Well, the long vacation might have tipped you off, but it seems that we, the Tribe of Anthropik, have come to the end of the trail. We’ve waited this long mostly to clear up some issues of timing, but in May, the Anthropik Network will come to the end of its five-year run. But don’t fret too much—at 1:30 PM Eastern time, on 18 June, you’ll get the first issue of Toby’s People.
Willem Larsen and Urban Scout have put together an amazing, thorough, and much-needed introduction to “E-Primitive.” Larsen’s explorations of animist language and oral tradition at the College of Mythic Cartography have contributed greatly to the growing rewilding movement, and this work summarizes much of that work in a single piece. We at the Tribe of Anthropik feel proud to present this work, cross-posted from Urban Scout and the College of Mythic Cartography. We don’t necessarily agree with all the details, but that hardly matters next to the importance of the main point, with which we could hardly agree more. This article greatly inspired us, and we hope it will inspire you, too.
I think most prospective rewilders can share my dilemma. We hear about the fabulous adventures of those successful trackers, educators and idols of our movement who’ve found some way to dedicate themselves, full-time, to their passion, usually thanks, at least in part, to a supportive and understanding community (often their own family) who have the means and the will to support those endeavors. Good for them, and we all owe the people who support them a measure of gratitude for giving us those motivating, inspirational icons, but it makes for a model few of us can really emulate. Perhaps our families don’t really understand what we hope and wish for (and given the massive amounts of disinformation and propaganda invested into discouraging such pursuits, we can hardly blame them), or perhaps they simply don’t have the capacity to support our endeavors, as unlikely as they seem to ever net any economic benefit that our society would recognize. We do not have the skills, nor the community support of any kind of tribe, to rely on our earth skills for shelter and sustenance; if we tried to shelter ourselves and feed ourselves with what we know now, we’d only ensure our death, whether by starvation, thirst or exposure.
Thanks to Rob for needling me about the podcast: I’ve posted a page archiving season one, and finally removed the “Coming soon” marker from the menu. Have we podfaded? Well, yes. You might notice that the last podcast released concerned our wedding; and, upon returning from said wedding, we moved into the new apartment we live in now. Which has nowhere for us to record—I know, I tried, and wherever I went, it sounded awful. We’d very much like to move, particularly since I’ve changed jobs and now work 30 miles away, as opposed to up the street, so instead of walking to work, I spend 2-3 hours every day on Pittsburgh’s parkways, but I’ll get more into that later. So, when we move, we will bring back the podcast. That will happen some time in 2008, and we really hope it happens sooner rather than later for quite a few reasons, but it may not happen until as late as August.
Yes, this has taken significantly longer than The Economist needed for “Noble or Savage?,” but really digging into the evidence usually does take longer than a superficial analysis, bald assertion, or an assemblage of half-truths. As before, I haven’t written anything original in response to this article, since it doesn’t present anything new—everything here quotes articles you’ve seen here, answering these claims, over the past two, sometimes even three, years.
“Noble or Savage?,” The Economist,” 19 December 2007:
I have already had a few commenters direct me to “Noble or Savage?,” the article from the Dec. 19 Economist magazine. The article has not raised my low opinion of this periodical. As Kenneth Boulding so correctly assessed, “Anyone who believes that growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” You may recall that The Economist teamed up with Shell some years back gave us the absurdist essay contest question, “Do we need nature?” (Derrick Jensen gave perhaps the best answer: “It’s insane.”) But this most recent offering presents precisely the kind of article I have, unfortunately, become all too familiar with—overblown rhetoric based in faulty evidence presented deceptively. Nothing new appears in the article that we haven’t spent pages debunking here in past articles, but we can hardly expect casual readers to have read that much of the Anthropik backlog. Since I have no doubt that many will continue to post links to this inane article mistaking its argument for a cogent one, I offer this piece. It has little new for regular readers; instead, I have simply collated my previous responses to the evidence misrepresented by The Economist article, so that it appears all in one place.
I can’t promise a return to regular blogging here, and even this post will be much abbreviated, but Greer’s latest (”The Age of Salvage Societies“) is making me positively itch. This is something we’ve talked about plenty of times here, so seeing blatantly untrue statements like these not only going unchallenged, but recieving a round of praise for their “insightfulness” is really grating for me. So, some quick facts to keep in mind if you read Greer’s article.
Giuli asked me tonight if I’ll ever write another article for Anthropik again. The truthful answer to that is, probably. I can hardly stay away for too terribly long. Too many things about the state of the world frustrate me for me to not write about them. But at the moment, this site offers me much more aggrevation than it provides me in outlet, and with so much in my life in flux at the moment, it’s difficult to justify the expenditure of time, and more importantly, grief, that regular writing would entail.
I’ve been a fool. For a long time, I’ve been advocating for a holistic sense of rewilding; changing culture, rather than simply focusing on primitive skills, and rewilding rather than resisting. Fortunately, a small, brave cadre of commenters have shown me the error of my ways, and how projects like the Fifth World, or Giuli’s Fabulous Forager, fundamentally betray primitivism. They’re absolutely right; this is nothing more than an excuse to cling to our old, civilized addictions. We can’t suffer that kind of impurity, and with that in mind, to try to rectify for my past wrongs, I’ve come up with some lists to give up others like myself, in the hopes that those brave souls who so helped me, might also be able to help them.
