Creating ancestral skills communities is central to rewilding. We need people sharing skills together, we need people tending land together. These communities don’t form over night. It takes time to build them. I spoke with Lucy O’Hagan in February of 2020, in one of my first episodes of the Rewilding Podcast. Now it’s February of 2025 and a lot has changed in the last five years. Their community has grown, our friendship has deepened, and I continue to be deeply inspired by their work. Last August I traveled to Ireland to attend the first ancestral skills gathering on the island, facilitated by Lucy through their organization, Wild Awake Ireland. It was a life-changing experience for me, which was something I really didn’t expect. If you haven’t listened to our first podcast together, I would recommend going back and listening to it before you listen to this one. In this episode, I hope to pick up the conversation from where we left off five years ago, ask Lucy to share insights from the last five years of building a rewilding community in Ireland, and share my own stories of visiting Ireland.

NOTES:

The Rewilding Podcast, Episode 4: Complex Contexts w/ Lucy O'Hagan

Wild Awake Ireland

Language Movement: an dream dearg

Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape

Wisdom Sits in Places

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One of the key aspects of wildness is adaptation. Being able to change and adapt to different needs, in different environments, is a cornerstone of resilience. While a large part of this involves getting to know the land where you dwell, it helps to know multiple landscapes. It can teach you how to think on your toes and figure out how to do things in new ways. While rewilding leans more toward longer term ancestral living within a culture, and survival is more about meeting immediate needs in a context removed from culture, survival skills are a necessary base that culture builds on top of. In this way, people into rewilding should consider practicing survival skills in multiple environments, as a way of building the foundations of resilience. To talk with me about this today, is Tom McElroy from Wild Survival Skills. 

Tom McElroy has taught Survival and Primitive Skills to more than 15,000 students worldwide over the past 23 years.  During his twenties Tom spent an entire year living 'off the land'.  He built and lived in a shelter made from forest material, rubbed sticks together to make fire, purified water naturally and hunted, fished and gathered his own food.  Tom has taught at various schools around the world, including Tom Brown Jr.’s Tracker School. He holds a bachelor's degree in Anthropology and Geography from Rutgers University and a Master's in International Policy related to Indigenous Peoples from the University of Connecticut and has studied with indigenous people all over the world.

Notes:

Instagram

YouTube

Wild Skills Survival

Desert Island Survival

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I’m fond of saying, “There’s no one right way to rewild.” A friend once asked me, “Sure, Peter. But is there a wrong way?” I wanted to do something fun for this episode that I haven’t delved into much before in this space, so I invited my friend on to talk about the “wrong” ways to rewild. Don’t be fooled by the candy bar image, I love elements of contemporary society that are in some ways more aligned with ancient ways… But what I abhor is when people water down rewilding to make it less about escaping from the captivity of civilization, and instead, focus simply on making captivity more comfortable while the world burns.   

Notes:

Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths in Subcultural Evolution

Rewilding, Dispatched

"Urban Hunter-Gatherers" Chapter excerpt

Cambodian genocide

After the Revolution

Ecotopia

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When some human societies made the shift from wild, procured foods to domesticated, produced foods there is a corresponding decline in the health of those people in the archaeological record. Today, the majority of people eat domesticated staples, and our health has taken a huge decline on a global scale. Wild foods are an important nutritional component to the human diet. Rewilding can mean rekindling the relationship to wild foods that humans have historically had. To talk with me about this on the Rewilding Podcast, is Monica Wilde. 

Monica Wilde, known as Mo, is an ethnobotanist and research herbalist. She lives in Scotland in a self-built wooden house where she's created a wild, teaching garden on 4 organic acres, encouraging edible and medicinal species to make their home. Mo holds a Masters degree in Herbal Medicine, is a Fellow of the Linnean Society, a Member of the British Mycological Society and a Member of the Association of Foragers, which she helped to found in 2015. She has been teaching foraging and herbal medicine for several decades. Mo wrote the award-winning book The Wilderness Cure: Ancient Wisdom in a Modern World, in 2022, that imparts what she learned from her year of living on only wild foods. Afterwards she started the Wildbiome® Project - a citizen science study tracking the health changes seen on wild food diets. The next arm of the study is in April 2025.

