I think that most, if not all of us drawn to rewilding are drawn to it in part as a reaction to the inherent violence of domestication. At least for myself I know that I strongly dislike the violence at every level, including the violence of humans against humans and also including the violence of humans against non humans.
One of the points that Derrick Jensen makes in Endgame that is striking to me is how broad and inclusive the term “violence” is. We use the same term to mean many things, and as a result we don’t typically differentiate between them. But this is a mistake. What if instead of using the term “violence” we use the term “resistance”? Is resistance not justifiable in the face of oppression and wanton destruction? And should not resistance be at least as great in degree as the oppression and destruction that it faces? Otherwise it is doomed to fail.
In my short lifetime I have witness unspeakable atrocities, as have we all. In particular I’m thinking of the atrocities that are committed routinely against the wild and natural world. This is thought of as “the cost of doing business” by the mainstream. I, for one, will not stand by idly while this continues. Resistance (and I’m talking about active resistance) is necessary from everything I can see. If you want to call that violence then that is your choice. I call it the defense of life.
Another point that I think is crucial here is that rewilding means nothing if there is nowhere left to rewild. Living as a wild human has dependencies. Those are the dependencies that any wild animal would have, things like access to clean water, air, food, etc. Civilization clearly poses a very serious threat to those things. As much as I’d like to think that I can ignore the destruction caused by civilization and merely hide out in the woods, the truth is that the latter will only work until that habitat is destroyed for yet another “development” or whatever the case.
I honestly don’t think any of the participants of this community are advocating for the use of violence for the sake of acting out anger as a replacement for therapy, for example. However, I do think that some of us believe that resistance and defense against civilization are essential to life on this planet, and we see that as fundamentally aligned with and crucial for rewilding. I think that all forms of resistance are important, including marches and protests and boycotts and petitions and all of that. But to limit ourselves to only those actions that are deemed “non-violent” and acceptable to the powers of civilization is to lose the war. And yes, in my opinion it is a war. Do the lives of the trees and the birds and the bears and the rivers not count? I feel they do. And if that is the case then we’re not just talking about a war, but we’re talking about the most horrific genocides ever waged on the planet. And that’s something worth fighting. Again, I strongly believe this is not only justifiable, but also closely affiliated with rewilding in today’s climate. Without a real resistance that can not only halt but dismantle civilization then there will be no wild, no rewilding, no life on this planet.
My friend, you’ve probably never heard of Bougainville, eh? Bougainville is a large island near Papua New guinea that is perhaps the best example of successful militant rewilding.
This island used to have a thriving indigenous population, but was then colonized by numerous civilized nations. The people there were initially non-violent towards their colonizers, hoping they would be allowed to live peacefully with their new neighbors. Unfortunately, this strategy has never halted the hegemony of civilization.
You can probably guess what happened to them; missionaries, diseases, peace treaties, division, an influx of white people, wage slavery, dependency, the usual tricks of civ. The people of Bougainville dealt with it “peacefully” until they built one of the largest copper mines in the world there and gave the natives crumbs in exchange.
The natives peacefully plead for their rights and the health of their island, but they were treated like obstacles to production, and swept aside.
This sparked the BLA (you can probably guess what that stands for!) to rise up, sabotaging the mine and kicking the company off their island with slingshots.
When the Papua New Guinea and Australian armies came into to pacify them, they decided to fight back for their sovereignty. Many good people died, which is always a shame, but eventually, the BLA captured some guns, and fought off the colonizers.
The Aussie government imposed a sea blockade in an attempt to starve the people out, as they were dependent on agriculture and civilization. But they underestimated the ability of these people to rewild!
The Bougainvillians made the difficult transition, losing many in the process to starvation, but utilized transition technologies like alternator generators and coconut oil biodiesel, and quickly planted many forest gardens.
They are still in resistance to this day, and have not been granted sovereignty, but continue to live wild and free, while engaging in combat with those who would have them be slaves.
I recommend watching the documentary “Coconut Revolution” about this situation. You can watch it online at: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1192286025577999101
The point I’m trying to make is, first: it is possible to rewild in an armed conflict situation, and, secondly: non-violence is always the best way, but it is far-fetched to expect the largest, most brutal hegemony the world has ever known to grant sovereignty to a group that is in resistance to it’s violence.
Hey joeh! Nice to meet you. Tough topic to discuss, especially over the internet. So Id like to point out some things before i continue,
For example there is no “we” . There’s lots of individuals on this forum living in different places, under differing circumstances, its simply not possible to create an artificial category called “we” make up a set of moral rules for them and be done with it.
This issue has been going on and as long as i can remember and before. Do we need to resolve this “issue”? I think not. I already know my relationship with violence. It seems to me you need to resolve this issue for yourself. There are no universal rules and you won’t find an argument that will unite all under the banner of pacifism.
