Ria Montana's Blog, page 3

Ria on Vegan Anarcho-Primitivism on Go Vegan Radio

GO VEGAN RADIO #645

By Bob Linden on September 17, 2020

“Fascinating Interview with Vegan Anarchist Primitivist RIA DEL MONTANA, author of “Eco Patriarchy – The Origins & Nature of Hunting” – exploring human evolution, our deep Vegan origins, and rationalizing of killing which we know is wrong.”

Ria’s interview starts at 44:00

the Ape that Ate All

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From an ecological lens, all species have their own ways of acquiring food within their wildscapes. Shifts in the human dietway, from pre-sapiens to today, have correlated with the degree of our increasing use of objects and technologies, which correlated with our invasion, colonization and annihilation of thriving autonomous communities of life. Our foodway has been a major factor driving our adaptation into dominating, ecocidal lifeway.

Do you believe civilization’s hype that humans have been naturally ordained to be the planet’s apex species? How does it feel to you that we human apes impact & dominate every niche of every habitat? How do you see this story ending, this story of the ape that stepped out of nature to rule all? How dark is your rose colored lens?

It’s challenging to retain autonomous relations with other animals when what remains of the wildscape is barely a shadow of itself. But wildness remains. It may be in broken remnants, but it’s alive, struggling, around you and within you. And one day there will be a great return. It won’t be with humans if we cannot adapt to return with it, but it will return.

Vegan Bashing & Banishing by Rewilders

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I’ve commented a couple times in the forum rewild.com. Someone posted a question on vegan primitivism. I briefly mentioned my book on the topic, EcoPatriarchy: The Origins & Nature of Hunting.

Peter Bauer responded:

“This forum is not the place for you. The discussion of veganism is insane, and will not be allowed on the forum anymore. Go find another place to missionize your philosophy based on pseudo science. Self-select yourselves out of this forum.”

My reply:

“Wow Peter. It’s one thing to disagree, but to shun, based on misunderstanding the perspective of another? Something must have really touched a nerve. What hurts most about this shunning is all the indigenous people who voiced their realities in the book, being shunned once again. Their struggle to break the pigeonholing they endure is intense. And all the solid science backing their realities dismissed as ‘pseudo-science’ with no genuine consideration. If you’re going to critique the book, did you read it first?

When vegans interested in rewilding join groups like Wilderness Awareness School, they are often pressured out due to intolerance of the dominant group who shun them just for their presence. What is the true source of the problem?

If you want to ban me from this group for mentioning my book, is that not an abuse of power? The discussion seemed to be fine before resorting to name calling, ‘insane’, and authoritarian control. What’s the fear of letting the discussion happen?

If your mind ever opens to considering the perspective of those whom you shun, my book addresses your criticisms.

Primally wild,

Ria”

Within seconds he suspended my account. Others respectfully opposed the tyranny, and were treated the same.

This type of vegan bullying by rewilders – scorning, mocking, demeaning, snubbing, and outright ejecting – is commonplace. Peter is one of many. His ease in open vegan bullying while in a position leading a nonprofit working with children shows how entrenched this oppression is in the rewilding community.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Twenty years ago my teenage son went to a vegan accepting rewilding summer camp at Wilderness School in Brattleboro Vermont. While there were open discussions between vegans and nonvegans, all exchanges were respectful. The program has no problem including vegans. This program and Peter’s program are both derivatives of the teachings of naturalist, tracker, survivalist, and author Tom Brown Jr. and the childhood guidance he received by Apache elder Stalking Wolf. While there is much controversy over Tom Brown Jr., the programs, sparked through his reported experiences with Stalking Wolf, remain intact. So what accounts for vast differences between rewilding programs in the treatment of vegans?

