This week I decided to go back to the basics of Urban Scout, remind myself why and where I came from and do some performance art! So I camo’d up, grabbed my trusty bow-drill and headed out to the Last Thursday event on Alberta Street.
Adam from Radio Active Lunch interview me a few weeks back about my book. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks Adam!
Rats have invaded our compost bin. They have chewed holes through the plastic and have a network of tunnels that now spread beyond the compost. I don’t really mind much. It seems that the Squirrel likes the rat hole, because while it can’t fit through it entirely, it can pull out scraps or eat the bugs attracted to the pile. The cat used to catch lots of mice before the rats moved in, and rats have a strength too great for most domestic cats. At times the rat, the squirrel and the cat have all hung out in the backyard together like they all decided to have an accord of neutrality. It looks so cute to see them all sitting there curiously looking at each other!
I moved back to Portland some time ago now. I don’t really like living in Portland, but all of my friends live here, and all the cultural rewilding opportunities happen here, blah blah blah you’ve heard it all before. Lately, I really feel the weight of toxicity in the city (perhaps all those wi-fi signals have finally got to my brain!?) and don’t want to stay here much longer. I keep telling myself, “just a little longer”. I plan to eventually move back to Molalla, or at least out to the woods somewhere near Portland. I want to find land out there to live on or perhaps just travel around the cascades in a gypsy wagon. But alas, for now I must work and toil in the confines of urban civilization.
This year I’ve really felt inspired to work on baskets. The key to building fluency with any skill starts with a good “setup”. Aside from having the materials to make a basket, you need a soaking pool to make them soft and moveable again after drying. Since I don’t live near a natural body of water, I built this soaking-pool in my backyard with old pallets that I pulled apart, a few screws, my screw gun/drill and a big tarp. It doubles as a mosquito incubation chamber. Fun!
After a year long experiment with a new rewild.info, I have decided to bring back the old rewild.info with a few new changes that you probably won’t notice. I did a little reorganizing and changed the banner. That’s pretty much it. It feels kind of weird, like finding an old favorite article of clothing that you forgot you had. Does it still fit? Am I still the same person? Can I integrate it back into my life? Can we move forward in a new way? I sure hope so. Thanks to all who had the patience to try out the new forum. And thanks for all the voices who pushed the old one to make its comeback. Check it out here:
Dear Internet,
I think it’s time for me to have a wikipedia entry, no? Please make it so.
Thanks,
Urban Scout
Doug from Diet Soap interviewed me last week for a podcast. Check it out:
Diet Soap Podcast Supplement: Ideology and Nature
Great review of my book by Keith Farnish on CultureChange.org. Thanks Keith!
Doing a little rewilding up in Spokane on Thursday. Check the details here:
http://spovangelist.com/rewild-or-die/
The Starfish and the Spider feels like an anecdotal book about decentralization. Written for stupid corporate fat cats, the book can feel rather sluggish and boring at times; talking about making profits and technology. But overall the idea of decentralization comes across pretty well, even if it leaves you feeling unsatisfied in terms of its practical use in the real world. How does one translate the idea into a reality? That’s not really the purpose of this book. It sort of peters out towards the end as it more or less tries to explain how to create hybrid organizations out of classic corporate models (BARF!!!). I really enjoyed the parts about the Apache and the ALF, and I recommend checking it out for those parts alone!
The original Ishmael by Daniel Quinn contained a vague chapter on resistance, but the publishing company would not allow it, instead they made him focus solely on “changing minds”. Here is what Ishmael really thought about this!
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The Molalla High School Green Team (environmental club) is throwing their yearly, Earth day music festival and they’ve invited me to come and teach some rewilding skillz throughout the event. It’s going to be awesome. Plus, it’s a fundraiser for their club. And it only costs $2! Come support the Molalla High School Green Team and see the beauty of the Molalla River.
Date: Saturday, April 24, 2010
Time: 11:00am – 9:15pm
Location: Clark Park, Molalla OR (http://tinyurl.com/ycxgan9)
Cost: $2
Music Line-up:
Methods of Silence (12:00-12:15)
My Robotic Mother (12:35-1:00)
Arion B / Peter Horace(1:15-1:30)
The Routine (1:50-2:20)
Diezel P (2:40-3:10)
The Hugs (3:30-4:00)
Nathan Vieira (4:20-4:50)
Boy Eats Drum Machine (5:10-5:55)
Youthbitch (6:15-6:45)
A Blinding Silence (7:05-7:35)
Midnight Callers (7:55-8:25)
Kendálin (8:45-9:15)
Come join the MHS Green Team! See you there.
