Where Have All the Savages Gone?
by Jason GodeskyOn Wednesday, Ran Prieur discussed Ted’s article, “Truly Wild,” from his blog, Free Range Organic Human.” Ted makes some excellent points, and he wants to know, “This concept of ‘rewilding’ is anyone really trying to achieve it?” Ran Prieur wants to know the same thing: “Indeed, why hasn’t a single primitivist yet walked the ideology? Why hasn’t a single wilderness survival master gone full-time?”
It can be hard for revolutionaries when the revolution doesn’t happen as quickly as we expect it to. We succumb to depression, even misanthropy, as Ted did in an entry he posted the very next day, “Misanthropic Thoughts.” Ran Prieur, too, begins to suspect that it’s simple human nature.
I’m coming around to the idea that going primitive, like marrying a movie star or climbing Mt. Everest, is one of those things that everybody feels the desire to do, but almost nobody would actually enjoy doing. Even permaculture homesteaders are usually disappointed. I don’t really enjoy going up to my land—it’s just an investment to get free apples and cherries and have a chance to survive a hard crash. This all makes me wonder where humans are going. Maybe the easiest way for us to go back to nature is to go extinct and come back as something else.
Am I the only one who isn’t surprised? I’m not surprised that no one has yet succeeded, and I’m not surprised that many of those who have been plugging away at the grand project of rewilding have become discouraged. Brent Ladd, who wrote an excellent, must-read for any primitivist, “Realities of Going Primitive,” no longer lives primitively. His article highlights some of the material difficulties. No, contrary to the romantic notions of anarcho-primitivist imagination, none of them feature the oppression of hostile government; they do, however, feature the blindness of government to the possiiblity of primitive life.
Modern society and its disdain for the primitive do something that always seems to be just over the ridge. It is impossible to hide from its ever searching eye and I am often humming Greg Brown’s song “Ain’t there no place away….” I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but fear and misinformation has bred a gargantuate monster of regulations, laws and codes that can be aggravating to the would-be primitive. I’ve already spoken of hunting/trapping limitations with DNR officials who are armed to the teeth. I may be a bit paranoid, but after we had built our lodges, it seemed that air traffic directly over our shelters picked up immensely. Maybe just intrigued pilots or maybe some surveillance by government officials? Several times we’ve had groups of F-16 fighter jets storm the tree tops above our lodges.
It is not only being watched and the hunting regulations that aggravate me, but there is also the issue of housing codes and zoning nightmares. Social Services once threatened friends of mine who were residing in a wigwam with their children that the children would be taken away unless they were in a house that met zoning codes. This meant they had to have tar paper on the roof, a wooden floor, no open fire, and a thing called a “rat wall.”
Ladd’s suggestion is true: education about the possibility of primitive life could go a long way to alleviating these problems, but it is essentially an intractable problem. Civilization cannot co-exist with other societies, and so long as civilization is in a state of anabolic growth, no escape is possible.
Is it any wonder, then, that no one has succeeded in rewilding for very long? Civilization is still in anabolic growth. That state is breaking down—for all the reasons we’ve explored in depth on this weblog—but it is not yet broken, or perhaps more accurately, there is still a system of anabolic growth counter-balancing the already system trend of catabolic collapse. While the anabolic growth system is weakening, the catabolic collapse system is strengthening. When catabolic collapse supercedes anabolic growth—and only then—will the window of opportunity open for rewilding.
That is generally what we’ve called “collapse” here: when that window of opportunity opens. We’ve predicted that window to be something like 2012-2015, or thereabouts. But by the same token, if we approach the process of rewilding as solely a question of practical skills, we are lost. Our domestication entailed far more than just the destruction of our bodies and the atrophy of our independence; it also entailed the enslavement of our minds, the separation of mind and body, the profound mistrust of our senses, and our abandonment to a purely human discourse when the intuitive, anthropomorphic voices of animals and plants and rocks and rivers fall silent, and all we can hear are our own voices, talking to ourselves.
I haven’t made up my mind about Tamarack Song. There’s a lot of good things I hear about from the Teaching Drum (Wikipedia); they’re the only full-immersion, year-long program I know of, for instance. At the same time, I hear many terrible things about them, with regards to cultural appropriation (see “New Age Frauds and Plastic Shamans,” or “Native Religions and ‘Plastic Medicine Men’“). I do know that some of his most ardent critics—such as those from “As the Teaching Drum Turns“—have not impressed me at all (one of them had quite a bit to share with us in response to, “Neoshamanism is Masturbation“). My own attempts to rediscover our shamanic heritage while avoiding cultural appropriation most recently led me to Merlin, for example. But, despite all this, I can appreciate several things Tamarack Song has written, taken by themselves. This one, especially, speaks to me:
I’m going to give you all some straight talk, in hopes that it will help to steer you on to a track might get you somewhere. The reality of the situation is that I have not met, or heard of, a single person in the past 40 years who has used the approaches that we have been talking about, who has been able to return to primitive living. This includes the authors of the popular books. Yeah, they might talk a good talk, but look at what they’ve actually done—a month in the mountains, a solo year in the woods, some time in Alaska—is that really living the Old Way? Where is the clan? Where are the elders? The children? Where is the example and clan memories to learn from?
