Woodland Ways Bushcraft Weekend Courses
Ray Mears Free Webcast Lecture on Survivors
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Primitive Living, Self-Sufficiency, and Survival Skills
"I reach into the brush for the aluminium can. I place it on the trail, smash it, and put it in my pocket to haul it away. Animals I realize, do not judge their environment. From ants to mice to deer, the creatures accept their environment without questioning it. They do not look at the litter of humankind and frown at our negligence. They do not have beliefs about what is right or wrong. They only operate in terms of their own immediate security: Is this particular element safe or hostile? Is it useful?
A pile of refuse left behind by humans might provide food for one creature or shelter for another, or it may become just another part of the scenery to others, like any other rock or tree. Deer for example, have no fear of parked cars, as long as the cars remain parked and otherwise non—threatening.
Primitive cultures too tend not to judge their environment in terms of right or wrong, but only in terms of usefulness. The new resources and technologies that enter their environments are seldom judged by where they came from or how they were made, but by how economical they are for meeting their specific needs in the here and now.
Anthropologist Richard B. Lee learned that on his second day studying the Dobe !Kung bushmen in Africa. They talked him into driving them in his truck to their foraging grounds. He drove while they all rode in the back singing songs about sitting around getting fat while the truck did all the work. In two hours they harvested enough mongongo nuts to sustain themselves for five to ten days. Reflecting on the incident, Lee said it was an intelligent use of their resources—after all, he wrote, ‘°Why hike in the hot sun for a small meal, when the bearded White man might take you in his truck for ten large ones?”
In primitive cultures the driving force of belief is and was economics. To survive and prosper, primitive peoples had to harvest more calories of energy than they expended. They had to adapt and make economical decisions to enable them to harvest more calories with less efort, just as we do today They would not resist a glass bottle as a source of arrowhead material any more than you or I would pass up a twenty-dollar bill lying on the sidewalk." - Page 14 - Thomas J. Elpel
"Take only memories, leave only footprints."
