Ria Montana's Blog, page 2

Ancient Wisdom We Have Forsaken: The Covid Crisis

by Jack McMillan and Ria Montana

 

So tired of it all, the endless ‘debate’ and angst about this current crisis – Covid. The pandemonium is dizzying. 

This crisis is real, we suppose. As real as every other self-inflicted malaise of our spinning out-of-control ‘civil’-ization. And it will play itself out as it will, in spite of how bogged down we get in perplexities, competing theories, and varied, disparate solutions surrounding this real yet unreal crisis. We’re enmeshed in the tertiary branches of this unfolding saga of chaos and confusion, blind to the forest by the trees of our fear-based hype. ‘Covid’ may be real, but the greater real of it is the calling to consider the deeper existential, experiential crisis of civilization and to get to the root of our obvious dysfunctionalities as a society and as a species. The real crisis, beneath the surface of this one, points to how we have been indoctrinated to relinquish our autonomy to think and feel for ourselves, tapping into our archetypal intuitions and wisdoms about life from which emerges awareness with instinctive callings. We have disconnected ourselves from primal wildness and the organic flow of life. We are living in humans’ self-constructed artificial closed system of civilization, remote from unfettered Earth, stuck in the prison of our amplified brains and screaming egos, detached from our languishing hearts.

And within that disconnect, we have become, as a collective, lost in technology and its technocracy, swirling in a citadel of babble, now in its current iteration of Covid clamor. But it’s been going on for at least 10,000 years, this babble and disconnect, ever since we stopped being unimposing mammals on this Earth, free from our conceits of pseudo-supremacy. It was then we left our belonging, embedded in wildness. We began objectifying, subduing, commodifying, and dominating wild and once-wild animals and plants, whom we recast as ‘its’ in a slight of mind and denial of heart to numb us from the pain of our alienation from nature, and our true natures. Rationalization supplanted our innate compassion and became our Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Thus began the descent into the death march of civilization.

This rationalization provided an illusion of ‘working’ for thousands of years while we exploited new frontiers, whether of other lands, other peoples, or other life forms, while we expanded and intensified our supremacist war on all to consume the spoils. We are now so estranged from visceral sensations and situational awareness that we neither notice nor care about the ravages in our wake we ourselves are ushering in, such as the monstrous destruction of Earth’s biodiversity in this current 6th mass extinction event, and slaughtering over 70 billion fellow animals per year, over 150 million every hour, and trillions of marine beings, for mere titillation of our taste buds. We are essentially obliterating Earth’s biota and abiota to prop up and propel our social hegemony, our artificial, speciesist behemoth lifeway, once mutualistic now parasitic and as audacious as our mountaintop removals with our mechanisms of mass destruction. Yet we tell ourselves, in utmost human-centric arrogance, that we are kind and caring, as we willfully and maliciously assault life, and remain steeped in prevarications when our victims – and now a covid posing as a metaphor of deeper calling – implore “What are you doing!?” and cry “Stop!!”



But now at last, we have run out of new worlds and new victims to subjugate. Out-of-mind and out-of-sight finally fails. Our exploits now come full circle and close in on us, the pompous assailants. The chickens are coming home to roost. We are an organism that has walled itself off from our intrinsic relationship with the greater sustaining whole and began feeding on itself with a cancer of dis-ease, in a pilot’s death-spiral mired in delusion and illusion of an altitude of superiority, all the while steering ourselves and Earth in an increasingly rapid descent toward inevitable annihilation of both self and the mountain. Along the path toward crash we have all manner of self-made crises in addition to the species extinctions and biodiversity loss— climate chaos, ecosystems collapse, world hunger, resource wars, ocean death…and on and on and on, while we quibble over hyped fear porn of a pseudo-pandemic distracting us from the far more deadly virus of our domination over all.



What’s the underlying cause of it all? Connect the pieces to the puzzle and we can easily see our misbegotten sense of superiority, and our hierarchical thinking, resulting in our meddling other-ization of those we perceive to be ‘lower than’ us, whether flora or fauna. Stripped of their personhood and natural-born autonomy, we close them off from our hearts and any consideration for their sovereign and sacred interests and lives. 

This domination starts with animal beings we brutalize, and moves on to Earth ‘it’self, in a wanton assault to serve our misperceived exaggerated needs. The ethos turns inward, extending into our human realm with ruthlessness heaped upon those we perceive as our underlings. Civilization’s devices leave us fettered and brutalized, with the survivors among us entrenched in incipient misery seeping into our very souls. Everything done to enslave the free living returns upon and into us, internalized in our own collective and individual essence, becoming us and tragically now so very becoming of us. The suffering we sow and the dooming affect of our disconnect billows, while we twiddle and quibble, tumbling and stumbling ever downward, lost in a rabbit hole of obfuscations of the truths we left behind.