Why didn’t it work for them, and why won’t it work for you? Because they carried civilization with them into the wilderness, and you likely will as well. You can learn all the skills you want, and The Mother will spit you back out just about as fast as you went in. The more stubborn individuals will last a few months or maybe a year, but rest assured, they’ll be back.
Why? Because they didn’t do their work. We come from a technological society, so we naturally think that substituting primitive technology for civilized technology is our doorway. The only problem is that Native people are not into technology. They spend only a couple hours a day providing for their simple needs, and they mostly use simple means. Look at their tools—few and crude, and their craftwork — basic and utilitarian. What a Native person excels at is what I call qualitative skills—how to sit in a circle with your clan mates and speak your truth, how to find your special talent so that you can develop it to serve your people, how to use your intuition, the ways of honor and respect, how to live in balance with elders and women and children, how to speak in the language beyond words, how to befriend fear and live love. Without these skills, you will surely die. Or else you’ll go back to the life that shuns these skills.
We are not merely domesticated for want of skills, or for ignorance of how to feed or protect ourselves. The most difficult chains to break are the ones we carry in our minds: our blindness and deafness to the animate world, screaming with life all around us. Recently, I’ve been reading David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous, and though I haven’t yet finished it, it has already blasted open my mind to the living spirits all around me. How can we ever become part of an ecology, become native to a place, take part in the spirit of that place, if we are deaf to the voices of that place, and blind to the life of that place? The chains are strong, but subtle; we have been domesticated so long, we don’t even see them.
So, is it any surprise that no one has yet succeeded in the project of rewilding?
I agree with much of what Ted said:
Truly wild people make cries like that. They can produce a primal war cry that totally scares the shit out of civilized people. What it did to me though was draw me. It shocked me that it affected me that way. I couldn’t believe it appealed to me. At the time I was way more suppressed then I am now. Wild people are scary. The wild is scary.
Where does that come from? Part of it comes from the independence born of the knowledge and self-assurance that he can provide his own food, make his own clothes and shelter and tools, and that he is dependent on no one but himself, but part of it also comes from the fact that he knows he is part of a vast world screaming with life all around him. It is not a belief; animists do not “believe” in spirits. They believe only in their own experience. They have not learned to doubt their own experience, as we have.
People like Ran and Ted, and I hope us at the Tribe of Anthropik as well, have helped sow the seeds of a rewilded, feral humanity, but the growing season has not yet come. These two aspects of rewilding cannot be separated, because there is no separation between the mind and the body. They are inseparably one; they must be rewilded as such.
So, it is far too early to despair and grow misanthropic. The window of opportunity is just now beginning to open.
Thanks for this great piece and the reminder to re-read David Abram’s excellent book that I read some years ago.
Comment by BeyondCiv — 25 August 2006 @ 6:11 PM
i can understand where your coming from, though personally i think your confusing the beauty of life with magic.
Comment by truekaiser — 25 August 2006 @ 7:55 PM
Then you don’t understand what magic is. I’m almost finished with David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous, so hopefully, soon, I’ll be able to put it into a crystallized form, but reading this book has really blasted my brain open. Civilization’s left us with some awfully odd ideas about magic. When your idea of “magic” is so bizarre, you might even come away thinking it doesn’t even exist….
Comment by Jason Godesky — 25 August 2006 @ 8:33 PM
i do kind of look forward to how you will explain what your own personal definition of ‘magic’ is.
what i do know is what has been mistaken for magic in the past. this includes everything from mind altering compounds. to systems both natural and man-made that people do not understand how they work so they attribute a supernatural being/entity/spirit to it. i understand this and it doesn’t detract from the beauty the natural world. the intangible feeling you describe and claim with some good proof that civilization lacks is the sense of personal value of nature and one’s place in nature.
Comment by truekaiser — 25 August 2006 @ 9:25 PM
I’m sorry, I’m sure this sounds terribly conceited and dismissive, but my brain hasn’t been blown this wide open since I read Ishmael (I wrote about the effect that had on me a year and a half ago). It’s going to take some time to put all of this in order in my own mind. I heartily recommend Abram’s book, of course, so you might get a straight answer (and certainly a more complete one) more quickly simply by reading it for yourself, or the abbreviated first chapter online, “The Ecology of Magic,” for a very abbreviated taste, but I now know that our idea of “magic” is extremely superficial. We look at the effects of animism, but we cut out its heart. I now also know that the heart of animism is simply believing in your own experience. We departed from that so long ago, that we no longer remember how to trust our own bodies, but that’s what animism is all about. Magic is simply the result of that: it’s what happens when you trust your experience, and interact with the world around you. A sense of awe for the world around you is part of that, but it goes well beyond that. It’s not just awe, it’s communication, and even conspiracy.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 25 August 2006 @ 10:02 PM
In my time at Teaching Drum I found that it was utterly unproductive to force myself into learning skills and being out in the woods when I was spiritually unprepared for it. In Tamarack’s quote he puts the focus on spiritual maturity, which can be pursued in many contexts, not just the so-called primitive. Paradoxically, pursuing a foundation of spiritual maturity has , for me, meant withdrawing from the woods and focusing on grounding and building myself while “safe” within civilization.
