Introductions

[quote=“BlueHeron, post:580, topic:67”][quote author=victor1 link=topic=33.msg14317#msg14317 date=1232258901]
I used to teach survival to about twenty kids between the age of 12 and 18 in the north woods of minnesota. we would disappear for a week in the summer and a week in the winter.
[/quote]

Long Lake Conservation Center?

Just venturing a guess… I’d be totally tickled if I guessed right, because I went on one of the winter retreats at LLCC with my 5th grade class. The whole trip remains as one of my favorite memories from that age.

Anyway, welcome victor, and walter and Moxie, to the online community![/quote] hey there. i went to LLCC when i was a youngster also. but i taught for Civil Air Patrol which is a search and rescue unit supported by the air force. i was a senior member and was assigned to the cadet program before and after i got out of the army. good program for the youth. survival was part of the training. after i came back from overseas, i noticed that how bad the government and economy sucked and was going to go into the border wilderness of minnesota and cananda and stay for a year then write a book. that dream has yet to happen. i am now studying up on self sustained living and squatting/disappearing on public land. i see alot of post of people that do that on a regular basis on this site and my hats off to them. i would like to get involved with people in the western states living this way and their successes and failures interest me. a person can only talk so much about it. its the actual experiences that make the site what it is (in my eyes) anyways. live free…

Hello all, Reticent Lemon here. I followed a trail over here off of DJ’s website and have been lurking ever since. So far I am greatly moved by what I have read, and feel I owe you all so much. The approach here is so refreshing I feel like I can finally breath. So…thank you.

About me…i am 33 and currently reside, out of necessity, in Southern Ontario, Canada. Kinda stuck right now as I am recouping from a major illness/trauma. I know it’s a social no-no to be upfront about this kind of stuff in civ, but i can’t exist here honestly if i don’t mention it because at times it does affect my ability to communicate quickly and coherently. Hope i can still stay, as i would like to do whatever i can from inside the trap to help others get out, even if i never make it. Though i do desperately want out…

As to rewilding skills, i have some knowledge of animism, a bit of understanding about plants and birds, but otherwise am green ;). Used to be a carnivorous reader, have read all manner of books from kindling like Stephen King and my old biopsych texts to DJ, Zerzan, Thoreau, Barry Lopez, Robert Wolff. For better or worse i can at the very least contribute the salvageable remains of my education in psych and env. sciences.

Oh, and i can knit…rectangles.

welcome, Reticent Lemon! Glad to hear you can breathe. :wink:

i appreciate the welcome, yarrow, thanks! :slight_smile:

Hello there

I’ve been lurking on these pages, learning from all the stories and benefitting from the brilliant observations contained therein for a while now, and finally figured the polite thing to do might be to say thanks and perhaps even (breaking the habit of a lifetime) pitch in and contribute :o

So: Thanks! and:

My name is … erm, people call me Ian.
I intermittently E-Prime.
I live in southern England and currently have a blog at:


(the name reflects my warped sense of humour).

You guys have more or less sold me on this rewilding lark over the last year-or-so since I chanced on Anthropik via Ran Prieur’s blog. I’ve made my share of dandelion root tea, hawthorn fruit leather and rosehip jam since Summer/Autumn '08 and done various stints on the wwoof (dot org dot uk) scheme, which I plan to continue for the useful post-higher-education practice of ‘getting out of my head’, but my real interests for the moment lie, I suppose, in the more philosophical/intellectual aspects of the ‘re-indigenised’ (with an ‘s’!) or re-indigenising perspective.

Having tiptoed around the issue for many years mostly through fear of psychological upset, I closed last year and so far have begun '09 by finally writing about what I know best - trying to make myself indispensable as Andre Gide (via Quinn) suggests - namely music and, in particular, singing. I guess you could say that I’m beginning to concern myself with the question of what it might mean to rewild music from its civilised (another ‘s’!!) forms. I’ll put links to what I’ve come up with so far in the somewhat starved-looking ‘Music, Art & Creativity’ section, or you could just go to the above link and read from December 31st.

Really looking forward to some in-depth discussion, and hoping to make some connections with people who don’t look at me like I’m insane, or react with stunned silence when I tell them what I really think :slight_smile:

cheers,
Ian

Welcome Ians! Odd coincidence.

PacNW Ian: Welcome! Your high school struggles definitely give me unpleasant flashbacks. Good luck untangling that knot.

