Commercialization of Rewilding?

Visions of the Rewilding Renaissance Rewilding Mind & Heart
#1

Hey all,

I just went to this guys website and I’m super turned off by the commercialization of what he calls “rewilding”.

www (dot) danielvitalis (dot) com

Yes, we need it all. Yes, his products are probably better than a lot of things. Yes, his ideas about nutrition are awesome. Yet… it seems what he is calling rewilding is more self-absorbed… There is no cultural rewilding, or land management rewilding even mentioned on the site. It feels like he’s just using the word rewilding to describe The Paleo Lifestyle + Survival Skills + Prepping. Is that all rewilding is to him?

It seems like there are a lot of groups capitalizing on the term rewilding, but using it as more of self-help, nature therapy way rather than a cultural movement toward cultural ancestral living.

Am I wrong? This is my impression from looking through his site and watching his videos. Can you tell me what you think? What is your experience?

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#2

For me, I feel that, and also (as I’ve mentioned other places) anytime a person doesn’t use “rewilding” (as a term, as a philosophy, as a branding) to connect and build community, to talk about their teachers and their lineage, to share what other folks are doing too…

…in short, anytime it’s a marketing decision to drive consumers to interact with only them, I’m left pretty miffed.

This happens a lot and I don’t like it. I won’t publicly attack anyone doing rewilding work - we certainly need it - but it certainly makes me stop and think about how, why, and with whom I collaborate, and what I want to help build in this world.

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#3

hi all! daniel whipple here. living in colton, oregon on a micro farm. began my primitive skills training with peter back in 2010. since then, i’ve worked with a number of people, mostly in arizona, on lost skills.

it’s a complicated issue it appears. one persons rewilding is different than another’s. vitalis is kind of an icon to some. he has an ego for sure, he knows who he is to some people. in crowds, i see him play it up and behave in a manner that i wouldn’t choose for myself. he becomes someone else to those that expect it. as i said before, he’s a salesman. but get him out of the public eye and he’s mellow, extremely thoughtful, very eloquent and intelligent. one of the best minds i’ve met and i’ve known him since 2010.

As far as his not mentioning things like land and cultural issues, he is well spoken on these. he has hundreds of videos on youtube and many of them go into cultural issues especially. he has recently started a quarterly online magazine that comes out on the four ancient holidays of ancient peoples. the publications are filled with a plethora of topics. not much is said by him about land management. this is because he is not a political person. he realizes the political system is a farce and not worth engaging. this is where his preparedness comes in. he’s in the class of rewilders that incorporate aspects of primitive knowledge into their everyday lives. he lives in the woods in maine. he is in the difficult position of being the guy that chooses to try to expose truly domesticated humans to a different way of thinking. i remember when i first met him at a health freak conference i was volunteering for in LA, speaking to wealthy white people mostly. he had to become a caricature of himself almost, to get their attention. he didn’t tell them about crazy pills and extracts. he told them about wild tonic tree mushrooms and spring water. mostly blank faces, but then all of a sudden, people are going out in nature for the first time in years to get spring water. so, that’s awesome.

could he himself go on a 6 week wilderness challenge where all you show up with is a personally prepared deer skin suit and a knife? i don’t think so. but he wants to get there. is he currently using words like, surthrival and selling things like colostrum and deer antler velvet extracts? yes, but he’s gotten bored of that and it is personally moving toward something more genuine and nature based in his personal life, selling those things to nfl players and those that can afford it to fund his research and activities.

is his way right? who’s way is right? are people being affected in a positive way? what are the tradeoffs? is it worth it? i personally prefer the urban scout’s way of doing things. but there are many that believe that society as it is will continue for quite sometime and they are trying to incorporate wild aspects into their life. vitalis does good work and is a good person. if name dropping helps, his close friend aurthur haines promotes him and they collaborate often. stephen harod buhner is also a close friend if anyone’s familiar with that author.

i would love peter and daniel vitalis to actually meet. i know that the two of them would get along, and daniel would actually probably be interested in collaborating on some projects and definitely learn from peter. vitalis is not a person to be hated on(not that peter or anyone has) but utilized if possible. knowing him as i do, i can say he is a genuinely warm, loving, caring and hopeful individual that has that side of him that he now has to manage, the image of himself that he’s created.

#4

Hey Dan,

Thanks for sharing this. Definitely makes me feel better to hear this.