We could discuss violence and non-violence of course. Im trying to point out that coming at this discussion saying " Look here ! DO this. Don’t do this!" is often not very effective.
[quote=“joeh7762, post:1, topic:1357”]Not only do I believe that it’s possible to rewild nonviolently, I will go so far as to say that REWILDING MUST BE NONVIOLENT OR ELSE IT WILL NEVER WORK.
I think the issue of violence is the great unresolved issue of rewilding. And I need to be absolutely clear about this: I think the real issue here is VIOLENCE BETWEEN HUMAN BEINGS.[/quote]
ReWilding only makes sense in a localized context. In some places and times violence will have its place. In some much less so to the extent that its almost invisible or non-existant.
why the division between violence against humans and for example violence against the landbase and/or animals?
I think any emotion can have the same result or worse. depending. Love clouds judgement just as well if not more. As does fear. As does pride. And so on. We make do.
Yeah, that’s a problem eh? Civ is the enemy, but the enemy is made up of friends and collegues and family, of ourselves even. Difficult position i agree. Still I relate to Civ like this: Civ goes to war against the Wild and uncontrollable. not vice versa. This is happening wheter i want to or not. We are only enemies when we fight back. When we don’t fight we arent enemies we are window dressing. backgroundnoise.
as im sure we all are trying to do
I dont believe in enlightening the masses. If something scares me its mass politics and “reasonable” voices that we should follow. shudders . Also lots of people might join you who are similarly angry at civ when you show anger. I also want peace and quiet, im not sick of anger though. Sometimes i am angry sometimes not.
hmm some girls like machismo. some boys like machismo. But yeah there’s alot of posing and ideological positioning involved. Personally this bothers me as well but what bothers me is the people themselves. I deal with it because i have good friends with firmly established relationships that don’t need to prove themselves all the time with machismo.
yeah they didnt live in civ. again different people different times different places and so on…
[quote=“joeh7762, post:1, topic:1357”]As far as I’m concerned, the natural-unnatural distinction just doesn’t work, because it completely misses the point. According to my definition, Nature means everything that exists, therefore, nothing that can exist or happen in Nature is unnatural. That means that civilization itself is perfectly natural. The distinction that works for me is between HEALTH & SICKNESS. According to my view, wildness means health & civilization means sickness.
Human beings are social animals. A true society cannot be held together if people cannot get along with each other. Fear, anger, rage, hostility, aggression & violence between people cause social cohesion to break down. These negative emotions are symptoms of the disease we call civilization – signs that something has gone terribly wrong. True social cohesion can only exist when people are kind, gentle, loving & peaceful toward each other. Without this kind of relationship between people, social cohesion breaks down, & laws are created to take its place & try to hold society together. But I think we can all agree that laws really do a lousy job of holding a society together.[/quote]
“Negative” emotions aren’t diseases. Fear is healthy. Anger is healthy. “Negative” emotions are used to keep groups together too. Social cohesion breaks down when communities grow bigger then they can maintain meaningful relationships with. Social grooming can no longer be effectively employed to keep the people together and abstractions and laws are applied to keep from falling apart in smaller groups (which would be a wiser idea)
[quote=“joeh7762, post:1, topic:1357”]It makes more sense for me to view civilization not as a thing or a group of things created by humans, but as a PROCESS. More specifically – & essential to my argument – civilization is a PATHOLOGICAL PROCESS – in other words, a DISEASE. Even more to the point, the damage done to human beings by civilization is essentially PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA. I believe that all the problems civilized people suffer from can be traced back to psychological trauma, usually done to us in infancy by our own parents.
If civilization is a disease, then rewilding should be seen as the cure. In my view, the essence of rewilding is HEALING OURSELVES from the trauma done to us by civilization.[/quote]
yeah. not much to add here
I think people can maintain a healthy relationship with violence.
That could be the case for humans living in “untouched” indigenous societies, in a general sense. But when those same humans come into contact with a violent civilizing force, they defend themselves… violently. When they see their trees being forested, when they see violence done against the land (and ultimately, to them) they react… again, violently.
Likewise, there are people in rewilding (not everyone, but there are some) who use violence against civilization when they witness its violent, systematic injustices.
[quote=“joeh7762, post:1, topic:1357”]It makes more sense for me to view civilization not as a thing or a group of things created by humans, but as a PROCESS. More specifically – & essential to my argument – civilization is a PATHOLOGICAL PROCESS – in other words, a DISEASE. Even more to the point, the damage done to human beings by civilization is essentially PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA. I believe that all the problems civilized people suffer from can be traced back to psychological trauma, usually done to us in infancy by our own parents.
