An interview with Daniel Vitalis
“As a byproduct of domesticating the world, we’ve domesticated ourselves.”
Daniel Vitalis calls himself a “modern day hunter-gatherer.” He writes, lectures, and hosts podcasts and web series as a means to delivering his ambitious, provocative philosophy of rewilding. In its common usage, this term is usually associated with restoring ecosystems to a state of wilderness, in which wild animals and native plants can live without human intervention. Vitalis, however, applies the term to the human organism: our physiology, psychology, spirituality, and communities. Like ecosystems, humans have transitioned from a natural, wild state of hunting-gathering nomads to our domesticated, sedentary selves, a change that Vitalis believes has been largely to our detriment.
This strain of thinking relates to the wider movement toward ancestral living, which finds its roots in Weston Price, a Canadian dentist who, in the 1930s, travelled the world, comparing the teeth of people living in both modern and traditional ways. Price’s findings suggested a deterioration in the health of humans whose ancestors had been a part of the Neolithic (or Agrarian) revolution, and for whom farming upset the balance of their lives.
In his work since 2008, Vitalis has applied ancient principles to nearly every aspect of his life: sleep, diet, hygiene, beautification, sex, medicine, and movement. His life-project is a kind of paradox: to live as a hunter-gather here and now, in America —not, for example in the Amazon rainforest —during the “anthropocene,” the era in which every nook of our world has been probed and fiddled with by humans. Through foraging, hunting, fishing and various survivalist-adjacent techniques, he lives like a mountain man amidst the endlessly roaring stream of techno-culture.
In his various programs, Vitalis speaks with scientists, doctors, chefs, naturalists and other experts to adapt his ideas to the obstacles of contemporary life. He demonstrates and explains practical skills, such as gathering “raw” spring water and tapping maple trees, and considers topics as prickly as orgasmic birth and the history of infanticide. He can be a controversial and sometime off-puttingly righteous figure in his proselytizing. Likewise, his theories can be abrasive and radical, but they are also profoundly relatable for anyone who feels a pang for an alternative way of life.
After years of following his work with skepticism and intrigue, I called Vitalis at his home in rural Maine. He spoke with the blazing confidence and warm affability that often characterizes public speakers, answering questions in long, seemingly scripted monologues. For a man of the old, natural world, he is surprisingly calculating about his choice of words, and spent a fair amount of our conversation establishing the etymology and definitions of his terms. In this way, he is forever an insurgent, anticipating misunderstandings and defending attacks from a culture whose core foundations he questions. Vitalis and I had few nice moments of salty debate, which were to be expected; since he is challenging everything we think we have ever known about civilization.
- Ross Simonini
I. Artifact Land
ROSS SIMONINI: The concept of wildness is at the center of all your work. What is your definition of wildness?
DANIEL VITALIS: I collect some old Webster’s dictionaries and I have the second edition in print, which is my favorite, and when you look at that, the word wild has about 15 definitions. The first is usually “a thing in its natural state,” and that is usually followed by 14 definitions describing all manner of unkemptness, uncouthness, and disaster. So it’s a word that refers to something untamed, and then the other definitions are really, clearly negative. I think this suggests a very deep taboo in our culture, or maybe better to say, our civilization, which is antithetical to wildness. I mean, humans lived in a wild state for two to three hundred thousand years in our current form, and only in the last six to ten thousand have we tried the experiment we call civilization, which is a practice of whitewashing all wildness. It’s only been very recently that we have realized we should maybe keep some things or places wild.
RS: Through preservation, rewilding natural landscapes.
DV: Now, some people like to play semantic games around the “what is natural?” question. Like, is depleted uranium natural because everything is originally derived from nature? So I think looking at the word “artifact” is helpful here. It’s where we get the words “artificial” and “art.” It means something that bears the mark of human will upon it. Such as: an obsidian arrowhead versus a raw piece of obsidian — same composition, but one is shaped by human will. So I think we can contrast “natural” with “artifact.” But these days we live in a time called the anthropocene, when everything is being meddled with on the phenotypic or genetic level, so wildness is harder and harder to define.
RS: In the anthropocene, are humans a kind of artifact?