I don’t usually share some of my more personal stuff here, but what the hell. I’m pretty excited about the banjo, so why not throw this up here to see how I improve over time? This is a tune I learned a month or so ago from my banjo buddy. It’s called Sandy River Belle. If you know the lyrics, please post them!
[youtube BFeWsbjcqQw]
The mentality of colonization runs deep in our culture, particularly deep in those who benefit the most from the colonization. While I like to think of myself as a non-racist, I still have the mindset of the colonizer that prevents me from seeing my own racism and prejudice. For a while now I’ve grappled with this. I think one of the first steps in de-colonizing my mind involved recognizing that I live on stolen land. This scared the hell out of me.
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Hello readers. Guess what? April 1st will mark the third official year of my blog! Crazy, huh? After 3 years I’ve finally published my collection of rewilding articles. I’ve begun to move away from general rewilding philosophy and gotten much more into specifics of creating rewilding culture. I’ve also got a much more keen idea of rewild camps and how to get others inspired to run their own. Over the next year my personal focus will rest on four major topics. Boxing, banjo, basketry and Chinuk Wawa. I’ve worked on these four things for a while now, and you haven’t heard much about it here because I keep the more personal stuff, well, more personal. So you probably won’t hear much more about it, but I’d just like to share what I work on in my “own time”. Aside from that, I think I will put some more general passions down here to work on over the next year on this blog and over at www.rewild.info:
Rewild or Die! Finally, the edited collection of my blogs is out.
A few weeks back I took the Grover Cleveland High School NW Ecology class on a hike through the Gifford Pinchot. I hadn’t worked with a group that large (25 or so people) in quite some time, and since I didn’t have much time I did what we call the “drag and brag” in that, I dragged them down the path and bragged about how much I know about Northwest Ecology. This hopefully inspires students to understand how much knowledge is out there and maybe even to get a few of them to come to the rewild camp. I had a great time and forgot how much I enjoy doing environmental education. If only it paid more than television production!
I have a lot of friends and family. The great majority of them know nothing about rewilding. Many consider themselves Christians, Mormons, Atheists, Democrats, Republicans, etc. I want to make the point here that I don’t base my relationships on whether or not someone has an interest in rewilding or even understands anything about it. Obviously I lean towards rewilding friends, but I don’t require it. Why do I remain friends with these people? Because I don’t act like an insane fundamentalist asshole.
A few weeks back I went to a anarchist curated fundraiser for an anti-civilization film. In lieu of my recent “fan mail” and the overall attacks I get from green anarchists, I’m very apprehensive about going to these kinds of events, but I wanted to show my support for the film and meet the filmmaker. I didn’t stay long. Why, in a room full of people who generally agree more or less with me about civilization, did I feel like I stood in the lions den? On my drive home I realized that the activist (and particularly anarchist) community that I have known and experienced has felt like a hate culture.
This book is a 3lb tome that describes Jon Young’s mentoring model. I recommend it for any rewilding people out there, simply on the basis that it has a great collection of games and “routines” that help people have amazing experiences with the other-than-human world. The routines in this book gave me experiences that formed the foundation of my relationship with animism. However, it would be a lie to say that I recommend all of the content in the book. It’s worth digging through the domesticated outlook of connecting with nature (i.e. the feeling of schooling) for the more rewilding type gems. Very worth it, in fact. I wouldn’t have been able to really understand much of what I know now if it were not for the principles in this book. So thank you Jon and company for finally getting this work out there for people to start experimenting with!
Check it out here: http://naturementoring.com/
Whenever I get to talking about how fucked up this culture is and how much it is fucking up the planet, someone inevitably writes me off as just preaching doom and gloom without “realistic” solutions. Generally what they actually mean is solutions [sic] that will prevent them from having to fundamentally change the way they live their life.
For a long time now I’ve used this blog to post up angry rants about random topics, generally relating to rewilding in some way or other. I’ve realized something in the last few days that is blowing my mind: I’m fucking sick of “rewilding.” Yes that’s right folks. I’ve had it up to here with the word rewilding.
A beautiful raccoon heart at the December ’09 Rewild Camp. I cut it out of a full grown female raccoon who died under the wheel of a car on Powell st. I wanted to eat it, but I don’t know about the toxicity of organ meats of urban omnivores. Especially those riffling through garbage cans in Methland, USA (S.E. Portland). I’m still debating on whether or not to eat her legs which are currently in my freezer.
