May, the earliest summer heatwave of my 60-year lifetime.
Beyond 1.5°C, human survival depends on skills no Neoshaman can teach and plant knowledge none of them has.
“The reason we are in this mess is that all the shamans have been killed”. Paul Francis, Therapeutic Shaman, Interview: SHAMANISM, SERVICE & POWER / Paul Francis Interviewed by Natalie Nahai.
Amazingly, Natalie Nahai is now a NeoShaman too and is discovering how unsustainable her life was; good for her! But I can’t take therapists who dispute regulation seriously. Just like I can’t take people who call themselves therapeutic practitioners but don’t want regulation to keep the frauds out and claim the regulators are just another racket. “I never thought of it like that”, Natalie chimes. We have regulation for a reason; does Natalie Nahai agree? It’s not clear. Let’s ignore oil as the cause of our current changed climate and ecological collapse.
The same goes for climate deniers.
“Dystopian Survivalism”: When A Big Neoshamanism Podcaster Realises They are Not Ready For Collapse Even Though It’s Already Happening & They Didn’t Notice
Dystopian Survivalism and Thrutopia have to be the biggest laugh I have had all year. As it’s been ranted, the speakers at the Big Green Gathering say we need survival skills for collapse. That’s right: dystopian survival skills. I am laughing at your stupidity. The people whose homes have burned, go on, tell them it’s Thrutopian to lose everything and run for their lives.
Celticana: People actually believe the Celts were indigenous to Britain
No indigenous person has hunted and gathered on Britain’s shores for over 8,000 years. The Celts were large-scale iron ore miners and grew grain on a large scale. The Celts came to Britain during the Bronze Age collapse. They were a colonial power. They didn’t build Stonehenge. Neodruidry blends Neolithic monuments with the idea of the Celts.
I don’t care what you believe. I just dislike pseudohistory, pseudo-archaeology, and other frauds, and I find the sale of Spirituality distasteful, culty, and not good for the soul.
Apparently Neodruidry and Celtic-flavoured Neoshamanism lead to the same place: Neoshamanism: “..an eclectic collection of beliefs and activities drawn from literature, workshops, and the Internet. It is an invented tradition of practices and beliefs based on a constructed metaphorical, romanticised ‘ideal’ shaman concept which often differs considerably from traditional shamans.” Joan B. Townsend. Nothing about neoshamanism is safe. Claiming to make Neoshamanism, or Core Shamanism learned from Michael Harner, safe is just laughable. It’s a sales pitch to hook in the guĺible. Nothing they have to teach can prepare you for collapse. In less than 6 months, the “Dystopian Survivalism” rant has proven that whatever these people are teaching is pointless for human survival beyond 1.5 °C. No neoshaman will blaze the trail to human post-collapse survival, and unless they buck up, the changing climate will leave them behind; they can eat all the money they made.
12,000 Years of Agriculture is Ending.
Indigenous people, when they saw the culture coming from Europe, saw the Wen’tiko (Wendigo). They absorbed the 1st settlers and taught them their ways. Indigenous people are not the same as industrial capitalism’s people.
Indigenous peoples know more about ecological collapse than most non-Indigenous people realise. They have witnessed the wholesale intentional destruction of their environment for the conquest of their lands. Mass slaughter of buffalo to destroy their livelihoods. The operations of colonialism had already happened to the Europeans who colonised the Americas; colonisation of the mind makes theft from the “Indian” easy through othering them.
Today, those colonised minds with the Wendigo illness are looting indigenous people of their ceremonies, rituals, and fashions (Powwow), and they make up the connection with nature or claim it’s possible through ritual. Modernity has created a culture of lazy, pseudo-spirituality vendors and consumers who think they have a choice about nature or, worse, don’t like nature. They want indigenous spirituality without the risk, learnable in a weekend, minimal contact with nature, and mostly based on delusional BS, and somehow that makes them a healer. -That’s why they oppose regulation.
Long-distance directed-energy healing is like Alien Space Ray Guns Starting Forest Fires.
Come on, people, we can do better than listening to these idiots and paying the soothsayers & snake oil peddlers who say connection to nature is as simple as sitting under a tree. Or the ones who smile gaumlessly at you from the screen and tell you they are in nature for you. They all want your money and are happy to con you.