I think politics are central to rewilding. When I say land management, I mean indigenous practices of “Tending the Wild”. So many survivalists just take, take, take from the wild. Even when they have ethics like “don’t take it all” they are still in the mindset of taking. Where is the philosophy of giving back? And i don’t mean by producing bamboo toothbrushes… I mean by planting seeds in the ground (and not selling a container of seeds for your apocalypse survival kit). Of small controlled burns to create mixed forests, etc.

I think that he’ll get there as we all do. It’s just frustrating to see someone with popular acclaim to be so behind the curve of rewilders who have been doing actual rewilding (tending the wild in a community) and shouting about it for years… then to see someone like him not mention them (where does he think his definition of rewilding came from???) mention the most central aspects of rewilding or those who have been doing it for decades.

I would like to chat with him. If he is as you say than he would probably agree with me.

I also know that I can be a little bit on the harsher side (or rather Urban Scout can through me) and I’ve got a pretty good handle on Urban Scout these days. I don’t want to talk shit on Daniel Vitalis because I think the things he says and does are great… It’s just… Where’s the rest of the message? I don’t think he’s fully got it yet, and I don’t think that Arthur Haines has either, even though I think they are both doing great stuff. I haven’t seen them talking about “the reach around” yet. Giving back means planting seeds. He doesn’t have the core books of hunter-gatherer land management on his reading lists: Tending the Wild, Keeping it Living, Forgotten Fires, The Earth’s Blanket, etc. He doesn’t have cultural rewilding books like Ishmael or Derrick Jensen’s earlier works on his lists… Not even John Zerzan… Again, he seems to just be using the word to mean Paleo Lifestyle + Survival + Prepping. That’s great and all… but it appears to me a completely a civilized way of thinking.

Okay I feel super rusty in following this forums rules of “telling my own story, asking questions, and interpreting generously.” I may need another mod to step in and help me out. If I was good at that, we may not even be having this conversation. I may be high-fiving those guys and doing cross promotions. I love the work they are doing (as it is a small part of the larger whole).

Perhaps you can link to a video of him talking more about these core principles? Is there one? Thanks again for bearing with me. I keep asking myself if I’m jealous… but I don’t think that’s it. I think I’m offended because he hasn’t given a lineage and doesn’t understand where the movement has been or how it came about, and doesn’t mention reciprocal land management as the core of rewilding.

#5

In all of this, I think it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that for the mob/gang/population at Rewild.info, we coopted the term “rewild” and its variations - rewilding, rewilder, etc. - from green anarchy so that we could more easily talk about something that no one had a word for, namely the emerging culture of animist relationship to village, land, and family. Peter and I have talked how, perhaps rightfully so, he was accused of this coopting in a negative light by green anarchists - but it was an amazing word that seemed to capture the cultural and personal aspects of what we were doing so well.

Unfortunately, I think even as Peter and others popularized the word, it kept transmitting to many folks what I’ve always felt were the adolescent, narcisstic qualities that it had inherited from the rather young and privileged population of green anarchists.

Don’t get me wrong. I love crazy kids. Crazy kids are where its at. But I don’t rely on crazy kids for seeing a mature and nuanced vision of the world. I rely on them for passion, honesty, and taking risks that no one else would dare do.

Unfortunately, this youthful vibe seems to still overwhelm the other aspects of the term “rewild” where-ever it meets new eyes - and Americans are in love with adolescent narcissism. This “self-help”, personal achievement, personal transformation, almost neo-shaman-werewolf-sexiness thing that has precious little to do with the mundane daily rewilding of family and village, but is a powerful drug for folks looking for something else than a techno-utopia.

Even in your comment, Dan, you mention “could [Daniel] himself go on a 6 week wilderness challenge where all you show up with is a personally prepared deer skin suit and a knife? i don’t think so.” That doesn’t go deeper for me - I see that going in a horizontal direction, just more image-focused primitive skills embedded in an adolescent worldview, in some other part of the landscape that is still on the surface of things.

In other words, his leading rich white people to springs to me just threatens the springs. The first world way of engaging the natural world, of engaging with anything beautiful really, is the urge to possess it.

But whoa there, let me stop a moment before this sounds like I’m attacking Daniel. Again, I’m not wanting him or any other folks leading people to nature to stop. But I do want them to keep going even deeper. To be humble and keep learning. Step one is getting people to see beauty, to see the natural world. Step two is to teach them how to approach it and each other.

