Black and Green Bulletin

where now for the anarcho-primitivist "movement" and/or momentum?

2007-04-21T16:55:00.000-06:00

I just ran across this aand thought it would be worth posting as it is of interest.

Anarcho-Primitivism

I. Introduction

Anarcho-primitivists comprise a subculture and political movement that, generally, advocates hunting and gathering as the ideal human subsistence method (from the point of view of sustainable resource use) and the band as the ideal human social structure (for its features of egalitarianism). While the goal may seem improbable, a primitivist would contend that more modest goals are either undesirable or unachievable within the system. The past 10,000 years have after all been largely a history of “solutions” to the problems of an agricultural society. This critique of “civilization” inherently rejects less radical ideals and claims to go uniquely to the heart of all social discontent. It is multi-faceted, drawing on several traditions of thought. These include the nineteenth century social speculators, anthropology of hunter-gatherers, situationism, anarchism, radical (deep) ecology, and anti-technological philosophy. The potential problem of implementation is largely solved by a growing consensus that an end to “economic growth” is fast approaching, making revolutionary change inevitable. The direction of that change is the focus of anarcho-primitivist interest.
Anarcho-primitivism is subtly influencing society in several ways. The Unabomber’s “manifesto” enunciated many of the central tenets of anarcho-primitivism (e.g. rejection of liberalism and industrialism). Primitivists were among the protesters participating in window-smashing, spray-painting, and other vandalism at the Seattle WTO protests in December 1999. They are probably among those elusive “eco-terrorists” who carry out property destruction in the name of the Earth Liberation Front. The popular novel Fight Club (1996), which became a feature film, portrayed a group of alienated young men who reject consumerist culture and attempt to bring it to an end through massive sabotage. While anarcho-primitivism may not seem worthy of much thought or attention because it falls far outside the mainstream of political discourse, it ought not to be dismissed. It merits substantial attention solely on the basis of its harmonious integration of several historically disparate lines of thought.

II. Aims

The prefix “anarcho” signifies the anarchist rejection of the state in favor of small-scale political structures. Additionally, as primitivist icon John Zerzan (2002:67-68) explains, “I would say Anarchism is the attempt to eradicate all forms of domination.” So a key distinction must be made between anarcho-primitivists and anarchists generally because, “[f]or example, some Anarchists don't see the technological imperative as a category of domination.”
In the most general terms, they reject “civilization” in favor of “wildness.” More specifically, they call for the abandonment or destruction of industrial (and possibly agricultural) technology in favor of subsistence that is not based on the industrial “forces of production”—hence, the adoption of the “primitive” label. This means that primitivists reject even forms of production based on collective management and ownership because any production exceeding immediate subsistence needs is seen as incompatible with long-term sustainability. Derrick Jensen (2000:143) explains:
Make no mistake, our economic system can do no other than destroy everything it encounters. That’s what happens when you convert living beings to cash. That conversion, from living trees to lumber, schools of cod to fish sticks, and onward to numbers on a ledger, is the central process of our economic system.

III. Influences and Precedents

a. Anarcho-primitivism’s internal coherence lies in its complementary and self-reinforcing synthesis of several previous modes of thought. The oldest and most pervasive of these is the romantic idea of the noble savage. This idea, popularized in the eighteenth century by Rousseau (2001), has persisted ever since (recall the Iron Eyes Cody anti-litter advertising campaign). This romanticism was adopted by the nineteenth century transcendentalists like Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller (Pearce 146-150). However, these early radical thinkers, while admiring of the “primitives” and favoring social change, did not seek to emulate their societies: “The fact is,” Thoreau wrote, “the history of the white man is a history of improvement, that of the red man a history of fixed habits of stagnation.” (Pearce 1965:149). The white man’s “history of improvement” was the focus of another group of speculators, including Comte, Tylor, Powell, Morgan, and Spencer, who advocated unilineal cultural evolution (Bettinger 1991:1-29). The most prominent of these was Morgan who outlined the progression from savagery to barbarism to civilization. These stages were defined by increasing technological progress (originating with stone-age hunter-gatherers) resulting in a corresponding decrease in reliance on nature and the increasing opportunity for managerial and artistic pursuits (Bettinger 1991:4), but only for an elite class. Although Morgan’s categories of society roughly correspond to some of those still in use today, the idea of unilineal evolution is of no more than historical interest to anthropologists today, who no longer endorse sweeping generalizations without significant supporting evidence.

b. It was not until the 1960s that the negative stereotype of “savagery” was challenged. In 1966, the first international conference on hunting and gathering societies (entitled “Man the Hunter”) was held in Chicago (Bettinger 1991:48). The significance of this conference was to overturn the longstanding assumption that hunter-gatherers’ lives were “nasty, brutish and short,” in the enduring words of Thomas Hobbes. Marshall Sahlins famously made the case in his paper, "Notes on the Original Affluent Society," which consolidated brand new ethnographic research from Africa and Australia. He concluded that hunter-gatherers (of the most mobile sort) could be characterized as affluent on the basis that their few and simple wants were easily met. He called this economy the “Zen way” (1972:29). Although significant problems with his source data are recognized now, his essay is still commonly assigned in introductory anthropology courses because of a lingering sense that he “had a point” (Bird-David 1992:26). Since Man the Hunter, there has been no shift in the scholarly literature back toward the negative stereotypes of hunter-gatherers. (A shift away from stereotypes in general is an obvious trend, however.) Richard Lee, a co-organizer of the 1966 conference, still publishes work propounding the study of the “primitive communism” phenomenon (Lee 1995). Participants in this revolution of hunter-gatherer studies certainly were and are aware of the romantic stereotype of the noble savage, and, if only unconsciously, they had brought it up-to-date with modern scholarship, giving it significant credibility. This primitivist trend attracted many to the study of hunter gatherers, and certainly formed a foundation for the appearance of anarcho-primitivism in the ensuing decades.

c. In a novel critique of modern society that we would now recognize as postmodernism, Guy Debord expressed in The Society of the Spectacle (1995) the vacuity of life within industrial society in terms of “the spectacle”—his term for symbolic representation run amok. In Thesis 1 he says, “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” (1995:12). Debord was part of a revolutionary French art movement of the 1960s, Situationism, which rejected the substitution of representation for direct experience. Like previous art movements had done, Situationsists sought to bridge the divide between art and everyday life. Primitivist Kevin Tucker (2003) makes clear that, in the decades since Debord presented his critique, the dominance of his “spectacle” has grown exponentially with the development of audio-video recording technology and the internet as mediums of communication (“medium” is a key word here, suggesting “mediate”) that replaces the direct interaction of individuals. As in the early primitivism of the Transcendentalists, Debord’s situationism implied a desire for social change, a desire that he makes explicit in a preface to a recent edition (1995:10). The above quotation of Thesis 1 also illustrates Debord’s primitivism. In lamenting the loss of a perceived past in which direct experience was universal, he paved the way for anarcho-primitivism, which would paint a clearer picture of that implicit alternative. Debord and his contemporaries were aware of political movements that had historically exhibited similar critical attitudes to social and political norms (“Situationism” 2002). Among these was anarchism.

d. Anarchism, also called libertarian socialism, has a long and complicated history beginning in Europe approximately 200 years ago “in the climate of reason” that simultaneously gave rise to libertarian and authoritarian socialism (Bose 1967:77,379). At the end of the nineteenth century, it was taking hold in the US and Europe among organized laborers. It was at this time that the stereotype of the bomb-throwing anarchist was born, fueled by events such as the Haymarket Affair (Bose 1967:253,392). However this stereotype does injustice to the idealistic motives of anarchists as explicated by its numerous philosophical proponents. The chaos they are so frequently accused of desiring is arguably the antithesis of their true motives: the widespread (socially accepted and internalized) disorder of war, oppression, greed, hunger, depression that stalks hierarchical societies is the object of anarchists’ assault. As Howard Zinn (1997:644) explains,
It is these conditions that anarchists have wanted to end: to bring a kind of order to the world for the first time. We have never listened to them carefully, except through the hearing aids supplied by the guardians of disorder—the national government leaders, whether capitalist or socialist.
The ultimate aim of anarchists is hardly different than that of other idealists throughout history. But anarchists’ optimism—their faith in the ability of human beings to voluntarily cooperate with each other—sets them clearly apart from all the others, who unfailingly require some authoritarian class for the maintenance of “order.”
It was perhaps a lapse in this long-standing faith, stemming from the lost optimism of the 1960s, that led some anarchists in search of a historical basis for their convictions—a search that led back to the origins of the first states—that is, to the beginning of “civilization” itself. These primitivist themes began to appear in anarchist publications in the 1980s, and they explicitly referenced the 1960s anthropology of hunter-gatherers (e.g. Sahlins 1972); the egalitarian band structure seemed to exemplify the anarchist solution to social disorder. The environmental movement also flourished into the 1970s, and this is reflected in the anarchist-leaning fiction of Edward Abbey.

e. Abbey’s 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang (1976), centered on a small group of radical, mostly young individuals dedicated to sabotaging the infrastructure that allowed for the taming of the “wilderness” of the American west. They are sympathetically portrayed as the underdogs in a country where political power is held by no-good despoilers of nature. The uncompromising sentiment for “eco-defense” (a novel concept itself) expressed by Abbey reflected a radical environmental ethic that was totally new and would become known as “deep ecology.” This ethic is summed-up well by its recognized founder, Arne Næss: “The flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth has intrinsic value. The value of non-human life forms is independent of the usefulness these may have for narrow human purposes.” (1999) It was in this context of Abbey’s advocacy of “monkey wrenching” and Næss’s eco-philosophy that the name “Earth First!” was given in 1989 to a new movement dedicated to defending the natural world by any means necessary (“About Earth First!” n.d.; “Earth First” 2005).
Derrick Jensen (2000:188) expresses “the central question” that environmental activists face: “What are sane and appropriate responses to insanely destructive behavior?” He continues, “So often environmentalists…are capable of plainly describing the problems…, yet when faced with the emotionally daunting task of fashioning a response…, we generally suffer a failure of nerve and imagination.” Earth First! reflected the first attempt to overcome this failure of nerve, but the challenge drove others to take more extreme measures. The large-scale property destruction (glorified in Edward Abbey’s novels) of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) was one response to the ineffective “reformist” measures taken by many activists. The first actions claimed by the ELF occurred during the 1990s in the UK and US. Examples include the 1998 arson of the Vail Mountain ski resort, the 2003 arson of a San Diego condominium construction site, and multiple examples of vandalism at car dealerships, particularly of sport utility vehicles (“Earth Liberation Front” 2005).
The radical environmental movement was compatible with primitivist ideas, as the popular portrayal of Indians as ecologists demonstrates. “Primitive” people, especially mobile hunter-gatherers, are directly dependent on the land for their subsistence and, presumably, have a more “ecocentric” worldview than is possible in modern industrial society. There has been some dispute over this point in recent years from scholars who seem “intent on demonstrating that it is ‘human nature’ to be environmentally destructive” (Hunn 2002). Eugene Hunn attempts to put the debate into perspective concluding, “by the excellent condition of the continent when the first Europeans arrived,” that Native Americans had done something right. He continues,
That the continent was not ‘pristine wilderness’ is undeniable, since it had long been home to millions of Indian peoples. That Indian peoples had cared well for this land, had conserved its biodiversity, is also undeniable. To dispute the reality of ‘The Ecological Indian’…is to blind us to the damage done since, in the name of progress and of profit.
Thus, environmental problems came to be seen as a symptom of the far larger problem of “civilization,” which has demonstrated unconcern for any limits to “growth” to the detriment of the natural world. One individual responding to some of the same concerns with a more anti-technological focus was Theodore Kaczynski, widely known as “the Unabomber.”