“Post-Agricultural Collapse: Human Survival Is Dependent On Nature Survival, But Will Humans Hunt and Gather?”
1.5 °C is a phase change in the changing climate. Beyond 1.5 °C, we lose the Goldilocks climate niche for Arable agriculture. It starts with the worst harvest ever and the loss of the ability to grow things we have been used to eating for the last hundred years.
“There won’t be post-collapse Plucky Humans hunting and gathering…”: how unimaginatively stupid do you have to be to think up this kind of thing and call yourself a writer, when most of what you churn out is airport pulp fiction pseudohistory and speculative spirituality with a smattering of Plum Village Zen Buddhism mixed into the cocktail.
“We have exchanged a favourable epoch for one that demands adaptation to a climate 3.3,000,000 years old, predating the epoch in which we emerged. “Pliocene and Eocene provide best analogues for near-future climates” https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1809600115
It’s a very good paper, but it’s intellectually beyond someone who doesn’t understand survival skills in the context of modern agriculture, ecosystem collapse, modern housing, and off-grid tech.
“Our study suggests that climates like those of the Pliocene will prevail as soon as 2030 CE and persist under climate stabilisation scenarios. Unmitigated scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions produce climates like those of the Eocene..’
Most of the plants we ate during the last 200,000 years evolved before we did and then co-evolved with us. We won’t be the idiotic notion that the “plucky humans” idea is: we could be far more intelligent than that, if only we could get over our need to court money.
The plants we gathered and processed for staples still grow all around us. They are ignored by foragers as boring and have no market value. It takes work to extract the food from the wild staples; they are forest-gardened, not cultivated in sprayed, monocultured fields. Some are toxic and require processing. The NeoShaman aren’t watching the seasons; they are watching their wallets. The seasons and precipitation patterns in the UK have changed: We now have a wet season and a dry season.
The Hero’s Journey
Modern nature spirituality has notions like the Hero’s Journey. A period spent alone in nature improving skills and returning as a hero. Mostly returning in failure, believing that failure proves living off the land is brutally hard. People who have tried living off the land on foraged food and found they are not getting the carbs their bodies crave, rather than realising they are underskilled and missing knowledge, tell people living off the land is hard, or even impossible. This is the problem when you think connection to nature is achieved by sitting under a tree and little more.
The Hero’s Journey is just another piece of nonsense; you can’t do a week’s bushcraft course and expect to go on a “hero’s” journey. My 1st experience living off the land successfully came after 20 years of training.
You have skills; you are useful for my survival plan. Since the 2026 Big Green Gathering, I have been in demand.
Will survivalists do well during collapse? That depends,
I’m on the management team running a camp for 120 people. This year, we risk-assessed on the 4th of August that fires at a camp, where fires were central for cooking and gathering around, would not be possible. All cooking was to be on stoves off the ground. This was before the PM put out the alert. We were not going to be part of setting the village on fire. I saw what happened in Glastonbury with the local community and the Goddess Lama’s fire. As responsible campers, we had only 1 fire on site, which ran the showers and was contained in a stove.
My main roles are health and safety and water: off-grid showers and Water Regulations compliance for the site.
Designing and building off-grid showers for a camp with running water is very different from setting up post-collapse emergency showers without running water.
“We are only interested in teaching the future leaders” — I’m not.
Bushcraft at Embercombe is ritualised; it’s not a survival skill. There are no adaptation skills for Agricultural collapse emerging from Embercombe, and yet Embercombe has been running climate leadership training. It’s not cheap, so it’s aimed at the Bourgeoisie, whom Marx predicted would be utterly useless and untrustworthy in a revolution. These are the people who will do and say anything to prop up the system they disagree with while talking about change. Where the F☆☆☆ are these leaders with their collapse and post-agriculture skills?
“Can you name the tribes of Britain? This was the question put to Tim ‘Mac’ Macartney of Embercombe when he sat in a circle of American Indian elders back in the 1980s…” the Celtic Tribes. He couldn’t, and they derided him for it: they knew; they knew the names of the Celtic tribes, the peoples of Britain before the Romans. “We thought you were educated,” they said. “You don’t seem very educated to us.”
