The NSW government can shutter Forestry Corp at any time. People would financially benefit from them doing so, and it would instantly protect over 2,000,000 hectares of some of the most biodiverse environments on the continent, home to species that literally date back to the time of the dinosaurs.

I lugged my collection of books from town to town, across a continent, from place to place, for 40 years. It has always felt like if I didn’t have them, I didn’t have the knowledge or insights they contained: “Medicinal plants of the PNW”, “Against His-story, against Leviathan”, “TAZ”, “Foods of the indigenous peoples of British Columbia”, “How to make wild mead and wine”, “Living My Life”, “The Castle”, “ Les chants de Maldoror”... But I recently moved to a new place. I brought my collection of books and when it came time to unload and store them, I began to refer to them as ‘boxes of words”. “Damn it, another 50 lbs of words! I can hardly lift this thing!” Quantifying their content in this way was a liberating moment. I had finally put them in their place.

Books are not literally knowledge or wisdom or insights — they are paper and ink and glue, the congealed labor and alienation of workers, commodities in the marketplace. And they are heavy! I have boxes and boxes and shelves and shelves of words. And once again I get the sense that I’m merely an object of history, a cliche, a passive being who has internalized enlightenment and civilized values and aspirations. Like the bourgeois who wants to live in their own castle, I’m the philosopher with his own library!

The emergence of literacy and its role in society is a large and complex topic, one deserving of much debate and conversation. But it’s important to me that the reader of my essays is aware of my discomfort with, and ultimately rejection of, literate-centricity. It seems implied by the writing and publishing of my thinking that I must view literacy as a neutral, if not necessary or important, tool in the spreading of ideas. But this is not the case. In fact, I believe that a better world, an anarchic one, would have difficulty making a place for it. It would have to be an imposition, a misplaced, ill-fitting carry-over from the old world into the new.

Literacy presupposes many relationships between humans and between humans and their environment.

Is orthography more important than say community songs and dances? In an ecologically sane, imaginative, horizontal world, are there going to be school buildings in which we are forced to sit quietly as children, being taught how to write and spell, or will we be at the river learning how to fish, or in the field learning how to gather medicinal herbs and edible plants? Will we be laboring at a printing press, with its machinery and oils and noise, or honing our oratorical skills at gatherings? Will we be in the machine shop making parts for the press or reciting poetry from memory to our lover in a meadow?

To my mind, books are like cars or computers or electric guitars. We make use of them today, within the context of this particular social order, but I assume that we have no intention of maintaining the cultural values and social relationships necessary for their survival in a post capitalist world without centralized political power enforcing a homogeneous culture on a population. If anarchy is renewal, is a liberatory explosion of the imagination, a rejection of coercion, of monolithic lifeways, then I fail to see how literacy would survive in such a de-commodified, horizontal, de-massified existence.

I admit that I have greatly benefitted from books, from poetry and radical theory to how-to and fiction books. I’ve been enriched by their possession. But I’ve also enjoyed my toaster, electric piano, disposable lighters and automobile and sincerely hope and doubt that any of these would survive the dismantling of the global grid of authoritarian institutions and a rediscovery of our kinship with nature.

Historically elite classes kept a great deal of knowledge to themselves, keeping the peasantry ignorant of important facts, which made literacy and books sort of levelling tools, a way to even the playing field. Clearly, in that context, we seem better off with them. But are we really? Aren’t there other ways to impart important knowledge? If all the municipal buildings and the banks were burned to the ground, if there was no longer records of ownership or debt as everything was freely shared, what sort of information would still be necessary to record and store?

So I am encouraging us to look more closely at literacy, the social order and relationships that created it and the way it forms our thinking, reinforces unhealthy habits, and reproduces oppressive and uniform social orders. I am also speculating that truly free people deep-rooted in habitats would probably not pursue literacy. Without elites that have an interest in keeping certain knowledge for themselves, facts and philosophy would be shared and debated equally through daily activities, not contained in books.