Photo by Forest
I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations about the mysterious package I received. I’ve learned a lot, become aware of a lot of things I didn’t know about and thought deeply about my reactions and how I will deal with this kind of thing in the future. I’ve made mistakes in the last few weeks that resulted in a situation I didn’t know how to deal with, and so I made a few mistakes in dealing with the situation.
Hey yall, if you live in the Portland/Salem area here is a great way to pass some time in the winter days and learn some cool skillz at a super cheap rate:
This year, Echoes in Time host’s Dale Coleman, Goode Jones and Leland Gilsen will be offering a taste of primitive skills over the weekend of December 11, 12 and 13. This is a very limited class size of 10 students and 4-5 instructors, therefore the instructor to student ratio high. Lunch will be provided and the diet is Opportunivore, if you required something special, bring it. We will be able to sleep in Goode’s shop next to the woodstove, so bring sleeping bags, and personal care items. Cold running water and restroom facilities are available in the shop. There are hotels/motels close if you prefer. We usually go out to eat in the evenings. Cost for this weekend is $75.00. Please contact Dale Coleman (echoesintime [at] aol [dot] com) and send registration fee early to reserve your spot.
A power system sits in place that keeps the rich rich and the poor poor. This power system lies outside of most people’s perception because we grow up in it, never knowing anything different, never seeing it articulated but understanding it down to our bones. It feels as natural to us as drinking a glass of water. This power structure keeps us as slaves, forced to continue building civilization. Without empire civilization could not, would not exist.
As some of you may know, I run a free monthly skill-share called Rewild Camp on the last Sunday. For more info and to get involved, go to www.rewildportland.com.
 
Raccoon season starts next week. I finally made time to prep my traps in the way my trappers education booklet told me. I boiled the conibears to get the factory grease off and then mixed in a handful of black walnut to see what would happen.
Seriously, topics like this bore the shit out of me and I shouldn’t even have to write about this. But because it happens so frequently, I thought I should. The other day some asshole posted a few comments on my blog calling me a hypocrite (among other things) for watching television. I deleted their comments. A little later they started posting comments about how I had “censored” them.
Everyone talks shit on English Ivy; its invasive behavior has given it a bad rap. A while ago I started to feel empathy for the plant and wonder what kind of relationship I could begin to have with the plant, other than pulling it off of native trees and letting it rot in an ugly pile on the side of a trail.
Hey there Scout,
I am just wondering that, while you are honing your skills to be able to create new out of the aftermath of civilization while nature is still intact, what are your thoughts about what to gather from this world (i.e ropes, tarps, rations, guns) to facilitate survival during whatever happens whenever it happens. haha the future is so wonderfully vague but extremely heavy if you have the proper amount of imagination and paranoia! also do you have a place to escape to, do you think this is necessary? a plan on how to get there undetected, other people to join? i am working on all of these problems right now but my energy and focus rise and fall like the sun and that quickly and if its a nice day outside you can guarantee i am not focusing on the warm weather clothing and wool blankets i will need stowed, mostly working working on my tan(vitamin d), muscles and ability to become nature as to remain undetectable. but i know there are things that are extremely important that will insure that the people with the right intentions for nature and the universe can prevail and that we should have these at the ready just in case anything happens. its funny because i have gone to some “survival” website with lists about what have, they will list “at least a half gallon of water per day per individual, which does not provide water for hygiene, so be sure to take breath mints and STRONG DEODORANT” seriously these people are worried about “hygiene” and its the Apocalypse?!?!? i guess if they weren’t intending to survive on MRES, which are sure to putrefy their systems, they wouldn’t smell so foul but come on, if you even wear deodorant right now i am pretty sure you have a special comet with your name on it hurling towards the earth this second..
I don’t know how well to say thanks but keep exploring and sharing,
Jessica
When I walked into the Derrick Jensen talk at the Econvergence this year, one of the organizers asked me to sit on a panel the next day at PSU for the Econvergence discussion on “Radical Sustainability”. It seems that another speaker who was to talk about primitivism didn’t work out and they needed someone. Of course, I engage in rewilding, not primitivism and I don’t consider primitivism and rewilding to be synonyms for each other, since rewilding is a much more modern, better understood and culturally sensitive approach to indigenous living. Therefore, I don’t consider myself a primitivist. However, they knew of my differences and we’re still enthusiastic about having me aboard to talk about rewilding, so I said yes.
 
Today I finally gathered some Black Walnuts. I’ve been watching them for weeks now, ever since I got my traps. I never really thought I would get into dyeing things but then when I got my traps, I read online that I should dye them first, with Black Walnut husk.
