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The One Who Steals The Fat

At century’s end, we’re consumers, not gatherers or producers. We’re at the mercy of dimly understood industrial processes and long lines of supply. Being at such removes — practical, geographic, and technological — from our sustenance, most of us are ignorant of the source of our tap water and the provenance of our food.

In Distrust Of Movements

I have had with my friend Wes Jackson a number of useful conversations about the necessity of getting out of movements — even movements that have seemed necessary and dear to us — when they have lapsed into self-righteousness and self-betrayal, as movements seem almost invariably to do. People in movements too readily learn to deny to others the rights and privileges they demand for themselves. They too easily become unable to mean their own language, as when a “peace movement” becomes violent.

Excerpts From Path Without Destination

Possessions are signs of status, success, position, and power. It’s no wonder that our modern society has been called the consumer society. Unlimited economic growth has become the ideal of every nation in the world. In order to achieve such growth, we have destroyed lives, families, the social fabric, and our relationship with the natural world. We have passed the point of increasing human well-being by increasing material wealth.

Enemy Of The State

An Interview With John Zerzan

I’m talking about time not existing. Time as a continuing thread that unravels in an endless progression, linking all events together while remaining independent of them — that doesn’t exist. Sequence exists. Rhythm exists. But not time. This reification of time is related to the notion of mass production and division of labor. Tick, tick, tick, as you said: Identical seconds. Identical people. Identical chores repeated endlessly. But when you realize that no two occurrences are identical, and that each moment is different from the moment before, time simply disappears. If events are always novel, then not only is routine impossible, but the notion of time is meaningless.

Listening To Helen Caldicott On The Car Radio While Stalled In A Traffic Jam Downtown

Down The Garden Path

How Ten Thousand Years Of Agriculture Has Failed Us — An Interview With Daniel Quinn

Famine doesn’t occur among hunter-gatherers, because they don’t sit there and starve: they go wherever the food is, as all animals do. One reason why famine and agriculture are connected is that, when crops fail, practitioners of totalitarian agriculture stay put and starve, because there isn’t anywhere else for them to go. If you look at famines throughout history, you’ll find that almost every one is connected to crop failure.

The Economy Of Eden

“I have learned how to grow healthy crops,” wrote Sir Albert Howard in his 1940 book An Agricultural Testament, “without the slightest help from mycologists, entomologists, bacteriologists, agricultural chemists, statisticians, spraying machines, insecticides, germicides, and all the other expensive paraphernalia of the modern experiment station.”

The True, Original First World

We have got it backward in our conventional worldview. The world of indigenous peoples, like the Lacandones, is the real First World, because it has been here the longest; it was here first. The so-called First World of the industrialized North is first only in capital accumulation and military force.

Weeds Are Us

Ralph Waldo Emerson, who as a lifelong gardener really should have known better, once said that a weed is simply a plant whose virtues we haven’t yet discovered; that weed is not a category of nature but a human construct, a defect of our perception. This kind of attitude, which comes out of an old American strain of romantic thinking about wild nature, can get you into trouble. At least it did me. For I had Emerson’s pretty conceit in mind when I planted my first flower bed, and the result was not a pretty thing.

The Contrary Farmer

The truth is that farming at its worst is no more physically punishing than operating a restaurant, brokering commodities on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, or training for the Olympics.