/lit/ - Literature

My uni is having a conference on this book tomorrow, has anyone here read it? What did you think?

continued >>3688035
responding to >>3686487

>Or are you talking about the looming spectres of global warming and ecological collapse? I don't know how the world will deal with those issues, but I've no doubt the solutions will come from science and technology, not living in tribes.

>implying tribes cannot into scientific and technological innovation

Fuck anon, just who do you think first harnessed fire and discovered most of the medicinal plants that Big Pharma bases its synthetic drugs on?

And Quinn never said in any of his books that saving the world meant going full primitivist anyway. What he calls for is not the abandonment of science and technology, but rather that we use these tools for a new purpose. Instead of using our science to create ever-shinier consumer baubles, we ought to be using it to find new ways to provide for our basic needs without sacrificing the rest of our non-human neighbors upon the altar of "progress." We need to re-evaluate what progress MEANS.

If you're wondering just what a higher-tech Leaver society might look like, check out Ecotopia sometime. There's more than a little tribalism in the way that its citizens interact. If you'd prefer some non-fiction reading material about how such a society might feed itself, then check out The One-Straw Revolution (Masanobu Fukuoka) or Permaculture: A Designer's Manual (Bill Mollison) for starters.

>Harmony with nature necessarily lacks the protection of civilization.

Ishmael would probably say something like: "No civilization can survive for very long if it thinks that it can subjugate nature or divorce itself from nature."

Why yes, I do hail from the Pacific Northwest. And I would love nothing more than to crank it up to eleven. Viva Cascadia bitches.

continued from >>3497658
in response to >>3497588

Quinn never states in any of his works that primitivism is the proper solution to what ails us. (He took great pains to stress that there was no one right way to live, after all.) We're not going to survive and live happier lives by adopting Leaver TOOLS. We're going to live better by adopting Leaver PHILOSOPHIES, IDEALS, and SOCIAL STRUCTURES. We're going to stop living as cogs in a machine and filling the holes in our souls with mass-marketed trinkets. We're going to start thriving again as members of semi-autonomous bands and tribal communities instead of suffering within our old fissioning nuclear families and hikikomori cells. We're going to kill our nihilism and existential despair by reconnecting to the living landscapes that once nurtured our spirits and inspired our art. We're going to remember that humanity belongs to the Earth, and we will revel in that remembrance.

Pic very much related as one of many possible non-primitivist visions of such a future.

>>3475463
I don't usually go for these "help me write something" threads, but dammit this is relevant to my interests. What are the basic tenets of this "survivalism" you refer to?

Just a layman by the way. Pic related is why the title of your book-in-progress caught my eye. The main political party in this novel was called the Survivalist Party, and so I'm wondering how much or little your philosophy has in common with the writings of Callenbach, Quinn, Zerzan, and other ecologically-minded writers.