Comment by David — 26 August 2006 @ 11:33 AM
Perhaps in our disdain for the culture/civilization that exists we have been quick to polarize our views, although they are not in line with our conditioning, nor our spiritual progress?
Dissonance is a key factor in developmental theory, and critical scarcity will propel us toward a more primitive living, although the mental habits & knowledge of this twisted civilization likely will not leave us in short order. Only if you can learn to live in the present moment more fully, our memories often empower us, but they also can become a prison. Some prisoners break free, can’t handle the freedom and look to get arrested again–for the control/ease/and of the prison system, perhaps we are like that as well–only after there is no prison to go back to, will any large numbers of people likely “re-wild” in a significant manner.
My soul screams daily, yet rarely does my voice reflect it. Perhaps I’m am a bit too civilized, but I am what I am, but I’m open to something different, and willing to take the steps on my own, without the world forcing ‘the change’.
Be well~
Comment by Bubba — 26 August 2006 @ 12:25 PM
Jason,
I have a question for you. Do you invision rewilding as somthing taking place for humanity as a whole? When the time is right?
So that we go from being domesticated as a species to eventually wild as a species in a relatively short period of time?
I don’t see it that way. I think the crash might not be that sudden. I think people will have to choose to live wild even in the wake of peak oil. I think Europe won’t even be very affected by the oil crash, the third world won’t be much worse off than it is now.
I think it may be the case that the wilderness will have to be taken back. Civilization is what 6000 years old?
If the crash sets us back by a thousand years, which I doubt, there will still be civilization.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 26 August 2006 @ 1:46 PM
Jason,
I also want to say that I am really excited about what you said about animism. There is much to be said about it in the topic of rewilding. It is the default spirituality of wild people wherever they are on the globe, from the Arctic to Papua New Guinea.
I am really looking forward to hearing more of your insights on that as you digest that book you mentioned.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 26 August 2006 @ 1:51 PM
About Tamarack Song:
I got bad vibes from the website. I sensed it wasn’t for me. At the same time I have read articles I liked from people who went there, so I don’t want to bash it. I can’t see the merit of creating a website just to bash it.
I think this cultural appropriation thing is a touchy subject. On the one hand I see the point the Native Americans are making. On the other hand, I lived surrounded by three Indian reservations and recieved plenty of cold hard hateful stares from Indians, because I am white. Not from everybody, but similar to my reception in black inner city neighborhoods.
I really don’t know how to handle that type of thing. Do I owe blacks and indians an apology? I am a wage slave, not an aristocrat.
Can I admire aspects of black culture and aspects of Native American spirituality and incorporate them into myself? Is that a copywrite violation or somthing?
Comment by Ted Heistman — 26 August 2006 @ 2:15 PM
hey jason,i had a similar reaction to spell of the sensuous,moved to the point of going to the university of nev ada/reno to hear abhram speak.i must re-read as there are just a few books out there that should be lifelong companions.thanx for your insights!
dan
Comment by Anonymous — 26 August 2006 @ 2:54 PM
David — I’m afraid I’m just as suspicious of the all-spiritual approach, too. I can’t even say I’m preaching a balance, because the two are one and the same. If you’re looking for hierarchies in the natural world, and can’t appreciate the connections and interplay between living things, you’re not going to do very well hunting, or gathering wild edibles, but by the same token, how can you foster that kind of sense when you live in a hierarchical world of solely human interaction, uninformed by the non-human communities around you? It seems to me that in animism, praxis is dogma, and vice versa. They are inseperable. This seems, to me, the very root of animism.
Ted — Define “humanity as a whole.” In 100 years, I think most of the speices will be wild again … but not because of any kind of mass awakening. It will happen because collapse will destroy the systems domesticated humans rely upon, so we’ll have a stark choice: go feral, or die. I think a lot more people will bumble into a rewilded life on accident just trying to survive, than there will be people who actively pursue it, but I think actively pursuing it will lead to a much easier transition. I expect to see permacultural villages in the Bible Belt, where Jesus becomes an animist savior, for instance. People will pick up these beliefs simply because there’s no other way: these beliefs are formed by the daily experience of a wild human, and nothing else. To not be an animist when you live wild would be the kind of cognitive dissonance that very few can tolerate: just like trying to live as an animist inside civilization is a cause for terrible cognitive dissonance.
