AnPrim On Fire: Human Supremacy Within Anarcho-Primitivist Narrative

From Vegan Primitivist

Within anarcho-primitivism plays an ongoing dialectic pinpointing origins of the problem of civilization. Impugning only capitalism or the industrial age is seen as much too timid. From the left, radical environmental activist leader and author Derrick Jensen notably impugns the point people exceed their capacity for self-sufficiency, the dawn of cities. In Ishmael and The Story of B novelist and civilization critic Daniel Quinn renders agriculture as human’s dichotomizing choice to be Givers or Takers. Couple cities with agriculture and you’ve hit the anprim sweet spot.

Looking farther back than agriculture as the start of humans’ split with nature slashes approval. Anarcho-primitivist author and Anarchy Radio host John Zerzan’s look back to origins of art and language has appealed to some but with less enthusiasm. In his 3/13/19 radio show Zerzan reals in others’ analysis on the catalyst of controlled fire, instead positioning civilization’s origins at the point humans domesticated animals and plants. Some say looking back only ~10 millennia paints too shallow a picture, ignores all the props setting the stage for humans igniting the world with civilization.

The debate on civilization’s origins parallels the debate on what qualifies as a technology. Values connoted by technologies are biased to support the interpreter’s view on origins. For example, those who blame agriculture see the plow as an obvious tool of civilization. Those who include controlled fire in the blame see hearths uncovered in archeologic digs as technological shifts in humans’ relationship with living communities that set the stage for domestication of plants and animals. Agriculture-blaming purists deny that using fire is technology toward civilization, perhaps to justify keeping fire in their rewilding repertoire, or perhaps in an effort to ward off criticism of hunting and cooking animals. In the premise set forth here placing civilization’s origins with the beginnings of human primate’s colonizing lifeways, inventions such as mortar and pestle are not catalysts toward civilization if they are not used as colonizing instruments, but spears are catalysts toward civilization if they are used as colonizing instruments, no matter how ‘simple’ in design. Yes other species use hunting implements, but not in a way that degrades and massacres large scale living communities in a mega-regional, or even worldwide colonizing scheme as humans have.

Even today various prehistoric fire methodologies manifest, adding insight into how civilization might have transitioned in through fire use. I’ve joined Pemón people in southeast Venezuela in slash & burn jungle ‘gardening’, turning yucca into bread to trade with nearby villages. I’ve surveyed evidence of rotational camas plot burns abandoned centuries ago on a Salish island tribes once used not to inhabit but just to grow and harvest the tasty bulbs. I’ve seen Karuk burn redwoods’ underbrush clearing space for huckleberry and oak ‘gardens’, and grazing meadows for hunting deer and elk, cultivating ‘crops and livestock’ into the forest (their words) for so long that elements that made the pre-human forest robust are replaced by and made dependent on human lit fires. And I’ve heard female native docents frustrated with male docents’ focus on telling stories of hunting and war rather than how wild edibles were foraged and fire was used to extensively clear land for planting of domesticates maize, beans, squash, and melons, the less masculine staple plant foods provided by women’s labor.

Observations such as these spark wonderings on impacts of earlier humans’ fire use on habitats, and in turn on their own culture. To what extent did controlled fire lead to agriculture? Being domestication was likely not the original purpose of many inventions like fire mastery, what were the transition periods, catalysts, and factors setting the stage for civilization to erupt? How did early human actions shape early human ethos, and vice versa? How do these moves toward civilization form an overarching theory on humans’ adaptations and evolutions from their origins into H. sapiens current domesticated form?

Comparative anthropologist and anarcho-primitivist author Layla AbdelRahim’s theory is that human primates shifted away from symbiotic habitat roles as seed spreaders into a predatory mindset, lifeway and foodway. No matter the exact nature of the cause, the problem is revealed in the shift from foraging plants to hunting animals. AbdelRahim’s conception connects with other analysis on the impact of early human ‘progresses’. Back to Zerzan’s Anarchy Radio show, the following week 3/19/19 I called in with a follow up question on his ‘domestication not controlled fire made us civilized’ statement: What set the stage for domestication? His answer: division of labor and ethos of control. Despite how long ago humans’ first sparked flame then how long it took to integrated it into routine use on a widespread basis, it is more than conceivable that fire mastery was a crucial step toward not only dividing labor but controlling, preying upon and colonizing bioregions. One could argue that other animals have domesticated other life, or have divisions of labor, or shaped entire ecosystems with control over elements like water; but no other has gained perhaps the supreme control, control over fire. Changes in ethos and world impact were certainly monumental.

In primatologist and biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham’s book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, cooking allowed for increased calories to shift from the gut to the brain for inventive thinking that gave humans a new advantage, a power over other species. Human relations not only changed with other species, but within our own. For example, men shifted their focus from foraging to hunting, providing periodic meat, while women continued foraging and gathering to cook vegetation and occasionally meat. While men went out on risky hunting quests, women were tasked to provide steady sustenance, staying closer to the hearth. Cooking was susceptible to pilfering, so a ‘primitive protection racket’ formed pairing cooking women with stronger male counterparts to control food distribution. Hence cooking instigated the cultural practice of food as property and men’s subjugation of women through pair bonding, an ownership-of-women patriarchy continuing to this day. And yes, some women have hunted; imitating and adopting the way of the oppressor happens. Generalities in cultural analysis tell a generalized story.

With men’s shift to hunting specialization resulting in not only predation upon other animals but domination of female mates, one might question if women’s later shift from gathering and cooking specialization to joining men in adopting agriculture might equalize the power imbalance. But agriculture further polarized the sex power imbalance. Researcher on gender and technology Deborah Spar is wrapping up her latest project with the book: The Virgin and the Plow: How Technology is Changing Who We Are, and How We Live and Love. She finds that agriculture settlement needed children to both work and to inherit accumulated property. For men to know who their children were, as their rightful laborers and heirs, they began controlling women’s fertility. Agriculture honed the notions of adored female virgins and monogamous wives. As humans domesticated themselves and others, this quest to establish paternity intensified a patriarchal hierarchy with men at the top, and women, children and other animals leveled beneath as property to exploit.

AbdelRahim’s anthropological predation theory parallels an anarcho-ecology colonization theory. Wild communities thrive through intricate interactions, responsive dynamics, cycles of life becoming death becoming life, and a constant striving toward diverse connectedness and homeostasis of primal freedom. Mutual aid is the way of the wild. Changes are met with attempts to re-stabilize the living system. Species slowly shift their ranges, reforming networks through co-adaptations. Defense mechanisms ward off more invasiveness than a community can withstand. Species die offs occur but are limited. This is generally how hominids lived with others from their first steps out of trees for millions of years, notably as more prey than predator. But as human primates invented a series of technologies giving them not just abilities to survive and thrive with and within wild habitat, but powers to expand, control and conquer their predators and all others, they adapted and evolved into a colonizing species, in time degrading all Earth’s bioregions.

When one Homo species honed the ability to control fire, changing their foodway and making their brain even more inventive, did this cascade into Homo colonizing the planet? Long before animals and plants were brought under H. sapiens total control, humans virtually wiped out all their predators, spread across Earth, and reformed continents of habitats. In their book Man the Hunted: Primates, Predaotrs, and Human Evolution anthropologists Robert Sussman and Donna Hart smash the man-the-hunter myth with evidence of early humans succumbing to predators such as cats, dogs, hyenas, snakes, crocodiles, and raptors. Progression from prey to colonizer of the planet implies myriads of inventions, catalysts and adaptations, some more impactful than others. For the foraging primate, fire mastery meant not only protection from predators, but turning predators into prey with fire-formed weapons, then cooking them to further feed their inventive brain. Fire’s warmth welcomed expansion into colder climates. Fire mastery may have been the most significant technology transfiguring a resourceful species from foraging prey living within habitat ranges to Earth’s most effective predatory colonizer.

Imagine the immense series of ‘advances’ with accompanying progress trapping repercussions, cycles of stories with the same motif differing only details. As various bands of Neanderthals mastered fire with flint (Andrew Sorensen, Emilie Claud, and Marie Soressi, Neanderthal fire-making technology inferred from microwear analysis, Scientific Reports, 8, article number 10065, 2018), it may never be revealed the extent fire altered their lifeway and environments. By analyzing DNA in plaque on Neanderthal teeth, paleomicrobiologists discovered a band seemingly with fire under a thousand miles from a band seemingly without fire. One from Spy cave in Belgium mostly ate meat like woolly rhinoceros and wild sheep. Others in El Sidrón cave in Spain were entirely vegan, no trace of meat, just mushrooms, pine nuts, tree bark, and moss. The Belgian Neanderthals hunted; the Spanish ones foraged. (Laura Weyrich, Sebastian Duchene, and Alan Cooper, Neanderthal behavior, diet, and disease inferred from ancient DNA in dental calculus, Nature 544, 357-361, 20 April 2017) Imagining the outcome of contact between fire and non-fire human bands serves as a lesson in how supremacy expands by applying a theory in Andrew Bard Schmookler’s The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution. Spoiler alert: Evolutionary dynamics drive power in unavoidable ways people don’t choose.

Play along: Imagine Neanderthal groups living within reach of one another. If all choose the way of life without aggressive fire use, then the entire region may live in homeostasis. But what if all but one choose mutualism within habitat, and that one uses fire for ambitious expansion and conquest? What are the possibilities for others confronted by the aggressive fire powered neighbor?

  • One group is attacked, defeated and destroyed, leaving lands seized as spoils of war.
  • Another is defeated, but not exterminated; rather, subjugated to serve the conquerors.
  • Another flees into some less livable place, ceding former habitat to the growing power-seeking fire-controlling Neanderthals.
  • Observing these events others decide to defend their autonomy. But the irony is to win, they too must become powerful. Since the aggressors honed ways to grow their power with innovations in organizing strategies using fire technology with ferocity, the defensive Neanderthals must transform into something more like their adversary.

The four possible outcomes are destruction, absorption and transformation, withdrawal, or imitation. In every possible outcome the lifeways of predation and colonization are spread. And, neither the oppressor nor the oppressed are free, but owned by the technology, the ethos. While the Neanderthal line was cut short, H. sapiens continued on with impacts well known. This parable explains for example why both civilized men and women comply with cultural norms on pair bonding and monogamy. They are fixed in perpetual compliance with cultural normatives established as far back as the geneses of agriculture and fire mastery.

Was it not humans’ shifts toward predation and colonization that changed the nature of plants and animals through preferential selection, not just in how others live in relation to the new powerful primate, but who lives and who dies? Would H. sapiens have been able to domesticate eventually the entire planet without predation, without colonization, and without the fire that sparked them?

Denial of catalysts toward agriculture such as controlled fire and hunting is denial of human supremacy through patriarchy and speciesism. This is why anprims struggle with defining human habitat ranges – they don’t want limitations experienced by wild animals as homes, they are trapped with craving a destructive sham freedom to colonize, they are accustomed to the entitlement to roam so extensively and fearlessly that they no longer sense total belonging within a bioregion’s community of life. This is why anprims laud hunting, justifying it in the wings of more recent indigenous people’s cultures and mythology of earlier humans ‘primal ventures in wild but predatory ways – they don’t want to live as foraging primates, they have been conditioned to crave the hunt of animals, unknowingly craving civilization’s catalyst. This is why anprims mock veganism, devaluing and dismissing it with invalid claims of being nothing more than leftist drivel – they don’t want to acknowledge their own innate compassion for animals suppressed by predatory indoctrination. As in the parable of the tribes’ futile ending, is it not a choice to rewild? Do attempts to rewild clash with the human as the embodiment of civilization?

Civilization is not one event in time, but a labyrinth of invasive actions that become practices and mindsets of H. sapiens’ supremacy, bewilderingly manifesting overtly in those who strive for a way pre-civ, or anti-civ, or post-civ. Painfully and tediously pulling back the veils gets one nearer to understanding humans’ wild freedom. An anti-colonizer finds the way of primal anarchy to be resisting civilization, refusing to relent, while rewilding earth toward abundant flourishing.

