Good Life Revival: Permaculture, Rewilding, Homesteading

What can so-called “invasive species” teach us about the health and vitality of our ecosystems?

Is it possible that these oft-maligned invaders are actually serving functional roles on the land? And if we determine that they need to be managed, how exactly should we go about it?

When you read Beyond the War on Invasive Species by Tao Orion, today’s guest on episode 44 of the Good Life Revival Podcast, you’ll discover that the conventional “restoration” narrative is pretty cut-and-dry: invasive species are a Problem that require complete and total eradication, primarily through the use of chemical herbicides such as glyphosate, 2,4-D and imazapyr.

How effective is this management plan? Not very. What sorts of consequences does it have for the health of the land, and all those who inhabit it? We do not know, but like many other myopic decisions that we humans are making in this era, it's safe to assume that the full effects may not even fully manifest for decades, or centuries, or millennia to come.

By contrast, Tao, along with a growing number of skeptical ecologists and naturalists (myself included), would argue that the proliferation of non-native species is merely one symptom of a problem that runs much deeper than plant populations in flux, down to the core of our civilization and how we organize our lives.

“We need to be willing to take responsibility for the ecological changes that our lifestyle brings.”

When we allow ourselves to ask “why?” all the way down to the root of the problem, we are forced to confront the uncomfortable truth that our very way of life in the modern era is the reason for undesirable species thriving where robust and resilient native communities once flourished.

“I honestly think people feel guilty about the ways that land is being managed. There’s a deep sense of unease about the way our society has come into being — about our colonialist history.”

Tune in to hear Tao and I discuss the complex nature of invasive species and the field of restoration ecology; what invasive species can tell us when we read the landscapes around us; and how we can promote ecological literacy in a culture that only seems capable of investing in short-term treatments to minor symptoms of systemic problems.

I have chosen Beyond the War on Invasive Species as my pick for the book club in the month of July. Order a copy directly from Tao and she will even sign it before sending it off. Support good people doing good work!

Today’s episode also features several new pieces of music by yours truly. Stick around to the end where I share a new song of mine — 8 years in the making! — called “No Inside, No Out.”

Want to hear all of the original music from the podcast, in full? That’s just one of the perks for pledging your support for the Good Life Revival at any level on Patreon, the crowdfunding platform that makes it possible for me to do this work.

You can also gain early access to interviews like this one with Tao, which was published on Patreon a full week ahead of its release on the main feed.

To learn more and pledge your support today, visit patreon.com/goodliferevival.

Do you communicate with the plants on your local landscape? Because they are always trying their hardest to reach you, whether or not you’re able to hear them.

My guest for this installment of the Good Life Revival Podcast — no. 43 — is Daphne Valentine, a professional forager, farmer and pickle-maker from Murphreesboro, Tennessee. When it comes to communicating with plants, Daphne speaks with authority, drawing from a deep reservoir of lifelong experiences.

“Plants have a frequency. If you’re in tune with it, if you’re listening, you’ll hear it. […] Medicine plants give off a pretty strong frequency, and we hear that as foragers.”

Aside from her pursuits as a forager, she and her husband grow medicinal hemp on their farm through Tennessee’s Hemp Research Pilot Program, which she says is a very profound experience.

“Having grown hemp from seed to big bushy plants that are speaking, very loudly, I understand the connection. I understand the language that it is speaking.”

Each of Daphne’s primary interests are united, I think, by a core passion for the physical and emotional healing power of medicine plants, and of food as medicine itself. I hope this conversation encourages you to venture out on to the land to cultivate intimate relationships with all of the plant allies that you find there.

What do we find when we take a hard look at our collective suffering in the modern civilized world?

Is existence itself a state of suffering, as the Buddhists would have you believe – or is it possible that there is a fundamental disconnect between how we live and what our animal bodies and minds require?

“We are each still born a nomadic hunter-gatherer. If we were born into a hunter-gatherer culture we would turn out just the same as anyone else there. There’s nothing innately changed about us — it’s entirely social.”

My guest on this episode of The Good Life Revival Podcast is Kevin Tucker, the anarcho-primitivist thinker and writer responsible for the Black & Green Network, which connects green anarchists around the world in order to build momentum for the rejection and dismantling of civilization.