Collapses always happen suddenly. That’s the way complexity works. Collapse, like anabolic growth, is a self-reinforcing process. It speeds itself up. Now, there is always an element that clings on, in a reduced state, sometimes for centuries, and I think we’ll still have a few pockets of civilization even in 100 or 200 years. And if you want to say that it hasn’t collapsed yet because a few cities are still clinging on, I suppose you can, but I’ve argued in many previous articles why collapse happens quickly, and why it happens so quickly in all of our existing examples. We’re not talking about anything as simple as “set back 1000 years,” we’re talking about a catabolic cycle that this time has no end but the Paleolithic. Where else could we stop? I know many peak oil followers think about an agrarian life, but they miss the reason we switched over to nitrogen fertilizers in the first place: we’d turned the last of our farmland to desert. For 10,000 years, agriculture was a race to claim more land before the old land gave out, and in 1960, we reached the end of that race: all the possible farm land on earth had finally given out. The Dust Bowl was nothing less than the desertification of the Great Plains. We no longer farm soil, the soil won’t support it: no, now we farm a layer of oil we lay down on top of dead soil. When the oil’s gone, what will we farm? Civilization isn’t simply supported by sheer inertia, it needs to be fed. Where will people get their food? I talked about a lot of this in thesis #29, where I laid out a lot of the evidence for this. Collapse will be complete this time, for the simple fact that we’ve devoured all the resources, and there’s nothing left to support a small civilization anymore.
On cultural appropriation, it seems you and I are of a very similar mind, Ted.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 26 August 2006 @ 4:24 PM
Jason,
I see no conflict between what you’re saying and what I’m saying, except perhaps in angle of approach: Right now I’ve put on hold the effort to foster that outward awareness because my attention is on healing the wounds I made in trying to force an outward awareness while neglecting inner needs. It’s like fixing a cracked window before you can see out of it. I think that’s important. If we’re blinded to the world around us, then we’re also blinded to ourselves and our own deeper natures. Developing awareness of one eventually and inevitably leads to awareness of the other, since they are indeed inseparable.
And if anyone is to succeed in “rewilding,” i.e. in breaking out of our familiar state of being in the world, then I think that, since we all come from and are deeply affected by a system of hierarchical domination, it’s imperative to engage and address the internal wounds that the system has caused, so that we don’t inadvertently repeat the same negative patterns in a new milieu.
Comment by David — 26 August 2006 @ 9:16 PM
No, I don’t see much conflict, either, David. I only know what you wrote, so I’m cautioning what might be a tip in balance to the other extreme—not that you have, only that your previous comment had the potential.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 26 August 2006 @ 9:20 PM
Jason:
I’ve written and erased a couple different comments here, just because I don’t want to offend or sound condescending, but hell. I really feel like you’ve stepped into the world I struggle in, and it makes me happy to have another brother here, in the land of natural awe.
Living in the city and trying to keep a semblance of animist sanity - anyone trying it deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
Next I’ll get you to take up animal tracking goddamnit! The first true animist science!
Comment by Willem — 28 August 2006 @ 2:55 AM
[quote]If you’re looking for hierarchies in the natural world, and can’t appreciate the connections and interplay between living things, you’re not going to do very well hunting, or gathering wild edibles, but by the same token, how can you foster that kind of sense when you live in a hierarchical world of solely human interaction, uninformed by the non-human communities around you? It seems to me that in animism, praxis is dogma, and vice versa. They are inseperable. This seems, to me, the very root of animism.
[/quote]
by the by, in case you haven’t seen it, this explains one way you explore resolving that particular conundrum:
http://trackersnw.com/html/nw/ppac.php
and an article on the camp…
http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/Content?oid=51732&category=34029
Comment by Willem — 28 August 2006 @ 3:11 AM
Oh, come now, Willem, I’ve been on this wavelength for a while, though David Abram just pulled me deeper in than I ever thought there was. I’ve been doing a bit of tracking for years now, though I’m only now learning to hunt.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 August 2006 @ 9:32 AM
Plenty of people live most of their days in a very civilized manner, yet are able to go out an hunt very successfully. Humans can become engaged in the present moment, not only during crisis but in a purposeful manner as well.
I hunted when I was younger, and there is a difference depend on what tool you have, gun, bow, knife etc. But I think too many people are overemphasizing the difficulty of some basic human abilities, that can be learned fairly quickly.
I think its evident that civilization has taught too many of us, to think far too much, especially in regards to taking mental positions on topics that sometimes may be talking about who can grasp the wind.
I hope that what I see on many of these type of sites, are just people attempting to overthink, fearmonger, and overdramatize the types of things most aren’t very familiar with.
Plant identification for foraging is something that requires more practice & knowledge, and likely will be your more reliable source than merely trying to hunt game, people kill animals all the time, often with their cars.
Comment by Bubba — 28 August 2006 @ 9:52 AM
Foraging wild edibles is something we’ve already been doing, but most extant foragers live primarily on hunted game. The !Kung are an exception, but because they’re so often romanticized as the “ideal” hunter-gatherer, and because Richard Lee’s studies were so deeply biased by !Kung data, it circulated for a while that foragers relied primarily on gathered plants, even leading some people to talk about “gatherer-hunters.” In fact, when Cordain did a more cross-cultural study, [PDF] it was shown that forager diets are anywhere from 56–65% to nearly 100% of the energy in their diets came from animal sources.
I agree that the skills are fairly easy to learn, and much depends on the tool you use. I think it can be very useful to learn on modern tools—learn to hunt with a rifle, learn to fish with a rod, etc.—and then move on to increasingly primitive tools. This fall, I’ll be taking Pennsylvania’s Hunter-Trapper Education course, getting my first license, and hunting with a rifle. At the same time, I’m going to be practicing at targets with a modern bow. Eventually, I’ll get up to bowhunting with a modern bow, while I work on making my first primitive bows. After that, it’s off to hunting with primitive bows, atlatls, bulas, and other tools I make myself, off my own land.