Some rewilding authorities have something different at stake. When one person confronted Peter on his attack, he pointed to his group rules on topics, that allowing discussion on vegan rewilding would be the equivalent of allowing discussion on flat earth. The person pointed out the flaw in the analogy, that anthropologists are finding DNA evidence of early indigenous veganism, such as Neanderthals in Sidrón Cave. That was enough to make this person another target for bashing and banishing. Why are some rewilders so offended that they go berserk? Veganism challenges not only their ideas, but their ideals. Their identity is tied to a glamorized notion of an epitomized indigenous human they aspire to recreate in themselves and the world, one that ironically happens to be supremacist against others. For them, vegan and indigenous are oppositional stemming from their view of the relationship between humans and other animals, no matter how many paleoanthropologists, or indigenous individuals themselves, report otherwise. They challenge that there is no example of an indigenous vegan, and when examples and analysis are pointed out, they close their eyes tighter and scream louder. Their invented ideal identity is their lifeblood, and bleeding out causes them real emotional pain.

Patriarchal rewilders think themselves as counter to civilization, free in their wildness. But without the mainstream mythological ‘human as natural hunter’ ethos to prop them up, those rightfully frustrated with civilization may not follow civilization’s indoctrination into their rewilding groups. At the height of civilization’s harm, is the best rewilders can do exploiting animals up close and personal, normalizing carnage? In this world suffering under human control, how can the human ape release its destructive ways of domination and killing, re-embed within surviving living communities in a spirit of mutualism?

“Amazing how discussing our treatment of animals continues to be a taboo. It is really the task of our times to fix the way we see and treat other species and nature in general.” Francisco Sánchez

Ria

 

 

Sedentary Primitivism(?)

via Sedentary Primitivism(?)

Sedentary Primitivism(?) by Julian Langer

If there is a quality to the wild world, that often gets called “nature”, which is by all appearances “unchanging”, it is that it is always changing. It is not static and is never (entirely) the same as it was.

Even the mightiest mountain moves its slow dances across the landscape, while it also moves with the processes of winds, rains and subsidence. The transient flow of a river is a more obvious space of movement and change, with its greater intensity of energetic-motion – one philosophy enthusiasts will remember as Heraclitus’s image for Being.

As animals, we undergo processes of metamorphosis that alter our Being continually. We move as the world changes and we change with it.

Of course, we may well be rhymes of what we were, similar in sound and shape. It would be ridiculous to expect continual totalising becomings, that render nothing similar. But change retains its paradoxically unchanging presence.

If rewilding really signifies re-membering ourselves – as in returning to the community of wild changing beings-as-becomings, through disassociating with that realm that attempts to construct an eternal unchanging presence (by “conquering” death), that we know as civilisation (a constant failure) – then those of us embracing the wild world, if we mean this authentically, are embracing ourselves as changing Beings. That aforementioned realm of unchanging sedentaryism that we know as civilisation persists both geographically, in the formation of towns, cities, nations etc., and psychically, through the ideation of essences, laws and so on.

Perhaps the greatest weakness to any process of rewilding, which seeks to create space for the resurgence of primal anarchy, is intensely sedentary thinking(?).

The essay that Kevin Tucker wrote 10 years ago, The Failure of Revolution, has resurfaced again. This is a piece that I have appreciated, along with much of Tucker’s thought. However, my question is – what has changed about Tucker’s critique of revolutionary thought? If nothing, why nothing? Hasn’t his experience of the world moved even slightly with the world? Is this a sedentary place within his thinking?

Perhaps Tucker’s most more recent valuable piece of writing, which doesn’t conform to the (perhaps unfair) criticism of his spending much of his 20 year process of being an anarchist theorist basically rewriting the same thing, is To The Captives. His (psychic-)nomadic movement here, with a partial critique of some of the limits to anarcho-primitivism, is something I see as needed within rewilding anarchist thought.

