The Rewilding Podcast w/ Peter Michael Bauer

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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Fascist ideology has been on the rise, with a calculated effort on the part of fascists, to infiltrate environmental movements. Rewilding has seen its fair share of this over the years. As a return to our egalitarian roots, rewilding is the political opposite of fascism. And yet, there are foot holds of sort, within the ideology and world view that fascists can exploit for their own gain. To protect ourselves from this fascist creep, we need to be aware of it and also aware of the problematic aspects of where our own ideologies can be misconstrued to lead us astray. In this episode I’m chatting with Cara Delia Schwab.

Cara is an anthropologist with a masters degree from the University of Heidelberg. Her thesis was on racism and resistance through media and art in the US. She went back to school to get a B.A. in social work and has been working in that field since 2015 (with immigrants and refugees mostly). She is a “wilderness” instructor in training with Wildnisschule Odenwald. Her plan for the future is to teach foraging classes through her business www.wildnisliebe.de. She has an allotment garden, where she grows her own food. Her ideal life would be writing and spending the rest of the day outside somewhere weaving baskets and working with her hands.

Notes

Cara Delia Schwab
www.wildnisliebe.de
Cara’s Instagram
Wildnisschule Odenwald

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The Rise of Ecofascism

Hierarchy in the Forest

Mothers and Others

The Lies That Bind

No Politics But Class Politics

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In this episode I’m talking shop with my friend and colleague Sharon Kallis. Sharon facilitates a community organization similar to Rewild Portland in Vancouver BC called Earthand Gleaners Society. She is an award winning artist who focuses on fiber arts through a locavore lens, by growing, foraging, and gleaning raw materials and processing them into fiber and weaving them into finished products. She is known for her community art installations wherein she connects people to their place through creative collective works of art, often with garden waste, invasive species, or other locally available materials. Her book, Common Threads: weaving community through collaborative eco-art, was published by New Society Publishers in 2014 and is used in many post secondary programs as a model for creative engagement in shared green spaces. I met Sharon through our shared passion for using invasive species for arts projects. As fellow community organizers within an urban rewilding context, Sharon and I often converse to share ideas, commiserate over similar challenges that we face, and celebrate our successes. In the following conversation you’ll get a bit of all three of those as we discuss the ins and outs, and triumphs and failures, of running community rewilding organizations in the city.

Notes:
Sharon Kallis Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/sharonkallis/

Earthand Gleaners Society
https://earthand.com/

Common Threads
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
https://bookshop.org/a/24844/97815713...

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On this episode I am once again chatting with my friend and colleague Woniya Thibeault. This episode contains spoilers for the television series ALONE, of which Woniya has been a contestant on twice. If you haven’t watched season 6 or Alone Frozen, I recommend doing so before listening. 

Woniya came in second place on ALONE season 6, and more recently won half a million dollars when she came in first place on Alone Frozen. Both times she brought a rewilding, relational perspective to her experience and to the public. However, when creating a show there is always a lot that ends up being edited out. To increase awareness for her journey and to teach the public more lessons that didn’t make it onto the show, Woniya wrote a book titled “Never Alone” about her experience on Season 6 of the show. Woniya has always been someone who has inspired me through her dedication and passion for living in a way that is more connected to our ecologies. In this conversation we talk about her new book, her experiences, survival challenges, and more. 

Notes:

Never Alone by Woniya Thibeault

Woniya’s Patreon

Buckskin Revolution

YouTube

Instagram

ALONE: Frozen

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Rewilding looks different in places all around the world, but also shares many similarities: from settler-colonialism to mainstream co-option. In this episode we’ll be looking at Rewilding in Eastern Australia. My guest is Eva Angophora.

Founder of Wild Beings, barefoot wanderer Eva has spent the most part of the last 5 years living outside in various wild locations, learning and practicing living skills such as friction fire, natural tanning, leatherwork, animal processing/using the whole animal, weaving, natural rope making, wild foods foraging and bird identification. Passionate about sharing a more connected wholesome culture and providing spaces where people can connect with the Old Ways and incorporate more of these skills and practices into their lifestyle choices that lead to connection & a more empowered way of self sufficiency. Eva is a Bushcraft educator working in schools and facilitator of Ancestral Skill Sharing Gatherings, rewilding  workshops, wilderness immersions and women's rewilding gatherings through Wild Beings, co-facilitating alongside Wildcraft Australia for their seasonal family village camps.

Notes

Eva’s Instagram

Wild Beings Website

Wild Beings Instagram

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Rewilding 101

What is the difference between mob, clan, tribe, language group?