I agree most of us overthink these things, but it is a great deal to change. Fortunately, the changes complement one another. Hunting and gathering reinforces an animist mindset, and an animist mindset makes you a better hunter-gatherer. Learning how is easy, and mastery is something we’ll be doing for the rest of our lives.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 August 2006 @ 10:10 AM
Hey –
Back to that forager topic again…
Even IF you are right and that percentage of plant/animal food products is based on volume (I still suspect it is based on calories), remember that ALL of your trace vitamins and minerals will come from plants. And unless you pick a very different place to live, that will have to come in the form of foraging (you won’t want to eat partially digested grass from deer stomache, the way that the inuit eat partially digested seaweed, etc, I suspect)
That being said, the amount of time spent foraging may well tend to be equal or higher even for cultures predominantly meat fed.
Janene
Comment by janene — 28 August 2006 @ 11:30 AM
Sure, like I said, we’ve been gathering wild edibles for a while now. It’s the part of foraging that takes an encyclopedia in your brain, the part that takes massive rote memorization, and so forth. It’s where you get your vitamins and minerals from. I’m not saying you can have a healthy lifestyle without wild edibles at all. What I am saying is that it’s not an energy source or a protein source–those both come from meat. You need wild edibles, but it’s not the bulk of the forager diet. It’s a crucial component, but it doesn’t comprise the bulk. Meat does. Meat provides energy and protein for a forager. Wild edibles provide vitamins and minerals. You’re not going to go very long without a good helping of both.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 August 2006 @ 11:37 AM
I think the way it works is the men generaly hunt and the women generally forgage. I agree about the diet of hunter gatherers mostly being meat. I also think its porportional to how far north you are, the farther north the more meat. Finally you get to the inland Inuit that subsisted entirely on caribou and fish. Its seems impossible but they eat organs not just the meat and that gives them the vitamins. But that far North it is really hard to survive, becaue game is porportionally really scarce considering the area. Very little game stretched out over hundreds of miles.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 28 August 2006 @ 11:44 AM
Also I think in more southern areas, it is a matter of calories vs. volume coming from plants. The men could come back empty handed from hunting and rely on the efforts of the women, but when the hunters were successful there was a big pay off in calories.
So in a way the hunting was not as efficient on a day to day basis. More like feast or famine.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 28 August 2006 @ 11:51 AM
Ted’s pretty much got it. Inuit would even scrape the insides of caribou stomach for greens. As for closer to the tropics, that’s rather what Cordain overturned: even in lower latitudes, meat still constitutes more than half of the diet. Not necessarily big game; small game can be easier to catch, and more reliable.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 August 2006 @ 12:00 PM
My concern is not what native foragers did, but what most of us living in the 1st world, such as the US will be able to do.
A mix of both makes intuitive sense of course, in addition to providing nutrition fundamentals.
The issue for me is, that hanging your prospects on having a steady supply of animal meat (particularly the animals with some good fat in them) is going to be problematic.
Rabbits, deer, and chipmunks maybe but all are pretty damn lean. Relying on more plant sources for food will likely just be a practical neccessity. Especially if your hypothesis doesn’t hold, and more people than you think look to whats left of the woods for food sources.
Thats why if you don’t plan on starting off as a wandering hunter-gatherer type, you might want to get some chickens, the eggs give you some good minerals, in addition to the eggs.
Learning all of the above mentioned certainly is good, but i suppose it goes again to your ecological environment, how everything plays out in the years to come. But with the current trajectory of ecological destruction/encroachment, planning on having regular wild game to eat, especially low-fat/calorie protein type animals likely will not work too well.
Plus, we go back to the unspoken, 1% of folks who could even possibly survive this way as a pure hunter-gatherer, which doesn’t empower the spirit too much?
Comment by Bubba — 28 August 2006 @ 12:52 PM
In 100 years, foraging will be easy. There is no such thing as a “pure forager,” but the humans of the future are going to look an awful lot, by and large, like the foragers of the past in a lot of significant ways.
The hard part is co-existing with a civilization innately hostile to your existence. That’s the part that takes planning: the part where you have land ownership and bag limits to deal with. During that period, we plan to use a good deal of permaculture as a stepping stone. See “The Escape Plan”
Whether civilization will continue to devastate more land that it lacks the energy to devastate, or hordes of people flock to the woods, these are the kinds of unprecedented things that can’t be predicted. They’ve never happened before (even though there have been many collapses), and seem to defy basic rules of social organization. But they’re unprecedented, so they can’t be predicted: just like we can’t predict if the sun rises in the west tomorrow, or if aliens invade a week from Tuesday. I find little use in worrying about such prospects because of that: there’s nothing that can be done about them, and since they’re unprecedented, they’re also extremely unlikely.