England Ian: Welcome! I can’t wait to see how you rewild music and creativity. Believe it or not I just had a conversation about the need to have more thought about that here. :slight_smile: Go for it!

;D
Hey everyone!!!
My name’s Larena/windtooth. I live in the Pac. NW.USA.
I’ve been a fan of Tom Brown Jr books since my early 20s…I’m early/mid
30s now.

I have taught myself weaving baskets, SOME leather-craft, beading and
jewelry making. I know 130-140 native plants to my area…some are out-
side my area. I know what they look like, but don’t know their
preparations in weaving/cooking/medicines/etc.

I have read a LOT of books on Primitive living/tech for many yrs, but am
now looking to DO those skills out in the field. I need practice!!!
I am very art-sy and crafty…I love making things. I can make a basket…
but my baskets are functional and not pretty. I need to refine my skills and
learn the techniques to make beautiful as well as functional art/tools. I feel
that I have only 1/2 the story, when it comes to skills learned. On the other
hand, I know that I am more prepared than most ppl out there. I am interr
ested in ALL skills…you never know when you might need it!!!

I believe that I need to be prepared for whatever will come. I must
care for and protect myself and my family. I must defend those that I love and care for and count as my tribe/family/friends. I believe in the goodness of humanity but I also recognize that in desperate times ppl may sometimes do things they would not otherwise do, thinking that they had no other choice/. There are always choices. I must forgive myself for mistakes I have made and do my best in the future…and …that is all. That is what I believe. I do not know what the future holds, so I am trying to prepare mentally…and gain skills needed. But…I do not feel I will learn them fast enough…that it all will overtake us before any of us realize…like an in-comming tide…

I have done a lot of reading…and this is about me. I have heard of 2012. Of the annunaki/neberu/12th planet. I have heard about global warming and also the opposite…an Ice Age overdue…and overdue by a lot! I have heard about water wars and wars over resources and that the creatures of this planet are going extinct. I have heard about a “polar-shift” and radiation from the sun and mutations…which are all suppost to precede the comming ice age. The world is dying…or perhaps being reborn??? I don’t know. I don’t know anything…so I am waiting to see what happens. But I am also preparing. I still believe the future is bright with possabilities…we are what we make of it…right!!! I still believe in goodness and in truth!

Wecome Woozletracker!
Nice to see another brit on this forum.
If your interested in meeting people to practice bushcraft skills with in the UK you might want to check out http://www.bushcraftuk.com/ they hold regular meets all over the UK.
Rob

hello all. new here and just saying hello.
i’m an aging queer pagan hermit hippy living in the peace river valley in northern alberta, canada. i’m something of a jaded romantic, but a dreamer,nonetheless. i live quite an isolated life, partly by choice and largely by geography.
i have been a druid all my life, since long before i knew what a druid was. since i was raised very catholic, having made a lifelong study of the occult and magick, i’ve also been a heretic since before i knew was a heretic was.
i am a retired high school english teacher who has often been in trouble for siding with students against administration, so it probably wont come as a surprise that i am also an anarchist (or, more accurately, i’d call myself a bioregional anarcho-communist) and think that any form of government is an afront to personal freedom. i firmly invision the ‘perfect’ world as a network of bioregional autonomous zones.
reading is a passion of mine and i read omnivorously. i look forward to meeting new and interesting people here.
view more

Thanks for the welcome, Willem & Rob, and thanks for the bushcraft link, Rob (again) - will definitely have to check that scene out and get my Ray Mears on :slight_smile:

I’ve had a hard time trying to find the long-promised ‘like-minded people’ in this country. I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise that ‘the most colonised nation in history’ (so says Scots folk singer Dick Gaughan) contains so few people switched on to indigenous issues - it’s been hundreds or thousands of years since the last of those living traditions went extinct or got absorbed into the dominator culture. Unlike in the US and elsewhere (any non english-speaking rewilders out there?) we don’t have tribal neighbours or even written records of how they lived to keep this stuff in our heads and provide immediate examples to follow: all we have is the archaeological record and accounts from the fringe of our colonial expansion. I reckon the folks at the sleepy heart of Empire will face the rudest awakening of all when TSHTF. We have the most work to do to ‘de-colonise our minds’, so I guess that means there are plenty of places to start. Still I can understand disillusionment when faced with such a daunting task…

…which is why we need the rewilding movement to come over here! It’ll be like the Beatles, only in reverse ;D

Links now up in the Music/Art/Creativity section. Eager to hear any thoughts.

