“Carrots & Sticks” - Behavioral Violence
During our reset and catch-up session, a small group gathered, but the intimate conversation opened into something expansive: a reframing of how we understand human nature, relational life, and the forces that try to tame them. This primer grows directly out of that conversation and prepares the ground for our next session on “Carrots and Sticks”—behavioral violence, reward and punishment, and the disciplining of the wild.
A young whooping crane being relocated from suburban Chicago in order to be returned to the “more bird-friendly environment” of Horicon Marsh.
Anthropologists and archaeologists studying what we call “prehistory” have uncovered something that unsettles many of our modern assumptions about human nature. For much of our evolutionary past, multiple hominin species coexisted in Africa, including the immediate predecessors of Homo sapiens. These populations lived through a period of extraordinary environmental volatility—ice ages, megadroughts, and sudden temperature swings—with catastrophic ecosystem shifts often occurring within a single human lifetime. This instability concentrated groups of early humans in the East African Rift Valley, where they were forced to improvise new ways of living.
What emerges from this research is not a story of a species predesigned for stability, hierarchy, dominance, or self-interest. It is instead the story of a species whose defining feature became improvisation: a radical plasticity forged in the furnace of climate chaos that enabled us to live in groups defined by strict vertical hierarchy when necessary, open horizontal heterarchy when necessary, and to form all sorts of rituals and myths and patterns of love, friendship, affinity, and enmity to survive the difficulties presented to us. Yet even this is only half the truth, for adaptation alone does not explain how humans survived.
What is too often neglected is the fact that humans did not survive by adapting as human alone, in isolation from other species. We survived by attuning. By caring. By cultivating reciprocal relationships with all our relations: the animals whose flesh fed us and whose movements taught us where water might be found; the plants whose leaves and fruits nourished us and whose rhythms signaled climatic shifts; the landscapes of stone, soil, and sand that held wisdom we learned not to command but to inhabit.
Our ancestors did not simply improvise to endure chaos; they improvised to help others survive it, too. We cared for the animals, the plants, and the landscapes that were also navigating climate upheaval, and from these reciprocal relations emerged the early seeds of the abilities that would later make us herders, gardeners, and architects. This shared endurance suggests that the origins of humanity are not rooted in competition but in co-flourishing—not in fixed behavior but in relational improvisation, a way of surviving through responsiveness, generosity, and deep entanglement with more-than-human life.
From this evolutionary ground, we might reconsider a Yupik story shared by Aaron during our last session, a story in which animals welcome a vulnerable, naked human who appears in their midst as kin. Squirrel offers warmth with their pelt; Elk offers nourishment with their flesh; Bear offers fear as wisdom; and Human accepts the responsibility to understand the needs of these relations who have gifted them so much, and to care in return.
Such Indigenous stories are not romantic artifacts but archives of relational intelligence—knowledge carried across millennia that mirrors what evolutionary science is only now beginning to understand. In the Yupik story, the human becomes human by entering into obligations with others who are not human but without whom no human can survive. This is not metaphor; it is anthropology in narrative form. Indigenous cosmologies remember something Empire would have us forget: there was no “human” who existed apart from the relations that made human life possible. Humanity was never a solo project.
From evolutionary science and Yupik cosmology, James suggested we might take David Graeber’s idea of baseline communism—the everyday ways people help one another simply because someone needs help—and extend it further. This way of living is not an invention of anarchist political theorists; it is the inheritance of a species shaped by 300,000 years of relational survival. We traced how this shows up today: drivers stopping so ducks can cross the road; people feeding stray dogs and cats; volunteers pruning overwhelming ivy and blackberry bushes to give other ground-cover plants a chance to establish themselves. Such small acts are not incidental; they are echoes of our evolutionary beginnings.
Only after grounding ourselves in this deep ancestry of care can we properly introduce the next session’s theme: behavioral violence, or control through reward and punishment—how this poetics of relation can be lured out of us with carrots and beaten out of us with sticks. Whereas ancestral relational life cultivated attunement, reciprocity, and mutual survival, modern colonial systems cultivate compliance, legibility, predictability, self-surveillance, and fear of deviation.
This “carrots and sticks” logic isn’t only in prisons or schools; it structures workplaces, immigration protocols, welfare systems, conservation policies, and even interpersonal relationships under capitalism. It is a logic that narrows the range of possible actions and attempts to discipline the improvisational and nurturing relational capacities that enabled us to survive in the first place.
Yet alongside this disciplining logic, forms of refusal continue to surface—sometimes deliberate, sometimes simply alive. Ylfa turned our attention to the story of conservationists teaching whooping cranes their migration route by flying alongside them in ultralights. The process is painstaking: humans hatch the chicks, isolate them from any sight or sound of human bodies, dress in full white suits, speak through puppets shaped like crane heads, and spend months imprinting themselves as surrogate parents. They guide the fledglings through rehearsed flights, then take to the air themselves—flapping fabric wings, buzzing the sky in motorized ultralight aircraft—so the young cranes will learn a migration path long lost to their species.
Some cranes follow the plan perfectly, tracing the route exactly as they were taught. And some, after all that choreography and care, bank away from the scripted path and decide to winter in Walmart parking lots. In doing so, these intransigent cranes reveal the deeper injunction that fortress conservation tries to hide: You may live, but only where we tell you to live. The cranes, by settling in a Walmart parking lot instead of a designated wetland, are not making a mistake. They are making a claim. They are telling us, stubbornly: We want to live here. And if this will be our wintering ground, then perhaps this shouldn’t be a parking lot at all: restore the wetland that was.
Their refusal exposes the violence of a system that protects “nature” only by isolating it, disciplining it, and removing the relational freedom that all living beings—including us—require to survive. And if we listen closely, the cranes are not only rejecting the boundaries set around them; they are reminding us of something primordial. They show us that life has always slipped the enclosures built to contain it, always sought out the cracks where wildness can breathe.
But they also gesture toward something else: a kind of world-making power hidden in even the smallest acts of refusal. By choosing a Walmart parking lot over a sanctioned wetland, the cranes remind us that the places we are told are barren, disposable, or ruined may still hold the potential for life—if only we dare to inhabit them differently.
Like them, we inherit an ancestral capacity to turn away from the routes we’ve been trained to follow, to settle where the world tells us we do not belong, and to insist—quietly or defiantly—that another way of living is possible. The cranes are not just resisting behavioral violence; they are remembering a lineage older than carrots and sticks. They are practicing the same relational improvisation that shaped our species in the first place.
To resist carrots and sticks is not merely to avoid punishment or reject reward; it is to reclaim the freedom to decide where and how we live, whom we belong with, and what worlds we help sustain. The cranes demonstrate that even in the most asphalted spaces of Empire, wildness can take root and speak back.
And so the questions we carry into our next session are simple, and difficult, and ancestral:
What would it mean for us, too, to winter where we are told we should not?
Where are the Walmart parking lots in our own lives—and what would it look like to turn them back into wetlands?
