The King’s Deer: Is America no place to practice primitive survival skills?

To live is an act of consumption. How can we conserve nature, and still understand and appreciate it, and continue to pass our knowledge of primitive survival skills down to our children and grandchildren? The survival of our species may very well depend on it.

Yet practicing primitive survival skills is regulated by federal and state and frowned upon by “conservationists” falsely so called. How could anybody object to learning about nature by practicing primitive survival skills? If you’re worried about your carbon footprint, the health of our planet, hugging the trees or saving the whales, you can’t truly appreciate nature from inside your home or from inside the walls of a school. You have to get out in nature and experience it and you can’t get any closer than to nature than by practicing primitive survival skills.

By that measure, nobody appreciates nature more than the primitive survival crowd. How could they be a threat to nature? They are nature’s biggest fans.

It has do with an extremist environmental mantra that became a mandate and has been force fed to the US Forest Service, the Boy Scouts of America, schools, state forest and fish and game agencies and on down the line. The mantra is:

Leave No Trace (LNT)

It sounds harmless enough, unless you realize that it is a scientific impossibility, and you try to make it the law of the land. No one can live or even pass without leaving a trace. Like all animals, human beings must consume in order to live. By existing, every Homo sapiens has an impact on the rest of the planet and the rest of the planet has an impact on us. Just like our ancestors, we have been part of what we now refer to as nature. Attempting to separate man from nature is the sandy foundation Leave No Trace is built upon.

What started as an ethic “in response to environmental damage cause by outdoor recreation”, became a movement. At first, it was common sense that people should pick up after themselves and not damage the environment. But like many commonsense adages, it falls apart when taken to its literal extreme, something the founders of the movement likely never intended.

LNT extremists believe that people should be totally separated from nature. Our forests and deserts must be roped off and people should be fed by monoculture on factory farms. You can’t go mixing human beings and nature.

They think our natural parks should be placed under glass domes and that we should be fed, clothed, fueled, and entertained using the natural resources of countries without far less environmental regulation that our own nation has. In essence, their argument is that our natural resources should be placed behind glass, and we should trash someone else’s back yard. It might work, except for the fact that we are all on the same planet and what you do in China affects the air and atmosphere and water in the USA and vice versa. We are all in this together.

The King’s Deer

I had the occasion to observe two of the grandfathers of the primitive survival, David Holladay and Dave Wescott, discuss this subject one year at PrepperCon. For decades their craft has been regulated out of existence to the point that primitive gatherings are hosted on private property because it is pretty much impossible to host them anywhere else. These are the people who practice fire my friction, flint knapping, and gather wild edibles for their day job. In addition to being educators, they are experts at living off the land, something that has become so highly regulated in the US that it is at times impossible to do without offending someone or breaking a rule here and there.

David Holladay said, “It’s like the story of Robin Hood. When Robin was arrested for killing one of the King’s deer. Pretty soon it will against the law for a guy to feed himself. You’ll be thrown in jail just for living.” He was absolutely right.

Legislators love to make laws. The problem is too little energy is assigned to getting rid of the bad and outdated laws. There are so many laws in the USA that nobody knows how many there are. Congress tried to count how many laws we have, but there are so many laws that they ran out of funding before they were able to count them all.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse, so we are held accountable for obeying laws that are so numerous that the government is incapable of even telling us how many laws there are, much less what every one of them says. It reminds of the book Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent. The premise is that the average professional commits three felonies a day and ends the day unaware that he has done so.

In Utah, harvesting rainwater that falls on your own property was heavily regulated until just a few years ago. It was illegal to collect more than a couple of barrels if they were above ground. Keep in mind, rainwater harvesting is a practice that is good for water conservation. If everybody did it, they would be more aware of their water usage and the work and expense of harvesting rainwater and they would naturally waste less water. They would also use thousands of gallons less water per year. Now, Utahans can have a tank of up to 2,500 gallons… as long as they register it with the division of water rights. Not to worry though, most are very much in favor of rainwater storage. Utah is one of the exceptions.

So, who cares if a few hippies go out in the desert and rub some sticks together, maybe collect a few rocks, drink little water, and eat a few plants? It turns out, federal and state government, the Sierra Club, and the rest of the present-day LNT whackos care very much. They don’t want them getting their hippie stink or their bare footprints all over the Sierra Club’s forests and deserts. They don’t want them eating any plants, braiding cordage, making fires, and don’t even think about building a primitive shelter.

Never mind that these activities were sacred to the people who started the LNT movement. Because today’s LNT extremists are so much more enlightened than their neandertal predecessors who enjoyed the outdoors someplace other than on their flatscreen TV. And they are more than happy to lecture you about why is wrong to have children, eat anything that wasn’t grown in some other country, or set foot off of asphalt or concrete.

LNT & the CCP

I can’t help but wonder if they aren’t useful idiots for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Take rare earth metals for instance. China processes 85% of the world’s rare earth metals. If it weren’t for the LNT crowd, we would be processing our rare earth metals here in the US, where there is strict environmental regulation. Instead, we load rare earth metals mined in the US onto ships, which spew carbon and chop up dolphins all the way to China, where they are processed free of environmental regulation, then we sell our rare earth metals to Chinese companies at a discount, since they are already there, China uses them products, which are then shipped all they way back the US, once again spewing carbon, running over whales, and chopping up dolphins with giant propellers the whole way. And it’s the “environmentalists” who are causing this to happen?

Electric vehicle production may drive demand for rare earth metals, but China has another interest. The US is more vulnerable to a High-Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP) than any other nation. A HEMP would destroy the Very Large Transformers, that step electricity up for transmission and step it down at its destination. Each VLT uses many tons of rare earth metals, is custom designed and built, and has a lead time that measures in years. China controls the lion’s share of production, processing and manufacture of VLT’s. With a single strike, they could cripple the North American grid. If they do, the US would be dependent on China to rebuild it.

Allowing China to maneuver the US into this position was colossally stupid on our part. All they needed was the cooperation of the LNT crowd, who lined up for handouts from the CCP.

Live Free or Die

In the process, the USA went from the “Land of the Free” to the “Land of the Not Quite as Free as We Used to Be.” I never felt as free as I did out hunting and camping in the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. But after 9-11, the bedwetters did something the terrorists never could have done. They passed the un-Patriot Act, built the TSA, and in that climate, LNT went from a commonsense ethic to a “Let me see your papers!” mandate. It makes me sad that our kids and grandkids will never know what it feels like to be truly free … at least not here in the “Land of the free.”

I was free to practice primitive survival skills and to feed myself off the land. But my son will be an outlaw for doing the same thing in the same place at a different time. I suppose every generation has to have its revolution and becoming a criminal so mankind doesn’t go extinct is as good a reason as any. I say, “Down with the King!”