First Published January 8th 2026
Edited and republished January 29, 2026

Updated 9th July 2026

The Oldest Known Source Of Carbohydrates For Humans Is Food Our Hunter-Gatherer Ancestors Ate.

I started growing Typha Latifolia a few years ago in my ponds, and I started to understand why indigenous people across the globe revered this plant. However, it is also regarded as an invasive species in many places.

In the UK, it is one of many native wetland species, and it’s an important plant for carbon capture. The annual biomass output from Typha is phenomenal. We could be cleaning our rivers and capturing CO2 into a plant that fills the cells within its leaves with CO2 and pressurises it.

High CO2 Concentrations In The Aerenchyma Of Typha Latifolia

Of course, this is more nuanced, but there is potential to capture CO2 in much higher concentrations than just the biomass. Typha has the potential to survive temperatures as high as  48°C, as well as at the Arctic Circle. This plant has been found almost everywhere humans have inhabited over the last 100,000 years. https://bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.1537-2197.1992.tb14568.x

Indigenous people have used Typha for bedding, insulation, thatch, floor mats, medicine, food, fire lighting, arrow shafts & cordage for millennia.

With far greater skill than I. Mats made from Typha, stacked and layered, make warm, insulated mattresses.

I looked at typha and thought this could be a survival food growing in plain sight. However, in some places, it is becoming increasingly rare. I have made bread on hot stones from the flour of the typha root, and it is agreeable as food. But the question I ask is how hot is too hot? Because the bottom line is that surviving the collapse of agriculture requires new knowledge and novel foods.

Paul Beckwith on the Climate Emergency Forum has been saying repeatedly, look at the work of Hansen et al. Global Warming in the Pipeline for Earth. 1.5-2degrees C is a new planetary atmosphere: changed seasons, mega-droughts, mega-heatwaves; this is a signal that we need a new approach, because this heat is both unpleasant for most people and could become unsurvivable for most.

What will we eat when agriculture collapses?

Or as Dr Gail Bradbrook says, when the supermarket shelves are empty?

The distinction is important: by the time the supermarket shelves are empty, agriculture is already fully broken. The waffle about food-banks and mutual aid is just noisy people trying to sound relevant.

But this is a serious question. This is dystopian survivalism: “We are not going back, I want people looking forward. Because you can’t live in a mud hut on a Welsh Hillside. We go forward with today’s technology. There aren’t going to be Plucky Humans roaming the post-collapse landscape.” No, there will be starving people, some of whom think that foraging might help them solve their hunger; they will enter the dwindling remnants of nature, desperate and either decimate what is left, or die trying or by each other’s hand, or after mistaking something toxic for something edible.

Exposure to extreme weather will become a major risk.

Modern New Age Shamanic Practitioners Do Not Have Training Or Experience To Solve The Food Crisis

Somehow, they can still say “another world is still possible” and focus on exploring the intersection of art, activism, science, and spirituality to consciously create a regenerative future, as 20,000 people died in Europe in a week of hot weather.

Collapse Is The New Initiation Culture

We just haven’t worked that one out yet. It’s been going on for a while; it probably started when we wiped out the megafauna, including the Neanderthals.

AMOC- The Next Climate PANIC

Climate PANIC: The mental state when climate activists and influencers are suddenly confronted with a new existential threat which they have no training or solution for. The Climate PANIC is the “whatabout weapon”; it’s a provocation stick with which to assault people whom they feel threatened by. The assault aims to elicit answers, while trying to look and sound superior. The elicitation is instead of asking, because asking would mean admitting they don’t know.

It’s not the sub-zero conditions of AMOC collapse that worry me. Humans have adapted to and survived sub-zero conditions inside the Arctic Circle for 1000s of years. AMOC collapse will increase climatic whiplash events and greater extremes of heat and cold in the regions which were once temperate and agreeable. The AMOC collapse will be the coup-de-grace for agriculture in much of Europe and especially the UK. We can fantasise about regenerative farming all we want. It’s meaningless when the AMOC collapses. The “my toilet will freeze” outburst is easily solved with compost toilets. But the frozen water pipes are a bigger existential crisis which will kill 1000s. Clearly, a frozen toilet is more important.- If you want to know what to do to adapt to AMOC collapse, you need to keep reading this blog.

