Reclaiming Culture: An Interlude
Jun. 11th, 2026 06:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
claire_58We live in a time of rapid change and uncertainty. The 50 year failure of the environmental movement has left us with a tangle of interconnected problems. Ecosystem destruction; freakishly high levels of pollution of the land the water and the atmosphere; and resource depletion combine to create a looming crisis of epic proportions. We are faced with increasing political and economic instability and it’s clear that there will be no large scale co-ordinated efforts to address any of it.
This blog is about what we can do, as ordinary people in families and small groups, to create lives worth living; to build a future worth having; and to be a force for renewal and regeneration in our much depleted world.
I had planned to move on to taking all the accumulated ideas about systems thinking outside into the neighbourhood to start the process of exploring your home territory. Instead I’m going to take a side trip into some of the ideas generated by the last couple of posts.
In permaculture self-responsibility is the prime directive. The whole idea is that we can take meeting our own needs into our own hands. We can create resilient systems of production that imitate natural systems and have a positive impact on the ecosystem around us.
It’s a DIY approach to getting small scale, sometimes very small scale, micro or even nano-systems, going everywhere. Providing for yourself and your family as much as possible and helping others in your community do the same is the goal.
Human needs are pretty simple: Air, Water, Food, Shelter, Clothing, Education, Entertainment, Health Care, Other People, Heathy ecosystems (which brings us back in a circle to air, water, food …) Yes, you can add layers of complexity getting into the particulars of meaning, status, useful work etc., but these are the big ones.
Productive food systems are the main focus of Permaculture design partly because industrial agriculture is so extravagant in it’s use of resources and so devastating to the ecosystem and partly because of the top three human needs it's the easiest one for people to act on.
Well and good, but if we are looking for where it’s easy to take meeting our needs into our own hands there two others that really stand out: Entertainment and Other People.
Entertainment is certainly the low hanging fruit when it comes to meeting our own needs even without other people. Take a walk.* Get a book from the library. Draw pictures. Write stories. Learn to play an instrument. Sing. Dance. Take up a hobby. Learn a new skill. Pick something and go for it. As Joel Salatin says “Anything worth doing well is worth doing badly first.”
Taking responsibility for providing our own entertainment is also a great way to build up our fragmented and tenuous social connections. Community develops when people need each other. It also develops when people get together to have fun, to eat together, to celebrate and to entertain each other.
Entertainment is one of the things the corporate world is happy, even eager to supply and you have to ask yourself why. Cultural dominance is easier and less expensive than military dominance. Movies, videos, and other forms of industrial entertainment shape our worldviews and our expectations. They inform our thinking.
Some ideas become commonplace, others become outlandish and strange, still others become either literally unthinkable, or so unconventional that they require huge explanations and a lengthy backstory to make them clear.
More than that, corporate entertainment keeps us passive and distracted; amused or frightened; passionate or outraged. It keeps us spinning. It prevents us from focussing on the things that really matter and from pursuing our own goals.
Providing our own entertainment is a revolutionary act. It’s the first step in reclaiming our culture and re-creating our sense of ourselves as part of a unique community in a particular part of the world.
Culture is what people do and how they do it. It’s all the ways and means they have for meeting their basic needs and all the other things they do for pleasure and companionship. Reclaiming culture is doing things.
It’s cooking and eating together.** It’s keeping family traditions alive and creating new ones. It’s the way we decorate bodies and our homes. And, of course it’s all the other ways we express our creativity too.
Story telling, art, music, and dance, have been as critical to human development as using fire and making string,*** or any of our other technological achievements. Like any other element in a complex system all these things have more than one function.
As mentioned above they foster and strengthen social bonds. They are also ways of sharing ideas, our own ideas, when we do it ourselves; remembering our history, our own history, not the version of events that serves the political and economic elite; and providing a strong resilient foundation for our children as they grow up into an unpredictable world fraught with conflict and confusion.
Providing our own entertainment is not a frivolous extra to be considered after we’ve got the important stuff going. It is important stuff. It’s how we free our minds and build up our resistance to the outside influences that distract us, deny us agency, and lead us into helplessness and despair.
Reclaiming culture includes a huge range of activities and possibilities. Building practical skills like cooking and other hobbies; connecting with friends and neighbours, learning to navigate your home territory, and cultivating the awareness of your local ecosystem. All of these are cultural practices.
And yes, the world is full of serious problems. The predicaments we face bite and will continue to bite for a long time to come. Reclaiming our culture won’t change that. But providing our own entertainment; keeping our own sources of information sharing active; and using our creative talents to connect with others and to bring more joy into our lives, is probably the best response we have.
* Don’t just take a walk, take up walking. Walking is active relaxation as opposed to watching a video which is passive stimulation and it has quite a different impact on your nervous system.
** Cooking is always a cultural expression. Decisions about what is or is not food are cultural and have very little to do with actual nutrition. Eating together is a fundamental of shared culture.
*** The string revolution: Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years - Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times (1996) W. W. Norton & Company
no subject
Date: 2026-06-11 09:14 pm (UTC)The quote by Salatin is actually a very lightly modified take on what was originally from G.K. Chesterton, discussed here: https://www.chesterton.org/a-thing-worth-doing.
This post has given me some serious food for thought and action, and I hope many good and worthy conversations - perhaps while walking together!
Cheers,
The Anonymous Pre-Industrial Woodworker (TAPIW)
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Date: 2026-06-12 02:39 pm (UTC)Thank you. I'm so glad it helped solidify your ideas.
I'll take the edit. "Reclaiming culture is doing things together." Yes. Yes, it is.
Thanks for the link to the discussion of Chesterton. Such an interesting writer. I love the idea that some things are better done by non-professionals for love rather than money. The gift economy and the household as a pattern for the community is a whole long topic I want to get into at some point.
The other saying I thought of using for this one is "Be brave enough to suck at something new." Not quite the same meaning but maybe closer to what I wanted to say. I'm trying to encourage people to deliberately push the edges of their comfort zone and enlarge their range of possibilities.
Enjoy your walking and talking and thinking.
Best wishes,
E.