Haven’t seen it. I remember some passages in this where they talk about coming across dams in the middle of nowhere on the coast of BC and Alaska that are no longer serving any purpose, and feeling moved to dismantle them. Good read.
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Oh yeah, @andrew, I remember the 2014 ‘sustainability’ panel. Damn that was weird. I was up there with a bunch of annual/monoculture farmers, and I kept trying to steer the conversation beyond food, but soon realized it wasn’t gonna happen with the other panelists up there, and that the audience was probably not ready for much more than a 101-level glimpse into the world of “sustainability” in any case. Most ppl come to paleo to lose weight, and getting them to start seeing all the other ways in which an ancestral perspective can help them and the world around them is a loooooong process.
I was glad you raised the permaculture question, and I know I didn’t go into full-on AP rant mode when you asked it; in the split-second I had, I wasn’t sure how I could address the issue while not seeming (to the sustainability newbies in the audience) like I was gratuitously and randomly blaming all the nice farmy people on the panel for the downfall of humanity. I mean, sweet home-grown tomatoes and plump little piggies never hurt anyone, right? 
Fortunately, the 2015 sustainability panel was a lot better! Most of the other panelists were a lot more permie/AP/rewildy in their thinking, and the panel went much further and deeper. There were some moments of audience cheering, suggesting that some ppl were ready to accept these ideas, at least hypothetically. I felt a definite shift from 2014. Obviously the diffusion of a rewilding ethos into the paleo community has barely begun, but I do feel a growing receptivity. Ironically, there’s much more receptivity to these ideas in the paleo community than I’ve found in ‘sustainability’ circles; there are a lot of reasons for this, but it’ll be interesting to see how it all unfolds. The PFX organizers are definitely hip to this stuff, which gives me (some) hope.
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Is the panel you’re referring to the one Lierre Keith was supposed to be on, and that I was an alternate on, but wasn’t paying attention? Missing out on that propaganda opportunity was a bummer.
yeah, I was really bummed that she wasn’t there! I was so excited to have a fellow radical feminist to riff with, broadening the convo waaaaay beyond food. I didn’t know you were an alternate; i guess you didn’t either, till it was too late. Wish you’d been up there too. Could’ve had a critical mass to steer the convo beyond the pastoral ideal…
Yeah, I’ve scored hundreds of pounds of free fat from local butchers who would otherwise throw it away. Doesn’t work everywhere, but there’s still a lot of good free stuff out there for those who don’t fear… DUHN DUHN DUHNNNNNN… saturated fat.
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Yeah, I use to collect the fatty parts of the brisket from a local BBQ joint. They said they couldn’t sell the fatty parts. Unfortunately wasteful and unsustainable.
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It would be cool to collect a bunch of tips on how people are getting cheap/free animal fat that would otherwise be “waste”.
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Shared in the other thread. Praise the lard.
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Nourishing Traditions, I have the book but have not listened to Sally Fallon giving a lecture. Btw, I have very poor teeth.
Interesting discussion.
In my opinion it all depends on our ‘perspective’ on humans, animals, nature, Earth, the Universe.
I see it all as a creation we are part of, and therefore need to preserve. In every part of life we have to be aware, conscious. We need to know the effects of our actions. The way we eat, the way we get our food, as well as the way we get and treat all other things we use and everything else we do … we need to think very well (meditate) before we act.
For me this way of thinking leads to what can be called ‘permaculture’. The word ‘feralculture’ is strange to me; it implies ‘wild’ at one side and ‘culture’ at the other side. In my opinion ‘culture’ is ‘not wild’, but ‘tamed’ 
So are you saying that our hunter-gatherer ancestors 200,000 years ago were tamed, or that they didn’t have culture?
That is exactly what I thought a permaculturalist would say.
Historically, wild humans are exterminated for the “benefit” of tamed humans.
Toby Hemenway - Clash of cultures HG vs agriculture http://bit.ly/1pAIwrD
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Maybe the way I wrote this was unclear. I think it’s my view on the word ‘culture’. I see this by the question of Andrew here ‘… or that they didn’t have culture’. No, that is NOT what I mean.
To me the word ‘culture’ means: a habit, a way of living / acting, developed by (a group of) humans. So ‘cultural’ is not ‘natural’. To me ‘natural’ is ‘wild’. The hunting-gathering people had/have their culture. They have a certain way of life, their habits, traditions, their art, stories, etc. They do not have ‘agriculture’ in the sense of sowing, planting, growing crops. They ‘harvest’ from wild nature. But they, themselves, are not ‘wild’, they have their culture!
When I said ‘tamed’ I meant: not wild but developed; there is ‘a culture’. People always have and always had a culture, since the very first beginning of humankind. Hunting-gathering people make use of the wild nature as a part of their culture. They are not ‘wild’.
(The only people who are wild are those very rare ‘wolf-children’ and alike, who are raised and educated by wild animals. At least that is my opinion.)
Because the word ‘feral’ means ‘wild’, in my view it’s a contrast to the word ‘culture’. So ‘feralculture’ is a contradictio in terminis.
It seems to me that assuming the position that there never was a wild human precludes much consilience on this particular question.
“Feral” doesn’t mean “wild” per se, and implies something domesticated that has moved toward wild, or has become wild. The recognition of our domestication through a hyper-mediated culture is actually why we use “feral”. In that sense, I think it nicely escapes the entire question of paleolithic cultural taxonomy.
Even if it didn’t, I like contradiction. It makes people think and invites discussion.
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Thank you Andrew, for explaining. I did not know the word ‘feral’ (my language is Dutch), so I looked it up in the dictionary. there it said ‘wild’. Now you say it is a domesticated (animal) moved toward wild, I did some more searching (wikipedia) and yes, you are right. So the meaning of ‘feralculture’ changes completely for me. Now it makes sense! It’s about modern ‘domesticated’ people who go ‘back to nature’ in their way of living.
But still I like the word ‘perma-culture’ more. ‘Perma’ (permanent) implies ‘everlasting, all-inclusive, whole’. Permaculture (as a word, not as a theory or a system) includes all: nature AND culture, humans, animals, plants, minerals, everything from microcosmos to macrocosmos, from the beginning and going on for ever …
I think this will invite some more discussion
Unfortunately, many people do not take permaculture to mean “permanent culture”, but “permanent agriculture”. It is my belief that if we permanently have agriculture, we will not have humans. So while I like the concept of permaculture, as I believe Holmgren and Mollison intended it, I believe it has been distorted. This distortion seems most extreme in the US, where permaculture has become something of a marketing gimmick. My impression is that permaculture has become something capitalists think they can improve by profit incentives, and I think that’s false, and also makes it difficult to use the term.
It’s a pity, Andrew. All good things are taken by the commercial business (capitalists). They change the concept so they can use it to make profit. Probably soon they’ll take the ‘feralculture diet’ too. That’s the way it works.
But don’t worry. Just go on doing things the right way!
I go to local slaughter houses, and ask for it. Some give it to me free, some charge a little bit for it. I get the kidneys along with beef suet usually free.
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