f. A 34,000-word paper entitled “Industrial Society and Its Future” was published in September 1995 by the Washington Post. The Post was complying with an anonymous offer from the “Unabomber” to stop his 17-year bombing campaign in exchange for the publication of his revolutionary treatise. Sixteen mailed bombs were sent by Kaczynski, resulting in the deaths of three and injuring 23 more (Goldberg 1996). The “manifesto,” as the media called it, decries the ever-increasing dominance of technology within modern society. It calls for a revolution, not against political structures, but against “the economic and technological basis of the present society” (Kaczynski 2003:3). This tendency to aggressively challenge technological innovation can be traced back to early eighteenth-century England when advances in textile manufacturing technology threatened to make obsolete centuries of tradition. These detractors of technology, popularly called Luddites, from 1811 to 1812 sabotaged this new machinery creating an uproar in English society (Sale 1995a). Their name derives from the mythological figure, Ned Ludd, whose name served as a pseudonym in their letters of threat of and explanation for their vandalism (Sale 1995a:77-78).
Modern philosophers including Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, and Chellis Glendinning—so-called neo-Luddites (Sale 1995a:237-240)—continue to promote the skepticism toward “progress” that has surely existed as long as technological innovation itself. The difference between neo-Luddites and their predecessors is that, in the nineteenth century, new technologies were only a social threat, whereas today technology threatens the biological systems that form the basis of human existence (Sale 1995a:266-267). Kaczynski’s text is very clearly informed by neo-Luddite thought, although he does not cite the influence of any previous thinkers within it (Sale 1995b:305). Elsewhere he has said, “Technology, above all else, is responsible for the current condition of the world and will control its future development.” The ideology of the Luddites and their modern counterparts provides a crucial pillar of anarcho-primitivism.

g. A final pillar supporting the primitivist ethos demonstrates the unsustainability of industrial society. This body of work refutes those arguments that claim science will provide the solutions necessary to sustain current First World living standards in the face of massive resource degradation and depletion. It also provides anarcho-primitivists a safe, simple answer to the challenge, “How are you going to get there?” The 1972 book, Limits to Growth (LTG), was the first systematic assessment of the sustainability of modern society. More than a decade of environmentalism still had not popularly integrated ubiquitous environmental problems into a coherent message for public consumption. Earlier works like Erlich’s The Population Bomb and Carson’s Silent Spring had focused on specific bite-sized issues. LTG offered a satisfying, yet disturbing complete picture. It was the product of a research project commissioned by the Club of Rome, an international, informal group of “businessmen, statesmen, and scientists” (Meadows, et. al. 2004:ix) who wanted an assessment of the sustainability of the overall course of human society. The final report predicted that unless widespread measures were taken to reduce consumption and pollution sufficiently early, human society would overshoot global carrying capacity and ultimately face a collapse, defined as “an uncontrolled decline in both population and human welfare” (Meadows, et. al. 2004:xi). The research group reached this conclusion through the use of a computer model which was able to factor in multiple variables and the interaction between them. LTG was the first attempt to present the environmental crisis as a whole and show that it required a systematic response (Kassiola 1990:17).
Resource shortages have become a serious concern in recent years among limits-to-growth theorists. By far, the most popular and far-reaching of the theories of resource depletion concerns petroleum. “Peak oil” refers to the point at which total oil extraction (in a particular oil-field, a region, or the planet) reaches its highest point along the slope of a bell curve. From that moment on, supply begins to drop while demand persists. This phenomenon has been observed for decades, but the global economy has been able to sufficiently redistribute oil to regions where the supply has long been exhausted (e.g. Texas). The consequences of the global peak of oil extraction are only recently being considered: when global supply is unable to meet global demand, oil’s market value will begin rising ever-faster. Anything and everything that depends on oil (try imagining some aspect of out society that does not) will become increasingly expensive, and eventually industrial society will grind to a halt. It must be added, few if any of the scholars who promote limits-to-growth critiques are excited about the end of “civilization” they foresee (most hope to avert it), but, for an anarcho-primitivist, their scenarios provide a near-panacea.
The seven influences outlined above are by no means universally recognized among all anarcho-primitivists, but they are clearly visible throughout the available “anti-civilization” literature. The key writers, including John Zerzan, Derrick Jensen, and Daniel Quinn, all come from different backgrounds—the labor movement, the environmental movement, or entirely non-political—but they each synthesize elements of the above influences and add their own unique contributions.

IV. Synthesis

John Zerzan (1994,2002) adds the most academic voice to the chorus. While his writing style is the least accessible, his critique is by far the deepest. He seeks the root of all domination, and this path leads him deeper into prehistory than even the origins of agriculture. Art, language, number, time, and even symbolic thought have been subjects of Zerzan’s interrogation. For him, each of those serves to mediate humans from the direct experience of the world that Guy Debord elegized. Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael (1995), is undoubtedly the most widely read book questioning the basis of civilization. It is a novel that revolves around a Socratic-style dialogue in which the reader learns how civilization came to be and what humanity has forgotten as a result. Derrick Jensen provides a uniquely psychological analysis of modern civilization, drawing on the work of R. D. Laing and Erich Fromm. He uses his own experience of child abuse to show how the same types of relationships are manifested on a larger scale throughout society (2000). He also assesses the psychology of hate groups in terms of its relationship the dominant culture (2002).
All of these individuals agree that civilization was a mistake that has had disastrous consequences for human and non-human life, and it will continue to wreak havoc until people decide to stop it or until it collapses under it own weight. After one of these events occurs, the planet will finally be able to begin recovering from 10,000 years of human domestication.
Picture yourself planting radishes and seed potatoes on the fifteenth green of a forgotten golf course. You'll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five degree angle. We'll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what's left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against the bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night....
[Y]ou'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower.... [T]he air will be so clean you'll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles. (Palaniuk 1996:124-125)
The above quotation from the popular novel Fight Club is a vivid description (some might say caricature) of a world in which industrial civilization has been survived by the kinds of small-scale societies to which anarcho-primitivists aspire. There are two modes of thought on how people can affect this outcome. The first, advocated by Daniel Quinn (2000), is that it can only be accomplished through the dissemination of a new “vision” through society, which will inevitably result in the radical transformation of civilization necessary to end the destruction of the natural world. Quinn feels that without first “changing minds” all other efforts will be fruitless. However, this strategy has been criticized for a lack of urgency. Derrick Jensen (2000:182) conveys this urgency well:
Many perceive the pain of denuded forests and extirpated salmon directly in their bodies: part of their personal identities includes their habitat—their human and nonhuman surroundings. Thus they are not working to save something out there, but responding in defense of their own lives. This is not dissimilar to the protection of one’s family: why does a mother grizzly bear charge a train to protect her cubs, and why does a mother human fiercely fight to defend her own?”
The more common response among primitivists reflects this urgency and calls for direct action that will bring an end to the destruction wrought by industrial technology as quickly as possible.
A legitimate objection to destruction of the infrastructure of industrial society is that it would inevitably lead to the deaths of millions. Aside from the high probability that such a scenario will eventually occur, if current trends continue, without any help from saboteurs (Meadows, et. al. 2004) and that the sooner that catastrophe occurs the less “disastrous the results…will be” (Kaczynski 2003:3), an anarcho-primitivist would argue that such objections exhibit naïveté about the reality of technological progress.
You can't get rid of the "bad" parts of technology and retain only the "good" parts. Take modern medicine, for example. Progress in medical science depends on progress in chemistry, physics, biology, computer science and other fields. Advanced medical treatments require expensive, high-tech equipment that can be made available only by a technologically progressive, economically rich society. Clearly you can't have much progress in medicine without the whole technological system and everything that goes with it. (Kaczynski 2003:121)
The increasing incidence of cancer is probably the most ironic consequence of this “progress.” In terms of the human health that modern medicine ostensibly improves, the cancer epidemic provides a striking wake-up call to advocates of medical technology. It generally agreed that cancer is a disease caused primarily by the lifestyle of Western Civilization (Moss n.d.; Ransom 2002). All the same, life expectancy has increased in the last 100 years (“Life Expectancy” n.d.; Stobbe 2005). This begs the question of which is more important, quantity or quality of life.
The consequences of modern technology are certainly far greater for nonhumans, as they are not its intended beneficiaries. The present global rate of extinction is estimated between 100 and 1000 times the (normal) background rate (Levin and Levin 2002). As a result of large-scale logging, less than two percent of U.S. forests were more than 200 years old in 1997 (“U.S. Forestland” n.d.). Every introductory environmental science textbook describes in detail the seemingly endless atrocities perpetrated against the natural world. Fisheries are being harvested at rates far in excess of the maxim sustainable yield. The same chemicals responsible for the human cancer epidemic transform diverse productive land and water habitats into barren waste dumps.
Anarcho-primitivism seeks a return to a wild life free from the culture that seems to be doing its best to destroy the planet, a life that humanity successfully realized for nearly all of our time on this planet (Rosman and Rubel 2004:181). What this entails in the modern context is a small scale society that is independent from the global industrial economy, but said society would also not be restricted by the modern constraints of property and imaginary borders. It would be self-sufficient, subsisting successfully on the local land as well as any scraps which civilization (or what is left of it) provides. It would lack the desire to control or subdue the life forms upon which it depended. But most importantly, such a community would have a visceral sense of and relationship to a physical place.

V. Prospects

Much of the anarcho-primitivist community is restricted to the pages of anarchist magazines and websites. This is community in a very loose, virtual sense, but in the modern context this form of “community” is almost surely a prerequisite of any new zeitgeist. These are real individuals writing, reading, and thinking about anarcho-primitivism across the world, and their common interest connects them. This “community” is only significant insofar as it has the potential to lead to face-to-face interaction, however.
There are some signs of actual emerging communities which advocate and apply (to an extent) the principles of an anarcho-primitivist philosophy. The first large-scale secular movement that exhibited some “primitivist” themes was the outbreak of communes during the late 1960s (Houriet 1971). The hippie subculture idolized the Native American cultures of the southwest like the Pueblo, Hopi, and Zuni (1971:198). Synonymously called the “back to the land” movement, these intentional communities emphasized that the land was true basis for the economy (1971:153, 181). The hippies advanced few of the philosophical and none of the empirical arguments that have become available in the last 35 years as justification for a non-civilized life, and their communities have all but disintegrated. In the early 1980s, the various threads of primitivism began to cohere into the independent worldview outlined above.
Today there are a few groups of people who actively seek out community that approximates (as closely as is feasible) an anarcho-primitivist alternative. Most loosely connected to anarcho-primitivism are so-called primitive skills gatherings, at which attendees camp in an undeveloped area and learn a few skills of self-sufficient survival including bow and arrow making, friction fire-starting, edible wild plant identification, animal tracking, and shelter construction (“Primitive Skills” n.d.). For some, the interest in these meetings may be more hobby-oriented than ideological, but the skills they teach would be of definite use where the necessities of life are not provided by a global industrial economy.
Wildroots is the name of a self-described “radical homestead” in North Carolina. One resident participated in a brief interview (Anon. 2005) providing the following information. It began with only two individuals and the population has since doubled. Two are from the “upper middle class,” one from the “middle class, and the other from the “working class.” Visitors are welcome and typically stay for a few weeks in the spring and summer. “There aren't really rules, except that if anyone new wanted to live there long-term and build a dwelling, the four of us would all have to agree on that.” There are also no “economic limits to ‘membership’.” The group lives on 30-acres of lush land which is owned outright. All of the members have spent time at larger intentional communities, and one member has lived at one.
“We are pretty heavily influenced by many of the same ideas even if we haven’t all read the same books. Many of us are into Chellis Glendinning and Derrick Jensen.” Clearly, Wildroots is philosophically rooted in anarcho-primitivism. The resident said that Wildroots was not the only attempt at a primitive community and cited two examples in Washington state (“the Institute for Applied Piracy and the Feral Farm”).
It should be clear, by now, that there is a reasonably solid canon of anarcho-primitivist philosophy available, which provides the seeds for what could potentially blossom into a movement. Several periodicals (Green Anarchy, Species Traitor, Green Anarchist, Fifth Estate, Live Wild or Die, The Final Days, Green Journal, Disorderly Conduct, Cracks in the Empire, Do or Die, and Quick!) are dedicated to anarcho-primitivist theory, and the most widely circulated American anarchist magazine, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, frequently features primitivist viewpoints (Zerzan 2002:3). The Federal Bureau of Investigation apparently sees the potential of a radical environmental movement, since it has deemed eco-terrorism the number one domestic terrorist threat. The small communities currently in existence may represent the budding of this movement or they may not. In either case, the arguments in favor of anarcho-primitivism should be evaluated openly by mainstream society because, if its claims are valid, their implications are immediate and uncommonly far-reaching.

