Good Life Revival: Permaculture, Rewilding, Homesteading

What makes humans unique among living creatures? How do we restore the human animal experience in its wholeness?

For episode 24 of The Good Life Revival Podcast, I visited with earth skills teacher Luke McLaughlin in rural Weaverville, North Carolina, at the new base of operations for his Holistic Survival School.

Luke radiates the kind of calm, patient confidence and wisdom that can only be gained through years of pushing his ability to survive in extreme conditions with nothing but the shirt on his back - and sometimes even less than that!

Once upon a time he applied those survival skills on television for the Discovery Channel's Naked & Afraid. These days he teaches the ancestral skills that make us human animals unique through intimate, detailed classes and workshops, and he does this from a place of love and openness, clearly having tapped into a wellspring of compassion after dedicating his life to Mother Earth many years ago.

Luke has some really insightful things to say about the transformative healing powers of what we variously refer to as earth skills, primitive skills, wilderness skills - whatever you want to call them! - and what it means to truly trust in nature for your most basic survival needs.

Meet Alexander Meander and Stacey Costner, self-proclaimed feral homesteaders and stewards of Ardea, their 60-acre homestead sanctuary in rural Kings Mountain, North Carolina.

For today’s episode of the Good Life Revival Podcast, I traveled to Ardea to speak with Alexander and learn about how he and Stacey have designed a lifestyle and a livelihood for themselves through the intimate relationship that they’ve cultivated with their land.

Alexander and I had a great discussion about what it means to be “feral”, and how we go about developing a less domesticated way of life for ourselves through the food that we eat and the landscapes that we work with.

Alexander shares a great deal of information about the foods—both wild and cultivated—that make up the core of their rich feral homestead diet, and along the way we explore some of the facts, beliefs, and opinions that inform Alex’s worldview.

If you’re interested in how you might apply the core ethos of rewilding to a permaculture-based homestead design, then you’d do well to learn from the example set by Alexander and Stacey at Ardea.

Our culture teaches us from a very early age that there are two kinds of places in the world: “people places” and “wild places.”

The people places are the cities and towns where we live and operate. The wild places are the parks and forest preserves outside of town where we occasionally visit for recreation.

In our cities we observe herds of people, trash in the streets, smoke and fumes emanating from exhaust pipes, smells of human and industrial waste, and geometric grids constructed of concrete, metal and glass that confuse and disorient us.

It makes sense that we would want to keep all of that separate from the “wilderness,” right? To preserve those wild places in their “natural” state; to “take only pictures, and leave only footprints.”

Unfortunately, this concept is built around two major conceptual flaws: that outdoor recreational spaces are “natural, pristine wilderness,” and that there is no connection between these “wild places” and the “people places” that surround them.

There is no place on Earth that does not feel the impact of modern human exploitation. We have already “left our traces” everywhere.

How, then, can we participate in our ecosystems in such a way that they are improved, rather than degraded, by our presence? How do we reestablish our fundamental connection with nature and live in a way that’s not just less-bad, but actually regenerative?

It is possible, and in this episode of the Good Life Revival podcast, I’ll share with you my top five suggestions for making a positive impact on any landscape you come to work with.

I hope that my thoughts on this subject will help spark your imagination about the ways that you can begin to create the world that we all want to live in, but most importantly, I hope you will come away from this episode with at least few ideas that you can put into action right away.

What is life like for the world’s few remaining cultures that haven’t been wholly erased by civilization?

For the latest installment of the Good Life Revival podcast, I invited my friend Ben Belty to come on and tell us all about the trip he took earlier this year with the Maine Primitive Skills School to get to know the indigenous Saami people of northern Sweden.

This is a culture that has been chronically traumatized for many generations now by the looming forces of civilization, but they still retain their ancestral knowledge of living in harmony with their frigid and unforgiving landscape.

Ben shares some of the insight that he gleaned from this trip, and explains why it’s so important to learn from peoples like the Saami. We also discuss what it means to live on the fringes of civilization, and how we go about ‘rewilding’ ourselves, in realistic terms.

Ben also traveled up to northern Michigan recently to harvest wild rice, and we talk about why wild grains are such an excellent staple food, and how wild foods are a key component of a lifestyle that’s closer to the land.

We modern humans have forgotten something profound about the way we live. Each of us understands instinctively that something is missing, but most of us have no way of discovering it through direct experience. Yet this forgotten knowledge is the foundation upon which our entire civilization is built.

Daniel Quinn called it “The Great Forgetting.” What did we forget? In order to make sense of that question, we will have to reconsider everything we thought we knew about the dawn of agriculture and the birth of our civilization – not to mention the millions of years of “pre-history” that came before that!

In this episode of the Good Life Revival podcast, we’ll cover:

-What is The Great Forgetting, and how has it shaped our modern culture?

-What is Totalitarian Agriculture and how does it differ from other ways of life?