In today’s ruined wilds, the way of primal anarchy is de-cultivating civilization. Technologies that perpetuate civilization can be retooled to discard civilization and the ethos that led to it: predatory control and colonization. This colonizing Homo-driven sixth mass extinction event is no time to play the fabled caveman exploiting pristine remnants. The first step in rewilding is sensing Earth’s call for healing and responding to it. Sciences such as restoration ecology can be utilized until humans awaken their lifeway that innately co-tends wild co-homes. In giving back to the wild, humans return themselves to the wild, reviving the ethos of mutualism in habitat.

Ria,

3/21/19

https://veganprimitivist.wordpress.com/

There are 191 Comments

Good article. I can definitely see a link between the advent of fire mastery and further technology- leading as you say to differentials in power and setting the ground for a mindset of exploitation(which only grew more overt in expression over time).
Though I’m sure that the anti-vegan posturing you mentioned exists in part because of internalized narratives of hunting, the radical construction of living a life bounded as it was in the way of early humans, and to an extent as an expression of modern biases against veganism... I would say that some of the resistance must be related to the extreme difference from our current lifeway and the difficulty of returning to it. If you take the entire graduated spectrum from rampant consumer non anarchist to anarchist then from anarchist to anarcho primitivist and finally from the standard anarcho primitivist perspective to the early human vegan/opportunistic omnivore that you appear to advocate for...each step requires a massive shift, from one to the next, as regards ways of thought and daily life. As with most normies when seeing anarchist thought for the first time (or even the treatment anprims get from r/cth most of the time) the expected result is revulsion and outright rejection.
That being said - to bridge what you propose to where someone like myself stands(accepting the anprim critique, but seeing the most possible extreme way of realizing it as a return to an agrarian lifestyle using permaculture tecnics etc - a minimal primitivist praxis tbh)how would you propose we advance toward something even older. I’ve read fire cooked food contributed to the emergence of language for one thing(plant based included). And since most vegans I know rely on either industrial farmed produce or at best, locally grown stuff (which still is well outside of even the most modest indigenous forest gardening...which is further still outside of the prefire human), and we currently live bounded as we are by privatized lands - how should we proceed?
I ask this sincerely.im not yet vegan myself, but my wife at least is moving that direction from the experience of keeping our own livestock...for me it may be a longer road(currently focused on transitioning to being a locavore)...but I do want to find ways outside the monetary system to support my family and to do so in a way that is radically rooted and as non exploitative of the land I live on as possible.
If at any point in my long winded comment I seemed snarky or anything I apologize- I’m sleepy and had a long day - it was unintentional....I’m just curious and cursed with being long-winded.

Nice article. I think I more or less agree with you. Certainly I think that a focus on cooking/eating animals is a root-cause of oppressive/hierarchical behavior. Fire certainly played a role in that.
Overall, I tend to have mixed feelings on whether to critique indigenous lifeways that incorporate the use of fire in land "management". I'm not sure I believe that there would be purely egalitarian communities in the absence of fire. And I do think that many indigenous cultures who have utilized fire are/were so much more egalitarian than my own culture that I have to pause before I question their history.
Its a curious situation: if fire had never been harnessed, maybe we would never have seen the rise of colonizing cultures. But given the use of fire for millennia, some outcomes and cultures seemed much more desirable than others.
I also think its interesting that fire-prone ecosystems have co-evolved with anthropogenic fire over the past 10,000 or so years (since the last ice age). In terms of restoration, this presents a problem: do we restore to a condition that assumes no anthropogenic fire, or are indigenous cultures and their intentional fire-setting a characteristic mechanism of disturbance? I tend to go with the latter while quietly questioning whether we should be allowing the lofty characterization of our species as an ecological "keystone".

not everything used to be a forest. mono-cropping is more destructive to the land than pasture-raised animals. it cannot be done in as many places, and requires far more water from irrigation.

“the economic evolution of dominion”: https://youtu.be/r8VNSrl6yck

there’s a great point in that clip regarding social stratification from domesticating plantlife, and how we are NOT unique in this regard, as similar features have been found in certain ant species.

there are also plenty of videos of herbivores making caloric intake from other animals when given the opportunity. so if there really some sort of hierarchy induced by a creature’s ingestion of animal-derived fats, proteins, and cholesterol how come it isn’t across the board?

Thanks for sharing this talk on “the economic evolution of dominion”. Nice spin on the same motif, but combining evolutionary biology, anthropology and economics. Interesting to hear more mainstream professionals shifting blame from industrialism to agriculture. Sad that even the mainstream is in increasing agreement with anprim, making anprim seem increasingly mainstream but in a way lacking in effective resistance.

Regarding the difference in how humans have stratified compared to other animals and plants, in a way that's resulted in what we've done, I do agree with her pointing to the complex evolutionary social forces of dominion, supremacy toward a tragedy un-embedding ourselves from nature. In the end I would agree with her initial warning - a little bit of knowledge may be dangerous, but the idealization of the Pleistocene is old, and her conclusions lead to no real changes. But maybe speaking truth is the first step to action.

Animals do sometime eat out of their nature, and adapt dietways. My point is that the human primate's shift to hunting and meat eating altered our lifeway into a powerful, colonizing species that is no longer functioning mutually in habitat as it had, but as a destructive colonizing force.

About 1/3 of earth's arable land surface is consumed by both agriculture and pasture. And grazing livestock's interactions with habitat are degrading compared to wild grazers.

Acknowledging and despite the vegan bias of the source, there's an interesting analysis Why Plant Crops Don’t Kill More Wildlife than Pasture Raised Animals that highlights some studies on this. An example of the conclusions:
"...Following the harvest, 17 of the remaining 32 mice were hunted by predators such as weasels and tawny owls. Clearly, the loss of cover made them more vulnerable to predators. But the mice knew that too. So they adapted. After the harvest, they became cautious in their forays, refusing to venture far unless it was safe. Many left the fields and migrated to nearby scrub. On the farms, the number of mice on the fields declined by 80%. But the point is, they had not been massacred by a combine harvester. The half who were killed made an important contribution to the ecosystem. Without wood mice, predators such as foxes, owls, stoats, martens, badgers and hawks would have a hard time surviving."

https://freefromharm.org/common-justifications-for-eating-animals/why-pl...

Thanks for the discussion.

Ria thanks for your replies. It’s refreshing to have discussion that goes somewhere. Although I’m still surprised by the silence from AnPrims. Do you think that’s a sign that they are oppressive? They don’t even share their response, much less ask questions to explore your ideas. Your thoughts really strike the heart of their ideology, and they are so tied up in their ideology it’s easier for them to ignore you than deal with the possibility that their life is based on their misunderstandings. Maybe they don’t like being labeled patriarchal or supremacist, but by not responding they are acting it. Anyway, thanks for standing up for what you believe and discussing it.

given that all these comments are anon, how can you know that these commenters aren’t anprims themselves?

i think this is just a provocation to get an antipathetic response, since so far they have been more or less agreeable, at least curious.

Great piece Ria! Succinct yet comprehensive. As always, your writing sets the gears in my mind spinning. We can observe that traits identified with civilization can be found in sustainable primitive societies. Fire, hunting, hierarchy, etc. Toned down greatly, of course. I think most modern civilized people see this as a sign of inferiority in these groups rather than a sign of primitive people's understanding of the true nature of sustainability and a choice to live within what their landbase can provide. The South Seas expansion provides a good example. As people inhabited those islands, they began destroying the ecosystems. Some, like Easter Island, sealed their fate by cutting down the last tree. Others stopped what they were doing, seeing it would lead to their demise and changed their practices to live sustainably. I can imagine in both groups, someone explained what you explain in this article. Some of the island societies listened and survived (at least until European expansion). Others no doubt tossed the heretic to the sharks. Stay wild.

go back to the comment sections of your local newspaper, or back to your facebook wall

The overemphasis of the term hunter-gatherer plays into the man-the-hunter myth. If you’re gonna label a group of animals (including humans) based on the way they eat, primitive humans have foraged for their mainstay for a much longer period of time. Plus, if civilization kept slowly creeping in, if you want to adapt to a pre-civ way of life, foraging is much more pre-civ. Humans hunting has done much more harm than humans foraging. Is eating plants less manly? Is that part of the patriarchy?

And that supremacy is no different in psychological parameters than white supremacy, because THE AOE-LIKE CREATURE that fell out of a tree 1 million years ago and stood upright on 2 feet got an arrogant superiority complex which has been epigenetically embedded and is innate and physiological viciousness and slashing burning smashing heathen rage.

He's talking about the minority of people who go ape-shit due to drugs, fucked up wiring or toxic ideological brainwashing, not everyone.

I think the picture you have painted about our early hominid ancestors going about their daily lives with viciousness while slashing, burning and smashing things is false. Similarities to chimpanzee and gorilla society would indicate a quiet peaceful life gathering fruit and berries and raising offspring. In fact, this psychotic portrait you paint may just be a projection of your own inner tendencies. There were no swords and flamethrowers 500,000 years ago!

VERY IN DEPTH! I am excited to see the end result and see what JZ says in response to it

AnPrim is heavily invested in hunting, even if he agreed with this on some level, he’d have to stop himself from admitting it out loud. His fan base is mainly manly men, anti-vegan men. No way would he jump ship after all these years and all his meaty friends. Too much change, would throw his life out of whack. Play along: imagine JZ going vegan again!

Maybe if he acknowledges the Amazon women phenomenona as not being an anomaly but real and global, that the male hunter/ female gatherer binary is false. But as usual he never actually gets out in the field living his theories, its always armchair speculation and doom.
I would be all for JZ if he lived in a functioning wilderness totally self-sufficient with and equally distributed gender nihilist group of primitivists. But just saying the word " gender nihilist" makes him go into a derogatory tirade about their non-existenence and irrelevancy.

That women can run their own society without men. I'm being poetic calling it the Amazon women phenomenon after the Ancient Greek myth. Surely you have heard of,,,,,oh wait, you don't read books or history, ok, bye.

Yes, I've heard of that. I didn't realize it had a pseudo-intellectual sounding academic name.

I enjoy creating words to capture a conceptualization.,.

We welcome all Amazonian Stirnerian women into our union of clans.

I have one living with me now, she commands the TV AND I do the dishes ;)

You realize it's now virtually impossible for anyone to live in "a functioning wilderness totally self-sufficient with and equally distributed gender nihilist group of primitivists", right? Even the last few pockets of real H-Gs don't live that way anymore.

I guess JZ doesn't pass your purity test (not that anyone could, given your criteria).

"And why is it impossible?"

Because genius, civilization is everywhere. There is no escape from it. Go start a feral commune somewhere and within a few years the bulldozers will come....to make roads, or a pipeline, or a farm, or a gas plant, or a fracking well, or a housing subdivision, or a logging operation, or a mine, or a transmission line, or etc., etc.

Your 'totally intact self-sufficient' wild foraging group won't last very long without outside disruption at some point. Maybe if you try it on a mountain top. Even the few existing real foraging groups in South America, India, or Sentinel Island are being disturbed.

This shouldn't need to be explained to you.

"the few existing real foraging groups in South America, India, or Sentinel Island are being disturbed."
Granted, but their minds have not been as severely and detrimentally disturbed as yours has been with a toxic defeatist negativity.

It's not about "defeatism", I am simply describing the reality of the situation.

I think we should be fighting and destroying civilization from wherever we live, in the here and now, not trying to run away to somewhere else to build some future utopia.

My biggest issue is how we're quickly found to be struggling alone in our "corner", while the rest of the sheeple including our "friends" are still in a trance.

What is possible will make me stronger if it doesn't kill me, so far all is good.

Breaking news: the State is possible. Not only possible, extant.

Where is the ‘dominant’ anprim response to this challenge from the margins ? Anyone out there?

trying to discern the origins of civilization sounds a lot like trying to figure out how many angels dance on pinheads.

I don't believe we will know. And I don't think it is important.

Who are we willing to be now & going forward, those questions are answerable.

