A crossover episode between the two best (so far) Green Anarchy podcasts.

First half at Rewilding: Peter Michael Bauer interviews Natasha Tucker

Second half at Primal Anarchy: NT interviews PMB

I’ve binged hard on both of the projects, and not every moment of every episode of these two podcasts is fully enchanting, but … everything I’ve linked for you in the past few days is really good.

I will keep binging, and expanding my scope.

For instance: There’s a anarchical book review podcast called The Book On Fire. I’ve listened to exactly one episode.

It discusses a book called Against The Grain, which as you might imagine examines the relationship between piled up stacks of barley or wheat and ‘the dawn of civilization’.

The podcaster here is taking a break in a multi-episode examination of a related book (The Dawn Of Everything) written by ‘the two Davids’, Graeber and Wengrow. This book was huge a couple of years ago–I’ve mentioned it before, and linked a lot of interviews with Graeber in particular.

According to this episode, the Dawn book is essentially about trying to disprove the theory that sedentary agriculture leads directly to social hierarchy and the Divine Right Of Kings. The Grain book is more favorable to this theory, and the contrast drives the narrative here.

I don’t recommend listening, because all these fine academic distinctions are thinking games that don’t really matter, unless you love that kind of hair-splitting for its own sake.

The basics, in my opinion, remain unchanged.

When people stop moving and settle down, and start storing surplus calories in a granary, it looks like a good thing but it’s really very fucked up.

The human population explodes. Social hierarchies do emerge, and so does income inequality. Oppression and politics have a reason to form. The granaries become a way of measuring wealth, and for fighting wars for control over it. In short, civilization happens.

Most everybody cheers this right down to the modern day. Progress!

But these podcasts are anti-civ at their core, and so am I.

I love me some real science and I would never say no to, for example, quality modern healthcare, if I could find any. Even more deeply, I love words and written language, and those things didn’t exist five or six thousand years ago.

But all the nice things we got out of the granaries don’t counterbalance the untold human misery and injury to the Mother planet and her children that have come about as a result of that same “Civilization”. Eight billion people later, it’s going to kill us all dead, and in the meantime, a mother must warn her child against drinking from any creek or river no matter how sparkling, because it might have battery acid in it, or worse.

Even the tap water turned those trusting kids into permanent mental defectives in Flint, and they are not alone. No matter how healthy we try to be, we are all swimming in a nasty and toxic chemical soup like the proverbial fish who can’t see the water.

Civilization is not just the end of us, but also makes it damn near impossible to fully embrace what little time we have left in a doomed world.

The world is still a beautiful place.

The society of the civilized is an ugly hellscape filled with fools screaming at each other about red and blue, democracy and ‘autocracy’; every one of them scrambling after slave dollars by telling lies, and living lies.

There is a hole in every one of us, and the man with the key to the granary and the bank and the day spa, alongside his daddy and his daddy’s daddy, made sure that every baby is born with that hole, and that it is kept unfilled like a gaping wound. In you and in me.

Anarchy now? Sure, I’m for that.

But it will never happen until I can get you to believe in it too, and even if I somehow could (fat fucking chance) maybe it will be too late for any of us anyway.

Abandon all hope, ye who dwelleth here.

I’ll be in the kitchen, rearranging the canned goods and the toaster oven like so many deck chairs, wearing my chinese wireless headphones and listening to the very best people tell me what rewilding might be, amen.