Hi everyone
I’m a n00b here, just found this forum. I feel that the flicker of light that I first saw when I found this place has turned out to be a cozy fireside, where i can put down my burden and enjoy the presence of other likeminded souls and say goodbye to my journey alone and in the dark.
I am completely new to the internet manifestation of human rewilding, so I will get things wrong in my terminology, I may blurr edges and generally sound naive. But my direction is true.
We are starting a project, including anyone here that wishes to join, in voice spirit or on the ground. Help us make it what we all imagine. Some friends and i are starting a project in the northern territory. We have a 250 acre block fairly deep into the bush and it is mostly surrounded by wilds existing as public, crown and private land. The back of the block leads away into a big wilderness with billabongs waterfalls caves and valleys. It leads to parts very remote. We are beginning a project where we, as human beings will try to change our resource base from heavy dependence upon fossil fuels and the techno industrial grid, to a localized and seasonal energy and resource base. This sounds fairly straight forward, and it is, but doing so will be an enormous lifestyle change, thrilling for some and absolute hell for others. We will have a layered approach starting from our base 250 acre block. Here we will build our houses out of local materials, learn skills from local indigenous, tan hides, thatch and generally learn what skills are needed for low tech (free) living. All the while we will be developing our food system that will provide an energy base for ourselves, and a learning platform for laying down strong and resilient forage gardens. From here we wish to take another step further away from petroleum man and deeper into the local ecology, with the quest to integrate into the land by entering the wild in a positive way where the ecology benefits from our presence- I will write a dedicated post about this going into detail on how this works. This might be done on a seasonal basis when sufficient skills are attained. So this project is it’s very early days, and we are now wanting to build a network of people who have an interest in something like this, and then form a group of people who are willing to work together and give it a go.http://zone5project.blogspot.com.au
We have a layered plan, we wish not to be with petroleum man any longer, so we have a plan of permanence where we can move away from the nipple of the industrial grid while making a transition into the wild.
My background is in permaculture and using these design methods, We have worked out a pathway for making our impact on wilderness positive, and hopefully giving us a net calorie gain. I outlined the gist of this and posted it on permaculture.org forums to see what sort of feedback I would get, it got very little, and I am taking that as a good sign and a green light.
Here is the main content of the post;
‘But all this zone 5 has had me thinking and i am going to put it out there: human rewilding into zone 5, to some extent. I know that it would be yet more ferals, but i was thinking that the whole area is chock full of ferals doing harm, maybe the addition of one more could help bring the whole into balance. An example could be where we have enormous problems throughout the area with gamba grass, it grows about twelve to fifteen feet high in the wet season, and then left ungrazed it drys out in the dry season and then when it burns it reaches temperatures around 1500c. This kills all of what little soil life developed over the wet and boils the bark in trees, it creates conditions where only more gamba can thrive. The fire cycle up there has gone nuts, full of shocking feedbacks, creating a desert of gamba and eucalypt. A speargrass fire is a mild inconvenience by comparison. Some semi/seasonally nomadic humans could exist herding and mobbing cattle on the gamba where it responds well and grows nice sweet shoots and is little threat in the dry. Learning and mastering of low stress stock handling and setting could see all those scrubbers replaced with managed herds and the function of keystone species put into play, stopping those extreme fires.’
There are ferals of all kind, pigs, cattle, cats, wild pig dog mongrels, many introduced pasture species etc. Scrubbers refer to wild cattle, they go bush and without an apex predator, their grazing patterns arent effective in keeping those introduced mega tropical grasses in the life cycle they’re evolved for, so they burn very hot and gas off biomass in tonnes, killing nearly everything.
The re introduction of predators in a lot of national parks around the world has seen great improvements, but in Australia the only apex predator are humans.
I don’t exactly know if herding cattle is rewilding fully or not, but it is an appropriate way of dealing with an ecology that is dangerously out of balance and converting all of that vigorous tropical photosynthesis into human consumable energy. The old people of the country used to track down wild mobs and bring them in using old skills of the land.
So there is the outline. So far we are Tim - he is the owner of the place and knows the country we are talking, myself and my partner and two children. We have a network of friends who may join later. We would dearly love anyone else with these sorts of interests to join in any way, particularly other families and women. The limit of people will be reached when we have stumbled on the right tribe size.
Come and build your humpy and live in the bush!