Books are not just one feature of a beautiful web of learning. They are more like the hub of a mechanical wheel, with a set of hard spokes emanating from it. Each spoke represents a static, simple fragment of what might have been a holistic and complex culture. One spoke points to the alienation and coercion inherent in schooling as an institution, another to the ossification of language as the organic is forced to bend to the inorganic, another to alienated labor making the machinery and paper and ink and glue, and yet another points to a society of experts and the division of labor, etc. It seems so obvious that, given the choice, only some people might choose to maintain literacy and books, but many others, likely most, would not and it would be difficult to argue that the literate culture would be superior to the illiterate. In fact the literate one would plainly need a social order very similar to the one we are trying to dismantle!

There is a big difference between language/oratorical skills and the ability to communicate using script. If we were to live in organically self-organized communities that are entrenched in habitats, would we have an interest or the time to teach script and copy texts? Wouldn’t we be busy mending fishing nets, making medicines, repairing our structures, preserving food and other daily necessities of survival? Isn’t it likely that as authentic communities form and separate from the massified cultures of capitalism, localized dialects would emerge? Does it make any sense for local dialects and languages spoken by small numbers of people to have their own script? To what purpose?

Without authoritarian institutions, private property records, large homogeneous territories controlled from above, there would be an explosion of new languages blossoming over the planet as centralized control, colonialism, compulsory education and mass media disappear. We know that there was once an enormous diversity of languages, and that they were erased by economics, political imperatives, outsider interests, subjugation, invasion... If this is the case, ridding ourselves of these forces would lead to a re-emergence of this diversity. And in that scenario, why would small villages, isolated regions, roaming clans of nomads, experimental unions of egoists, autonomous tribes, etc ever want to take the time to build a script that reflects their language, perhaps only spoken by a few hundred or thousand people?

It seems plainly ridiculous to assume that literacy will endure everywhere or even anywhere where anarchic social relations prevail. I doubt that the interest, ability and energy will exist to ensure its universal continuance. A few texts in some places might be copied and reproduced in some fashion, but we shouldn’t project a literate world into a decentralized, non-industrial, de-massified and ecological existence. It seems much more likely that the average inhabitant of any given area will be expected and encouraged to nurture highly developed memory and oratorical skills rather than literate abilities. Of course there are social and pro-industrial anarchists committed to maintaining urban civilization, and, in the beginning at least, they would recognize literacy as an essential cog in that machine and therefore try to maintain it, but it would likely be a difficult proposition if coercion were truly absent, and overtime the effort would fail.

In the meantime I want to encourage face to face conversations and debates, public speaking, memorization of texts and other forms of direct, non-literate communication not only among eco-radicals, but among all who truly want demassified societies, anarchic relationships and orientations, authentic upheaval, etc. Even reading to each other is probably better than reading alone. Instead of handing someone a zine or an essay, why not try to memorize it, make it your own in some way, then share it with your friends/comrades/neighbours?

Memorization, public speaking talents and the ability to take the stories and ideas of others and make them our own can be powerful tools and skills in our struggle to dismantle the psychological and propagandistic institutions that dominate our lives, to help open our minds and hearts to what is truly important and re-discover new ways of learning about and sharing them.

“If I decide to break the chains of domestication, I can only do so because I feel the chains and suffer the effects of domestication on my own skin.” – Alfredo Bonanno

I

While out walking or cycling at night, foxes can always be seen roaming the housing estate. The glow of their eyes in darkness, appearing from dark alleyways suddenly visible under the street lights, they move around without a sound, hardly noticed. These lovely magnificent creatures are the embodiment of wildness. Leviathan towers all around but yet these wild beings live on freely from domestication. The foxes at times live off the scraps and waste that civilization throws away, but long after civilization crumbles these creatures will live on.

These wild beings will live on long after civilization kills itself because they are not dependent on civilization to provide the means of life. They remain wild and undomesticated, still equipped with the knowledge and skills to find food, build shelter, and survive independently for themselves.

