It’s not often that we here at Anthropik stumble upon a piece of news that makes us piss our pants in glee. But yesterday, Ran Prieur posted a brief notice about a new movie in which he’s going to appear… a movie that also interviews Daniel Quinn, Derrick Jensen, Richard Heinberg, Chellis Glendinning, Jerry Mander, and Richard Manning. It’s called What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire, and it’s a documentary about everything we’ve been saying for the past three years. Holy vindication, Batman! This might just be the greatest thing since no bread.

John Michael Greer’s post of last week, “Glimpsing the Deindustrial Age,” was a very good one, and it led to a very interesting discussion about the role of agriculture in a sustainable community, one that attracted some attention. I would have liked to continue the discussion there, but after a particularly long post in which I answered the strongest claims fairly conclusively, and even brought the subject back around to Greer’s prefered topic of myth and narrative, my response was deleted. In it, I had suggested that Greer’s comparison of primitivism to mere apocalyptic cults was a caricature, as useless as me highlighting the shared history his worldview has with the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. He took this out of context, and invoked “Godwin’s Law” to delete a thorough post that answered all of his strongest points. Obviously, this is an important discussion to have, but it is equally obvious that Greer will not tolerate open and fair discussion of it on his blog, instructing me to “post elsewhere in the future,” so I am forced to make my response here—and I feel compelled to respond, because already far too many of these points are being taken as “true.”

The Seneca were relative newcomers to the Allegheny Forest—their villages begin to appear only around 1600 CE. The county I live in now, and the forest I hope to move into, both take their names from a river that drains northwestern Pennsylvania, runs south, and joins the Monongahela flowing north from West Virginia to form the Ohio. It gives its name to the mountains as well, contesting “Appalachia” until the late 19th century for the name of the whole eastern continental divide of North America. Some early pioneers even suggested it for the name of the whole continent. This name—Allegheny—comes from the French spelling, and echoes the myth-shrouded predecessors of the Seneca in the Allegheny Forest, most often called the Allegewi.

By its very nature, primitivism must be local. We’ve had a great deal to say about the general theory of primitivism, and that will no doubt contiue, but you may have also noticed an increasingly local focus as we ourselves begin to take an increasingly local focus. And here’s one point where, as Zerzan put it, “the rubber hits the road.” And of course, it’s by its very nature of local interest, so this is especially for all the Pennsylvanians in the audience.

Nearly a year ago, we published “A Pirate’s Life for Me.” It’s become one of our most popular articles (though I suspect that might have more to do with people pirating our bandwidth for that picture of Johnny Depp). It made the case that the pirates’ lasting, romantic allure lay in the fact that they represented a kind of primitivism, or as Captain Bartholomew “Black Bart” Roberts put it, “In an honest Service, there is thin Commons, low Wages, and hard Labour; in this, Plenty and Satiety, Pleasure and Ease, Liberty and Power; and who would not ballance Creditor on this Side, when all the Hazard that is run for it, at worst, is only a sower Look or two at choaking. No, a merry Life and a short one shall be my Motto.”

The Reverend Jerry Falwell

Jerry Falwell, 1933-2007

De mortuis nihil nisi bene, Cheilon of Sparta said (or at least, Horatius quoted him): “Nothing but good about the dead.” So, I won’t say anything. Instead, I’ll simply leave it to the words of the late reverend.

In his 1609 Histoire de la Nouvelle France, Marc Lescarbot noted that the L’nu (popularly known as the Mi’kmaq or “Micmac”) allowed everyone to hunt freely. In Europe, hunting was permitted only for the nobility, leading Lescarbot to note, “the Savages are truly noble.” The term “Noble Savage” first appears in English in John Dryden’s 1672 play, The Conquest of Grenada: “I am as free as Nature first made man, / Ere the base laws of servitude began, / When wild in woods the noble savage ran.” The term then disappeared for nearly two centuries, only resurfacing again in English with the derogatory use of John Crawfurd, president of the Ethnological Society of London, in 1859.

As long as the moon shall rise, as long as the rivers flow,
As long as the sun will shine, as long as the grass shall grow.

The ancient history of the Allegheny is not well-known. The Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in southwestern Pennsylvania offered one of the first challenges to the idea that the Clovis came to North America first. Settlement there has been traced to 30,000 years ago (though this has been disputed by others who’ve never visited the site, on account for the “nearby” coal deposits that could change the dating, which are actually several miles away, too far to do any such thing). Meadowcroft offered shelter to passing groups all the way into the historic period, where things become somewhat clearer. It was about this time that the Onödowága’ (”People of the Great Hill,” better known to us as the Seneca), the “Keepers of the Western Door” of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) began moving south into the forest and settling it.