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Stobbe, Mike (2005, Dec 8). “U.S. Life Expectancy Hits All-Time High.” Retrieved December 8, 2005, from Yahoo! News: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/oldest_boomers;_ylt=AhXDqCfognrWZBxv8WBYHvqs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA2Z2szazkxBHNlYwN0bQ--
Tucker, Kevin. (2003, Spring). “The Spectacle of the Symbolic.” Species Traitor: An Insurrectionary Anarcho-Primitivist Journal, 3, 15-21.
U.S. Forestland by Age Class. Retrieved December 7, 2005, from Endgame Research Services: http://www.endgame.org/gtt-oldgrowth-us.htm
Zerzan, John. (1994). Future Primitive and Other Essays. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.
——. (2002, Spring). “It’s All Coming Down!” In Green Anarchy, 8, 3-3.
——. (2002). Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilisation. Los Angeles: Feral House.
Zinn, Howard. (1997). “Anarchism.” 644-655. In The Zinn Reader: Writings on disobedience and democracy. New York: Seven Stories.

CANARIES IN THE CLOCKWORK

2007-04-04T15:28:00.000-06:00

By earth-ling-gerring

Do you have the time? Or does Time have you? It must if you got your wristwatch on, you do have one right? Compulsory attire is cumulatively tiring. Clocks on our wrists, we compulsively watch our watches. Watching it, watching you, who’s watching who? But the clocks remain, always all the time, in time off and time on. Like an international date line, the timeline is strait as a railroad, to be in time means to be in line. All of the watched watchers marching in line to Time. ‘Get in Line’ the laud speakers scream. Hardly necessary when you’re (c)locked in, day in and day out, in the prison of Progress which is the progress of Prison. Locked in by clocks, cell blocks, city blocks, and market stocks. The Timer calls the shots. He tells the racers when to go and when to stop. We race around, the rats that race for the traces of the faces of meaningful scraps that turned out to be meaningless traps. Lab rats in the Laboratory race. We’re the cattle in the cattle stocks, and end up at the chopping blocks. Chopped from the land, and laid out in blocks. Acres and acres of mass market massacres. The work of the clock is made to degrade you through the use and abuse of (wo)man hours they take away from your life everyday which it counts on as your life counts down, and proceeding along in this way like clockwork. Time is running out for us domesticated mammals especially, and maybe even then for life on this planet Earth. If it dies, what then? Nay I say, why not run out of time altogether, how about now? The time has come to escape this flying machine. Fly, fight, and flee, to freedom! It’s about Time! Have you looked outside of this fascist zeppelin? Do you not see its mead of lead? It’s not even flying at all, but has already started to fall; we’re falling back down to earth. Abandon ship! Sound the call. When the Time come, how about we really punch the clock. Smash it to pieces, to find our peace. For we need the shards for arrowheads, we’ll need them to shoot at the hearts and the heads of the encroaching robot Army. Only then will we humans have time to burn. And burn it we will, with our wills we will act, and may the words on our breath fan the flames. The flames of the Phoenix that will fly down upon the city, and into the clockwork. For we are the canaries in the clockwork, and may we summon the creation/destruction of the Phoenix of chaos to bring this civilization to and end. And in it’s ashes, maybe then; we may sow the seeds of freedom and let them grow wild.

welcome to the new version of Black and Green Bulletin

2007-02-20T12:50:00.000-07:00

i have just expanded this site. so that there is now 4 sections. the main home page is this one followed by the resistance, rewilding, and collapse bulletins in which i will put news related to each of those subjects.

ELF action update

2007-01-21T17:38:00.000-07:00

Escondido, San Diaego, CA: Jan 19th 2007: a multi-million dollar condo was set ablaze yesterday at aproximately 1:35 pm by unknown millitants, cause waht is being called the "largest structure fire in the city's history". damages have been estimated at around $6 million.

"Four buildings, which were under various stages of construction by D.R. Horton of San Diego, burned to the ground at an estimated loss of at least $6.6 million, Reed said.

Firefighters were able to save the fifth building, which was near completion and almost ready to be shown to prospective buyers "

Deep Green Resistence conference

2007-01-21T16:41:00.000-07:00

deep green resistance
confronting industrial culture * April 6-8, 2007 Deerfield, Massachusetts

How do we stop the mass destruction of our planet? We need a world without environmental devastation and social oppression: we need to confront civilization.

Join us for a weekend of exploring long range strategy, direct action, oppression, peak oil, natural living, and the deep questions of how to mend our hearts and sustain our spirits in these hard times. Good fun, great food, and the quiet woods also included.

The Rise of Age of Machine, The Fall Of The Age Of Man!

2006-10-13T18:30:00.001-06:00

the technological system is a network of machines and and the prosses fo their creation and movement. Starting with the transformation of the earths innards into prosses replicators who displace vanrrient human labor with hegemonous machine labor. The displaced labor then has went to the service of the machines, who where to service the dominant class. The machines then becoming a class of their own, a non-human slave class, quickly (historically speaking) displacing the previous non-human slave class; work animals (oxen, horses, etc.). However, this new slave class was very different but became disseminated for labour among the human classes in a similar way. They start as only in the service of the dominant class of humans, but as the class of humans who service them, and the machines to produce machines started to be invented and be disseminated, their number increased and there for the classes which they served also increased. The amount of this slave labour that one had was still a mark of ones place in the class system, in this case replacing animal and/or human slaves with machanical slaves. But, the key difference with this new class of slaves was that firstly they where so efficient at their services they provided, and the variations of the services, they continued to increase in number and variation of function, so that they quickly displaced all other slave classes. Because of this growth, and its subsequent requirements, the largest human peasent class that was formally self-sufficiant and served no one except themselves but where still nonetheless subjects of the higher classes, became increasingly a class at the service of the machine class, and thus lost much of their autonomy. It should be noted that by servicing humans in this way they where also replacing them, thus taking the knowlege and skills required to preform that service away from the human relm and putting it into a new relm in which it became practically irretrievable. It should also be noted that the humans who are being serviced, after being removed from the requirement of performing the labour and knowing the skills on which they depend soon loose these skills and then must have servents. They become dependents, much as a child to its parents; infantile. This fact coupled with the removal of knowlege and skills from the human relm, the dependence becomes practically irreversable and totally universal. As most people should know, the elite consuming classes are more dependant upon the producing classes than vice versa. this is the reason that the elite classes must use force to maintain their privaledge within the class system. this same dynamic exists between the human classes and the machine class, with one very important difference. With humans, being free willed animals who have various allegences, feel emotions, and do not nessisarily work together, it is possible for controlling classes of humans to manipulate their needs, deprive them at times, and force their subserviance. This is, however, not possible with machines. And like other situations where a dominant amd numerically smaller class was not able to exert their force enough to ensure subserviance upon a numaically larger less privaleged class, a shift in class power relations occurs; a revolution, like those that occured in the North American brittish colonies, or in 18th certury France. Thus the machine class came to dominate this civiliztion. The ruling class of this civilization is Not made up of humans, but of Machines. But this being so, why is it not obvious to everyone? Because like the human anthropologist talking to the Jelly Fish in Daniel Quinn's book "Ishmael", the doninant myths and religion of a civilization are not seen or even understood by their most ardent beleivers to be myths and religions. They become invisible. There is a reason why critiques of technology within this civilization
are treated like, well, like blasphemy. It is a very powerful belief too that maintains ingnorence of facts that effect our bodies, minds, social interactions, and eviornment in such a profound way. It must be a powerfull belief to main itself for it is only through the sacrifice of our lives to labour for the machines that this situation continues to persist. Can you not see it? For who is most of our artificial landscape desined to service? It is desined by and for machines. It's needs, production and efficiency, are those that are met by the modern ladscape we are subsumed within. In fact there is entire sections of our artificial landscape that are segregated for manchines only; highways. the train in the station doesn't wait for you, it doesn't care, because its not your needs that it is serving after all, it serves efficiency of production by moving workers who serves the reproduction and maintenence of the technological system. the cold concreate is unforgiving, it is often said. Of course, forgiveness is for humans, not machines. It is Machines who matter, not people.

mass society and the question of voluntary association

2006-10-12T17:52:00.000-06:00

Some anarchists wonder, why against mass society? or more specifically, why is, or is not, mass society compatable with anarchism? Firstly, let's define anarchism as a belief in and/or a society based upon three basic principles. one.) Ditect Action as a primary means of engagement with others. Direct means without and mediation between the subjects involved, that is, not alienated. this is anti-technological in essance, but that is another topic. Action meaning if you want something to happen, you act. You Do It Yourself rather than delagating it to someone else. Two.) Mutual Aid based interdependent exchange; I gift you a 'good' or 'service' or something less material, and you gift in return. cooperation. 3.) Volutary Association with any people, cultural mores, traditions, etc. Basically this means choosing what culture you belong to, if at all. Mass society on the other hand is a very large group of people under a single association. This has been also called the Nation, or ethnicity, which can be but is not nessisarily under a single state. For instance, Lebanon is a state but not a nation and is instead many various nations. Whereas Japan is both a single nation and state (except the Ainu). there is no, nor has their ever been, any example of mass societies where everyone chose to be part of them. I do not think there is any reason why people whould ever choose to be part of of a mass society, although some whould I'm sure choose to, but most would not, but then its would no longer be a mass society then would it? if one wants to keep a mass society a mass society, coersion is inevitable. all mass societies, the American one is a good example, continue to be mass societies by either subsuming and incorporating other societies or destroying them. mass society is synonimous with cultural imperialism. there is amazing diversity within humanity, and it exists percisely to the extent that it resists a mass society, and does not associate with it. Human cultures wish to diversify, if allowed. this is the nature of ecological systems, and we are certainly no exception. Just look at the cultural decentralization and diversification within this mass society following the political rebellion 40 years ago? it was marked by an explosion of countercultures and subcultures, this is what people naturally do. They form volutary groups, or associations, which develop their own cultures, when these groups grow to within a certain range, they start to themselves break up into smaller groups. In fact, I would say that one of the strangths of anarchists in the US is their ressistance to mass society. All this makes sense, of course beause for the vast majority of our time as a species, and even before that, we lived in small groupings. it is part of who we are. This can only be changed through coersion. Therefore, mass society is incompatible with voluntary association, and by extension Anarchy. This means also that it is incompatible with all the things that are only possible through mass society, like industrialism, and complex systems beyond a certain scale. in essance, civilization. So for all you anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communists out there, such models are not anarchist.

million dollar office building under construction burned to the ground

2006-10-11T08:11:00.000-06:00

Elk Grove CA: Oct 10th- Arson is the apparent cause of a fire that has completely destroyed a million dollar office building under construction at a quarter million dollar loss for the investors. A blaze broke out at about 3:30 a.m. at a building site at Franklin Boulevard and Laguna Park Drive, authorities said. The new two-story office building, which was in the framing stage, was heavily damaged. Witnesses said flames were 40 feet high.

sweedish anti-civization action is taken! sabotage causes blackout.

2006-10-10T12:35:00.000-06:00

Malmo, Sweaden: Oct 8th- aparently an act of sabotage has caused a hour long blackout in one of sweadens largest cities, affecting 25,000 recipients of electricity. "That is a very serious matter and the police also see it that way," the Eon (a german energy company) spokesman said.

