Go for it!

By putting your plan to the test you find out what works well for you in your particular environment and what does not work well. Then you re-evaluate your plan and open up to ideas you might have been reluctant to consider before. You don’t know what the best plan will be until you start experimenting. If you fail miserably the first few days of the two week trial then go home. But you will have learned something. The only way to learn is to put your ideas to the test. Maybe you’ll find out that you need to grow some of your own food. How much? You can’t answer such questions until you put your plan to the test. If you want to wait until you bone up on your skills a little that’s fine.

How do you imagine this differs from what we do? To me, it sounds like precisely what we do.

I am a student of primitive skills. I don’t need Jason to do anything for me. My point is Jason’s or anyone’s survival plan has no credibility until at least some elements of it are put to the test.

That might make sense, except that we’ve seen all the elements of it tested, over the past million years, by everyone on earth up until about 10,000 years ago, and just most people on earth in the intervening period. No more tested plan exists. The only test that remains, tests whether we can do it, here and now. But of course, that won’t tell you anything about whether or not you can do it, where you live, will it?

Who would be so foolish to bank their life on a plan that hasn’t been tested?

Heh; my sentiments, exactly.

Red Wolf Returns, thank you–that meant a lot to me.

As an aside, whenever someone says “You can find them at any local library”, my library doesn’t have it and probably won’t get it.

Generally a wise strategy, and one I usually use myself. In this case, though, I ended up buying them on faith. It worked out OK for me this time, but yeah, I’ve gotten burned that way before.

Jhereg and Jim, seeing that discussion getting so nitty-gritty really sets a stark contrast. On the one hand, we have this thread rehashing all the basics yet again; and then we have your discussion really moving us forward. Awesome! I just wish I had more to contribute on that account.

The more we interact the more it seems like we are just a semi-tone apart in the pitch of our ideas. I guess that is why the combination comes out a bit screeching sometimes.

I think so. We should try to keep that in check from now on; we’d probably make better friends than enemies, eh? With the way the world keeps going, can we really afford to waste our energy on this kind of bickering?

But some more salient points did crop up in the course of it, and while the vitriol doesn’t get us anywhere, good, solid disagreements do, so let me respond to some of the points you made.

In retrospect it would have been more helpful to just wonder if the attempt at glamorising HGing was productive.

We can certainly have that discussion, though I don’t think the Fabulous Forager would make the right venue for it. This thread can host that discussion much more nicely.

I would turn this on its head. I don’t think we glamorize hunter-gatherers at all. Rather, I think we merely correct the general view which so disparages them. Our society has a completely mythical view of primitive life as “nasty, brutish and short” born not from any honest view point of hunter-gatherer life, but from not viewing hunter-gatherer life at all. Instead, we substitute our imagination in the place of evidence, and come to the idea that hunting and gathering must amount to a miserable, impoverished life, based not on evidence, but on our own myths, thought experiments, and ultimately, the stories by which we define ourselves, rather than them (Jehuda, 1998). I find it more than coincidental that Hobbes, who based his assertion of “nasty, brutish and short” entirely on thought experiment and rejected the suggestion that he might want to consider accounts of explorers who actually encountered such people, “was contemptuous of much empirical experimentation—though not of all experiment—and seems to have had no conception of inductive inference at all.” (Rogers & Ryan, 1988:85) For Hobbes, only the thought experiment had validity; evidence had no place in an academic discussion. Note that all we have to do to “glamorize” hunter-gatherers comes down to just listing known, established facts of how they live.

Does such a correction have “value”? I would say it may present one of the most valuable things anyone today can do. Though utterly baseless and possible only in a carefully cultivated environment of absolute ignorance, the myth of the impoverished hunter-gatherer who struggles for survival plays a crucial part in our civilized self-image. It reminds us that, even though our civilization kills us, our family, our land, and everything around us, we have no alternative, because however hellish our current existence seems, we need to remember how much worse off we lived without it. Smashing that myth means assaulting one of the main buttresses that keeps civilization going. If people understood what hunter-gatherer life really entailed, that living primitively doesn’t just mean bare survival but positively thriving, living in luxury the likes of which only our most pampered elites can afford (remember, this fact of hunter-gatherer life provided the original meaning of the phrase “noble savage,” as used by Marc Lescarbot in his 1609 Histoire de la Nouvelle France, not nobility of character), people would finally see the history of civilization in its proper perspective.

Just like our image of “the savage,” in the Western imagination we have romanticized primitive life as a form of asceticism; the mountain man has become a secular hermit, a kind of latter-day flagellant for the eschatology of the left. This has as much basis as the view of tribal peoples as oversexed, brutish and violent (Jehuda, 1998); both have nothing to do with any kind of lived reality, and everything to do with our own mythology (though I imagine the “lone mountain man,” trying to live primitively without a community, might experience quite a bit of privation). Breaking this dire mismatch of primitivism and asceticism presents us with one of our most crucial and urgent challenges. We need to make people realize that primitive life does not mean privation, but luxury; that living in a human manner does not require sacrifice, but a demand for more. So long as we demand people to give up things, no one will want to change anything; not even us. But when you turn it around, and put it in a more truthful context of what you’ve already given up, and more importantly, what you need to take back, well, that perspective gives us the things we desperately need, the things we’ve raged about destroying ourselves and the planet in search of: a future.

