Interview: James Van Lanen

Talking with James Van Lanen, anthropologist, re-wilding advocate, and author of Human Rewilding in the 21st Century, mapping the intersections of species-level fitness, ecological embeddedness, and the long arc of civilizational collapse…

On species-level fitness versus civilizational fitness, on Herbert Spencer and the colonial roots of survival of the fittest, on aggrandizing agents and the alpha-hoarding pattern, on the Radical Anthropology Group and the female coalition theory of human speciation, on Pierre Clastres and secondary primitivism, the people who ran back into the jungle, on five hundred years of Amazonian oral history as the most successful anti-civilizational politic in human history, on the Hadza and the smartphone controversy, on his rebuttal to Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, on Joseph Tainter and continually diminishing returns, on the gathering that would fall apart at thirty days, on nodal community versus rigid communes, on finding your gifts rather than peddling hope, on daughters and the stone knives,

Thirteen years traveling by small aircraft to remote Alaskan communities, fieldwork across four continents, Siberia, the Amazon, Africa, and now independent, outside the bureaucracy of both the academy and the state. His work challenges both the right-wing bunker prepper and the techno-progressive urban left, arguing instead for rural dropout-ism: not ideology, but as a true measure of human fitness.

Excerpts

On Amazonian Isolated Tribes

There's some sort of oral history passed down for generations that says: those progressive complex societies — don't go in. They're very dangerous. And they've maintained that politic for at least several hundred years, if not thousands.

Channeling Derek Jensen

You are just a puny little human. You cannot change this situation as an individual. But figure out what your gifts are: what's really in your heart, and apply them to bettering the situation even in the smallest way you can.

On Species Fitness

 And I came to the conclusion that real species level fitness is intimately connected to the natural world without all this technological mediation that's the why I've just never stopped this path because to me on a personal level, pursuing that wildlife provides me this really strong feeling of living optimally.

Connect with James @

https://www.jamesvanlanen.com/

https://www.humanrewilding.earth/