The vast majority of humans on the other hand are totally domesticated and dependent on civilization and the vast majority would not be able to survive without shops and machines. Only a tiny percentage of humans that inhabit the earth still live wild, free, and living autonomously. The rest are imprisoned within the concrete and metal structures of techno-industrial society.

Domestication begins from birth, straight away an individual is given a birth certificate and social security number. These will be needed throughout life, to be recognised by whatever state an individual happens to be born into, to go to school, to work, to open a bank account and from there to get loans to buy shit, to get a passport, to register to vote, so the state knows who you are, what taxes you have paid or owe, your credit history: to be controlled and exploited. From birth, through childhood, into adulthood,an individual is moulded and taught how to behave, what is acceptable and what is not; through force and blackmail of collective and religious moralities created by the systems and institutions that make up civilization. The end result: a domesticated and a functional obedient citizen and wage slave.

Everything within the civilized culture is geared towards this. Education, children’s stories, TV shows, movies, books, games, and even songs are all exposure to the social norms and control of civilization. The soul purpose of the individual in civilization is to produce and reproduce the social structures, authoritarian institutions and daily subservience to civilized society. There is little room for escape from behind the computer screens and consumerism.

II

Tenalach (Irish) – Used to describe a relationship one has with the land, air and water, a deep connection that one literally hears the Earth sing.

I’ve always felt an affinity and closeness with wild spaces. From childhood, playing in the fields and woodlands, fishing in the lake and swimming in the rivers that were close to the housing estate I grew up in. As a kid taking day trips to the Wicklow mountains seeing all the views, beauty of the trees and plants, rugged valleys, and at times what seems like inhospitable landscape of bog land and cliff drops.

Being in such spaces conjures up and stores feelings within me I wouldnt be able to adequately describe with words. Perhaps they could be described as something spiritual.

The landscape has been left scarred by civilization. Roads built long ago by the British colonists to flush out any hiding rebels, shells and ruins of buildings left over from the dawn of industrialism scattered across the landscape, electrical dams blocking up rivers, TV and radio transmitter masts, bog land robbed and left mutilated to feed industrial “progress”, forests cut down and replaced by animal agriculture and monocrop Sitka tree plantations poisoning the land, and the mass graves from pogroms and genocide of the religious and imperalist conquerers. There isn’t a place left on this island that civilization hasn’t left its mark.

In my early 20’s locked up in prison for taking part in the anti-imperialist struggle, I felt these feelings for the wild more intensely.

Not seeing any plants or trees, except the ones I could see from my cell window on the horizon. The urge to walk in grass and sand in my bare feet, wanting to roam in woodland to look up at the sky through the canopy.

For the years spent incarcerated I daydreamed about being in nature, being in the mountains, being by the sea.

After four years with eight months left I was granted temporary release for Christmas.

For the first time outside the concrete walls, iron bars and razor wire of prison there was only one thing I really wanted to do and that was to go to the ocean.

The beach was a short walk from where I was staying. To get there I’d first have to walk through a park. As I walked, even though it was winter there was still a lot of colour. A lot of the big tall trees in the park are evergreen trees so they still had their colour. Going through the park my head and eyes were darting around taking in the landscape, walking under the tall trees, their canopy blocking out the sky. It was an amazing feeling being hit in the face with so many different colours, different shades of green.

Sensory stimulation from the sounds of flowing water making its way down streams, birds chirping and singing, the wind blowing long grass and branches, colors of the landscape and the various shades of browns and greens of foliage was almost overwhelming to the senses.

When I reached the beach I walked for a little bit and then sat on a sand dune for about two hours looking out into the vast ocean of green, reflecting in my thoughts and finding some solace in my mind.

Are these feelings that rush around my mind and body urging me wildness, the inner primal anarchic instinct buried by years of domestication?

Or are they an individual desire and love within me for the wild?