You are a caged animal held captive in a burning world.

Heat and dryness, floods, and saturation: the domesticators - the priests and politicians, marketers and bureaucrats - tell you that you cannot go back to keep you from realizing that they cannot move forward. We lay dormant, stagnant in a world under assault, becoming the spectators of unilateral destruction unfolding around us. Over our bodies. Inside our minds.

If you aren’t enraged, it’s not because you’re dead inside, it’s because you’ve been trained not to feel it. Conditioned. Not broken, but wounded. Potentially fatal wounds, but not necessarily.

This is your world on domestication.

Tamed. Hurting. Enslaved.

We are sold narratives to keep us from looking up. To keep us from seeing that the sheer destruction caused by civilization is not inevitable. To see that the world production has built is terminal. To see that the path paved by industrialism is a short cut to catastrophic fallout. To see that the destiny manifested by settler colonialism was a death sentence for those who chose life over survival.

To see that a social animal out of context erupts in existential crisis about the very meaning of life. To see how individualism isolates us. To see how walls close us in as much as they keep others out.

We are sold narratives that keep us complicit. Complacent.

Consuming substitutes of the lives we had evolved for piecemeal with wages that barely sustain an unfulfilling life, from work that only breeds our dependency upon a system that leeches souls while devouring the wild world we were searching for all along.

You were born a hunter-gatherer.

You were born a social animal, one that moves within the land and moves between bands in a world that was meant to be less measured, less exact. We were meant for lives with more meaning and less consequence. A life where connection and meaning are implicit. Where animals have voices and trees have stories. A world where rivers flow unabated and water isn’t a health hazard.

A world without fences.

A world without flags.

A world without rulers and gods.

That isn’t a foreign world. It isn’t a concept. It’s not a philosophical supposition, it’s not a mathematical equation nor a scientific hypothesis. It’s not revolutionary rhetoric nor reactionary nationalism. It’s our world.

It’s the world we have quantified and qualified. Broken down and marketed, automated and mapped. The world we view with the colonizers’ eye, the farmers’ hand, and the capitalists’ greedy smirk. The world we see in fragments so that we can’t feel how we are killing it. How we are killing ourselves. Computational vision: algorithms require no sympathy for the dead, no empathy for the dying.

It’s a world that others haven’t forgotten. A world that they continue to struggle for. A world that our minds and bodies yearn for. A world within reach. A world torn apart and extracted, packaged and sold.

A world that nurtured us, as a species, to build the freest and most egalitarian societies to have ever existed. And we know it.

They sing songs of progress and growth as lullabies for dystopian futures they could never deliver. They sing of freedoms in an era of rampant inequality against a rising tide of authoritarian regimes willing to slit any throat to win a war without end.

They say you cannot go back. They say history moves in one direction. They chew the gusto of the frontier and feed it to us in monuments: statues and statutes. They say their way is the only way. They hide their weakness in plain sight: the electronic arteries of the grid crisscrossing marked land, fiber optic cables following the paths laid down by the slave trade tracing colonial maps.

The oceans are rising. The lands are sinking. Their infrastructure wasn’t built for a living world, but against it. It was never destined for anything but collapse. And those who profit from it would gladly sacrifice all of us upon the altar of the economy.

There is no more “back” than there is “forward.” Our world is living. Time is a line imposed upon a circle. If we are looking ahead then we aren’t looking inward. If we see the world with their vision, then we won’t use our own eyes.

We won’t feel.

We won’t see that the primal anarchy we have grown within still exists. That there are those who are still fighting for it. There are those who refuse to be caged. Those who refuse to die.

We are here. A living world struggling to survive while a globalized techno-industrial civilization actively tries to bury it. Caged and tamed, docile even while boiling over with a destructive rage and sadness: hurt and wounded, but not broken.

We are here to say that you never had to go back. You exist as a continuation of life flowing from this Earth. The breath of our world flows through you. The wildness is never gone, but it is under constant assault.

We are here to say that either the world burns or the cities do.

We are here to say that abusers convince you that you have no choice.

We are here to say that marketers convince you that you have their options.

We are here to say that you are wild. That you can be free.

We are here to say that there’s a match in one hand and bolt cutters in the other.

We aren’t here to say the world is waiting.

We are here to say that the world is fighting.

We are here to say that their story only ends one way.

And we are here to tell you that there are others.

Black and Green Press was founded in 2000 as a resource for the burgeoning anti-civilization milieu. It has since become the largest and longest standing publisher of anti-civilization and primal anarchist work.