“Green anarchism is explicitly against civilization… Either the Earth is alive and worth fighting for, or it isn’t.”

Kevin is the author of Gathered Remains: Essays on Wildness, Domestication, Community, and Resistance, published through his own Black & Green Press in early 2018.

(I’ve chosen Gathered Remains as my pick for the month of June in our ongoing book club series – you can learn more about that here.)

Over the course of our two-hour conversation, we dig deep into the topic of green anarchism, its relationship to rewilding and the hunter-gatherer lifeway, what it means to be “domesticated”, and the impending cultural collapse that many of us believe is already under way.

I must admit that this is a sharp break from my usual M.O of presenting you with uplifting, motivational stories to inspire you to take action. As much as I prefer to spend most of my time in that head space, where I personally am able to be most productive, it is incredibly important that we keep in mind why we all desire to see a cultural shift towards a way of life that’s better aligned with the needs of the Earth – because our civilization could not possibly be any more dysfunctional and maladaptive, and it is not long for this world.

“These are the death throes [of civilization] and they are ugly — these are very ugly times and they’re going to continue to get worse.”

Make no mistake, this ship is sinking, and if we have any hope of constructing a lifeboat in time, it will require us to confront this stuff head-on. I hope you can muster up the courage to join me in doing the hard work of taking a hard look at the myriad existential crises at hand.

Why do we choose to swim against the current of modern civilization in this era of rapid change?

That’s a question that each of us, individually, will have to answer for ourselves. And that answer is liable to change, perhaps dramatically, as we venture further down the path back to nature and uncover hard-won knowledge about our place in the universe.

Ben Falk, a permaculture-oriented land designer and site planner who runs the Vermont-based company Whole Systems Design, says his position has shifted over time.

“I’ve moved away from the idea of trying to ‘survive.’ The big goal isn’t me surviving… I’m doing it to have a better life, and improve a place. I’m not trying to survive forever.”

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Ben on the topic of homesteading, and he was generous enough to share a mountain of practical info and advice for folks all across the spectrum of experience living close to the land.

“We’re cultivating an ecosystem that’s great for all living things here, and we just try to live on the byproducts of that ecosystem… we’re living on the interest.”

Ben’s 2013 book The Resilient Farm and Homestead played a pivotal role at the start of my own personal homesteading journey, shedding light on a seemingly bottomless well of things I didn’t know that I didn’t know… you know?

Ben is very down-to-earth and insightful when it comes to practical self-reliance, and also really a treat to converse with. I think there’s a lot to take away from this one, no matter where you find yourself on the path back to the land!

How do we navigate the spiritual landscape of our unique bioregions while honoring both our own ancestry and the history of the land and its people?

This is a line of questioning that seems to unite all of the passions of Becky Beyer, a teacher and practitioner of foraging, folk magic, and witchcraft outside of Asheville, North Carolina.

Becky is equally knowledgeable about the spiritual practices of her European ancestors and of her predecessors in that backwoods melting-pot we know as Appalachia.

She teaches about folk traditions and ethnobotany through her blog, Blood and Spicebush, and through the classes and workshops she offers in person. She's also a foraging instructor for No Taste Like Home.

We had a great conversation about the intersections of paganism, animism and witchcraft; the indescribable magic of the Appalachian region; how ethnobotany is living, breathing body of knowledge that we can contribute to as foragers; and how we settlers can honor both our European ancestry and the original peoples of our continent and bioregions, without falling into the traps of nationalism, colonialism or appropriation.

How long would you be willing to live in a tent, in order to pursue the lifestyle of your dreams?

For the latest installment of the Good Life Revival Podcast, I had the pleasure of chatting with Kim Davis, who's just begun to make a name for herself online as the Realist Nemophilist.

nemophilist - noun, singular.

(rare) One who is fond of forests or forest scenery; a haunter of the woods. (Wiktionary)

Kim and her mountain man Dan met when he was a pilot and she was a flight attendant, not long before Dan was diagnosed with a rare early-onset of macular degeneration -- in other words, he was fated to go blind in a matter of years.

This led to a sea-change in their lives, as they began to question what really matters to them and how they might design a lifestyle that they "don't have to take a vacation from."

"You don’t realize how much you’re plugged into that lifestyle — we didn’t, until we tried to leave it... I’m surprised by what I don’t really miss."