At the core of the looming crises we fret and obsess over, and protest and rail against in a sinking futility, is this fatal flaw: our massive failure of compassion toward the other, and a refusal to fully feel and embrace how the other is us. We are one and the same.  We talk about humanity being “one big family” but we don’t really believe that or feel that. We talk about having respect for the Earth and fellow animals, and we doubly do not really believe or feel that. We wage war on both, and then war on each other in a reap of the supremacist predatoriness we sow.



Some say we must solve human issues first, but such supremacist perspective is a shallow, upside-down, and ill-fated origin of the issues we seek to solve. “As long as there are slaughterhouses there will be battlefields” (Tolstoy). We must start from the problem at its core, in its entirety. The mind-set and heart-set of amity, of mutualism, of compassion, expanded to all gives rise to thriving communities of diversity of life, humans and non-humans alike. For eons, all our talk and efforts for ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ have only amounted to shape-shifting the problems, leading only to ever-spreading failure and lament of same. Our supremacist, human-centric approach to life IS the problem. An approach prioritizing human issues while excluding Earth’s others only further propagates the very issues we are trying to resolve. Further still, the fallacy of human supremacy easily shifts its victors and victims. In the end, no one is spared from the arbitrary hierarchy of civilization doling out who is worthy and unworthy of compassion. Contracted and fragmented compassion limited to human concerns negates and violates the very concept of compassion, making it oxymoronic and counterproductive. Humans’ open and whole compassion for all is the only way all are released from civilization’s prison into liberation.

The slogan “Earth First!” means something, and something deep. As in a family, altruism is what gives and sustains the life of the family. “For it is a giving without hope of getting” (Leslie Cross). Expanded to communities, bioregions and all Earth, compassion for others is a selflessness inspiring broader thriving infusing mutualism into both individuals and the overall whole. Shifting toward this giving and sharing, rooted in authentic caring for all beings, can succeed where human-centered selfishness has failed in ways now closing in on us and the world. Or we can continue being caught in the advancing viruses of our selfishness, bringing all down with us.



This coronavirus is an ironic perversion of another word of exactly the same letters — CARNIVOROUS — now scrambled into a prevarication of the truth that is right in front of us, that has been calling to us for so long now. We human herbivore apes are by our social nature compassionate and mutualistic, in unity with others in community. When our compassion remains unbroken, we are altogether primally repulsed by causing the suffering of other animals and their homes; conversely we get pleasure from soothing the pains of others. How we are with fellow animals and Earth is how we invariably are with ourselves. Sow misery and murder and by ‘jungle justice’, it returns to us exponentially. That we reap what we sow is the wisdom we have forsaken.



The current coronavirus is seen as real. Yet it is just a concretization of something far deeper, and a manifestation of something far more vile than virus. We can keep hammering away at that concrete, but all it is doing is creating a rubble we will stumble over and then rebuild with brick and mortar into the next monolith of myopic mindlessness and ruthless heartlessness. Through indoctrination into civilization’s separation and supremacy, we repeatedly and increasingly reap what we sow, ad infinitum. Earth needs us to stop railing against the reap while ignoring the sow. Earth needs us to sidestep, drop out of, and smash the ways of our barbarian civilization, to end the reap civilization’s hardened heart is sowing. 



Despite how daunting this sounds, it’s really not so complicated. Want to  end our assault on the Earth and all life? Want to cease resource wars, stop climate change, end world hunger, avoid these zoonotic viruses, heal Earth, liberate ourselves and other animals from our dominating ways? In other words, want to thrive embedded in the community of life unchained by civilization’s persecutions and prisons? The only way is to ditch the attitude of human supremacy and hierarchal thinking by putting our hearts and Earth’s life first, thereby resisting and refusing the authorities and tangible and intangible structures of civilization, which is by definition the speciesist domestication of plants and animals. All else will follow, informing and guiding our way out of our ‘out damned spot’ madness. Nothing short of that will ever heal and restore ourselves and the wild world. Or end the unending litany of the shallow babbles of our discontent. 

Ancient Wisdom Forsaken: The Covid Crisis

by Jack McMillan and Ria Montana

So tired of it all, the endless ‘debate’ and angst about this current crisis – Covid. The pandemonium is dizzying. 

This crisis is real, we suppose. As real as every other self-inflicted malaise of our spinning out-of-control ‘civil’-ization. And it will play itself out as it will, in spite of how bogged down we get in perplexities, competing theories, and varied, disparate solutions surrounding this real yet unreal crisis. We’re enmeshed in the tertiary branches of this unfolding saga of chaos and confusion, blind to the forest by the trees of our fear-based hype. ‘Covid’ may be real, but the greater real of it is the calling to consider the deeper existential, experiential crisis of civilization and to get to the root of our obvious dysfunctionalities as a society and as a species. The real crisis, beneath the surface of this one, points to how we have been indoctrinated to relinquish our autonomy to think and feel for ourselves, tapping into our archetypal intuitions and wisdoms about life from which emerges awareness with instinctive callings. We have disconnected ourselves from primal wildness and the organic flow of life. We are living in human’s self-constructed artificial closed system of civilization, remote from unfettered Earth, stuck in the prison of our amplified brains and screaming egos, detached from our languishing hearts. 

