When Ivy swore her oath and became the Guardian, it sent many of the Grandfathers even deeper into their madness. “You see her betrayal!” they shouted. “Poison Ivy grows everywhere, hemming us in! It’s us against the whole world! We have lost the paradise of our ancestors, and now we must make war on the whole world!” Some among them retained their sanity, though, and tried to return them to reason; the most persuasive voice among them came from Ivy’s twin brother, a healer named Jason.

In recent years, it has become fashionable to suggest that our various plant and animal domesticates actually domesticated themselves (e.g., Budiansky, 1999), or even domesticated us (Pollan, 2002). As some of the market material for Pollan’s Botany of Desire puts it, his book “shows how each plant has evolved to gratify human desires and thus has enticed us to help them multiply. Just who, he asks, is domesticating whom?” Such arguments invariably make the case that domestication is simply a question of co-evolution, and that as much as humans have used plants and animals, those plants and animals have equally used us, or even moreso, to proliferate across the globe. This is true, up to a point, but it obscures much more than it reveals. To say that domestication is a relationship is true, but in a trivial sense; it illustrates only the wide variety of relationships that are possible.

Some years back, I went with my mother to the Catskill Animal Sanctuary, a place that provided a home for abused and mistreated farm animals. There, founder Kathy Stevens introduced us to an extraordinary ram named Rambo (of course). “Rambo, a majestic Jacob sheep, was one of 17 large animals packed into a single stall, fed with occasional moldy bagels, carcasses decomposing underfoot. Rambo arrived at the sanctuary angry and frightened enough to throw a human across the barn. But it’s a year later now, and Rambo’s most assertive gesture is his lean: he demands a head scratch from all visitors by leaning against their legs.”¹ But when my mom and I arrived, Rambo didn’t lean against us; he was keeping vigil in the pen of an animal new to the farm. You see, whenever a new animal is brought in, invariably feeling frightened and confused, Rambo spends all his time in that animal’s pen, sleeping with it and helping it eat if necessary, until the animal feels more comfortable in its new home. Rambo then moves back into his own pen until the next new animal comes onto the farm. While most (civilized) people assume that animals have no emotions or memories and will accuse me of anthropomorphizing, I can’t escape the conclusion that Rambo remembers his own difficult transition and has devoted the rest of his life to helping other animals find their way through their own.

By now, the original plan said, you’d be looking at the new site on the new server. This has not happened. There’s still character encoding problems to work out with the data transfer, and some other issues that will need resolving before we point the domain to the new nameservers. New posting will be very slow in the interrim, but any comments you make will be preserved until the new blackout date, which will probably be this weekend. Also remember, the forums will not exist anymore after the migration.

This week’s Archdruid Report is actually really good. “Culture Death” starts off with an invaluable summation of the mythological nature of “the Nation,” and how that myth took root and flourished with the rise of fossil fuels, though the lack of emphasis on the printing press, and standardized language as just one of several factors rather than the clearly dominant factor are differences of emphasis between Greer’s summary and most of the leading scholarship. Thus, as with most things, deindustrialization promises the reverse process: the end of “the Nation” as the locus of group identity. Greer still ignores bioregionalism as the force drawing the new fault lines for the end of the “Nation” myth, but his analysis of the problem is solid enough. It’s the solution where things start to get a bit wonky.

You have heard the tales of when our Grandfathers went mad, yes? Well, back then there were two twins, a girl named Ivy, and her twin brother. Ivy was a trickster and a shapeshifter, but when she saw the destruction the Grandfathers had wrought in their madness, she grew incensed.

She went to the Grandfathers and scolded them, saying, “Can you not see what you are doing?” But they were under Grass’s spell, and all they said was, “Yes, isn’t it beautiful? All that forest that was just going to waste, now it’s all beautiful Grass!”

We missed last week’s article, “Imaginary Countries,” but that’s all right, because this week’s installment of Adam’s morbid fantasy covers much the same ground: the prospect of shifting political boundaries, and the fact that the United States won’t last forever. It’s a relief that for once, Greer has taken some time off from trashing primitivists, but it’s unfortunate that we can’t offer a little more depth to his analysis. Greer’s points are fine enough, but they’re shallow. He largely misses the much bigger and more important underlying phenomenon at work here: bioregionalism.

We’re in the early phases of planning the third annual Mountain Festival for Labor Day weekend, at Seneca Rocks, West Virginia. We’re planning the event as a bioregional rewilding unconference and temporary autonomous zone. This isn’t the announcement yet, but we do want to hear your feedback: your interests, questions, concerns, ideas, and all the rest. There’s a lot still to pin down, so we want to hear from you.

Mountain Festival History

Anthropikon MMV

The first Mountain Festival was originally billed as “Anthropikon MMV,” but has since been retconned.

• Anthropikon MMV, the official announcement.