If civilization is a disease, then rewilding should be seen as the cure. In my view, the essence of rewilding is HEALING OURSELVES from the trauma done to us by civilization.[/quote]
I agree with you absolutely. But I don’t know how non-violence is supposed to be related to psychological healing.
If someone accosted you on the sidewalk and seriously threatened your life, and if you were carrying a gun, wouldn’t you shoot in self-defense? Or would you really say to yourself, “I can’t kill another human being, because it would interfere with the psychological healing process I am going through?” There is a place for violence. Of course it should be used judiciously. It may or may not add more trauma to one’s life to have to do that. Hell, it may even be therapeutic, or restore confidence in one’s sense of self-agency (which is nearly lacking among the civilized).
One last point… If I ever have to kill in self-defense, or for survival, I would do my best to make a clean kill and minimize trauma. Violence is not always a symptom of sadism, although some civilized groups (e.g., adamant pacifists) would want us to believe so.
I appreciate everyone’s comments on violence. You’ve said my piece already.
Anger–the refrain from an 80’s punk rock song (Rise, FWIW) comes to mind: “Anger is an energy”. Anger motivates action. Anger provides fuel for change. Without anger, we’d have a big hole in the spectrum of human emotions, and when anger gets repressed, ignored, stuffed, then we’ve really got problems.
Civilization’s daily war on life makes me angry. It gives me a restless feeling, a vacuum, it makes me search for a way to respond.
I can shed some light on this from a background in trauma release therapy. All animals have built in to their nervous systems and bodies a “fight , flight or freeze” response to threat. Most any animal will get violent when their fight response is triggered. What civilization does is to “domesticate” us, which is to traumatize our nervous systems to the points where the fight, flight or freeze isn’t shaken off, it gets stuck in our nervous system, so past threats are always present. Wild animals and humans don’t get traumatized, they can release the activation of the threat after they are safe. Or a wild human can pull in the services of the medicine man to release the stuck trauma. I heard a story about a Navajo practice to take men returning from war straight into ceremony for three days before they are allowed back with their families. It’d probably help our societies if we did the same, reduce suicide and abuse statistics for vets. We aren’t ever ‘safe’, so we are activated in fight, flight or freeze all the time! So violence from traumatized domesticated humans can be triggered by something that’s not even appropriate, because the fight energy is stuck there lurking in the nervous system. I think domesticated pets can be traumatized too, but you don’t see traumatized wild animals, they all have instincts to shake it off. So, if we heal our nervous systems, we may not be prone to outbursts of inapprpriate violence, but hopefully we are capable of appropriate fight energy when a real threat is there. Actually, that’s what domestication is intended to do… have us so shut down with freeze, that we are completely docile, and never fight back at all when under attack.
Hmm, Marita, very interesting. I especially found it interesting that pets can be traumatized. I’ve suspected that all along about my cat… she seems so anxious, as if I will abandon her. Either she was taken from her mother too early, or it’s a result of her first human putting her in an animal shelter. I’ll never know for sure…
OMG, I knew I was going to open up a huge can o’ worms with my post.
First of all, I’m very sorry for sounding so preachy about this. I know very well I can’t force people to change their views or behave differently. I just can’t help feeling very strongly about this.
I also understand that we need to resist the violence of civilization. I’m not trying to ignore or dismiss all the horrible destruction of life caused by civ.
I guess I can’t really call myself an absolute pacifist. If I was backed into a corner by a hostile person bent on killing me, & my only alternatives were to kill him or die, then I would kill him. I would do the same thing if someone was threatening to kill someone I love.
Just about everybody who has responded so far seems to be saying, “I don’t like violence at all, but unfortunately it’s necessary.”
I have not read Endgame. I haven’t read any of Jensen’s books yet.
Wow, I just feel really overwhelmed by all the responses I’ve gotten so far. I need to save this thread & read through it over the weekend & do a lot of thinking about this. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to post anything else till Monday, since my access to the Internet is limited.
Oh, yeah…marita…I’ve been doing a lot of research on trauma & trauma therapies, so what your talking about is very familiar to me. I’m particularly interested in stuff like Somatic Experiencing & Focusing. I’ve read Peter Levine’s book Waking The Tiger, & I like the ideas & techniques he describes.
I just can’t help feeling really uncomfortable about using violence to resist civ. I’ll do anything I possbly can to resist nonviolently.
But do you really think the system is bent on crushing the rewilding movement violently?
I get your anguish, I should have added that to do violence to another - especially human is very traumatizing, we also have strong instincts to not do violence or be coercive with our tribe, so I get why you resist that very strongly. Another thing that’s going on there is that one part of your brain (fight/flight is reptilian level brain) is clashing with your neocortex, so you basically are at war with yourself, and that’s awful as well. One thing I have wondered is if it was for these reasons that some tribal people considered those people in the tribe differently than human not in their tribe. It was more okay to do violence to humans outside the tribe than inside the tribe. The only thing I have noticed is that horror and violence need to be released if they aren’t to make us sick and crazy.