Another nomadic movement within anarcho-primitivist thought is that which Ria Montana brings to the discourse – that I reviewed here. I might have disagreements with Montana, but I appreciate that she is challenging some of the orthodox beliefs and inherited assumptions within rewilding praxis. Again, there is something desirable about individuals moving away from the sedentary locations that plagues this area of discourse

It is remarkable that Tucker has felt the need to (continually) act with hostility towards individuals and ideas that do not try to occupy spaces that are different to those of his and the traditional framework of primitivist philosophy – especially when Tucker is at his best when he moves away from that space.

Perhaps I am like a feather, leaf or (maybe even a) bag, floating in the wind. I am not a settlement and not settled. As the world changes, there are new places to explore and new challenges, which I am learning to move with and through.

I guess my question to primitivism is – is this a sedentary settlement, building monocultures, or a space for wild, moving, differentiating, diverse praxis?

I will leave this thought here, with a quote from the primitivist I have focused my thought on here the most –

“Langer is a bag floating in the wind.” Kevin Tucker

rendezvous with corona Life

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I have a rendezvous with corona Life

Quarantined by primordial Earth,

When Spring winds whirl fluffy seeds

From air to forest floor—

I have a rendezvous with eco-Life

When Pandemic brings wily days.

It may be he shall capture my heart

Reveal purity of this land unmanned

Enlighten my eyes and propel my spirit—

It may be I shall praise his will.

I have a rendezvous with Life

On scarred plot of neighbored hood,

When Spring arrives year 2020

And Wildness appears less daunted.

Leviathan cogged peeps tranced to conform

Pillowed in ease and deceitful sweet,

Where Wild falls away in machinelike sleep,

In each pulse disconnecting pulse,

Where policed stirrings are silenced…

But I’ve a rendezvous against this Life

Under moonlight in a penetrated peopled place,

When Spring winds traverse this time round,

And I to my Wildest being am true,

Shall embrace that rendezvous.

The Origins and Nature of Hunting: Ecopatriarchy – a review

 

Ria writes within a tradition of anarchist thought that I am often considered tied to – anarcho-primitivism. One of my most significant struggles with anarcho-primitivist discourse is, despite its exploration of areas not often ventured through within even many radical areas of thought, it has largely manifested as a monocultural space, with some very concrete roads for praxis. My personal experiences and beliefs regarding anarchy are more inclined towards fluidity and diversity. Ria’s journey off of the beaten track of anarcho-primitivist thought was wonderful from the outset, for this simple rejection of conforming to the norms of this area of discussion.

Now there is a fair bit that I feel could be criticised about the analysis that Ria presents, but I do not feel a need or desire to do so. This is because, from the outset, she presents her analysis as a means of building a case to support her experientially based beliefs – not as an objective, reductive, singular truth. The book is Ria seeking to connect with people’s compassion and that is largely all it needs to be seen as. What I enjoyed about this is, again, how different it is from the absolutism of purist an-prim thought – given that this is for the most part a challenge to the mainstreams of the tendency.

In challenging the “hunter” narrative of anarcho-primitivism, through a vegan-moral perspective, Ria “kills” (metaphorically) 2 birds with 1 stone – or perhaps 2 stones with 1 bird? The first is the fetishisation of eating meat within rewilding thought and the second is the toxic ideological object of “Man” the violent force, as if it is something romantic and desirable, and the sexism that pollutes much of the primitivist space.

Again, this is by no means perfect – but who wants perfect?! Does the reader really gain much from the email exchanges and conversations with anarcho-primitivists, seemingly via computers, which Ria has included? I don’t think so, personally. But this is her book, her challenge to primitivism, from within primitivism, and I think more like this is needed – I’ve dedicated a decent portion of the manuscript I’m working on to challenging some of the mainstream primitivist ideology from a prim-sympathetic perspective.

Now that this book has put forward this challenge to the anarcho-primitivists of the world, my thought is “will they rise to this challenge, or will the sexist monocultural ideologues just scoff and disregard this as some woman’s opinion?”

