Urban Scout has a wisdom and intelligence far beyond his years. He is helping us move away from this culture of death and toward a sane culture that will not kill the planet.
- Derrick Jensen, author of Endgame

When I feel like surfing a bit nearer the edge, I check out Scout’s latest. It’s irreverent, angry, informative, and sometimes he’s not even nice. Urban Scout is out there exploring and inventing rewilding and contemporary tribal skills with style, and I admire that he doesn’t claim to know it all. Scout always takes me down an unanticipated path. We civilized folk have forgotten what he’s trying to remember for us.
- Toby Hemenway, author of Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture

Urban Scout combines passion, intelligence, and a quirky sense of humor, and puts it all at the feet of the most important cause any of us could undertake: “rewilding ourselves, our environments, and our relationships. And he even manages to look cool while doing it.
- Jason Godesky from Tobys People

Biography

Peter Bauer (aka Urban Scout) is a multi-disciplinary artist and environmental educator. He is a performance artist, writer, filmmaker, photographer, designer, musician and basket maker. Born in Portland, Oregon, his family has lived in N.E. Portland for 5 generations. At 16 he proudly dropped out of high school to begin his life-long unschooled journey of rewilding. He keeps a popular blog about rewilding (www.urbanscout.org) and created a popular international internet forum and wiki (www.rewild.info) for fellow people-who-rewild. Locally, Urban Scout has been an environmental educator with Cascadia Wild, Friends of Tryon Creek, Audubon Society, TrackersNW and has his own non-profit company called Rewild Portland that he founded at age 19. He has received both local press in the The Oregonian, Portland Mercury, Willamette Week, national press in ReadyMade Magazine and international press in Positive Living Magazine (UK) and Chain Reaction (AU).

Urban Scout’s Story

My parents named me Peter but people ’round these parts know me as Urban Scout or just Scout for short. Over a decade ago I began to realize that the agrarian civilized lifestyle would not reach a point of sustainability. The more I studied hunter-gatherers, the more intrigued I became as to how they lived in such an egalitarian, sustainable manner. I decided to make it my life goal to live as a hunter-gatherer. I call this process rewilding. As a cultural creative and multi-disciplinary artist, I have a duty to inspire others to find rewilding. I write stuff, makes videos, take pictures, make designs, build installations, teach classes and use this blog as a public exhibition space.

At 16 I began to independently study the structure, history and future of our civilization. After reading lot’s of books on environmental devastation and anthropology I came to the conclusion that civilization will not reach a point of sustainability, but come crashing to the ground in a short matter of time. If I wanted to survive, I needed to learn how to hunt and gather and live with the earth. This became more than simply an idea; it became more like a religion. I figured, what good will a high school diploma be in a post-apocalyptic world? I dropped out of high school and immediately began taking classes and teaching myself the skills of hunter-gatherers. Over the last decade I have practiced and instructed people in these ancient skills. Even though I teach these skills, I still feel vastly ignorant to what even a young child in an indigenous culture would know and sense of their own environment.

As you may imagine, many physical, emotional, social, philosophical and existential difficulties arise as I attempt to rewild myself from a total city slicker born and raised to work as a wage slave in a coffee shop, into the lifestyle of an indigenous hunter-gatherer living off the land in a sustainable way. Indigenous children had the abilities to survive in the wilderness without their culture for several weeks at the age of around 9 to 12 years old. Unlike those kids, I don’t have the luxury of a million year old sustainable culture to immerse myself in for 9-12 years to prepare myself for such a rite of passage. Basically I work towards making an immersion “curriculum” for myself, imitating what I know of hunter-gatherer cultures. I do not believe a person can take a few lectures on survival or primitive living and then go do it. I believe it takes years of practice, generations in fact. I have created as close as I can the safety and security children in primitive cultures had while slowly, carefully and respectfully learning to survive without those comforts.

I do not intend to replicate the kid from the book Into the Wild or the guy in the documentary Grizzly Man or the TV show Survivor Man or Man vs. Wild. Cheating death, extreme situations, running away to live alone in the woods or “making it back out alive” stem from a civilized fear of nature and lack of community. I understand the elements can kill and I will not let myself freeze, starve, get eaten, die from sickness, etc. I take baby steps toward a primitive lifestyle; slowly but surely leaving civilization behind . Therefore my health and hygiene, like that of the wild animal, lie at the top of my priorities.

