So you want to live like a hunter-gatherer, huh? In order to do that we need to remove the barriers civilization has in place to stop us from rewilding. If we wish to remove these barriers that prevent us from easily rewilding, we must first identify them. The following list shows many of the barriers I have come in contact with. The list feels incomplete, but it covers much of the basics. It also reflects the “pure” end of the rewilding spectrum; those who live so far from civilization (culturally) that they no longer use any industrial-made tools or interact with the civilized economy at all. The most basic survival course covers your immediate needs; shelter, water, fire and food. We’ll start with how survivalists acquire these skills vs. how the hunter-gatherers of the Northwest Coast acquired them.
Every barrier falls under one of two categories; violence (aka “the law”) or scarcity. Under the barrier of violence civilization will exert physical force on you for breaking their laws; like how the mob makes stores pay them for “protection” which really means they won’t steal from the store. In the same way we pay the government for the same kind of “protection.” If we didn’t pay them, or behave the way they tell us to, they will send the cops to shut us down or throw us in prison. Tell me how that differs? Under the barrier of scarcity, the lives (such as salmon) that we eat in order to live sustainably now have dwindling populations thanks to civilizations various forms of violence to the planet, in the case of salmon actual concrete barriers called dams.
Shelter
Materials: If rewilding simply meant “survival” as so many people equate it with, than I could build a small debris shelter. But what where will my family sleep? Where will my culture sleep? A debris shelter works great for a lone scout who needs to stay on the move. But for a larger culture who plans to hang out longer than a few days, we need something more substantial and “homey.” Most of the Northwest coast Indians slept in thatched huts during the summer months, but in the winter they lived comfortably in longhouses made of Western Red Cedar planks that they could remove from old growth trees without killing them. This process requires a team of people, a whole set of primitive tools including wedges, hammers and ladders and lots of local old growth cedars. In order to live in shelters like the natives did here we would need all of those things. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an old growth cedar large enough to get even one good plank out of, let alone enough to construct an entire long house. The temperate rain forest of the northwest rots most natural materials rather quickly. Cedar lasts because of the anti-fungal tannins in the wood.
The pre-civilized, undomesticated, sustainable economy no longer exists and will take a long time (at least a few hundred years for Cedar trees to become old enough for sustainable harvesting) to get back, if ever. So much material already exists now; most houses have one person living in them. Think of all the wasted space! We don’t have a primitive economy, but we do have what we already have here in civilization. We don’t need to create more industrial products, but we can use the ones already created to hold us over as the economy changes back to a wild one.
Location: The native cultures who lived here before civilization ravaged their homes had their own policy for when/where to build or repair their shelters. Civilization will not let you set up a shelter just anywhere. You need to first have land or property which means you have to pay money for it. Than you must get a building permit in order to construct your shelter. If you don’t go through these avenues, than civilization feels it has the right to (and probably will) kick you out of wherever and tear down your shelter. Most camping laws prohibit people from setting up a camp for any period of time more than a few weeks, and some cities like Portland, you can’t camp at all. This means you have to stay on the move which means you need some form of transportation for your shelter, unless you plan to build a new one at each site, which would again would most likely break the law of energy conservation.
Storage & Security: Something a survival shelter has little to nothing of. These longhouses also stored much food, clothing, & other supplies and (most importantly in the Northwest) kept them dry and rot free. Often times the survivalist concept doesn’t include security of possessions (except for maybe securing minimal food from bears or other animals). Security and storage of your “stuff” becomes an increasing concern with the denser the population of humans, as well as the smaller number of people in your group. If someone always sits watch over the stuff, you’ve got pretty good security. But if you have to leave items unwatched in a densely populated area, you may not see those items again. Usually we don’t think about this because all of our items have 24-hour security locked away in our homes. But if you don’t have a home, or you don’t have a lock, etc. than security becomes a major issue. Especially as the more set-up you get in terms of tools/supplies, etc for an authentic hunter-gatherer culture (and not some week long excursion in survival), than you end up acquiring a lot more stuff to account for. You need the right tool for the right job, and sustainable hunting/gathering/horticulture, depending on bioregion, can require lots of different tools. Don’t believe me? Just read the books Cedar, Indian Fishing and Stone, Bone, Antler & Shell by Hilary Stewart! You don’t want to spend hours and hours grinding down a stone wedge only to have it disappear!