Civilization is the Vamire God

2006-09-25T09:13:00.002-06:00

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: “two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered vistage lays, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well these passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mockt them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains, round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

“Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817)

Civilization, that demon God of madness, power, and war. He floats ethereal through the mind of man like a smog born of the overzealous industriousness of his hands. In a dark irony he has tried to clear the fog from his eyes only to fill his mind this putrid smog. Stranded within this dense smog of his own creation he knows not where he is, nor remembers who, and feels alone. We all know where civilization lies and where it does not, but we fail to know also where its boundaries lie and what defines them. Though still enmeshed within its confines I have come to see it for what it truly is; a prison. For I have looked between its barred windows to the life that lies outside. Nay, the outside that is itself life, the inside the undying death. Inside of these glimpses, have often looked back over my shoulder, back towards the confines, it is from this vantage point that its boundaries take on form and contour. The walls of its citadels are constructed with the brick and mortar of words and beliefs. Built to the precise blueprint of logic by many hordes of devout monks to its sanctity. Each a specialist in its unceasing construction. Each a specialized cog in this mega-machine. In its phallic towers, as if to penetrate the heavens, the bells of manifest destiny sound. I hear it, despite my loathing, all the time, for it is broadcast from every word. What does it sound like? The civilization, this death cult. It sounds of the drone of power plants and the roar of the highway. And the crunching smashing sound of clear cuts and construction. It’s the sound of guns sirens and jets. It is the shallow backdrop of elevator music, and the cacophony of a million talking heads talking to themselves. It abhors the silence necessary to think, and so, my thoughts are clouded and elude me. I see it, geometry of grids, squares, and boxes inside boxes. It is like a fishing net, thrown upon the earth to catch our lives and take them for its own. Or a mold creeping across the landscape and the meaningfulness of it. I taste it; a copious blandness, that numbs and sends jolts of temporary highs while it sickens me and rots my insides. I am addicted to it, as I often try and fail to tear myself from it. They call it food, but it is not food. It is a fake food that we stuff our faces full of while we continue to starve. Oh how I smell it! What stink! It is the musty smell of rot and of death. It is a hot repulsive smell of tar, oil, exhaust, and plastic. It makes my stomach coil and my head ache.
But more e than anything I feel it. Deeply like a sword plunged through the pit of the soul. It’s that omnipresent fear that staves off total revolt. The rage at the fact that the chains remain. That it remains and nothing changes. The pain! Oh the awful pain. It’s the pain I have endured and the scares that remain. The suffering of others that we all know is going on. The incomprehensible amount of accumulated suffering and pain of all the genocide and extinction of our bloody history. The void. The utter loss, and the becoming numb. But under all this, behind it, is the immense feeling of sorrow. That total sorrow. All this, and for what? Nothing but even more of the same. We, our species, stand here with the blood of all life on earth on our hands. We are all responsible for this, the biggest extinction event in the entire history of earth. It could possible take us to extinction as well, and for what? Yet we continue. We all wish to die, it seems. One can see all this in the eyes of all the humans crowding these monuments to our mass suicide we call “cities.” We are all in pain and to varying degrees insane. I am sure of so little, but I know in the depths of my being what has caused all this. I know it all too well. It is my enemy and it is civilization in its totality and has always been so. It is the rightful enemy of all that truly wishes to live. Why do so many plants and animals resist it, these dear friends of mine derided as ‘weeds’ and ‘pests’? They do this out of necessity, circumstance, and the will to live.

the march of the clocks must be stopped

2006-09-19T15:28:00.000-06:00

How one perceives and experiences the passage of time is the fundamental phenomenon that determines how fast, or slow, ones life goes by, which is intimately connected to whether that time is or is not of quality. With the rise of civilization, that perception has been completely altered. While we can never really know how Paleolithic peoples experienced things, I don’t think that is completely necessary to understanding change wrought to our perception of time by civilization. One need only be able to distinguish between what is natural; that is, what is not the creation of civilization, and what is artificial; that is, what is created by civilization. As I have said before, the actual order of things underneath all of civilizations delusions, is of cycles within cycles within cycles, etc. that is circles, which are anarchies, not hierarchies which are triangles. Our current ideas past and future are a twisted bastardization of these circles which, I believe, was enabled through a steadily expanding degradation of the present moment, that in turn was fundamentally enabled by, and the result of, a apparent widening separation from natural cycles and our dependence on these cycles day to day. But the drastic change from the eternal present of hunter-gatherer perception bound in all the cycles of natural existence (as is my current understanding) to the hegemonized, measured, mechanized, and then subsequently internalized, bought and sold by humans perception of time did not happen overnight, but was a process that expanded right along with the pace of civilizations expansion. While I am sure there is more to this process than what I know and will describe, these are the factors that are most easy to spot and thus subvert. With the adoption of agriculture, the cycles of planting and harvesting of the staple crops come to determine the perception of time among agricultural settled societies. Though this is still a cycle and thus circular, it is disconnected from the natural cycles of the ecology in which they reside and is instead connected to the cycles of a few, most likely non-native, domesticated plants. Thus in many agricultural societies we see measurements of time still based on the natural cycles of the day, the month (origin: moon-th), and the seasons of the year, but the regional differences in ecology being plowed over by the relatively uniform cycles of domestic plants. Thus enter standardization. These cycles in turn became broken up by the expanding of the use of number and measurement. Eventually, this lead to the creation for the ultimate domination of time: The Clock. Make no mistake, this process from the get go was about the quest for the ultimate control over people by the ruling class and/or the ruling religion/ideology. Because by standardizing time, the party who does this takes away from their followers and/or slaves the ability to have their subjective experience of time inform what they do with that time, or even the acknowledgement that that subjective experience exists as the defining factor. This allows the subjugation of those lives to happen on a scale, and with a depth, that was hitherto impossible. The Roman ruler who first imposed Christianity on the empire did so in a large part through the standardization of time through the creation of on of the first instances of the arbitrary blocking of time in the creation of the week. Which itself was stolen earlier Mesopotamian civilization. The first clocks where then erected to facilitate this program (or was it the other way around?) were bells in Christian monasteries that marked the week and the call to church for large masses of people. When the technological complexity of this machine was increased with the invention of the mechanical clock, the first ones where installed in churches. The mechanical clock paved the way for the planned mass standardization of production called “progress” and industrialization. All that follows would not have been possible without the clock. The clock is the foundation of modern industrial civilizations domination over the time that makes up our lives; therefore, I think it should be subverted individually, socially, and totally. The relationship between the subjective nature of ones (animal) experience of time, and that of the hegemonized machine time of clocks and the technological and economic structures that rest upon them are inherently antithetical. This is a war that takes a toll on all of us. For it is the fault of the clock and our obedience to it that we stress over being late to someplace or the creation of these week based schedules in the first place! Problems of having to “save time” or be able to “buy enough time” is at base a problem of time being scientifically measured and broken down into pieces, which are then bought and sold as units of economic value. Liberate your perception of time, for it is nothing more than our very lives that are being broken down and sold. This war is a front in the war that is all wars; the Primal War. So one is not only able to choose which side one is on the individual level, but can also choose to go on the attack on the social level. Remember Y2K? How I wish it had been for real! But could it be artificially created? Someday the clocks will stop…

Log-off the (dis)connected life. Smash the Internet!

2006-09-12T12:37:00.001-06:00

What does a totalitarian culture look like? Bland, homogenous. But I think it is most of all experienced as a silence. Mass culture’s silent spring, the invisibility of the voices and manifestations of any storyline that does not fit into the plot of The Mass Culture. It is a absence that gnaws at the pit of the soul. The modern Nation-State’s mechanism for keeping “unity,” for keeping the mass a mass is through the propagation and maintenance of a Mass Culture. How do I know this? I am immersed in such a culture everyday (that is except the ones during which I’ve retreated to the forest) against my will. This mass culture, this American (which is apparently very much an –ism) culture, is an especially totalitarian one. It is a condition ruled by fear; a dictatorship of a single social ideal. “you’ve got to succeed”, own a home, a car, keep up to date, etc. it is the same message that has been shoved down so many throats since after world war 2, the difference being they’ve refined the message and gotten better at getting it into your head without being too obvious. “the fascists didn’t loose world war 2 they just switched sides.” A dictatorship enforced by the might of the technologies of mass media and their helmsmen. All in the service of a never named aloud social engineering program, a distinctly American fascism. You of course already knew this, and have heard it before, but do you, or we, really know it? It is not a new process but has gone into overdrive recently as the clock winds down. For example: have you noticed that all the media, even now on the web too to some extent, cover the same stories whose overall message is the same, as if representing a orchestrated play. Have you noticed how the government is so very particular about when certain events and information are to start and end, and of when information is released? Modern society is the product of a conscious effort for more than 100 years, and continues to be so. This country pioneered this, and continues to do so. Have you noticed that as this countries fascist developments become more and more egregious the broadcasting of this fact has become more and more meek. I think many of us understand this intellectually but have yet to come to terms with its reality. The internet will soon not be a place for communication of any dissenting opinions, especially anti-civilization ones. I think it is high time we stop using it as our primary way of communicating with each other and organizing things. If we put all our creative and expressive energy into the internet system than we become reliant upon it and thus if it goes down so do we. Not to mention that the internet allows a unprecedented amount of power to those in control to monitor, track, and be in control of what we and other rebels are doing and saying. How many times must it be said that technology is not neutral? That the medium IS the message!? So without further ado, let us make zines not websites, support GA/AP magazines in their print form not their online one. Post our messages on the walls of buildings rather than on message boards. Smash the internet! Life is elsewhere!!

PS: B&G Bulletin also makes zines, if you want some just e-mail at primalwarnow@riseup.net

Stinging Nettles; easy, tasty, and healthy

2006-09-08T15:12:00.000-06:00

leaves alternate, ridged. most notably, they sting you. although all species of nettle are edible, and/or medicinal.
WHERE? they grow throughout North America, in wet and shaded soil.
USE: they are a yummy spinnich green and make a tasty tea too. this is convienient because you just boil them and you get both a spinnich and a tea out of it. diaretic, astringent. good for lung congestion apparently, my book tells me at least. its iron rich! and it is also calming. but that it relly tastes pleasing is all it took for me to highly reccomend this plant.

Assasinating power at the point of production!

2006-09-07T07:50:00.000-06:00

get the idea?

LEBANON, OR. - August 18th: "Somebody had used firearms to shoot out insulators on a Bonneville Power Administration transmission line, the BPA said from Portland." "The vandalism to BPA’s Green Peter-Lebanon 115-kilovolt line occurred in a densely wooded area approximately 11 miles east of Lebanon. The line faulted at 6:22 p.m., and power to the Lebanon substation was restored at 10:28 p.m. Spokeswoman Mary Zimmerman of Consumers Power said the outage affected about 5,000 of the company’s 20,000 customers, most of whom are in Linn and Benton County. She said she received outage reports from Lebanon and Sweet Home and a few customers in Scio."

a personal anarcho-primitivism A MANIFESTO

2006-09-07T07:27:00.001-06:00

this is a manifesto i wrote which i am making into a zine with colages and stuff but am reprinting here, if you want a copy of it email me at primalwarnow@riseup.net

I am an animal, as is every humyn being. I Breath in, and breath out. A child is born and elder dies. The sun rises in the east, and the day is thus born, and the night dies. The sun sets into the west, and night is born, and the day dies. So too the seasons come and go, for this is the earth breathing in; spring into summer, and the breathing out; autumn into winter. These patterns are all the same pattern, and that pattern is inherent to all existence, even the universe itself (read the big bang theory/entropy). It is the circle completed; it connects everything into its true wholeness. For each of these circles of life and death, contains within itself many smaller such circles, and also is itself a smaller circle within a larger one. The words ‘smaller’ and ‘larger’ however are confusing as to the interrelationship that they represent. This relationship is not synonymous with less/more, worse/better. For every scale (small/large) continues in their prospective directions indefinitely, and so ones understanding of what they are is simply a reflection of where on this scale they are. And to refer to this relation as on of direction I think is most accurate, for it is most interrelated to time. All of this is me, and I am it. I breathe in, and then out. This action is itself a complete circle of a lifetime, birth and death. Contained within this action is the birth and subsequent death of innumerable single celled and microscopic organisms; a lifetime of ups and downs, through adolescence, mating and old age. The breathing in; a bringing together of dead matter to form new and unique living matter, the animation of matter with the breath of energy. The taking of others life to enable yours. The breathing out; the breaking apart of living matter to form dead matter, the draining of energy from matter. The giving of ones life to enable others. A giving and taking of life and death, it comes and goes. These are the bonds formed of cooperation and Mutual Aid that hold the community of life together in a state of Anarchy. This is the ecology and cannot be ignored. It is how the cells of my body stay together and continue to function. So it is with the insects that buzz about my head and the plants and animals that I eat, and so too with the earth itself and the elements that make up its components. And so on into the atom and out into the universe, this is what holds everything together, it is everything.
This is not an abstract diatribe of metaphysics, nor is this pattern and it’s interconnections an abstract concept to be chewed on by the intellect then spit out upon the ground. But it is who you are, and will become and it is the key to the health of our planet. One must come to terms with it, for it is nothing more than the inevitability of death, and too the persistence of birth. But it is not enough to simply come to terms with it, to know that in the mirror there is a face and it is mine. But it must be drunk like water, like the ocean to swim and bathe in, and to drown. It is to be embraced, lived, and loved. There is no other pattern than this. Understanding this, loving it and considering it sacred, is the key to the fabled happiness that all the human cultures of the world so often seek, but never find. This understanding is not the sole providence of humyns either. In fact, it is humans that have the sole providence of not understanding this. All other life forms that are not under the iron hand of the civilized humans touch understand this intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, instinctively, and they live it fully. It is us that do not. But are we not also part of this pattern, why are we alone in this condition? The most basic myth of civilization proclaims this condition as our gift. But this is most egregious lie, for it is no gift, but a curse. However it is not curse put onto us by some controlling “god” that we cannot escape. It is a curse we brought upon ourselves, that we can reject at any time. We can indeed have our paradise, but not in heaven, right here, right now, on Earth.