My own take is that it is dangerous to plan for a single scenario. Overcommit to one threat and you may leave yourself unprepared for another.

Agreed, but that merely underlines the importance of hunting and gathering. If things work out, permaculture (and really, shouldn’t we speak more accurately of permacultures, in the plural?) could work in many places. But if you rely on that, you will find many other places where it will not work. Horticulture (as far as I can tell, a synonym) only worked in the past in a fairly narrow equatorial zone.

Yes, we have Geoff Lawton’s inspiring permacultural example of greening the desert, but listen to Lawton’s account critically. Listen to how much mulch—made from trash—he needed for that project. Yes, we make a lot of trash, but the Middle East has a lot of land, too. In 2006, the U.S., the world’s largest trash producer, produced 251 million tons of it. ¹ Now, to translate this into area units, think of a dirty construction site. You’ll generally find about a pound of drywall waste per square foot.² Now, the Arabian peninsula only accounts for a fairly small portion of the Middle East, but it still covers 900,000³ square miles, or about 2.5 × 10¹³ square feet, so even if you could turn trash into mulch with 100% efficiency, it would take the U.S.’s entire trash-making capacity almost 100,000 years just to cover the Arabian peninsula in mulch no thicker than you’d get from drywall at a construction site. We can’t deny the massive ecological impacts landfills have on their surroundings, but even with as much garbage as we make, they still take up a tiny, tiny percentage of our land area. So, I find Lawton’s exclamations a little premature; we really can’t green the whole Middle East. As impressive as the experiment’s results become, it can only work in isolated places, not for the whole Middle East, much less the whole world.

Which comes back to the picture that the past million years of human experience has already painted: permaculture can work wonderfully, sometimes, in some places, but only hunting and gathering works everywhere. We can’t predict the future. Ultimately, we don’t know what will happen. Some people will undoubtedly succeed with permaculture; in other places, permaculture enthusiasts will find that way of life becoming impossible. Only hunting and gathering works everywhere, from the Congo to the Arctic, from the Kalahari to Tierra del Fuego.

That said, hunting, gathering, fishing, permaculture, all these exist on a spectrum of related strategies, so if you begin hunting and gathering in a context well-suited for permaculture, you’ll have an easy time simply escalating the amount of peramculture you do, just like shore-dwellers will likely do more fishing, equatorial hunter-gatherers will do more gathering, and Arctic bands will do more hunting.

But often societies faced with great crises come up with completely unanticipated solutions.

From studying the crisis points of past societies, both when they collapsed and when they didn’t, I can’t say I agree with this statement. Yes, civilizations have at times narrowly avoided collapse, like the timber crisis in Europe in the 1600s that resulted in the rise of coal, or the end of the Bronze Age, but I wouldn’t call the solutions “completely unanticipated.” In fact, the solutions followed a clear pattern: some alternative existed, but for one reason or another did not have the appeal of the preferred option. As the preferred option ran out, people turned to the less appealing option. People in the 1600s objected to the foul odors and smoke from coal, but as wood began to run out, they had little choice. Ancient societies far preferred bronze, but as they destroyed the forests to smelt it, they figured out how to make better use of iron. If we expect this pattern to apply to our current crisis, then we need to have some tenable, but less preferred, option available. Various people have proposed various candidates; nuclear power, for instance, would fit the pattern quite well. Except, uranium has already peaked, and when we account for the amount of energy it takes to obtain uranium, its EROEI drops to something in line with windmills and water wheels. Blacksmiths used coal before the timber crisis (the carbon helped in the production of steel), and everyone knew it presented an option, though most people preferred timber. But they all knew that as timber ran out, they could always simply begin burning coal. Metalsmiths knew about iron, and knew something about working it; they just preferred bronze. But as disappearing forests made smelting increasingly difficult, driving up the cost of bronze, they began to use iron more. Today, we have no equivalent options. We have no less preferred alternative waiting in the wings, something we all know could work, if we didn’t have something better on hand at the moment.

Genetic engineering and alternative energy are the positive wild cards in the game.

I disagree; I don’t see anything particularly “wild” about either one. None of the alternative energy possibilities currently offered, alone or in combination, can even come close to substituting our energy usage, even temporarily. The “Dei ex Machinis” series went into this in detail. As for genetic engineering, that phrase can mean one of two things: either it means (1) custom-made life, which appears in science fiction and nowhere else (even when presented as otherwise), or (2) a more recent version of husbandry. Even the much-reviled “terminator seeds” do not differ all that much from, say, what ancient farmers already did to Zea mays, which humans must hand-pollinate.