"Who are we willing to be now"? A bunch of coward wasichus scared to sacrifice ANYTHING

assuming everyone's backgrounds. in the other thread it was "kill these fuckin wasichus"

Wasichu is someone who ruins the earth and doesn't respect wakan things it has very little to do with race

Lakota is a living language and there are many teachers

Is Zhachev now also Lakota? Impressive fluidity. Soon a Lakota tattoo to accompany the Japanese one?

Who is Zhachev

An attention seeking, feral, nomad, assassin, vegan, sniper, military tactics expert, music producer/DJ, stalker, harasser, misogynist sad boi with a Japanese-Lakota spirit.

slander

i hope those angels get pricked or skewered so that they’ll stop dancing

Nettle, very good sentiments! In other words, the past is just water under the bridge, instead lets make sure we have clean water to drink in the future.

I can see how you might get that from what I wrote but that is not quite what I meant.
We are living in the ruins of decisions made in the past, the past didn't go anywhere. What I was getting at is how that all came about is largely unknowable. Trying to answer if the controlled use of fire lead to a one way path to civilization is imo unanswerable so let's stop wasting time on that line of questioning.

regarding humans and widespread use of controlled fire: there would charred remains everywhere dating thousands and thousands years back, right? There isn't that evidence to my knowledge! Fire/combustion did become our dominating technology however and still remains so.

What about all the coal everywhere like really big remains everywhere dating back thousands of years.?

You obviously skipped the geology section in your quest for knowledge, if you even know what that is, one sentence, Carboniferous Period 360 to 300 million years ago.
However, there are theories of highly civilized species existing pre Jurassic of which all traces have been obliterated by continental drift, tectonic upheaval and weathering.

A samurai haiku -----

Winter blizzard blows,
Hot soup with morsel of meat,
Make baby happy.

Very interesting read, I haven't thought about anarcho-primitivism yet but it surely sounds interesting - especially the vegan perspective on that.
May I ask how your daily life is like as a vegan anarcho primitivist? I which ways do you apply these theories to your own way of living? Sorry for being such a noob..

Just like all anti-civs, living in the context of civilization is no longer a choice, it's taken over the planet.

One of our species' hallmarks is our ability to adapt to our surroundings, we're quite the generalist in this regard. My surrounding is urban with remnant patches of mainly second growth woods and wetlands. So I live off the lard of civilization's wastes and forage in ways helpful not hurtful to struggling wilds.

But there's no perfect answer, no utopia, everyone has to find there own way, individually or in groups or both.

make homo vegan again

we've never stopped having bodies that are vegan. and deers eat bacon

As I've said before why don't the like of Ria and Layla just go full anti-natalist efilist already. It's the most extreme reaction to physical life existence that there is.

How could anyone connected with nature and aware of reality think this is a good time to bring another human into existence. How 'bout we take a lesson from wild animals who slow or stop propagating when environmental conditions are tough. How tough does it have to get before humans understand that every human birth in today's context creates more suffering to self and others, exponentially? No matter your philosophical stance, in the end our species will have a die off, most likely at our own progress-trapped hands. How many of us do you want to experience it? Just imagine, no matter if its in a series of collapses (like those already starting) or a huge single event, how much civilized humans will suffer in the end.

For civilized humans, giving birth has become an ingrained tradition. And traditions are nothing more than peer pressure from a bunch of dead people.

Ria, the only time we should stop breeding is when menopause occurs.

living off the lard of civilization
a diseased and suffering thing
with a head full of false imaginings.

a mother hamster will often eat her babies. this act projects forth from fear of the cage and from a hope for extended survival in that same cage. the contradiction is notable but ultimately insignificant.

nom nom nom

Okay well... so human mothers should also eat their babies due to poor economic conditions where they live? Sounds like a sustainable source of food! Fuck for BabyBBQs 9 months later... Maybe the Virginia settlers were right after all! :S

it's hard not to, but we tend to interpret what we wish to be true. We want early humans to 'naturally' be the way we want to be today. For example, our culture has such a macho pro meat bias that we easily embraced Dart's 'killer ape' theory that early humans were vicious predators, man-the-mighty-hunter. We embraced it so thoroughly that many still hold the belief despite evidence now pointing to the opposite conclusion, that early humans of the time studied by Dart were running for their lives from bigger meaner creatures now extinct. And when people today did face the reality of early humans as prey not predator, they fixated on the 'caveman' days of hunting as the ideal time, anything earlier (foraging or scavenging) is too early.

Cherry picking bias is why when there is evidence of cannibalism or infanticide or rape or pedophilia. we have a knee-jerk reaction to excuse it away as an exception for some extreme condition, not the early human norm. And this is why it's so hard for even scientists to believe there have been early humans who did not eat meat, even though our biology is herbivore. When evidence of any meat eating was found, the behavior is overgeneralized as done routinely, and by every member of the group, and all groups. Then when evidence of a vegan diet is found, it's a knee jerk reaction to say 'it's safe to assume' this was not the case with everyone, or they had to be eating insects or lizards or something but there was just no evidence left. The bias is revealed in 'fall back' reactions.

It's almost like the closest thing we have to conceive some sort of utopian human lifeway is early human history, so we read our biased ideals into it. But there is benefit to learning from the past to find out what works, to help choose what lifeways to bring into our future. Also, at least for some, it's just interesting to know evolutionary history of humans and others. And to find our biases and debunk them informs us of our cultural lens, who we are today, and how we got here.

i mean, if you call the capability to be herbivore makes them "herbivore by nature", but it seems that they are called omnivores by scientists just because there's the capability for meat consumption as well. There were certain tribes that ate only meat because that was the only thing around, what are you going to eat up in the arctic regions other than whale blubber and fish? You might accuse me of "civilization bias" and all but i want to hear why you say that humans "are herbivore"

I'm with Ria here re: meat-eating bias. If Chimps are frugivores, so are we. This is because their diet includes non-plant-based food sources more often than ours, in the wild. Even modern h-gs only eat around 10-20% of their calories from meat. Omnivorous frugivores are we!

As Swift's A Modest Proposal was intentionally ironic as I'm sure yours is ;).,.

my point here, as a vegan for over a decade, is that hamster logics and hamster imaginings aren't at all even necessary.

tho, yes, pretend can be fun!
and fun is (usually) fun (and a stronk motivator!)!

You seem to more or less admit that you are on the anti-natalist track of things. The problem I have with your position is that it's really not our place to say whether life is worth it or not. This was a position that Renzo Novatore captured perfectly by concluding that life is neither good nor bad, simply tragic with interceding bits of good times and meh in between. I to arrive at a distilled agnostic position.

Ironically I'm someone who fits far more in the ancient, comparatively more carnal, old world then I do the post-antiquity world. I've actually suffered from being brought into a world touched by puritanism. I'd still probably do it again on the whole as I do affirm life in the grand scheme of things(I assume the homie le way does as well) in spite of EVERYTHING. This does not mean that I think the value of life should be subsidized by reified value however. I'm not anti-anti-natalist and really do see the logical points of the perspective of the likes of Benatar, Inmendham ect. Sure the species will die off either terrestrially or artificially or in perhaps some improbable Asimovian crazyness. I still say dance and detourn on the way. Personal suicides are of course welcome.

Well said, the whole notion of instructing others to prevent a potential creative emergence of life into the world is arrogantly playing god and side stepping the forever tragic path of eternal entropy, a condition one must embrace if an honest perception of human fate is to be ever joyfully celebrated. Let's turn this B-grade global capitalist horror movie into an intelligent tragicomedy masterpiece.,.

After technological birth control methods settled into mainstream's awareness about 80% of human pregnancies in the US were still unplanned. Now it's down to 40%, with about half of those aborted.

But for centuries if not millennia after civilization erupted humans propagated at high rates, guaranteeing strong commitment to civilization's 'progress'. Being we love to believe we're free and at least partially happy, denial of our progress entrapment takes the form of philosophizing and moralizing to pressure hyper-increasing our species' population, while other species languish under our notions and actions of supremacy over them, even to extinction.

You talk of the 'value of life'. To whom do you refer? When each human life, especially 'developed' human lives, takes heavy toll on lives of others, including our own species, and exponentially into the future, is that awareness of that toll not enough to free yourself from your indoctrinated shackles to procreate?

You want to dance? Dance wildly while smashing civilization, or healing wild places. It is there you will find true freedom & happiness.

I actually do have some personal agreements with you here and there. I have no desire to procreate personally and I can at least see the perspective of the anti-natal position. I'm obviously not down with anthropocentric leviathan.

When it comes to the value of life your trying to view it within a utilitarian lens which I reject. I think the value of life is in the eye of the beholder. It's an inherently subjective call. I don't think you can really smash civilization, only leave it behind physically and psychologically. Go silently into the night as far as registering history goes. Ultimately though, as le way correctly says, you have to make some type of piece with the entropic sufferable physical world.

so human procreation is "compliance with ancient indoctrination"? all other forms of life apparently have the biological need to procreate, but in humans that is purely from ancient indoctrination?

just like the insipid arguments around diet and how nutrition is obtained, that argument seems to be stuck in the box of civilized thought, even while it claims to be free of it.

"so human procreation is "compliance with ancient indoctrination"?"

Have you got a better rationale behind it, then?

There's no "biological need" to procreate, lol. Not in any animal life. It is accidents! When a female mammal is ovulating and some male around feels like fucking, it randomly happens after a mating incident, *because non-human animals don't know about contraception and abortion*, dimwit.

In my book, fucking is good, but procreating is the dumbest, most irresponsible thing to do as humans, at least in the current context where IS IT NOT NEEDED and also is adding an economic social burden at every new birth.

"Meat-Eating Among the Earliest Humans" Is an on point interesting read, even with slightly less meat & civilization bias than other scientific reports. Most of it speaks to butchering not killing, scavenging with stone tools not suitable for hunting but cutting flesh and bashing open bones for marrow and skulls for brains, not spears and arrowheads. The anarcho-ecology colonization theory is in line with early human primates initially scavenging due to drastic change in environmental conditions, but then some eventually adapting into a more colonizing lifeway incorporating persistent carnivorous scavenging. This would have been an early step toward colonizing culture.

The likely timeline is that earliest bipedal primates foraged for millions of years, then scavenged for perhaps over a million more before the rather recent advent of organized hunting. Our herbivore biological bodies had time to adapt to including meat in the diet, and the fact that our bodies had to adapt points to meat not being our biological origins. Our biology followed our behavior.

Still to this day, of all the diets out there vegan is healthiest, especially raw vegan. Some patriarchal & civilization bias: Women who eat raw vegan are less fertile, perhaps due to lower body weight. Perhaps that's nature's way of keeping populations healthier and in check. Another glaring hint that meat and civilization are not an effective evolutionary path is how the "large brains come at a cost, making childbirth more difficult and painful for human mothers than for our nearest evolutionary kin"

The report connects early human behavior with modern chimp behavior - 3% of their diet is hunted meat. Besides saying it's a stretch to assume early human diets were the same as chimp diets, I question the validity of comparing any animal behavior in today's environment so heavily impacted and degraded by civilization to earlier times.

The author's portrayal of 'required nutrients' has a strong civilization bias. For example, B12 (that she says is only found in meat) is the biproduct of a bacteria found in soils that early humans ate roots from, and that washes into waterways that early humans drank from. Another underlying bias - it's good that humans developed 'big brains'. If that's what turned us into a colonizing species that brought Earth into its current condition, philosophy has to work hard to justify the big brained human 'goodness'.

Gotta give the Briana credit for rejecting Dart's misinterpretations on his Killer Ape theory that remains in the modern conscious to this day. It's kinda ironic that his proof of humans hunting other animals turned out to be jaw bones of humans being eaten by the likes of hyenas. And his proof of humans murdering each other being a child carried off by a raptor.

The later evidence that starts to point to humans hunting species of antelopes and zebras that went extinct doesn't question the possibility of human's role in causing these extinctions.

'meat made us human'? Maybe 'meat made us civilized' hmmmm … 'meat made us colonize'

Thanks for making me think.

