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Wildlife in the Home

Wed, 28 May 2008 22:04:06 -0400

Ran has mirrored a great article by Ianto Evans from The Hand-Sculpted House, about how humans and other-than-humans live with each other, rather than in isolation, in various saner societies around the world, and some suggestions on how we might renew that relationship. - Jason

I’ve long loved Keith Olbermann’s rants. His...

Mon, 26 May 2008 19:49:00 -0400

I’ve long loved Keith Olbermann’s rants. His characterization of assassination as the worst blight on American history seems over the top (Really? The worst? Not slavery, the genocide of our native population, the conquest of the southwest, the concentration camps and anti-insurgency practices we used in the Philippines, not the Tuskeegee experiments? … but now I’ve gotten myself on an Olbermann-esque rip of my own…). But I really love this clip for its excellent summary of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, how we’ve had to forgive her “early and often,” and for his final assessment, that all this reveals a startling lack of what virtues that even I, an avowed anarchist, demand from someone seeking public office. - Jason

How Are Humans Unique?

Mon, 26 May 2008 19:45:53 -0400

How Are Humans Unique?:

“Human beings do not like to think of themselves as animals,” this article begins, once again committing the fallacy Daniel Quinn called “The Great Forgetting,” corrected by his admonishment, “We are not humanity.” You might correct that statement to say, “Domesticated humans do not like to think of themselves as animals.” Animists have no trouble whatsoever with that kinship. But the bulk of the article concerns the author’s experience comparing the intelligence of human children to apes, and discovering that the apes came out ahead. According to the mythology of the Enlightenment, our intellect makes us uniquely unique, “the paragon of animals,” as Shakespeare put it in Hamlet’s mouth. That cornerstone of our self-definition relied on a carefully guarded ignorance, the tautological “fallacy” of anthropomorphism, and a common commitment to never actually test the assertion. Now that someone has broken that, we can see clear evidence that intelligence does not define us. In fact, what defines us uniquely (but not as uniquely unique) seems to lie in our sociability. We make relationships with all our relations. Yet, our domestication relies so heavily on ripping our lives out of their fundamental matrix of social relationship—put simply, domestication’s antisocial agenda quite explicitly strips away our humanity. - Jason

Six 'uniquely' human traits now found in animals

Mon, 26 May 2008 19:37:45 -0400

Six 'uniquely' human traits now found in animals:

Thanks again to Scout for this summary article from New Scientist about some of the “uniquely human” traits that we’ve since found in other-than-human animals. Humans have our unique characteristics like any other species, but the idea that we have some kind of unique uniqueness that sets us apart from the rest of the living community marks perhaps the foundational delusion of our domestication. - Jason

Airborne Bacteria Make It Rain, Researchers Find

Mon, 26 May 2008 19:35:48 -0400

Airborne Bacteria Make It Rain, Researchers Find:

Urban Scout scouted out this piece of news: researchers have found that bacteria living in the clouds make it rain. And all that time, you laughed at animists who talked about the spirits who brought the rain. Who laughs now? - Jason

Getting to know Mother Earth the old way

Mon, 26 May 2008 08:35:00 -0400

Getting to know Mother Earth the old way:

I read about an event, not a powwow because it involved different tribes dancing together rather than competing, described as evidence of a native animism renewed, because as the humans danced together, a pair of bald eagles appeared to dance with them. I had no idea that those dancers included the Seneca, or that it took place so close to my own home, in northwest Ohio. Neither did I realize that this year’s events take place next weekend. We have some obligations to see to Saturday morning, but Giuli & I intend to make every effort to come for what we can. - Jason

Deep ecology. If we can recognize the pathology of someone who...

Wed, 21 May 2008 23:08:16 -0400

Deep ecology. If we can recognize the pathology of someone who thinks only they matter, what about all those people who don’t subscribe to deep ecology? - Jason

Calvin Luther Martin

Wed, 21 May 2008 12:49:15 -0400

Calvin Luther Martin:

I may have a new favorite author. I’ve read enough of Keepers of the Game and Way of the Human Being to love them both, each in their own unique way, yet it barely occurred to me that both had the same author. Calvin Luther Martin describes himself as a recovering historian running out of words, but if so, he’s spilled more than enough of them for the rest of us along the way. - Jason

A special kind of nerd. As a nerd, this fairly well sums up my...

Wed, 21 May 2008 12:37:00 -0400

A special kind of nerd. As a nerd, this fairly well sums up my take on “the Singularity.” - Jason

“‘White people’ don’t exist.” I...

Mon, 19 May 2008 21:35:49 -0400

“‘White people’ don’t exist.” I heard Martin Prechtel say that in an interview today, and with some of the discussions on REWILD.info about Old English and such, it really hit a nerve. American Indians will accept “American Indians” if necessary, but the very generalization that clumps the Tlingit, the Haudenosaunee and the Maya under the same heading expresses a huge amount of the problem in and of itself. And yet, we have no problem seeing German, Irish, Norwegian, and Russian all lumped together as “European,” or worse, “white.” We once had an indigenous tradition, and we have a lot more that we can recover than we might at first assume. Benjamin Bagby provides a striking example, as in this clip of his performance of Beowulf. Today, few of us really understand what “storytelling” in a rich oral tradition really entails. Give him 10 minutes, and Bagby will go a long way towards correcting that. - Jason

Walking Stick Foundation

Mon, 19 May 2008 21:27:45 -0400

Walking Stick Foundation:

I discovered this via the Alliance for Wild Ethics. The Walking Stick Foundation works for “the restoration and preservation of aboriginal Jewish spirituality.” - Jason

The Alliance for Wild Ethics

Mon, 19 May 2008 21:24:34 -0400

The Alliance for Wild Ethics:

Wondering what David Abram has kept up to since publishing Spell of the Sensuous? As you might expect, awesome things. - Jason

Satish Kumar on elegant simplicity. Expect more videos from...

