you.
— Leviticus 26:30

Lately a new kind of rewilding has been gaining ground: the ‘rewilding’ of ecomodernists. Ecomodernism claims that technological progress will ‘decouple’ civilised people from the land, allowing them to continue living comfortable, modern lives while reducing their influence on the nature around them.

Accelerate technological progress; intensify production in civilised areas through aquaculture and industrial farming; shuffle rural people into cities: this, they say, leaves and will leave vast regions of the Earth to the wild.

Outside of the decoupling thesis, ecomodernism’s version of rewilding is more obviously revisionist. For example, some ecomodernists advocate ‘de-extinction’, or using biological technologies to revive extinct species, so that they can reintroduce those species to their once native habitats. While considering these ideas, I have always been struck by a comparison with the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, ‘to repair the world’.

In recent years, left-wing Jewish groups have utilised this concept to push a narrative of progress, emphasising the fight for social justice as the most important element.

But the man who taught me of tikkun olam repudiated these hubristic interpretations, stressing that the concept came from the Aleinu prayer, in which the Jewish people collectively pray for God to ‘remove all idols from the Earth, and to completely cut off all false gods; to repair the world.’

As I learned it, these idols include man’s unending faith in himself to fix the world.

The debate about rewilding is the like the debate about tikkun. Ecomodernists have declared that ‘this is the earth we have created’, so we should ‘manage it with love and intelligence’ to create ‘new glories’.

They call this ‘rewilding’. But rewilding is not about continuing technical domination; it is about removing the idols of Progress, the dams, the roads, the corporations — and this includes man’s unending faith in himself.

Many ecological philosophers and conservationists have already tackled the problems with ecomodernism. Eileen Crist writes:

Importantly, modern development proceeds by converting and exploiting a massive portion of the natural world, and that particular portion is not one humanity is decoupled from. The portion of the biosphere that modernization assimilates, humanity is and will be very much coupled with; except that “coupled” is hardly the right word — comprehensively dominated is a more accurate depiction […] On all fronts, industrial food production is a ruthless, machine-mediated subjugation of land and seas as well as of wild and domestic beings.

But Crist critiques ecomodernism from the perspective of bio- or ecocentrism — the original philosophical justifications Dave Foreman and others gave for rewilding — and ecocentrism, too, has some problems. It is a strain of ethics in the Deep Ecology tradition that argues that nature has intrinsic moral worth.

Theorists argue over the unit of moral worth — is it the organism, the ecosystem, the biosphere? — but the end result usually looks the same: ecocentrists protect nature because nature is deserving of their moral consideration.

And when they are against civilisation, they are against it for the sake of nature. Among other things, this idea leaves room wide-open for decoupling strategies.

The ecomodernists are right: under this version of ecocentrism, accelerating the development of civilisation is desirable if it results in more wild lands. It can only be rejected if we proudly claim that the whole point of preserving the wild is because we want to experience and ideally live in wilder conditions. And there are even bigger problems with the philosophy.

Some argue that ecocentrism follows an observable trend of humans expanding their altruistic capabilities from the band to the tribe to the nation and now to all of humanity. The next step, clearly, is to include non-human life.

But this argument ignores an important point: an expanded ‘moral circle‘ depends on and is the result of civilised infrastructure.

Biologists have found that altruism in organisms, while an important part of their evolutionary strategy, evolves to only a limited degree. In humans, it seems as though natural altruism is limited to about 150 people, after which groups need to devise rules, rituals, and other regulatory mechanisms to maintain cohesion.

Of course, the exact number is irrelevant. The issue is that altruism beyond a certain point has to be instilled. This is the difference between solidarity — the altruism of natural man — and civility: the altruism of civilised man.

Norbert Elias writes about a historical example of moral cultivation in the first volume of his magnum opus The Civilizing Process. Elias argues that, instead of simply adopting European social mores, the people of the Middle Ages underwent a long period of education that shaped their behaviour through shame, guilt, disgust, and other such feelings.

For instance, Elias reviews several etiquette manuals and points out that commands now reserved for children were being issued, regularly, to adults.

People of the Middle Ages had to be told not to defecate on staircases and curtains, not to touch their privates in public, not to greet someone who is relieving themselves, not to examine their handkerchief after blowing into it, not to use various pieces of public fabric as handkerchiefs, not to use their eating spoon to serve food, not to offer food that they have bitten into, not to stir sauce with their fingers…

Beyond direct instruction, European society also developed taboos around sex, defecation, and urination; they passed laws; and they made non-compliance of cosmic importance by employing Christian dogma. In other words, the European ‘second nature’ developed only through multiple, interlocking systems and over a long period of time.