Raw vegans! Oh, for fucks sake, what a load of shit. There's no fuckin way you can cut it to make it seem like cooked food is less nutritious than raw. No human ever had time to eat 15 hrs worth of spinach and bananas everyday. Asceticism taken way too far. You live off of processed food out of dumpsters and are advocating raw veganism. Ridiculous

This is the kind of avitality stuff that Nietzsche and others talked against. I hate to see this kind of thinking taking over the niche zones of anarchy.

extended drake meme format (or alternatively brain expandy format or rick flair face format):

>Schopenhauer : (
>Stirner : (
> Nietzsche : (
> Novatore : )
> ur MOM : D

Holy shit Ria. WHY ARE THERE NOT MORE OF YOU IN ANTI-CIV ANARCHY! This is by far the most exciting debate on this fucking site!

Fertility is also a sign of health. "Lower body weight" that's starvation.

ria: "I question the validity of comparing any animal behavior in today's environment so heavily impacted and degraded by civilization to earlier times. "

indeed. yet you have no problem assuming you know what animal (including human) behavior was like in earlier times. or so it seems.

"How could anyone connected with nature and aware of reality think this is a good time to bring another human into existence."

Because gregarious people gotta reproduce. Because "society".

Urban yuppies will be more often those refusing to have children, as they might see it as unnecessary burden (which it is) and a practice that doesn't get along with their luxurious pipe-dreams, which is all fine to me. They travel often, live in family-unfriendly condos, bike around instead of driving, hang out in gyms, go out in trendy social venues/spots that are even more family-unfriendly... That's why I'm suspicious of that whole narrative with LGTBQ as being an obstacle to reproduction, because "heteronormativity!". It isn't, you poor sociology theorists! Proof: LGB suburbans are still having kids, damnit. Because their living milieus are supporting not only a substitute of reproduction (while I see nothing wrong with adoption), but a reproduction of the conservative culture of the suburbs, that is all about the family -and technology- as the center of social life.

In a way I don't quite get the hate that the anti-gentrification crowd have of this urban yuppie subculture. The problem may just lie rather in the shitty awful architecture of these condos (lol) as well as their invasive re-development gimmicks in urban areas. Of course, some yuppies are into this bar & grill commodity worship... yet that's not even the stuff that's being vandalized most of the time! So strangely... many among this type of normies -no matter how I despise them- are pretty ethical in their urban lifestyles, intentionally or not. I wouldn't say as much when it comes to their polluting, invasive commodification of nature as "adventure" sports, or weekly escapes, tho.

Me finds it insane that those hippie and leftie crowds are still making babies... yet they also ain't as much connected to nature as we'd think (well for the leftists, it's pretty obvious). I guess this must be due to that delusional "last hope" of creating a better world through a better education? Tho I ain't sure these kids will grow to be their parent's idealized image.

"And traditions are nothing more than peer pressure from a bunch of dead people."

Well put, but it doesn't HAVE to be. Peer pressure will enforce anything that rides whatsoever. Including the pseudo-iconoclastic breaking of traditions like what the boomers have relatively achieved. A tradition if nothing else than an older practice, passed on from a generation to the next. So the absence of passing on an anarchistic tradition to the next generation is... self-defeating, no? I'd very much have loved that the weak yet previously-existing squatter culture from pre-millenial age be passed along to the millenials as anarchist tradition, yet that's not what happened. Was that due to the despise for traditions? If so, then that meant shooting at your own feet with double submachine guns, Ria.

But I rather believe that was just due to a carelessness, or being too busy with other kinds of politics...

To be continued in my new upcoming podcast/mini-essay... Tuesday at 11 PM on radio.anarchyplanet.org -after JZ's show- if all goes well!

cool. not gonna be able to listen at that time. will it be recorded? if so, post link pls.

Ooooh yeeeeah, white yuppy me me me lifestyle is fiiiine by you cos you are soooo self absorbed in your white celebrity anarchist culture, but some people have no choice they end up with kids in poverty like most of Africa and thing is there that parenthood isn't a social construct but an organic process which defies ethics or morality, it just is part of lifes essential experience.

"but some people have no choice they end up with kids in poverty like most of Africa and thing is there that parenthood isn't a social construct but an organic process which defies ethics or morality, it just is part of lifes essential experience."

I wasn't referring to Africa or any other poor region of the planet, where anyways 10 kids got about the socio-economic weight of 1 kid in rich Western countries. Overpopulation in poor countries is not as much an issue than in countries where kids are grown to be Gargantuesque consumers. The poorer areas of Africa aren't car-crazed, consumer-driven economies. Nigeria for instance has got a huge recycling/refurbishing economy, yet imports/production of new shit (outside of oil) is very low.

But where is your "they have no choice" argument applies to richer countries? What is the purpose of having kids in these countries when you're middle-class or above? I've been respectfully asking people around IRL why they decided to have kids, and all I had was emotional or repressive answers. That's because there's zero rationale with having kids in privileged conditions in the first place, other than some made-up beliefs. There's nothing wrong with those who had kids already, but just fucking stop! Nothing's forcing you... your God is dead, and what about your "race", your lineage or your nation? All fluff as well. The economic constraints are hardly there.

ultimately it's a side note to me, to stop gentrification all together would mean to stop money moving around in bank accounts. This would be nice overall but would be part of a more catastrophic anti-civilization phenomenon which none of us have in our power to effect even in the slightest. The "anti-yuppie" lense in the whole manner is kinda boring to me at this point, it's all just leftovers from the late 20th century angst, i mean what the fuck is a yuppie? Are people who work in restaurants as bartenders and waiters still yuppies, or is that just the graphic designers, programmers, banking eunuchs? So much recycled terminology that doesn't even begin to define the essense of modern "society". I appreciate your venom fauvenoir...

"i mean what the fuck is a yuppie? "

It's u.

I ain't the one who pretends seeking to stop gentrification (but I'd like everyone to JUST FUCKING STOP, PERIOD)... you can't stop it as far if you won't stop the deeper system that makes it work. As a matter of fact most of my comments on the subject, over the years, was rather critical of anti-gentrification activism and especially its activists.

See... I grew up in a poor lumpen neighborhood among gangster rockers, first-gen punks, hobos and sex workers. Since then it was heavily tokenized and invaded by more upscale people from more comfy backgrounds. And many of those purportedly seeking to oppose gentrification are from these more privileged crowds, and very rarely from the older lumpen.

NA cities have always been engines of social mobility. Or any city developed by capital. As engines of leviathanesque production fueled by *classist* tensions, social mobility keeps rotating around as the city expands and undergoes formatting. My biggest problem actually with the current gentrification is aesthetics. Suburban normies got terrible taste and are willing to buy whatever cheap prefab shit that some low-grade moron is gonna offer them, so we end up with those mediocre sanitized residential condo areas filled with bed bugs. Actually these are copy-paste versions of any fucking generic condo development you'll have all across the developed, industrial world.

So since the people living in these places rely heavily on escapism as their living areas are secluded borefests (they just won't admit the obvious), that'll mean an extensive reliance on consumer entertainment systems, as well as travel and tourism industries, including getting one or two residences in the countryside, all of which is causing exponential pollution and devastation of ecosystems...

Gentrification is nothing else but mid-layer capitalism, the social mobility and struggles that are in constant flux in the imagined bell curve between the "rich" and "poor". And that's a THICC mid-layer. A huge, complicated, diverse, messy basin of interest or identity groups that seek their own share of the pie. It's so vast that you or your friends are likely to be involved in it. I think there's even street people involved in it. It's all over the place. It's capitalism! But also "society".

"Banking eunuchs" lolwut? Not sure, but I got insider intel that the banking cadre these days is very strangely into neo-New Age shit... and that is troublesome -or laughable- even if understandable. That may or may not be related to those conspiracy theories, but more likely is another cultist subset of group capital consolidation, that hints back at a well-known Order of the Solar Temple cult scandal within Hydro-Quebec that did the news back in the '90s. Very '80s gimmicks... and yea, '80s "nostalgia" has been trending among millenials. Maybe not relevant... Xianity's a dying dinosaur, so these may be palliative measures to cope with the spiritual void of the mass commodity society.

okay, so for some reason I was tricked into replying in a 1 year old comment section, but... well...

Hey, I thought it was a worthwhile comment. I have felt similarly about the gentrification discourse in my locality. Lots of misplaced blame games and naive ideas about effecting symptoms of capitalism without going much deeper. Not pushing any discussion of gentrification to be more subversive (if it could be at all) but pulling it into the muck of guilt, name calling, and other weak politics. I think a lot of people screaming about gentrification don't even have a wikipedia level understanding of what it actually is and the stages it usually moves in.

It seemed like it took in the timeframe of years for many people to wrap their heads around to at least blaming developers instead of individuals sitting across the the table from them in their organizing collective.

@critic makes a good point. Also, its increasingly irrelevant to use the term working class or bourgeois, the socio-econpmic boundaries and dynam8cs have changed in the last 100 years. Its not like society remains dormant, power shifts and mutates into many different forms.
Maybe your fervent anti-yuppie stance indicates a stagnation in your own cognitive and psychological perceptions of culture and power, and you have trouble distinguishing between intention and fatalism, which is a major flaw for anyone who takes on the task of critic.,.

" your fervent anti-yuppie stance" hahahaha! Who dat?

But no, I ain't @critic, sorry. There's at least one big different between our writing styles, being their's has an apparent complete lack of humor or satire. The "It's u" part... that was satire.

What I been trying to say, here, is that, while yuppies are indeed a social phenomena that exists, it's also just an aspect of broader dynamics of social mobility.

But why the butthurt, I'm wondering... Are u feeling targeted when I "yuppie", hmmmmm!?

Finally, to have someone dictate to me a code of ethics I should be living by is the height of arrogance and against the whole anarch spirit. An anti-natalist must embrace voluntary celibacy to escape the critique that they are only vegan hedonists with an environmental consciousness.

Ethos: the characteristic spirit of a culture, era, or community as manifested in its beliefs and aspirations.

I use the word ethos because it is descriptive, not didactic. Although I do have thoughts on ethos of destruction and ethos of thriving, I don't think I'm dictating.

Regarding your anti-natalist rule, to get personal, I sensed that I shouldn't bring a child in the world after I was ripped out of my pre-school freedom along a forest edge & stuck into kindergarten. From age 18 on at my annual gyne appointments I requested my tubes tied, and was laughed at & repeatedly told there are 3 rules before that could happen, 1. Gotta have at least 3 kids, 2. Gotta be at least 30, and 3. Gotta have permission from a husband. When I accidentally got pregnant I pleaded with the dr to tie my tubes after giving birth, and was told the same 3 rules. I reassured him I wouldn't change my mind, and that I didn't want or have a husband, and refused to leave his office. He finally agreed to do it if I got a psychiatrist to confirm that I was making a 'sane' decision. That's how I got my tubes tied at 23. Later some men friends told me they were prevented from getting vasectomies, but only based on the first 2 rules, they weren't required to have permission from a wife.

But no matter when people wake up to it, it's not surprising that they meet resistance of civilization compelling them to propagate future consumers, stick them in schools indoctrinating hegemony of the predatory culture, and on to work.

Vegan yes, but hedonist? Only if pleasure means primal life. Whenever I think of hedonism, I picture people enjoying civilization. I enjoy civilization collapsing. I grieve for wild every day, and my only escape is restoration projects. Environmental consciousness - hope so.

Mkay, I was a tad harsh, I can truly sympathize with your feelings, I loath civ myself, but unfortunately I'm a biased parent, BUT ITS TOOOO LATE BABY, chee-ow ;)

I mean it's not anti-natalism (that sounds like rather nutty as a position) but rather a rationalist approach to what is in fact, an action with HUGE consequences. You're talking 'bout giving life to one or several human(s), not cats or dogs. These newborns, especially in a social context that solicits very little DIY and self-help but rather economic/political dependence (and interdependence), represent every time a new load of demands and also more production of shit. At least that's very likely, unless they end up as under-productive social loser scum like me. ;-)

Lots of challenging ideas and claims. But statements like “ of all the diets out there vegan, especially raw vegan, is the healthiest” sounds like ideology speaking. Healthiest in terms of our relationship to our habitat? Or in terms of our longevity? Or sense of physical wellness and energy? It makes us happier? We experience less illness?

if you want i'll cite sources, but to me it's also just common sense.

and the implications of this are powerful when considering the nature of our species

Love your fresh thinking!