I went out the other day with Willem and harvested a whole bunch more fireweed as well as nettles for this next year. I’m going to process even more for my own projects but I want to save a bunch and do another cordage skill share at Echoes in Time next summer. I’m going to save some nettle for that too. I generally cut the stalk as close to the ground as possible and then strip the leaves off by running the stalk along my hand, either with a bandanna or wearing gloves. I do this with both nettles and fireweed. Once they dry I will put more pictures up on how to process them into fiber that you can spin into cord.
A couple months ago, while traveling to a friends property in the early morning, I came across two roadkill raccoons within a few hundred yards of each other. One female with a light tan color, the other a male with a darker grayish tint. Each one small and juvenile, and not even a shred of a winter coat. Poor little creatures most likely died instantly since they both lay in the middle of the road. I picked them up and took them to my friends where we skinned them and ate their meat. Raccoon legs taste amazing, if you ever get the chance, seriously try it. I don’t quite know what to do with organ meats yet, so we left the rest of the carcasses for the coyotes or other scavengers.
I remember learning the figure-four dead fall and a simple snare close to a decade ago. When I learned them, I simultaneously learned that the law does not allow them unless you stumble into a real survival situation. This really put me off from ever trying them out or experimenting with them. So the art of trapping fell by the wayside to edible plants and other ancestral skills.
Dear Scout,Who gave you the authority to define rewilding for everyone, everywhere? Just because you keep a blog and prance around in a loincloth doesn’t give you the right to tell us what rewilding means! Go fuck yourself!
I didn’t really define rewilding. I took the definition I found on the internet.
But for the sake of it, let’s do some word play here. Rewilding, the slang for re-wilding. An obvious premise sits in this word: giving something back its wildness. Of course, “wildness” means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But let’s go with Dictionary.com’s definition of re-:
a prefix, occurring originally in loanwords from Latin, used with the meaning “again†or “again and again†to indicate repetition, or with the meaning “back†or “backward†to indicate withdrawal or backward motion: regenerate; refurbish; retype; retrace; revert.
and wild;
1. living in a state of nature; not tamed or domesticated: a wild animal; wild geese.
2. growing or produced without cultivation or the care of humans, as plants, flowers, fruit, or honey: wild cherries.
3. uncultivated, uninhabited, or waste: wild country.
4. uncivilized or barbarous: wild tribes.
If we look at the first definition list above, the subtext of the definition of rewilding that I found online “to return to a more natural state; the process of undoing domestication” makes practical sense as the definition of rewilding.
Why do definitions matter? People must have a shared reality in order to work together in that reality. I once got into the most insane arguments with a man who refused to share reality with me, claiming that “nothing is real” and that “there are no such thing as facts”. These arguments looked like little more than philosophical masturbation to me, than practical thinking for taking actions to create a sustainable planet. While I agreed in the philosophical sense with him, it didn’t help anyone to make choices in the real world. While I don’t believe in the concept of “facts” I do believe that we need to have shared observations of reality. We can observe that agriculture destroys the soil. If we can’t have that shared reality, we can’t work together to change our subsistence strategy to one that builds soil. Similarly, if we can’t have a shared reality of what it means to rewild, the word might as well mean nothing at all. The more we clearly define an idea, the easier time we will have using it for practical purposes.
In a sense, I will claim ownership of the term rewilding, in that my life’s work centers around caretaking the idea of what it means to return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, in its wholeness. I don’t think of rewilding as some new buzzword or some small scene of people or a wildlife conservation tactic. I see it as a complex lens through which I view the world helps me to make decisions about how I want to live my life.
Now, some contention may lie in that I strongly advocate against running away to the wilderness. While I strongly advocate against it, I still see it as part of rewilding. Because my focus lies in fostering as much rewilding as possible, running away to the wilderness doesn’t effect much change. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its own merit, it certainly does! I also advocate for creating “rewilding havens”; land where people can work together to rewild. This differs from running away into the wilderness because people still focus on creating an interface with civilization to draw out its members, rather than shunning all of it and living as a hermit (which I believe also has its own merit).
When it comes down to it though, I don’t see one “right way” to rewild. Everyone has their own limits and passions. I will continue to do what I can to build a cultural momentum of rewilding, using the fullest extent and articulation of the practical, shared definition.