Perhaps the notion of progress spreading ever west will come full circle as the hard working and unsqueamish asian nations transform their societies once again.

The current boom of China and India has little ecological basis, and more resembles a global, fiscal version of three card monte: their ecological poverty, translated into financial poverty, makes them key targets for exploitation by those who do have some ecological wealth (or at least, the ability to mass produce it and lay it out on Iowa’s fields). All financial wealth ultimately springs from ecological wealth, but the idea of coming full-circle simply contradicts the very nature of the process in question.

Humans currently capture a tiny percentage of the raw energy coursing through the planet.

When you say “raw energy coursing through the planet,” you must not mean the planet’s primary production. Humans capture 40% of that all for ourselves, and I don’t think anyone could call 40% a “tiny percentage,” much less when considering that we must share that production with all of the other millions of species on earth. Yet I cannot guess what else you could mean by that.

And we relate to the world through organisms that are burdened by the happenstance of a billion years of spontaneous progress.

I think this reveals a fundamental difference of axiom between us. You seem to take as given the founding axiom of our civilization, that we can do it better. I agree with Daniel Quinn’s assessment that “Nothing evolution brings forth is perfect, it’s just damnably hard to improve upon.” I see very little evidence of our ability to improve upon the systems that billions of years of evolution has already optimized. What if we could double the efficiency of photosynthesis? I imagine a great deal (and none of it good, given Jevons’ Paradox), but why should we believe that we can accomplish something like that? We have no precedent for such breakthroughs; on the scale of an achievement like that, our petty scientific achievements amount to very little. Consider: possibly the greatest moment in medical science came when we simply recognized the efficacy of mold, something indigenous peoples had already known for millennia (many cultures stuck moldy bread, etc. into wounds to help them heal). When you step back for a moment and put aside our superlative self-praise, it seems to me that we really stand just a half-step beyond leeches still.

We could speculate endlessly about all the “what if’s” that have no precedence or rationale. What if aliens invade? What if we all achieve enlightenment? What if the stars align, and dread Cthulhu rises from the sunken city of R’yleh? Any of these things could change everything, but we really have no reason to expect any of them.

We have to anticipate the possibility that industrial society wont go anywhere soon, or will merely transform to make life similar but crappier for anyone not insulated by massive wealth.

Again, I disagree. Let’s put aside the reasons above, and simply posit that the mysterious X factor comes to pass. We find some magic, heretofore unknown solution, some fuel nobody’s ever tried before in a complete reversal of all historical precedence. That still won’t allow industrial society to survive. It won’t allow the soil to go fallow. It won’t stop climate change. It won’t stop mass extinction. It won’t provide us with new cultures to absorb to keep from cultural stagnation. Most importantly, more complexity (as any such solution would have to become) will never solve the most fundamental problem of diminishing returns on complexity. Our current crises simply represent the most immediate facets of the underlying crisis of diminishing returns on complexity. We might overcome those immediate problems with some fancy new invention, but only by further aggrevating the ultimate problem.

Consider this metaphor. You take an empty, six-shot pistol, spin the chamber, point it to your head and pull the trigger. Nothing happens, so you put a bullet in the chamber, spin it, put it to your head and pull the trigger. Nothing happens. If, every time, you put one more bullet in the gun, put it to your head and squeeze the trigger, would it make sense to say, “We have to anticipate the possibility that I can keep doing this without getting shot?”

Collapse presents the only thing we can say for certain about industrial society’s future. How, when, where, these things remain up in the air, just like we don’t know which try in the metaphor above will kill you; we only know that you won’t do it seven times. You might walk away from it, or you might shoot yourself. You might only shoot yourself on the very last attempt; or you might shoot yourself with the first bullet. We can’t predict that. We only know that you won’t do it seven times. We don’t know if “Powerdown” might work; we don’t know if Peak Oil, or climate change, or some as-yet unimagined crisis will seal civilization’s fate. Really, those details don’t matter much. We know only that things cannot continue the way they have.

Any potential rewilding environment may well be relatively productive in terms of total biomass, but it doesnt automatically translate that it will make a suitable human habitat, even if it did so historically.

I think that statement requires some evidence. The percentage of biomass that humans can consume hasn’t really changed very much, so available biomass does translate into how much human habitat one has available.

Comparing a disturbed forest and an undisturbed desert is misleading.

Well, to make sense of that, we would first need to find an undisturbed desert. Even the deserts on Mars do not qualify, since huge storms and winds constantly disturb them. But I suspect that by “disturbed,” you mean “disturbed by humans.” I do not think that humans disturb our environments in such unique ways as to warrant this qualification. Our scale may seem unprecedented, but the fundamental effect of, say, a plow does not differ from the effect of a flood or some other natural disaster. The term “climax ecology” has fallen from use in ecological circles precisely because of its implications of a static state that your claim here seems to rely upon as a premise. The “undisturbed ecology” does not exist. I would go so far as to say that the very word “ecology” means a particular system of constant disturbance, with each disturbance both caused by and causing the other disturbances around it. Beavers disturb streams by building dams; trees disturb rocks by breaking them up with their roots; bees disturb flowers by moving pollen from one to the next, et cetera ad infinitum. Even agriculture, as catastrophic as it seems, operates within the normal ecological process of succession. Agriculture simply sets succession back, while horticulture encourages it along. But neither of these invent any new process, such that we might call one “disturbed” and the other not. I reject, whole-heartedly, the notion of human uniqueness in the world, and with it the notion that our participation in the world, and ours alone, counts as ecological disturbance.