“Seeing Macartney speak was one of the highlights of Sunrise Celebration. It was Thursday, summer solstice, cold and rainy, and I was bleary with the onset of migraine. We were in the mood to listen, so we picked a talk at random: ‘Dreaming the Ancient Trackways Alive’. Could be good, most likely bollocks, we thought, but at least it’ll be dry. We weren’t expecting to be moved to tears.”
The talk was about the need to mix activism with spirituality. To be an activist is to suffer defeat after defeat after defeat. Without spirituality to recharge and revive us, we risk falling into bitterness, despair, or, worse, self-righteousness. The spirituality Macartney advocates is an American Indian charged spirituality of minimal belief — that the earth is sacred.“
“Now, mere mention of the sacredness of the earth and American Indian wisdom, and my scholarly voice kicks in with a “but but but.” That’s the Western way, to pick holes in things until there’s nothing left. I can do that. It’s useful, necessary even, but cynicism shuts doors and reduces possibilities. I know that to my cost.”
“And for once I was impressed. Here was someone I could believe. Macartney is honest about his failings and walks the talk, literally. Recently he set off on a pilgrimage to Anglesey in the depths of winter with no compass, map or food, trusting in his bushcraft skills and the kindness of strangers to get him there. He’s in his sixties. No, his message hit home.”
I have known Andy Letcher for a long time; I’m in the Oogaboogah clan (Read the preface of Shroom). The above paragraph is from his blog. I think Andy would agree that he knows very little about survival skills. I can see why he’d be inspired, though.
If Tim ‘Mac’ Macartney’s bushcraft skills were so good, why are survival skills ritualized at Embercombe? And why is it so central to Celtic Neoshamanism that they are? I suspect that, as a field practitioner, Tim ‘Mac’ Macartney lacked certain knowledge about the wild staples and how to safely process them to make them safe to eat. Survival skills with incomplete knowledge are very uncomfortable. The hunger gnaws at you; it’s very easy to point the blame at nature and bushcraft, rather than yourself. The Dunning-Kruger effect explains it well.
The ritualisation of survival skills stagnates the learning process. For them, the system works because everything is perfectly dry, processed, and ready to go. A ritual fire is communally blown into life with the same materials over and over again. What happens when it has been raining for weeks and you don’t have the carefully prepared material for your special fire? You may be lucky to have a Scout in your midst who, through knowledge, experience, and repeated trials, can light the fire. But more to the point, the Scout (in the indigenous sense) can light a fire in the worst conditions.
Embercombe is a beautiful place for rewilded nature. But. The ritualisation of bushcraft has created a stagnation in their learning, and it’s likely because Tim ‘Mac’ Macartney’s wilderness skills were lacking. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is common in wilderness skills: It’s the experienced camper who argues that having a fire on the ground is safe during an extreme drought as fields are spontaneously catching fire. They argue, “if we watch it” and “because we haven’t had a fire problem before”; It’s the bushcrafter who goes into nature not fully equipped with survival knowledge. You cannot know what you do not know, and what you do not know in survival skills is vast. Indigenous wisdom is irrelevant; the Celtic tribes are irrelevant and a distraction. Failure to recognise a lack of knowledge leads to the ritualisation of bushcraft. Real Bushcraft/Survival Skills, therefore, are dystopian because the Dunning-Kruger Effect is especially strong in Neoshamanism, given how we actually connect to nature via the limbic system.
The ceremonialists are the least relevant people during collapse—underqualified, unregulated self-styled healers, pilfering indigenous wisdom & rites while rejecting indigenous life-skills.
Embercombe encourages a culture of silence around the rites there. “The Journey” workshop—maintains a strict code of confidentiality (“the first rule is not to talk about it”) that can lead to perceptions of insularity or cult-like secrecy. It’s a retreat for wealthy environmentalists and neoshamans to teach them woo. They want you to shut up, because they don’t want to be questioned.
Dr Gail Bradbrook: “We need the Guys (people) Who Can Build Stuff!”
These exclamations are frustrating because, from where I stand, it appears that the under-skilled are the noisiest people, looking for shortcuts and not asking for help, but demanding it from those who have spent decades learning and developing a combination of low-tech, off-grid solutions and modernised survival skills.
A survivalist sees little difference between living in a Bender house and a “mud hut on a Welsh hillside”, because it’s the skills & experience that make it easy.
