As you know, I have been talking about the importance of the work of Jim Corbett (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Corbett, http://www.saguaro-juniper.com/corbett/jim-corbett.html) (Goat Walking & Sanctuary for All Life) to what we are up to, and your post brings him to the fore once again. Jim talks about the notion of the Cimarron which is a spanish word that means a domesticated animal or slave that goes free. Here is a quote from Goatwalking, from the chapter called “The Cimarron Alternative:”

Escaping Pharoh
Nomadic Patoralism may have originated among primitive serfs who saw that
their herds combined agriculture’s food-production security with the
mobility needed to escape subjugation. When humankind learned how to produce
suplus wealth by farming, the warriors among them discovered ways to take it
away, cultivators’ dependence on a plot of ground anchoring them so they
could be subjugated, taxed and conscripted. When warriors established a
terrritorial system of organized violence, a primitive state was born. There
are many theories about stateless societies and how they could be created,
but only in symbiotic relationship with herbivores have subjugated human
communities escaped.
Maybe the Israelites’ escape from Pharaoh is a paradigm for all pastoral
nomadism, the one and only way entire peoples can go feral, but in any case,
an outlook that is rooted in the cimarron’s experience of liberation is
radically different from the outlook of a community that has never been
subjugated or that has never gone free.

Art Brock & I have been talking a lot lately about the evolution of economies from the Natural -> Agricultural -> Industrial -> Information/Process (See Art’s excellent depiction of this for details). Yesterday I realized that the Agricultural revolution, really isn’t as much about the technology of farming, i.e “Agriculture” but rather it’s more deeply about domestication. Land, plants, and animals, and even people, are all domesticated in that revolution, which is the pulling of humanity out of being at home in nature, into it’s own constructed home, the domicile, which is a home outside of nature.

What hit me when I read your post JF, is that what we are up to, and what your vow is making you figure out as a matter of practice, is the great undomestication, the going feral, the Cimarron Alternative. And the central powerful lesson in Goatwalking is hidden in “only in symbiotic relationship with herbivores have subjugated human communities escaped.” The key to me there is the necessary symbiosis with the non-human. [BTW, this is also a theme of the Spell of the Sensuous]. Of course at the bottom of symbiosis, is the information flows that make it possible and thus the metacurrency work. Perhaps the story of liberation, of going feral, of entering into jubilee & Sabbath, where we don’t change the land for our purposes (domestication) but instead integrate into it for it and our common weal (symbiosis), can be one that can give depth and resonance to the more technical story of figuring out the currency systems…

-Eric