That said, I agree that comparing a disturbed forest and an undisturbed desert misleads. It misleads us to think that a disturbed forest might have as little to offer as an undisturbed desert, like the Kalahari or the Arctic. I dwell in the Allegheny National Forest, perhaps the most “disturbed” forest on earth. It does not exist as any kind of ecological anomoly. The black cherry provides the natural second-growth species for this forest; its seeds survive for a long time in the shade, and they spring up in the sunlight. They live a short time compared to the longer-lived, shade-tolerant species that make up the old growth forest, and thus provide shade for those older trees to begin their lives, and eventually take their place forming the ultimate canopy. When “disturbances” invariably happened in the past, from storms, fire, or other natural disasters that had the very same impact as humans, this happened. After humans turned the Allegheny into the “Pennsylvania Desert,” this very same process unfolded. Today’s problems have little to do with the forest itself, and everything to do with its human mismanagement. But the forest struggles to heal itself, and would do so, quickly, if we did not restrain it so vigorously.

Yet even in its current state, food comes very, very easily. I know several local springs for fresh water. One of the forest’s biggest problems actually lies with the large deer herd; the forest has 10 deer per square mile, far in excess of a healthy population for the ecology. Wild edibles proliferate throughout the forest. In all honesty, I cannot with a straight face entertain the notion that such readily apparent bounty can seriously compare to the harsh realities of, say, the Kalahari, where only ancient oral traditions even allow them to find water, much less the hidden and scarce food available. Your suggestion that the Kalahari Desert, perhaps the cruelest environment on the planet, could somehow present a greater challenge to make a living presents something I simply cannot take seriously. I have to demand a good deal of evidence; as it stands, I find the very suggestion absolutely ridiculous.

And often the environment that brings the most opportunities also brings the most threats (violence, competition, predation, diseases). Semi-arid regions in some ways seem to be ideal for HGing because they get the balance between threats and opportunities right.

This argument seems very anachronistic to me. Contrary to popular imagery, I see little actual evidence that humans have suffered much from predation in a very long time. Even in Africa, where humans evolved the longest and would thus have more integration into the food chain, while a hungry lion will eat just about anything, humans still do not make for regular game.

For the remaining threats, we must ask who does the threatening? Wherever horticulturalists dwell, you find hunter-gatherers dwelling among them: in the Amazon, New Guinea, the Congo, and so on, horticulture, hunting and gathering forms a continuum of activity, with neighboring tribes emphasizing one or another activity over the others. Those that garden more do not threaten those that hunt and gather any more than they threaten each other. Competition does not define their relationship, since they largely complement each other. In permacultural terms, hunter-gatherer neighbors cultivate and maintain the “zone 5″ area of the horticultural village.

Obviously, we can see that hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists dwell as easily with one another as they do with neighbors who follow the same subsistence pattern; in fact, better, since neighboring horticultural villages often do compete with one another, unlike hunter-gatherers, leading to a great deal of violence.

So, your statement seems more than a little dishonest: the environments do not threaten hunter-gatherers at all. Nor do they even face unusual threats from most human societies in those environments. Rather, they specifically face threats in any productive environment from civilization. Yet to say that hunter-gatherers face a threat from civilization any more keen than any other society again seems more than a little dishonest. Every other society faces such threats.

Now, you could pursue the old argument that the current dominance of civilization proves its superior adaptability, and that all other societies must have some unsustainable flaw, as evidenced by their failure to stand up against civilization, but I would disagree with that argument strongly. Civilization optimizes society for conquest. Societies can allocate their resources in many myriad ways, betweens concerns like making a living, providing for the general welfare, military defense, and so on. Civilization optimizes for conquest by stripping all other social capacities to the barest essentials. The modern United States might provide the most stark example of this, but even such a liberal beacon as Denmark pales in comparison to a horticultural village or a hunter-gatherer band. This optimization for conquest has meant that, wherever civilization could define the conflict in terms of conquest (by, say, invading and beginning a genocide), it has won. In conflict with such an enemy, you have one of two choices. Since your enemy has committed everything to conquest, anything less than your own total commitment to military defense will mean defeat and conquest. So in the first option, you decide to keep parts of your society dedicated to living in a sustainable manner, and as a result, you cannot mount an effective resistance to civilization’s total war, and you fall to their invasion and genocide. We have ample examples of this. In the second option, you do devote yourself utterly to military defense, and manage to repulse civilization, but only by voluntarily becoming a nearly identical civilization yourself. One could argue that the Germanic tribes who sacked Rome exemplify this possibility, or the Mongols who conquered China.