I have already recommended this book to 1 vegan male friend and have 2 vegan female friends in mind to recommend it to as well. I suggest that primitivists give this book a look over and use this as an opportunity to reflect.

https://ecorevoltblog.wordpress.com/2020/03/28/the-origins-and-nature-of-hunting-ecopatriarchy-a-review/?fbclid=IwAR1W0bzWwiNKCfefgucJ1tiN5hEIbC8leApY1beayxlyCjGex0jkO_G2aWU

Mutual Aid Restoration Ecology

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https://geoffolson.com/page5/page8/page25/page25.html

 

In response to an articles in The Guardian, “Pablo Escobar’s ‘cocaine hippos’ show how invasive species can restore a lost world” someone posted:

A: I’ve been wondering if instead of slaughtering camels, Australia could relocate them to western North America to replace the extinct camelops. Assuming any potential disease introduction could be anticipated and avoided, this suggests that might not be a terrible idea (probably starting with a pilot program with sterilized camels).

“Now scientists say that contrary to the conventional wisdom that large invasive herbivore mammals have strictly negative effects on their new environments, Escobar’s ‘cocaine’ hippos show how introduced species can restore a lost world.

A team of conservation biologists has compared the traits and impacts on the ecosystems from large invasive herbivore species like the Colombian hippo with their extinct counterparts from the Late Pleistocene (around 116,000-12,000 years ago) period like mammoths, giants sloths and giant wombats. They found some modern day invasive species restore parts of ecosystems not seen since before humans began driving the widespread extinctions of megafauna.

Their new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that some introduced herbivore species are an almost perfect ecological match for extinct species from the Late Pleistocene, such as modern day wild horses known as mustangs and the extinct pre-domestic horses in North America, while others bring back a mixture of traits.”

And in Earth Archives “DNA extracted from bones collected in the Yukon show that North America’s last camel was a close relative of Old World camels and not llamas as previously thought.”

Ria: When examples of human controlled non-indigenous invasive species are put forth to demonstrate ecological benefits, I sense Orwell. It’s akin to exalting civilization’s benefits to nature. Can you think of examples? Sure. But do modern humans even have a way to comprehend civilization’s overall impact to wild? If you really believe civilization shuffling species out of their native habitat and placing them into the habitat of others is overall good for nature, you probably need to check your human supremacy and check your indoctrination. The best we can hope to do is assist wild’s return to the most recent state of thriving wild, without speciesist mind games.

A: I don’t. But I believe non-native camels in Australia make more sense in North America, which has camels until 13,000 years ago. And for the camels, being relocated is certainly a preferable alternative to being shot.

Ria: The hallmark of civilizations’ good intentions is their inevitable unexpected consequences. We do it over and over, and never learn. That’s why the safest thing we can do is interventions that slow the rate of change, Wild lives thrive best in slow changing communities and degrade with faster changes because co-adaptations take time. Returning what can be returned to wild’s most recent thriving state may not be as exciting, and may not save what civilization prefers to save, but we created this situation with lives being pit against other lives. For example Civilization chooses pet frenzy that decimated wild lives because we want to feel like we care about animals and we want the close inter species connection. Wild ethos revolts from civilization invention and use of animals humans bred into existence. Wild ethos takes lifetimes and generations to hone. If we’re wild at all, we’re in the infant stage, and admitting that will help us check our ego.

A: So what solution would you recommend for feral camels in Australia? Mass shooting?

Ria: What do you recommend for all the future wild harm that action will create?

A: It may not create any. It may restore a broken ecosystem, as wolves did in Yellowstone. It’s not clear what wiped out the camelops. It may have been humans. I’m suggesting a pilot program with sterilized camels so the effects can be monitored.

Ria: The wolves were indigenous close enough in time that their return increased wild homeostasis. That is not the case with more distant species because the ecology is so changed. If you’d like I could list huge ecology degradation events that began with good intentions that stir the heart, like avoiding camel deaths. shallow narrow thinking has caused huge harms.

