A Guide to Going Primitive

A critique of modern education’s systemic encouragement of “lifemaxxing” among college students, and suggestions for how to avoid its destructive outcomes. 

 “The college lifemaxxing culture is exhausting. At the heart of this drive for optimization is the message that no one is good enough as they are. How can we learn to accept our imperfect selves without feeling the need to optimize every aspect of our lives? Go Primitive!” 

Trees Need Roots, Houses Need Foundations, and the World Needs

Mixing a story about a boy on a college campus falling in love, with reasoned and clear philosophical arguments, this pamphlet demonstrates that the lasting impacts of one’s sustainability choices and actions cannot occur without deep-rooted awareness, appreciation, and love of the natural world.  

“To make a sustainable world, we really need sustainable people, a sustainable mindset, a sustainable philosophy, and sustainable values. Even if we could manage to implement these grand sustainable systems across the globe, if the people using them aren’t sustainable deep down in their values and mindsets, it’s hard to see that much deep and lasting sustainability will result.”

Education Uprooted: There Are No Winners in a Learning Race

Utilizing the lessons of perennial plants, this pamphlet offers a heartfelt and hard-hitting critique of modern education’s focus on high-speed learning and test taking and what that does to those who can’t keep up. It offers instead a model for slow learning with others, rather than in competition with them and a stopwatch. 

“Let’s demand learning that excites rather than demoralizes; that is calming, not stressful; and that applies to the actual world, rather than disconnecting us from it. Let’s change the schoolhouse narrative and broaden and deepen its perspective. Learning is a long, magnificent journey, not a bleak, breakneck race to understanding.”

Closed for Business

Taking a page from the biblical command to rest every seven days, this pamphlet encourages readers to find new ways to step off the treadmill that is our society and to rest, whether alone or with others. 

“I see unsettling patterns everywhere: from people feeling increasingly too busy to enjoy life, to the surgeon general’s warning that adolescents face “profound risk of harm” from exposure to social media, to the growing habit of doomscrolling in our always-on-alert environment. What’s the medicine for this dis-ease? Many of the world’s faith traditions provide a powerful and seemingly simple remedy. Rest. Take a break from the world. Retreat and invest in inwardly transformative and peace-keeping practices as a way of living graciously and harmoniously in the world.”

The Urban Wanderer: A Reimagining of Thoreau’s Walking

Using the language and metaphors of Thoreau’s famous essay, the author transplants Thoreau’s saunterer to the city. 

“I wish to make an extreme statement, if only to make an emphatic one: we can all be champions of the city as civilization—workers, keepers of cultures, stewards of Nature. But who will speak for the city as Wildness? Who will say that to walk its streets is to move through a living landscape, where we are not just citizens but also creatures, attuned to the tides, the hush of night?”

Ending Chaos in Our Nation’s Farms and Gardens

This satirical piece imagines a new government directive that applies its assault on DEI programs and initiatives to gardening and farming, and the havoc—not to mention absurdities—that ensue.

“Dear Gardeners and Farmers: The government is about to impose sweeping changes to gardening and many agricultural systems. The catalyst for this edict is the so-called rampant proliferation of “chaos gardening,” a playful practice in which gardeners randomly scatter mixtures of seeds across the ground and then embrace whatever emerges. The government’s newly formed Department of Uniform Disciplines (DUD) is extremely disturbed by this, calling it ‘depraved DEI.’ We will reach out soon with advice about how to resist, as resist we must.”

The Plantspeak Papers

The irony is not lost on the authors of this pamphlet that it is printed on the pulped remains of our kin. But as it is still a durable format for conveying information in your language, we have chosen it reluctantly.

faith in a seed, hope for the next generation

We need young people to feel hope, instead of the quiet desperation that pervades their daily experience. We need systems that go eyeball to eyeball with the challenges of this moment, responding with compassion and wisdom. We need to delight in this creation, to ask why, to dream, to create, and to envision a future replete with possibilities and hope.

Slowing Down Is A Radical Act

Deep understanding and insight are a result of being fully absorbed by what you are learning and opening yourself up to it. Spending an extended amount of time with one topic opens one to the possibility of being changed. Therefore, slowing down and being intentional about where you direct your attention is necessary for change in self and society.

The Middlebury College Student Almanac

Too often, attending college can be made to feel like a necessary four-year detour through a quaint small town on the way to a career. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can turn a detour into a destination when we experience the joy and peace that comes with being together in this time and place.

Relationships Matter

For more than 40 years, I have had horses in my life. Mostly, my horses are pets and partners. But I have always wanted to share with other humans the wisdom and gifts the horses offer, day by day and year by year. Now, I use my herd to give workshops to groups, such as veterans and educators, about the profound experience of linking nurturing with nature.

Go Farm, Young People,
and Help Heal the Country

A just and sustainable future will require rebuilding rural America. For too many decades, the countryside has been exploited and depopulated to support urban society, and enrich only suppliers and processors. For too many urban people with progressive politics, rural areas are dismissed as parochial, and resented for holding disproportionate power. And young people in rural communities have moved to cities in search of better opportunities. A better strategy, successfully pioneered a generation ago in Vermont, might be to encourage more young people to live in the country.

In this pamphlet, environmental historian and farmer Brian Donahue argues for empowering rural people so that they can replace the current extractive economy with an attractive economy, and for repopulating the countryside with intrepid young people to help drive change.

local food, more hope

In the revolutionary spirit of Thomas Paine, author, historian, and gardener Kathleen Smythe declares that the time has come for declaring independence from a global agricultural system that robs us of our food sovereignty and treats both consumers and farmers as mere colonial subjects; from the living Earth as inexhaustible rather than an exquisite complex of life that has slowly accumulated for millennia; and from human bodies as receptacles for whatever fossil fuel farming can produce most cheaply. Local food is our best hope in this declaration of independence from global food networks.