You make one hippie joke… And the next thing you know a permaculturalist mob pounds on your door ready to burn you at the stake! Sure, I may have articulated my thesis poorly and I didn’t use delicate enough language… But in the end, I won the war. So there!
Archive for the 'General Blog' Category
Native peoples played a major role in the maintenance and enhancement of biological diversity by introducing disturbances that created and maintained mosaics of different vegetation types. These disturbances, caused mainly by burning, were carried out specifically to maintain populations of plants that were gathered for food, cordage, basketry, and other uses and to enhance their quality. Thus traditional gathering, practiced holistically as both gathering and management, has the potential to promote biodiversity and restore communities to their formerly more heterogeneous conditions.
In her book Tending the Wild, M. Kat Anderson has painted a very different picture of indigenous peoples than most civilized people could even begin to fathom. She begins by taking us through the history of California and its Native peoples. Using accounts of explorers, missionaries, pioneers and anthropologists she shows how those of our culture came to California with no understanding or lens with which to understand native land management. Rather, like everywhere else, civilization saw resources to extract, came and conquered California and her people. With California’s wildlife & Native cultures now decimated, newer research has shown that Native land management actually contributed to enhancing the biological diversity and abundance of life. Anderson argues that if we wish to restore our mutual relationship with nature, we must learn these ancient management techniques and implement them immediately. Although she uses only California Natives to back her thesis, we can witness these same principles among indigenous cultures the world over. This book works not only as a history of indigenous horticulture in California, but mostly as a beginners manual for those who seek to understand more about sustainable, indigenous land management. This book rocked my world. Don’t miss out, buy it now!
Click the pic to buy the book!
A few (always white) people have attacked me as a cultural appropriator. If I learned a Lakota song, recorded it and sold it to others, that works as cultural appropriation. If I make a fire using a bow-drill, that doesn’t count as appropriation because it represents a piece of technology widely distributed around the world and carries no dogmatic cultural practice with it. I don’t benefit financially from the sale of particular indigenous traditional cultural practices. You won’t see me sell a line of Traditional Chanupa Pipes.
We know that humans who lived here for millions of years did so in a sustainable fashion. We know that civilization has caused the one of the largest mass-extinctions in only a few thousand. We know that the thousands of cultures that did not practice agriculture and create civilizations lived in this other sustainable way. We know that a lot of those cultures had civilized contamination by the time our cultures anthropologists wrote about them. Fortunately, enough writing on less-touched cultures exists so we can estimate how much contamination a certain culture experienced before we wrote about it, by understanding the baseline of indigenous cultures. For example when someone argues that rape/spousal abuse existed in indigenous cultures, we can often link that behavior only to post-contact.
Dear Diary,
Well, looks like the History Channel dropped my interview for their apocalypse show… I knew I shouldn’t have binged on all those frosted Circus Animal, animal crackers! Oh well. I keep getting bites from TV people, but no catches yet. I just don’t understand. When will I get my big break? Geez. I feel like such a whiny douchebag. Well, at least some nice folks put a few bucks in my tip jar. Thanks to Carrie and John.
Continue reading ‘W61,62,63: Reading, Writing and Rewilding’
My triumphant return to filmmaking.
The English language, quite literally, came from nowhere. No native people spoke it, not even the English. It works as a conglomeration of languages, a mish-mash made for one purpose; trade. If languages provide us with a context with which to see the world, than English programs people to see the living world through the lens of exploitation: trees as dollar bills or animals as units of meat, humans as slaves. English tells us from the moment we utter our first word to our last that the world exists for one purpose; commerce.
Hey friends, If you appreciate the work I do here, please support me by clicking the tip jar icon on the right and tipping me.
My friend William made this after I told him about the ants that have started attacking civilization and I had to pass it on:
Who can live with a light heart while participating in a global slaughter that makes the Nazi holocaust look like a limbering-up exercise?
- Daniel Quinn in Providence
The more time I spend at my job, the easier it gets to ignore my pain. I can shut it off and let my body function. I can remove all external thought and simply become part of the machine, pushing a button over and over and over again, lulling my heart back to sleep with rhythmic clockwork.
Click the pick to see other products/clothes with this shit.
On Sunday I was interviewed on the topic of rewilding by Adam and Robert on their radio show Free Range Thought, along with my friend John Sweeney from Growth Is Madness, who is doing a population growth series with them.
This Lolcat idea came from my friends Jana, Willem and Mr. Sweetey.
That you so much everyone for your words of solidarity in my current state of depression. The best feeling in this state of depression doesn’t come from bullshit advice, but solidarity in feeling the pain of those around me. Thanks for that. It feels good to not feel this pain alone. So, thank you thank you thank you! And thank you to Jason, David and Christine for throwing some much needed cash into my tip jar.
You’re right. I’ve gotten really sick of writing, and this is just a ploy to pass the time until my writers block passes (probably four weeks from now when my job ends!). Write an essay under 500 words in length on your topic Vs. Rewilding. It can be sincere, ironic or absurd, just make it good!I will select my favorite three who will win an award or prize of some kind… Perhaps a lifetime membership to the Urban Scout Cool Kids Club. I’ll make little badges or certificates you can frame or something. You have one week! Please send them to urbanscout (at) gmail (dot) com with the subject “rewild challenge.” You have until Sunday May 4th.
Good ‘ay mate, if you live in Australia check out the new issue of Chain Reaction, the national Friends of the Earth Australia magazine. I adapted my Agriculture Vs. Rewilding chapter for an article in it called “Rewilding Food Systems.” If you can’t find a copy of the magazine you can read it online here.
I notice a lot of people from Austin, Texas check out my site, and I have a few myspace friends in Austin. I thought, perhaps, that some austinites would feel compelled to throw a weekend rewild camp? mikerock just formed an e-mail list in yahoo groups for those-rewilding-austin, so if you live there and want to connect with some like-minded folks, peep this list. If you want my help to organize a rewild camp in your area, first read my How To Run A Rewild Camp article and than tell me what you need.
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