Rewild
From REWILD.info Field Guide, the free Field Guide To Rewilding
To rewild means to try to return to a wild state, to go feral, or to try to reverse the process of domestication. The term particularly refers to reversing human domestication, and creating new growth, feral cultures for humans, but it can refer equally to reversing the domestication of other plants and animals.
Contents |
[edit] Wild or feral?
Opinions differ among rewilders as to whether rewilding properly aims to make humans wild, or feral. Proponents of returning to a wild state point to a definition of wild congruent with ideas about old growth cultures, while proponents of creating a new, feral culture stress the creative synthesis the project requires. In either case, the differences appear fairly nuanced.[1]
[edit] Thoughts on rewilding as a process
[edit] As a verb
- The term "rewild" acts as a verb which implies an action, a motion. It does not symbolize point A (Civilized) or point B (Wild) but the space between. As a verb, it symbolizes a process of undoing domestication, not the endpoint. It may look like a woman breast-feeding her child. It may look like a group of people collecting wild edibles. It may look like someone turning off their TV for an hour a day. It may look like hanging out with your friends. It may look like refusing to pay rent or buy food. It may look like killing a deer for the first time, using a rifle. And it may look like using a bow & arrow. It may look like reading a book and changing the way you see Civilization. It may look like refusing to send your children to school. It may look like stealing from the cash register at your wage slave job. It may look like tearing up the streets with a sledge-hammer to plant crops. It may look like investing in "green" technology. It may look like taking down civilization. It may look like frustration at the current state of the world. Everyone has various comfort zones, social networks or friends who can show them things. Rewilding does not exist just for the small elite class of purists who band together and head for the woods to live a 100% primitive life. It serves as an umbrella term for all those who strive to undomesticate themselves, even if only in the smallest way they can.
[edit] As a life project
- For most green/anti-civilization/primitivist anarchists, rewilding and reconnecting with the earth is a life project. It is not limited to intellectual comprehension or the practice of primitive skills, but instead, it is a deep understanding of the pervasive ways in which we are domesticated, fractured, and dislocated from our selves, each other, and the world, and the enormous and daily undertaking to be whole again. Rewilding has a physical component which involves reclaiming skills and developing methods for a sustainable co-existence, including how to feed, shelter, and heal ourselves with the plants, animals, and materials occurring naturally in our bioregion. It also includes the dismantling of the physical manifestations, apparatus, and infrastructure of civilization. Rewilding has an emotional component, which involves healing ourselves and each other from the 10,000 year-old wounds which run deep, learning how to live together in non-hierarchical and non-oppressive communities, and deconstructing the domesticating mindset in our social patterns. Rewilding involves prioritizing direct experience and passion over mediation and alienation, re-thinking every dynamic and aspect of our reality, connecting with our feral fury to defend our lives and to fight for a liberated existence, developing more trust in our intuition and being more connected to our instincts, and regaining the balance that has been virtually destroyed after thousands of years of patriarchal control and domestication. Rewilding is the process of becoming uncivilized.[2]
[edit] Rewilding topics
| We encourage you to update this page using E-Prime. |
Rewilding reverses domestication, and it has many facets, so don't feel intimidated if you think you want to rewild but think you have nothing to offer at the Rewild Camp—you probably already have more than you know.
[edit] Primitive skills
- For main article, see Primitive skills
The most obvious, of course, is primitive skills: making stone tools, making a friction fire, making cordage, making clothes, so on and so forth. These skills are the foundation of freedom; you can never be free while you’re dependent on others for your needs. If you know how to build a debris shelter, how to use a bow drill, how to make cordage, or any other primitive skill, sharing it makes for an excellent session. You can expect quite a few primitive skills sessions at the Mountain Festival.
By the same token, don’t be intimidated into not joining us just because your skills are meager and you need practice, or even need to learn. That’s much of the point of the Festival; come practice with us, and learn from those who do know these skills. But these are just the foundation. As Tamarack Song put it:
- We come from a technological society, so we naturally think that substituting primitive technology for civilized technology is our doorway. The only problem is that Native people are not into technology. They spend only a couple hours a day providing for their simple needs, and they mostly use simple means. Look at their tools—few and crude, and their craftwork—basic and utilitarian. What a Native person excels at is what I call qualitative skills—how to sit in a circle with your clan mates and speak your truth, how to find your special talent so that you can develop it to serve your people, how to use your intuition, the ways of honor and respect, how to live in balance with elders and women and children, how to speak in the language beyond words, how to befriend fear and live love. Without these skills, you will surely die. Or else you’ll go back to the life that shuns these skills.
