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.

The safest generalization one can make about life on earth might describe it as a thin layer of green rust. Much further below the surface of the earth, and even bacteria finds existence made difficult; too high in the atmosphere, and they again become thin. Bacteria represent the oldest form of life, and the most prevalent, but when it comes to multi-cellular life, plants form the bulk of it on this planet. Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis deals largely in the global community of plants, and how they cooperate and share with one another. The entire animal kingdom exists as a kind of auxiliary to the world of plants; laid on top of it, and completely dependent on it. Yet all too often, we turn a blind eye to the secret life of plants, and mistake them for passive, inanimate parts of the scenery.

“No shirt, no shoes, no service.” It’s a common enough sign in store windows and other establishments, though, who would ever be seen without shoes? Shoes are essential to civilized life, and they bring with them a distinctly civilized manner of walking: lock the knee, and brace a controlled fall on the heel; roll the foot forward, rocking into another locked-knee heel-fall. It’s difficult to walk any other way while wearing shoes, and you’ll often find this described as the way humans walk. But of course, humans are not born with shoes on, nor did we evolve in shoes. Every human begins walking a different way, and needs to be meticulously trained to walk like this.

The great secret of human adaptability is culture. Culture provides a “soft” layer between the biology of Homo sapiens, and the environment we relate to. Culture is learned, and as such, culture can adapt far more quickly than biology. Humans have evolved as cultural creatures: we are born not as perfect tabula rosa, but certainly without all the parameters set. Disgust is an excellent example, felt so deeply that it has often been taken to be innate, even cosmic in nature. Yet what we feel disgust about is largely culturally constructed. We have a deeply-felt, biological response, but it is felt in response to arbitrary, cultural stimuli. Because of responses like that, humans were able to move out of Africa and, developing new cultures, adapt to nearly every bioregion on the planet. As such, a healthy, functional culture must meet two ends: (1) it must suit our evolved, biological, human nature, and (2) it must adapt us to our local environment.

At the time of the Battle of Plassey in 1757, Great Britain had a population of 7 million. India had a population in excess of 200 million. Britain could not conquer India outright. However, the subcontinent’s massive population was divided into myriad language and ethnic groups ruled by a vast number of princes and potentates with competing interests and long-running disputes. By leveraging one group against another, Britain was able to maintain dominance over a country larger, more populous, and more heavily armed than itself. The economics of coal provided the energy for global hegemony, and demanded global territorial claims in order to provide resources and refueling depots for a coal-powered shipping and naval fleet. As coal gave way to petroleum, a new kind of empire emerged. In the midst of the world wars and the decade following them, the great European empires shed nearly all of their colonial holdings. Direct government of vast, global empires became impractical; instead, petroleum favored a new order, one that fit well with the British strategy in India. It replaced territorial control with hegemony, de jure dominion with de facto control, and the conventional empire with a globalized, neocolonial order.

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.”

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.

Howard Zahniser grew up in Tionesta, the county seat of Forest County, PA—so named for the Allegheny National Forest it sits in, near the largest remnant of the former old-growth forest that once flourished there. Zahniser was a prominent conservationist and advocate for wilderness, and one of the principal authors of the Wilderness Act. On 3 September 1964, Presdient Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law. Today, it protects over 106 million acres. The Friends of Allegheny Wilderness have offered a middle ground between locals and the Allegheny Defense Project’s zero-cut policy, asking simply to protect more of the Allegheny Forest under wilderness designation. While 18% of the National Forest system is designated wilderness, and even in eastern forests the average is 11%, in the Allegheny where Zahniser grew up, less than 2% is protected by the law he wrote. The Friends of Allegheny Wilderness aim to change that, and protect more of the forest under the designation. It’s a noble goal, and one they pursue with far more tact than their former compatriots in the ADP, but they still suffer from a major problem: the idea of “wilderness” itself.

We’ve occasionally been in touch with Kevin Tucker, so his comment in the 13 July 2006 Pittsburgh City Paper that he doesn’t “know any other primitivists in the Pittsburgh area” was a bit odd—though he may not consider the Tribe of Anthropik legitimately primitivist. After all, we don’t think technology is necessarily evil, and we have no problem with symbolic thought. Still, when it landed in the hands of one of my co-workers, he too was baffled, since “a Clusty search for ‘pittsburgh primitivism‘ produces all kinds of results for Anthropik.” The printed version included a photograph of Kevin with tattoos, piercings, and dirty blond dreadlocks going down his back. The same co-worker told me that he found my own take on the subject far more compelling, if for no other reason than I didn’t look like a “freak”—and as a result, the same ideas coming from me seemed to him eminently more reasonable.

So many of our carols mention making Christmas last all year, but it’s obviously one of those ritualistic phrases that we’re not supposed to think very much about. With malls and stores marketing for Christmas shopping as early as October in some cases, we can certainly see some headway to make the “holiday shopping season” last all year. Christmas gifts account for a full quarter of the personal spending that takes place in the United States, so the desire is obvious. But what would it mean to the rest of us, if we took those songs seriously, and actually did make Christmas last all year?