After relocating from Denver, CO to rural northern Maine last year, Kim and Dan purchased a few humble acres out in the wilderness and set up shop in a canvas tent, where they've roughed it through the harsh Maine winter in anticipation of building a tiny home for themselves once the landscape thaws.

In our conversation, Kim shares their incredible story of how they came to find themselves living in a tent in the woods, what their daily life is like in and around the tent, and what their plans are for their future out on the land.

We also spoke at length on the topic of race, and Kim was gracious enough to share her perspective as a black woman returning to nature and moving through rural America in a state that's not exactly known as a haven for people of color.

"My race speaks for me in the way your lifestyle may speak for you."

I am so grateful to Kim for spilling her guts here and being so candid and, well, real! Listening to our conversation is like catching up with an old friend who you haven't heard from in years.

Is it a privilege to be aware of our domesticated captivity within the walls of civilization? Is it a necessity to act on that privilege?

This is a line of questioning that I followed with Peter Michael Bauer, author of Rewild or Die: Revolution and Renaissance at the End of Civilization.

Of course, to even make sense of questions like these requires some fundamental shifts of perspective: as Peter points out, you need to be able to view them through a specific sort of lens -- the lens of rewilding -- without which you're left to wade through a whole mess of cognitive dissonance and half-truths you likely inherited from the dominant culture.

Suffice it to say that the forces of oppression and exploitation have a vested interest in framing our conversations in such a way as to divide and conquer us whenever possible. And we're all guilty of perpetuating this cultural climate, to a greater or lesser extent.

"Forgiveness doesn't go viral. Shame goes viral."

How, then, do we begin to push back against The Powers That Be in a meaningful, productive way?

Recognizing the privilege of being born into the wealthiest and most destructive culture the world has ever known, how do we harness said privilege to subvert and undermine the will of our oppressors?

We recorded this conversation in late February, just after the passing of the author Daniel Quinn (who I discussed in episode 34). As you’ll hear, Quinn’s work fundamentally altered the trajectory of Peter’s life, and he has some fascinating things to share regarding his encounters with Quinn, and how Quinn felt when he learned that his books inspired this movement of people who wish to dismantle civilization. (Here's a hint: it's probably not the reaction you're anticipating.)

Oh, and stick around to the end of the episode where I share a very personal spiritual experience I had recently at the fertile intersection of domestication, resistance, grief, and love.

For this installment of The Good Life Revival Podcast (#36) I spoke with Jonathan Mead, a nature-based movement coach and founder of The Uncaged Human. Jonathan teaches folks like you and me about how to reclaim our human animal nature through functional, nutritious movement.

You might think of what Jonathan does as rewilding fitness, in the sense that his work is aimed at ameliorating the ills of domestication that we face as captive creatures in this zoo we call civilization, and he draws upon what we know about the functional health of non-civilized humans in order to forge the path forward.

And there's a lot more than just "outer" work to be done: freeing a human from her civilized cage requires some fundamental inner work, too. After all, an unhealthy mind can be as much of a source of chronic pain and tension as an imbalanced body.

Jonathan and I had an excellent conversation about what he does and why does it, how his approach to fitness differs from the more conventional narratives you’re probably familiar with, and along the way he shares a ton of really practical information about getting your mind right and creating a cage-free environment for yourself that encourages a diversity and abundance of quality movement.

Is it possible to feed our families and our communities from the products of the forest, without harming nature in the process?

For episode #35 of The Good Life Revival Podcast, I had the pleasure of chatting with author Samuel Thayer, renowned as one of North America's leading authorities on wild foods and foraging.

Samuel is the author of the Forager's Harvest series of books, which he recently completed with the third installment, Incredible Wild Edibles, in late 2017.

We spoke, among other things, about his work as an author and teacher, the kinds of values we need to instill in our peers and the generations to come about wild foods, and the potential for wild spaces and non-domesticated species to serve as viable, sustainable alternatives to the tremendously damaging conventional farming paradigm that dominates the landscape and threatens to collapse our global food systems in the not-so-distant future.

Incredible Wild Edibles bears the subtitle “36 plants that can change your life,” and I can personally vouch that this is no exaggeration! Gathering wild foods is so much more than a hobby; it’s a way of life, and anyone who aspires to live with the rhythms of nature will quickly become obsessed after their first taste.