It is not that humans haven’t or can’t understand this and live within the paradise of abundance that all other creatures do, but that civilized humans, meaning they are both domesticated and the domesticator, and that they are both the inhabitants of and builders of civilization, don’t. These poor creatures have not always been so miserable (in fact, for 99.9% of the history of our species we lived in peaceful state of anarchy), nor will they (which is us) forever be. However, we are right now miserable, sick, weak, psychotic, and suicidal, and seeming hell bent on taking all the biota of earth with it towards extinction. This is where we find ourselves at the present moment, which is the only moment that has ever or will ever exist. All this craziness that our species is enmeshed in though, originates in, and is fundamentally based upon, single precept: that humans are the smartest, most capable, most unique, noblest creatures to on this planet to have ever existed and that we are therefore above, and the rulers of, all other life and thus earth itself. And conversely that all other life forms are therefore bellow us, inherently incapable of our amazing mental and physical feats, that they are stupid, unconscious machines. BULLSHIT. You say insects and plants do not think, oh no! and that other animals little or not at all. We, the Humans, and us alone posses the awesome power of abstract(ed) thought, we alone can search the universe in our quest for understanding. What total folly, the fools. You search and you search, but what for really? Is it that you have lost something? Up there at the top of the food chain, so high it is! Be careful, because you can (will) fall. Way up there all by yourself, are you feeling a little lonely? Ever wonder why the belief in the existence of space aliens is so prevailing and prevalent in the most ‘advanced’ of cultures? The cry of these believers that is so oft repeated sums up their feeling so succinctly “but there must be other intelligent life out there somewhere” maybe, but there is definitely right here on earth. With your supposed ‘gift’ of disconnected thought you seek to connect things. You point to as proof of your superiority that since other creatures are not on par with your ‘intelligence’ because they are not enmeshed in the never ending searching for understanding, as you do? They are not intelligent, you go on to cite as further proof, because they do not use their understandings for purposes of control of everything about them, like you do? What arrogance! Maybe they are not constantly searching for understanding because they already have it. As it is simply a recognition of what is inherent in all life, and the universe. And that if they were in fact intelligent, like us, they would of tried to take control of their environment, like us, which inevitably causes of the climate and ecology which gives us life in the first place? Maybe other life forms don’t do this because it is stupid, is ultimately destructive, and benefits no one.
We used to understand all of this, and a very few of us still do, but we have succumbed to a great forgetting. So then the big question, the question that humanity must answer, is Why? The cause of this Great Forgetting is the same as the processes of its expansion, which is the same as its ultimate result; which is the same cancerous sameness. Existence for us was once a beautiful painting, it is the iron surgical knife that tears that painting to pieces. We are the pieces, each just a color that used to be a painting but now just pieces, each in our own box, a cage, a cell. All these boxes stacked nice and neat in columns and rows, towers and pyramids. These are the fruit of Progress. It is the counter and the clock. The farms and the factories. The Machines and the work. The Worker and the Soldier. The weapons and the towers. It is the Cities and the Altars. The masses and the Kings. The Prisons and the guards. The Gods and the Priests. The Truth and The Law. It is The Man. It is The Plan. It is The Man with The Plan. Most of all, it is The War, the first war, the last, and the next. It is the war that is all wars. It is the war of self against other, Us against Them. Order against Chaos. Tame against wild. Man against nature. Man against animal. Man against woman. Man against child. Man against man. The Truth against lies. Religion against sacrilege. King against commoner. Upper class against lower class. Capital against community. Law against crime. Government against autonomy. Hegemony against diversity. Forward against backward. It is the omnipresence of war. It is all the time, everywhere. It is the quest for, the acquisition of, and the exercise of control and power. It is control and power themselves. It is civilization in its totality. It is the aggressor in the war that is all wars; The Primal War. But there is another side to this war, that which resists, and fights back. And like all wars, of the two sides, only one will win, but which?

The Primal War is raging, now more than ever. The time has come to choose sides, for there is no neutral ground. It is high time we recognize this, and arm ourselves accordingly. Now is the time, and this is the Endgame. The battles we fight today are the decisive ones, the ones that will decide the ultimate outcome, and the ones that truly matter. We, the writers, have chosen our side. Against the Great Forgetting; against Civilization, for we are the Remembering. We are the perpetual other, the barbarians at the gates. We are ancient and eternal, and we have just arrived. We are the weeds that keep coming back and the ones that resist the pesticides. We are the cracks in the monuments and cities. We are the rabbits that steal your carrots, and the raccoons that eat your garbage. We are the criminals who steal from the stores and the people rioting in the streets. We are the dogs, cats, cows, and pigs who escape and become feral. We are the children who pull the fire alarm, disrupt the class, and vandalize. We are the antibiotic resistant bacteria, germs, and viruses that grow stronger by the day. We are the women who kill the men who try and rape them. We are the black youth who shoot police officers. We are the storms that tear apart cities. We are the trees whose roots crack the sidewalk. We are eco-warriors who burn down developments and the animal liberationists who free animals from factory farms. We are suicide bombers. We killed McKinley, Lincoln, the Russian Czar, JFK, and every authority who was ever assassinated. We are outlaws and outsiders. We are the wild and free, who refuse to be tamed. We are all the animals, plants, and insects in the forest, in your yard, in your house, and we’re buzzing in your ear. We come from without and we come from within. We are armed and we are dangerous. For we are everywhere and we fight for nothing less that survival. We will not stop until civilization destroyed and gone. Forever.

2006-09-07T07:12:00.000-06:00

i'm back! i will hopefully be posting much much more frequently. here is an essay my friend sent to me, i know the feeling, but the state does indeed try to make it impossible as free range organic human blog has pointed out

To be the change we want to see in the world, we are putting effort
towards living life as we see fit. We, as earth, partake in daily
revolution …dramatic, bold, life-changing and cyclical paths around the
sun and we seek a tangible revolution around and in relationship. As we
examine our relationships with each other, other humans, all other
members of the land community and begin to shed the armor of
civilization and feel, again, the actual sensation of being a part and
not apart, we rejoice.

How do we find peace in this world that seems so filled with domination,
fear, dependence and violence? We have learned that peace is not to be
found snug in the confines of our personal fences, in the pages of
magazine, from the flashing lights of the living room box nor in an
empty Coke can, a bottle of Allen’s Coffee Brandy, the last cigarette in
the pack, fast food, the bright lights of the supermarket or the green
fields of a local farm. We have learned to look through, outside of, and
around the edges of ‘this world’. We have seen civilization and
recognize, once and for all, that we are separate from it. Humanity does
not equal civilization. Civilization is our ultimate oppressor and from
within it peace is war and war is peaceful. Woman identified people
become property and dehumanized, demonized and eternally associated with
wildness. The whole of the earth is split, as we are rent from it, and
the left side of the human mind dominates landscapes, ecosystems and
spreads its creations far and wide until we impact it enough that even
we can no longer ignore it. Once this sinks in, this full, tingling
realization that civilization itself is anti-life, one can never be the
same.

As we rewild and return, relearn, unlearn and remember, we heal. We
heal an ancient and forever now relationship. Our sense of self
broadens as we realize we are not our cars, nor the contents of our bank
accounts, we are not our jobs, nor our clothes. And our sense of self
deepens as we realize we are made of wildness. Our hearts are wild; our
bones are wild, self-determining, self-willed, untamed and free. We can
not truly separate ourselves from the ancientness of every atom or the
beat of the drum in our very chests. Mountains and rivers have shaped us
as savannas have too. It is now harder to see where all becomes I and I
becomes all. And thus, we realize we can break ourselves from this
ultimate addiction to civilization and once again, trust earth and trust
ourselves. Letting go of false security and finding true security.
Examining our true human needs and dropping all the ‘but don’t we’
needs. We find peace in community; those direct, buzzing, wild face to
face experiences of a group of others, human and otherwise.
To free ourselves, we see that choosing to move away from the entwined
systems of domination known as domestication is key. Domesticating
others can never be done if we don’t domesticate ourselves. The first
thing colonizers colonize is their own peoples minds. As RedWolfReturns
states “How you get what you need is how you control others and it is
also how you are controlled. Unless this fact is faced and owned,
everything else is self deception.” It becomes possible to even imagine
living without domesticating others, without exploitation, without
control when we see what it does to us, when we see the true cost.
Slaves to wages, gender roles, schools, and hierarchies we can not
imagine life outside of the illusions of success and progress. Sold a
bill of goods that technology and the new priesthood of science will
save us now or in the end. We blindly accept this because we fail to
imagine since our imaginations, which are rooted in the forever wild
-here and now, are stolen from us moment by moment.

Anesthetized by toys, entertainment, drugs and therapy, we spend our
money receiving ultimate lifetime guarantees that we won’t see through
the lie. One fundamental part of the lie is property as freedom. Our
lives are consumed in the service of projects that are not our own in
order to earn money. Since property is defined as a thing and we need
money to purchase it, subsequently freedom lies in things that can be
bought and increases with their accumulation. So, in the lie, we are
free to choose to starve or sell the time of our lives to the highest
bidder. And since we can not move freely, responsible for our own
survival and thriving lives, due to property, we are all slaves in a
system of enclosures. Property creates divisions. It is a social
relationship between things and people and is an institution that could
not exist without the force of the state. This institution makes us work
and pay to reproduce it. We believe, as Wolfi Landstreicher does, that
“All property is ultimately state property since it exists only by
permission and under the protection of the state.” This lie keeps us
from any relationship that is entirely outside of this system of
property or the state. We long for unmediated collaborations,
experiences and connections with others and this includes land.

We seek others, ones…like us… who can never be the same again, to rewild
with, creating community and struggling together to reveal the depth of
our addictions and oppression. And healing from the deepest wounds, laid
bare when we wrench the penetrating claws of civilization from our very
being. In solidarity, with our burning eyes, tearing like from pepper
spray, but truly from opening them for the first time. We seek to
rebuild the inherent trust in ourselves and earth. We seek others who
have armed their desires and are willing to take back their lives moment
by moment.

As freely associating individuals we expect to grow to a size of 35-50
people and not much larger since the potential for direct relationship
will decrease with the abstraction of greater numbers. Self-empowerment
will be the norm rather than the exception. We will have time to share
the wisdom found throughout the real world as we forage and hunt within
an ancient/new relationship, a gifting relationship. Gender roles will
be abandoned as we realize our full potential as whole human beings
forever immersed in all that has recently been separated as feminine and
masculine and judged. Our internalized judge and jury will be banished
as our hearts grow, fed by passionate connections. We will find
compassion for ourselves. Rewilding and healing are two words with
direct relationship. The amazing healing power of our natural bodies
being fed by natural diets and relationships will again become the
central focus of health. No longer will disempowering institutions of
medicine keep us from taking direct responsibility. There will no longer
be experts to rely on. There will be little, if any, distinction
between healer and patient. Our direct, unmediated relationship with
plant allies will be part of our healing.

