The One Skillset No One Wants From Indigenous People, & The Skillset of Dystopian Survivalism
I started growing Typha Latifolia a few years ago in my ponds, and I started to understand why this plant was revered by indigenous people across the globe. Although it is an invasive species in Hawaii.
With far greater skill than I. Mats made from typha, stacked and layered, make warm, insulated mattresses.
In the UK, it is one of many native wetland species, and it's an important plant for carbon capture. The annual biomass output from Typha is phenomenal. We could be cleaning our rivers and capturing CO2 into a plant that fills the cells within its leaves with CO2 and pressurises it.
Of course, this is more nuanced, but there is potential to capture CO2 in much higher concentrations than just the biomass. Typha has the potential to survive temperatures as high as 48°C, as well as at the Arctic Circle. This plant has been almost everywhere humans have in the last 100,000 years.
Indigenous people have used typha for bedding, insulation, thatch, floor mats, medicine, food, fire lighting, arrow shafts & cordage for millennia.
I looked at typha and thought this could be a survival food growing in plain sight. But in places it is increasingly rare. I have made bread on hot stones from the flour of the typha root and it is agreeable as food. But the question I ask is how hot is too hot? Because the bottom line is that surviving the collapse of agriculture requires new knowledge and novel foods.
What will we eat when agriculture collapses?
Or as Dr Gail Bradbrooks says, when the supermarket shelves are empty?
This is a serious question. This isn't dystopian survivalism, and any suggestion that it is, is entirely in the words of a famous author and cult leader who invented these tropes about survival skills. "We are not going back, I want people looking forward. Because you can't live in a mud hut on a Welsh Hillside. We go forward with today's technology. There aren't going to be Plucky Humans roaming the post collapse landscape."
Basically, what is being suggested is keep the old systems' benefits and technology. But somehow it stops being exploitative while maintaining internet connectivity, somehow, probably through magical thinking the old system is hospiced and we grow a new one based on Celtic Values.
It's not the sub-zero conditions of AMOC collapse which worries me. Humans survived inside the Arctic Circle for 1000s of years. AMOC collapse will increase climatic whiplash events and greater extremes of heat and cold in the regions which were once temperate and agreeable.
Have you been flooded out yet, or watched helplessly as your neighbours are swept away? Initiation into climate collapse has been, for some, a literal baptism of fire.
Spiritual leaders and influencers on public social media who reject the learning of the skills which made the 1990s counter culture movement happen are also enjoying the fruits of those labours by going to the Big Green Gathering. Those platforms, stages, music venues, and all the infrastructure that make it happen: showers, compost toilets, come from skilled "people who build stuff".
"We need people who can build stuff" Exclaims Dr Gail Bradbrook in an Interview with Phoenix Rainbow. She wants to talk to people who want to organise around the collapse practically.
I am one of those people who builds stuff, it's a kind of lefty prepping, let's just consider it as #solidarityprepping. This is where we collectively prepare through skill and knowledge sharing.
Some survival skills are really useful and are the difference between being cold and wet and struggling in a pinch, or being warm, drying out and getting through bad weather. I have been in these exact situations surrounded by under-skilled people.
I stopped going to the Big Green Gathering; it grew too big and lost its intimacy. I now build off-grid showers for any off-grid setup, with no electricity. Backwoods engineering is part of the Dystopian Survivalists skillset.
"Following the driest spring recorded in 50 years in the UK (with England experiencing its driest spring in more than 100 years)1, reduced grass growth has raised concerns about a hay shortage this year. Pressure from continued dry, hot weather is leading to farmers and horse owners having to supplement their animals’ feeding with hay, which will contribute to supply issues"
The fact is, we are already there; this is now an agriculture in decline. I was posting YouTube videos about the drought in March & April of 2025. Maybe horses are not a climate-friendly pet?
AMOC collapse will devastate our already failing agriculture. But stressing about cold, for humans and smaller, more hardy animals, is ridiculous. It is the extremes of heat we cannot survive, and once again, the scientists attending and speaking at the National Emergency Briefing did not mention Wet Bulb Global Temperatures.
The One Skillset No One Wants From Indigenous People
How did humans survive the evolutionary bottleneck?
Adaptation, cooperation and adopting diverse skills. Indigenous people have lived in close connection to the land using many of the skills I advocate for learning. Because survival skills give confidence, could save your life, and will definitely bring them into a deeper connection with nature than a ritualistic initiation burial where you are told how it connects you to nature through ritualised death and rebirth.
The thing is, it doesn't matter how healthy your diet is, you can't eat and shit your way to nature connection, because the GIT Serotonin cannot cross the Blood-brain barrier. So even though GIT Serotonin acts on the heart, regulating blood pressure and valve activity, it does nothing to help you experience entanglement or interconnectedness. This assumption is scientifically wrong, and there are a number of peer-reviewed studies which show that less than 1-2% of the total Seotonin which the brain produces when stimulated by nature, images of nature and birdsong are there for the brain to process experiences in nature, such as processing fear with pleasure. Anything else is unscientific psychobabble..
"In the education of the gut, it’s where most of the serotonin produced in our body is in the gut. Serotonin is the neurotransmitter that helps us sense this sense of entanglement and connection with everything, and calmness and responsibility towards everything else. And the other thing, too, in indigenous education is that there are very few things you teach directly."
In Gathering Moss, Robin Wall Kimmerer identifies that mosses were ignored by the anthropologist, because they were gathered by the women for secret things, and the anthropologist, being male, took no interest in what they were doing.
Anthropologists like Michael Harner were in search of the spiritual connection to nature that indigenous people clearly demonstrated. But instead of looking at how they socialised their children into nature, he saw Ayahuasca as the agent for connection, and this was flawed. Ayahuasca can help you experience the interconnectedness of nature, but it cannot sustain that connection. Core Shamanism claims we can connect to nature through misappropriated rituals and ceremonies. Unfortunately, this too is a dead end.
We have plundered indigenous peoples for their land, knowledge wisdom and spirituality, but we ignore their skills as primitive and backward. Everyone wants to be a shaman, and this characature fits perfectly.
North American indigenous people are deeply insulted and offended by white plastic medicine men and women selling spirituality.
It seems bizarre that someone who calls themselves a Shamanic Practitioner (we aren't being shaman, we use their tools) is hostile to learning about real connection to nature and has invented a variety of excuses as to why she rejects the skills indigenous people teach their children.
I was sad to hear the description of coppice cycles skipping a generation, "last cut in the time of our grandfathers" as a description of Celtic coppice cycles.
Coppice cycles have changed little since the Neolithic, depending on what it was required for, coppice cycles range from 1 to 15 years, but never 80+ years. This isn't artistic license, it's laziness, it's easy to learn about coppicing, and if your spirit guides told you, then it's either ego or delusional. Making a statement like this as part of a "shamanic journey visualisation meditation" just misleading people. Its misinformation. In exactly the same way that describing the skills that the counter-culture use to put on events like the Big Green Gathering as dystopian survivalism, you are completely misunderstanding how we manage our own climate anxiety.
As for dominating the messaging, believing modernity can be hospiced to its end, even as industrial capitalism is committing another genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in America. This isn't peak fascism, Trump still has time to start a war so he can bypass elections as America descends ito the race war the privileged whites have always dreamed of. We don't need the saccarine mantra or magical thinking of a "world we could be proud to leave the next generation" when clearly we are leaving them a nightmare, and some people would condemn them to an unskilled nightmare, because of their ego.
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