Ian

Welcome bikerdruid and windtooth!

windtooth: pacnw, eh? hmmm…

Yep, I had a lot to learn and not much to say 8)

Bill here, and thanks for welcoming me to the fire.

Greetings!

Liberty McGeo here for The Garden Earth Project @ http://GardenEarth.Be.

Just found the site through researching the topic “rewilding”. I am writing an article for the site about “Rewilding Suburbia”. Guess you guys beat me to the term :slight_smile:

Glad to find such kindred spirits, and looking forward to our acquaintance.

Hi, I am Earthmother and found this site by accident at 4a.m. in the morning. Guess I am an internet junkie too, ( the first step is admitting you have a problem). Anyway, I live in a rural community surrounded by orchard, vinyard, veg. and berry gardens, and chickens, dogs and other wild animals. Trying to be self-sustaining, and succeeding somewhat. I am a landscape designer and I also teach nutrition, natural healing, food storage and food preserving and emergency preparedness, as well as organic and biodynamic gardening techniques and a few other things that I can’t think of at this early hour.
I live in Northern Utah up against the mountains, where winters are long and summers are pure delight. I am a avid skier and lover of the outdoors.
I am older than almost all of you :-[ but young at heart. Hope to be able to learn here as well as share what I know.

Welcome Earthmother. Sounds like your lifestyle is about where I would like to be in the next few years. I would like to learn more about the biodynamic method (and gardening in general, for that matter). I know Helen & Scott Nearing employed some biodynamic techniques, but not much beyond the outline presented on Wikipedia.

Greetings. My name is Joey. I’m currently in New England. In my 30 years thus far on the planet I’ve experienced a fairly full range of civilization, and I’ve grown more and more disillusioned, particularly in the past few years. Though I’ve been quite “successful” according to our society’s understanding of “success”, I can’t help but feel that it is empty and accompanied by a sense of shame for the amount of unconsciousness required to continually dominate and exterminate all for the building up of one’s false sense of accomplishment and supposed progress.

For years I lived in big cities, and I longed for the ability to see the night sky as it was meant to be seen, as I recalled having seen it when on vacations in the middle of nowhere as a child. That was the start of my conscious awakening to the real world as well as the plastic and isolating nature of civilization. I was never like everyone else anyway, but I was good enough at pretending that I was able to deceive myself. But with this realization that we humans had cut ourselves off from such a primal and basic thing as witnessing the stars was the beginning of the end of that deception. I slowly stopped caring to fit in. I slowly stopped believing anything that I had been taught.

Like many people (though not nearly enough) the constant wars that the United States engages in prompted me to learn more about modern as well as historical imperialism. But I began to see that the roots of imperialism weren’t just about oil or gold. I started to see how imperialism can’t be stopped just by signing treaties or through “free trade” or any of that nonsense. I started to see that imperialism was necessary to prop up my lifestyle. And I started to see clearly that driving hybrids and supporting “fair trade” wouldn’t be enough. I started to see clearly how any manufacturing, and institutionalized division of labor, any mining of “resources”, etc. was inherently unsustainable and would always lead to imperialism. And I started to see the many ways in which the rights of those at home in the imperial nation are severely limited through coercion and violence. I saw that imperialism doesn’t just oppress those in far away lands. It oppresses those at home too. But it most people just don’t know they’re oppressed.

I grew up in the Midwest among cornfields. I thought that was natural as a child. Now, to visit makes me feel depressed. The fields are lined with signs stating that the corn or fertilizer or myriad of chemicals used are provided by some division or another of Syngenta or Dow or Dupont or Monsanto. The air is hazy and brown. There are no trees. The rivers are dammed. The rivers are dirty. This is not the world I want to live in. This is not the world I want to leave to future generations.

I want more than just the stars and an end to imperialism. I want clean water. I want clean air. I want top soil. I want forests. I want majestic rivers to overflow their banks when they need to, without human interference. I want the fish back. I want the wolves back. I want the frogs back. And I want to have a place in it as a participant, not as an outsider. I want to have meaningful relationships with other people based on love and mutual respect and community. I want to have meaningful relationships with trees and herbs and mushrooms and raccoons and deer because we all acknowledge our interdependence.

