No question that I love the Nodal concept. I think a lot of us are trying to figure this out, but none of us have gotten there yet. I'm excited about the fact that I have two families coming here tomorrow (one has land in Minnesota, the other in North Carolina and Georgia) to talk more about this face-to-face. We are all out there. I think a lot of people rooted when times got tougher and that's a good thing. I think now is the time to start pulling this together and building it up.
That's another question I came to in this piece and it came from my own search: I wanted a land project and now we have land. But there's complications to it all and complexities of life that make things more challenging. There are awesome things about where we live and then the summer heat makes you wonder what is so great about life in the first place.
The answer, in so far as I think there is one, is coming back to relying on current networks and expanding them: embracing the idea of flux and mobility. How do we focus on building community when we're spatially dispersed and individually anchored in different ways and places. It's not an easy situation, but I think it means being honest and focused on the parts that matter: how and when we connect and build that network, rather than just being the best of being zero-impact wild superheroes with cooler pictures on social media.
The hard part is trying to do that online. It's where everyone is and it's also where noobs come to posture. I get the excitement and all, but the rewilding community needs a shot of DIY enthusiasm and a lot of humility if anything solid and real is to come of it. How does that get started? A whole lot of this: be honest and connect as humans.
In terms of the questions; Feralculture is not a land trust, but might, at some point, become one.
There's a lot of potential there and a lot of questions about how it moves forward. Is FC the Alaska nodes or is it the entire network. I support the Alaska stuff, but there are also reasons why going there might be impractical. Lots of discussions about the land trust idea though, online and off. It's a really good one, but the more that network can get a leg up, the better off it will be once things are ready to roll on a larger scale than just face-to-face and friends-of-friends.
This speaks to my points above. I think there's honesty and practicality here, though personally I'm not drawn towards any cities. I get the deal though. I don't think of it necessarily as an "urban-wild connection" than I do "we need people to build communities, where the people at?" And there's a lot to be said for that.
To a certain degree, it's kind of a "let's put our dicks away and figure out how this really works." Or could be. And I think that's good. If the land is the place and the community is the project, then there you have it.
RE: Peter's point 4, I look forward to your thoughts on my behemoth of an essay in BAGR 4: 'Society Without Strangers' on conflict resolution and community.