Walking a Past into the Present

AWE Season One Episode Eight

At the time of writing, The Crow’s Nest has subscribers from 43 countries and 42 US states. The majority of readers (58%) come from the USA, with 15% from the UK, and 4% from Australia. Canada is next, then France, both with 3%.

The huge majority of readers are almost certainly English-speaking, which makes sense—Substack is a US company and my work is in English. I love to read voices from other parts of the world, they often tell different stories to that which we from ‘western’ nations share, something which I find very useful and important. Too often, we can be caught in the trap of only reading certain views—to really grow, we need to expand those circles.

I do also have subscribers from across six nations on the continent of Africa, seven nations in Asia, but just one nation in South America. I am grateful and delighted that my words are read so widely, however, happy that they resonate across different cultures and different geographies.

What does this have to do with our ongoing discussion of how we can use nature and, in particular, ancestral knowledge of nature, to enhance our day to day current existence?

In part, I begin with this data to position us all within a geographical framework. For the purpose of this piece, all of you reading are connected by three things: you subscribe to my words, you read English (or use a translation tool), and your ancestors were all recently hunter gatherers. Recently, in terms of the age of our species, as I talked of in Our Generations and a Stolen Birthright.

For some of you, it is likely you have hunter gatherer ancestors more recently in your lineage than others.

A brief aside on the term hunter gatherers. I use this interchangeably with hunter fisher gatherers but the evidence suggests that the term fisher gatherer hunters would be more accurate, simply because it is in this order which the majority of such societies seem to have acquired their food. I also like the term forager, as it links all three of these.

Often, it is assumed that the forager way of life died out in Europe millennia ago, with the appearance of Neolithic farming communities. This is incorrect. Even within the historical record there are examples of such societies not only existing, but thriving. The Sámi people, of Sapmi—in northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola peninsula of Russia—were still getting most of their food from foraging as late as the latter half of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries (eastern Sámi), before moving to predominately pastoralist, reindeer-herding societies. See this paper for more.

This is but one example.