These are announcements, invitations, calls to action, manifestos, proposals and other items we write about not simply to educate you or expound an opinion, but in the hopes that you’ll join us in a direct, concrete action.
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.
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.
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.
The 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” written and narrated by former US vice-president Al Gore, won both critical and popular praise for its concise presentation of the dangers posed by global warming. But despite its success placing climate issues squarely in the center of American consciousness, “An Inconvenient Truth” communicated only the tip of the melting iceberg; it is but one of several disastrous, short-term consequences of industrial civilization that also include peak oil, population overshoot, and mass extinction.
We’ll be organizing a rewilding unconference in Pittsburgh’s Schenley Park, 25-27 August 2007, leading up to the Pittsburgh screening of What a Way to Go on the “Get Tim and Sally Out of Debt Tour.”
This is an unconference. That means that there is an initial welcome session, and that’s where the agenda for the weekend is set. Everyone has to teach a session; no one simply an idle observer. There may be several sessions going on at each time; if you’re not teaching one of them, you can attend whatever sessions you like.
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.
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.
The first Mountain Festival was originally billed as “Anthropikon MMV,” but has since been retconned.
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.
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.