I do most of my rewilding within the largely domesticated urban environment of Portland, Oregon.You might think that leaving civilization behind implies leaving the city. However, I cannot run away to the wilderness because my family and friends cannot join me out there, and I cannot live without them. Humans, I believe, have evolved over time as socially organized animals. A lone human, hell even a dozen humans in the woods doesn’t come close to our socially designed way of living. A lone bee cannot live without its hive. Humans can function, but not truly live, without their tribe. My tribe lives in Portland and the surrounding area. Therefore when I say I work towards leaving civilization behind , I speak of course, about the culture or economy of civilization, not the physical space in which civilization resides (the urban jungle). Though I do spend lots of time in the country and wilderness as well.

I built this website to as an exhibition space for my urban-hunter-gatherer-grower adventure. Part fact, part fiction, part man, part myth, as Urban Scout I try to use the comedic irony and novelty of our situation as a clever disguise to cloak and spread a truly sustainable world view, for a time beyond our own. I never, ever take myself too seriously (purity gives me writers block!). Here you may find a photo guide to skinning and cooking a squirrel, a rant about Science vs. Tracking, a Q&A about apocalyptic safe sex, purchase my book about rewilding, read a review of the latest media concerning the collapse of civilization or simply a weekly journal about the trials and tribulations of going against the grain.

As much as I would love to immediately abandon the monetary and food economy that traps us in civilization, I don’t have those skills. Why else would this project exist! So for now I need funding, which I find through donations or “tips” from readers like you, running rewilding workshops through Rewild Portland and yeah, working the occasional freelance job in film production. I also need lots of emotional and social support, which you can give by leaving your comments here and engaging in the conversation.

The Origin of Urban Scout

My passion growing up had always been filmmaking. As a child I took any and every video production class available. When I got to high school, I transferred to an arts school that focused on video production. Before I dropped out of high school, my plan was to graduate, move to L.A. and attend the UCLA film program and become a famous film director. But then I started down the path of rewilding and thought that spending time making movies when the world was about to end didn’t make much sense. After spending several years learning and teaching environmental education I stumbled across Bill Moyers interview series The Power of Myth with Joseph Campbell. I realized that media production could help to educate people about the problems we face. I found an outlet that could combine my desire for cultural change and my passion for film-making.

When I was 19 I founded a non-profit, at the time called Mythmedia, with the purpose of creating environmental and cultural change through the media arts, with a focus on film production. I ran a monthly independent film screening called Broadcast. We held the screening on the full moon of every month. For each moon, we would ask a “Sacred Question,” which people could answer by making a video to show at the following screening. Honestly, I don’t remember the question that inspired me with this particular idea. Maybe we asked, “Where will you go when you die,” or perhaps, “Who are your ancestors?” It doesn’t really matter now I suppose, but it would feel nice to remember.

Whatever the inspiring question, my idea felt simple yet powerful. I wrote a 60 second monologue about a man living in a post-collapse world, traveling back to the ruins of downtown Portland to observe the ghosts of his ancestors, who had sadly not realized they had died long ago and so continued to go to work everyday (Get the metaphor?). I would place the monologue over shots of me in a loin cloth, camouflaged with mud, and perched on buildings like Batman.

I asked a friend to shoot the video for me. He obliged. We ran around town shooting little bits here, little bits there. When we finished he convinced me to buy coffee wearing my loin cloth. He filmed me doing that. He said he would capture the footage onto his laptop and give it to me later. As fate would have it, that never happened. Instead, he edited the coffee shop vignette and showed that at Broadcast. A funny 30 second short about a dude in a loin cloth, covered in mud, buying coffee like a regular shmoe. He titled the film Urban Scout.

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Rewind a few years. During my brief time attending the Wilderness Awareness Community School I met a student who alleged to have gone barefoot for three years, wearing merely sandals during the winter. Feeling inspired to try this, I threw my shoes in the closet and set out to feel the world with my feet. Eventually I noticed I could not go in certain places; no shoes, no service. This gave me an idea. I created the trojan horse of the barefoot movement; cutting out the soles of my old shoes and stitching the top of a pair of socks into them. We used the term “Urban Scout” quite often in those days, probably originating from us city slickers who found inspiration from Tom Brown Jr.’s The Way of the Scout. We used the term to describe someone who used the skills of invisibility and wilderness awareness within an urban habitat. Since the shoes rendered my barefootedness invisible and kept the sensory data feet pick up available, I called the shoes my Urban Scout Shoes. No one ever blinked an eye at them, I never got caught.

An ironic, tongue-in-cheek title for a cartoonish character who obviously did not fit the scout code of “invisibility,” Urban Scout, the 30 second video sent the Broadcast audience into a fit of laughter, telling us to make more. So I wrote several more shorts for Urban Scout, but neither one of us seemed to have the time to shoot them. At a screenwriting class I took (that I later dropped out of) I pitched the idea of an Urban Scout movie to the class. The teacher looked at me and said, “This is a short, right?” At the time I thought it would make a great feature length movie, however it felt intimidating to even attempt something like that. The whole class stared at me and I responded, “…Yes.” At that moment, I knew I would write and shoot the movie that summer. I decided to string the shorts we had written into one long short with a story. I rewrote it so many times that the only short to appeared in the longer short: Urban Scout lighting cigarettes for change. An idea that had come to me years previous.