So the case that hunter-gatherers, who currently dwell in tropical rainforests, the Arctic, arid grasslands, and some of the world’s most inhospitable deserts, seem somehow especially suited to arid grasslands simply does not hold up to critical analysis.

The most basic question to ask about rewilding in your region is “Can I collect enough calories within a reasonable walkable area, consistently enough over the year, to sustain me?”. If your current environment fails that test then questions of hunting protein, herbal medicines and primitive tools become moot. Historical records of HGers in the area may be misleading if the ecology has changed significantly since they left the land, hence my reluctance to place too much emphasis on historical records.

Agreed, that would seem like a fallacious use of historical records. But we haven’t used historical records in such ways. We have compared how hunter-gatherers do, today, in far less productive areas (like the Kalahari), to far more ecologically productive areas (like the Allegheny National Forest). As noted above, this critically underestimates how easy rewilding will seem, but I don’t think that really bears out your skepticism.

permaculture is the means by which individuals, armed with enough knowledge, can help restore previously dameged environments into functioning ecosystems.

I see permaculture in part as a means of becoming native, as jhereg mentioned, as well as restoring some of civilization’s damage and in part helping to rewild species we domesticated. Lisa Rayner wrote an excellent article, “Ecological Collapse, Trauma Theory and Permaculture.”

So yes, it will not be viable to immediately focus only on hunting-gathering in the short term

I hear this sentiment often repeated, but on what basis? Hunter-gatherers succeed everywhere; horticulturalists only in some places. Wherever horticulturalists dwell, you’ll find hunter-gatherers doing quite well in their midst, but some areas support so little ecological activity that only hunting and gathering will work there. So how can we continue perpetuating the logic that, in the face of severe ecological crisis, we will have a better chance following a strategy that requires a significantly abundant ecological basis, than that which works in areas so ecologically unproductive that only it can work?

Permaculture, hunting and gathering do not oppose one another; on the contrary, they complement one another. In some areas, permaculture will undoubtedly succeed, alongside hunter-gatherers; in others, only hunter-gatherers will succeed. But if we want to consider which strategies have the best chance of success, then this common refrain puts the situation exactly, and perilously, backwards. After all, it encourages us to invest our time in permaculture, where few (if any) practitioners give much time to hunting or gathering, instead of hunting and gathering, where permaculture frequently recieves attention. If you only focus on permaculture, you have only a (rather slim) chance of success; if you learn hunting, gathering and permaculture, your chance of success explodes, regardless of whether you end up emphasizing hunting, gathering, or gardening.

I would like to point out that we need to think of how to introduce rewilding concepts to other people.

You’ll find my latest attempt at that in the Thirty Theses. I can’t say I feel like I’ve really succeeded yet. The Fifth World might accomplish a good deal of this, too. But I don’t think an emphasis on permaculture necessarily helps introduce people to rewilding; it introduces people to permaculture. Permaculture doesn’t necessarily—in fact, almost never—involves rewilding.

The main caveat with presenting H-G as the best strategy is to be accused of wanting to regress. My mother went as far as to tell me “primitivism, ceationism, it is the same bunch”. Even if you give people more arguments than they give you, they just have these epidermic reactions.

I’ve found few things as difficult to accept as the fact that no more than 1% or so of us will ever “get it.” Tim Ingold’s writing about the “building perspective” vs. the “dwelling perspective” really puts this into a new paradigm. The very fact that you face the notion of “going back” implies the notion of “going forward,” and the idea that society progresses only along a single line, moving us towards the ultimate fulfillment of our “nature” or “purpose.” I would say that the fundamental problem here lies not in how you present the issue, but in how we can break down the building perspective and build up the dwelling perspective in its place. In other words, the need to replace the logic and psychodynamics of literacy with the logic and psychodynamics of orality, or, as David Abram put it, come back to our senses.

And I think that ultimately, this is the bottom line for the HG vs Horti debate. It’s a personal choice that really needs to be informed by the persons location. After all, “primitive” cultures were/are quite diverse, and I honestly expect the rewilding cultures of the future to have every bit as much diversity.

I largely agree, but for the caveat mentioned above, that we should learn all of these strategies (which, after all, intermingle freely in actual practice); the pursuit of permaculture in particular could easily come at the exclusion of hunting and gathering, whereas I don’t hear too many rewilders talking about hunting and gathering without also advocating permaculture.

We get into trouble sometimes if we try to make hunting and gathering fit into our lives yet don’t make the necessary holistic adjustments to actually make things work for us. In my experience this is usually why we get so many failures and negative-sounding reports about how “impossible” primitive living is today.

Hear, hear. Yet, can we really make those holistic changes in today’s world? I can certainly see the potential, even in the near future, but today, this moment? I don’t know if the space really exists for that.

