Driving home from my cousin’s wedding in North Carolina, Jason and I spent most of our time winding through the mountains of West Virginia. Until you’ve been there yourself, you cannot comprehend how appropriate - or understated - the state motto, “wild and wonderful,” truly is. The Appalachias are at their most dramatic in West Virginia: steep, tree-laden peaks surpass the clouds as mist rises up from the valleys below. And if that wasn’t enough, the mountains appeared to be flamboyantly showing off for us; we stopped at an overlook just in time to see a double rainbow stretching above two mountains. We saw two more rainbows on that same trip. West Virginia natives often refer to the state as “almost heaven.” Just from what I could see from the highway, all I can say is, “almost?”

But obviously, the astonishing natural beauty is not the thing most people think of when someone mentions West Virginia. The mountains do burst with an extraordinary diversity of plants and animals… but the insides of them are routinely hollowed out for coal. There is a great deal of wilderness in the state… but that’s because most deforestation occurs due to the building of new homes, and many rural West Virginian residents are too poor to afford new homes. It’s the darker side of West Virginia that most people out-of-state tend to focus on, and let’s face it, it’s hard not to. Jason and I took an off-highway “shortcut” that, thanks to winding mountain roads, ended up adding two hours to our trip. We wound past trailer parks containing trailers that had entire halves rusted off and replaced with hand-cut logs. We saw shantytowns with dilapidated shacks and tents, the likes of which I’d never seen outside of documentaries about third world nations. I couldn’t comprehend this kind of poverty existing in the United States anytime after the Great Depression. And yet, here it was. The most heartbreaking poverty among the most awe-inspiring natural surroundings you can imagine.

What’s most fascinating about this contrast is that, if these people living in shacks and rusted old trailers stopped relying on civilization for their well-being and started hunting and gathering, they would live like kings. I can’t imagine how the indigenous people of West Virginia must have lived before the white man came. What was it like when people took full advantage of the bounty of the mountains? Unfortunately, shopping center and official state tourist trap Tamarack (The Best of West Virginia! The greatest place on Earth! You love Tamarack. You will give your firstborn child to Tamarack. All hail Tamarack in its divine, spiky-roofed glory!) didn’t offer much information about the Native Americans of the region. But it’s not hard to imagine Kwakiutl-like chiefdoms arising purely out of foraging. It’s just that lush.

This is the kind of thing people tend not to talk about when defending civilization. The most infamously impoverished people in the United States have a richly diverse ecosystem literally in their own backyards. The stereotypical coal miner from West Virginia doesn’t have to work himself to death in order to keep his family’s heads just above water. Even the subsistence farmer doesn’t have to farm. But then, none of us have to. That is, after all, the myth that keeps us all imprisoned within civilization: the belief that we need the system. When you sit down and think about it, it’s really incredibly inefficient. The rural West Virginian works 8 hours a day or more doing something that has nothing to do with aquiring food for herself. She is then given pieces of paper that represent the necessities and luxuries of life, which she in turn exchanges for necessities and luxuries obtained by other people. She then goes home to her humble trailer - the best she can afford - nestled within mountains bursting with food. All that is required is 2 or 3 hours a day to hunt and gather it. And yet, the West Virginian - the civilized person - stays chained to this bizarre maze that we all race through just to stay alive.

Why do we do it? In My Ishmael, Daniel Quinn points out that schools never teach civilized children even the basics of wilderness survival. We graduate from college completely ignorant of that which primitive children know instinctively by the age of 12 or so. Schools do nothing better than take up time; steal precious seconds and minutes and hours and days of childrens’ lives teaching them the most important skill they’ll need in civilization: how to sit down, shut up, and do as you’re told. Schools take up so much time teaching this skill, in fact, that children barely have any time to learn survival skills on the side. Even if we don’t want to rely on the system, we have to out of ignorance. Whether we’re ignorant of any other way to live or ignorant of how to live another way, we’re not leaving.

But it’s not just ignorance that keeps us from being free. Even those who know how to hunt and fish, and even which plants are edible or medicinal, do such things only on vacation; most of their time is still spent at work. And when asked if they might like to live in tribes, they balk in sheer horror. They insist that tribal peoples live hard lives, full of pain and suffering and endless work. Yes, it must be very difficult, having to do all the things that civilized people do while relaxing on vacation.

In the end, we’re trapped by our own beliefs. We believe the earth to be harsh and unforgiving, even when it presents us with unimaginable bounty. We believe in the necessity of the system, even when it proves more difficult to remain within it than to leave it. We believe it so strongly that we’re willing to suffer our entire lives just for the possibility of moving up the socioeconomic food chain. But I’d like to offer a challenge to anyone who argues that it has to be that way: go down to West Virginia and tell them that.