Monica’s Instagram

Wild Biome Project Instagram

The Wildbiome™️ Project Results

The Wilderness Cure

The Ethnobiology of Contemporary British Foragers: Foods They Teach, Their Sources of Inspiration and Impact

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Humans evolved in social, cooperative bands, using this cooperation as an evolutionary advantage. These days, rugged individualism still seems to dominate many outdoor activities from regular camping to bushcraft and even to rewilding. When people think of ancestral skills, they think mostly of the hand crafts like basket weaving, pottery, or archery, and not the invisible, social technologies like conflict resolution, mentoring, or practices of sharing. This is a challenge that many skills practitioners and leaders of schools and other community organizations often come across. If rewilding is returning to our human roots, then community building works as the primary ancestral skill. Everything else stems from this. Today to talk about this with me, is Luke McLaughlin. 

Luke is the founder and director of Holistic Survival School in North Carolina. His work centers around connecting people to the natural world through ancestral living skills, to help remember how humans lived in balance with their environments in times past. He learned his skills working at a wilderness therapy program in the deserts of Utah. After spending hundreds of hours on the trail and helping hundreds of people, he witnessed firsthand how important these skills are for life lessons and personal growth. He has demonstrated his skills on the Discovery Channel’s show Naked and Afraid and their offshoots, Naked and Afraid XL and Naked and Afraid: Alone. Luke’s main focus is making deep connections and providing a life-changing experience through the Deep Remembering immersion program.

NOTES:

Venmo Luke, 6788

Holistic Survival School

Luke's Instagram

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To attain the level of resilience that cultural rewilding calls for, requires moving away from an economy based on extraction for profit that lays waste to local ecosystems and destroys ancient ways that people have lived from the land. To move away we need alternatives, and examples of how other people have found and maintained sustainability. How have humans lived in a myriad of ways for millennia without destroying their land and not living in greatly unequal societies? What is a subsistence economy and what makes them so resilient? To talk with me about this today is Dr. Helga Vierich

Dr. Vierich was born in Bremen, west Germany and immigrated with her parents to Canada, growing up in North Bay, Ontario. She began her studies at the University of Toronto in 1969. From 1977-1980, as part of her research, she lived in the Kalahari among hunter-gatherers in the Kweneng district with Richard B. Lee supervising. During this time she worked as a consultant on the effects of the extreme drought in Botswana. She was awarded her Ph.D. by the University of Toronto in 1981 and went to work as a Principal Scientist at the West African Economics Research Program, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (headquarters in Hyderabad, India). She worked as a visiting professor of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky from 1985 to 1987, then as an adjunct professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta from 1989 to 1997. From 1999-2022 she worked as an instructor at the Yellowhead Tribal College in Alberta. Now retired, she spends her time on a rural farm with her husband.

Notes:

• Dr. Vierich’s Website
• Why they matter: hunter-gatherers today
• Before farming and after globalization: the future of hunter-gatherers may be brighter than you think
• Changes in West African Savanna agriculture in response to growing population and continuing low rainfall

Photo by Vasilina Sirotina

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Rewilding is about seeking a reciprocal relationship to the environment and to one another. Material and cultural conditions kept humans in relative check with their ecologies for potentially millions of years, so what were they? If we are to understand this, we must hold up a lens and look at the diversity of hunter-gatherers (both past and present) to fully realize what their cultural and environmental limitations were–and are–today. Why did some abandon that way of life while others have fought to the death to defend it? What led humans to switch from one subsistence strategy to another, and what were the social and ecological effects of these changes? Is it possible to fully know? What do we know? To talk about these core rewilding questions with me, is Dr. Robert Kelly.

Dr. Kelly first became involved in archaeology in 1973, as a high school student. He received his BA from Cornell University in anthropology in 1978, his MA from the University of New Mexico in 1980, and his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1985. He has taught at various Colleges since 1986; from 1997 until retirement in 2023 he taught at the University of Wyoming. Dr. Kelly is the author of over 100 articles, books, and reviews, including The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers, The Fifth Beginning, and Archaeology, the most widely used college textbook in the field. He is a past president of the Society for American Archaeology, past editor of American Antiquity, North America’s primary archaeological journal, and past secretary of the Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association. He has been a distinguished lecturer at many universities around the country and the world, including Argentina, Germany, France, Finland, Norway, Japan, and China, and he has worked on archaeological projects in Nevada, California, New Mexico, Kentucky, Georgia, Maine, Chile and, for the past 25 years, Wyoming and Montana. He has received over two million dollars in funding, with multiple grants from the National Science Foundation. Since 1973, the archaeology, ethnology, and ethnography of foraging peoples has been at the center of his research.