Fish Leather: tanning and sewing with traditional methods

ALONE Australia

AI will increase inequality and raise tough questions about humanity, economists warn

The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter

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Subsistence–the way we acquire our food–is a central aspect of rewilding. To talk with me both about the anthropology of subsistence but also the challenges and practicality of it is James V. Morgan. James is a former professional anthropologist who has spent nearly two decades studying and working with indigenous hunter-gatherers on three continents. He has spent years trying to understand the relationship between anarchist theory and action and indigenous politics and lifeways. He is currently working on three different books surrounding these topics titled, "Human Rewilding in the 21st Century: Why Anthropologists Fail" and “Anarchy After Graeber” with the third book yet to be titled. His previous writings have appeared in Hunter-Gatherer Research, Human Ecology, Oak Journal, Black and Green Review, Wild Resistance, and Alaska Fish and Wildlife News. More than only pursuing research and writing, Jaime is also an active subsistence hunter and forager, extensively involved in the material arts of rewilding and bushcraft, mostly off-grid in the far north.

NOTES:

Anarcho-Primitivism/Primal Anarchy

Green Anarchy Magazine

Oak Journal

Black and Green Review/Wild Resistance

Ultrasocial: The Evolution of Human Nature and the Quest for a Sustainable Future by John Gowdy

Photo by Elly Furlong on Unsplash

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Permaculture is a design science for creating regenerative landscapes. In rewilding, we often perceive it as a kind of technology based on ancient hunter-gatherer-horticultural subsistence strategies from around the world. While there are many valuable criticisms about permaculture (just as there are about rewilding), it is still one of the most effective tools for creating alternative subsistence strategies to the extractive ones that dominate our world today. To understand how far we’ve come, we need to listen to the elders of the movement and hear all they have endured and accomplished to get us where we are today. Hazel Varrde is one such elder for me, and the rewilding community.

Hazel began gardening around age five. They earned degrees in Forestry and Systematic Botany from Syracuse University and SUNY College of Forestry in 1969. Hazel taught Wild Edible Plants and Woods-lore at Laney College in Oakland CA in the early 70’s and helped Bill Mollison teach the first Permaculture Design Course at Evergreen State College in 1982. Hazel has taught various Permaculture courses ever since, becoming a notorious teacher and proponent of social forestry. I first met Hazel in 2009 during my Permaculture Design Certificate course with Toby Hemenway. Hazel was the only guest teacher in the class who seemed to share my vision of a rewilded future, and I knew that I needed to go and learn from them directly. I took their Social Forestry class in 2015, and then came back as a guest teacher the following year. I’ve since continued to practice various forms of social forestry, while sending many people their way. Land tending is an integral part of rewilding, and social forestry is an inspiring model for us to use. Hazel has finally finished their book on Social Forestry, and you can pre-order it now. I am happy to help get the word out.

Notes

Social Forestry by Tomi Hazel Vaarde

Siskiyou Permaculture

Mentions

Playing with Fire: Social Forestry with Hazel by Peter Michael Bauer

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For regular listeners to the podcast, and those entrenched in the rewilding movement, we know that rewilding looks different in various places, and has different meanings (sometimes often leading to conflict). While human, anarchic rewilding has been around just as long as conservation rewilding, they often seem to be at odds–especially when it comes to the support of state institutions. Which is no surprise. Often times conservation efforts are state sponsored, leading to displacement of people in the name of resource conservation rather than creating regenerative systems of land management. States have it in their best interest to control food production, and conservation falls under this form of management. It’s not liberatory, nor is it a long term solution to an economy based on extraction. Human rewilding, in contrast, is considered a radical approach that aims to connect people to their place through direct land management and subsistence practices. This circumvents state power, pitting people against the institutions that aim to control everyone. In order to gain more resources from the current power structures, rewilders must walk a fine line between what is acceptable, and what we can get away with. In the end, if it seems like we may be making too much headway in creating an alternative way of life, the state will take away whatever resources it has lent us.

One organization I see facing this dilemma at the moment, is The Rewild Project, a non-profit focused on environmental education and ecological restoration, based in the in the United Kingdom. Their mission is to re-connect people to nature and their ancestral heritage through arts and crafts, growing food, outdoor learning and community-building projects. To talk with me about their programs and the challenges they have faced and are currently facing is their director, Scott Baine. Scott has led a life of eco defense activism, nature connection, traveling the world learning survival skills, and community organizing around rewilding and rewilding related concepts. He returned to the UK to study land tending practices of permaculture and regenerative agroforestry, with the aim to create edible forest gardens. Scott is passionate about rewilding people, not just the landscape.