The coming world changes can paralyze us with fear and despair, but, as
someone has said, the antidote for despair is action. The life of our
desires just so happens to provide us with the adaptability to survive.
Since no intertwined multi-layered human created and controlled systems
of extraction, production, consumption, exploitation and domination are
necessary to meet our needs, technology can be replaced by tools. Tools
are created and maintained by an individual or a small group of
individuals with materials found at hand, used and then dropped out of
hand to return fully to the totality of creation.
As we remember what it is exactly to be human, one among many, never
again will we romanticize the misanthropy of civilization and we will
not forget that it is red in tooth and claw and that within it our lives
are nasty, brutish and short.

The vision for this community both excites me and scares me. I am
excited because if this vision comes to fruition I will have been a part
of something big, something life changing, Earth-changing and
relationship changing. I know that in this experience I will “come
home,” that scattered pieces of me will collect themselves, reconnect,
and I will feel completely whole again. I know that I have been missing
my tribe for so long-lifetimes long and my soul has mourned for its loss
of connection to the whole, as my mind has lived the life I have been
told is “normal.” This “normal” life never fulfilled me, not even for a
moment, there has always been something missing.
I filled this void with the same things my family did, with food,
school, clothes, toys, gifts, television, and with the hopes of
financial freedom so that I can lead a “decent” life. It’s all an
illusion though. I was taught to value things and have dreams that
didn’t contribute to a life of communion with the Earth that I am made
up of. I was taught that technology was the way. I was told not to get
dirty. Eventually as I got older I just wanted to stay inside and watch
life happen on TV, even though it only portrayed an illusion of life, I
didn’t question much. I was a good slave, a servant, and a consumer for
the bill of goods the advertisers sold me. I allowed them to take away
my dignity and I believed their lies that told me that I am not good
enough just the way I am. I sold myself, no questions asked. My
lifestyle also helped to sell out the Earth.
I have taken more than I have given to the Earth. I know this now but
I used to be asleep. It was easier to be asleep, or to think I was the
truth is that I was in denial of my participation on this Earth. I was
aware of changes occurring in the environment but I wasn’t honestly
looking at how I contributed to them. I thought it was someone else’s
problem but now I realize how my negligence has helped to create massive
dis-ease to this planet, and my soul.
Now I see the Earth, my home, my creator, crumbling before my eyes. I
realize that I’ve brought two children into the world and that we may
all be suffering due to low oxygen, polluted water, lack of food and
competing with others for these needs to be met someday. I cannot
change what has been done but I can make better choices now. It isn’t
easy though because I am sick. I have been bitten and partially
devoured by civilization. I have been tainted and I’ve passed my
addictions down to my children. I feel scared to face the truth, to
change because the claws of civilization are so deep in my flesh that it
hurts to move.
Every moment that I look away from the materialistic world that tells me
I am not good enough unless I buy their products, I get a little
stronger. The addictions are so powerful though that thinking of giving
them all up and living with the contents of my backpack, the clothes and
shoes on my body and the knowledge of how to make the things I need to
survive scares me so much.
I will be giving up the illusion that I had a position of value in
society, I will become one who is truly different. Instead of looking
clean in decent clothing with my hair and face well kept, I will come to
town in buckskin clothing that I made myself, and my valuables for trade
in my handmade birchbark basket. I will smell like an animal because I
won’t smell like perfume or deodorant, I will smell like me. My smell,
my hairy legs and armpits and my buckskins will divide me from the
onlookers but I will feel unified with my natural world. As the
onlookers talk of me on their cell phones and get into their plastic and
metal cars I will walk away to go tell my friends, my tribe, in person
what I saw that day. As those same onlookers go to the grocery store to
purchase their products wrapped in plastic and cardboard made in who
knows where and drink their Pepsi’s I will re-enter the woods. I will
stop along my walk home to occasionally eat wild edibles and drink my
lovely water. As they go home to cook their supper on their electric
stoves, wash their dishes with instant hot water, turn on their lights,
and settle down for their evening shows I will cook wild caught or
roadkill meat, and dumpstered veggies over the fire and clean up with
water we heated in a clay pot we made. Then I will relax into the
evening as the sky turns gently from light to dark and feel the rapture
of the firelight in front of me. I will feel joy with my tribe near me
as we tell tales and make music, real, live music. I will have been a
part of my world and not just a spectator oblivious to the resources I
could have used without a care.
This is the life I want to live. Am I there yet? No. How long until I
get there? I don’t know. I know that I feel sick at my daily
participation in the ills of this Earth and yet I feel some fear at
changing myself. I have always had a position of acceptance in my
society because I have followed the normal expectations and I feel
nervous to step into new territory even though I believe it is the way
for me. I face rejection from my family, my friends, my children,
society and on the other hand I face a freedom that I know will feel so
sweet. I will not ignore the delicious consequences of a life lived in
community. Besides, there are others like me who are leading very
different lives. I will be creating a new family. I will be helping to
create a community with shared values and the intention to support each
other while also supporting the Earth, our mother, our life force, us,
me. I will have come home.

New Orleans, EROEI, and collapse

2006-03-16T12:33:00.000-07:00

I have just spent some time in NOLA, and it got me thinking about how this plays into, and contributes to, the excelerating collapse, in this case having to do with climate change (or to put it in a different way; the elemetals attack on civilization), civilized human reactions to it, and how that relates to creating primitive anarchies. One of the first aspects of there that i noticed was the debris and its abrupt disruption of the normality and its consiquencial revealing of the sick underbelly of this culture. in all the trees, on the roads, everywhere was/is piles of plastic crap of all the floresent collors of the rainbow. This brightly collored meaninglessness in matrial form contrasted greatly with the drab brown and greys of the leafless trees and sprawling skyon that first day of my arrival. It looks earily like a plane crash here, which is unspurising because it is a jetplane as it is all products of civilization. "but civilization, like a jetliner, this freak phoenix incapable of rising from its own ashes, also collapses across the earth like a million bursting wasps, flames spreading across the runway in tentacles of gasoline, samsonite, and charred flesh. and allways the absurd rubbish, Death's confetti, the fragments left to mock us lying allong the weary trajectory of the dying bird- the dolls head, the shoes, eyeglasses, a beltbuckle". Later I talked to many residents who where there durring the storm and/or returned shortly after, and this aspect that i had observed was not lost on them, much the opposite in fact. The results of this are a sizemic paradigm shift against civilization that is spreading. How so? first, when one looks at this two thing become clear; we (this culture) have too much useless stuff, and that civilization is just so much concreate, metal, wood, plastic, and a percarious belief system. it is not forever. For some of the people i talked to, their experience exposed to them the nature of technology, progress, and their state of utter dependence. This is made clear to thinking people in any severe disruption of the techo-structure. another aspect that became clear was how different groupings of people with this society reacted. On the one hand you have the forces of the State and the elite's corporate interests to which they serve putting massive amounts of resorces into rebuilding the places with the highest profit potecial very quickly, like the oil & gas infrastructure and gambling meccas in places like Biloxi, and putting absolutely no resorces into rebuilding the most maginalized areas like the 9th ward of NOLA, and other black communities. What is interesting here is not that they favored the rich white areas over the poor black areas ( that goes without saying as it is part of the very nature of this system), but that they chose at all. remember, it is in the states interest to maintain the normality everywhere, as a rupture in it anywhere is a threat to its existance everywhere. No wonder there was and still is marial law there, they are valurable. So why was some collapse allowed? because it is no longer possible to fully fuel growth and maintenence simultaniously as the EROEI (Energy Returned On Energy Invested) has turned negative; so some parts must be priorited and others must be given up on. Hence Peak Oil in the world sense is fully underway in Africa, South America, and parts of Asia; first. I also noticed the over-socialized reaction of leftists and how it was mainly negative in that it was directed at upholding the normallity. Now i am not saying that helping the people worst affected by this is a bad thing, but that the main activity was rebuilding things to their perious state. This is thought of as sysnonimous with helping the marginalized groups most effected. But is it really? It seems obvious that that is simply staving off collapse and maintaining the status quo which by extension means keeping marginalized groups marginalized. They are just doing the work the state couldn't, no wonder the State is helping fund the "radical" groups doing said work like the Common Ground Collective, and the rainbow family kitchen (does not label itself as radical however), not to mention that this funding gives them control of these groups. Take note: the collapse of civilization has officially entered the margins of the center, how much longer until it enters the center of the center? does it matter?

Plant Of The Day: CATTAILS- a maltiuse food staple

2006-03-09T10:06:00.000-07:00

Cattails have been, and can be, the staple on ones diet and beyond. They grow in virtually all parts of North America, are extremely nutricious and delicious, and have food uses in all seasons. but their uses extenbd to various building uses and medical ones too. durring the spring time, the new shoots below a foot in hieght can be cooked up like asperigus or cut up like green onions and used that way. durring the summer, the seed heads that are green can be roasted/boiled similar to corn. haven't tryed this one though. The mature leaves can be used to weave baskets and a wide veriety of other items. Also, apparently it can be soaked in an oil excellerant and used as a torch. In the fall, the fluffy seed pod can be used to stuff pillows and similar uses in the way cotton is used. From late fall to early spring the lower part of the stalk and the root can be used as a starchy root veggie or dried and ground into a flower. a good reference is the peterson's field guide and i found some info on the net here and here.

Increasing attacks on construction sites in Florida county

2006-03-09T08:08:00.000-07:00

Clay County, FL: MARCH 6th- Flemming Island naiborhood was attcked with grafitti over the weekend. officials say that vandalism and theft are more and more common at construction sites in the county. Apparently though, theft is more common than vandalism. this is a positive move that i think very much slows the expansion and development of the pysical aspects of civilization down because as more energy must be expended in maintaining the infrastructure that is already in place (highways, New Orleans, Etc.) the amount of energy available for expansion projects becomes less. so by increasing the amount of energy that they must use to expand slows them down which the sorce article for this bit of news points out. lets slow it down to a halt.

Arkensas eclectricity substation sabotaged

2006-02-09T16:26:00.000-07:00

Beton, AK: FEBUARY 9th- FEC Sardis electrical substation was vandalized on monday night, causing a 45 minute blackout for 3,500 customers. a company spokesperson said that unknown people cut and stole expensive copper wiring that controlled voltage levels. estamates of the damage range in the thousands of dollars.

ELF burns down spawl development

2006-01-19T07:26:00.000-07:00

Camano Island, WA: JANUARY 19th- Authorities suspect that the Earth Liberation Front was responible for an arson fire tuesday night that burned down a nearly completed 9,600 square foot house causing $3 million in damages. investigators would only say that "someone spray painted a threatening message on a pink bedsheet and draped it across the front gate."

NOTE: updates to be more sporadic

2006-01-17T15:26:00.000-07:00

i will be updating this site more sporadically because of computer access issues (don't have one, so i do it where i can)

orissa Tribes Demand alnd back, riot.

2006-01-12T09:24:00.000-07:00

Rourkela,JANUARY 10th: Armed tribals took to the streets of this steel city, setting trucks and dumpers on fire. they demands the return of stolen land that the steel company took from them 50 years ago. Carrying bows, arrows, and axes, tribals fanned out across the city in the early hours of the morning setting may cars on fire and stopping traffic.