But does it make sense to generalize one diet across the great variety of habitats? If our habitat makes us as we make our habitat, based in an organic reciprocity tending toward maximum habitat balance and health of all its life forms, wouldn’t it be the case that every set of relationships is unique, and therefore every diet too?

Also, what of raw meat and fish eating lifeways? Doesn’t that somewhat challenge the connection between domestication of fire leads to meat eating/predatory behaviour, leads to division of labour/domination etc.?

I wonder the story behind your name.

Thing is, humans don't belong in any and every environment they choose. That's the ways of colonizers. We and others in our living community thrive best when humans are not colonizing others' habitats, but living within our own.

Hey, if some human would rather catch an animal and rip it open with their sharp claws, then bite into its raw flesh with their sharp teeth, rather than pick some leaves & berries... so many thoughts... Do you think humans have an innate compassion for other animals?

"Do you think humans have an innate compassion for other animals?"

i don't know if compassion is innate or not. and i surely don't think it would be the same for all humans. i am not one to attribute much to "human nature", whatever that might be.

i happen to have lots of compassion, primarily (but not exclusively) for non-human animals. i also have compassion for plant life. i even have compassion for the blackfiles and mosquitoes that make it so hard to be outside for a couple months a year. none of that means i won't eat a plant, or periodically some part of an animal, or even some insects if i had to. and it surely won't keep me from killing those pests that want my blood - i just make sure i kill them quick, no suffering.

also, why would humans not have movement between habitats/bioregions due to changing conditions, just like other forms of life do? i am the first to admit that modern humans are mostly a pathetic blight on the beauty of this planet. but it seems like you have a bit of a double standard.

I'd much rather podcast with an anprim or restoration ecology, at least anti-civ partner. If you know anyone who'd be interested in co-podcasting, feel free to send them my way. And, someone who could handle the techno part of it. No permaculturists please.

Thanks for the idea.

You and Deep Howls would be great together. I'll put in a word if you want

I'd say you could share my blog with them, but a lot of people are averse to vegans or primitivists, or especially the two together, but I don't bite, too hard, and I like to have fun, so that's an asset, I suppose.

hahaha, the blog’s name is “Howls of Deep Siberia”, in any case it’s Siberia which is deep, not the howls lol ; )

it’s tricky, huh. to somehow trade emails amidst a sea of trolls. i suggest a diaposable throwaway account, and then trade your real contacts and then delete throwaway.

All these projects and e-infrastructure and we still can't manage. What are we doing with our lives

stfu spinoza

MWUHAHAHAAA ETHIC SMASHING IS MY FAVOURITE THING TO DO IS A CAPITALIST SOCIETY AND THE WORLD OF WORKING TOWARDS EXTINCTION EMPOWERED BY ETHICS EVEN THE ANTINATALIST ONES?
WHEN PEOPLE CEASE ADVOCATING BEHAVIOR POLICY THEN MAYBE THE WAR AGAINST NATURE WILL END.

Pleeeese podcast! You offer SO much green anarchist vegan information that I hardly see around.

verbally; this was apparent in your chat with Aragorn! on the Brilliant podcast. You could have (and should have) nailed him on so many points. From your own admission in this thread, I take it you feel the same? Personally, my advice to you: get someone to help you figure out the technicalities about how to podcast and then podcast by yourself and on your own terms putting forward your own arguments. VeganTrove (from Austrailia) may be help to you regarding setting up. She has a simple but effective way of getting her points of view out on the net. Just start off simple and see where it takes you. It's about your message and not bells and whistles, remember that. Set up a YouTube channel and post it on @News. Don't underestimate yourself. You have a lot of interesting material and you provide links and evidence which is needed. James Corbett is another who started off simply, had no idea had to put it altogether, now how produces independent slick documentaries etc. Guests will want to be on your podcast and you will be invited on to podcasts too. You just get the confidence, prepare some notes etc and your articulacy will develop as you learn (as you go). It's obvious you have a burning need to get your perspective out there, so do it. Good Luck

they could practice by reading their blogposts out loud
and putting questions or arguments someone might ask in a bowl, to grab one at random and practice answering impromptu

If it were to come into fruition, I'd definitely want at least one other person, and it'd be cool to have a call in show, with longer discussions with people like the ones in this thread. And also for people to share what they're doing rewilding nature - that's my life.

I've always talked sloppy. When I was a young kid I hardly talked, just spent most of my time in the field & forest, mostly alone but sometimes with other kids, but little talking. When they put me in school they gave me speech therapy. And, it's more than articulation. There's a delay in how I organize my thoughts that's not conducive to the immediacy of speech. But free-flowing spontaneous friendly conversation is cool.

Hah, sooo contradictory, to be concerned about ones articulation, which is a construct of civilization. Stay in the forest and utter sporadic spontaneous sounds as we are born to do.,.

yeah, I feel guilty for all my civilized ways. Wish there was an option, but when life on earth is under attack the war is brought to everyone. There's no ignoring it with egocentric blinders, or wishing it away with positive thinking. But you're right, very self-contradictory.

I'm guilty of it also, but the up-side is in refining the line between decency and primal spontaneity, thus we instruct our children to go to the toilet rather than crapping on grandpa's kitchen floor ;).,.

the childhood experiences strike a note within me, even though i feel like in some ways i was the exact opposite. I have always been really good at talking and forming words, but i could never play "the game". A lot of people have mocked me and told me to shut up because i always seemed to interfere with smooth social interactions. A lot of my adult life i've been just learning how to "be lonely" and try not so much to care about what other people think. I don't even think schools can properly prepare children to be social anyway because of the ever shifting landscape based around technology and soft power...i mean, fuck expectations concerning the future, right?!

I AM THE GOD OF SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST, OF DOG EAT DOG OF HAMPSTER EAT HAMPSTER AND OF ANTINATALIST SPECIES SURVIVING THE HARD ECONOMICS OF THE FUTURE. HAIL ANTINATALIST RULE, WE SHALL STAND DEFIANT AS ADULT WARRIORS UNTIL WE GAIN OUR GERIATRIC UTOPIA .

Of all these responses are any responding to her challenge to the anprim mythology part, from a believer or practitioner of it?

Keep us assessing each other on unnatural irrelevant factors, placing us in hierarchies, selling us dreams that turn our hope into fake lives.

Imagine if you were born to a primitive people, The nihilists might be repulsed at the thought, but the group identity had to take priority over the individual, resulting in an intense sense of belonging, with the group thoroughly needing most every individual for sheer survival.

I remember learning of a people, I think it was in 'central america', that had a group based justice system. If a person from one group harmed a person from another, a person who cared most for both the harmed and the harmer was chosen to hear the telling of events. That person decided how the harming group would make restitution. The group was responsible for the behavior of all.

Imagine if that kind of justice system were applied in civilization.

I say 'fuck expectations' when people say there's no use in trying to help heal remaining wild habitat. That's the only time I hope beyond hope.

Agreed, though some of us nihil-esque individuals can adapt and blend into any cultural system. Look at it this way, we have a carte blanche intellectual potentiality in the same bundle of human desires which all of us share. Forget the Freudian egotist individualism with its inbuilt selfish agenda, the nihil-esque Stirnerian individual is the omnipotent one giving guidance and overindulging the spook infested collectives with words of wisdom and a helping hand in awakening their own powers. I feel most at comfort amongst the indigenous animists because their mythologies involve and integrate living animals, ecosystems, Natures superiority over human status and therefore a code of conduct in respecting this condition of existence.,.

If.

what are the ecological restoration projects/activities you have engaged in? Just looking for ideas, i happen to find ecological restoration a noble one. Tree planting is something i've wanted to do but there's got to be something that individuals can do other than that...

There's also this book by Douglas W. Tallamy getting into the science of why native plants. But it's a northeast US habitat, so plant species will vary.

"As development and subsequent habitat destruction accelerate, there are increasing pressures on wildlife populations. But there is an important and simple step toward reversing this alarming trend: Everyone with access to a patch of earth can make a significant contribution toward sustaining biodiversity.

There is an unbreakable link between native plant species and native wildlife—native insects cannot, or will not, eat alien plants. When native plants disappear, the insects disappear, impoverishing the food source for birds and other animals. In many parts of the world, habitat destruction has been so extensive that local wildlife is in crisis and may be headed toward extinction.

Bringing Nature Home has sparked a national conversation about the link between healthy local ecosystems and human well-being, and the new paperback edition—with an expanded resource section and updated photos—will help broaden the movement. By acting on Douglas Tallamy's practical recommendations, everyone can make a difference."

...realizes that even if you successfully rewild an area and help replenish the ecosystem, if this area becomes suddenly targeted by development this means it will all have been done for nothing, *as far as you do Jack Shit opposing that development directly*. Therefore broader geographic considerations become necessary for this practice, as resisting development can become an unavoidable step in rewilding, not just the rewilding itself.

But yes, I know how native perennial plants can help restore the place and this rewilding project of yours appears to have been fairly successful at bringing people to such an educative practice, and I like that thing. The best things we can do often haven't got much to be discussed about.

Great point. It's a species ethos thing. And a bringing down Leviathan thing. Hey, I just noticed that Dave Foreman has this book Rewilding North America: A Vision For Conservation In The 21St Century.

"Dave Foreman is one of North America's most creative and effective conservation leaders, an outspoken proponent of protecting and restoring the earth's wildness, and a visionary thinker. Over the past 30 years, he has helped set direction for some of our most influential conservation organizations, served as editor and publisher of key conservation journals, and shared with readers his unique style and outlook in widely acclaimed books including The Big Outside and Confessions of an Eco-Warrior.

Cooking meat does not provide any more nutrition, it actually takes away nutrition. The theory that we figured out how to scorch our meat and then our mental capacity increased because of it, is completely absurd. It never makes sense to plant anything.

I have a couple of questions on this. I agree that fire, rather than agriculture, seems to have been the first human invention that set us on the course towards the invasive colonizing species we are today. However, is it possible that although our natural habitat and lifeway was equatorial and herbivorous, our shift to hunter-gatherers, though initially unnatural, led to adaptations that make it more natural now? Not that eating meat is necessary, as the science you've pointed out ensures that it's not. But rather that we are adapted to living in habitats that were not originally natural for us, and therefore our wild presence would no longer be unnatural; that it's possible for us to be connected and intimate with the land in a northern climate even though winter dominates much of the year and our nakedness and herbivorous origins make it impossible to live there without tools, animal flesh, and animal skin/fur.

An example I think would be how we evolved naked and herbivorous near the equator, where nakedness was natural for heat exchange, dark skin protected us from the sun's rays, and the landscape was diverse enough and warm enough year round to provide adequate nutrition without animal flesh. But as we adopted fire and meat and other cooked foods after our scavenging period, and the tools to procure them, we were able to move to habitats and climates that would otherwise be inhospitable. So by the time some of our species reached places like what is now northern Europe, they required shelters and clothes made of animal furs, and a diet heavily based on meat, and tools and inventions to procure meat, and fire to cook it and keep warm. Because they didn't evolve in that habitat, they had to take the adaptions to the environment from other animals who had them, like the fur, or the meat of those animals because there wasn't year round plant material in sufficient type, quantity, and diversity.

Though we were thus initial invasive and dominating in this sense, as time went on, the landscape adapted to our presence as much as we adapted to its. Wherever we moved, massive die-offs followed, as animals that had not co-evolved with us were suddenly faced with our predation and domination. But after those die-offs, we seem to have found equilibrium in those landscapes, where we thrived and the landscape was undegraded by our presence for thousands of years until the advent of agriculture and the encroachment of civilization.