-How did this one form of culture come to dominate the global landscape?

-What were humans doing before agriculture, and what is life like for contemporary peoples who don’t participate in our culture?

There is no time to waste. If you believe you will do it someday and you’re not working towards it today, then that thing you really want more than anything else will never arrive.

To die having never lived is one of the greatest tragedies that can befall a conscious human being, and yet it is one of the most well-trodden paths taken in this era.

I’m here to assure you that you can escape the fear of death by experiencing the exhilarating rush of a life lived to its fullest. When you walk away from the dominant culture of medicated, programmed monotony, you will finally be free to experience the full spectrum of what this life has to offer.

There is no time to waste, so don’t hesitate for one more moment to create the life that you envision for yourself. It won’t arrive tomorrow, but each day that you’re given on this earth is another opportunity to dispel negative energy through positive activity. It doesn’t matter how you get there, but only that you try. Make it now.

This is my old pal Micah Wiles, a young farmer from the small town of Somerset, Kentucky with a passion for ecology that's matched only by the beauty of his work at Cedar Creek Farm.

Micah has spent the better part of the last decade developing a food forest and silvopasture on the family farm where he resides with his parents, who run a homestead winery as their main enterprise.

In the photo above, he's showing us some of the older trees in the first phase of his food forest design, which includes pecans, persimmons, pawpaws, apples, peaches, mulberries, and so much more.

In the latest episode of the Good Life Revival Podcast, I speak with Micah about the history of the farm, his relationship with the land and his local community, and how he and his family sustain themselves in a way that's in tune with the rhythms of nature, while working to elevate the local community and educate others on this path.

“What if our financial system looked more like an ecosystem?”

This was one of the big-picture questions that eventually led Ethan Roland and Gregory Landua to propose that money isn’t the only form of capital driving the human economy.

By viewing the financial system through the lens of permaculture, Roland and Landua eventually settled upon eight forms of capital that they observed flowing between individuals and communities, each with their own unique currencies:

Social, financial, living, material, intellectual, experiential, cultural, and spiritual.

Roland and Landua’s foundational framework was built for the domain of business, but it’s easy to see how these concepts can be applied more generally for making conscious lifestyle choices – and that’s what I’m all about! :)

In this episode, we’ll cover:

The eight forms of capital – what they are, how they connect, and how to generate and exchange them in your daily life

What a visit from the family and a food forest installation can tell us about wealth and the pursuit of happiness

Why some forms of capital are more valuable than others, but also why balance is key

Plus, Brooke Sycamore shares a story based on the Chiricahua Apache tale of the coyote and the money tree, with musical accompaniment by yours truly.

Greg Zimmerer is one of those people who forces you to rethink that pile of excuses you’ve accumulated to explain why you’ve been putting off that thing that you’d really like to work towards — whatever it may be.

He farms 1/8th of an acre in his parents’ backyard to sell to local chefs and patrons of a new, up-and-coming farmers market in an underserved neighborhood in Louisville KY.

This is his first season as an urban farmer, and he’s bringing in a respectable amount of money each week through his small scale market garden, growing a variety of crops with a shoestring budget on borrowed land.

In the this episode of the Good Life Revival Podcast, Greg explains how he manages to pull it all off while simultaneously juggling an academic career in geosciences, an entrepreneurial career as a permaculture designer, a side gig delivering pizzas, aaaand as if all of that wasn’t enough, he’s also a single dad with a very sweet son, who’s maybe still a bit too young to understand the value of a hard day’s work.

In an era when all the double cheeseburgers you could ever hope to eat are available to you at a moment’s notice, why bother going to all the trouble of learning how to identify and gather wild foods?

The main appeal of foraging, for me, lies in cultivating a more intimate relationship with wild nature in all its beauty, mystery, and abundance. It’s one thing to spend some free time hiking and camping in the woods, but something else entirely to come home with a bag full of wild food from that place – to be nourished physically, mentally, and spiritually by the natural world.

Wild edible plants are almost always hardier, more vigorous, more flavorful, and more nutritious than their cultivated counterparts. Best of all, they require no work on our part, aside from harvesting and eating!

People haven’t always domesticated plants and animals, but wild nature has always supplied us with food. Only in the last century or so have modern people really abandoned the old ways of foraging for wild plants, and it’s up to us as individuals to correct this misstep and learn for ourselves.

We have the ability to take back this fundamental understanding of how to work with the natural world. It’s not hard, but it does require patience, diligence, and careful observation.

Today on the podcast, we’ll cover:

Why I decided to change the name from ‘Permaculture Lifestyle’ to ‘Good Life Revival’

What to expect from this show going forward

Why foraging is such an important part of my daily life

Why eating with the seasons is not just a trendy fad, but a moral imperative

The seasonality of wild foods, and how to work with them

My seven ground rules for foraging safely, responsibly, and confidently