Mon, 19 May 2008 20:32:59 -0400

Satish Kumar on elegant simplicity. Expect more videos from Resurgence in the future. - Jason

Chasing Utopia, Family Imagines No Possessions

Mon, 19 May 2008 19:58:00 -0400

Chasing Utopia, Family Imagines No Possessions:

The New York Times takes notice of voluntary simplicity, focusing on Aimee & Jeff Harris, who have chronicled their journey at cagefreefamily.com. Thanks for sharing your experience, Aimee & Jeff—I can only imagine the hate mail you must get right now! Actually, Jeff asks the same question I’ve wondered about: “Do I have internet access in the woods?” Sorry, still haven’t solved that problem. - Jason

Not That the Actual Forbidden Knowledge is as Interesting as That There Is Forbidden Knowledge

Wed, 14 May 2008 22:03:04 -0400

Not That the Actual Forbidden Knowledge is as Interesting as That There Is Forbidden Knowledge:

A fascinating article on the realities of infanticide. ”But addressing the issue in this way, and looking into the roots of the equation that predicts maternal infanticide, makes social psychologists confront the queasy implication of all of their work: if it’s that sane and natural for them to do this awful thing, if this awful thing is so hard to resist, how can we justify stigmatizing and punishing them? And if we can’t, then how can we live with ourselves having just (the historian points out) joined the 85% of all known historical societies, up to and including Christian western Europe as late as the late 19th century, that socially tolerated infanticide any time in the first couple of days after birth?” Thanks for the link, Ran! - Jason

Tribe is Reclaiming a Lost Legacy

Wed, 14 May 2008 21:47:19 -0400

Tribe is Reclaiming a Lost Legacy:

This may present the best news I’ve ever heard. The Mdewakanton Sioux community, flush with casino profits, has begun a “shrewd chess game,” cutting off Shakopee developments, growth and expansion, slowly knitting back together their traditional territory.

Says Stan Ellison, the tribe’s land manager, “Our staff is going through original surveyors’ notes, establishing old boundaries between prairie, forest, wetlands. We are returning native grasses to land that has been farmed since the 1870s. A park, to the tribe, is not a soccer field. It is restored prairie where members can hunt birds, and forests where we can turn maple sap into syrup, and show our kids that syrup isn’t something you buy at Cub.” They’ve even started using burning again to promote the growth of native plants over European invasives! Thanks for the good news, Patricia! - Jason

The Incredible Shrinking City

Sat, 10 May 2008 19:30:50 -0400

The Incredible Shrinking City:

In “The Longhouse,” I made the case that in the Rust Belt, collapse has already begun. Witness Ohio’s nearby Youngstown, a small city that really has more to do with Pittsburgh than Ohio. ”We’re one of the first cities of significant size to embrace shrinkage,” said Mayor Williams. As collapse looms, you can either wait for it to crush you down, or you can adapt and move to a simpler way of dwelling ahead of it. I wouldn’t call Youngstown sustainable, but it has headed in the right direction. As John Michael Greer has put it, the wave of the industrial revolution rewarded those who embraced complexity; the wave of the “deindustrial” revolution will reward those who embrace elegance. Already, delegations from Flint, Wheeling and Dayton have come to study how Youngstown has done it. Special thanks to Ran for pointing out this good news right in our own backyard! - Jason

Game Geeks on Primetime Adventures. A quick overview of PTA,...

Wed, 07 May 2008 21:11:48 -0400

Game Geeks on Primetime Adventures. A quick overview of PTA, one of the best known story games. - Jason

Gray Thunder: Listening to Elephants

Tue, 06 May 2008 22:47:15 -0400

Gray Thunder: Listening to Elephants:

“One story told by Pacquo tells of a rogue elephant who was destroying crops in a nearby village. The elephant’s repeated intrusions prompted the authorities to threaten to kill it if the problem was not solved. A Samburu elder faced the elephant and somehow communicated that people were going to come and shoot it if it did not go away—and within a short while it disappeared in the bush. The elephant never returned.” - Jason

Yes, I feel comfortable calling Edward Bernays the Antichrist....

Tue, 06 May 2008 22:43:51 -0400

Yes, I feel comfortable calling Edward Bernays the Antichrist. Part One of Adam Curtis’ documentary, The Century of the Self, looks at the connection between Freud, his American nephew Edward Bernays who invented the term “public relations” (by his own account, because of the ugly connotations of “propaganda”), and the grand strategy of controlling the masses by addicting us to an empty materialism. Anyone familiar with the pretas? - Jason