A: The horses mentioned in this article are a good example of domesticated animals filling an ecological niche left by extirpated wild creatures and have thrived. Horses and camels disappeared from North America at almost the exact same time. Granted, modern wild horses are of the same species as the extirpated horses of 13,000 years ago, and the camels are only of the same genus as the camelops..But no more similar animal presently exists and no animal has filled the niche left by the camels.

Ria: I could refute the cases you bring up, and post their ample opposites, but the bottom line overall is that unintended consequences of human intervention in the complex “natural world” have impacts unknown in present and future as dynamics evolve. Humans have disconnected themselves from from nature in a mode of superiority. We regret while holding on to the lifeway that continues to decimate other species. Even today’s rational, scientific mind concedes: our species is just beginning to understand wild interconnections of living and non-living things. Ecosystems are complex beyond the modern mind’s ability to wholly perceive and appreciate them, but on the surface, nature can seem simple. Hearts are pulled to save our preferred species, favoring ‘cuteness’ or closeness to our own body forms. Maybe this is why there have been so many attempts to shift ecosystems about at our whim. The sense of ‘saving’ may feel good, but the true impacts reveal its false nature. The impact of humans’ introductions is tough enough to predict and fully comprehend with recently extirpated species, but impossible to know going further back. We keep rolling the dice with detrimental real impacts to others, all so we can feel good about ourselves as saviors. People who want to really help wild animals need to begin by replacing their false hope and simplified answers with acknowledging their ignorance. Begin by observing, accepting the pain our species has caused and continues to cause others. Only then, through much time, can we know how wild communities in their entirety call us to act.

A: I agree with much of what you are saying here. I’ve made similar points to people arguing that we should try to re-engineer ecosystems to reduce wild animal suffering.

Ria: Yeah, engineering is what we did that caused this nature destruction. Some anthropologists make the case that we began engineering ecosystems over 100,000 years ago, more than half of sapiens existence, so it’s deeply ingrained in us through thousands of generations. The hard thing is that some engineering is needed to halt & help, like fighting fire with fire. Very tough decisions, because there is no easy answer. Species are dying, nonaction can make things worse, and interventions inevitably place some species above others. Very tough.

If anyone is interested for suggestions on how to help wildlife right where you’re at, check out Douglas Tallamy’s Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens.

Berry Freedom

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Since I first started having a vegan primitivist presence online, people contact me with questions on vegan primitivism in action, both to try to disprove its feasibility, and to manifest it in the ‘real’ world. It’s inspiring to know that there are many people interested in and longing for vegan primitivism. This is such a hot topic that the interest sometimes swells and I announce that I know virtually nothing of vegan primitivism in action. That’s true, especially in relation to lifeways and dietways of our earliest ancestors. Study of vegan primitivism fueled my anthropological exploration in the book EcoPatriarchy: The Origins & Nature of Hunting. The theory laid out is that human apes hunting animals resulted in our species dominating others and the world, both in ethos and action. Regarding questions on a future vegan primitive, one of my stock answers is that in a world colonized by civilization, untouched primitivism, regardless of diet, is impossible. Other things must come first, like action based in wild compassion.

Another related challenging topic in my writings generating the most follow up is human domestication through control of fire. Most recently: “I was just re reading your anti fire vegan essay, which is one I really love. I was curious what ways you rewild yourself and your land base? Do you do long term self-sufficient works, or small trips? Ethical vegan foraging?”

When I’m following my being’s wildest calling, action in the ‘real’ world follows compassion. While survival instinct may be fundamentally strong for all life, opening perceptions and feelings for ecology’s life force in entirety leaves my being with a pained passion to undo civilization’s harm. For me, that takes the form of wild tending, restoration ecology, minus the human-centered functions, like human food production. In my earth healing interactions ethnobotanical knowledge collaterally comes to me, sometimes tempting me to hone a lush vegan primitivist ‘haven’. I sometimes flirt with that temptation, like locating wild wapato, aka Indian potato, and spreading its seeds into my locality. But I’m living a hard species lesson: Re-embedding with wildness requires re-enlivening compassion for all wild. That means facing the harm our species has done, and responding accordingly. Doing what we can to rectify our harm precedes authentically rewilding our own species.