DV: Modern human beings are a domesticated form of homo sapiens. We exhibit the behavior of domesticated animals. As a by-product of domesticating the world, we’ve domesticated ourselves. Domestication means “of the house” and we are certainly of the house. In the last two to three hundred thousand — and I apologize for the huge range but we have recently had evidence that may have overturned the previous idea of present-form humans being two hundred thousand years old. So, for most of those years, we were not of the house and we did not practice agriculture. We had clothes and language but we were not sedentary. Today, we are different from those hunter-gathers in the anthropological sense. There are some humans in the world who are not artificial and domesticated but most of us are. And most of us live in something I call artifact land. More than half of the world’s populations live in cities, and they rarely see anything that wasn’t shaped by human will. What about the tree on the sidewalk? Well, that horticultural variety was domesticated. What about my dog? A domesticated breed of the grey wolf. What about the sky? You see satellites, planes and the contrails of plane flight. What about the grasses? They are non-native and imported from Europe. In this way, we really do live in the anthropocene.
RS: Do you draw the end of human wildness at the beginning of the agrarian revolution?
DV: It’s not a timeline for me. Like, I don’t personally think the domestication of dogs is a bad thing for people or dogs or the landscape. But take the term neolithic revolution, which also has racism embedded in it — this term suggests that the whole of the earth decided, in one moment, to move from dirt-covered starvation to agriculture, which freed us from the shackles of having to hunt and gather. The date is usually around 10 thousand years ago, and this is where, in the fertile crescent, the first crops were grown. The idea is that this easily spread across the world, but the reality is that there are still people resisting the neolithic revolution. There are still people who would like to not be in the globalized agrarian culture. In fact, most cultures resisted this when they were colonized by agrarians. So it’s not complete yet.
What happened is that some people made a dramatic shift into agriculture and they started to conquer other places. Such as in Mesopotamia. But the shift wasn’t just there. It happened in Peru, China, and Indonesia, with different crops and different animals that were the subject of their husbandry. And those conquerers subsumed the world. Here, in North America, we have that legacy very fresh in our minds, when hunter-gatherers were in contact with agrarians and we know what happens to indigenous people with that kind of colonialism.
So I don’t personally see this change as a positive thing. We gave up our birth right in the process. Anthropological literature often asks, why did we give up the hunter-gatherer life? We had more leisure time. We were happier, had better health. We had no hierarchies. We were not subjects. We were sovereigns. We lived sustainably with our world.
Today, as we watch our environment burn, we still look to any solution other than a return to our wildness. Wildness is a taboo, a proscription against something that never has to be explained. No one had to explain to us, growing up, that wildness was taboo. We knew things that were wild were bad. But I think when people explore their wildness, the world opens up, including their happiness and their health.
RS: Why would we do such a terrible thing to ourselves by building civilization? Was it out of a kind of laziness?
DV: We don’t know why we chose it. We often talk about history and pre-history. History refers to the beginning of those city-states because that’s the beginning of writing — and it appears that early writing is just to keep track of the monetary exchanges going on. Hunter gatherers don’t write. History is his story, a useful way to think about it, because it’s the history of patriarchy.
I mean, hunting and gathering sounds like it’s a lot of work, but farming takes much more time to secure subsistence. Farmers are also susceptible to famine. And eventually, agriculture also began to hurt our skeleton. We shrank. Our brains got smaller. Famine led to malnutrition. So we got more work and less health. We also got the first hierarchical structures.
Now, there are still many hunter gathering groups around the world but none of them have hierarchy, a word that means to be ruled by a priesthood. People of both genders were equal opposites in hunting and gathering societies, even though they did very different work. Everyone, including the leaders and the children were considered sovereigns. Everyone is free to make their own choices, which is a stark contrast to what we are used to. So it wasn’t laziness, because it was more work and was a less comfortable social structure. To me, I think the roots of civilization comes from the ruling by priesthood.
RS: Does this suggest that religion has led to our demise? Or is it just that civilization is a natural tendency for us?