As far as die-off, primitivism is not a cause of die-off, but a strategy to survive it. Die-off is caused by civilization itself. Coming to terms with that will be the great spiritual crisis of our generation, but I think Paula Hay is off to a great start. See “A Mythology for Collapse” (1, 2, 3), and “Astrology of Peak Oil” (1, 2, 3)
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 August 2006 @ 1:07 PM
[quote=Jason]Oh, come now, Willem, I’ve been on this wavelength for a while, though David Abram just pulled me deeper in than I ever thought there was. I’ve been doing a bit of tracking for years now, though I’m only now learning to hunt.[/quote]
Ah well. It came across wrong in the end regardless. We just don’t know each other well enough, I suppose. In any case I celebrate your feeling of going “deeper in than I ever though there was”. Beautiful.
Comment by Willem — 28 August 2006 @ 1:27 PM
Are any of you familiar with Weston Price’s research on the diets of “primative” people? Several comments here touch on the concepts that are brought out in his work. His book (published in 1939) - Nutrition and Physical Degeneration - completely changed how I view food. The Weston A. Price Foundation provides nutrition information based on his work. There is a modern cookbook (based on Price’s work) that I would highly recommend (Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon). It is as much a reference as a cookbook. Fats and fat soluble vitamins are extremely important, organ meats and meats eaten raw are also recommended. There are certain foods that “primative” people include in the diets of both parents prior to conception and also after (for the mother) to insure the health of the child. A lack of fat soluble vitamins causes dental arch deformities as well as other skeletal defects and a host of other problems. After reading Price’s book, you only have to look around and see that most of our population is malnourished. These nutritional principles are crucial to consider if one wants to live off the land and not need modern medical intervention for themselves or their children.
Jan
Comment by Jan M. — 28 August 2006 @ 1:29 PM
Hey –
Yeah… right. Just don’t discount the value of fruits, root vegetables and nuts for highly concetrated energy!
Jan — Weston Price dealt mostly with horticultural and subsistance agriculture peoples as opposed to hunter gatherers. As a result, most of Fallon’s suggestions are strategies for adapting un-healthful agricultural products. Its still quite useful, and I have used anumber of her techniques and suggestions to good effect. But IMO, the best possible thing to remember when choosing your diet is that greater variety will almost always be beneficial.
janene
Comment by janene — 28 August 2006 @ 3:07 PM
“Whether civilization will continue to devastate more land that it lacks the energy to devastate, or hordes of people flock to the woods, these are the kinds of unprecedented things that can’t be predicted. They’ve never happened before (even though there have been many collapses), and seem to defy basic rules of social organization. But they’re unprecedented, so they can’t be predicted: just like we can’t predict if the sun rises in the west tomorrow, or if aliens invade a week from Tuesday. ”
>>I was referring to a more short sighted view, certainly civilization continues to do a good job of destorying/encroaching upon nature, and likely will have the ability to do so for a bit longer anyway, before anytype of catabolic collapse occurs.
Although I understand your basic logical conclusions about precidence, I think the possibility that larger numbers than you might imagine hunting more, is not anything close to the sun not rising etc. I’m quite familiar with some of the survivialist type rednecks, and I’m pretty confident they will be looking to hunt if needed or possible.
I suppose I don’t have your unquestionable faith in the fact that unprecidented occurences aren’t worth at least looking at, asking what if? If you can come up with reasonable what if questions, can be useful and likely will be.
For example, What if more than 1% people think to hunt more as food becomes more scarce? What if the sun didn’t come up tomorrow might be a good question to ask also, if it helps you live your life anybetter today.
Comment by Bubba — 28 August 2006 @ 3:19 PM
Janene - I still stand by my recommendation. If you can recommend another guide for how to eat I would be glad to read it. I’m always looking for information.
I don’t hear anyone else other than those associated with the Weston Price Foundation promoting the value of fat soluble vitamins, and also promoting the use of animal fats and saturated fats (plus promoting eating raw meat, eating the “whole” animal, including bone broths, and soaking/sprouting nuts and seeds).
Have you had a chance to read Price’s book? He documents some of the nutritional wisdom that was lost because of civilization. Has anyone else done anything like this? studying this many different peoples and diets? Eating a variety is good, but it is still possible to be deficient if you neglect certain classes of important foods (and I don’t mean agricultural products), particularly during periods of rapid growth in children and during pre-conception and after. Does anyone else show the importance of the father’s diet prior to conception? Or the importance of spacing children so that the mother has enough time to recover nutritionally before another pregnancy? Seems that if someone wanted a healthy, successful tribe, they would find his work very valuable.
I believe it is counterproductive to get hung up on the fact that *some* of the people he studied were agriculturists. He pointed out that of two tribes in Africa, the ones that were agriculturists were less robust. He did show that all groups ate some animal products and all ate at least some of them raw. They all ate fermented foods.
Fallon tells you how to prepare these types of foods. I haven’t seen this type of info in any other cookbook . If you know of another, I’m interested.
Jan
Comment by Jan M. — 28 August 2006 @ 7:52 PM
I’m quite familiar with Price, as are most people here. You’ll even find the Price Foundation website listed in the “Culture” category of our web links directory. But I have some problems with Price, too. A lot of this was covered in thesis #21.