The tendancy to think rewilding must involve “buying land” is another potential pitfall here, since for most people the thought of buying land just reinforces the sedentary mindset all the more.

Well, the description of hunter-gatherers as “nomadic” may require some elaboration. “Nomadism” does not mean aimless wandering. Rather, nomadic bands fissioned and fused in irregular, seasonal cycles, often coming back to common campsites. They still use permacultural techniques along those routes and at those campsites, so that they will find those areas even more abundant when they come back next time. Today, one of the greater impediments to those holistic changes, comes from land ownership and federal land usage laws. I intend to make the whole ANF our range, but I want to buy land to have a core campsite where we don’t have to worry about the rangers cracking down on us for camping more than 14 days at a time.

• Jehuda, Gustav. 1998. Images of Savages: Ancient Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture. Routledge.
• Rogers, Graham Alan John and Alan Ryan. 1988. Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes. Oxford University Press.

The most basic question to ask about rewilding in your region is “Can I collect enough calories within a reasonable walkable area, consistently enough over the year, to sustain me?”. If your current environment fails that test then questions of hunting protein, herbal medicines and primitive tools become moot. Historical records of HGers in the area may be misleading if the ecology has changed significantly since they left the land, hence my reluctance to place too much emphasis on historical records.

One thing to keep in mind here is that H/Gs are usually nomadic or semi-nomadic. Meaning that they either move frequently or at very least between two or more camps per year. The more arid and sparse the landscape, the more camps they tended to establish and the farther people tended to range throughout the year. Also, walking was/is not the only means of transportation available to “primitive” foraging peoples. Boats are an excellent example of a primitive technology that dramatically increases a people’s nomadic range (and potentially a good one for modern rewilders as well).

We get into trouble sometimes if we try to make hunting and gathering fit into our lives yet don’t make the necessary holistic adjustments to actually make things work for us. In my experience this is usually why we get so many failures and negative-sounding reports about how “impossible” primitive living is today. People often try to fit a round peg into a square hole. Attempts at sedentary h/ging are one example among many of us agricultural people attempting to adopt h/ging yet still holding onto an essentially agricultural or civilized mindset (other examples include “solo survivalist” excursions such as are popular on TV right now, “naked into the wild” stories, and the “abo-trek” approach popular in many primitive skills circles). The tendancy to think rewilding must involve “buying land” is another potential pitfall here, since for most people the thought of buying land just reinforces the sedentary mindset all the more.

The main reason most of us more easily connect to rewilding on the gardening/horticulture end of the spectrum is because we come from a sedentary culture. If we want to maintain our sedentariness (and we live in a bioregion where sedentism is feasable), then horticulture certainly makes more sense. Perhaps h/ging is more likely to be embraced by those in our culture who already display nomadic tendencies. There are already whole subcultures in american society which do this right now (and are often romanticized by mainstream culture because of it).

Well, I think that this is what horti/perma-culture is about in the rewilding movement : permaculture is the means by which individuals, armed with enough knowledge, can help restore previously dameged environments into functioning ecosystems.

This is certainly a part of horti/perma’s role in rewilding. For my part, I also think of horti/perma’s role as one of realigning ourselves with our ecology. In other words, I see it as an important part of becoming native to our land by reforging our relationships with the land. It’s a subtle concept, I think, but at least for myself, it seems to help a great deal.

It brings me to the 2nd point : in light of my recent failure to present the primitivists ideas to my parents and sister, I would like to point out that we need to think of how to introduce rewilding concepts to other people.

Yes, this is tough. I wouldn’t claim any amazing successes on this topic, but I can certainly briefly discuss how I approach such things.

First, I don’t discuss ideology. At all. In other words, I don’t use the words “primitivism”, “rewild”, “Stone Age”, “native”, etc. Instead, I try to focus on a good rewilding solution for a problem someone has. So, if they’re struggling with high gas prices, and not gardening, I’ll try to convince them to try a little bit of gardening, to help cut down food costs and help make up for the extra gas costs. If they’re not interested in gardening, I might suggest some other alternative, such as making their own coffee cut w/ roasted dandelion or chicory roots instead of buying their morning coffee from Starbucks on the way to work in the morning. Or if they’re already gardening, I’ll ask them about various techniques that might help. If they’re using their car to go reasonably short distances, I might ask if they’ve ever thought about using a bike instead. In other words, I try to focus on concrete, practical steps that are:
* “Ideology Independent”
* Tailored to the person, as best I know them
* Presented in an open and honest manner (no accusations!)
* Not completely outside the persons comfort zone

It seems like people respond better to that approach.

And it is likely that hunting and gathering will constitute a fair part of your food supply, if you live in the USA near some natural reservation. On the other hand, in a country like France, you might end up closer to the perma/horti-culture end of the rewilding spectrum.

