 One evening I was walking back towards the edge of town, one of my regular, late in the day, dasher on the block, five to seven mile circuits of what remained of the daylight. At the top of the hill I pawl was in the scrubby cops, then sat and just listened to the rhythmic, lyrical song being sung by the wind in the trees, with percussive accompaniment from the calls of blackbirds and the branches above me drumming against one another. In the end I sat until it was dark, so beautiful was the ethereal music. Spend enough time outdoors and you begin to perceive the countryside differently. This is an ancient landscape, one that our modern sensibilities are barely able to perceive. In part that's because we live in different times, but primarily it's a result of our lifestyle in this western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic, or weird, society. Many people have lost the intrinsic, animistic relationship to life, the landscape, and rest of the essence of being a living animal within a greater living world. For me, finding that moment on the hill, almost drowned in the distant urban noise of the darkened evening, was transcendent, but that was just one of many such moments it is still possible to find in the chaos of the modern lifestyle, but only if you make a commitment to go and find them. If we have lost some intrinsic to perceiving a natural life, we will not find that again in some mythical distant past from invented stories, conjured to fill the holes in our modern lifestyle. Likewise, archaeology or anthropology over their history shown themselves to be fickle sciences subject to the bias of the observer. And if you want to find new ways to live, nostalgic looking back to some better imagining past, can't dictate our future course either, if only because, more than likely, it never existed. And what of all those TV natural history films, buried in rousing mute music and anthropomorphised views of the creatures humans find cute? They tell us far more about what's wrong with how we view the world rather than giving us an honest view of the world's state and our place within it. No, a more sensible relationship between modern humans and the planet will not be found, in a book, on the internet. On urban protest lines, we will not buy in the shops, and politicians cannot enact laws to make it. We need a change in perspective. For that reason, we will find it through the direct experience of what it is to be alive amongst all of a non-human life. We will find it out here in the unfiltered direct experience of being outdoors. For example, all those native films on TV, do you think people just go out and capture that stuff? That all those insects, birds and fluffy creatures are just out there doing cute stuff for us to see all the time. Camera operators spend weeks or even months outdoors just to get a few minutes of footage, or continuous feeds from hides with automated cameras that are edited these days by artificial intelligence to give just the right audience of experience for the viewer. No, from Country Fowl to David Attenborough, how the media has sold the natural world to the public is as an engineered spectacle, designed to reinforce our beliefs as how we view ourselves, not the world around us. As Debord said, all that was once directly lived has become mere representation. We see an abstracted view of the world in the mass media, then future reports abstract their abstracted view further in order to meet our simplified expectations, eventually it only represents a bare semblance of its original self, and as we have no direct experience to compare with, we do not know this to be the case. That lifestyle is not real, it's not natural. It's a highly biased human construct designed to reflect an imagined view of ourselves and certainly not our objective place within nature and the Earth's environment. Nature TV shows and eco-issues generally are suffused with illusory human hubris that has shows on technology or economics. If you want to see the world as it is, you have to take that constructive view of the world apart, cutting through that curated engineered spectacle by seeing the experience in the world as it is, in person. If COVID should have taught the public anything, it is that, irrespective of any claims to the contrary, politicians and technocrats are not in control. Just as, a decade or so ago, the financial crash demonstrated economists are not in control either. The reality then, no one is in control of our technological society. Those at the top are as effectively trapped in the double-bind of failing economic growth and technological progress as the ordinary consumer. Now building climate change, resource depletion and ecological breakdown, the public can have no confidence that their lifestyle is being guaranteed by anyone. Or, to quote Erin Brockovich's latest soundbite, Superman's not coming. As I sat in the musical gloom of the approaching twilight, I resolved what I needed to do, where it was I needed to go. Most of all, how the work I do needed to change, to reflect this reality, whether people like that or not. At that point I've afforded a label to describe this idea, stating what it was that inspired this way of working on what it sought to do. Long walks and an alco-primitivism. It's a grand title for what is a simple idea, that with minimal consumption, and as little expense as possible, anyone should be able to go and learn the practical skills of simple living, irrespective of the restrictions that the mainstream world tries to impose on our access to the outdoors. It's started because that world has ignored its historic duty of care to protect our future. It is the only practical safeguard open to all, to deal with the kind of world that will inevitably arrive over the next decade or two. The slow, grinding decline of what many consider modernity is inevitable. This overdeveloped, econometric worldview shows itself incapable of the kinds of change necessary to avoid this. And even many of the people out to save the planet, are still blind to this reality, as they personally find it so challenging in their present day lifestyle. In this new blog, I'll produce information and videos to help those who wish to learn the skills of living simply, amidst the madness of our modern day world. And yes, just like all that nature stuff on TV, this too will be a curated collection. The difference here is that your challenge is not to see what is being shown to you, it's just to use the information to try out these activities for yourself. You take the basic skills shown here, but you must find the experience and skills meaning as you see it. If there is a point to this blog, it is, I hope, that you might slowly build the confidence to realize modern society and the lifestyle it advances are illusory. That much of the material goods it offers are unnecessary for a comfortable, rewarding life. And that moving on from that high consumption life to something very different and less materialistic is not hard once you have the capacity to create it yourself in cooperation with those around you. The best way to start doing that, randomly spend a day on foot at all times of the year in whatever weather, walking from a train or bus stop with no expectation as to what you might find. If you really want to see the world, then dispose of any plan or pretext. If you only go when the sun is shining, you will only see the world for a fraction of the hours in the year. If you only go at noon, then you will miss the dusk, dawn and twilight world. If you only walk in the day, then you will miss the beauty of the world at night. If you only go when you feel happy and energetic, how will you experience what the natural world can do for your spirit when you're sad? Yes, that's difficult. Because change is difficult, but the purpose of the blog is to introduce you to the basics of what you need to do this, which will hopefully make it easier. If there's a solution to our present problems, that it is not to be found in yet more technology. That just compounds the problems of systemic complexity that place human society generally. If there are multiple solutions to be found by most people, then it is by living a simpler life, working with natural systems to provide for their basic needs. The place you will find the inspiration for that is out here, in the desert of the real. And yes, compared to those TV natural history programs, the monocultured countryside covering much of England is a green desert. If you spend all your time watching 90 programs on TV, it creates an unrealistic view of the world and so the actual countryside can seem a depressingly empty space. Until regular experience shows you how to find those special moments which still exist out there if you develop the skills to find them. How you develop those skills to adapt to the future change you face nationally and globally is up to you. The only certainty is that in a technologically complex world, utterly dependent upon industrial energy and resources, discovering an ability to deliver out those things must be advantageous to your future security. That is what this blog will explore, both from theory and practice. In an uncertain world, it is sensible to be prepared, but even if we're lucky and that future doesn't arrive in the very near future, chances are that you'll still have a fun time practicing these ideas.