TL;DR: I ask if there are any established communities in existence. I state that I want to start a Rewild Community. I explain that I believe in reconciling the pursuit of progress with Rewilding. I suggest that a Tiny Home community would serve well. I suggest using an ecological rewilding project as a location or somewhere in New Hampshire due to the Free State Project; I recognize this last suggestion is politically charged.
Hello,
Recently, I have found myself ever yearning to escape the city which I currently live in, but I also think community to be of the utmost importance, and I find myself wondering where there is a rural community in which I will find my kin. I am wondering firstly, if there are any legitmate, established communities out there?
If not, secondly, I am wondering if creating such a place could be done. And, who is interested? Who is seriously interested?
I can forsee one problem being disagreements over degrees of rewilding. I, for my part, don’t think I share the view that we must revert totally to complete primitivism. I think this might be actually a regression. Rather, I want to attempt to reconcile the pursuit of knowledge and progress with our evolved genome, to correct the evolutionary mismatch that insidiously pervades our unfettered modern society, to rediscover lost ancient knowledge but while not recklessly discarding the knowledge we have painstakingly garnered since the agricultural revolution, for it is only by that knowledge that we have discovered rewilding. This is of course, is if it is indeed possible to reconcile these two modes of being. But I would like to try. We are relatively still in the nascency of the discovery of evolution, and we have yet to turn our exploration of this subject back unto our own selves. This, I see as our humankind’s next great step. (Although, alternatively, I suppose the problem of evolutionary mismatch could be solved by a materialistic transcendence, the singularity, our merging with machine, us artificially, deliberately altering our genome and physical form to suit our new constructed environment. However, this does not seem a reasonable solution for the presently existing individual and family. And likely, it could be tremendously painful. But I now digress…)
So my vision is of a place with the likeness of Lothlorien, if you have read LOTR, wherein we live harmoniously with external nature and our intrinsic nature while still searching the skies and lands for new glimmers of knowledge.
Okay so, in what form would this community be? Do we simply live in proximity or do we organize collectively? Personally, I think to each their own as much as possible, that each individual should have sovereignty.
I have been very interested in Tiny Homes of late, and think a Tiny Home community would serve well as a rewilding community, and at least for myself, think I would like to live in one.
And where should this community be? I have two suggestions. First, there are many areas that sustainability groups are trying to rewild, to return the natural ecosystem to its maximal health, often while working with the local community. I think one if these locations might be a perfect place to start a Rewild Community. If we approached these groups and explained our goals and our ideology, I reckon they might be very interested in having us set up a community in one of these locations. But, I don’t know the specifics of such projects, so I might be wrong.
Second, and forewarning that this could be a divisive idea, is starting a community in New Hampshire. Why? The Free State Project. It “is a movement of thousands of freedom-loving people to New Hampshire, where [they] are working to reduce the size and scope of government in order to achieve Liberty in Our Lifetime”. I encourage you to search it up and read on it. I think that the values this group espouses are generally quite similar to ours in many fundamental ways, even if not in every specific way. And I recognize that because this is attached to a political ideology that it is a charged proposal. But, it is a proposal that cherishes liberty which to me seems very congruent with rewilding.
So, please let me know what you think of these ideas. Let’s start increasingly discussing a community so that one day we may realize such a place. Let’s have a healthy dialogue.