Ask Urban Scout #8
For everyone who’s actually read DQ’s books or have been exposed to such concepts or views on modern society … how many of them are actually living it out? And to the extent that you do? … pretty fucking cool, I must say – how you live your life. But I have to ask you – can we really bring such radical change? (in terms of an alternative way of living from our current agricultural “taker” lifestyles)?? or is it just the way things are meant to be and eventually future generations will just be fucked and that’s just the way it goes? Thanks,
www.speakzine.com
Hey there Speak. Thanks for the questions. Let me break ’em down for you.
how many of them are actually living it out?
Well, it depends on how and what they choose to do with the ideas. Daniel Quinn has some great thoughts, but he also claims to have a great love of civilization and does not ever say, despite everything he has had to say about it, that it needs to go. He doesn’t really say much at all other than, “If humans still live here in 100 years you can bet they will have a different way of life than we do.” He says he never suggests for people to “go back” to living primitively. He says something like, “I have more in common with the Surgeon General who said, ‘smoking causes cancer,’ not ‘stop smoking.'” I think that feels like a rather cold and careless way of putting it, though maybe he doesn’t feel like rocking the boat too much.
I prefer the Derrick Jensen approach; that we must bring civilization down as soon as possible. In my own words; rewild the domesticated lands, humans and other-than-humans. Civilizations appear as ecological phenomena that appear and disappear with and only with the advent of agriculture… and we all know that agriculture means deforestation, which leads to desertification and global warming. Hunter-gatherer-horticulture societies practice the only level of technology we have seen that has real sustainability.
If humans don’t render the earth a desert wasteland unfit for anything but micro organisms, they will live as hunter gatherers again and probably not that far in the future from now. Seeing that as “going back” merely expresses a refusal to abandon the mythology of “progress.” Nothing inevitably goes “back” or “forward” or up or down. Things change. So how many people live out what Daniel Quinn says? Zero, since he doesn’t really say much about another way to live, other than that if we want to live we’ll need to find one.
That said, obviously a large portion of my life and actions come from Quinn’s works. Though you can’t point to him and say he suggested anything that I do, rather I do what I do because of the ideas he brought to my attention. But others such as Derrick Jensen, Martin Prechtel, Joseph Campbell, Tom Brown and Nancy Turner among others have also greatly influenced the lifestyle as well.
And to the extent that you do?
…Not many people focus on rewilding. But we have seen a large surge in the past few years. I have witnessed a rewilding renaissance begin to form and solidify across the globe over the last 10 years. That feels encouraging to me.
can we really bring such radical change? (in terms of an alternative way of living from our current agricultural “taker” lifestyles)?? or is it just the way things are meant to be and eventually future generations will just be fucked and that’s just the way it goes?
Derrick Jensen believes that it a mere 12 people could take down civilization. If that has truth, than a small number of people could bring about a very radical change. Could I do it? No. I don’t have those skills. The change to a new way to live only becomes possible with the death of the old way. We either wait for civilization to collapse (to lose the energy to maintain a monopoly on violence) and rewild or we make it collapse ourselves through rewilding.
People make lifestyle decisions based on economics (food production). We will only see lifestyle changes when it becomes economical. This means that as oil runs out, people will have to use less destructive farming practices, though if we look at the Middle East today we can see that even before petroleum fertilizers civilization caused desertification. In fact, the only way civilization maintains its food production today involves petroleum fertilizers. But we’ll have to do more than just organic farming, more horticulture and less agriculture, etc. So in that sense, people will only make the jump when civilization collapses and it becomes impossible to live this fucked up life. This shows us how gradually rewilding has picked up. It also shows us that rewilding will not reach a critical mass until absolutely necessary. This again comes back to our two choices; wait to rewild until total collapse, or encourage rewilding now to help push collapse along.
I guess we have a third option. Forget that we heard/read/know any of this. Keep living as though everything will work out just fine. Of course, our chances of survival and our relationships to the non-human world will suffer greatly.
Thanks again for the questions and thanks for doing the work that you do!
Urban Scout
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Show your support and appreciation for Urban Scout
Hey Urban Scout,
Greetings from Europe!
I think what you are doing in amazing. It’s great to see a rewild movement happening. It is inspiring.
I live in Ireland. Ireland is totally reliant on imported fossil fuels. The proportion of energy dervived from renewables is a pitiful 3%. Car sales are at record levels and predicted to grow. Consumer spending was up by 10% in 2007. Most people just want their piece of the pie without thinking of the costs…
My friends and me think the world is f*cked. We have no idea what to do. We can only see the growing world population punishing the natural world leading to tough times ahead.
I feel jealous that you guys in Oregon have such vast and beautiful forests. All of Ireland was once covered with woodlands, now it is the least wooded country in Europe. (raped by the English many years ago).
We are trying to get involved in organisations that promote sustainablity and biodiversity. It is something i suppose…
I think rewilding kicks ass and will keep following your blog updates for more info.
Keep up the good work!!
All the best,
Brian
Hey Brian,
Crazy information about Ireland. I had no idea. Sounds like yall could use a big dose of rewilding! Haha. Most of the beautiful “forests” you mention are really just Douglas Fir tree farms run by the US Forest Service. They have minimal diversity and would have little value in a post-apocalyptic world because of their lack of diversity. Poor forests.
I wish you the best of luck with your work in Ireland. Perhaps I can make a trip out there someday!
Scout
Pity about the “forests”…..Douglas Fir growing in patches here too…totally soulless.
No problem man. The Scout is welcome anytime!
Hey Scout,
Thanks for choosing to belong to what you love — and fighting for it. Now for some needlessly stage-directed, poorly executed humor. And serious questions embedded therein.