Like peter says, inspiring them to take is just more taking - white people are great at that already. Teaching them how to approach is what we, as the nonexistent but all too real fantasy group known as acculturated white people, suck at.

This means talking about lineage, talking about courtship, talking about “the reach around”, talking about how we talk about these things.

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#6

People want to be reaffirmed on their life path. I think it is difficult to talk about responsible and contextual rewilding, while keeping rewilding in the safe realm of everyone-included-feel-good-self-helpy personal rewilding. Grandma calls this sort of thing “taking the sting out of the truth”. I imagine most of Daniel’s audience doesn’t want the sting.

Like Willem says, white people are really good at always approaching the wrong way. Lately I’ve been thinking that the best way to circumvent this pattern is to step back from egotistical, self-centered rewilding, and instead to inspire all rewilding efforts to be carried out under the umbrella of service to the land. And each other.

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#7

Lovely. Yes.

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#8

I think the solution is to just do what we have been doing… which is to ignore these people and keep doing what we’re doing…

It’s just hard to ignore sometimes when that spike of frustrated adrenaline hits me.

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#9

peter, i think you’re absolutely right in bringing up the take take take. and also providing people with the laziest solutions{toothbrushes(that can also be used as fireboards!) and cans of seeds}. it’s just a little frustrating for me because i know the guy outside of surthrival, the conferences, the spotlight and the cash. i also feel some disappointment that he’s not saying, ‘screw the lazy, i’m gonna stick to my guts and be real and genuine and not try to appeal to the masses!’.
he certainly does give honor to those that have gone before him, well before the more recent rewilders. he speaks of indigenous peoples frequently and also speaks of many others, but to hear that, one has to wade through the myriad videos and blogs he’s got.

in the end, i’ve got to agree with you guys that ultimately he’s doing a disservice to the world by watering down and making too accessible the skin deep aspects of rewilding. his message is rewilding within the current paradigm, not undoing it. many people think that this way of living, torturing the earth and its inhabitants, is not going away. to a large degree, that’s true. i make decisions every day that are condemning of this natural world. we all do. if we think of ourselves as legit rewilders, we’d immediately stop doing many of the things we do. computers, cell phones, shoes, packaged or transported food/herbs, etc.

we all fall short in our alleged devotion to service to the earth. is vitalis doing so to a greater degree? i can’t say. i can only be accountable for my own actions and conscience. do i want to see i line of cars at the spring that i go to to get water, the pool littered with trash, fuck no.

i think peter is absolutely right in saying that the solution is to keep doing the work that he and others in this group are doing. a true service to the young and old and the world. damn i wish i wasn’t too busy on a farm to hang out!

#10

Hey Dan,

I want to make sure everyone knows that I’m not saying Daniel Vitalis is a hypocrite. I don’t think that rewilders are hypocrites, as I wrote in my “Hypocrisy vs. Rewilding” chapter in Rewild or Die. Rewilding means returning to an ancestral lifeway; it’s a transition, a process. We can’t just live the way we want immediately. There are thousands of barriers to that. Using the tools of this culture to transition into a culture without those tools is not hypocritical because we are not rejecting using the tools, we are rejecting the culture that made them.

I’m not saying that Daniel Vitalis is not cool enough, or core enough, or pure enough. What I am saying is that he is using the word to describe only the self-absorbed aspects of our movement. Those are absolutely necessary parts, but are a small part of the movement to create rewilding cultures of humans that are tending the wild. His site doesn’t even hint that there is more, and in fact distracts from more by circling back in on civilization by selling consumer solutions. Like Al Gore’s “light bulb” solution to Climate Change, Daniel has a product line to make you feel like you’re rewilding when you are not. That’s my frustration.

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#11

Alright. This is turning my stomach again.

On facebook I said:

What frustrates me isn’t “purity” but rather, mis-direction. It was great that Al Gore made a movie about Climate Change, for example, but it was also classic mis-direction, in that the solutions were consumer based ones; “Buy different light bulbs.” As long as there are magicians out there mis-directing authenticity and systemic solutions, I’ll be getting mad at them.

Part of the problem of the Rewild Brand Snake Oil is that it re-brands (mis-directs) what rewilding means and we lose the momentum carried by the original meaning as the new brand becomes the only brand.

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#12

Do people honestly not understand what the word “WILD” means? It baffles me that anyone could believe a can of vitamin supplements or whatever that Vitalis stuff is could possibly have anything to do with REturning to a WILD state.

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