42. Domestication and the Suffocating Void of Modern Civilization with Kevin Tucker of Black & Green Review

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.