DV: I’d say, it’s unnatural. We lived in a sustainable way for three hundred thousand years without this ruling, and you could probably push that number back much further. There’s a tendency to think about humans as all one, but it wasn’t the tendency of the people living in Australia or the Arctic or the Pacific Islands. Those people were not interested in this. A small few were interested in these ideas of civilization. But it’s been those who like to be at the top of those pyramids that have the force of the military and policing state behind them and so, through conquest, they can foist their ideas on that. For some reason, a small group of people decided to use religion to do this.
RS: You said “for some reason.” What was, in your opinion, the germ of this divergence?
DV: This is definitely speculation, but there have been many civilizations, of course, and all of them have had a domino effect of falling for similar reasons, and are followed by a debased version of the one before it. There’s a pattern of elite groups across many civilizations and these elite groups have been deeply obsessed with the occult, stretching back to the earliest art and storytelling and accounts we find about civilizations. The oldest thing we find like this is a site in Turkey called Gobekli Tepe, which is where wheat was first domesticated. This is an occult structure built for rituals. And in my opinion, that obsession of the occult has infected the hearts of people who want to rule. I think that’s not natural. It’s an aberration.
When you get large groups of people together, the natural tendency is toward egalitarianism. But there is the phenomenon of sociopathy and sociopaths are characters who do not express the same empathy. These people smell like us and look like us, but they are not like us. In it’s darkest form, it’s psychopathy. We think of the serial killer but this could be the cold blooded government assassin or the C.E.O. Elite positions of power attract these kinds of people. Now, what creates that psychological divergence, I cannot say.
RS: So is this all a problem of sociopathic leadership? Did hunter gatherers not have power structures?
DV: Hunter gathers still tend to have chiefs, but that person is still a functioning member. He still has to hunt and gather. He doesn’t sit back like a billionaire and have people work for him. Hunter gatherers don’t lack but they can’t horde, they can’t produce more than they need. It’s very difficult to generate more than you need from a hunter gatherer lifestyle, so everybody has to participate. Our society, through agriculture, has created a system in which we produce more calories than it would naturally produce, at an expense that we have to play later. This creates a class of people that don’t need to contribute in the same way and instead, can just decide how to rule over their surplus. And those people are, of course, invested in maintaining those positions.
II. Dominoes
RS: What is the size of a traditional community?
DV: Usually about 50 or so.
RS: Have larger communities precipitated our downfall?
DV: Not necessarily. There are many other differences: hunter-gathers live semi-nomadic and they source their calories from across the land. They don’t use money. They use a reciprocal gift exchange. That’s the natural way for all people. I mean, I think most people feel that money is not right. It’s not resonant. It’s abstract and symbolic.
Again, I want to make clear these large civilizations are. We’re talking, the first city states happening 6 thousand years ago. We are three hundred thousand years old and the first city was six thousand years ago. And all the civilizations that have existed have collapsed. It’s not like I can get a plane ticket to the Mesopotamian civilization or the Ancient Egyptian civilization or the Ancient Greek civilization or even the British empire. All of these are now pale shadows of what they once were. These societies are unsustainable. They can’t last because they outstrip their land. So, unless we crack the code on this, which I don’t think is realistic, it won’t go on.
Psychologically, we tell ourselves that we are the greatest people who ever lived, and yet we don’t know how we will live in the future. We use that word sustainable a lot but think about it: civilization is not sustainable because it can’t sustain itself for usually more than a thousand years. On the other hand, our natural pattern as hunter gathers can go on for many thousands of years, as evidenced by, say, the aboriginals who have been in Australia for 60 thousand years.
RS: Have you spent much time with hunter-gatherers?
DV: I have not.
RS: Because you are concerned you’d unwillingly bring civilization to them?
DV: I think that’s happening anyway. The last of the pre-agrarian hunter-gathers will pass on in our generation. But my interest is not in the past, actually. My interest is in hunting and gathering in the modern world. That’s my focus, whereas we’ve been speaking about my philosophy toward modernity.
A lot of people are interested in going to so-called primitive cultures — and there’s a lot of racism in that term — because we are interested in their ways. And what we find are people leaving their lifeway behind for the modern world. But I’m disinterested in cultural appropriation. I don’t want to go to hunter-gatherers and eat my Power Bars while I’m there. I want to hunt and gather in this landscape. Can a culture like theirs exist here and now? We can’t do it for 7 billion people, but can some people do this? What are the impacts on ecology? Can it affect future generations? What kind of culture would emerge if a small group of people start to do this?