Water
Purity: Before civilization brought its pestilence of domestication to the Americas, indigenous peoples could drink water right from streams and rivers. These days a bacteria lives in almost all water sources, which once drunk, will cause you some serious indigestion and if untreated, can kill you. Unless you drink from a spring, you need to boil your water. Boiling however does not take out Prozac, dioxin, estrogen and the numerous other industrial made toxic compounds we now find in most water sources. Even the safest water, tap water, often contains chlorine, fluoride, and/or arsenic. If you live in an urban environment it makes much more sense to drink tap water do to fire laws and fuel scarcity, as well as all the other chemicals in the ground in urban places you can’t boil out. This generally means you have to pay for water or steal it. Some can find free water in local fountains, but it limits your ability to move freely as you have to stay in close proximity to your water source unless you find a way to contain it. I have however also heard of police harassing homeless people for filling containers with water from public drinking fountains. So the threat of violence increases by stealing water or drinking from public fountains.
Transportation: If you must boil water every time you need to drink it, that means you’ll not only need fuel for a fire, a fire-proof container to boil the water in, but also a fire-starting device. This means you’ll need a system where you have multiple fire-making sets and fire-proof containers at various water sources. This increases your security problems as someone such as a cop, other vagrant or garbage clean-up crew might steal, break or throw away your tools while away. If you decide to carry your water with you, you’ll need a nice container like water bladder. This goes for all of your tools. Will you carry them with you to every location? Or will you spend the time making and hiding new ones for each location?
Fire
Fuel: In the woods, this issue doesn’t come up as much, but it can. In the city, organic debris such as branches and twigs that fall to the ground usually get shipped out of the city and composted somewhere far. I tried to gather all my own firewood for cooking, water purification and heat and it proved very difficult. Unless you want to spend all your time searching for firewood, which you can’t, you don’t have enough to sustain yourself in an urban environment. This means you have to use industrial machines, which means you have to use gas or electricity.
Location: In the woods, again, this issue doesn’t really matter unless a fire ban exists. But in the city you can’t just start a fire anywhere. If the law allows you to do it in a park, you usually need a fire pan that sits at least 6 inches above the ground. This means another piece of industrialization you have to carry around. I know some people who have dug a hole in their backyard, but I don’t know the legality of that. Even then, if you use a backyard then that means someone, you or a friend, pays rent or a mortgage or property taxes, which means you still support the industrial economy.
Stealth: Fire makes you high-profile. During the day the sight and smell of smoke and during the night the light from the fire can arise suspicions of authorities. Anything that attracts more attention to your livelihood could mean more interactions with authorities, and we don’t want that!
Flora Food
Pollution: Many of the plant foods and medicines carry toxic amounts of metals in them, especially those that reside near the roadside or railroad tracks. Most people use pesticides or chemical fertilizers that will make you sick if you eat.
Subsistence: Many of the wild edibles do not suffice for plant subsistence; you can’t thrive eating only dandelion greens. The soil in many areas has so much toxins and so little nutrients that the plants themselves may not have much. The native cultures in the Portland area survived mainly off of the wapato tuber through the winter time. The wapato used to thrive along the Willamette River but when the valley’s indian populations declined almost 90% in the 1830’s due to disease, with no one to tend to them and with the introduction of agriculture and invasive species, the wapato nearly died out. It still lives in a few places along the river. This story illustrates that returning to a diet of native plant foods, or even trying to subsist from wild plant food sources on a cultural scale, would prove difficult at this time. Anyone interested in this lifestyle needs to focus on habitat restoration.
Fauna Food
Pollution: Toxins, stored in fat, move up the food chain. Animals store more toxins than plants.
Subsistence: As with our plant brothers and sisters, the main animal eaten here in the northwest by native peoples, the salmon, lies on the verge of extinction.
Permits: In order to hunt and trap most animals, you need to purchase permits for them. You also cannot use primitive means of doing so, which means you must buy industrial-made traps, guns and/or arrowheads.
Conclusion
We haven’t even covered even more advanced, long term necessities such as health and hygiene. Where do you shit? What about medicine? What about bathing? The myth that hunter-gatherers didn’t have a complex economic system stands as the main barrier here. When you actually sit down and begin to visualize a complex primitive culture, not some survival scenario, you begin to realize that it looks nearly impossible, nor desirable to attempt to live that way now, under the thumb of civilization, with the constant threat of violence and the painful exhaustion from expending too much energy to gather what you need in a 100% primitive, truly “off the grid” kind of way. At this point in time it would not reflect the authentic hunter-gatherer lifestyle we’ve seen, but rather the suffering lifestyle of the survivalist. We need to look for ways of leveraging the current civilized economic system against itself, towards a hunter-gatherer one. We need to invent an entire rewilding economic system. It really does take a village to rewild!
