Civilized Barriers to Primitive Living

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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