Awakening Into Deep Connection With The Web of Life

If only it were as simple as taking a pill and waking up in the morning as a conscious node in the web of life.

Spirituality influencers on public social media who reject learning outdoor skills, or any historical traditional skills practice which are deeply connected to the land, need to pause before throwing accusations at fellow activists with a different point of view and history.

After the roads protests, I did some work for Ben Law. I went on to manage a couple of hectares of derelict coppice woodlands in Oxfordshire and, in doing so, built a longstanding relationship with the owner’s nephew, who now owns the land where I make a lot of my films.

Ben Law is a major contributor to the Permaculture discourse in the UK and manages 8 acres of Sweet Chestnut Coppice near Hazelmere. He capture the nation with his Grand Designs home made from wood from the wood.

Coppicing is regenerative land management with a long history dating back to the 1st Neolithic farmers in Britain, if not older. An environment that has evolved over 7,000 years of human intervention is now in deep decline due to neglect. It saddens me when earth spirituality influencers can’t even do some basic research into regenerative land management, but are happy to make a lot of noise about it. It’s even sadder that they think it’s acceptable to take people on a shamanic journey in Celtic Coppice woodland “Last Cut in the time of our grandfathers”.

There’s always an opportunity to correct this. It’s a matter of humility to accept when one is wrong. This is factually incorrect about Regenerative Woodland Management and is misleading her followers. The original video is featured on the Facebook Group Sacred Earth Activism

The One Skillset No One Wants From Indigenous People: Survival Skills

How did humans survive the last evolutionary bottleneck?

Adaptation, cooperation and adopting diverse skills.

Indigenous people have always lived in close connection to the land using many of the skills I advocate for learning. Survival skills give confidence, could save your life, and will definitely bring you into a deeper connection with nature than a ritualistic initiation burial where you are told how it connects you to nature through ritualised death and rebirth, or sitting under a tree and asking what it wants.

Wilderness survival skills are a link to our ancestral past, to indigenous ways of knowing the land and decolonising the cognition of the Brain.

In Gathering Moss, Robin Wall Kimmerer identifies that mosses were ignored by the anthropologists because they were gathered by the women for secret things, and the anthropologist, being male, took no interest in what the women were doing.

Anthropologists like Michael Harner were in search of the spiritual connection to nature that indigenous people clearly demonstrated. But instead of looking at how they socialised their children into nature, he saw Ayahuasca as the agent for connection, and this view was flawed. Ayahuasca can help you experience the interconnectedness of nature, but it cannot sustain that connection. Core Shamanism claims we can connect to nature through misappropriated rituals and ceremonies. Unfortunately, this too is a dead end.

We have plundered indigenous peoples for their land, knowledge, wisdom and spirituality, but we ignore their food procurement skills as primitive and backward. Everyone wants to be a shaman, but none of the shamanic wannabes want to spend long periods in nature learning skills. Their pontifications about nature are frankly boring and pedestrian.

“Indigenous people don’t have jobs”

Iam not perplexed at the fact that indigenous people dont have jobs. After procuring food, shelter and clothes, what else is there that is required? How could you know, you cant know and that is why “Dystopian Survivalism” is the best version of the Dunning Kruger effect applied to Shamanic Practitioners I could point to as an example of why learning survival skills is an education like no other into insatiable and joyful curiosity in nature.

The Skills Used by Survivalists & Many Indigenous People Are Not Dissimilar

Indigenous skills are not just ceremony, rituals and planting trees which are native, on someone else’s estate and paying for the privilege. Indigenous plant knowledge & tools are mostly rejected, apart from ritual paraphenalia, ceremonies and “wisdom”. We know the earth is in trouble and we need to take care of it after paying out a shed load of money to one trainer or another.

Polychronic thinking is the indigenous way of knowing the land, living off the land and moving on the land. Polychronic thinking is how indigenous people understand time. Polychronic thinking is central to survivalism and fosters a deep relational connection to the land, plants and the animals there. The New-Age Shamanic-Practitioner grifter I have no doubt will talk endlessly about it, unless they learn the skills no one wants from indigenous people, they remain stuck in monochronology.

As I dig into the connection between the big names in today’s climate campaigning I not connection to a network of “spiritual entrepreneurs” and realise that the commercialisation of indigenous spirituality and further exploitation is big business.