So I focus on nourishing the lives of wild others struggling under the human burden. I protect and enrich their habitat, and feed them, literally. My special focus is inviting return of indigenous species we’ve recently extirpated, slowing the rate of change, keeping habitats lush, biodiverse, resilient and intact. I’m fortunate to have found expert specialists for guidance and collaboration, as my efforts are more physical interaction than abstract study. For example, I have a friend who propagates extirpated ferns in his basement and gives them to trusted others to find secret wild spots for their return. A birder friend shares his home with tree frog tadpoles to reintroduce into one of the wetlands I tend, both to re-establish their habitat and to feed raptors. Coopers hawks now nest. It’s disheartening when these guerilla specialists get discouraged and give up to domesticated humans’ and their pets’ relentless encroachment and other harm.

My wild awareness is growing. For example, naturally propagated blue elderberry (Sambucus caerulea) is virtually vanished from Seattle, and I intuit that plant played important roles nourishing birds with berries and propagators with flowers. I recently began live staking blue elderberry in its preferred dry, sunny spots, which tend to be more urban, and watch for return of their interconnected lost species.

Anyone familiar with the taste and health-giving qualities of blue elderberry has empathy for my temptation to harvest it for myself. I limit myself to taste tests. I don’t know what birds once enjoyed these berries, as they are yet to reveal themselves. For now, elderberry bunches fall and rot on the ground, in plain sight of modern humans who are so disconnected from wildness they cannot perceive the ‘real’ gems before their eyes and noses. Perhaps ironically, if modern humans grow to intuit their connection with blue elderberry, as how our ancestors enjoyed the fruit and spread its seeds in their animality, they too will sense wild ethos of leaving the berries to free besieged wild others from civilization as we free ourselves.

Wild Medicine

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Neanderthal mother and child

(Anthropos Pavilion, Brno, Czech Republic) ( CC BY-NC 2.0 )

 

Thirty years ago an autoimmune disease showed up in my blood. I researched the noxious artificial drugs and ripped up the scripts. Rheumatologists, the specialists who cause the highest rate of death by prescription pad, treated me like an outlaw for refusing their expertise. Then they treated me like a bizarre curiosity when I told them how ethnobotanical remedies soothe what ails me. They felt disempowered asking me to spell the names of plants to document in my file.

Even if modern healthcare were safe and effective, civilization and medicine collaborate in doling out enough ‘goodies’ to maintain order, keeping separate their stratified ‘haves’ and ‘have nots.’ The disparity of institutional healthcare serves as civilization’s warning to march in-between the lines, or you too will languish in famine and pestilence. But, like schools and jobs, medicine is a ruse propelling civilization’s ecocide rooted in belief of progress. That belief is just too scary to see as false, we’re just so steeped in the progress trap, feels like there’s no option, progress has become the only world humans know.

What is the price of progress? Medicine participates in modernity’s haughty carnage of ‘have not’ Earth and animals – torturing and killing test lab animals, polluting waterways with toxic drugs spawning fish and amphibian mutations, trashing land with heaps of synthetic waste products. Feeding cardiac inpatients health-harming slayed animal bodies, to later require more drugs and surgeries – like a well-oiled machine.

It’s not that I automatically decline modern medicine, but I intuitively pick & choose. Broken bone – ok, I’ll take a cast. I feel entitled to exploit modernity’s techno-topia as I choose. It has stolen humans’ wild knowledge and wild home where wild foods and medicines live. It causes a calamity of human and nonhuman ailments and deaths, earning as much trust and respect as a pathological serial killer. From technology’s pollution to car crashes, to house fires, to depression suicides to climate change disasters, the list is endless. While the pre-civ wildscape carried a different set of perilous risks, early human ailments and deaths may pale in comparison.

