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Title: What is Anarcho-Primitivism? Author: Anonymous Date: 2005 Language: en Topics: anti-civ, primitivism Source: Retrieved on 11 December 2010 from http://blackandgreenbulletin.blogspot.com/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Abbey, Edward. (1976) The Monkey Wrench Gang. New York: Avon.
About Earth First! (n.d.) Retrieved November 17, 2005, from Earth First!
Worldwide:
Anonymous. (2005, Nov 26). “Re: Interview.” Personal email to the
author.
Bettinger, Robert L. (1991). Hunter-Gatherers: Archaeological and
Evolutionary Theory. New York: Plenum.
Bose, Atindranath. (1967). A History of Anarchism. Calcutta: World.
Debord, Guy. (1995). The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone.
(Original 1967)
Earth First! (2005, November 15). Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
Retrieved November 17, 2005, from
Earth Liberation Front (2005, November 17, 18:24). Wikipedia, The Free
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Goldberg, Carey. (1996, September 21). “Diaries Disclosed In Unabom
Hearing,” The New York Times, Saturday, Late Edition — Final, Section 1;
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Houriet, Robert. (1971). Getting Back Together. New York: Coward, McCann
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