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A couple of weeks ago I helped a group of people dismantle an asphalt blacktop at a school, using crowbars and sledge hammers. It felt fantastic! No, we didn’t do it during the middle of the night and no the cops did not stop us. Depave works to (legally) free the soil and replant it with community gardens. Click the pic and read more about it at their website:
Culture Change recently published a cool article about primitive skills:
http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=511&Itemid=1
I have to say, for the record, I don’t think of myself as an anarcho-primtivist. Nor do I practice Rewilding as a “political statement.” Nor do I think that primitive skills offer a sustainable model. I do think they work as *part* of a sustainable model though! Which shows why I go to gatherings like Echoes in Time and other skill-shares. I believe that the sustainable model of hunter-gatherers lies in their land management routines and social (non-hierarchical) family structured organization. The first empires and civilizations used primitive tools. So the tools of hunter-gatherers don’t point to sustainability, but the lack of creating empire and civilizations (which inherently destroy the planet) do. You can have primitive tools without sustainability, you can’t have sustainability without primitive tools.
Several different journalists, over the past couple of months, have asked me to sum up rewilding in a couple paragraphs. I open my mouth only to spit and stutter. For years I’ve used the following definition:
Rewild, v; To return to a more natural or wild state; the process of undoing domestication.
The more I talk with people and the more I read and write about rewilding, the more I’ve found that the above definition appears over-simplified for your average member of civilization. Most people have preconceived notions of the words wild, natural and domesticated that stem from civilizations mythology which means the definitions serve the purpose of convincing people to believe in civilization. This means that when an average person reads or hears the above definition they will not understand what rewilding actually means to someone who has redefined those concepts (outside of civilizations propaganda). Therefore definition above obscures more then it reveals unless we simultaneously redefine several of the other concepts.
Now you see why I get a headache trying to explain rewilding in a couple of paragraphs. The definition begs a more complex analysis such as, what does a wild state actually look like (compared to what civilized mythology tells us)? How do we define natural and unnatural? How do we define domestic? What causes domestication to begin with? Why would we want to rewild? Why would you want to undo domestication? What stands in the way of undoing domestication? How do we surpass these obstacles that prevent us from rewilding? Without fully understanding the answers to these questions, the term “rewilding” looks to most civilized people I’ve encountered like it simply means “getting back to nature” or “primitive living.” Because of all this, I haven’t sat down and really thought about how to define rewilding in a long while. But it seems, the time has come.
The term rewilding refers to the action of participating in the social and economical renaissance of humans who use the preexisting social and economic models of our hunter-gatherer-gardener ancestors to recreate the sustainable relationship that humans had with their ecosystems for millions of years before the recent advent of agriculture, empire and civilization. This critique emerged from modern ecological and anthropological studies which show how civilization, agriculture and empire inherently destroy the land base for which we depend for our livelihood. Rather then trying to fix a model built on unstable ground, rewilding creates a new culture using an ancient recipe.
Rewilders recognize that as long as empire exists, it will force people into domestication and prevent rewilding from taking place. In order for rewilding to occur, empire must not exist. This reveals one of the complexities of rewilding in comparison with say, the idea of “simple living” or “getting back to nature”. The removal of empire stands as a pivotal topic in rewilding and the basis of many conversations that revolve around what to do about empire and how to dismantle it so that rewilding can occur.
In order to accomplish rewilding, “rewilders” practice a multitude of skills such as innovative team building skills, storytelling skills, martial arts and ancient hand crafts like brain-tanning deer skins into buckskins and making tools from stone, bone and wood. In order to create a holistic culture empathetic to the land and our other-than-human neighbors, an emphasis is placed on storytelling and sensory exercises that provide experiences in animism. Animism, which lies at the heart of rewilding, refers to a way of seeing and experiencing the world and its other-than-human members as persons who demand respect and not inanimate objects put here for humans to exploit.
Creating and maintaining wild or feral cultures marks the goal of rewilding. Although, rewilding does not denote an end point but rather a continuing cultural process of learning how to relate to the land, people and other-than-humans in a sustainable way. Even wild or feral cultures practice the art of rewilding.
After all this time, I’ve finally come up with a (rather mechanistic) definition that I think will at least explain a lot more to the average person, and perhaps peak their interest and let them see rewilding through a more complex lens then the previous definition.
Rewild, v; to foster and maintain a sustainable way of life through hunter-gatherer-gardener social and economical systems; including, but not limited to, the encouragement of social, physical, spiritual, mental and environmental biodiversity and the prevention and undoing of social, physical, spiritual, mental and environmental domestication and enslavement.
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Hey peeps. I’m fucking bored. Gimme some topics to rant about.
Up and running. Want to run a rewild camp or open space in your place? This is the site for you!
This is a video about Echoes in Time, the gathering I volunteer at. See my previous post for more info on the next gathering.
[youtube t473l-Nz0ps]