And within that disconnect, we have become, as a collective, lost in technology and its technocracy, swirling in a citadel of babble, now in its current iteration of Covid clamor. But it’s been going on for at least 10,000 years, this babble and disconnect, ever since we stopped being unimposing mammals on this Earth, free from our conceits of pseudo-supremacy. It was then we left our belonging, embedded in wildness. We began objectifying, subduing, commodifying, and dominating wild and once-wild animals and plants, whom we recast as ‘its’ in a slight of mind and denial of heart to numb us from the pain of our alienation from nature, and our true natures. Rationalization supplanted our innate compassion and became our Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Thus began the descent into the death march of civilization.

This rationalization provided an illusion of working for thousands of years while we exploited new frontiers, whether of other lands, other peoples, or other life forms, while we expanded and intensified our supremacist war on all to consume the spoils. We are now so estranged from visceral sensations and situational awareness that we neither notice nor care about the ravages in our wake we ourselves are ushering in, such as the monstrous destruction of Earth’s biodiversity in this current 6th mass extinction event, and slaughtering over 70 billion fellow animals per year, over 150 million every hour, and trillions of marine beings, for mere titillation of our taste buds. We are essentially obliterating Earth’s biota and abiota to prop up and propel our social hegemony, our artificial, speciesist behemoth lifeway, once mutualistic now parasitic and as audacious as our mountaintop removals with our mechanisms of mass destruction. Yet we tell ourselves, in utmost human-centric arrogance, that we are kind and caring, as we willfully and maliciously assault life, and remain steeped in prevarications when our victims – and now a covid posing as a metaphor of deeper calling – implore “What are you doing!?” and cry “Stop!!”

But now at last, we have run out of new worlds and new victims to subjugate. Out-of-mind and out-of-sight finally fails. Our exploits now come full circle and close in on us, the pompous assailants. The chickens are coming home to roost. We are an organism that has walled itself off from our intrinsic relationship with the greater sustaining whole and began feeding on itself with a cancer of dis-ease, in a pilot’s death-spiral mired in delusion and illusion of an altitude of superiority, all the while steering ourselves and Earth in an increasingly rapid descent toward inevitable annihilation of both self and the mountain. Along the path toward crash we have all manner of self-made crises in addition to the species extinctions and biodiversity loss— climate chaos, ecosystems collapse, world hunger, resource wars, ocean death…and on and on and on, while we quibble over hyped fear porn of a pseudo-pandemic distracting us from the far more deadly virus of our domination over all.

What’s the underlying cause of it all? Connect the pieces to the puzzle and we can easily see our misbegotten sense of superiority, our hierarchical thinking, and our meddling other-ization of those we perceive to be ‘lower than’ us, whether flora or fauna. Stripped of their personhood and natural-born autonomy, we close them off from our hearts and any consideration for their sovereign and sacred interests and lives.

This domination starts with fellow animal beings we brutalize, and moves on to Earth ‘it’self, in a wanton assault to serve our misperceived exaggerated needs. The ethos turns inward, extending into our human realm with ruthlessness heaped upon those we perceive as our underlings. Civilization’s devices leave us fettered and brutalized, with the survivors among us entrenched in incipient misery seeping into our very souls. Everything done to enslave the free living returns upon and into us, internalized in our own collective and individual essence, becoming and becoming of us. The suffering we sow and the dooming affect of our disconnect billows, while we twiddle and quibble, progressively lost down a rabbit hole of obfuscations of the truths we left behind.

At the core of the looming crises we see and fret about, and protest and rail against in a sinking futility, is this fatal flaw: our massive failure of compassion toward the other, and a refusal to see and feel how the other is us. We are one and the same.  We talk about humanity being “one big family” but we don’t really believe that or feel that. We talk about having respect for the Earth and fellow animals, and we doubly do not really believe or feel that. We wage war on both, and then war on each other in a reap of the supremacist predatoriness we sow.

Some say we must solve human issues first, but such supremacist perspective is a shallow, upside-down, and ill-fated origin of the issues we seek to solve. “As long as there are slaughterhouses there will be battlefields” (Tolstoy). We must start from the problem at its core, in its entirety. The mind-set and heart-set of amity, of mutualism, of compassion, expanded to all gives rise to thriving communities of diversity of life, humans and non-humans alike. For eons, all our talk and efforts for ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ have only amounted to shape-shifting the problems, leading only to ever-spreading failure and lament of same. Our supremacist, human-centric approach to life IS the problem. An approach prioritizing human issues while excluding Earth’s others only further propagates the very issues we are trying to resolve. Further still, the fallacy of human supremacy easily shifts its victors and victims. Contracted and fragmented compassion limited to human concerns violates and negates the very concept of compassion, making it oxymoronic and counterproductive. Humans’ open and whole compassion for all is the only way to liberate all.