In the case of northern Europeans, their dark skin moved to what we now consider white skin due to adaptations to ensure adequate sunlight absorption for vitamin d production. But we never evolved fur for warmth, a layer of thermos-regulating fat, or claws and teeth for carnivory. We didn't evolve those because we buffered our evolution from them through the use of tools and inventions. There's no selective pressure to evolve fur in a cold environment if you're kept warm by fire and fur. There's no selective pressure to evolve claws to hunt if you invent spears and knives and traps. But the things we can't buffer against, such as sunlight absorption, or gut length and internal physiology, seem have to adapted to this new environment.

Now if those of us of European heritage, with white skin, were to be truly wild again, we'd either have to live in the north where our white skin is most suitable, but which would require continued use of animals for fur and food, and the tool of fire for cooking it and for warmth, or we'd have to live in an equatorial habitat like we evolved to, but then our white skin would be a liability, and even hinder our ability to survive.

Our invasiveness caused partial adaptations to new unnatural environments, while our tools and inventions buffered us from full adaptation. So do we really belong anywhere now? In your opinion, does fire, though originally a tool that led to invasiveness and conquest, have a place in wildness now because we evolved into our current species using it? Is it really human supremacy to choose to live in northern climates even post-civ given that, although originally unnatural human terrain, we evolved to those places after moving to them, and the land-bases there adapted to our presence?

And what is your opinion on how people of white skin could truly be wild again, and accept human ranges rather than world presence, given that our partial adaption to the north in skin melatonin but non-adaptation in the form of fur and fat, kind of renders us unnatural in every environment, even the original human habitats we evolved from? And if partial but incomplete adaptation can occur through movement of place, making us unnatural tenants of any landscape without the use of some tools and inventions that ultimately mediate us from wildness, couldn't it be that our foray into meat eating, though originally unnatural, has led to the same situation, where now after hundreds of thousands of years of being a part of the human diet, some amount of animal products for some cultures at least can be beneficial, if not slightly necessary, in a wild situation without civ and agriculture and processed food, as we've partially adapted to them without the full adaptations of claws and fangs and short intestinal tracts and full immunity to atherosclerosis?

How do we deal with the legacy of our planetary colonization when its inception was so long ago that we have made partial adaptations to this unnatural state, and the land in many cases has adapted to us as well, to the point where what was once unnatural is no longer definitively so? Even the burning of forests for field and forest edges, while a form of domination over land and plants and animals conducted by hunter-gatherers, over time has led to adaptations on the part of the land and animals and fire regimes, so much so that once they were stopped and allowed to rewild, thanks to indigenous displacement by Europeans but before being plowed over, the landscape suffered. Of course a new equilibrium would be found given enough unhindered time, but my point is that maybe our original unnaturalness in some aspects of our relationship to the land ceased to be unnatural once we and the land-base co-adapted to the new lifeway. And maybe now it is no longer correct to say that our natural human habitat is equatorial, or that our only natural wild diet should be 100% vegan.

I would agree with most of your observations there. All accept that our initial transition into meat eating was "unnatural." Both adaptation and evolution are natural phenomenons. When environmental pressures become through abrupt climate change and associated habitat changes, the natural response is for animals to adapt. Recent findings have shown that bipedal apes were present in Africa for a very long time before there was a marked increase in brain size. Although the walked on two feet and shared many morphological characteristics with modern humans, their cognitive capacity was much more similar to what we see in chimpanzees. The transition from earlier hominid species into the homo genus corresponded to a time of massive climate upheaval in Africa. Essentially, what was once a large expanse of jungle and intermittent Savannah with a stable climate, began oscillating between extremes of aridity and humidity in very short spans of time. It was during this unstable period where our ancestors began making leaps in cognitive capacity, and those leaps correspond with archaeological evidence of fire use. There was jungle food available due to climactic conditions, which put tremendous pressure on the homids existing at that time, and they began looking toward other sources that would not have traditionally been primate food. The problem they ran into was that much of the potential sources had nutritional content that was "locked up." Without the ability of ruminates to unlock the nutrition in grasses, and the ability of carnivores to kill, eat and digest raw meat, there was really only one solution if hominids had any chance of surviving: fire. Fire serves as an external form of digestion, allowing us to unlock those previously unavailable nutrients. We would not have needed this if our original fruit-producing habitat had remained intact, but it didn't, and as any organism faced with severe environmental pressure would, we responded in kind. Naturally.

Correction: I meant to say that there was LESS jungle food available, due to climactic shifts and habitat changes.

Could it be that in the fluctuating climate and vanishing forest, Australopithecines had fewer food opportunities, and adopted passive scavenging to survive. Then the fat from brains & marrow triggered brain growth that allowed for the beginnings of inventive thinking such as precisions in chipping hand axes, and burning tips on sticks to make spears to chase away predators from their own kills? And this new inventive brain laid the foundation for early humans to do more than survive, but to turn their predators into prey, bringing on a new powerful ethos, expansion and colonization?

Yes, it could be. Anything could be, given the timelines and scant evidence we are dealing with. But, as I understand it, the evidence points strongly to fire being the main catalyst to the sudden leaps we made in brain volume and cognitive capacity. Australopithecines were scavenging meat for a long time without any marked increase in brain size. The increase seemed to have happened quite abruptly, in terms of evolutionary time, coinciding with climate/habitat instability. Fire harnessing also happened around this time, which is probably the singular thing that allowed any of the non-arboreal hominids to survive, given how erratic the environmental conditions were. Being adapted to forest-savannah edges that were commonplace in a humid climate, but with those habitats effectively disappearing at a rapid pace, there would have been sufficient pressure to cause extinction in even the most robust of species. And this is exactly what occurred for most of the hominid species existing at that time. The things that existed to eat in the newly forming dominant habitat were mostly comprised of roots and arid-environment animal species, as we see in the Kung and San habitats of present day Africa. Fruits and shoots became so scarce that there was basically a non-existent environmental carrying capacity for any kind of primate. Unless they had fire, that is. Then and only then did such landscapes become habitable for our ancestors. It was basically live in the new non-primate habitat with fire, or perish. There is a documentary out there on this entire subject, although the title escapes me at the moment.

I'd be very interested in that documentary.

You may be interested in this study on an Australopithecene who was transferring from forest to savanna, whose jaw and teeth suggest subsistence mainly on diet of hard or tough foods such as ground tubers, nuts and seeds: Macho, Gabriele A. “Baboon Feeding Ecology Informs the Dietary Niche of Paranthropus Boisei.” PLoS ONE, vol. 9, no. 1, Aug. 2014, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0084942. (abstract below)

Basically, biological anthropologist Gabriele Macho studied whether a diet of tiger-nuts, edible bulbous tubers of the sedge Cyperus esculentus , would provide nutritional needs for the early hominin Paranthropus boisei. She determined that it would have contained sufficiently high amounts of minerals, vitamins, and of particular importance, fat for the hominin brain. Hominins selectively gathered parts of grasses and sedges, such as bulbs and grass blade bases, for their diet mainstay. Abrasive tiger-nuts, rich in starches, were also digested by chewing for a sufficient time, up to 3 hours for 80% daily calorie intake, corroborating fossil cranial anatomy. Large primates typically forage 5-6 hours a day. This is how ‘nutcracker man’ earned his moniker, surviving for around one million years because they could successfully forage nuts through shifting climatic conditions.

Also, since Richard Wrangham and others concur that a major food source of cooked foods was from plants, if the problem was shrinking plant opportunities, where do the increase in plants come from? The cooking makes big brain theory is that they were able to consume I larger amount of calories without expending the chewing energy. If you'd like, I could show you another study that points to fat from passively scavenged brain and marrow as being an instigator of brain growth before controlled fire.

Abstract

Hominins are generally considered eclectic omnivores like baboons, but recent isotope studies call into question the generalist status of some hominins. Paranthropus boisei and Australopithecus bahrelghazali derived 75%–80% of their tissues’ δ13C from C4 sources, i.e. mainly low-quality foods like grasses and sedges. Here I consider the energetics of P. boisei and the nutritional value of C4 foods, taking into account scaling issues between the volume of food consumed and body mass, and P. boisei’s food preference as inferred from dento-cranial morphology. Underlying the models are empirical data for Papio cynocephalus dietary ecology. Paranthropus boisei only needed to spend some 37%–42% of its daily feeding time (conservative estimate) on C4 sources to meet 80% of its daily requirements of calories, and all its requirements for protein. The energetic requirements of 2–4 times the basal metabolic rate (BMR) common to mammals could therefore have been met within a 6-hour feeding/foraging day. The findings highlight the high nutritional yield of many C4 foods eaten by baboons (and presumably hominins), explain the evolutionary success of P. boisei, and indicate that P. boisei was probably a generalist like other hominins. The diet proposed is consistent with the species’ derived morphology and unique microwear textures. Finally, the results highlight the importance of baboon/hominin hand in food acquisition and preparation.

Found it. It's a Nova documentary called "Becoming Human." It has three hour-length episodes, all of which can be found on Youtube. Episode 1 goes as far as the transition from Australopithecene to Homo Habilis, where we find a marginal but not insignificant increase in brain size. This change is attributed to the wild fluctuations in climate, and to that fact that Homo Habilis was using stone tools for animal butchery. Forced adaptability combined with tool use/meat consumption seems to have been the driver behind increases in cognitive ability. Episode 2 gets into the most significant changes in brain capacity, which took place in the transition from H. Habilis to Homo Erectus. The impetus here seems to be further adaptability and the addition of controlled fire. Homo Habilis started it off with climate adaptiblity and tool use for butcher, and Homo Erectus carried the torch, quite literally, with fire use, resulting in a doubling in brain size from H. Habilis to H. Erectus.

While I am no expert, these seem to be the most accepted theories currently, and I think this documentary does a good job of presenting the evidence as to how the theories were formed. Since evidence of fire use rarely survives in the geological record, it can't be certain when H. Erectus began using fire, but it can be postulated that they were all along, as they had lost all aboreal features by that time, and it would only have been night fires that would have kept predators at bay for ground sleeping. They also began migrating out of Africa very shortly after showing up in the geological record, also suggesting fire use. But really there is no way to concretely link fire to increase in brain capacity due to the absence of evidence in the record, but what CAN be linked, and definitively so, is the newly acquired adaptability of hominds (under the genus Homo, not Austrolopitecenes) brought on by erratic climate shifts; a period which meat eating and tool use coincides directly. Australopithecenes had a stable climate and a stable brain size for millions of years. All species under the genus homo shared one thing in common: unstable climate and resulting adaptability, including tool use and meat eating initially, and cooking with fire eventually. Each step seemed to have led to an huge jump in brain size, which ultimately led to fully anatomical humans and our colonizing ways. The problem with the examples that you are giving, is that they are referencing Australopithecenes, which had grossly smaller brain/body sizes and nutritional needs. Further, they had guts and teeth more similar to chimpanzees indicating being best adapted to a fully vegetarian diet, whereas H. Erectus and modern Humans have much smaller teetch, a smaller colon and larger small intestine, none of which would make sense unless our bodies were adapting to a diet which required less digestion (eg. a cooked food diet). Australopithecenes also went extinct, indicating that, while they were able to eke out a living under stable climate conditions off of mostly grasses and certain tubers, such a diet was ultimately not resilient, and and/or they were not resilient enough overall, to enable them to weather the upcoming climate and habitat upheaval. Maybe it wasn't just fire that allowed the genus Homo to prevail. Maybe it wasn't just tool use or meat eating. Maybe it was all of these things combined - adaptability itself - that allowed our survival. That's basically the conclusion of this documentary. Either way, fire, tools and meat eating were instrumental elements in that adaptability, and it seems very unlikely we would have survived without them. Again, Homo Sapiens, the craftiest of all hominids, almost went extinct ourselves at one point, even with tool use, meat eating and fire. We were reduced to something like 12,000 individuals globally, if I am not mistaken. Times, it seems were very rough back in the day for large apes that walked on two feet on the increasingly inhospitable plains of Africa.

