#79: Primitive Permaculture: Interview with David Lauterwasser

(11/20/2024) Arnold talks with David of Feun Foo Permaculture and Rewiliding and the An Animist's Ramblings. An anarcho-primitivist, David has been making a case for expanding the cultures this political tendency uses as models for life outside civilization. Feun Foo is an experiment in adapting, to the modern context, practices of small-scale, forest-dwelling cultivation which have enabled a great diversity of societies—from highland Southeast Asia to the Amazon—to live in ecological equilibrium. Primitivism has often faltered for its lack of clear answers to the question: “knowing what we know, how should we live?” David is helping to guide these politics into a more applied, experimental, and fluid manifestation. We speak of the multi-dimensional nature of domestication; the awe-inspiring visits of elephants to Feun Foo; the personality variation of chickens; the strange and varied diet one ends up adopting subsisting off the land; and the need for a unified sense of identity among those who have rejected the mechanistic worldview, regardless of precisely how that identity manifests politically.