Now I understand why what I do is labelled “Dystopian Survivalism because I am not doing this:

Because this looks exploitative, and expensive. The world is in trouble, and prohibitively expensive Wisdom Festivals aren’t for the hoipoloi like me.

Sadly, it takes a suppressed government report for some people to realise that nature and humanity are in trouble, and a threat to national security. I knew 30 years ago that we had a problem of dwindling nature. Because I am doing outdoor skills in dwindling nature, and it’s the shortage of resources to build shelters like this that clearly indicates dwindling resources.

Someone who saw this said I should be teaching vision-quests using these huts, “they are so authentic”. Authentic like Shamanic Cosplaying?

A “primitive” shelter, built with no tools, no string, no cordage or any modern materials. The challenge was to build a shelter with no tools, knots or anything other than what is there in nature. This is only possible in the UK in certain environments. This shelter took me 2 hours to build. In most environments in Britain, this wouldn’t be possible. Site selection for the ability to practice survival skills, which includes building a shelter from what is available which will be warm and waterproof, takes great skill, knowledge and a deep connection to nature and an intimate knowledge of the land.

These are the dwindling resources soaking up 30% of humanity’s CO2 emissions for centuries.

I’m not claiming to be a shaman or shamanic practitioner. The idea that I’m not being a shaman, I am just using their tools seems too weird. You can’t be a Scout-Practitioner. A Scout? These are the unwanted indigenous peoples’ skills.

Somehow, imitation Shamanic Journeying, Shamanic Drumming, Shamanic Drums, rattles and other self-adorning paraphernalia are neither primitive nor backward. Cherry-picking indigenous skills is cultural misappropriation. Calling it Shamanism is not misappropriation because Shaman is a meaningless word attached to an extinct culture written about by someone who wasn’t even there.

Extinction Rebellion Global’s Survival Manual is another exploration of the Dunning-Kruger Effect in wilderness survival and how a few festival campers think a bug-out bag with no shelter is going to save the day during SHTF.

The 3rd heatwave is about to hit; XReadiness survival manual would have killed you by now.

“We Aren’t Going Back To Being Forager Hunters- We Can’t”

As agriculture collapses, permaculture, using native edibles and mass free education in planting, rewilding and responsible foraging will need to be taught on a massive scale. The time to start is now. Climate change is not a vehicle to commercialise the nature spirituality wellness grift.

Black and white thinking impedes self-development, especially if we don’t work on this aspect of ourselves. Learning survival skills has nothing to do with trying to return to living off the land full-time, post-collapse or any other time, but it offers opportunities to learn skills which expand the imagination and decolonise cognition, open us to foods we might not have known to exist and skills using more and more natural materials and fewer industrial products. As a gardener, all my plant ties are home-made from plant fibre. Survival skills teach resilience and resourcefulness.

Transformative adaptation is serving no one other than extremely expensive wellness retreats and grifters who are putting out information about other people’s amazing work and pushing their spirituality courses as a membership series; this must be tremendously lucrative.

Deep Adaptation, Transformative Adaptation, offer no practical usable solution to living through collapse; they simply reinforce the grift for people who think they are teaching people how to consiously evolve.

How we could survive in a post-collapse world

Dr Stephanie Rost

“The psychological impact of collapse will be immense, especially in a world where familiar landmarks and ways of life are disappearing. Emotional resilience will need to go beyond maintaining hope; it will involve developing a deep connection to nature, finding purpose in community service, and embracing new identities as protectors of the environment and each other. Collective mourning practices can help communities cope with the loss of their environments and ways of life, turning grief into a source of solidarity..

The ability to innovate and repurpose materials-turning discarded items into usable tools, building materials, or energy sources will possibly become a useful skill, and is a human skill we are capable of. Knowledge sharing through digital or low-tech means like local radio networks or printed guides can help spread crucial information on survival techniques when the internet is no longer accessible. Human mesh networks —for example, knowledge sharing through digital or low-tech means like local radio networks or printed guides—could help spread crucial information on survival techniques if the internet is no longer accessible. This is in line with the alternative wireless networks used in Syria during its civil war.
” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44282-025-00160-1

Anarchist survivalists are already years ahead using Meshtastic LoRa Communications, thinking polychronically because that is how nature demands the survivalist to think.

You can keep calling it Dystopian, but you are in catch-up.