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14 responses to “Civilized Barriers to Primitive Living”
Hey Scout, et al. Yeah, I want to live like a hunter-gatherer. I have a place where we could do it, too. It’s 550 acres of privately owned, undeveloped land in far northern NY. I am part owner. We’re planning an extended (4 month or longer) primitive living experimental adventure there this summer (’09). Please check out http://reinvent09.blogspot.com/ and let me know if you or anyone you know of might be interested in joining us. Please ask questions, especially if you see something on the blog that makes you raise an eyebrow – some of it’s worded a little ambiguously and may need a word or two of explanation.
Excellent post…very well written and thought out. Thanks for sharing…
dude the nail has no more head,you hit it to maney times.
Man, I’m glad I live in the woods, even if I am surrounded by yuppies and hicks.
Interesting thoughts. Sitting here in Australia however I still like to imagine I could walk off from society and live in the wilderness of Canada or Alaska and mostly avoid these problems you have listed.
hey Scout, left a reply last night and now it’s not here… did it get removed, maybe cus I put a link to another blog in it? just wondering so i don’t do “it” again in the future…
I had some more thoughts while I was falling asleep:
There’s a big threat of violence from non-police criminals for someone who is “homeless”, or gives the appearance of it. Dishonest people think, perhaps rightly, that they can get away with beating and killing homeless people more easily than homed people. This is especially true with solo victims. It’s an unfortunate result of a culture that discourages community and family.
The best strategy might also be a hard one in our culture, which is to be a part of some sort of community or group that will look after you. Duh, no shock there. Of course, I’m also a big fan of arming oneself, though that can present a huge challenge for someone who is, or even gives the appearance of, being homeless. This might also be easier out in the woods.
Hello. I’m new to your site– funny thing was, a few days before, I was joking to a friend about the need to find a new concept for shedding all the “over-civilizational” accoutrements we’re led to believe that we need. ‘rewilding’ is exactly what i was looking for –thanks, for that!
In response to you post: I appreciate that you mentioned survival and family in the same breath. I am a mother of two daughters, and the knowledge of their surroundings is vitally important to me. Even if we don’t deal with the ‘collapse of civilization’ in our lifetime, or perhaps even in theirs, I would like to know that some knowledge about a reconnection to nature begins to be passed at least generationally. Generational turnover is quicker than people seem to be aware of; this is something you may realize once you have children.
Make sure you read Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv. It is about the ‘denaturization’ of current American children. He also has empirical (and we know civilization needs ’empirical’) evidence proving that contact, and probably more importantly, knowledge, about nature, is more important than we realize to our physical, mental and spiritual health.
Once you realize the importance of children connecting to nature, you begin to question Western civilization in a whole new way. You begin to become aware of ‘nature suppresion’ and ‘nature control’ in urban areas, and how this has implications not only for nature, but the health and vitality of human social relationships as well.
You mentioned non-police enforcers so I will leave you with this thought: Yesterday, in my Consumer Ethics class, we were talking about reality and Marxian ‘false consciousness’. We began talking about private property as a false construct but one that Westerners cling to with all their might. One student mentioned that there comes a point where everyone believes in a something so much it becomes reality, hence, (most)everyone believes in private property so we must accept it as reality.
I didn’t have a chance to respond, but I wanted to say this: Just because most people have accepted a “reality” does not make it true, or even correct. Those that question it are called eccentrics, black sheeps, instigators, rebels. It is only when the questioning of reality reaches critical mass, that real change can begin to occur.
In the meantime, we have the foreclosure mess and the reality of the falsity of a consumer capitalist culture.
Thanks for this Urban Scout… your thoughts are SO helpful to me.
As someone who is looking at a lifetime of daily injections just to survive- it’s hard to imagine myself in this scenario- especially just the “survivalist” scenario. My hope is that we can keep the good things (medicine and science) and get rid of the bad things (hierarchy environmental degradation) ….. yeah right.
true, Martha.
It’s relatively easy to think of taking care of yourself if you’re in good health and single. It’s harder when you take into account people who rely on big social networks (children, disabled, elderly, or chronically ill) to survive.