At first I thought I would just go move to a homestead, grow my own food, etc. My friends and family thought I was extreme when I even implied that I’d consider no electricity. I didn’t bother telling them I wasn’t planning on running water either (other than a stream or brook, perhaps, but you know what I mean.) My research has shown me more and more that agriculture is key to the whole puzzle. I see how imperialism started with agriculture. As a long-time vegetarian this bummed me out. But I now see how much more destruction is brought about through agriculture (particularly grain monocrops) than through factory farms alone (though I still absolutely condemn factory farming as a horrific extension of modern agricultural practices.)

Now a true hunter-gatherer lifestyle appeals more to me than a homesteading lifestyle. This way of life also causes me to confront some moral issues for myself. To begin with, as I mentioned, at this point I’m still vegetarian because I’m not sure how ready I am to face the direct reality of having to kill for food. Though the truth is clear to me that killing is always necessary, whether direct or indirect. Habitats are cleared for agriculture, which kills animals and plants. And to support egg and milk production long-term you’ve got to kill off some of the roosters and the bulls. It’s just the way it goes. This whole issue is one I will need to work through for myself, though I know that logically the hunter-gatherer way of life is the most balanced, honest, and sustainable, and it is the only way of life I know of that truly place humans back in their place as part of the circle of life and death. Anything else still places humans in a role of destroyer as far as I can see. And I see the spiritual dimension of taking one’s place in the circle as being just as important as the sustainability issue.

With that said, at this point I’m willing to make a few compromises initially. In my view the only truly sustainable lifestyle, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, is nomadic by nature. I think it would be difficult to achieve this lifestyle while living in one place for a long time. However, from my experience the nomadic lifestyle is not tolerated in this country where private property is sacrosanct. Therefore, I think a tolerable compromise would be to purchase land and practice horticulture in the most primitive manner along with perhaps keeping some small animals such as chickens. I know this may well seem an insult to post such a thing on a site specifically about rewilding. However, I view this compromise as a transition step. In many ways this transition step keeps true to some of the basic ideas of rewilding since it is a subsistence lifestyle (no long-term food storage) and my preference would be to keep it as primitive as possible, possibly with no permanent buildings. And I envision hand-crafting all tools and shelter and clothing by hand and with hand-gathered materials. Hopefully, in the long term we humans will all return to the sanity of the hunter-gather way of life, and then private property will longer be an issue. Until then, as much as I hate to admit it, I think this transition step compromise is necessary.

At this point I’m feeling actually quite alone and isolated here in New England living with all the modern conveniences doing work that props up capitalism and imperialism and all the rest of civilization. I don’t relate to many people’s ambitions. I’ve been there and done that. I found the ambitions of civilization to deliver empty fruit. I’d really like to meet like-minded good people who are ready to make a go of it.

Thanks for reading.

Wow, quite an intro feralphilosopher!

What you’re proposing isn’t so far off from what we tend to discuss here, so don’t feel discouraged. No group is going to end up living the same as another, and we all have to find our strategies that work for us.

Oh, and if you feel like it might be helpful to you, feel free to join the Rewild New England email group (linked in my signature). We’ve so far managed to get together a few events and meet-ups, and I’m working on putting together a couple more soon.

Hey welcome feralphilospher, i think i understand most of what you told us. Its really a mess isnt it? I guess we are all confused and life ahead is often a direction im afraid of looking at. Things have gone wrong. I dont know my neighbours, my collegues, my housemates, my family. I have no tribe no land and only little dreams left. Politicians talk left and right, the show must go on…
Its really really difficult for us to deal with this thing, and i see many people (myself included) develop strange habits .Sadness and unbelief shows in loved one’s eyes.

Still, we both look at the same moon in the skies. Its good to know you are out there…

take care!

great intro joey. i’m a crappy typist so i rarely expound like that. cool.
i live in a rural setting in northern alberta. harsh winters, but rich area for growing and hunting.
we grow a huge garden, harvest a plethora of local berries and herbs, and live on venison and moose. we also raise chickens for meat and eggs.
i live a compromise lifestyle. i hunt and gather, but grow and raise as well. when it’s -50 in the winter, i’m pleased to have a cozy cabin and a crackling woodstove.
i’m new here too, and hope that the forum picks up. there is a lot to discuss. i look forward to sharing ideas with you and others.
peace, patrick