[edit] Gathering & Anarcho-Herbalism
- For main articles, see Gathering and Anarcho-herbalism
Closely related to primitive skills is how we relate to “the Green Nation”—the plants that provide us with so much food and medicine. The gathering part of hunting and gathering might leave the average rewilder a bit peckish, but wild edibles can easily supply our much more crucial vitamin and mineral needs. Morever, wild plants provide powerful and effective medicine and first aid. The key is an encyclopedic knowledge of the plant persons that inhabit your bioregion, coded into stories that maintain information about medicinal properties, taste, identification and poisonous look-a-likes in a narrative format well-adapted to human memory and recall.
[edit] Tracking & Hunting
Then there’s “the Red Nation,” the other animals around us. There’s much more to this than simply hunting as we usually know it; primitive tracking is a deep exercise in empathy. As David Abram wrote in The Spell of the Sensuous:
- Hunting, for an indigenous, oral community, entails abilities and sensitivities very different from those associated with hunting in technological civilization. Without guns or gunpowder, a native hunter must often come much closer to his wild prey if he is to take its life. Closer, that is, not just physically but emotionally, empathically entering into proximity within the other animal’s ways of sensing and experiencing. The native hunter, in effect, must apprentice himself to those animals that he would kill. Though long and careful observation, enhanced at times by ritual identification and mimesis, the hunter gradually develops an instinctive knowledge of the habits of his prey, of its fears and its pleasures, its preferred foods and favored haunts. Nothing is more integral to this practice than learning the communicative signs, gestures, and cries of the local animals. Knowledge of the sounds by which a monkey indicates to the others in its band that it has located a good source of food, or the cries by which a particular bird signals distress, or by which another attacks a mate, enables the hunter to anticipate both the large-scale and small-scale movements of various animals. A familiarity with animal calls and cries provides the hunter, as well, with an expanded set of senses, an awareness of events happening beyond his field of vision, hidden by the forest leaves or obscured by the dark of night. Moreover, the skilled human hunter often can generate and mimic such sounds himself, and it is this that enables him to enter most directly into the society of other animals.
General approaches to tracking would be appropriate, as might be an introduction to a particular animal. Perhaps a session on the American black bear, with its tracks and scat, its behavior, population, where it lives, what it eats, and how it behaves. Perhaps a session on bird songs and how to understand what they mean. Perhaps a session on mimicking animal calls. Or, perhaps you’re more interested in sharing the skills that apply after the kill: how to properly skin, dress, or butcher an animal, how to preserve meat, and so on.
[edit] Body skills
- For main article, see Body skills
A huge part of our domestication has been our alienation from our own senses. We no longer have a direct, synaesthetic experience of the living world around us. Any session or exercise that opens up our senses is very much part of rewilding; reawakening our synaesthetic senses and getting back in touch with our bodies are crucial elements of rewilding.
[edit] Rewilding relationships
- For main article, see Rewilding relationships
Actual wild peoples rarely speak of their technologies in the glowing terms we do; rather, it’s their modes of relating to one another that they invariably cite as the source of their wealth and prosperity. The major work of rewilding lies less in the perfection of skills than in developing rewilded relationships. Tribal, band and clan societies have a great deal to teach us about how to organize our society. How do you form a rewilded society? How do you raise your child as you yourself are trying to rewild? Jean Liedloff’s work is absolutely in rewilding.
[edit] Animism
- For main article, see Animism
What do you call a rewilded person who refuses to become an animist? Hungry. Animism isn’t a religion one believes in, at least not in the traditional sense; neither is it a belief that occult ghosts lurk behind everything. Rather, it’s the simple and radical acceptance of your experience of the world as true. Your direct experience of the world around you is that of a living world. We are trained to deny that; the animist simply accepts as persons everything in his world that acts like a person. Even our ability to percieve one another as persons is an exercise in empathy; animists simply aren’t as miserly with theirs.
[edit] Rewilding language
- For main article, see Rewilding language
How we speak is a huge part of our problem, but it’s also a powerful tool to reconcile us with the living world. Working with language is an enormous part of rewilding. You could share some basic grammar and vocabulary from local native languages or pidgins, or perhaps lead an exercise in E-Prime, or begin a discussion on verb-centric speech.
[edit] Coping with civilization
- For main article, see Civilization
Trying to rewild in a thoroughly domesticated world can cause no end of problems. How do you relate to friends and family who don’t share your outlook? How do you deal with hunting regulations and camping laws that so often make rewilding more difficult? How do you account for the fact that you as a feral human need to worry about things no wild human ever did—like mercury in your fish or dioxin in your water? We face new challenges, and sometimes just a good understanding of the problem is enough to get a start. This is part of rewilding, too.
[edit] References
- ^ "Feral vs. Wild" thread on REWILD.info Forums
- ^ "Rewilding," Green Anarchy Info/Shop