TECHNO-LOGIC-KILL: a missive against mass technics

2006-01-08T13:07:00.000-07:00

The ever expanding social aprication of mass technics has had profound influence in the way society has changed over time. In fact, it could be argued that it is the major factor in how the social landscape changes. In the real world, or the natural world, time is not linear, but moves in cycles. Dawn brings day turns to duskand brings night, and repeat. This was a defining part of what shaped how we lived and saw the world. With the introduction of electric light, this changed dramatically. This prosses, whose logical conclusion is efficively to abolish the night, to abolish darkness, changed our sleep patterns, the role of the night in our way of interacting with the world, and it expanded the relm of control by the State. Every night we go to sleep, and wake up anywhere from 4~8 hours latter. We are accustomed to this. But the difference lies in that we go to sleep is totally disconnected from the natural cycles of day/night because the electric light has artificially extended the day for as long as it is on. Before the mass imposition of electricity in Europe and the United States (I've only read about these place in reguards to this issue), peaples sleep patterns were radically, different. There was two seperate 'sleeps', one starting shortly after sundown and ending shortly before midnight, and another a few hours latter until sunup. It only took a few years after mass electrification for this to be dramaticall altered. Prior to this it was common there to record ones dreams and reflect, and have time for relaxation inbetween sleeps, then, gone. Slowly but surely, we are ripped from the natural world and shuved into this atrificial world we have created. And I ask, how could we create such a world so alien to our needs?
With each new technological advance, another skill is lost, another thing that we were able to do for ourselves is forgotten as one stops doing it regularly, then they don't teach it to their children and another generation knows how to do one less thing. Another factory is built, another commercial made to sell the latest automation upgrade, another life spent in misery working to death to make the newest automation. The slow prosses towards the total biological atrophy of humans continues until our extiction as capable biological animals. Whose in control; the cripples, or the weelchairs and everything that is required to make them? We find ourselves in an enviornment alien to human needs, seemingly not needing us. Wake up in the apartment, a small white box entirely simmilar to the others in the building, itself a giant box. Don't need to use the stairs, so down the elevator, standing together with complete strangers, an akward silence. Out the door and into the street. A flood of strangers in uniforms flow past, your presence doesn't affect them. Wait, stop! a flashing electric light orders. Cars wizz down the street. Must stay on the sidewalk, in the street lies the real threat of death, the streets is allways saying. And on your other side, lights, messeges, screaming "look!" "new stuff!" "more", "look!!". Just gotta keep walking. Need to catch the train, can't walk there, or don't want to? No time anyways. wait! the train leaves without you, wouldn't wait for you anyways. It doesn't care, doesn't even know you, it can't because it's one of the new ones thats automated no people, just machines. Every day, same thing. Day in, day out. A life sacrificed on the alter of technological civilization. but not released to death, condemed to an existance not living but alive; undead. Where are you walking to anyways? extinction.

ALF free inprisioned Boars in England

2006-01-06T11:35:00.000-07:00

Devon, UK: JANUARY 4th- The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) took responsibility for reintroducing wild boars into England after a 300 year absence. ALF cut the fenceing around the wild boar pen at DeDame's Woodland Wild Boar Farm, releasing 100 animals. 41 rather young boars we recaptured, but despite hunters best efforts the majority remain free.

DIY skill of the day: water, water, water

2006-01-06T08:05:00.000-07:00

When one looks at the basics of life, on the top of that list is in most cases water. this is basic. without it we die, rather straight forward. Another basic place to start is that civilization uses massive amounts of fresh water for everything from watering lawns, to manufacturing computers. Since civilizations appitite for water keeps growing, we are now entering into a water scarcity senario which could very likely be an agent in collapse in a similar manner as other peaking resorces. How we get food and what that food consists of is the defining factor in what human social organization looks like (1). In a simmilar way, how and where we get fresh water tends to define where we live and in which areas we mirgate threw. Most people today only in effect know to get water fom a pipe, or at least in the end only trust water from a pipe, but in reality this is just a complex, machanistic, and midiated way of doing the same thing as is done in primitive ways.
Where?: The most ideal is a spring. Follow a stream to its highest evelation sorce and there will be a spring. You can judge the relative cleaness of it by looking at the snad and sediments it has left on the floor of the stream at its sorce. If your real lucky there is a clean lake or pond around. Another method is if you follow the land it its lowest point, you will probably find some sort of body of water. Walk at least 50 feet away, the lowver the gradient of elevation the better, and dig a hole. This should fill with water. If it looks to murkey, scoop out whats there and let it fill again. This is using the soil to filter your water. You can do this by the edge of the ocean too, same rules apply. If you are in a more civilized enviornment, stealing water from the outside fausetts of houses and buisnesses is easy. In the desert in a survival situation water can be found in many cactai, this is however not the most enjoyable, or consistant, way to get water on a regular basis. Also, raw fish is a good sorce of both food and water. Note: much of our world is now filled with industrial toxins, bear this in mind.
How?: Once you've fond your water and it is not nessisarily good to drink , or you just want to be sure, then the next surest thing is to filter it. To construct a filter first get a hollow tube (a log or whatever you can get) and pack well into the middle of it charcoal (NOT ash), followed by a layer of sand, then a layer of leaves , small rocks , or other such things that will hold the sand in and will provide some minor filtration. Then add a rock or something else to hold it all together. Do this until it is clear. A solar still is easily contructed by digging a hoel in the ground, streaching a tarp over it that is well sealed at the edges. Then place a small rock in the middle on the top and have a collection container on the bottom . This will get you some fresh water, but this is more of a survival thing and probably not the best for everyday use. Then there is boiling it, allways surefire.

those still stuck in the constructed image of reality dished out to you, its time to Wake Up!

2006-01-05T12:28:00.000-07:00

Its time for us, those fighting against the current order in all our stripes, to realize that the situation we face is not just going to change, but it already has. While i am sure many already know this, the question is in what way do you know it, and how do we incorporate the understanding of this new context into our day to day activities. How do we survive, thrive, and keep on fighting. so what is the new context i am reffering to exactly? that across the western world; across Europe and North America, and most definately, in The US, overt Fascism is becoming the Mode Operendi of the State. Of course, this is not new. It has been growing for many years now, slowly and behind the curtain. however, at least in the United States where i have a front row seat, it has now reached the tipping point where the image of the normality, of supposed "democracy" and "freedom" that is forcibly plastered on the surface of this modern hell, has ripped open as the fascism underneith it has now grown to big to hide. Bush has now stated, and acted upon, that he not only can bypass any law, but that he is the law. "the basic civics lession that there is three co-equel branches of government that provide checks and balances on each other is being fundamentally rejected [by this regime]" and "...congress is impotent" the current news is saying (there has never been a real "democracy" or any such rubbish but this indicates a move to overt fascism). A new law passed in Ohio will allow police to detain anyone in any public space without being charged with anything. Revised version of the Patriot Act establises Secret Police. All public transpotation systems will now have armed gustapo patrolling them all the time. Video cameras monitoring your every move are now ubiqutous. New cars are being made with GPS tracking devices built in. All communications are being monitored. The federal government says they can and should detain anyone anytime without charging them with a crime. It has been common knowlege for some time here in the US that Television, newspaper, and radio media has been bought and paid for, i.e. no free press here. This too however is not new, but what is new is the growth of directly connected Government propaganda being sold as news. the outlets of speach have been falling one by one as we, here on the internet, become the only place where speech exists. It seems that their strategy here is to allow this "free speach" but to isolate this until it is the only place where it exists, so that we would be too busy talking to each other to notice as they pop off free spaces one by one, until we are isolated. I AM NOT trying to give the usual conspiracy theory-ist crap fear mongering message of "be afraid, there is no escape!" because that achieves nothing and is just plain wrong. having said that, this government is fascist, so lets start treating it as such. there is no democracy, you get arrested there will be no fair trial, for it is just a play. They are mademen in a corner, for they know that civilization is coming to a close. Just like a cornered wolf. Lets use the little power we have left and take more or it back whenever, and wherever we can.

green anarchists destroy ATM in Istambul

2006-01-05T12:09:00.000-07:00

Istambul, TURKEY: JANUARY 4th- Istambul has just been informed by an anonymous e-mail that last night a group of anarchists destroyed an ATM as an direct action against the capitalist money system. "no compromise!", "Anarchy", and "Insurrection Against Civilization" where found spray painted at the site. they stated that they will prepare for further attacks against civilization.

open letter to anti-civilization anarchists in Turkey

2006-01-04T13:42:00.000-07:00

dear readers and potencial friends in Turkey,

as it seems that you frequent this site, and have informed me that you are translating this stuff (it seems also GA/AP stuff from the US in general) into turkish from english, i have a proposition. lets turn this traditional inperialist relationship, as far as the spread of ideas go for a start, around here. i would be very interested in publishing on this site original turkish anti-civilization writings, action updates, or anything else of interest. i would also like to print this potencial material in a upcoming print version of B&GBulletin. you may take this or leave it as you wish. you can e-mail us at - primalwarnow@riseup.net -.

for a primal Anarchy, and the destruction of civilization~ Black & Green Bulletin

Anarchist group NMLA may be linked to Atlantic station arson

2006-01-02T21:18:00.000-07:00

Atlanta, GA.- A man who formed a one person Anarchist organization that aimed to "free the opressed minority population of Atlanta" may be behind a fire that destroyed two condo buildings at midtown's Atlantic Station last summer, the FBI was quoted as saying. the FBI's main suspect is one Steven Clark. During the investigation, the FBI cited that they believe he had "indicated interest" in robbing banks to fund the activities of the Neo-Millenium Liberation Army. Clark, 40, fatally shot himself on Nov. 9th when government agents surrounded the hotel where he was staying. the FBI suspects others were involved. the fire broke out shortly before dawn on July 24th. 322 condos where destroyed. a few hours later a seconf blaze on the top of the nearby Art Foundry was started and 80 units where destroyed. the heat was so intense, that 20 parked cars nearby were destroyed, no one was injured. Damage estamits topped $5 million. The "authorities" say they are not sure if however, NMLA exists at all.

arson attack against school parcially sucessfull

2006-01-02T17:37:00.002-07:00

EURGENE,OR. january 2nd- A spat of arsons at a Eugene area high school have caused up to $500,000 dollars worth of damage. the fires, which occured late friday night, destroyed a hallway next to the gymnasium at North Eugene High School which left about a quarter of the school with smoke damage.
posters note: although much of this is not overtly political that does not make it insignificant. any attack on the the institutions of civilization (in this case school) is a welcome development in my book.

arson attack against school parcially sucessfull

2006-01-02T17:37:00.000-07:00

Students revolt in Australia

2005-12-30T07:52:00.000-07:00

Perth, Australia: DECEMBER 12th- The Arson Squad is investigating fires at Rossmoyne Seinoir High School and Seaforth Primary School over the weekend which have caused $40,000 in damages. Education Minister Ljiljanna Ravlich say the School Watch Hotline has recieved more than 3,000 calls this year reporting susicious activity at schools. WA government say that $4.5 million has been spent cleaning up vandalism at Perth schools this year.

Blackout in PA

2005-12-28T15:26:00.000-07:00

South Middleton, PA: NOVEMBER 21ST- Vandalism at South middleton's electrical substation was the sourse of last wensdays power outage that blacked out part of three counties according to police at Charlisle. they say the outage- which knocked out power to 20,000 costomers in adams, cumberalnd, and york counties- was caused when someone shot at the electrical "sting" insulators that hold high voltage wires at the Zion Road substation. South Middleton, Dickenson, and Monroe townships where affected. the sabotage coused $300,000 dollars in damage. power was out for up to six hours, some schools where caused to close.

government building target of arson in Australia

2005-12-26T15:56:00.000-07:00

Mount Isa, Australia. DECEMBER 12th West St. 3:15 AM- An alleged arson attack destroyed the administration building of the Council Works Department in the early hours of sunday morning. this was the latest in a series of long-running attacks made towards council property. "ther have been break-ins there but this is the first time someone has set it on fire" said Cr McCullough. "it will inconvinience us greatly and cost us a great deal of money", "we had to remove roof sheeting, but the fire destroyed about 30% of the building" he also commented. there are no suspects at this time.