The slogan “Earth First!” means something, something deep. As in a family, altruism is what gives and sustains the life of the family. “For it is a giving without hope of getting” (Leslie Cross). Expanded to communities, bioregions and all Earth, compassion for others is a selflessness inspiring broader thriving infusing mutualism into both individuals and the overall whole. Shifting toward this giving and sharing, rooted in authentic caring for all beings, can succeed where human-centered selfishness has failed in ways now closing in on us and the world. Or we can continue being caught in the advancing viruses of our selfishness, bringing all down with us.

This coronavirus is an ironic perversion of another word of exactly the same letters — CARNIVOROUS — now scrambled into a prevarication of the truth that is right in front of us, that has been calling to us for so long now. We human herbivore apes are by our social nature compassionate and mutualistic, in unity with others in community. When our compassion remains unbroken, we are altogether primally repulsed by causing the suffering of other animals and their homes; conversely we get pleasure from soothing the pains of others. How we are with fellow animals is how we invariably are with ourselves. Sow misery and murder and by ‘jungle justice’, it returns to us exponentially. That we reap what we sow is the wisdom we have forsaken.

The current coronavirus is seen as real. Yet it is just a concretization of something far deeper, and a manifestation of something far more vile than virus. We can hammer away at that concrete, as we are doing, but all it is doing is creating a rubble we will stumble over and then rebuild with brick and mortar into the next monolith of myopic mindlessness and ruthless heartlessness. Through indoctrination into civilization’s separation and supremacy, we repeatedly and increasingly reap what we sow, ad infinitum. We must stop railing against the reap while ignoring the sow. We must sidestep, drop out of, and smash the ways of our barbarian civilization, to end the reap civilization is sowing.

Despite how daunting this sounds, it’s really not so complicated. Want to help end resource wars, stop climate change, end world hunger, avoid these zoonotic viruses, heal Earth, thrive in natural communities, liberate ourselves and other animals from our dominating ways? Tend the malaise of our hearts. Reawaken compassion and put it into action. Nothing short of that will ever heal and restore the world. Or end the unending litany of the shallow babbles of our discontent.  

—  Jack McMillan. Founding board member, Cleveland Vegan Society; Ohio Certified Volunteer Naturalist

—  Ria Montana, author of EcoPatriarchy: The Origins and Nature of Hunting, Volunteer Forest and Wetland Steward

Habitat Acknowledgment

Let us open our minds and hearts to the lives of wild others with acknowledgment that we are here in what was until recently a place they belonged. This civilized construction, the displaced plants and pets and ‘food animals’ our species created and carried in, the roads taken to arrive here, have pushed them out of yet another place they once thrived. Many individuals and families have died as a result of our modern privileged presence. Our being here in our current lifeway is supremacist domination over the very existence of wild others. May civilization find its way to abandon itself in our remembering how to re-embed in habitat, how to remake our lifeway in wild community, inviting return wild diversity – of so many struggling and extirpated others, coexisting and belonging in a spirit of togetherness.

Readings from my book EcoPatriarchy: The Origins & Nature of Hunting

https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/665-ecopatriarchy-1-origins-nature-of-hunting-by-rea-montana
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/666-ecopatriarchy-2-origins-nature-of-hunting-by-ria-montana

Readings of three texts on issues in ecology are now available at Immediatism.com. Rea Montana’s book “EcoPatriarchy: The Origins & Nature of Hunting” is discussed and the full introduction is read in episodes 665-666. “How Deep is Deep Ecology” by George Bradford critiques the ideas and stances of thinkers in deep ecology, and especially analyzes Malthusianism and its effects on deep ecology in episodes 667-670. A second essay by Bradford, “Woman’s Freedom: Key to the Population Question” is a book review of Betsy Hartman’s “Rights & Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control and Contraceptive Choice,” and looks hard at global Malthusian ideologies that affect population control policies and access to contraception in episodes 671, 672. These were all requests and you may send feedback and requests to Cory@Immediatism.com.

EcoPatriarchy 1, Rea Montana
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/665-ecopatriarchy-1-origins-nat…
EcoPatriarchy 2
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/666-ecopatriarchy-2-origins-nat…

How Deep is Deep Ecology? 1, George Bradford
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/667-how-deep-is-deep-ecology-1-…
How Deep is Deep Ecology? 2
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/668-how-deep-is-deep-ecology-2-…
How Deep is Deep Ecology? 3
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/669-how-deep-is-deep-ecology-3-…
How Deep is Deep Ecology? 4
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/670-how-deep-is-deep-ecology-4-…

Woman’s Freedom 1, George Bradford
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/671-womans-freedom-1-key-to-the…
Woman’s Freedom 2
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/672-womans-freedom-2-by-george-…

John Zerzan on Vegan Primitivism

Ishkah: Okay yeah, so I’ve gone through all my questions, but I can give you one more hypothetical if you like. There was a podcast you did for Oak Journal on lots of topics like humanism and one thing that came up was veganism and then there was an interesting response by Ria who runs the website VeganPrimitivist.wordpress.com. They did a long response to some of the points that were brought up. [9]

And anyway their ideal future is people foraging plants and mushrooms only, and I think using fire, but just conscientiously choosing not to hunt animals. And I don’t personally think that you could plan that diet very well, with like B12, without fortified foods and stuff, I think duckweed we’ve found out now has a lot of B12, so if you lived somewhere there was duckweed, you could maybe do that, but another hypothetical that might reflect the modern world is…

If you knew that you could meet all your nutritional needs living this life, and you knew there wasn’t going to be warfare, and you knew you could maintain the skills of hunting if you needed to go back to that, would you hypothetically choose not to hunt animals? Just living a life where you’re communicating with them through seeing otters in the wild, but just choosing not to hunt, do you think that would be an ethical responsibility? What do you think if you knew that you could survive perfectly fine with low labor hours?

