#3 - Barnaby Nichols [Rewilding, Philosophy]

Thought Club with Percy Grunwald

Today’s episode is a conversation I had with my good friend Barnaby Nichols. I’m not really sure how to describe Barnaby in a way that will do him justice, but if pressed, I’d say he’s an author, artist, philosopher and rewilding expert. Really enjoyed this one and hope you will too!

Glossary

• Rewilding: “Rewilding is an attempt to bring back what ancestral ways of living you can within the modern context, for example more natural exercise, primitive skills, hunting and foraging”

• MovNat: Basically the concept of “Natural Movement”, which I would define as an exercise philosophy that focuses on movements that our ancestors would have done as part of survival, but that we now consider “functional” or “practical” exercise. A quote-unquote MovNat session would include things like running, jumping, throwing and climbing: movements that our bodies are adapted to by virtue of having been the fundamental movements that contributed to our survival in pre-agricultural times.

• Leavers and takers: From Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Quinn defines “leavers” and “takers” fairly early in the book as a way to refer people belonging to either of those two broad categories. The terms “leavers and takers” come from the phrase “to take it or leave it” with regards to an offer presented to someone. The offer in this case is agricultural society, the “takers” being the peoples that chose to “take” the offer, and the “leavers” the peoples that chose to continue living in their traditional non-agricultural ways.

• Sapiens and imagined order: From Sapiens by Juval Noah Harari. By “Sapiens” we mean “Homo sapiens”, the species that refers to modern humans. “Imagined order” is a term used in the book to refer to the fundamental ideas of a hierarchy or society. An example would be the imagined order at the basis of a medieval feudal society in which people believe that people belonging to “noble” classes are more important than peasants and therefore entitled to power over land and peasants, an idea that is bought into by both nobles and peasants. The reason Harari uses the term “imagined” within “imagined order” is that they almost always have no basis in an objective truth, but have come completely out of human imagination.

• Flintstonization: From Sex at Dawn by Chris Ryan. Refers to the fallacy of projecting modern contexts back in time when looking at the peoples of history. An example of “Flintstonization” given in the book is 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes presuming that the life of ancient uncivilized peoples was “nasty, brutish and short”, clearly a projection backwards of the plight of “uncivilized” people within the 17th century English society he happened to find himself in, rather than based on anthropological evidence of ancient peoples.

• Göbekli Tepe: Refers to an archeological site in southern Turkey that contains megalithic structures and is believed to date back to 10,000BC. The dating and location of Göbekli Tepe coincides with when and where humans first adopted agriculture.

• Dunbar’s Number: Refers to the supposed limit of the number of close relationships that primates, which includes humans, can maintain. Close relationship in this case means that you know the individual, but also know how that individual relates to all the other members of the group. The number varies in different primates and manifests itself as varying average group size for different species. The number is correlated to brain size and for humans the number is around 150.

Transcript

• 5:00 - Intro and why do you do cold water immersion?
  
• 10:50 - What does functional movement mean? Why should we do functional exercise?
  
• 11:50 - Functional vs practical exercise
  
• 13:50 - Did Paul Chek get it wrong?
  
• 14:30 - How did Barnaby progress from Paul Chek and MovNat to rewilding?
  
• 17:00 - How did the book Ishmael bring the disparate ideas of rewilding together?
  
• 21:50 - Do you think your way of living is one that everyone should follow?
  
• 23:10 - Do you think if people did what you do they would be happier?
  
• 23:50 - What’s the payoff of discomfort for you? Benefits of cold water immersion
  
• 25:00 - Barnaby’s framework for finding activities to do
  
• 26:20 - How do you put yourself back in time and think about how people lived in the past?
  
• 28:30 - Conspiracy theorists, critical thinking and contrarianism with respect to rewilding, veganism, etc.
  
• 31:20 - How are socialists, capitalists, monarchists all the same?
  
• 32:50 - What is rewilding?
  
• 34:30 - Do you think the rewilding movement has an agenda? Do you think rewilding is anti-civilization?
  
• 36:30 - Do you look down on people like DV who have capitalized on the rewilding movement?
  
• 36:35: What does adaptation to the environment mean in the 21st century?
  
• 38:20 - Do you have to be part of civilization? Couldn’t you leave civilization if you don’t like it?
  
• 39:00 - Could you leave society?
  
• 42:10 - If we’re not able to go back to leaver way of life, is there something we can do within the taker culture?
  
• 43:10 - Is there a way to get back connection and kinship without rewilding?
  
• 48:00 - Were Sapiens connected to land as they were expanding? What does connection to land actually mean?
  
• 51:30 - Did agriculture cause our disconnection with land? What does it feel like to be connected to the land?
  
• 56:00 - Why would anyone want to be an agriculturalists? Why did it take over?
  
• 1:02:00 - Did societal stratification occur as a result of agriculture or the other way around?
  
• 1:08:00 - Is agriculture and civilization deterministic and innevitable? If you leave people alone for long enough, are they bound to happen?
  
• 1:04:00 - Tying it all back together with the idea of rewilding. Rewilding, not un-civilizing.
  

Thanks for listening!

Love,
P