Welcome to the website of Mica Z. McDonald
I am an herbalist, writer, philosopher, ecologist, animist, and anarchic forest creature living in Wabanakik (Vermont).
This website is a place to collect the various projects I’m working on.
I am inspired by global movements of decolonization, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggle, as well as the revival, reclaiming, and reinvention of cultural traditions that bring us back into harmony and reciprocity with all of Nature and humanity.
As an author, herbalist, teacher, and thinker, these themes guide my work:
- Re-enchantment
- Re-visioning
- Reconnection
- Re-skilling
- Regeneration
- Re-commoning
- Re-peasantization
- Reforestation
- Rewilding
- Revolution
- Reclaiming
- Subsistence
- Low-tech futurism/ appropriate technology/ low-throughput livelihoods
- Decolonial & anticolonial praxis
Syl·van | ˈsilv(ə)n : of the woods, trees, or forests; pleasantly pastoral. From the French sylvain or Latin silvanus meaning “woodland deity”.
Rev·o·lu·tion(s) | ˌrevəˈlo͞oSH(ə)n : a forcible overthrow of a government or social order, in favor of a new system; a dramatic and wide-reaching change in the way something works or is organized or in people’s ideas about it; the movement of an object in a circular or elliptical course around another or about an axis or center; a cycle or return to a previous state of being. From Old French or Latin revolvere, meaning “to roll back“.
More about me
I have a degree in environmental policy from the University of Vermont and a clinical certification in Traditional Western Herbalism from the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism. I’m co-founder of Railyard Apothecary where I served as herbal dispensary manager and chief medicine-maker. I’ve been active in numerous social justice and environmental movements over the last 20 years at the local, state, and federal levels. I’ve worked for Senator Bernie Sanders, 350 Vermont, the Vermont Natural Resources Council, Vermont Workers Center, and the Vermont Legislature. Currently, I’m in a master program studying anthropology, philosophy, and anticolonial politics at the California Institute of Integral Studies. I’m a gender outlaw (transmasculine non-binary) living and thriving with chronic illness.
My life’s purpose is to contribute to a vision of an ecologically regenerative, low/appropriate-tech, egalitarian, decolonizing, anarchist, postcapitalist present and future for all. We have far too many dystopian futures available to us but too few positive visions of the future. We need a re-visioning of society now more than ever, especially that which is informed by anticapitalist and anticolonial theory and practice. We must resist the “official future” designed by corporate and state elites which proselytizes state-based solutions, hierarchical social orders, continued capitalist control, unnecessary and harmful technologies, and “big green” solutions to climate change which reinforce its original causes (hint: it’s capitalism and colonialism). The positive visions which we really need will only come, as the Zapatistas say, “from below and to the left” – from communities rooted in egalitarian and communitarian ethics, decentralized governance, and ecological reciprocity.
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Sylvan Revolutions 