Zerzan: That sounds rather nice, yeah I wouldn’t argue against it, I mean if it’s conceivable and I think you know hunter-gatherer life was more gathering than hunting, but still, maybe that would be more ideal. If you’re trying to learn anything from the record, it’s a bit hard to imagine that in terms of our evolution, but it sounds nice, yeah.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ishkah-a-conversation-with-john-zerzan-on-direct-action-school-shootings-authenticity-veganism?v=1628560186#toc3

Wild Eternal Life

By Ken, with contributions by Ria & Jack

A crisp February afternoon 1977, I rambled down gritty concrete steps making my final exit from University of Illinois, Chicago. I’d devoted six lengthy years to my goal of achieving a doctorate in Family Medicine, but the Coroner’s degree in my left hand connoted my consolation prize. Little did I know then how horrifically fascinating this field would be, more significantly, how one case would essentially unleash me from the vice of civilization.

Four decades passed since that day, and indeed no two cases had been alike. Gun suicides with brains blown onto sheets, couches, desks, walls or ceilings. Vehicle accidents where reattaching limbs or reconstructing torsos is futile. Bloated bodies, mostly intoxicated or murdered, washed ashore. Who could ask for anything more. Right as I begin growing jaded to it all, this case comes in that draws me into the wildest wild I’d known.

I am licensed in Dane County Wisconsin where I reside permanently, and Gogibic County Michigan where I vacation and recreate. I love the north woods, so this is my attempt to blend business with pleasure. All my life I’ve been very physically active exploring nature, and combined with my healthy plant-based diet, I have the vitality of a 30-year-old.

Friday November 6, 2022, while waxing skis in my tiny Michigan cabin, I receive a call from the Gogibic County Sheriffs Department. A small craft pilot reports possible human remains on frozen Deer Island Lake in Sylvania Wilderness. The pilot, who was teaching lessons at the time of the discovery, says he got a good look at the carcass.

Sylvania, a 29 square mile wilderness area, lays just north of the Wisconsin-Michigan border in the Ottawa National Forest. There are 50 lakes of various size, shape and composition within the wilderness boundaries. Deer Island Lake is situation in the southeast quadrant of the tract, an estimated four-mile snowshoe trek. I spend that night readying my gear and contemplating the case.

Saturday morning November 7, 2022, I step outside my cabin and greet an unusually stiff 26 below zero semblance. My nostril hairs freeze together and my throat dries with the first deep breath of arctic air. It is dead calm – one of those mornings snow squeaks underfoot like fresh cheese curds.

By 0800 I navigate north-northeast through brisk frozen forest, toting a heavy backpack full of gear. Lucky for me, there had been a few thaw-freeze cycles the week prior so my snowshoes float, for the most part, on top 30+ inches of snowpack.

About an hour into the excursion, I stop to shed a layer of clothing and can’t help but notice the serene silence. This indigenous forest I am nestled into is asleep in too early wintery slumber. Noiselessness almost hurts – my ears ring. As I realize how foreign the silence seems I think to myself Who have I become? Then, softly but suddenly, noise breaks the tension. It is the gentle tap tap of a distant woodpecker. My being melts as never before, signaling beginnings of a mystical shiftover… a prophecy.

With a plastic wrapped sandwich tucked in my pack, my mind ignores my hunger pangs. My body takes over taking automatic, intuitive strides toward a bluff edge log with bark still attached rising slightly above the whiteness. My woken wild being stands aside it. My knees and hips lower me as my left hand liberates my right hand from its glove. Now freed, it follows my eyes toward what appears to be a late fall oyster mushroom barely visible beneath splatters of crusty snow. My feral hand gently feels down along the log side, uncovers a mushroom cluster, yellowish-green with violet hues, then releases a velvety short stalk from its role decomposing the hardwood. With all senses open, I tenderly lift the cap to my nose that inhales a mildly fishy scent. Ignoring my civilized mind’s warning It could be poisonous, you should cook it first!, my mouth opens for a taste, paining as my frozen mustache detaches from my beard. My mind shudders back control. I stand.

From that point forward my mission takes on a conflicted aura. I deliberately study animal tracks with eyes that slip away to appreciate snow covered lichen, and a nose that acknowledges scents in arctic air. I cross Black Spruce Swamp, crest a wooded knoll and descend onto frozen Deer Island Lake.