RS: Right, because you are clearly not rejecting modern life. You host podcasts, webseries; you seem to travel a bit. So would you say you are trying to merge the two ways of living?
DV: I’m sensitive to the word “merge” because of transhumanism, which is the modern incarnation of the occultism I mentioned before, and that is the merging of biology with technology, and I don’t want to associate with that. For me, I believe it’s important to stay fit for your environment. Fitness is the ability to thrive, reproduce and survive in your environment and my environment is the anthropocene. My environment has a wild plant beside an empty coke can and a candy wrapper. I forage in a world where cars and planes whizz by. I have to be careful when I forage plants that glyphosate hasn’t been sprayed on them. My ecosystem has fish with mercury. I have to remain fit for this world, which includes the business and technological world. If this world changes, I have to then adapt to that next world. Try living in this world and not using technology. You would be unfit. In order to share this information, I have to use it. So I don’t want to merge these things, but to live in this world, I have to.
RS: This word “occult” keeps coming up for you. It usually means “hidden” knowledge and refers to esoteric practices. Why do you view the occult as inherently negative for humanity?
DV: I like this idea that you can know a thing by the fruit it produces. If we look at the fruit of the occult, then the fruit is the subjugation of people. Science has become its own cult. Scientists would prefer to deny that but I think that’s becoming obvious. Scientists are quick to point out the dangers of superstitions, and they see science as the defense against those superstitions. Well, science also gave us agent orange and pesticides and artificial fertilizers that ruin our soil. It gave us the eugenics movement and the atomic bomb, which we dropped on people. A further subjugation of people
RS: Would you contrast occultism with animism, which seems to be the natural form of human belief?
DV: Animism is sustainable. Animism is a natural spiritual outlook. It’s nourishing for the soul. A lack of it leads to unethical behavior in the world. When you stop believing that everything is animated by a life force, when you relinquish it — and I say relinquish because I think it’s our natural program — when that is overrun by egoism, you can see that the fruits of that are very toxic. We see that in climate change. And yet, we continue to act like this is the right way. So when I look at the occult, through time, it only seems to temporarily edify the people who hold power over others. And it does mean hidden, so why do things need to be hidden if they are for the edification of all?
RS: Hiding knowledge leads to control.
DV: I think it’s interesting that if we went to the most liberal parts of our country and asked people about egalitarianism, about the best diet, about more connected social groups, most people feel pretty warm and fuzzy about those things. If we ask those same people how they feel about technology and modernity, most people don’t feel good about those things. Yet, we still celebrate so vehemently our civilization and we belittle the life way of hunter gatherers. And remember that’s everyone who lived on this planet until very, very recently. That’s all of our ancestors. We all come from men who hunted and women who gathered. That is the whole planet, except for modern humans. It’s not a weird obscure thing. It’s our back story and we’ve turned our back upon it.
Really, I think there are two competing worldviews. There’s the natural world view that we are enmeshed in livingness all around us [animism] and then there’s the belief that the world is not okay as it is. We must conquer the world and change it and ultimately, we must leave it and go conquer the stars. This earth is just a pile of matchsticks to fuel our progress, and there’s something about the world that we need to overwrite. That belief led to the first wheat being planted and it’s what led to our missions to Mars.
III. Do we want to be pugs?
RS: It seems clear that you think we, the domesticated humans, are not “fit.” This is an idea that has been spoken of in many civilizations: that there is an ideal human, and that most of us do not fit that description.
DV: Yes, it’s true that people in power throughout many civilizations believe there is an ideal human. For instance, the Maya. We think of them as spiritually advanced, except for the fact that they were cutting the heads off of the hunter gathers to sacrifice them to their sun god at the top of their pyramids. We think of the Egyptians as enlightened, but who built their pyramids? Slaves. There has been an ideal throughout time and it tends to relate to the people who rule that civilization. We see the eugenics movement that only went underground in the early 1900s. We see that the United States, Canada, and China all forced in-fertilization on people who they believed were unfit because they believe in an ideal kind of person. We say things like “celebrate diversity” but if we really wanted to do that we wouldn’t be causing the extinction of so many languages and traditional lifeways.