And I think that ultimately, this is the bottom line for the HG vs Horti debate. It’s a personal choice that really needs to be informed by the persons location. After all, “primitive” cultures were/are quite diverse, and I honestly expect the rewilding cultures of the future to have every bit as much diversity.

I wanted to answer Shane’s last post, which was fairly interesting, since it helped me order my ideas.

Any potential rewilding environment may well be relatively productive in terms of total biomass, but it doesnt automatically translate that it will make a suitable human habitat, even if it did so historically. Comparing a disturbed forest and an undisturbed desert is misleading. And often the environment that brings the most opportunities also brings the most threats (violence, competition, predation, diseases). Semi-arid regions in some ways seem to be ideal for HGing because they get the balance between threats and opportunities right.

Well, I think that this is what horti/perma-culture is about in the rewilding movement : permaculture is the means by which individuals, armed with enough knowledge, can help restore previously dameged environments into functioning ecosystems.
So yes, it will not be viable to immediately focus only on hunting-gathering in the short term, since there will have to be some work to be done on the land first. But the very nature of the work (permaculture) implies rewilding, and some plant gathering. It is also likely that the collapse of civilization and the process of reopening niches for wildlife will be fast enough that hunting becomes quickly possible. At least this is my view of things in light of the situation here in France. Besides, hunting will be necessary in the first place in a damaged ecosystem : having perturbated ecosystems usually means you have one predator species ut of control - this is already happening in many Western countrysides and here too. So we humans will have to help regulate those species, while famine due to agricultural failure deals with regulating our own species’ population. This is another reason for rewilding minds : having a rewilded mind will be a critical factor of success in your regulating your own ecosystem, both through permaculture and H-G activities. If we have been wise enough, then it is likely our children will “reap” the rewards of our work. After all, the rewilding movement is not just about rewilding yourself by walking barefoot and stop buying bread; it is also about rewilding the land through improving your knowledge of the ecosystem’s inner workings and how to work on damaged ecosystems (look up “Terra Preta” in Wikipedia, and you will see what I mean by rewilding the land : turning a concrete suburbian desert into something as rich as a rainforest).

It brings me to the 2nd point : in light of my recent failure to present the primitivists ideas to my parents and sister, I would like to point out that we need to think of how to introduce rewilding concepts to other people.
The core ideas of primitivism are way too complex to just introduce them by saying “hey, we should all live as cavemen again”. This is why the H-G aspect should not be too much emphazised against the permaculture aspect. After all, the people living with us also come from a civilized background, which means that to them, it is more natural to grow food than to collect it from nature. On the other hand, hunting was fairly common in our parents’ grandparents’ generation, but not as main means of providing food. Therefore it is critical, I think, to begin with presenting permaculture, then explain how the ecological knowledge acquired through experimenting with permaculture enables one to rewilding. Hunting and gathering can then be prezsented as the natural outcome of rewilded cultures living in rewilded ecosystems.
The main caveat with presenting H-G as the best strategy is to be accused of wanting to regress. My mother went as far as to tell me “primitivism, ceationism, it is the same bunch”. Even if you give people more arguments than they give you, they just have these epidermic reactions.
The other caveat is that presenting H-G as a viable strategy involves talking about the collapse of civilization. And that’s something too emotionally striking for people to grasp in the first place. So I recommend presenting permaculture first, since you can label it “transition” more easily than you can label exclusively H-G living as “transition”. If you start talking about collapse, people will label you as utterly pessimistic - in fact you are optimistic about mankind, but the end of civilization seems inherently pessimistic to most civilized people because they view human history as progress. And indeed permaculture IS the beginning of civilization collapse - people choosing a lower level of complexity, and adapting to a viable strategy.

So yes we ll have to focus mostly on permaculture first, if our ecologies are too damaged. But being able to make a living from H/G-ing comes as a logical consequence of permaculture’s success.
And it is likely that hunting and gathering will constitute a fair part of your food supply, if you live in the USA near some natural reservation. On the other hand, in a country like France, you might end up closer to the perma/horti-culture end of the rewilding spectrum. It will be a long-term work anyhow, and we’ll have to embed the principles and processes of PC into the oral culture we transmit to our descendancy.
Regarding the possibility of basing your society’s food supply upon grains, I think you have to be careful to avoid monoculture.

Jean-Vivien Maurice

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080220161704.htm

Most Detailed Global Study Of Genetic Variation Completed
ScienceDaily (Feb. 21, 2008) — University of Michigan scientists and their colleagues at the National Institute on Aging have produced the largest and most detailed worldwide study of human genetic variation, a treasure trove offering new insights into early migrations out of Africa and across the globe.

and

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080216175953.htm

Human Culture Subject To Natural Selection, Study Shows
ScienceDaily (Feb. 20, 2008) — The process of natural selection can act on human culture as well as on genes, a new study finds. Scientists at Stanford University have shown for the first time that cultural traits affecting survival and reproduction evolve at a different rate than other cultural attributes. Speeded or slowed rates of evolution typically indicate the action of natural selection in analyses of the human genome.