When people tell me survival skills aren’t required for their skill set to learn off-grid skills. My response is that those people are superfluous to my survival. The people who build stuff need willing learners, not academics who do shamanic ceremonies learned from a plastic shaman, who think nature is there to recharge their batteries, and who, on the one hand, talk about matriarchal societies while still pushing the patriarchal paradigm.
Neoshamanism has shown us that they offer no survival skills for heatwaves. They can’t bring back spring and summer rains. They just want money for rotten rope. They serve no purpose.
We, the ultra-skilled, are not here to serve the lazy white shamans and their followers. If climate change is survivable, I want willing learners, and I expect hard labour and brutal tests. The collapse of this civilisation will be mostly lethal. Personal adaptation is as important as state adaptation. I think the neoshaman types have shown us they are not going to attempt to learn anything useful; instead, they will attack those who are already highly skilled, while proving themselves increasingly irrelevant to surviving civilisation’s collapse.
A spirituality unique to survivalism and the survivors of this civilisation’s collapse may emerge of its own volition. It will be based on a new paradigm of commonplace death and everyday survival. It will be free and free from grifters.
Survival skills are the foundation of Joyful curiosity and exploration of your environment. They teach the wisdom of when it’s not good to light fires. They teach fundamental survival knowledge such as bush medicine; wild food, including staples; off-grid hygiene; dry sanitation; water purification; shelter repair and construction; fire skills; and much more. But most importantly, the connection to nature is deeper than any ritualised fire or sitting under a tree and asking it questions.
By being aware of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, the student never graduates; there is no graduation in a skill set that takes a lifetime of learning. There is no end goal for the Scout other than to be nature and to know that, parallel to the Gaia hypothesis of a Sacred Earth, there is also an Earth indifferent to human survival, indifferent to the survival of complex life, but still central to the living universe.
Prosocial cooperative learning in nature strengthens bonding and promotes oxytocin release. Map reading, navigation using maps, charts, compass, solar and celestial navigation enlarges the amygdala. The more you learn about nature, the more structural changes occur in the brain.
The Medea hypothesis, proposed by palaeontologist Peter Ward, challenges James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. Suggesting that mass extinctions were common. The hypothesis was that lower and lower CO2 would kill all life on Earth. Of course, the opposite is occurring, driven by human activity and still related to CO2. But the hypothesis is relevant because it complements Lovelock’s Gaia Theory by successfully arguing that complex life is a self-deleterious process, homo sapiens are no different. The Gaia and Medea Theory are not opposing theories; they complement each other; they are 2 sides of the same coin.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ward was not popular, but the hypothesis evolved as well. For the survivalist, these ideas are important because if we think of nature as benevolent, it will kill us. Being humbled by nature, repeatedly, though dangerous, is an important lesson. “Safe shamanism,” sanitized for Western tastes or fears of nature, does not achieve the structural changes in the brain that survival skills have been proven to achieve.
The foundations of survival skills are how we connect to nature and the land. When a Neoshaman rejects that with an angry rant, they probably expect me to waste my time disputing them. What am I going to do when the sewers don’t work? Compost my poop. What are you and your followers going to do when agriculture collapses? Yeah, you didn’t expect the climate to change so fast, and sitting under a tree asking it questions is more sanitised nonsense. You better go on YouTube and learn some skills.
As for the rest of us, this blog won’t tell you how to survive collapse. It will give you snippets and tasters of skills and solutions. It will give you hints, but it won’t give you what you’re asking for. I expect those who want to adapt to collapse to work hard on their prejudices and the skills they need to learn.
We connect to the land through survival skills, mindfulness, being there, and learning prosocially. It takes time. It’s required for personal adaptation and acclimatisation to change. The collapse of this civilisation requires skilled practitioners. Skills are preparedness, and preparedness is an antidote for anxiety.
If a Shamanic Practitioner has the humility to know that they do not know nature, do they have the humility to learn?
Survival Skills are often rejected by people who push their own flavour of nature-based spirituality because they are perceived as difficult. The “expert” practitioner becomes the novice who knows nothing in the presence of their disciples. The 1st humbling by nature is often humiliation for the under-skilled. To admit you do not know in front of those whom you teach is humility. Accepting that you don’t know before nature is to ask for the help of those who can teach, and those who can teach are really skilled people. Rejecting them with silly tropes only reflects back on those who make up the tropes and then repeat them like a self-soothing mantra for collapse anxiety
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