A lot of this is good information, however, not all of it is true, especially the parts about native peoples before civilization. Example: the part about water. Bacteria has always lived in water. Native peoples were usually immune to it, or got their water from elsewhere. Early Europeans in the Americas could not drink the water because they were not immune to the bacteria and other things in it. We are not immune to it now because we grew up on tap water. Also, the pollutants. That part is correct. Anyway, drinking water from a stream has always been risky, even before civilization. That is why tea, wine, beer, etc. are so popular. The water is made drinkable. This is not to say that civilization hasn’t made the water dirtier. It has. But it was dirty already. Also, fluorine is in the water purposefully. People who drink fluorine water have less cavities. The fluorine protects them. A little chlorine doesn’t hurt you, either. Instead, it is what kills the bacteria and makes the water drinkable. It’s in their on purpose, too.
To the previous comment:
1. Indigenous people didn’t have antibiotic-resistant bacteria to contend with, neither did they have the chemical pollutants that we have now, and the only difference between those and unfamiliar bacteria is how quickly they kill you.
In any case, they had enough sense not to drink downstream from where they shit–which was more often on the ground than in the water, unlike us. Where did you think the sewer lines went? The water doesn’t run out halfway between your toilet and a landfill.
2. It’s fluorIDE, not fluorINE. FluorINE is a gas. It’s not in water. It would escape immediately and go fuck up the ozone layer. By the way, people were successfully avoiding dental disease before someone figured out to add fluorIDE to the water. If you don’t spend your life eating nothing but junk food, your teeth generally fare better, regardless of how often you brush them or how much poison you drink. Surely, since you’re informed enough to let us all know that fluorIDE is associated with lesser incidence of cavities, you are also informed enough to know that a fluorIDE overdose causes tooth enamel DAMAGE. That’s right–there’s only a VERY narrow range of “safety” between “OMG you will lose all your teeth without this special element to protect them” and “OMG your teeth are turning brown and crumbling.” Since we had no way of measuring fluoride intake before people even discovered that substance, how in the world did any of us keep teeth past the age of ten before Crest was invented?
Get off the grain, get off the sugar, get enough fat and minerals in your diet (not in pills or capsules), then come back and let us know how you are doing. I forget to brush my teeth all the time and until recently had not used fluoride in years (I wound up using my daughter’s toothpaste from the dentist since mine ran out), yet the only teeth I’ve lost have been wisdom teeth and one other molar that took years to rot away. The less grain and sugar I eat, the cleaner my teeth feel. Before that, I can only guess what was saving them. I have no idea.
By the way, if you want to still have a working thyroid in twenty years, may I suggest avoiding fluoride from now on. It’s in the same elemental class as iodine, and often “confuses” the thyroid into uptaking it instead of iodine. We have something close to an epidemic of hypothyroidism going on in this country right now. Care to offer any guesses why?
…I think in a pinch I’d take my chances with a wild water source, if I knew it wasn’t being polluted to death. This hysteria over water sanitation’s going to turn out to be like the hysteria over keeping sterile households. It’s gonna turn out we need that bacterial exposure to key our immune systems properly. Watch. You’ll see.
I know I’m a little late to this comment thread, but on the topic of clean water: yes, the bacteria and other nasties now residing in our water sources can harm you if your system is not accustomed to them. That’s why entire companies exist around selling water-purification products to backpackers: filters, chemical treatments, even UV sterilizers.
In those same backpacking circles, certain figures advocating a simpler, less gear-dependent approach to the activity made a splash by suggesting that you could safely drink untreated backcountry water if you first took in just small amounts over a period of time, and they acted on that philosophy. Your digestive system can learn to deal with crypto, giardia, e. coli and etc.
Of course this doesn’t cover chemical contaminants/metals, and god only knows what nasties breed in city rivers and streams.
Also, rain can be a very useful source of safe water, vaporizing and recondensing (hard to do with primitive materials) can remove many chemical contaminants, and water in transparent bottles laid out in the sun on a reflective surface is sterilized in a matter of hours by the UV rays (a method being used very succesfully in portions of Africa where safe water is hard to come by). That’s also hard to do with primitive materials, of course, but like you mentioned in regards to housing, the presence of civilization’s infrastructure means we can’t just jump in feet-first. We’ll have plenty of time to reuse civilization’s materials before ecosystems heal to an extent where primitive methods are once again feasible.