I can definitely see your side of many of the points. However, your assertion that wearing American Apparel merchandise is just as anarcho-primitivist as scavenged, homemade, or otherwise free clothes doesn’t seem right to me. The best case scenario of how you came across American Apparel clothes is that you found them lying on the ground somewhere, or in a free box or something like that. Even then, wearing them risks influencing all of the fashion punks (who seem to be the real problem causers for you) to think that ‘punks’ in American Apparel is cool. They might then buy or steal American Apparel, and perpetuate the whole thing when people see them wearing those clothes.

Anyway, living in Cascadia certainly lets me experiance a unique people who in many ways look and talk like your average fashion crusty or p.c. punk, but truly have the will and desire to learn about, and then share, all these truly useful ancient techniques. Examples of this are edible/medicinal plant walks, roadkill processing work shops, herbal based womyns heath collectives and the like.

Excellent point about re-wilding looking different to different cultures though, that is often overlooked.

if you’ve studied anthroplogy at all you know that primitive peoples have a HUGE range of behaviors beliefs ideals religions etc. and there are tons of things that most enlightened left winger type folks would really be opposed to about plenty of primitive cultures if they suddenly found themselves a part of them (example: “yes, you are marrying your second, cousin. no there’s nothing you can do about.” or “lawerence the medicine man had a vision, and you’re definitely a witch, you’re gonna have to leave now”)
we can’t not liking these things, we’re thinking with twentieth century civ minds, and of course we can’t say they are wrong, but that just isn’t our cultural context and it doesn’t make sense for us try to glorify it.

so we just need to remember that the thing we are focusing on is how to survive in a hunter-gatherer way that’s best for the planet. the rest of the culture that would be created if we were to have some sort of feral hunter gatherer society today would likely be completely different than anything in the past.

and when it comes to clothing and appearance, it doesnt matter a bit how we look as long as we are focusing on maintaining ourselves in an environmentally friendly way.

lastly, anyone who has gathered wild foods know it’s not a bit like dumpster diving!

I appreciate that the punk scene feels shit upon by the culture-at-large. I do too. I used to thrash back in the day. It feels meaningful to take part in a different culture–a sub culture–that speaks to you. We definitely need a new culture, and we will have to make it up as we go. Maybe it will involve scarification and tattoos and dreadlocks. If you don’t want to starve, it will also definitely involve foraging–for more than the civ’s leftovers. But when we get to the place of living in a new culture (which probably won’t completely happen in our lifetimes) then all those things we bring with us will become the new status quo.

It’s not about rebelling against the old so much as it’s about finding a way to something new that will outlast the old.

I’m flashing back to the Viet Nam war era. Quite a few people responded to the doings of this nation by dropping out of the mainstream and became hippies. I really liked that “scene,” then; they were self-sufficient, environmentally-conscious, ate well, and lived closer to what I consider a natural state of being. Ah, the good ol’ days. And, I see the same in you rewilders, natural builders, and so on. But not faux hippies so much.