“Daniel Quinn has some great thoughts, but he also claims to have a great love of civilization and does not ever say, despite everything he has had to say about it, that it needs to go.”
(overly dramatic doubletake)
What, what?
Wherever did he claim a “great love” of civilization? Same place he self-identified as a “connoisseur of collapse and calamity” and a “card-carrying member of the Prison Planet Society”?
I mean, what wacky dimension have I been shambling around in for the past two weeks?
(shudder)
I brace myself to discover Blackbeard’s famed utterance: “Arrrr, a land-lubber I be! Yo-ho-ho and six feet of bubble gum!”
Jokes aside, I say this amounts to a pretty sizable dis. Or a shocking revelation.
“Though you can’t point to him and say he suggested anything that I do, rather I do what I do because of the ideas he brought to my attention.”
Well, ok, maybe the questioner can’t. Hey, I hear they’re building a 40″ pyramid with matching sphinx made entirely out of unread copies of “Beyond Civilization” at Burning Man this year. Wanna come?
Shit dude, I wish I had my copy of BC here right now to quote out of it… But he says something like this:
“People accuse me of hating civilization. Those who know me know that’s totally untrue. I am a great lover of civilization. I love that I can walk down the street to the grocery store. I love wireless internet, etc.”
I know he specifically calls himself a great lover of civilization because I have used that line so many times. Er… Uh… What? Poor choice of words on his part maybe?
As for building a sphinx made from copies of Beyond Civilization, it’s a date my friend.
Shucks, I also gave away my copy of “Beyond Civilization” — to a homebound, world-traveling Scotsman no less.
I did manage to locate further corroboration (a book reviewer on Amazon.com irate about this very “lover of civilization” verbage).
File, then, under “shocking revelation”, sub-category “kicking self for having missed it in the first place”. Time to pick myself back up. I mean, at least I didn’t end up in that racist vegan dimension x.
And another DQ quote, this time from an 1996 interview by none other than Oprah Winfrey:
“I admire what we’ve done very much. I–I love–I don’t hate technology. I don’t hate our civilization at all. But the–the controlling force right now is that everyone in the world has to live this way, and that’s what’s–what’s wicked. In our particular culture, we reward drive and aggression…”
Did you hear about Daniel Quinn’s new ink? No, not a book. It simply reads, “Maximum harm = Maximum FUN!” across his chest in this tight blackletter.
Seriously, he splits a tiny hair by differentiating our civilization from the one-right-way meme. Is this hair perhaps also made of enriched uranium? Other civilizations rose and fell without pwning the land and selling it to gold-shitting space robots…and these experiments were all abandoned for tribal life after a short stint, other than the ones washed under and folded into the Takers’ wake.
Civilization lead to the emergence of some nifty technology (Mayan calendar, i’ll take your sheer elegance any day over WiFi and…Safeway), and even did this without totally eviscerating our habitat or cultural diversity amongst humans. This one, however, clearly does both.
Thanks for the revelation. I see more clearly the context of why Derrick’s books are off Quinn’s reading list (shit, pun intended). And why Jensen will never be on Oprah.
As for getting the full scope of Daniel’s poorly chosen words in “Beyond Civilization”, I guess I’ll just have to wait until we torch that sphinx. Five days early on an eclipse. Apocalypto, Muthafuckas!
Haha. Got the quote now:
BEYOND CIVILIZATION (PAGE 90)
A Lover of Civilization
People who dislike what I’m saying will often try to reassure themselves with the thought that I’m just someone who hates civilization and would rather live “close to nature.†This will bring a smile to the face of anyone who knows me, for I’m a great lover of civilization and live happily in the heart of the fourth largest U.S. city, in easy walking distance to drugstores, supermarkets, video rental shops, art galleries, restaurants, bookstores, museums, pool halls, universities, and tattoo parlors. (And I live “close to nature†every second of every day, 365 days a year, since “nature†is something no one can escape living close to, no matter where you happen to live.) I’m not a Luddite or a Unabomber. I don’t regard civilization as a curse but as a blessing that people (including me) should be free to walk away from for something better.
Sorry DQ but that is a rather priviliedged perspective on civilization. Not to mention Nature. I prefer Derrick Jensens perspective on nature:
“Is the line between artificial and natural itself artificial?†We’ve all heard this argument before, usually put forward by those who have an antiwish to further exploitation: humans are natural, therefore everything they create is natural. Chainsaws, nuclear bombs, capitalism, sex slavery, asphalt, cars, polluted streams, a devastated world, devastated psyches, all these are natural. I have two responses to this. The first I explored already in my book The Culture of Make Believe, where I said, “This is, of course, nonsense. We are embedded in the natural world. We evolved as social creatures in this natural world. We require clean water to drink, or we die. We require clean air to breathe, or we die. We require food, or we die. We require love, affection, social contact in order to become our full selves. It is part of our evolutionary legacy as social creatures. Anything that helps us to understand all of this is natural: any ritual, artifact, process, action is natural to the degree that it reinforces our understanding of our embeddedness in the natural world, and any ritual, artifact, process, action is unnatural to the degree that it does not.†My second response to their question is: Who cares? I want to live in a world that has wild salmon and tiger salamanders and tigers and healthy forests and vibrant human communities where mothers don’t have dioxin in their breastmilk. If you really want to argue that oil tankers, global warming, DDT, the designated hitter rule, and the rest of the massive deathcamp we call civilization is natural, well, you can just go off in a corner with your $20,000 cheque and your utilitarian-philosopher buddies and play your bullshit linguistic games while the rest of us try to do something about the very real problems caused by civilization.