…on the summer solstice in 1968, the Diggers began radiating out from San Francisco to other regions and cities to spread their anti-materialistic and increasingly earth-centered ideas.
Homeskin was a statement of vision and intent for this exodus. It expands what had been the Diggers’ mainly urban experiment with mutualistic anarchism to now embrace the vast natural interdependence found in Earth’s biosphere. It was specifically written as a handout for a caravan of trucks that had been individually modified into rolling living quarters to journey slowly across North America from west to east as a kind of reverse pioneer wagon train. …Homeskin…contains the initial statement of “ecographic regions” that eventually evolved into the concept of bioregions.
—Envisioning Sustainability, 2009, Peter Berg
Homeskin is reproduced below in its original design followed by the text. Calligraphy by Jamil Brownson.
HOMESKIN
Planet Drum Broadside, 1970
“The parasitic life has greatly reduced the danger from predators, and from the demand for competition… the life of parasitism is not as hard on the parasite as the free life is on the free-living animal.”
Parasitology, E. & G. Noble
your body is home.
any place on this spinning geo-creature earth is part of the skin that grows us all.
MAN / WILD
Separate but living together. Environs, habitat, sanctuary, conserve &
Nature.
Feudal terms of a divorce from tribal interdependencies.
“State” got the children, land-men settled for private property.
MAN – MADE
INDUSTRIAL “plants” process wilderness to create and environ of
machines. Resource, product, undeveloped areas, motor, metro-suburb.
“Nations” supercede states in competition for “World.”
Perpetual global war as a primary industry.
Space exploration undertaken as a military necessity.
Scientific achievement supercedes enlightenment as a means of
overcoming natural disasters & obstacles.
Pollution & over population appear as obvious symptoms of human
parasitism on the planet.
But when a man stepped on the moon & failed to claim it as territory, national boundaries became obsolete.
Planet-sense is a tree-ring of consciousness that eats the bark of history.
* * * * *
ECOLOCALES
Planet-identity is simultaneously local & whole.
You are somewhere some-time & anywhere all the time.
“Ecology,” divided into fields of “human” & “natural,” is not of itself the tool
that will dismantle the artifacture that holds back our assumption of planethood.
It is a word that blocks a word that used to be “spirit.”
Approximately 3 million billion sestillion live plants & animals inhabit Earth, & we are demanding the freedom of “wildness”, the autonomy of “nature” for all creature-consciousness.
Ecology stands in relation to this epoch as economics stood to socialism, the
ideology of the machine-state.
But we are demanding more than an ideology that will release us from
social zoos.
We are demanding our creatureness, our free genetic destiny.
ECOLOCALES (con’t)
- Spirit-possession of ecographic regions, areas of distince climate, soil,
topographic & wildlife continuity.
Living on & maintaining the land.
Absorbing & celebrating spirits residing & arising there. - Planetedge exchange & support events to replace cities.
Free acts of facility & service that anticipate planetary social forms.
Food, supply, mobility & information access. - Planet-joinings.
Traveling caravans, nomadic communes, life-acting exemplars
hands-&-dreams unfolders.
Imagine an exchange trip between a chinese village & a northern
california commune!
A distinct personal Vision of food would end
the dumb emergency of Architecture!
NOCEAN
- Our standard for ocean food is wild, trapped instead of
cultivated. - Seawater is a fairly concentrated chemical solution capable of
nutrition, electrolysis & corrosion. - Ocean bodies absorb more heat than land masses.
Thermal gradients control growth of sea plants & animals.
Currents manage enormous quantities of heat in continuous circuits
around the planet. - Tidal force is in constant motion.
Biospheric pioneers begin occupation of the continental shelves.
Post-industrial nomads move through merged ocean/shore land
communities on coastal edges.
Elaborations on natural shorelife relationships
Gathering & re-seeding edible shellfish, seaweed grown on floating frames.
Recycling of land & ocean organic wastes.
Natural energy channeled for building & power.
Tidal engines, drift foundations, ocean thermal & chemical taps.
Boat chains, platforms, anchored balloons.
Kelp dried for rope, matting, containers, wrapping, clothing.
A REGULAR ROLLING EVENT
SPIRIT FARE FAIR TRUCK RACE &
TRAVELING RADIO
- We all spend a day a week food-gathering.
Buy, beg, steal, rustle, cultivate, hunt, pick it up off the ground or out of
garbage cans.
Go for weight. - Come to a central place (which changes), spread it out, check out
everybody else, & and take what you need.
If anyone disagrees with you, decide it on the spot.
Do you need it? - Get loaded.
- Lay in the sun.
- Badmouth lame gatherers & deadbeats.
- Praise those who surprise & delight you with their vigor & imagination,
especially if you’ve never seen them before. - Flirt.
- Gossip.
- Fix trucks well enough to do it again.
Homeskin Communication is a Tattoo of Time.
“Nows” instead of News.