Making the green one Red

“The redmen are the last people on earth who speak on behalf of all living things. The bear, the deer, the sagebrush have no one else to speak for them… The white people have no love for this land. If we human beings persist in what we are doing, we will become like a mad cancer on our Mother Earth. If we don’t stop ourselves, something will stop us. We are destroying everything. The way things are fouled by nuclear waste, nothing can live on it. After we have made the Earth uninhabitable, will the human beings take this to other planets? If we take these ways of destruction to other planets, we will be the worst cancer in the universe. The universes will be programmed for destruction. We will wipe out the whole galaxy with our filth.”

Glen Wasson, Shoshone educator quoted in Dagmar Thorpe's Newe Sogobia: The Western Shoshone People and Land (Battle Mountain: Western Shoshone Sacred Lands Association, 1981).

It’s time to find the red in you. Stoke the inner flame of your mind and let the colour bleed into your flesh. It’s time for a new relationship with the Earth; it’s time for the old relationship with the Earth.

You don’t have to have seen Koyaniquatsi to know that in the West we are living a ‘life out of balance’. A storm is rising, as we begin to reap the whirlwind of a couple of centuries of mad industrialization and devotion to a capitalist ideology that has spread across the globe like a plague.

In the affluent places of the first world turbulent minds are collapsing under the strain, and the worried well turn to TV, chemicals pharmaceutical, chemicals sub-cultural, therapy rooms, suicide. The world looks on and sees weak mindedness. I see birds lifting from the trees before the earthquake, dogs whining before the thunder and the rain. My friends who mad doctor to the masses cannot miss this mystery.

The opposition that Freud saw between civilization and the expression of human desires, human desires that civilization sublimates - has only grown more tense as ‘civilization’ becomes increasingly an imperial project alienated from the Earth. The glaciers melting are a warning, the hurricanes are a warning, and the desertification of Europe is a warning. The alienation of people seeking some solace of true and deep communication in the rooms of strangers they pay is a warning. These are all warnings and the things of which they warn.

Thinkers after Freud ranging from Jacques Ellul, to Jerry Mander or John Zerzan and others have posited a vision that might be considered anti-civilization or primitivist. These ideas are some of the most challenging for our contemporary culture to even discuss let alone consider. They are the exact realization of the criticism thrown at many environmentalists that they want a “return to the stone age”, some of these figures do want a return to the stone age and they have reasoned arguments to support why that might be a good thing. There is much room for disagreeing with them, lots of area for debate and several conversations worth having.

Perhaps the strongest card they hold however is that humans lived sustainably on the planet for 2 million years before civilization. The civilized industrial world is evidently so riddled with the seeds of its own destruction that this curious culture of the West could be but a blip. As we continue to disrupt and destroy the last indigenous societies on Earth, those small groups still trying to live a life in harmony with nature we may be eradicating not just the past but the future.


I do not want to return to the Stone Age, but that we have much to learn from cultures and societies we have dismissed as ‘primitive’ is to me self-evident. We cannot continue to live in our ivory towers, in our white bread world exsanguinating the Earth like some rapacious albino vampires sucking dry the one mortal left.

James Piers Taylor

IMAGE: Shoshoni Indian gathered around tipis, anonymous photograph held at Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-115466 (c.1890), Western Shoshone lead protest at nuclear test site (2002) from Western Shoshone Defense Project.