I think human wildness celebrates diversity on a level we don’t really consider. We bullshit ourselves so much in this culture. When was the last aboriginal model you’ve seen? We actually celebrate the diversity of a select group of people. When was the last time you saw a San Bushman, the oldest extant group of people on the earth, who are becoming extinct and exploited by tourism — when was the last time you saw them anywhere? We are not celebrating diversity. We are ultimately leading to one kind of human. It’s just going to take a little longer, but it’s leading to one kind. Eventually, we will all just speak one language and we won’t remember that we were once diverse.
Or let’s talk about dogs. People are starting to understand that dogs, especially pedigree dogs, are having health problems. Anything from hip dysplasia to not being able to breathe. Look at the pug, for instance. A pug is a wolf that’s been scrunched to the point that it’s eyeballs pop out of its head. Now, I want to celebrate the diversity of the canine genome but altering an animal to create variations is something I want to reexamine.
I understand that your question meant that I am critical of our domestication, but our domestication is leading to cancer and heart disease and diabetes and problems with our bones and on and on. The so-called diseases of civilization. We kid ourselves that we are going to find a cure. We act like we have no idea what’s leading to our decline in epigenetic health. But we do know: It’s our way of life. And the more we act like this, the more we breed ourselves into a genetic corner.
I’m saying, do we want to be pugs? Is it viable longterm? Do we want to think several generations ahead? We are literally a people putting our garbage in the ground thinking that, some day, we’ll come up with a better plan. I don’t think we are even fit anymore to decide. So in that way, we are the wrong kind of people. I just wish we were making an effort to become the right kind of people.
RS: Was there less diversity of genetics among these smaller groups of people?
DV: Well, again, we are three hundred thousand years old and we figured out how to not to be inbred. People assume that people in the past were stupid and had to be married off to other tribes to keep the gene pool diverse. Squirrels don’t need sex education. We have always understood this. If we went back three hundred thousand years and grabbed a human baby, they could be brought up to go to Yale and fly a plane. They were just like us. They had the same brain, and were possibly more aware than us.
RS: Now, this kind of knowledge is purely based on science, but at the same time, you seem quite suspicious of science.
DV: Well, the scientific method is extremely powerful. The problem is that when it’s not balanced with animism and spiritual cognition in the world — in the same way that spirituality not balanced with science can become a cult. So let’s imagine that you have only a right brain hemisphere. You’d be a great artist, but without the left brain, you couldn’t structure anything, so you’d become dangerous to yourself. If you only have one eye, you have no depth perception. So I’m not against science, I’m against the cult of science. That’s where science becomes scientism. I also don’t believe that a person who believes in the Judeo-Christian worldview is dangerous, but if that philosophy rules the world, it’s dangerous.
So what I’m talking about is the consensus view. I don’t know any this for sure, of course, but that’s an assumption that’s never been challenged. Science is the language we speak in the world. I could go around the world like Caine from Kung Fu and proselytize with no scientific basis but I think it would be a much tougher sell. So when I’m foraging or fishing or I’m hunting bears or collecting clams, I don’t need to read scientific literature. But it’s useful in my work, and in the last decade I’ve had to really deepen my knowledge of these sciences. It may seem like a contradiction, but I need to be able to show people things beyond an emotional argument. I also do find archeological work valuable but that does not mean I have to accept humanist atheism of scientism. Just like, to appreciate saltines and wine on Sunday doesn’t make me a Christian.
IV. Tending of the Wild
RS: Would you say you come to this work out of a feeling?
DV: Well, Ross, have you ever felt there’s something deeply wrong with how humans are living in the world?
RS: Of course. That’s why I’m talking to you.
DV: Me too, and I felt that the answers lay in the natural world. It seemed obvious that the deeper people get in the artificial, the further they get from reality. I could feel this before I understood science, which means today, for me, it’s a very balanced thing. There is an abundant amount of information coming in from many fields and it all suggests one question: why did we ever leave our natural lifeway? And remember, most of the people who left that lifeway did not do so by choice. This is not well understood. When school children learn history, there’s a tone that this is something we all did together. The reality is that almost all of the world fought against this except for a small contingent of industrial elitism. But our paradigm is written in this civilized way of thinking, so we can’t really have free thoughts outside of it. It’s multi-generational, multi-thousand year doctrine.