My hands work the focus on my metallic binoculars enabling my eyes to scan the entire lake shoreline. A lone Bald Eagle sits on ice along shore. A couple Ravens perch on branches close by. Using a majestic White Pine bowed out over the lake, my mind marks the location. That must be the site, I think anxiously and head in that direction. Closing in on the wintering birds, I notice a red spot on the ice near the eagle. As I approach the eagle takes flight, labors across the lake, and perches on a high snag.

Moving closer, I steal a binoculared glimpse of colors on the ice – brown and maybe some blue. The closer I come to the site the more tracks present in snow forming a vast intricate web, with the assumed human carcass being the center point. Tracks tell the stories of coyote, fox, fisher, weasel or ermine, vole, birds mainly raven, and even a lone bobcat. The emotion felt by each individual animal rises through these stories of tracks – patience in waiting their turns, hunger quenched, and sometimes determination to share with others.

Finally stepping up to the site, a calmness come over me. A partial skeleton lay in disarray on the snow-covered ice. Some muscle still adheres to gnawed bone, but overall, there isn’t much left. Blatant color, a red kerchief tied around a radius, and modern winter clothes packed down under a frenzy of critter tracks explains the scenario.

I begin my report, taking photos and video of the remains. Much of the skeleton had been consumed or carried off – winter boots laid half the distance to shore, flesh remaining inside still laced warm boots. I collect my samples – hair for DNA, jaw bone for dental records – and record my GPS location.

Curiously moving toward shore, I investigate an orange marking ribbon standing out like a beacon against a drab shrub patch. One end is tied to a Hemlock branch and the other to a small black metallic box which appears to be sealed and clasped. I remove the box, place it in my backpack and head back toward the car. The box weighs little – as though nothing is in it, but I suspect otherwise. Curiosity practically devours me on the trek back, but I remain loyal to civilization’s protocol and wait until there are sufficient witnesses present.

Sunday November 8, 2022, in my Madison Wisconsin office I open the mystery box with my friend and co-worker Sheila Jackson inquisitively looking on. We observe a paper which upon unfolding, reveals a hand written note. It reads:

My Final Message To The Species That Ponders Afterlife

Truth of life after death is finally unveiled after last breaths leave our lungs.

My corps need not be mourned, for it portrays eternal life!

The variety of fauna which comes to my grizzled torso will ingest me.

Portions will soar to heights with birds,

bits of me will journey runways through this forest.

I will be one with those who curl up and doze the quiet day away on a soft mat of Princess Pine.

Even the very tiny, terrestrial as well as aquatic, will host a part of me.

I will live on forever as these beings eventually die and nourish their successors.

My spirit shall spread like morning sunshine –

And some of you will recognize me, over, under and about the land.

Forever Yours!

Celebrating eternal life,

Jason ‘Hawk’ Gonzalez

My life is forever changed since this case, awakening my dormant human animal instincts… rewilding, now culminating in this spiritual clarion call.

The following day, I learn the results of the dental and DNA tests. It was in fact Jason Gonzalez who had multiple cancers, age 81. I’ve been to a fair number of funerals in my day, but never have I experienced such emotions, such transformative wild awakenings, as when I lead family survivors and others to Jason ‘Hawk’ Gonzalez’s death-rebirth site.

I ponder as these seasons roll on, and as each circling of the orb we the living remain upon, on this home his body left. I celebrate each cycle of the Earth returning him to his moment here, then, under the Sun. And its Moon. As I celebrate lives of others more personally known and dear. I pine for their return, if only for one more moment as the cycle nears that moment, yet knowing the Sun and the Moon, and the stars, and the time, can never align again as it did. The moment is lost forever. But it is forever found, and he, and they, are forever here, along with all that ever lived, and all that is forever eternal life.

How lucky they who pass are! They get to be forever here, in all that is wild, and forever in their eternal wild. And how lucky we are, given the privilege of this infusion in it all with them, however sublime yet limited, until we too join the eternal of it. And give back, that the snail may live to give. Thank you, Jason. You still live. And give. In spite of the lance you used to end a part of it.

Wildness

Do not seek me amongst

Sterile walls and surfaces

Where everyone is neatly dressed

Don’t imagine me with

Soft, clean skin

Clean fingernails

A whiff of laundry detergent

In a building with

Exit signs

Florescent lights

Recycled air from a vent

Hard echoing floors…

Think of me when you see

A deer in pause

At the sight of cars

Or smell rabbitbrush

After a hard rain

Meanwhile

Somewhere, far away, inseparable from

spirit and place

My ribcage clatters

With the sound of birds and insects

Growing unruly with leafy tendrils

The soles of my feet painted in dirt

Feathers of ravens and cedar in my hair

My heart chattering away

About the smell of rain soaked wool,

calluses on my palms, cut up shins from running through the forests with abandon

The moon beaming upon my face each night

My stomach grasps for the nourishment of roots and berries and wildflower meals

My life is a commingling of pine needles in my dufflebag, forever finding seeds in pockets and beetles scuttling across my pillow. Each day filled with celebration, where learning the language of a lively, churning forest is as easy as reading a book. Where squatting in the woods is as normal as brushing teeth.

