Your Inner Barbarian: Why Metalheads Should Care about the Environment

CDH and I are big on sustainable living. For him, it’s a desire for freedom, to not answer to anyone, to be the master of his own abode. For me, it’s more of a social awareness; I’ve never seen a need to acquire more stuff and think flushing decent drinking water down with our feces seems … shitty.

I grow my own herbs and vegetables, and buy the rest from a farmers market (less food miles). We eat a very simple mediterranean-based diet light on meat, heavy on fresh fruit and vege, and bread (which I make myself, every day). We steer away from processed foods, and I’m taking some community classes next year to learn to make my own soaps, shampoos and deoderents.

We use no air conditioning or heaters. We’re designing our dreamhome around the concept of off-the-grid, cottage industry living. CDH is looking into ideas for transport. It’s all quite quaint and nostalgic and profoundly hippyish.

So how does this hippy lifestyle coexist with our hedonistic metal ways? When you think about it as hemp sneakers and lentil soup and Jefferson Starship, hippies are total dorks. How can we marry electric guitars with wind-generated power, steak sandwiches and sausage rolls with a vegetable-rich diet? Satan worshipping with tree hugging?

Simple. Metal – at its heart and soul – yearns for a return to a barbarian society. Metalheads are the last of the viking warriors, the fading sons and daughters of Odin.

NB: “Tribal” and “Barbarian” relate to anthropological terms for differing societal makeups. They’re generalizations used to make inferences about societal patterns and processes, and don’t relate to specific peoples. <definition here>

The urban, tribal society needs everyone to cooperate, to work together to sustain the tribe. Tribes look down their noses at barbarians, who normally beat them at battles despite not knowing anything about contemporary architecture and mocha chai lattes.

Tribalists use consumerism and capitalism as a means of control. Religion, too, but I’ll save that fish kettle for another post. Barbarians thrive on the challenge of ‘making it myself’ and although they earn far less money, they need far less to live. Barbarians feel uncomfortable when asked to eat / drink / bathe with a product whose ingredients are unfamiliar.

Barbarians don’t trust the tribal leaders to look after their best interests. Barbarians trust their lords and friends and brothers, who eat at the same table as them and have proven themselves many times in battle.

Barbarians gain their happiness from hanging with their barbarian buddies, and working for the good of the barbarian settlement.

Barbarians grow their own food and share with their friends. They all drink together at the Viking hall. Tribes perform the tasks set them by their leaders, are paid for those tasks and use that money to boy their needs and wants.

Embrace your inner barbarian.

I’ll write more on this subject from now on, in amongst all the outfit photos and metal ramblings. That is, if you guys don’t mind.

Super Snuggles and Shoggoth Kisses
Steff