Notes

The Rewild Project Website
Rewild Project on Instagram
Rewild Project on Facebook

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Green Anarchy Magazine Rewilding Issue
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
Edible Forest Gardens
Inclosure Act 1773
Half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population
Right to Roam
The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes
For Wilderness or Wildness? Decolonising Rewilding
Rewild group kicked out after taking children for walk on frozen lake to teach them of the dangers
Sociocracy

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I first learned about animism in the book The Story of B by Daniel Quinn. While the term animism was initially invented by anthropologists as a way of classifying place-based, indigenous religions the world over, it has taken on a much deeper and expansive meaning in recent years. In many ways it transcends the notion of religion or spirituality to more of an ecological ethos encoded in stories, to shape a person's perception of the environment in terms of reciprocity. For this reason, animism is a prevalent way of perceiving and engaging with the world in the rewilding movement. Through animism, we can once more find belonging to people and place, and align ourselves with the cycles and systems of the ecologies where we dwell. 

Here to discuss the topic of animism with me today, is Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen. Rune is an historian of religion, Ph.d., educated from the Universities of Uppsala and Copenhagen. Rune has lived in many countries and done fieldwork in a number of contemporary (primarily Afro-descendant)  religions, but since childhood he has had Nordic religion as a strong field of interest. Today Rune is working on applying contemporary developments in anthropology to rethink the way we address Nordic religion both in terms of scholarship, but also as a reservoir of cultural knowledge for environmental activism and sustainability sensitization. Rune Hjarnø's ongoing work on developing the Nordic Animism perspective can be supported through this Patreon profile.


Notes

Rune Rasmussen
https://nordicanimism.com/
https://www.youtube.com/user/Runehr
https://www.patreon.com/nordicanimism

Mentions

The Story of B by Daniel Quinn
An Animist Testament by Daniel Quinn
Animism by Graham Harvey
The Handbook of Contemporary Animism Edited by Graham Harvey
Perceptions of the Environment by Tim Ingold
Panpsychism, the philosophy of Animism - Interview with Prof. Arne Johan Vetlesen.
Saving the Indigenous Soul with Martin Prechtel
Terry Jones’ The Barbarians

1. The Primitive Celts https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x72r71p
2. The Savage Goths https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x42a2ep
3. The Brainy Barbarians https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x72r71r
4. The End of the World https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x42v7ip

Sand Talk by Tyson Yonkaporta
Maori Spiral
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall-Kimmerer

Cover Photo by https://unsplash.com/@michael957

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Rewilding means a return to living in reciprocity with the ecologies in which we dwell, and with each other. It is a movement that critiques and rejects social hierarchies and authoritarianism as the “natural” state of humanity. Through contemporary anthropology, paleoanthropology, and archaeology, the rewilding philosophy pieces together how humans created and thrived in egalitarian societies for tens of thousands of years-perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. In one sense, it is essentially a call to anarchy: stateless societies, with collective decision making.

Hierarchy at the scale of what we call “the state” only becomes possible from the intensification and the control of food production, through the growing of annual grains. This sedentary, predictable surplus provides the material conditions for a small group of people to force a larger group of people to produce this food for them. These authoritarian societies take many different shapes, from less violent and coercive to the most extreme forms of control and domination, so abhorrent, we recognize them as so-called “crimes against humanity.” Through the rewilding lens, fascism can be seen as the ultimate pinnacle of the authoritarian, hierarchical state, of domestication to the fullest extent possible; using the most modern technologies for total and complete submission of people and of nature. Fascism is the furthest, most oppositional force from our innate wildness. This means that rewilding is inherently anti-fascist.

When rewilding as a buzzword for “returning to a wild state” hit the mainstream mostly through diet and fitness culture (such as the so-called paleo lifestyle), it was watered down and perceived by a public that has been taught misconceptions of “wildness.” Projections of grunting cavemen and social darwinism’s notions of aggression and competition stand in for actual anthropology of living, thriving, egalitarian societies. This biased and incomplete picture of wildness has cast an oppressive shadow over the term rewilding, allowing in individuals who promote hate and inequality as the natural state of humans. As we have seen in the past, fascism is often a reactionary attempt by the people to maintain order during a decline or societal collapse. As we enter a time of economic uncertainty, climate crises, and more, fascism is a growing, ever present threat. To keep rewilding on course, to educate people on the collaborative, mutual aid relationships that define human wildness, rewilders must actively work against fascism today, and the fascist creep, into our ideologies and movements.

To talk with me today about this growing threat, is Alexander Reid Ross. Alexander is a scholar with a diverse background. He earned his PhD in the Earth, Environment, Society program at Portland State University. He is the editor of the book Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab, and authored a book on the transnational far right called Against the Fascist Creep. He is a researcher whose focus is on exposing the far right and fascist movements that exist today.

Notes

@areidross on twitter

Against the Fascist Creep by Alexander Reid Ross

Palingenetic ultranationalism

Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior by Christopher Boehm

The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout 

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