There is no place in town for me where my dirty paws are welcome

Their Exit signs spell Escape

My free and naturalized life is frowned upon by more than you’d think

It’s unwanted, uncommon and despite it being the way for hundreds of thousands of years, it holds no place within modern society.

A society where birdsong is a nuisance.

The rain is tiresome

The insects are pests.

Ancient wild foods are only “edible” while chemicals marketed in stores are “food.”

Dirt is inconvenient- though,

did we not all arise from the soil and rock we try so hard to scrub away?

There is no vacancy for sanity in cities.

There is no space for a human who contains the universe within themself, who worships the rocks and sunrise, opposoms, frogs, moths, and moss.

And there is no want of it. I refuse to ask permission to exist. The wind can steal my hair and the earth can stain my skin in stardust and the moths and salamanders are always welcome to sleep on my cheeks- we will always exist insatiable for one another, never in denial of relationship, neither without nourishment from wordless, spiritual bonds. The earth is my temple and the stars shine to praise it

~Brion Kuebler

Brawl, part 2

buried inside True You knew all along

your primal clarion call, unbegun

now cogent but stalled by grim Blocks

squatting nested in your mind

ever obsessively ruminating

doubting

defeating, in

garbling self destroying wordy words

murmuring their crud

shrinking you into a quivering

quite almost a slumping

until Wild Love swoops in on you

flustering your nonreality

rousing you, but Blocks too

True You strikes “Get out!” to Blocks

Blocks strikes the same to Wild Love

the blows leaving you dazed

True You lays low

tacitly rooting for Wild Love

awaiting ripe moments to re-emerge

you know exactly what you need as

winter winds whirl chills up your bones

stiffening your motion

debilitating your being

Blocks ushers in a dreadful melancholy

dusk nearly ebbs as

Wild Love delves further in

a wild night ahead

paths crossed by broken branches

clear vision untangles bleak confusion

in tenacious fits & starts

Blocks coughs up crud in duff

moonshine cuts through thick clouds

an old voice rises

you recall as your True own

who will now walk with me

(and from whom will I walk away?)

as companion soothing the squall

of this collapsing dying world?

True You senses remnant recourses

snowstorm reveals Wild Love tracks

but only you get to decide whether

to save yourself in the pouring down

Rupturing Salish Wildlife Communities

Wild animals reposition their ranges and realign their associations, generally gradually. But spontaneous shape-shifting communities manifesting on their own terms are in steep decline. Civilization’s razed land, pollution, noise and overpopulated unwild human presence give some animals an artificial edge to overtake others, deteriorating wild homeostasis.

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Douglas squirrel (Tamiasciurus douglasii)

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Eastern grey squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis)

In 1909, Vancouver Park in BC intentionally introduced the prolific and adaptable grey squirrel, and development paved a path for the civilization thriving squirrel to spread. Since introduction, the indigenous Douglas squirrel range has shrunk to inner forest protective nooks as the nonnative eastern grey squirrel spanned into both remaining forests and the expanding cityscapes. The main impact has been decline in Douglas squirrel reproduction. Ecological impacts are immense, including displacing native birds of nesting habitat, and eating the birds’ eggs and nestlings. While they are immune to squirrel pox, they carry it and infect native squirrels and other animals, for whom infection can be deadly. The colonizing squirrel bites out the tips of the acorns, weakening oak tree regeneration, and damages and kills trees by stripping the bark. Eastern grey squirrel made the top ten worldwide invasive species list.

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Eastern cottontail (Sylvilagus floridanus)

In 1927 and 1931 colonizing humans also introduced the eastern cottontail to western Washington. Like the eastern squirrel, eastern cottontails are a generalist, highly adaptable to the human razed landscape, thriving both in farm and development sprawl. The prolific rabbit seems to prefer urban to forest living, impacting humans’ homescapes and gardens. Rapid increase in cottontail is food for the much-feared coyotes, which may bring rise to their numbers, and correlating rise in small pet deaths. Ecological disequilibrium is immense. For example, in the case of rare Salish oak prairies:

Cottontail herbivory damages plants of Garry oak ecosystems, including oak seedlings and wildflowers including lilies. They can kill mature shrubs and trees by eating all of the inner bark from around the trunk and chewing exposed roots. Cottontail herbivory also threatens plants at risk, including golden paintbrush (Castelleja levisecta), yellow montane violet (Viola praemorsa) and possibly white-top aster (Aster curtus = Sericocarpus rigidus). Rabbits can change the composition of plant communities by over-grazing their preferred species such as plants with higher nutritional content, thus allowing less palatable plants to increase in relative abundance, and by dispersing seed in their faecal pellets. Before the introduction of eastern cottontails, European rabbits and grey squirrels, very few species of small mammals inhabited island Garry oak ecosystems. These introductions may have caused increasesin populations of some native raptors and aided the range extension of barred owls (Strix varia) into these areas.

