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Do get in touch if you know about other Utrecht crypto-forests, or if you want to buy us a one-way ticket to the tropics, or if want some input for your own project, or if you want to join a walk, or for any aother reason at:

donotsearch at fightthegooglejugend dot com

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The G/Local Amazon: Deforestation, the destruction of natural habitats and the loss of biodiversity are tragic and irreversible events but ultimately their immediate effects remain local and that made deforestation easy to ignore. The issue of global warning has changed this, deforestation is responsible for 25% of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions. Everyday deforestation in the Amazon alone releases as much greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere as 8 million people flying from London to New York. We all live on the shadow of the Amazon.

Crypto-Forests: the (tropical) forest is the pinnacle of self-willed nature, the wildest and most dangerous of all possible landscapes: only savages, outlaws, witches and people with dark secrets call it home. But as the end-stage of ecological succession the rainforest is not the most wild but the most ordered and crystallized of ecosystems. Self-sustaining and self-perpetuating: it only appears wild to us mere humans because there is so much texture to its order that we mistake the trees for the forest; it belittles us and we do not like that. To quote Gary Snyder's TT Nomad's textbook 'The Practise of the Wild' “To raise a crop you fight the bugs, shoo the birds, and pull the weeds. The wild that keeps flying, creeping, burrowing in – is sheer frustration. Yet wild nature cannot be called unproductive, and no plant in the endless mosaics of micro- and macro communities is ever out of place.” The power of biological succession is absolute and every properly drained sandy field will, given enough time, bootstrap itself into a forest with self-confident finality. This lingering world is not a nuisance; it is an ethical and artistic proposition.  

Urban Reforestation: With a little selective active ruination, with a hole in the roof here and there, with a little dada-do-nothingness the city can begin its long road to fallow and reforestation. Excavations at various sites in the Amazon are revealing that the forest societies that flourished before the arrival of the euro-germs did more than sustain the forest. The recently unearthed 'Garden Cities of Xingu' suggest that large populations thrived far centuries as part of the forest, not at its expense. The current fertility and species-richness of former zones of habitation suggests something more: the Amazon rainforest has long been improved through human intervention. Transition Town Nomad's compendium of vagrant urban forests are to be understood as a model of what a future 'forest city', might look like.  

The Nomad: Nomads are not surrealists navigators, they do not roam free without constraint, they are not tossing a coin at every turn to decide where to go next. The nomad does not deviate into the great unknown, on the contrary, over time the nomad creates (actively, accidentally, serendipitously, through dump heaps and artificial selection) the landscape in its own image. Material possessions slow the nomad down, or to qoute Marshall Sahlins' aforism: "Ecological pressure assumes a rare form of concreteness when it has to be shouldered." Anthropologists have witnessed Amazonian bands going from pure nomadism to village life in a decade due to the attraction of the gravitational genus loci of commerce. Our society has much to give, its openness especially, but older brother seldom completely discards the old ways. Settled nomads will go on week-long treks and anthropologists joining these endeavours witness something that is both useful and tremendous fun, a holiday in which power-relations break down in favour of a good time. Nomadic life is the good life. Cities themselves can be nomadic. We need to get rid of all that stuff.

We have not yet spoken of survival (post-crash primitivism).