Elias argues that instilling a second nature into Europeans became necessary because right around the same time the patchwork of feuda

l territories, chiefdoms, and cities were being consolidated into much larger state-based societies. Nowadays, with states and their systems of education already established, a large-scale social transformation is unnecessary, and citizens usually go through the same processes of education in their youth.

Today the dominant ideology of global civilisation, in terms of power, is secular humanism. Among other things, this asserts that all of humanity belongs to a single moral community, and that each member of this community has a moral obligation to recognise all others’ rights and intrinsic dignity, which, conveniently, includes the right to live industrially.

This is the ideology preached by the United Nations, universities, NGOs, and progressive corporations like Facebook. Connectedness between people becomes an important goal; development, another.

The ideology is sustained by civilised infrastructure, like mass communication and transportation systems. Without it, humanism is untenable. Ecocentrism would be similarly untenable, because it further enlarges the moral circle to include non-humans. The trick, however, is to reject the artificial moralities completely.

Let me be clear. Solidarity, cooperation and altruism in small, natural social groups, is necessary for human flourishing. The human animal needs mates, parents, peers, elders to go beyond simply surviving and to live well.

But civility must be instilled; it is a technological modification.

Consider Freud’s thoughts on the matter in Civilisation and Its Discontents, in which he writes that one of the characteristic elements of civilisation is ‘..the manner in which the relationships of men to one another, their social relationships, are regulated — relationships which affect a person as a neighbour, as a source of help, as another person’s sexual object, as a member of a family and of a State’ (much like social manners began to be regulated in the Middle Ages).

But Freud warns that the repressed elements of human nature may express themselves in two ways. On the one hand, these desires might be redirected toward problems within civil life ‘… and so may prove favourable to a further development of civilisation.’

On the other hand, these desires ‘may also spring from the remains of their original personality, which is still untamed by civilisation and may thus become the basis … of hostility to civilisation.

The urge for freedom, therefore, is directed against particular forms and demands of civilisation or against civilisation altogether.’ Rewilding cannot be about trying to create a particular form of civilisation, like expanding its concept of justice to include non-humans.

Rewilding will involve casting off the chains of artificial regulations that currently bind our ‘original personality, which is still untamed’.

This kind of rewilding won’t look at all like the kind that is found on websites with e-stores, on Instagram profiles, or in lifestyle magazines. It will, in fact, be regarded extremely negatively.

For instance, in 1785 a group of freed and runaway slaves and white indentured servants settled in a wilderness area now known as Indianapolis. Peter Lamborn Wilson writes:

They mingled with Pawnee Indians and took up a nomadic life modeled on that of local hunter-gatherer tribes. Led by a ‘king’ and ‘queen,’ Ben and Jennie Ishmael, […] they were known as fine artisans, musicians and dancers, abstainers from alcohol, practitioners of polygamy, non-Christian, and racially integrated […]

By about 1810 they had established a cycle of travel that took them annually from Indianapolis (where their village gradually became a city slum) through a triangle formed by the hamlets of Morocco and Mecca in Indiana and Mahomet in Illinois …

Later ‘official’ white pioneers detested the Ishmaels, and apparently the feeling was mutual. From about 1890 comes this description of an elder: ‘He is an anarchist of course, and he has the instinctive, envious dislike so characteristic of his people, of anyone in a better condition than himself.’ […]

The observer continues: ‘He abused the law, the courts; the rich, factories — everything.’ The elder stated that ‘the police should be hanged’; he was ready, he said, to burn the institutions of society. ‘I am better than any man that wears store clothes.’

Are we ready to be viewed like the Ishmaels?

Live WildRewilding is an excellent framework for people who want to abandon civilisation, but it’s time to take it seriously. We cannot engage in the error of lifestylism — we must leave the zoo to rewild, and we must hold humans to the same standard as non-humans.

And we cannot mistake rewilding for a progressive project — the point is to decrease the stronghold of artificial systems, not increase it. Foreman, in the first newsletter for Earth First!, put it well: ‘Not blind opposition to progress, but wide-eyed opposition to progress!’

• John Jacobi is a part of the Wild Will Project.
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