RS: Myths seem to recall a previous way of thinking. It’s a kind of story that doesn’t obey the laws of civilization.
DV: I agree with that. With mythography we get into the realm of archetype, which is a powerful thing that distinguishes the way we see the world from how the animals do. Mythology is something we’ve always had. Storytelling goes as far back as civilization.
RS: You often ask people in your shows: “Are we doomed?” So I’d like to ask you that same question now. Are we? Should we move away from the globally-connected world? Is that even possible?
DV: It’s interesting to look at the direction that thinkers in many fields are going. I get to speak to lots of forward thinkers, and they certainly don’t accept all my ideas — I’m out, beyond the fringes with what we are talking about — but there is a sense that a re-wilding needs to happen. This is going on in the United States plains to rewild the ecosystem and it’s happening in Europe. People are returning to a simpler diet. And yet we are still barreling ahead. For some reason, in our civilization, it is okay to make decisions in our society that will affect six million years in the future, for the benefit of the current generation. To have electricity, we’ll create a nuclear power plant whose fuel rods will be toxic for a million years. We have made decisions that we have to live with for a long time and the change is not simple as making a shift.
Personally, I think there’s a bifurcation going on. Some people want to merge with machines: augmented reality, virtual reality. It’s not far off that people have a computer interface over their daily reality, such as headsets or glasses. Very soon, that will be commonplace. So I think we’ll see more of the occult transhumanist ideas become mainstream. I think transhumanism will replace the Judeo-Christian faith that is dwindling away.
At the same time, there is a loose community of people who are moving toward land-based ideas and technologies and ancestral diets and not just observing but participating in their ecology by hunting and foraging, or doing land restoration, and permaculture. We know from epigenetics that our food and environment will affect our gene expression. So it’s obvious that people eating 3d processed food and living in virtual reality, surrounded by objects that off-gas VOCS [fumes emitted by volatile organic compounds, like plastics], will have different health outcomes in their lifetime and in their children’s lifetime.
Other people living in nature, surrounded by fresh air and sunlight and away from technology, and deeper in calm natural environments. They choose not to be vaccinated and they will have different kinds of children. If these both go on, if they happen in a vacuum, you could see that you are creating two separate subspecies through these experiments.
I know I’m being black and white in my thinking, though. We all use fossil fuels, of course. This is more of a thought experiment than what I think will literally play out. But for me, ultimately, I side with the mysterious unknown that animates life. I think we are trying to be that force ourselves right now and that is our fundamental mistake.
RS: Hubris.
CV: The tower of babel. An ancient story. How popular is it now, in the new age and yoga scenes to hear, “you are god.” Under scientism there is a belief that the human brain is the most complex structure, the most intelligent force in the universe. If that’s true, that's terrifying. [laughs] I’m uncomfortable with that. I mean, Monsanto believes in the transgenic idea that we can manufacture organisms. If we trace our civilizations back, people at the top say these things. It’s all about power. I think about the terms of employee, and that word means to willingly or knowingly go into a ploy that is devised for you. When you are an employer, you do it to someone else. When you are an employee, it happens to you. And if you get to have power over people you get to be a “man-ager.”
I don’t think most people want a transhumanist future. In science fiction we see that, just as the end of the rainforest burns, people get into big shiny ships that look like Best Buy and they travel the stars and colonize them, without animals or plants or an ecosystem. I think this is very unrealistic. I think our fate is tied to our ecosystem. There has to be a return to our senses, literally. We have to see, smell, taste, hear and feel what’s around us.
So I think our best chance, despite everything I’ve said, is eco-management. That’s what humans do, like beavers. We naturally tend to our landscape. Forager Sam Thayer calls this eco-culture — a tending of the wild. If we can go toward that, it will take many generations, we will be much happier there. We talk about native peoples. Well, we are all native to earth and I think it’s time we start living in it.