As for other works, they abound; try looking for things listed under the “Paleolithic Diet.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 August 2006 @ 8:12 PM
Do you reject Price’s work simply because he studied a couple of groups (two, I think) that consumed dairy products? That doesn’t invalidate his work as a whole. I notice on your “Paleolithic Diet” link that there are a couple of articles by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig of WAPF. I couldn’t find any mention of Price or reference to his work in particular in your theses #21. I get that you believe milk is unhealthy. I’m not trying to argue about milk here. That actually has nothing to do with the points I was trying to make.
I had no way of knowing that your people already are familiar with Price (and being familiar isn’t the same as actually reading the book). I tried to search for Price on your site and found that the search function doesn’t work. I’m familiar with the paleo diet and have followed it myself. I was also vegan for a couple of years, so I’ve heard and used all the milk arguements…16 years ago…It’s nothing new to me.
Jan - hey I’d put a smiley here to show that this is intended all friendly and all, but being relatively computer illiterate, I don’t know how to do that.
Comment by Jan M. — 28 August 2006 @ 9:33 PM
Hey Jan –
I think maybe we are experiencing a failure to communicate
Price and Fallon have published some very useful materials. I think few here would disagree with that.
However, I think a lot of folks here ALSO look at it as limiting, in that there is a lot of focus on dairy, grains and legumes — if you don’t eat those things, then the info becomes less useful.
For myself, I do eat some legumes and some dairy, so I do use the fermentation techniques on my beans (having determined that they are fully digestable for me if they are properly fermented) and I try to buy only Organic Non-American Made cheeses: ‘Raw’ Cheese, I believe is produced without any heat, and it makes me ill, however, outside the US, most cheese is made with raw milk, and then processed ‘normally’ and that seems ideal to me.
I have not read Price’s book, only excerpts, web articles and Fallon’s book. So yes, I am sure there is other useful info… its just a question of how applicable… and how much time there is for reading each day divided by number of books to read:-)
Janene
Comment by janene — 29 August 2006 @ 8:34 AM
Weston A price thought that the eskimos and Indians of Northern Alberta were the healthiest of all. If I am not mistaken. I read the book.
They ate lots of raw fat and raw meat. That is why Weston A Price was in favor of drinking raw milk. There is no other source of raw fat in the western diet. The eskimos obviously didn’t drink milk. I think getting enough fat is what primitivists have the most problem with.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 29 August 2006 @ 10:28 AM
Jan — Damn, that’s pretty black and white. I don’t reject Price’s work at all. Why do you think I have a link to the Price Foundation on the site, why do you think he comes up in our discussions so often? I just don’t think he got the whole story. I think he had prejudices and biases that blinded him to some of the ramifications of things like wheat and milk. But in general, I find a lot of his work very valuable–I just don’t take it to be the complete and final word on all there is to know.
I’m glad you’re familiar with the paleo diet and other work that’s been done in similar veins. You said you’d heard of nothing other than Price to address these issues, so I assumed you must not be aware of this vast body of work, since it deals with such things extensively.
But no, I don’t “reject” Price at all. I find his work quite useful. I don’t “reject” Loren Cordain, either, but there’s parts of his work I disagree with, too.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 29 August 2006 @ 10:48 AM
I have decided to try an expiriment and give up dairy after I learned that milk and cereals contian exorphins, which I am no doubt addicted to and pacify myself with on a daily basis.
Who knows what a revolutionary I will be once I get off these pacifying foods?
Comment by Ted Heistman — 29 August 2006 @ 10:48 AM
Janene,
I sympathize with the problem of too many books vs. too little time. I have the same problem myself. We all have our own priorities and interests. My point was only to offer the info to this group as I couldn’t find any reference to it in my perusing of this site.
There is so much in Price’s book that isn’t in Fallon’s book. I didn’t previously consume any dairy products, but now I drink raw milk kefir. Otherwise, my diet is strictly paleo. Prior to reading Price, I was paleo, but had to discontinue fruit (I’m treating for candida). Having been fully indoctrinated in all the vegetarian dogma, Price literally knocked my socks off.
The main value his work has for me is the variety of superfoods that he discovered these various groups using and the common nutrients that they have. Fallon adapts this to the foods available to all westerners. It’s true that fish roe is a great food for the pre-conception and pre-natal/breastfeeding periods, but that isn’t something commonly found here (or affordable). Fallon does tend to focus on foods that we can actually get here and also what people tend to really eat.
The people Price studied went to great lengths to obtain certain “super” foods. I believe we all could benefit from knowing what they are if we wish to have good health for ourselves and our children.
Price’s book is full of pictures of dental deformities caused by improper diet. You could eat paleo and still have these deficiencies if you weren’t careful. I wish I had known all of this sooner. I could have potentially saved my two daughters a lot of misery due to orthodontia and in the case of my older daughter, the misery of wearing a pavlik harness (for her shallow hip socket) when she was a baby. Did my nutrition deficiency cause this? Very likely, I think. At the time I thought I was doing everything right as a vegan…I had certainly read all the books.