The Navajo story came from Peter Levine, that’s one of the schools of trauma therapy I have studied. Another one was Alberto Villoldo and his healing the light body school. I noticed that the techniques Alberto teaches to release ‘dense energy’ is quite similar to what Peter Levine teachs.
Joeh, sorry for overwhelming you! But I find it very helpful to spend time thinking about this important topic, and I hope you do as well.
Absolutely, completely, if they feel they have to. I look at it this way: the entire system will collapse if enough people refuse to participate. In other words, the ruling elite’s power and wealth completely depend upon the acquiescence and participation of all of us (willing or unwilling - they don’t care). And they fully know this. The education system, the prison system, the police, the laws, etc etc all exist for this very purpose - to maintain their power and control over us.
History has shown us that time and again, the rulers of civilization feel completely willing to use violence to exterminate or enslave (as owned slaves or wage slaves) whomever they choose. And so far, no people on earth have escaped this violence (except a handful of isolated tribes in remote regions, only because civ’s reach hasn’t extended that far yet). This point seems so obvious, I don’t know why I even bother typing it.
For a specific example closer to this time and place, look at what happened to Finisia, a rewilding hunter-gatherer who lives a nomadic existence. On her travels, a ranger arrested her for nothing more than planting native seeds along the trail (and for resisting his “authority”). They locked her up in jail for three months.
[quote=“joeh7762, post:14, topic:1357”]OMG, I knew I was going to open up a huge can o’ worms with my post.
Wow, I just feel really overwhelmed by all the responses I’ve gotten so far. I need to save this thread & read through it over the weekend & do a lot of thinking about this. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to post anything else till Monday, since my access to the Internet is limited.[/quote]
Take your time, dude. It’s always good to digest and figure out exactly what you want to say, and how to incorporate new ideas. I know I want to hear what you have to say in response, since so much was thrown at you.
Well, if you can make it to one of our local meetings, I’ll let you borrow my copy.
And I’ll echo what bereal said about violent force. If those in power consider us a threat, they’ll do whatever they can, including violence, to maintain their power.
I join the non-violent group, but I am ONLY advocating non-violence towards human slaves of the Machine! The Machine itselfe… You should learn to make thermite guys;-)
You people are not at all who I thought you were. I really thought I knew what rewilding was, but I guess I was totally wrong about that. You are not good people at all. You are totally insane. You want to use violence to destroy civilization. I am absolutely against that. You won’t even consider any other possibility. Therefore, I will have absolutely nothing to do with you people ever again. Goodbye.
You know, I almost put his initial post in the humanure bucket, but I thought I would let it go and see how people here would respond. I want to give everyone who responded mad props for being very generous with joeh. Everyone here followed the guidelines of this site in such a great way, to such an undeserving person. I’m really thankful of all of you.
It was also great to see such group cohesion with this topic. It really does show that most people here have read Derrick Jensen. I’m thankful to that. This is the kind of cohesion I would like to see in so many avenues of this site. I think with the up-coming changes that will happen much more easily as well. Anyway, thanks everyone this was great. And I don’t think I’ll remove that last post by joeh, because it stands as a great example of well… something. I don’t know, it’s just funny as hell to me.
I need to chime in here. Reading this experience, and not even having really involved myself in the thread, I still feel the sting of joeh’s final remark, as someone who cares deeply about this place.
How much care and attention can you pour into someone who from the first hasn’t earned your trust? A lot. A helluva lot. And where does all that care and attention go, once they’ve broken your trust? Out the door, with them. All the energy and thoughtfulness that could’ve gone to friends and family, left with someone “just passing through”.
I almost pointed out to joeh, that since he first posted this:
Every fiber in my being is screaming "NO! THIS IS BAD! THIS IS WRONG! WE CAN'T DO THIS!"
I felt almost certain that he didn’t belong here. The measures of “what is good?” “what is bad?” “what is right?” “what is wrong?” have a singular capacity to dehumanize us. They diametrically oppose rewilding.
It strikes me as more than telling that he ended his time here with this remark:
You are not good people at all. You are totally insane.
Just imagine if he called us “good people” and “sane”? Would he “be” more “right”? I can’t find a use for someone else’s labels in this regard. How do they help? I’ll just keep grieving, make choices based on what encourages more life, and protect what I love; what else can I do?
It’s always good to digest and figure out exactly what you want to say, and how to incorporate new ideas. I know I want to hear what you have to say in response, since so much was thrown at you.
