Hey , um, Crash, goooood to see you here! I was great to meet you this year at Stick, and your daughters are wonderful people. I hope Hannah and Abbey aren’t fighting over that shirt…
I couldn’t agree with you more in that regardless of what ‘primitive skills’ might mean, we all need food, water, shelter/clothing and fire. I don’t reckon that any rewilder imagines they can get away at the collapse of civilization without knowing a great deal about the physical skills of obtaining good food and clean water, even in the short term.
There seem to be so many myths floating around about how ‘hunter-gatherers’ used to be and how good they had it, but the more I learn and experience, the more I temtem (feel/think in chinuk wawa) that some hunter-gatherers had it pretty rough, actually, and that a line between hunter-gatherer and ‘agriculturalist’ is pretty nonexistent. What might be the first civilization at Norte Chico in Peru arose without even domestication, from a fishing culture. Northwest Coast natives owned slaves and property without agriculture or domestication. Highly respected cultures like the Haudenosaunee people were most certainly agriculturalists.
It seems that as time goes by humans try to make their lives and culture better, by trading off some things for others-- fleas and parasites for chronic diseases and cancers, harder work in the fields to keep more children alive during tough times.
I try to live the best I can in the world with the people I know and the land around me, working towards my ideals, but respecting everyone else’s ways and ideas. I try hard to keep an open mind and a good dose of humility, to know that at the very least, I know very little about what has come before and what will come next. The only things I can be sure about are the direct experiences in my own life and the personal relationships I have with my family and my land.
On that level, it doesn’t matter what my ideology is or who I am, learning the primitive skills of food, water, shelter and fire improves my life and the lives of the people around me.
I certainly do not mean to antagonize anyone, but when the collapse of civilization occurs, I will be spending time with people who have direct experience with food, water, fire and shelter. At that point, your garden, Crash, will suddenly be very popular with rewilders.