Some of the groups Price studied included foods like clay and ash in their diet (to obtain minerals and salt). Fish heads were important for nutrition, particularly in children. The eyes of fish are high in Retinal (vitamin A). Liver is a superfood. Raw meats can provide enough vitamin C to prevent scurvy. This info from Price. His work is a scientific study, whereas Fallon took this work and created a cookbook for the western palate. I found the chapter on raw foods (Fallon’s book) to be very useful myself.
I’ve enjoyed reading your diet related posts elsewhere on this site. I don’t believe we differ all that much philosophically when it comes to food.
Again, the thing that strikes me as so important about Price’s research is that he actually analyzes the content of the foods eaten by healthy modern primitives. This isn’t just a theory about what people of the paleo era ate, this is real data compiled on the habits and health of real people eating foods available today. Despite the impression from Fallon’s book, the emphasis was not primarily on groups eating lots of dairy and grains. His fascination with butter oil came from the discovery that this was a superfood that was available to Americans unlike many of the other super foods. Thus, he used this oil in his experiments and found that in combination with cod liver oil it brought many back from the brink of death. The importance wasn’t that it was butter, but that it contained a factor he called Factor X which was present in all super foods. Of course he would focus on what was actually available as a source of this nutrient. As paleo people, the other super foods would be of primary interest and you would have to read his book to get that info.
Jan
Comment by Jan M. — 29 August 2006 @ 10:52 AM
Jason,
I never said that Price was the final authority on anything, only that he did research unlike any other that I have heard of. I’m still interested if you have a particular reference that you would recommend. The reference to a “vast body of work” does me no good. Name a good book and I will seek it out. I am already reading several books that I found out about from this site.
As I said in my post to Janene, it is Price’s discovery of superfoods as well as the value of raw meat that is particularly important. The other issue that is dealt with in his book is soil depletion. I realize a lot of others talk about this, but this was my first exposure to the issue. Personally I am concerned about the lack of minerals in the soil that feeds the wild game that I eat. You are only as healthy as the soil your food comes from whether that be wild or domestic food.
Regarding biases and prejudices, I don’t know how it is possible to be human and not have them. In reading Price’s book, one has to be ever mindful of the context. That doesn’t invalidate the data, however.
And again, if your search feature worked, then I would have been aware that this subject often came up in your discussions. I tried several times to search…for the very reason of not wishing to be redundant. I have read quite a bit here already, but only discovered your site a few days ago.
And…in reading about your paleo diet experiment, I can’t help but be confused about how you condemn grains and milk, yet are willing to consume Splenda? You must be aware of what Mercola says about artificial sweeteners?
Personally, I’ve found that foods such as sauerkraut (I make mine salt free using a culture from Body Ecology and it tastes like a salad) and coconut oil are very helpful when eating low carb. Tangy foods help curb the craving for sweets and the coconut oil gives energy and is very digestible, plus it kills the various bad bugs that can tend to live in our gut. Anyway, I wish you success in your attempt to change your eating patterns and lose weight.
And…part of the reason that I even consume dairy now is because I had to give up fruit and I’m trying to keep my weight up while keeping my blood sugar down and also treating candida. I’m also seeking the probiotic benefit of the kefir. I actually became underweight by eating paleo. We each have our individual issues and health considerations to deal with. There is no one right way to eat for everyone.
Despite my appearance here as possibly confrontational, that isn’t the intent. I do very much enjoy your writing.
Jan
Comment by Jan M. — 29 August 2006 @ 11:54 AM
On the topic of rewilding…
I think that there is a very limited segment of society that even has any real options for any sort of permanent walk on the wild side. They are mostly younger people without a lot of social responsibilities. Which is not in any way meant as a denigrating remark.
But, I mean what if your 8 year old really doesn’t want to be wild? Can you imagine getting most 16 year olds to give up MTV, the mall, oh wait and ALL of thier frinds.
H’m and I have to say unless you personally own a piece of property that is big enough to be a year round habitat for a couple of humans, who’s going to let you just hang out on their land without calling the cops. And look at the kind of resouces humans need while they’re being “wild”. I mean a few dozen deer, a bunch of rabbits, lots of fruits, grains, and vegetable. That sort of predation is pretty obvious, especially if it isn’t just one or two people.Remember, vagrancy is technically a crime, so is theft or property damage. Ask the homeless. they get hassled about it enough.
I think the reason no one is going er..rewild, is that it’s actually illegal, impractical, and generally impossible while our current society is based on the concept of ownership. It’s ok to hunt in order to eat, as long as the cow isn’t some farmers. If you’re going to harvest berries, it better be on land where no one minds, etc.
I’ not saying that it’s wrong, but it just won’t work, not right now.
That kinda sucks, but remember that it was a bunch of wild, feuding tribes that caused people to bunch up into societies and make all of these rules in the first place. I mean what if it’s the deer herdthat your kid depends on for food that wild people eat.
Comment by Theresa Smith — 21 September 2006 @ 9:35 PM
Folks here might be interested in some discussions going on here:
http://p081.ezboard.com/fpaleoplanet69529frm75
Comment by RedWolfReturns — 7 February 2007 @ 10:32 PM