Rewind again, even earlier. At 17 years old, I had just returned from the Tracker School’s summer camp for teens (now operating under the organization Children of the Earth Foundation). As I walked down the bus mall a woman stepped out from a shelter, “Do you have a light?” she asked. At the time I didn’t smoke. “No, sorry.” I carried on, but then I had a thought, “Well… Do you mind waiting a minute?” She looked at me funny. I smiled and opened my backpack, pulling out my Bow-drill set. As I began to drill she watched in awe. A small crowd gathering and when I blew the tinder into flames they gave me an applause, while smokers took turns lighting their cigarettes. At that moment I knew I had something. I could feel the potential but didn’t yet know where it would take me.

I spent the summer of 2004 shooting The Adventures of Urban Scout.

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To gain more publicity for our release of the short, I created Friendster and Myspace profiles for Urban Scout. This led to necessary photo shoots and deeper character development. After shooting the film I continued to do these improvisational shoots, and I began to go out alone. I signed Urban Scout up for a local Gong Show where “Suburban Scout”, my arch-nemesis from the film, and I did a mock battle on stage (which, after a few drinks ended up looking more like a real battle as I forgot to duck for one of the punches) and ended with me lighting a cigarette with a bow-drill. Much of the improvisation helped shape the character and changed some of the script too. But something else, something unexpected happened during that time.

People started calling me Urban Scout. People I didn’t know, had heard of me… I mean, had heard of Urban Scout… The character I played. Somehow they got it confused and thought that Urban Scout and I had the same body. I began to wonder this too. Especially later on, when parts of the feature length script I had started working on, began to manifest in reality…

My promotional antics culminated at the first Nuclear Winter Formal; a multimedia show I curated to serve as the premiere of The Adventures of Urban Scout short film. You’d think it would end there. But during one of my solo improve days something happened to me. As my bare feet touched the hot pavement and as my loin cloth blew in the wind I remembered something. My quest for several years prior revolved around finding out what an animist hero looked like. Somewhere along the way I gave up on that quest… or thought I had. But here I stood, seeming like quite a model for how I wished I could live myself. A man pulled over and rolled down his window. ”

“Hey man.” He said.

“Hey.” I replied.

“What’s with the loin cloth?”

“I hunt and gather. I believe Civilization will collapse real soon and I want to prepare for it.”

“Seriously? What do you eat?”

“Road kill, plants, stuff I hunt & fish.”

“Where do you sleep?”

“I live at Oaks Bottom, a wildlife refuge down the street.”

“No shit!? Amazing… Can you teach me?”

Something happened here. Something I can’t explain. A trigger in my brain. It does feel amazing, I thought. Really fucking amazing! But then my heart sank. I didn’t really live this way… But could I?

“…Uh. I don’t… I…” I tried to respond.

“How can I get a hold of you?”

“Myspace.”

“Myspace!?!”

“Yeah. A friend I have lets me use his computer sometimes.”

“Crazy. This is crazy. Thank you so much. I’ll look for you!”

He sped away. Don’t know if he ever found me or what. Never said anything if he did. But something in me changed and I thought about myself, “what a poseur.” I only acted. I played Urban Scout, I didn’t really live the way he does. That seems impossible… but could I? Why simply write the story of your hero, when you could live the story of your hero?

Then things got really weird. Urban Scout became such a part of what I have done, that the boundaries of reality and fantasy began to merge. More and more people called me Urban Scout. Or Scout. Or Urbs, Urbby. Bourbon Scout. And on and on. Parts of the script came true, a nemesis revealed themselves; Hippie Scout, similar to Urban Scout’s nemesis in the script, Suburban Scout. I began to date a girl attending PSU for Native American Studies, as Urban Scout dates an Anthropology Major in the script. Luckily, I didn’t have a lone shark chasing after me… not yet at least. Multiple stunts, street performances, photo shoots, blogs, Nuclear Winter Formals, internet friends, publicized feuds, summer camps, a feature length screenplay and news articles later… Here I stand, on the threshold of becoming the hero in a story I wrote years ago that accidentally transformed into a joke.

Funny how things evolve. I’ve gone through phases thinking that idea of Urban Scout looks and sounds totally stupid. Sometimes it feels like bad art. I wish it would all go away. But for some reason I keep doing it. I can’t stop myself.