I am not sure whether or not to feel happy that there is so much discussion going on or guilty that I have stirred everything up so much. It seems to be more productive idea bouncing than slanging, which for an internet responses section is probably well above the average level of decorum.

Firstly I want to make a complementary apology to Jason. I was guilty of using a degree of vitriol in my replies as well, and while it kept things lively it probably wasnt really necessary. The more we interact the more it seems like we are just a semi-tone apart in the pitch of our ideas. I guess that is why the combination comes out a bit screeching sometimes.

I consistently return to this site to eagerly read Jason’s big-picture writing precisely because it is what he does best. From my perspective the ideas discussed range from deeply thought provoking to eyebrow raising, but with enough good stuff to make it all worth while. I am particularly sorry for my snarky response to Guili’s early contributions. If it is any consolation I often found myself editing down my base reactions to something at least carefully worded if not supportive. In retrospect it would have been more helpful to just wonder if the attempt at glamorising HGing was productive.

We have probably all grown up from childhoods that burdened us with disadvantages for the challenges ahead. I suffered constant colds and sinus/allergies as a kid (since connected with industrial dairy intake) and turned out weedier and weaker than I might have with more physical activity. I applaud Jason for admitting his own problems and limitations (especially when it makes him vulnerable to criticism from hard-nosed types like me).

But I think questions and criticism are valuable to the movement to prepare for the probable downturn in industrial society. My own take is that it is dangerous to plan for a single scenario. Overcommit to one threat and you may leave yourself unprepared for another. Societies have gone through many different types of collapse. But often societies faced with great crises come up with completely unanticipated solutions. Genetic engineering and alternative energy are the positive wild cards in the game. Perhaps the notion of progress spreading ever west will come full circle as the hard working and unsqueamish asian nations transform their societies once again. Humans currently capture a tiny percentage of the raw energy coursing through the planet. And we relate to the world through organisms that are burdened by the happenstance of a billion years of spontaneous progress. What would the implications be of doubling the efficiency of photosynthesis? What if humans could digest cellulose? What if we could power our machines with heat and light from any source? We have to anticipate the possibility that industrial society wont go anywhere soon, or will merely transform to make life similar but crappier for anyone not insulated by massive wealth.

Any potential rewilding environment may well be relatively productive in terms of total biomass, but it doesnt automatically translate that it will make a suitable human habitat, even if it did so historically. Comparing a disturbed forest and an undisturbed desert is misleading. And often the environment that brings the most opportunities also brings the most threats (violence, competition, predation, diseases). Semi-arid regions in some ways seem to be ideal for HGing because they get the balance between threats and opportunities right.

The most basic question to ask about rewilding in your region is “Can I collect enough calories within a reasonable walkable area, consistently enough over the year, to sustain me?”. If your current environment fails that test then questions of hunting protein, herbal medicines and primitive tools become moot. Historical records of HGers in the area may be misleading if the ecology has changed significantly since they left the land, hence my reluctance to place too much emphasis on historical records.

Many historical HGers maintained large growths of grasses, tubers and nut trees to base their society on. For those of you averse to eating any grains that means get a physical measure of the abundance of nuts and root crops on hand. If they come up short then you have a sense of how much you need to grow for yourself, making the questions of protein/medicine/tools etc meaningful. Growing starchy roots is so incredibly simple in so many climates. Get that right and you leave yourself time for all the other essential stuff, which in most situations is more easily met by HGing. Grains have the immense advantage of durability, portability and scaleability, but require more careful preparation.

Last weekend I was winnowing a large basket of buckwheat I grew earlier on. Perhaps I am projecting but there is something about harvesting, threshing and winnowing grains that turns on a light somewhere in my brain. Only the planting part seems less spontaneous (the love of a good hoe helps enormously). For the record I got ~15kg from 35m2, equivalent to 50 days of calories. I spent all up about three days labor that would have been five without the plastic. The space was in the row between new fruit and nut trees, weeds were killed with solarising plastic, a few litres of copra and lime applied, never watered and rarely weeded, and a crop of spelt or quinoa will follow, then a mixed green manure/fallow rotation will follow for a year before restarting the cycle.

I do wholesale orders for permaculture-related books and audio, and sell them with a tiny markup, generally cheaper than anywhere else I see online. I have Gaia’s Garden and 1 more copy of volume 2 of Jacke’s Edible Forest Gardens. Plus lots more, but several people in this thread specifically recommended those (and rightly so!)

You can see a list of items & prices at: http://discountpermaculture.com (Note that I list plants for pickup only; I don’t ship them.)

Hopefully this makes it through the spam filter!

Scrub

I’ve heard of the ground nut, but I haven’t found any yet.

Hemenway is the one I keep hearing. I may end up ordering it, but I don’t like to buy things sight-unseen. Usually I abide by the rule of three: I must pick up and look at an item on three separate occasions before I allow myself to buy it. (For music, I must like at least 3 songs on a CD)
–
JimFive