In the 1960s, colonizing humans introduced the US eastern cottontail across the ocean to northern Italy for hunting purposes. Despite the killings, rabbits escaped and are wreaking havoc on another novel ecosystem.

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Western screech owl (Megascops kennicottii)

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Barred owl (Strix varia)

As civilization spreads and degrades, species more tolerant of it have co-spread, sometimes densely overpopulating. Such is the case with the barred owl remaining within its native eastern US habitat until the early 2000’s, finally landing in Salish lands. Barred owls impact wildlife communities through predation, niche habitat displacement, and competition for food and space. These fierce owls are not only infamously a threat to endangered spotted owls, their increase in numbers correlates with decline in the Western screech owl population. This invader not only overtakes habitat and outcompetes for food, but stalks, captures and kills screech owls.

Modern humans driving and paving paths for animal introductions into habitats to which they have not co-adapted causes enduring, exponential rupture of indigenous wildlife struggling to survive. Long-lasting effective restoration needs to be first embedded in a change of mindset: replace supremacy with compassionate reconnection with wildness. It is then that authentic healing can begin to undo the harms of civilization.

The Future is Wild, Not Green

Shortly after Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore released their documentary Planet of the Humans, Dave Borlace, creator of videos on ‘sustainable solutions’ to climate change in his series ‘Just Have A Think’ posted a critique. Borlace effectively pokes holes into Gibbs & Moore’s look behind the veil of ‘green technology.’  

Borlace reveals how Gibbs & Moore portrayed old stories based on old data, neglecting to recognize improvements in tech updates. He turns to the criticized industries themselves to give them the opportunity to defend themselves, to refute the claims with their updated pitch. He cites neoliberal, pro-capitalism news outlets, such as Bloomberg, to support his refutations. He points out that human overpopulation shouldn’t focus on developing countries – though Gibbs & Moore didn’t – shifting blame to developed countries’ overconsumption. But don’t people worldwide strive for lifeways of increased consumption? Do upward mobility consumption and overpopulation both have Earth degrading impacts? What makes humans entitled to spread into and dominate all habitats of all others? How would we feel if there were 8 billion Great Apes of another species encroaching worldwide? Are we excluded from principles of ecology? How is Homo sapiens not a destructive invasive species, and why would that really be acceptable in light of the ecological degradation and desertification?

 In his assessing weaknesses of a rather weak target documentary, Borlace reveals more than his optimism bias, but his human supremacy bias in his longings to locate hope in our species’ domesticated, techno lifeway. His calling is to soothe the mainstream consciousness with the lull of ‘progress’. Don’t worry about those percentages of species we’re killing off at exponentially rapid rates, or our replacing old growth forest with farmland, or our fouling air, land & water, even to the detriment of our own ‘intelligent’ species. There’s always a magic solution right around the corner, so relax & keep taking that leap of faith in the environmental nonprofit-industrial-political complex that cowers to Earth harming power player plunderers.

Borlace condemns Gibbs for portraying ‘regenerative’ energy as expensive, for exaggerating greenhouse emissions and inefficiencies. But civilization’s energy choices, including solar & wind, rely on extraction from Earth, discordant with thriving, biodiverse life on Earth. Borace has a problem with palm oil, but every ‘resource’ extraction industry, indeed all agriculture, negatively impacts wild Earth and wild life. He did mention rewilding as a solution, which is altogether contradictory with the ‘lesser evil’ technologies of civilization he endorses. The way toward true sustainability cannot include wildness and mechanisms sustaining civilization, for they are oppositional forces. Perhaps civilization can transition while exploiting less and less, but the end goal needs to be humans re-embedding in wildness to achieve the only truly sustainable lifeway.

Limiting the only options to those acceptable to economics and lesser harm neglects to seriously consider the only truly sustainable option, fully rewilding Earth and rewilding ourselves. If restoring and returning indigenous is off the table, there is no true hope, as anything less is grounded in the human ape’s domination, retaining its position on the false pedestal of Earth’s apex predator, which is the underlying ethos driving and justifying humans harming and killing minimally sustainable, much less flourishing ecosystem homeostasis. Borlace speaks in human supremacist terms of ‘our’ energy ‘resources’ producing ‘less harm’ giving hope, which is scientifically and philosophically akin to the progress trap of a ‘climate mitigation’ device, as opposed to ending our oppressive colonizer lifeway via earth and animal liberation.

While hope in technology is still speeding toward the end on a dead end road, there is hope, but it lies elsewhere. If hope is a precursor to serious change, at least let the hope be based in reality. We can be part of an Earth thriving future, if we reject this harmful lifeway. For perspectives anti-hope hype rooted in human supremacy, with real not easy comfortable solutions, read Daniel Quinn, watch END:CIV – Resist or Die on youtube, read John Zerzan or listen to the show he hosts on Anarchy Radio http://www.johnzerzan.net/radio/ , or read Layla AbdelRahim, watch her youtube talks or check out essays on her page http://layla.miltsov.org/.

For Rewilding,

Ria