UNDER CONTROL, OR OUT OF CONTROL: the formation of society and the deinition of bounderies

2005-12-26T14:04:00.000-07:00

You've probably heard these phrases before; from parents to policemen, and maybe even from yourself. 'everything is under control' or 'this is out of control'. The policemen stands in front of the video camera to assure the public that everything is under control, that nothing is out of control and they can rest assured that (the unnamed thing) is secure. So what is it they are trying to secure? What is it that is either under control (good), or out of control (bad)? They are trying to secure, or fix in place, the behavior of people, other animals, or plants to fit within the boundries of society, which is to say within the relm of control/inside the gates. the phrase "to be under control", is very clear on what the dynamics of that relationship are. To be beneith the Control, the limiter. This seems to imply that Control is not merely a way of acting but a dominating force unto itself, almost independent of the will of the individual. The acting out of the will of Control, is the setting up of fences to define the boarders of what actions, and sometimes even ideas, can and cannot happen. It is this force, Control, that creates and maintains society. Although, possibility could also be said to be such a force, but that is not pertinent to this tract and whould require its own. How this force is expressed can take many forms; from auto-repressively with or without violent enforcement where the voice of control is in the heads of the controlled, to physical others who, violently or non-violently, coerce or present as beneficial the will of Control, the acceptance of boundries. When "to be out of/in control" is said, another atribute or the nature of Control is shown. that control is not only something that we are beneith, but it is also a place that we are either inside of, or outside of, a place with boundries. a world unto itself. This can only be maintained by what is "outside" not percievably existing so that the relm of Control is seen as everything, the extent of the existant. Difference cannot be astablished to exist if there is not a with and a with-out to which to draw a conclusion of difference. Thus the act of declaring and/or pointing to the existance of an "outside the gates of Control" is in and of itself a direct attack on Control. Control is then presented with three options; assimilate (bring under control), exterminate, or loose. The most beneficial and easiest for Control is to assimilate, the least beneficial is to loose. Therefore, it is most beneficial for Controls general state to be one of expansion, growth. for it to loose, is for it to contract. This pattern of behavior, is entirely similar to that of Civilization.

NOTE: To fight civilization one must understand its nature, where it is/what it is.

ELF suspect, Bill Rogers, found dead in jailcell

2005-12-23T07:44:00.000-07:00

a member of the Catlyst Infoshop collective who has been charged with eco-sabotage in WA by the state whas found dead in his jailcell in Flagstaff AZ early thursday State sorces said. the offical cause of death was called Suicide by suffocation from a plastic bag over head. However, there has been conflicting reports of actual time of death where the first official release stated it as monday, and the stary has changed a few times. of the 6 people rounded up in a nationwide millitant eco-defender roundup he has the most support from his local community. given the nature of this case and the context in which it has occured, i think he has been murdered.

i can't spell but i dont care

2005-12-21T18:12:00.000-07:00

i am sorry about the inproper grammar to the extent that it confuses what i am trying to say. it will be fixed this from this point forward. but as far as the spelling goes, can you understand what is being said? OK then, no problem. i mis-spell on perpose, no rule is unquestionable.

DIY skill of the day: composting toilet, from shit to soil.

2005-12-21T14:56:00.001-07:00

one of the most basic ways to start to be self sustainable, or what i think is a more accurate way to put it, or to (re)learn how to take care of ourselves, is to start with what we do with our waste. the mega-systems used by this civilization are aboslutely stupid. first off, if you live in a area more densly populated with humyns; you put the shit in fresh water so that it can be piped many miles where it is then concentrated and pumped full of killer cemicals to kill the bactiria, which eventually make their way into the enviornment and thus everything, at a plant which requires massive amounts of energy, and requires factories to produce the chemicals for killing, which in turn requires more energy. or, if you live in a less densly humyn populated area, you probably have a septic tank; smaller scale, same stupidity. still put shit into fresh water, then put into a giant tank which takes must be paid for (++$$) along with the pluming ifrastructure. after the water and shit go into the tank, they are then "leached" into a field, which is most likely right where you live, this then gets into the water table and everything that uses that water (you and your food). In short, this subsystem of civilization (just like the rest of them) is a helluva lot of work! and requires wonton destruction of your home, and expensive to boot! stupid! but luckily it is much easier to not do this. a composting toilet can be as fancy, complex and expensive as dictator Bush has at his eco-borgeouis green ranch (oh, you didn't know? but he insists that peak oil is a myth and the comsumer lifestyle will go on forever!) , or DIY ($0). Of course, the best solution is to eat all wild plants and animals and be nomadic, as this way ones shit contains the least amount of killer chemicals as possible so it is compost from the start and being nomadic none builds up too densely in one spot as to harber e-coli or other harmful bactiria because it will decomose rather quickly. But in lieu of that, a compost toilet is a geat and easy way to start.

what you need to have: at least 2 buckets (ya know those plastic ones, you can find them behind resturants), sawdust or some other dry organic matter, a bin for the compost (i use 4 wooden pallets nailed together, but anything with good air cerculation will work. Also, it would make it easier if their is a little door at the bottom to geet at the done stuff), hay to put ontop of each deposit of humanure made to compost bin (you could use grass clippings or any dryed out grass or grass-esque plant), and a seat to place the bucket in (this can range from a broken toilet seat to a full blown outhouse). thats it!

what you need to do: the work part of this consists of bringing full buckets to the compost, dumping them and putting hay on top, putting a new bucket with leaves at the bottom of it (important!) in the out-house (or whatever you use), and shitting.

a more thurough explaination and overall good resorse on this is The Humanure Handbook. i hope this is redundant for you, but if it is not and you already have the information, i hope it serves as a reminder and an inspiration to get to it. and if niether is the case, i hope this has opened your eyes. what better time than now, what better place than here?

Maryland development burned by the ELF

2005-12-21T14:15:00.001-07:00

Hagerstown, MD: DECEMBER 21, 2005- the Earth liberation Front claimed responsibility for a fire sunday that completely destroyed recently built, unoccupied townhouses. The fire caused an estimated $225,000 in damages. the responsibility was claimed in a letter sent to the local newspaper. it read "Last night we, the Earth Liberation Front, put the tourch to a development of ryan homes in Hagerstown, Maryland (off of route 40, behind the Wallmart). We did so to strike at the bottom line of this country's most netorious land rapist. We warn all developers that the people of the Earth are prepared to defend what remains of the wild and the green. we encourage all who watch with sadness while developers sell out the future of us and our children to join us in resisting them in any and every possible way. the Ents are going to war!"

hit where it hurts! UK substation vandalized

2005-12-21T09:02:00.000-07:00

Waymouth & Dorset UK: DECEMBER 16th- electricity was cut to 3,000 customers after vandals broke into an 11,000-volt sunstation and cut supplies. the substations where tageted over a six hour piriod on thurdsday night, Souther Electric said. a spokeswoman said that "mindless vandals went on a spree of destruction". power was lost in the chickerell and weymouth areas.

electric substation sabbotaged

2005-12-19T17:25:00.001-07:00

Lakewood, CO. OCT 9th- a substation near Glasgow was sabbotaged by someone shooting at the electrical transformer. damage leaked around 500 gallons of oil(not cool in my book), but as a result WAPA had to put the transformer out of service for 2 hours. transformer repair costs where tabulated to be at $27,000. no damage report for the black out has been issued.

my feral vision towards a post-collapse Anarchy

2005-12-19T14:20:00.000-07:00

civilization has been collapsing for some years now, and this is clearly visible here in north america. we still live in a industrial civilization, as it seems people in this country have forgotten. although that is not without a reason, as it has baisically died in this country. you can see it in the empty factories and warehouses slowly being reclaimed by plants and animals as they crumble back into sand. but in this country, where (as i have been told by my friends from other parts of the world) there is so much space, there is also much opertunitity. civilization is decaying from the inside out. it starts in the imaginations of people, where, one by one, its core memes start to look less and less apealing, as the outward manifestations of them become more and more grotesque. and this spreads until you can see it in the prison cell of everyday life. any wonder then that the specticle of popular culture, or the popular culture of specilce, now so glorifies how new and advanced everything is. why reinforce such concepts if they are such an actual quality of this modern life? unless maybe the story outside my window is looking less and less like their image of it. civilization is not evenly spread out upon the land, but it is just more concentrated in some places more than others. this means that its decay pysically starts at the margins, where it is least invested. if only we could remember the oh-so-apt adage in reference to conflict (and in this case also survival/happiness/escape) of to be where they are not. in reference to civilization(and specifically its chains and watchful eyes) this seems so obvious. many lament the problem of space and how it is dominated by capital, but when profit dries up, when its use-value is gone, it is discarded, this is just as true for land. this has been most definately exploited by the squatter movement, but they have so far focused for the most part on buildings in cities which still may contain profit for capital or some use, even if it is just demolition to maintain the illusion of the absense of decay. for this reason it is not being where they are not, but being where they are! this is obvious. so the problem that i hear from so mayny people and i echoed once is finding space to live outside of the confines of law and capital that inhibit our creation of anarchies. so lets find shelter and be the weeds that sprout in the cracks of civilization, cracks which are much bigger than you think. i like the idea of semi-sedentary scavenger, hunter/forager, and hortiulural squatter communities(tribes).

so now to the main point of this article, there is literally thousands of former agricultural or mining towns and industrial zones in this country that are either completely or near completely abandoned by humans. places that are no longer of use to civilization, but are of use to us. no oppertunity for their expansion means opportunity for ours!

Wild Edible of the Day: wood sorrel/spinnich dock

2005-12-18T07:49:00.000-07:00

this is a new plant in my indentification repertoire, and is also my new favorite green. it is a perennial and is related to the smaller but just as tasty, sheep sorrel. this one however is much bigger and just as tasty so it can be more than just a snack. it has a nice lemony flavor and is a hearty green which quenches thirst! i know it grows here in south eastern US, and in europe, but beyond that i am unsure. its medicinal qualities include helping with bladder and kidney stones. highly recomended.

"alternative energy" will NOT save civilization.

2005-12-18T06:52:00.000-07:00

although this may seem redundant to some, i have noticed a suprising frequency of people relying on this notion; that is, that "alternative fuels" will be able to replace depleting petrochemical fuels (oil & natural gas). This hope is science fiction, as was recently made so clear in an article posted on From The Wilderness titled "The most destructive crop on the earth is no solution to the energy crisis". In Europe in the 1600's, the net EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) for their primary source of fuel and construction material at the time, wood, past the point of diminishing returns. after this point, they invested more energy into procurring wood than the wood thus procurred could provide them. hence peak wood. so they were faced with a choice, either replace wood with a fuel that had a positive EROEI, or face the collapse of their civilization. they chose coal to replace their wood. so today this civilization has come to the same junction, albeit this time it is a global and techo-industrial civilization with many other additional problems coming to the fore; choose a replacement to oil with a equel or better EROEI, or face collapse due to peak oil. so when are the green fuels and eco-technologies coming allong to save us? they arn't! hello collapse, goodby civilization!

ELF srikes again!

2005-12-18T06:38:00.000-07:00

Vally Springs, CA USA.- the Earth Liberation Front seems to have been responsible for vandalism in the sierra nevada foothills. windows were broken and "E.L.F." was spray painted on the gurage of a partially constructed home at a site on loera hills road in Vally Springs, CA. there is considerable opposition to urban sprawl in Calaveras county where Vally Springs is located.

-This is what insurrection looks like!- South Korean farmers express their feelings about the WTO to chinese pigs

2005-12-18T06:29:00.000-07:00

What we're about here at the BGB blog

2005-12-17T14:47:00.000-07:00

here we are, standing on the precipise of the collapse of civilization, and the project of creating a living, breathing, primal anarchy in the ruins of civilization is now a matter of life and death. think i am being alarmist? apocoliptic? maybe, but it is warrented. don't take my my word at face falue though, use your brain and look at humanities present situation, and look inside yourself, what do you see there, and outside too? humanity is ill(in a manner of speaking) and our illness has made our collective and individual action pathological and destrucive. given that we here in the United (police) State of America, now live in a overtly fascist state, how long will we have to be able to talk like this on the internet? how much longer will there even be an internet? my opinion is that not long iether way, so lets get with the sharing of vital information while we can!

so, that being said, i'll tell yall what this blogs perpose is and more specifically what i hope to share here. i want to post as-frequent-as-possible updates on the spreading social insurrection around the world as it happens. i am also going to try to include practical rewilding/DIY info as i do it/come across it. also i am going to include regualarly updated documentation of the prosses of civilizational collpapse(yes it is happening right now!) in the cultural/pollitical/economic spheres. i would also like to include my own, and others, theoretical developmental writings on anarcho-primitivism/green anarchy/anti-civ theory. i might include other things that are completely random too.

just starting, this is a test.

2005-12-17T14:06:00.000-07:00

welcome to Black and Green Bulletin, news and info will be up an soon as i figure out how to.