I've spent a lot of time living by hunting and foraging in British Columbia, Montana, Idaho and Alaska. In mountainous and northern environments you MUST be a master big game hunter (moose, elk, deer, caribou, seal, whale) if you expect to survive for more than a few weeks, especially in winter.
Southern British Columbia is another story. I also lived with the Nuu-chah-nulth for a couple of summers, and put on more weight on a diet of salmon, halibut, dried seaweed, clams, sea urchins, crabs, smoked herring, herring roe, and a plethora of berries drenched in fish grease (it's actually delicious), but you gotta deal with cold rainy winters and a good boat is a must.
As part of my work in optimal foraging theory, I calculated required range sizes (taking into consideration prey and plant population densities and reproductive rates) to sustain groups of hunter-gatherers indefinitely. With a broad-spectrum foraging strategy in a prime area (think far south USA, savannah near rich bottomlands) each individual might need a MINIMUM of 20 to 200 acres. The farther you go into conifer forests, deserts and arctic, the larger your range sizes per individual become. You are looking at thousands and tens of thousands of acres per person.
The moral is, hunter-gatherers were nomadic for a very good reason. Foragers moved on long before the land was stripped bare of all resources to allow the land to replenish itself. In addition, for a BAND of hunters (as opposed to a solitary hunter) to live a truly primitive existence would require the use of the large-scale primitive food collecting techniques that are largely illegal today and would easily attract attention--game drives, controlled burning of the landscape, trapping large game (and taking far more than is allowed for sport hunting), using gill nets and fish weirs, sun drying of meat on a massive scale, uprooting plants, etc.
After travelling across much of the Americas, in my opinion the best places to live a TRULY primitive existence would be in sub-tropical areas: (you don't even need a bow to get food in these places--you can pick up shellfish, club porcupines and possums!).
1. Lacandon Jungle, Chiapas Mexico (tons of wild food, last virgin rainforest, immense, unexplored, periphery protected by the quasi-anarchist Zapatista National Liberation Army
3. South Texas coast, fantastic climate, warm water, can just wade out and collect crabs, whelks, and oysters by hand by the hundreds, mesquite, prickly pear, spanish dagger, acorns, largest undeveloped barrier island on earth, thousands of uninhabited spoil islands. Fresh water 2 to 3 feet below surface.
2. Southern New Mexico, vast amount of little regulated public land and fantastic climate. Primary foods are mesquite, sotol, agave, yucca, acorns, snakes, lizards, rabbits, porcupines.
Personally, I've always dreamed of living like a chimpanzee--no clothes, the simplest technology, a big group of rowdy buddies, and give up language altogether. It would be fucking awesome, but only feasible in prime foraging areas with a warm climate and very liberal or non-existent local human zombie population.
I've also dreamed in the past of an armed resistance and lets just say I have some major firepower. Then I get to thinking, what would I be resisting? As long as language (and books, the internet, movies) exists along with prime environments, civilization might just pop right back up. Animals (my true role models) don't have organized resistance either. Sometimes they scrounge, or even thrive off civilization's trash (coons, rats, bears, coyotes, etc) or they just straight up eat people every now and then.
I feel you with the anarcho-primitivist dream. It was my dream too for years. But after years of trying, I realized there had to be some kind of compromise. The total rejection of technology began to seem as strangely suppressive to instinct as civilization itself. I arrived independently at the primitivist conclusion after studying linguistics, genetics and watching chimpanzees for hours (I didn't discover John Zerzan, etc. till years later). However, after spending years trying primitive living experiments, and watching animals, I reached a deeper understanding. Civilization is not the buildings, computers, cars, highways, guns and bulldozers. It is a virtual virus that infects your mind, whose sole purpose is to repress instinct so that we function as a huge virtual organism with no purpose other than expansion, like cancer. This was the ultimate freedom. I let my conscious mind go. Stop worrying about insanely complex problems beyond your control. Just live for today like the dumpster diving raccoon.
I dream of community. Yes, the vision of sitting around a fire in a cave wearing deerskins with friends eating a raw deer liver is so visceral, primal, the epitome of living. I've done it, many times. But alone? It sucks. Gradually, since I saw I was convincing no one of the primitivist dream, and was having extreme difficulty living it myself due to game laws and the constant need to go undetected, my vision changed. What if I just lived like a good old fashioned hillbilly, like my mom's side of the family from Tennessee did 100 years ago? What if I lived by commercial trapping, using a truck or bike or sailboat to carry me the long distances between patchwork public lands? Finally I had an idea that worked. I reached the point where I could sustain myself on the smallest amount of money, yet thrive and LIVE. I became an expert hunter and trapper.
Still though, alone. It is going to be insanely difficult to build a community of modern hunter gatherers made up of strangers. You've gotta have that glue of kinship--great aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents. This one still has me stumped. But, I'm not going to worry about it too much. Just live the best I can and still try to reach out to people the best I can. And love every precious minute of my short time on this earth.
For now though, I must content myself with living alone on a sailboat catching fish with a cast net. And building a tarp covered wigwam in the midst of 100,000 spring breakers, teaching them how to eat fish eyeballs, find their own oysters and light cigarettes with the oldest friction fire technique--2 sticks. Build great big roaring fires on the beach which people flock to, share a beer with me, and disappear back to their hum-drum lives. Except for 2 wanderers I met 2 years ago. A barefoot couple who crossed the dunes eating rattlesnakes. But they too vanished on their own way the next day.