Ultimately, this really boils down to a chicken or egg debate. What came first, a transition into predatory and/or colonizing behavior without essential environmental impetus, or unstable, uncontrollable environmental conditions that would likely have resulted in bipedal hominid extinction UNLESS they began adapting through predication, fire use and colonizing behavior? Could we have chosen otherwise? Did we "fall from grace" when we didn't have to? Did we loose our essential goodness without sufficient cause? Would we be as we are today if not for extreme environmental pressure - the driving force behind most major evolutionary adaptations? My opinion is that we are as we are, because we had to be. We did not do the selecting, we were selected for. This may be the only point where we differ (I am also a primitivist from W. Washington focusing all of my time learning about ethnobotany, habitat restoration, wildtending, etc), but as far as singular points go it is a philosophically significant one.

Regarding the "where did the plants come from" question, my thoughts are that it was not a reduced supply of plant matter, but a shift in the kind of plant matter. We may have ate just as many plants in our cooked food diet, but they were certainly not the same kinds of plants that we were previously adapted to eating. Previously lush, humid, stable Africa provided plant foods in sufficient quantity that did not need to be cooked. Unstable Africa, rapidly oscillating between humid and arid, did not. There was still plenty of plant matter, but it was not traditional primate plant matter, so much of it had to be cooked in order to digest it. Living in Nisqually territory, I can absolutely understand the challenge later hominids were faced with. Most of the staple plant foods that grow here have to be cooked, or at least processed in some way. Fruits, nuts, and shoots cold sustain a person for a brief part of the year, but not well, and not for longer than that. Without the addition of marine and terrestrial life, this place would not be habitable. I think there is plenty of evidence suggesting early species of the genus homo faced similar problems when the African climate became unstable, and they began problem solving in much the same way that the indigenous people of the PNW did with camas, shorline/estuary roots, and even fern roots for tribes that had the fewest options, like the Nooksack. These were all staple foods for certain tribes, and all required cooking. There is no reason to think that a shift in climate wouldn't or couldn't have led to similar constraints in Africa.

To paraphrase Bob Black, instead of blaming the big man why not blame the big bang.

Why stop at fire? What does that mean? Im here saying fire is natural and can be a part of wildness.

Further, we are the ONLY species of human to have survived this period, despite the fact that numerous species existed before us, and several alongside us. The fact that no other bipedal homind species survived is very telling. It indicates that the conditions in Africa was very difficult for primates during the period in question, to the extent that every single species went extinct except for us. It is very likely that we would have faced extinction as well, if not for the adaptations we made in fire domestication and projectile hunting technology. Apparently we very nearly did go extinct at one point. Even if we could have survived it without these adaptations, our population would likely never have reached beyond what we see in primates today, with a few thousand scattered here and there in isolated habitat pockets. Certainly, none of us would be here having this discussion. This is the great irony of this vegan-primitivist dialogue.

It makes sense that at some point, in some very harsh conditions, humans went into hunting and eating other animals as a compromise for not eating each other... People have an history of resorting to cannibalism in conditions of extreme scarcity and misery -and lack of food autonomy- but this practice leaves a terrible aftertaste of our own past "savagery" and inhumanity. When it was so cold outside the caves, there was NOTHING ELSE to eat than flesh from living creatures. I don't see what's so hard to understand with that.

Or maybe some people here don't know how it is to be outside at -50C for hours, and have your seemingly endless cold nights start in the middle of the afternoon...

Although what you’re saying makes sense to me, it seems at odds with a vegan primitive premise. So I’m not sure if you agree or disagree with the overall premise here. But i could be mistaken. I’m new to this concept. I have been a green anarchist against civilization for many years, and I’m a vegetarian by default, because I refuse to eat industrial meat, and I also have no idea how to hunt or fish as I was raised in the suburbs. So although I’ve never been against wild meat consumption or indigenous hunter-gatherer lifeways, I personally eat no animals. The combination of vegan philosophy coupled with primitivism, and not part of overall leftism, is a concept that I only discovered is a thing yesterday, and I’m trying to comprehend it.

What you’re saying sounds like the usual arguments made for eating wild meat despite the comparative anatomy arguments given by vegans.

When I said unnatural, I meant more about it not being the diet we previously evolved to. But I agree, there’s nothing unnatural about a species adapting to changes in order to survive. That’s the engine of evolution. And if we did as you pointed out, and then continued for countless generations, and even evolved into our current species about 200,000 years ago consuming this way, along with other adaptations to differing climates that fire and animal use allowed for, at what point does that become our natural state? How does the premise of vegan primitivism hold up if we acknowledge that although our anatomy suggests herbivory, our unique cognitive characteristics allowed for inventions that gave us access to meat and fur and fire, and they buffered our physical evolution from gaining the anatomical features of more typical omnivores? Therefore, just because we have the anatomy of an herbivore, it doesn’t necessarily mean we couldn’t have evolved some dependency on animal consumption.

This article details how fire and animal consumption led to invasiveness and colonization, and seems to be saying that true wildness and the absence of civ would require a vegan diet, an absence of fire dependency, and thus also an acceptance of and return to a more natural human range and bioregion that would allow for the above, namely an equatorial clime. But if, as is shown thru my example of skin changes, we adapted to what may have been originally unnatural, and even the land and its nonhuman life adapted to us, before other forms of domestication and civ, how do we know that what the article is suggesting is right? How do we know it is indeed human supremacy to not accept a limited human range if humanimals and the land co-adapted after our migrations? Or that some light skinned humans could never live in an equatorial clime now without the aid of civ and technology?

I could just be interpreting all of this wrong. I apologize if that’s the case. I’m just trying to wrap my head around it. See if it makes sense.

You interpreted it right; much of what I said is indeed antithetical to the vegan primitivist premise. Ria is not wrong that fire was an instrumental step on the road to colonizing behavior and civilization. Maintaining that it was the singular cause, however, is a stretch. One could just as easily point to symbolic thought or agriculture and make equally strong cases. Pointing to one cause, or even a succession of causes, is a failure to understand the interconnectedness and inseparability of all things in nature. The reality is that the universe conspired over billions of years to lead to what we see before us today. Every part of existence is alive, including elements that the materialist worldview has mistakenly considered to be inert and lifeless. The idea that minerals, which are the essential building blocks for all life on earth, are themselves not alive, is simply irrational. How can a bunch of dead things combine to all of a sudden make something which is alive? The minerals themselves must contain the essence of life in order for more complex life forms to exist. And when it comes to those complex organisms themselves, bodies are comprised and influenced as much by the microbiome as anything else.

The point here is to demonstrate the arrogance of the idea that humans are somehow running the show, or that it is our job to dictate which direction evolution is to proceed. We can look back in hindsight and observe that a certain adaptation led us down a path that we judge to be disagreeable, such as fire or agriculture leading to civilization, but to suggest that it was WE who made the mistake, marks a huge lapse in understanding. People making such assertions have lost the spiritual awareness that was universal to all archaic humans, who saw existence as one uniform, alive entity. No value hierarchies or degrees of aliveness were prescribed to different lifeforms. Such a view would not have made sense to people whose innate animistic perception was intact. Ria suggests that human empathy is innate, but when she says this, what she really means is that selective, value-driven empathy is innate. In this she is in error. Archaic humans did not view animals as more alive than plants, nor even plants more alive than mountains or rivers. To them every single thing in the phenomenological world was equally alive. When this is one’s experience, it is seen and felt that nothing can really die, in the ultimate sense. Things can only return to the original body of the earth, and emerge again as something else.

Those first humans who harnessed fire and began the shift towards meat consumption did not make a choice; they simply reacted. As wild beings of the earth, there existed no mechanism in them that would have told them meat eating was bad or wrong. On the contrary, when faced with climate instability and food shortages, they would not have given second thought to looking towards animals for food. It would be many thousands of years later, after humans had thoroughly cut themselves off from the natural world through agriculture and living in dense urban environments, that we began losing our animistic consciousness, and these new modes of thinking began cropping up in the human psyche. The position Ria holds, in other words, is a position which is a direct product of the civilized mind.

I agree that fire led to changes that made civilization possible, but I do not agree that this was some kind of human choice, and certainly not something that can be undone by our effort or directive. Nature selected the current arrangement we are in today, for better or for worse. I personally do not like it, but evolution does not take personal preference into account. It doesn’t even take the future into account. This whole human experiment is likely an evolutionary dead end, and for the first time in the history or the earth, the maladaptions of one species will result in the extinction of many others. The vegan primitivist position is one that refuses to fully come to terms with this. Certain people cannot tolerate an existence where there isn’t a good vs. evil dichotomy playing out, and when you really get the bottom of vegan primitivism, you will find that is the engine that drives their theories. On the one hand we have the good vegans who, if not for the savage meat eating colonizers, would have existed in a harmonious natural paradise. In reality, we are all just humans. Those who exist today exist only because they had ancestors who were crafty enough to harness fire, make projectile weapons, and augment their mostly vegetarian diets with some meat when times got really tough. Over time, this led to an increased reliance on meat, especially as population pressure and climate instability put further strain on people, and eventually drove them into northern latitudes. It was fate all along. Never was there a choice to be made. There were never any good guys or bad guys. This just happened. Even civilizations arose independently in isolated areas around the globe, betraying some latent trait in our makeup predisposing us to the possibility of that kind of social arrangement.

I do not think that choosing to be vegan is a bad thing. Faced with this mechanistic world-eating monster we have created, anything that one can do retain or rediscover some semblance of connection to the natural world is a good thing. If that means veganism for you, great. But this is going to differ from person to person. There is no right way. I personally find a tremendous sense of connection in both hunting and foraging. Hunting for me has always been something I have innately gravitated towards, since well before any indoctinators got a hold of me. Ria would disagree, and maintain that it is only my culture that has somehow beaten my “original goodness” out of me. I in turn maintain that it is the very same culture that predisposes her to the kind of dogmatic religiosity that she espouses. In the end, it all comes down to value judgements, which are to be found nowhere in nature beyond the human mind.

you make some good points, imo.

what i don't get is why so many people need to find historical "evidence" - which, barring a sustained lineage of accurate, non-agenda-driven storytelling amongs folks that trust each other, can only be provided by authorities proclaiming interpretations of the unknowable as fact - to support their worldview in the now.

all the niceties and comforts that civilization provides have left too many humans with no reason to connect directly with the rest of the natural world, to understand their immediate surroundings in terms of meeting their own needs. an unfortunate side effect of that is some folks use the time and energy that could be used to (re)create that connection and autonomy for creating their own narratives about the past in order to demonstrate how their ideology for moving forward is "correct".

i'm not saying anyone should ignore the past, only that the further back one attempts to look, the further they are from any real possible understanding of it. let's say i read about conditions for certain people during world war 2, and i read something else about conditions for certain people during the paleolithic, both written in the 21st century by assumedly reliable sources (whatever that means). the former could potentially be a modern equivalent of storytelling, with direct lineage to the lives and words of individuals from that time. the latter could never be more than conjecture, educated guessing, based on generations of interpretation and re-interpretation of "data" collected millenia after the humans in question actually lived. i'm not denying that there may be some "scientific" basis for their interpretations, or even that they might be relatively accurate. all i'm saying is it cannot possibly be known, yet people form their entire ideologies around that shit as if it was their bible.

Ria forgot dogs, yes dogs which contributed to civilizations formation. They assisted in the hunting and smelling of foods, searching, catching, retrieving and guarding. Also in hard winter times they could be eaten as emergency food. They have a high body temperature and act like a hot water bottle in bed to survive those icy blizzards.
And as the ancient saying goes, the dog is man's best friend.

All species go extinct at some point. I'm not saying to not try to survive, but if survival meant starting down the path of ecocide for not only our own species but all ecology, then what?

It really breaks me up hahahaa how all the ethical milleniums try to impart some noble mythical values to the Ancients, to the pre-X-tian hordes who inhabited the deserts and forests, forgetting about the ruthless bloody claw and fang of Natures law, that there was never the gentle caress or relationships, but instead the violent taking and penetration, the gorging on bbq meat, the Dionessian rage upon everything that feels and tastes good.