Neanderthal healthcare for both acute and chronic severe needs treated with simple, effective remedies was widespread. There were individuals with injuries and illnesses requiring extensive levels of daily care over months and even years. Feldhofer Neanderthal (~40,000 y.a.) recovered from a severe arm fracture requiring immobilizing his limb and with provided food, water and protection, and received long term care for a chronic disease. Shanidar I (~45,000 y.a.) received care to survive for at least a decade with a withered arm, damaged leg, probable blindness in one eye and probable hearing loss. La Chapelle aux Saints (~60,000 y.a.) was cared for with severe osteoarthritis and a systemic disease. Just caring companions and primitive means, no need for committing carnage.

Early humans also cared for their own medical needs. For example, anthropologists found an ailing Neanderthal from El Sidrón cave with an abscessed tooth and an intestinal parasite causing diarrhea. DNA evidence analyzing food in his dental calculus found he ate a steady diet of Populus, which contains the natural painkiller salicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin, as well as plants covered in Penicillium mold, the antibiotic penicillin. Earlier humans, like all animals, found their medicines and healing strategies through deeply caring relationships, instincts and sharp primal senses waning under civilization.

Science doubts and mocks primitive wisdom. Reawakening healthcare animality shifts the locus of control back to ecology, reengaging belonging and symbiosis. While advanced medical technologies outperform healthcare of earlier times, especially for children, how many injuries and illnesses are caused by technology? And is it worth the cost of techno-ecocide for all? I sense most animals, including me, prefer wild healthcare and our stolen land & lives returned. Progress retorts: Do I want a child to die of an easy to treat infection? No more than I want a child to get struck by a bullet, or eat grandma’s pills, or commit suicide over what humans are doing to the wild world.

 

-Derricourt, Robin M. Unearthing Childhood: Young Lives in Prehistory. Manchester University Press, 2018.

-Ryan, Christopher. Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress. Avid Reader Press, 2019.

-Spikins, Penny. How Compassion Made Us Human: the Evolutionary Origins of Tenderness, Trust and Morality. Pen & Sword Archaeology, 2015.

-Spikins, Penny, et al. “Living to Fight Another Day: The Ecological and Evolutionary Significance of Neanderthal Healthcare.” Quaternary Science Reviews, vol. 217, 2019, pp. 98–118., doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2018.08.011.

– Weyrich, Laura S., et al. “Neanderthal Behaviour, Diet, and Disease Inferred from Ancient DNA in Dental Calculus.” Nature, International Journal of Science , vol. 544, 2017, pp. 357–61.

Cairns Gone Wild

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Perhaps the form of art that bothers me most is contorting wild into abstract form in more biodiverse thriving places. Ordering and objectifying fragments of wild habitat into moldable pieces was a major stepping stone toward Homo’s step out of wildness into intentionality of species supremacy. As the human ape grew ever adept at controlling and colonizing, breaching ecology by foregoing co-adapting, anxiety of disconnecting from wild embeddedness channeled into expressions such as art. Increasing intensity of symbolism drives an increasingly artificial life.

Domination comes with a painful loss of organic connection. While he later minimizes his own essay ‘The Case Against Art’, Zerzan noted of art’s origins: “The veritable explosion of art at this time bespeaks an anxiety not felt before: in Worringer’s words, ‘creation in order to subdue the torment of perception.’ Here is the appearance of the symbolic, as a moment of discontent. It was a social anxiety; people felt something precious slipping away.”

Civilized humans’ liminal calling to randomly stack rocks may be coming from a dormant calling to re-enter wildness, but with clumsier results than a toddler’s first walk. While still an indigenous invasion, these stackings may be a step toward wild’s threshold, intuitive attempts to drop domesticating in exchange for a resurgent wild presence, but without self-awareness or knowing how.