Notes:

Robert Kelly, Professor Archaeology at University of Wyoming

The Fifth Beginning

The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum (Revised)

 CARTA: Violence in Human Evolution – Robert Kelly: Do Hunter-Gatherers Tell Us About Human Nature?

ANTHRO, ART, (CLOVIS) and the APOCALYPSE: Live from the field with Dr. ROBERT KELLY | DIH Podcast #1

Human Behavioral Ecology (Cambridge Studies in Biological and Evolutionary Anthropology, Series Number 92) 1st Edition

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City landscapes are perhaps the most decimated and human centric habitats in today’s world. These landscapes are in need of thoughtful rewilding. Cities are some of the most domesticated places, but also positioned in some of the most historically fertile places. Cities were built where they are, because these places had access to a diverse array of resources. Many think rewilding means running away to the wilderness–but that’s not the case. For one, this is not a practical reality for most people. Two, because of their prime location and social capital, cities are both ripe for, and in desperate need of, rewilding. Permaculture, with its inspiration and core principles deriving from more regenerative sedentary, delayed-return societies such as indigenous horticulture, can be an effective tool for the urban rewilder. Using permaculture for place-making, becoming a part of your place, is a great way to start this journey. To talk with me about this today is Mark Lakeman.

Mark is the founder of the non-profit placemaking movement and organization known as The City Repair Project. He is also principal and design director of the community architecture and planning firm Communitecture. He is an urban place-maker and permaculture designer, community design facilitator, and an inspiring catalyst in his very active commitment to the emergence of sustainable cultural landscapes everywhere.  Every design project he is involved with furthers the development of a beneficial vision for human and ecological communities. Whether this involves urban design and placemaking, permaculture and ecological building, encourages community interaction, or assists those who typically do not have access to design services, Mark’s leadership has benefited communities across the North American continent.

Notes:

Communitecture

City Repair Project

Maya Forest Garden, by Anabel Ford  and Ronald Nigh

A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander

Phenology

Photo by Greg Raisman

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The longer a culture exists in a place, the more stories they have of that place. These stories act a way for people to interact with the land where they live and also act as social filters for how to perceive the land as well. Stories also engage people with the landscape through their imagination and when linked to a physical activity can make the connection more embodied and enjoyable. Humans learn through play, and playing with stories can be a great way to reconnect ourselves with the landscape and its inhabitants. To talk with me about this on the podcast, is a returning guest, Jason Godesky. 

Jason Godesky is an independent tabletop roleplaying game designer and world builder. He and his wife Giulianna Lamanna are the creators of the Fifth World, an open source shared universe that imagines what the future that we in the rewilding community want could look like.

Notes:

The Fifth World

The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? By J. Edward Chamberlin

Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache by Keith H. Basso

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There are few opportunities for people living in modern contexts to experience what life would be like living in a band of hunter-gatherers. While there are still several cultures in the world living this way, most are protected from outsiders through organizations like Survival International. While rewilding isn’t a synonym for primitive living, or a total return to hunting and gathering societies, we can learn a lot about how to live in a regenerative way through contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, as well as experiences that can replicate aspects of those societies. Boulder Outdoor Survival School (BOSS) in Utah is one such place to get a taste of the immediate-return hunting and gathering experience. I recently attended their Hunter-Gatherer course, and here to talk about it with me is one of the core instructors for that program, Randy Champagne.

Originally from Michigan, Randy found his way to the deserts of Utah after taking a survival course that sparked his love for the wild. He has been at the Boulder Outdoor Survival School since 2008 where he’s been teaching and practicing ancestral and modern survival skills. His passion is in traditional hunting and gathering techniques. He was a participant on the television show ALONE, testing his skills solo on Seasons 2 and 5 on Vancouver island and in Mongolia.

NOTES:

Randy Champagne Instagram

BOSS Hunter-Gatherer Course

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