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[BlueHeron]

I remember reading this thread and something about the points Ann Onimus brought up was really interesting to me, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

But thinking about it now, I think I know what it was.

There is a tragic irony in rewilding---

In civ, the closer to the top of the hierarchy you are, the more access you have to information, along with the knowledge of how to find it, how to think critically (a rigorous college will teach you this to some extent, whereas most [American] high schools won't), and the technological/time resources needed to inform yourself.  And in modern society, access to information increasingly determines, and is determined by, class structure.

The more you know, the more of the larger pattern you can recognize.  The more uninformed you are, and the more beaten down, the more likely you are to 1. be blind to the problems of civilization, 2. accept your situation, and 3. not consider alternatives or have much time or energy to pursue those alternatives.  Often the impoverished (culturally or economically) or in other ways more oppressed people are less informed.

I'm not saying that it's impossible for some people to rewild.... it's just a LOT more difficult and it takes an **exceptional** sort of person to overcome being born lower on the ladder and enlightening oneself as to what needs to be done.  I don't take my childhood socioeconomic privilege for granted for an instant.  But I also have to think about the ways I've been denied my own humanness in various ways and understand what it means to overcome them.  Intense loneliness, sexual and emotional repression, irrational levels of obedience to my parents and teachers, my small town always labeling me, telling me who I am and how I should act ... those things are unnatural and not anything any human deserves, especially as a child.

[heyvictor]

Do I understand you to mean that the more "privileged" people are more able to "rewild"?

I think all that privilege is likely to be a handicap. The more privileged have more to give up or lose or let go of. And they are more likely to want to bring their false sense of superiority (and other misconceptions) along with them.

The "less privileged"(I'm real uncomfortable with this terminology) might be much farther along the road without all the baggage that comes along with calling it "rewilding" and putting it in an ideological pigeon hole.

A lot of the "poor" people have nothing but alternatives because the mainstream promise of the "good life" is something they don't have a hope in hell of ever experiencing. They don't have to reject mainstream because mainstream already rejected them. It's something they have never been included in.
What they need is a positive alternative instead of one that will land them in prison or a body bag on their way home from Iraq.

Sorry if this sounds like an attack on what you said. I do have a thing about the idea that a college education or economic status is an indication of a persons intelligence or ability to clearly see the situation they are in and work towards alternatives. They're poor not stupid.

[BlueHeron]

As I was writing that post I felt "privilege" wasn't the word I wanted to use but I couldn't find another word for it.  "Luck" maybe?  And what I meant to say is that the more "informed" people are more likely to rewild (in other words, look for an alternative that speaks to them).

Nowhere did I say anything about intelligence, only access to information.  If you live in a state of socioeconomic oppression, you have fewer resources for getting informed.  (I admittedly have a very dramatic imagination and I think globally most of the time, so my mental image of that kind of oppression was sweatshop labor.  That kills me, to think of people who are in situations where they are consumed by meaningless work.)

In my experience, the information that was presented to me in college helped me, in the sense that I learned to be very critical of the status quo.  I started to recognize larger patterns in society that I wouldn't have seen before.  All of those patterns point to the unsustainable nature of civilization.  This is the "information" I'm talking about... take history classes for example.  When you start to know enough about different times in history and you can start to compare them to your own surroundings and evaluate what's going on in your own time.  This is what I did, anyway.

Maybe it's a bit different in Canada, but in the US I've noticed that a lot of people who don't have much socioeconomic status, and a high school education that can only be called a "holding cell", and their lives consist of working a job they hate to pay the bills, eating junk food, and playing video games.  I grew up in a poor rural area with lots of failing family farms.  This is what I've seen.  I've seen people who don't think they have any alternatives.  Not for lack of intelligence, but for not getting the experiences and education they need in order to know within themselves that living outside the box is even possible.  They don't even see a box, so how can they see outside it?

I had a high school friend whose parents got the middle finger from the "invisible hand" of economics.  Their farm was failing, and her home life was really stressful.  To cope she turned to art and music.  She wanted to attend an art school in Pennsylvania.

Well, she didn't get into that art school and so instead she stuck around the area where we grew up, and around the same time got into a relationship with someone of bad character and her life became focused on that instead of art.  She became pregnant and one night around midnight she was driving home and the car (who knows why) went into the oncoming lane of traffic and had a head-on collision with another car.

I don't know what happened in that car.  I know that you can drive down the road she was on, at that time of night, and not see an oncoming car for miles.  Unless she was literally falling asleep at the wheel, I don't see how she could have missed seeing the other car.  Or maybe she was really drunk.  Or she could have done it intentionally.  All I know is that after the art school rejected her, she stopped looking outside of the box, up to the very end.  A very intelligent, emotional girl who made the youthful mistake of putting all her eggs in one basket.  And there was nobody in her life who could recognize how she might have felt about rejection from art school (her parents didn't understand why she wanted to go), and point out other egg baskets, other alternatives.  Even if I had been around and aware of what she was going through (and I wasn't fully aware at the time, I was halfway across the state) I don't think I would have been able to say what she needed to hear.  Now that I'm older I think I see what was going on with her a little better.

I believe that if her family had been able to make ends meet a little better, her parents would have encouraged her to seek more alternatives.  As it was, they were in their own "box" of being trapped by financial woes.

[incendiary_dan]

I think what we're looking at more is the specific situations that one might find themselves in that are more or less likely to lead them to this particular path, some of which just happen to be more common among people in higher "classes".  Being sufficiently well read, having regular internet access, and stumbling towards the right ideas usually happens to people whose parents make a certain amount of money.  In many areas, anyone can go to a library and get the books, or log onto a computer.  But middle and upper classed young people are more likely to do these things.

For what it's worth, I'm young, male, "multi-racial", come from a poor family, live in the woods, and attended college (finishing up my last course, in fact).  Despite the fact that my degree is in Anthropology, many of these ideas developed outside of the academic setting, though often instigated by school-related things.  A class on culture change and globalization made me hate capitalism and neo-liberal economics, one about N. American natives led me to listening to a Dine' punk band, whose lyrics led me to anarchism, which led me to Green Anarchy magazine, which made me receptive to the Rewild.info advertisement I read in Wilderness Way.  I stayed here after reading Jason's Thirty Theses, which is just the sort of thing an anthropologist likes to read!  And all of this can be traced far far back to my initial interest in Neo-Pagan religions as a teen, which was only allowed to develop because my parents got me into reading and we had internet access at home (eventually).

I guess what I'm saying here is that one circumstance can have far-reaching effects down the line, and while "class" isn't a determinate, it's one of the many circumstances that influence what resources we end up using.  Plenty of it, also, is just sheer blundering.

[starfish]

I think we're seeing different paths to rewilding.  Most people on this forum have come to it through reading, intellectual inquiry, and research, then moved into more practical things, like learning skills.  Heyvictor and other people that he knows have come to it in a different way. 

This reminds me of a story that someone told me.  She felt very strongly about spreading the message of Daniel Quinn.  She was American, but had lived in Italy for a while, so she translated Quinn's books into Italian and gave them to her Italian friends.  When she asked them what they thought, they said, "It's very American."