That comes from all that. For me whatever human affairs come there has to be some affirmation of instincts and that includes human non human consumption. I don't think this is anthropocentric(not prescriptively anyway) and their should be ethical break lines(this can include personal veganism). Think Saturnalia for slaves but with non-humans instead. There will always be some type of animal to animal domination in physical life ascetics be damned.

Suffering should be a marginal interest focus not a central one. If it's central to you you're pretty much on the road to efilism.

Yeah its not like every emerging generation has to run the gauntlet of an ethical minefield, because this vegan doctrine would have to be enforced and instilled into every child's mind if there's any chance of it being a global encompassing practice.. So how do they solve that dilemma, easy, they DON'T HAVE CHILDREN, then they don't have to be authoritarean parents telling their kids to abstain from meat and animal products.
That's the religious side to the anti-natalist fanatics. They are sooo rapped up in their little self-utopianized bubble that they can't distinguish between Epicurean non-attachment and hedonistic narcissism.

S'cuse me... but you're a big fucking moron carrying around your straw men. If anyone's advocating to not have more children it's not fanaticism, but ON THE OTHER HAND, your butt-hurt reaction to a tendency you don't even know nothing about makes you sound like one fucking moralist fanatic.

"elifism" is only a thing in the minds of bigots like SE who won't open their minds to different POVs while managing to pretend being clever. Face it, not matter the bad 1000$ big words you're bringing in the salad, here, that doesn't make you more clever. Not even reading a-book-a-day will.

All I keep seeing as critique of antinatalism is more low-effort straw men rooted directly in fear or resentment. Being against having more babies is not being "anti-life" or advocating the murder of people. Here's a position that pro-lifers (anti-abortion fanatics) will take, and I'm not surprised SE or you are caught rooting this conservative stance.

Get pro-choice or gtfo from this site, you right-wing fanatic fucktard.

"efilism"

It may be a fringe position but you can find it on the internet. It's the extreme of anti-natalism. Just so you know I'm not actually anti-anti-natalist. I'm Nietzschean on matters of life but, just as he appreciated Schopenhauer, I can see the perspective of suffering focus to the point of negating life. Being anti-natalist is about more then just having less babies(which I am obviously for).

Anon here, seems I hit a nerve about most anti-natalism having characteristics of narcissistic selfishness and not sustainable idealism. And I'll stand by the older acceptance of argument by ad hominem, those who point the finger must be held accountable themselves. Its like yuppies eating organic vegan but living jetsetter lifestyles, hypocrisy is a flaw WHICH I WILL CALL OUT !! * gasps *

Human meat tastes good too, no? There was plenty of human cannibalism throughout Homo. We're not just hunters or gatherers. We're cannibals, no? Since compassion isn't a basic level instinct, right?

All of my questions are directed to Ria. I’d like to know her opinion. Not the opinions of people who disagree with her and then spend all their time trolling her shit.

so why not email her instead of bumping a year-old thread and asking questions in "public"? is it the performance that you desire?

The performance? Can u even hear the fear and hostility in your interactions with people anymore? Or is sarcasm and pompous jabs the only way u can relate? Holy shit, just asking a fucking question. I just found this site two days ago and had a simple question for its author or others who agree with her. I didn’t realize it wud be nightmare of trolling assholes. I should have have though. This culture did a number on you.

Thanks for being a huge asshole.

easy, fren. breathe a little. no hostility and no fear here. the good news is that you just found this site two days ago and you've already figured me out completely. this leads me to believe you're totally posting in good faith and therefore we will all be happier having experienced you. welcome, ryan!

(edit: just kidding. your "i'm not talking to you, only Ria!!1!" post was totally performative dog shit. my reply was 100% hostile.)

It's nice to see someone asking thoughtful questions in good faith, as opposed to the commonplace trolling and shit flinging that occurs at Anews. However, if you feel inclined to post here, expect comments from people from all angles, not simply from "the author and those who agree with her." There are plenty other echochambers to be found on the internet, but Anews isn't one of them. You would think that there would exist some solidarity between folks sailing under the anarchist banner, but, alas, the space you have stumbled into is about as fragmented, divided and divisive as you will find anywhere. If that's not your cup of tea, and if you expect honest good faith engagement from everyone, or some kind of meeting of the proverbial minds, this probably isn't the space for you. That goes double for any dialogue relating to green anarchy, primitivism, egoism, nihilism, etc - all topics that have been the source of a rich, colorful history of infighting and even downright feuding. Welcome to anarchy.

instead of some version of concern-trolling, why don't you say something relevant to the topic?

I've made several relevant posts on the vegan-primitivist topic over the last couple of days. Is there some kind of quota I am unaware of? How many posts do I need to make in order to satisfy it? If there is one, I assume you must b)Ee the self-appointed arbiter? Makes sense. There's always one in the group

Maybe you should go back and re-read my post, and the post I was responding to. Calling a spade a spade isn't analogous to complaining. I am in fact entirely indifferent to what goes on at Anews. Yeah, it would be cool if it were different in some ways, but it has value as it is too. But the person posting is new here, and was requesting that only Ria and her followers respond to the questions. I was just pointing out the futility of such a request, that there are more suitable forums for such a goal, and explaining the reality of how things generally operate in the comments section here. I have no personal objections to the atmosphere, because I have no problems taking it at face value, and not expecting it to be other than it is. You sure do have a lot of confidence in your assessment of my angle, given how wrong it is. Oh well, I'll carry on "being" the level of dialogue, whatever that means, and you can carry on "being tired," and announcing it publicly.

I've been chatting with someone, really interesting, and they put it in a nice little nutshell thusly:

"So correct me if I’m wrong, but what you’re saying is that even though the indigenous wildness we’ve seen since fire and migration looks something like embeddedness, the co-adaptation of the land to us that gives that impression was not by ‘choice,’ and is therefore a slave to our presence. True wildness would mean accepting a limited human range we’re adapted to that doesn’t require domination and environmental engineering. And although it would be painful, it’s necessary unless we’re willing to maintain our supremacist ethos and continue to be an invasive colonizing species. And it’ll be painful because we’ve designed ourselves into a trap, and we don’t really belong anywhere anymore due to our new partial adaptations as well as the degradation of our original habitat.

On top of that, raw vegan is our original diet, the one that we evolved to, and that although fire and millions of years of incorporating meat in some amounts have led to adaptions that allow us to handle meat, it is not necessary, and is not beneficial to us or our landbases. That if the landbase doesn’t support human life through wild plant nutrition, rather than close the gap with meat, that landbase should be abandoned for areas more suitable for wild humans and a wild vegan diet. And that our health, and the health of the land, and the shedding of power relations and supremacist ethos in general, depends on it.

And I know this might come across as dumb, but just so I have it straight, I assume too, that you’re not against meat eating by other animals, or that you think predation is inherently dominating. But rather it is in the context of humans only because it’s not our original diet, and requires tools and fire and expansion to acquire.

I also gather that you’re not suggesting everyone who survives the collapse move to the equator and call it good overnight, that rewilding will have to come in steps and be a conscious act. To restore ecologies to an original state of thriving as much as possible rather than just abandon them to natural forces after millennia of interference, and that could include controlled burns, reintroduction of extirpated predators, and even meat eating, as you pointed out in another article, if the meat is from invasive destructive animals and is done in the service of rewilding, and with the ultimate goal of eliminating them and our consumption of meat. And ultimately to phase ourselves out and relocate to wild suitable human habitat.

And if so, do you think fire and meat consumption of even indigenous species has a place in rewilding? If the goal is to phase it out over generations and relocate? Like if civ fell tonight, are you on board with living off the land for the survivors, hunting and gathering since a vegan diet in non-equatorial climes is unlikely? But at least minimize meat consumption with the goal of weaning ourselves off as well as re-locate to more hospitable landbases over time?"

Have a "diet", like I said before, Ria's vegan primitivism is basically a blueprint for eating. There are ways to eat meat and animal products that transcend the capitalist model of domination and misery without making a big deal about how what you eat came to the supermarket.

You can go and find your plot of land live the way you want to, but there are many reasons preventing about 99% of the human race from jumping on board with you. I've wanted to live totally separate from all of the painful bullshit of society for a long time now but it just isn't practical to think like that. Start your commune, but don't try to trick people into thinking that vegan primitivism is really a way to escape millennia of colonization and slavery.

Her book isn’t raw meat for the domesticated humans to gnaw their juicy bias on. If anyone gets her book, lose your guardedness and maybe you’ll get something from it. If you’re just going to fight with it you’re not mature enough to handle it.

The carnism in some people is just so obvious and annoying, it doesn’t help anything, only serving the purpose of letting people psychologically cope with their own atrocities. See the person she quoted? Use him/her as an inspiration. I’m sure s/he didn’t agree with her 100%, but s/he still engaged in learning and enlightenment. It looks like they both got something out of communicating, not just digging in their heals being’triggered’ and defending their egos.

"Her book isn’t raw meat for the domesticated humans to gnaw their juicy bias on"
Grrrrr grrrrr woof woof grrrrrrr!! * Lifts leg and urinates *

It continues still, this endless controversial debate, hahahaaa, sorry, its just that it still cracks me up, this concern, when all the time, hahahaaa *cracks up again* its just being human and surviving. WHAT'S the big deal. You get hungry, YOU EAT. You feel horny, you have sex. Babies might happen or not, whatever. WHY ALL THE ETHICS? I'm the spontaneous zen type, there are no laws or ethics in daily life, no morgages, no structured economy, no disputes therefore no wars. More sharing economics, no industrial agriculture. But all this soul searching and guilt, hahahaaaa *cracks up yet again, for the third time* When will you ever become strong individualists? *gazes over multitudes from the top of a hill*

I stand solitary and aloof, smoking an e-cigarette and pondering the Stirnerian's dilemma, of how to ķeep avoiding the sheepish moralist hordes who crave to plagiarize my unique originality without putting the hard cerebral yards in

i just want to say this: i find ria a hard-core ideologue, and far too wedded to the science and interpretation of "history" and academia, both of which are completely civilized constructs.

but i am in agreement on much of her perspective. i truly appreciate the seemingly deep-rooted desire for wildness and a world without colonizers. i despise civilization, and i live further from it than most who despise it (that i have known), in every way i can control. as i get up there in years, i fantasize about the life i could have created for myself if i had reached the understandings about myself and the world i live in, much earlier in life. i didn't get started on this part of my journey until 20 years ago, i was already past 40.

so bottom line, props to ria for the level of commitment, analysis and desire to share. and rotten tomatoes for the moralistic, prescriptive proclamations and reliance on interpretation and speculation of authorities.

"which are completely civilized constructs"

Bitch u for real!? So is coding... computers... writing in a given language... the internet... the fancies of logic fallacies... trolling...

I take heat from both sides on citing authorities, when I don't, I get accused of not 'backing up' what I say. That's why in my book coming out soon, I try to draw from a wide variety of people and thinking. I have lots of citations from everyday people. I interview indigenous vegans, I have tons of illustrations open for the reader's interpretation, and of the 'authorities' I draw from many fields. Anarchists are a hard audience. And no doubt, my book will be hated by vegans & feminists as well. I'm setting myself up for a beating. But, ain't gonna let it stop me from singing my song.

you seem to be doing everything well. hopefully you're also promoting your book on other platforms with a wider and friendlier audience as well. i don't know how your interactions have been with different audiences. i've seen you have the patience and dedication to engage in these long debates either in article form, or in the comments, engaging anprims and other types of anarchists. how have your interactions been with politically liberals, centrists or conservatives, maybe aficionados of gardening, or ecology conservation, or other types of everyday normies?

That things they rely on for both survival and entertainment are things they need to oppose and reject, then they're going to be hostile about it. The fact that normie diet is already super heavily moralized and controlled doesn't really help your PR.

The only reason I stick around for conversation is the fact I'm a sympathizer, but to me letting go of control tends of control tends to be a more liberating idea than fighting destructive forces

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