Also, I think that the fact that 200 species go extinct every day (or something like that, I may be remembering my statistics wrong ) must be taken into account in every discussion of tactics. IOW, tactics that take a longer amount of time mean that more of the world will be destroyed in the meantime, so I think that tactics that take longer should have pretty huge advantages over quicker tactics, to offset that consideration.

Paul, I think you are seeing a difference where one doesn’t exist. To me, “keeping the world wild” is the SAME as saying “trying simply to live”. To all wild creatures, these things are one and the same - the instinct to live necessarily includes rewilding the civilized world. I think that it would be the same for us, if we could completely rewild ourselves (become a truly wild human).

Another reason why I think that these are one and the same for humans too, is because our survival (as wild humans) will REQUIRE dismantling civilization and rewilding the land that it has domesticated, because civ’s domestication is progressively killing the land and its creatures, and every day that this process continues the capacity for wild humans to live is diminished.

Take the example of salmon. Salmon form a fundamental part of the ecology of the west coast of N America, and their extinction would dramatically impact (negatively) the potential survival of a whole host of species in those ecosystems, including humans. Even the plants in the forest depend on salmon for a ton of their nutrients (as salmon swim upstream and die), so even they will be harmed in their survival by the extirpation of salmon.

If wild humans wish to be able to live along the west coast in the future, we NEED to take out the dams to prevent the disappearance of the salmon. This is a basic matter of survival, IMHO.

This is why we have re-offending murderers and child molesters.

Rehabilitation is a crock.

I don’t get it, though– Why the need to keep pushing these dichotomies of natural/unnatural wild/domesticated? Makes no sense. It simply doesn’t matter whether you give things a nice name or a naughty name.

Try this:
“When I think of “resistance movements” I envision a small group of
people resisting against a much larger and all-powerful militarized
machine. To think of civilization as an all-powerful death machine,
the idea of resisting makes me feel small and paralyzed. But when I
turn the paradigm on its head and see civilization working
as a small resistance movement against the much larger and more
powerful world, I feel empowered; civilization does not have the power
to resist the flow of the world.”

Plants do what they can with their resources, not because of some ideal “to keep the world wild”, but simply to live. (Well, I don’t know, maybe like some people, some plants do, but…)

All in all, I like what you’re saying here, but I hate having to wade through a lot of dogmatic nonsense to get there.
Peace

Totally. You don’t need to necessarily blow it up. As long as you remove it and rewild the river. I think it comes down to scale and bioregion and discussions. Do Cascadians need to rewild the Columbia to have a softer crash here in Cascadia? If so, how does one rewild the river? Bombs could work, what else? etc. etc.

“Blowing up a dam seems like something well out of the ordinary for most people, hardly analogous to people just living their lives.”

Haha. I does seem out of the ordinary for most people. But I think that involves the scale to which civilization has brought us. I’ll use Daniel Quinns metaphor from the tales of Adam. If a lion starts killing more than it needs, Adam says he would hunt down the lion and kill it because, “that is a lion gone mad.” Worried the lion would wreak havoc on the ecosystem, he would hunt it and kill it so as to prevent that from happening. I doubt that hunting lions was a favorable task that any ordinary person would partake in… especially lions gone mad as they are no doubt less predictable than sane lions. A task such as that would definately not look as the tribesman going about his daily business. But it would fit in with the daily business of maintaining and care-taking the land.

Like the wounded lion who takes at random and more than he needs, civilization works as a culture that has “gone mad.” Like the hunter who has the balls and the skills to hunt down and kill that lion, those rewilders with the balls and the skills to remove a dam it would not look like your ordinary day of pruning your premaculture garden or checking your trap-lines, but still it would fit in with the daily business of maintaining and caretaking the land. Hunting down a lion did not require a big military operation (though to indigenous peoples it may have felt like such). But removing a dam may require something of a more grand scale as well.

I think such actions will be dictated by whether a band of rewilders stands at the front lines of the closing map or the further reaches already out of the map, as well as how far civilization domestication reaches with technology into others landbases. For example, though someone may live in the Canadian Rockies, far from militarized civilization, as long as those Dams on the Columbia stay in tact, they prevent salmon from getting to the rockies. This means that the rockies still fall in the map. If the natives of old had dammed the river and disallowed other natives upriver from receiving fish, you can bet there was some shit that went down. Similarly, if humans plan to rewild in the rockies, they’ll need to think about how civilization can keep them domesticated from afar.

I like a lot of what you’ve written here, but of course, I feel a little uneasy with the conclusion. Blowing up a dam seems like something well out of the ordinary for most people, hardly analogous to people just living their lives. As Rix put it, “If we just go about living our lives as wildly as possible, the civ may come along and try to pave us or cut us down, but they can’t cut us all down.” That, and much of the rest of this piece, seems to say more to me about slow and steady changes in lifestyle, rather than big military operations.

Imagine a series of dam collapses where they were helped to subside in natural ways and how unsettling for people’s belief in the god of progress. I have no idea how this would work in practice but instead of creating bad PR for the anti-civ/primitivist part of society (I bet the powers that be can’t wait for this to happen) it would create bad PR for civilisation itself.

Here’s to the weeds in the pavement, the trees by the sidewalks.