Introductions

[Lish]

My friends call me Lish. I write fiction, read, cook, play outside, and work part-time at my community food co-op. Overall, my goals are to gain skills/increase my comfort in the wild and spread the truth about civilization to a large amount of people through allegorical fiction. I live in Mt. Vernon, WA with my husband and cats.

After a mysterious period of psychological transformation in 2014, I became aware of how self-loathing and depressed the mechanisms of civilization had rendered me. Since discovering these ideas, life is actually growing into something beautiful again! I am still learning a lot, trying (with some measure of success, depending on the person) to engage others in discussions re: civilization/rewilding, and tirelessly working on the craft of storytelling. Sometimes I feel overjoyed by the sheer amount of beauty and information available and want to shout everything from the rooftops.

I am excited at the prospect of belonging to a forum of likeminded individuals, but admittedly intimidated, as I’m still pretty new to the entire problem of civilization. Before this, I did the college/big city/salaried job thing. It was weird, and not in a fun way. I feel like I’m finally on the right path now, in mind and heart, even if sadly ignorant of my home planet on a physical level. My heart bursts with gratitude for all of you who are involved!

[anon26382761]

Hi I’m Firekin, female artist, scholar, healer, and warrior from the midwest US. I apologize in advance for one huge paragraph, I’m on a flip phone. xD I usually don’t properly introduce myself in forums, rather not announce that I’m new, but I’m just so happy to find a place I might actually fit in. I was researching prehistoric culture and came across the concept of primitivism/rewilding for the first time, and as I read about it, I felt like the words could’ve been my own. The values of self-sufficiency, personal liberty, honoring our instincts, respecting non-human people…Everything I stand for. Few other herbalists are as zealous as me about nature, and most survivalists fail to see that the collapse of civilization isn’t the apocalypse, civilization itself is, so I don’t fit in well with anyone. Dx I wasn’t even sure if I would here, because I love small-scale gardening and I’m addicted to my mp3 player, but I see now that there are many different shades of wild here. :3

[forestrunner]

Hello to all,
My name is forest runner (real name keenan) and I’m from the Pacific Northwest, grew up in Oregon but right now I live in Washington. I’m in my early 20s. My interest in rewilding comes from my curiosity and a drive to understand the way the world really works and how the heck we got here, which combined with my love of the outdoors to lead me to the worldview I have today. I’m not very plugged into social media/the technosphere, so this will be an interesting experience in some ways! Haven’t done too much rewilding but I’m interested in harvesting and propagating wild edibles, and forming real community. Excited to network/share ideas here!

[Wylden_Freeborne]

Hello all. I am Michael. I am a father of two and husband of one in a family that has lived in everything from a school bus (our current home) to a milk house, a squat, a one room cabin with 8 people. We lived in a tipi for two years in the wilder places of Southern Oregon and Southern Missouri. While living in the wilderness, in community, I learned how very important learning to be in a real community is. It is, by far, the most valuable primitive skill that has been lost (stolen? good conversation for later?).
I am a bowyer, music maker and singer and hunter. I enjoy my bow saw most of all, then my mora and my draw knife is up there as well.
I participate in many activities that bring my ass onto the earth around fire as often as possible and would love to sit in a talking circle with you.
I came into the beginnings of rewilding on the banks of the Missouri river on a 103 degree day with my kids aged 3 and 4 at the time. We had spent the day chasing butterflies and turtles and they wanted to swim. They asked me if we can jump in the river and I had to say no, not here. The water is quite toxic in this area. They asked what made it toxic and I explained agriculture and industry. At the time I was an organizer for labor and a big supporter of farming. They caught me. They asked why I support industry and farming if it is killing the river. My youngest pined “we have to stop them dad. We have to stop money.”
From that point, I wept and carried on and decided to join the war for love and life.
I am open for any conversation with anyone. I would love to host you on th eland which holds me in the Willapa Hills of Washington. There is wood to be gathered, and people too.

[Urban_Scout]

Welcome all! Glad you figured out how to sign-up. Sorry for the problems. We are going to be migrating to different forum software that will take those problems away.

[mindyfitch]

I don’t know whether this is good timing or not, what with migrating to new forum software, but I’m past due for introducing myself and want to do so while I’m thinking of it, so…Hello! My name is Mindy, and the best thing about my name is that if you say it over and over you’ll find a little surprise there. I’ve been living in Portland, Oregon, since 1997 and have lots of people-roots here by now, which makes my life really rich and full. I spent my middle childhood in western Washington, most memorably Whidbey Island (slugs, nettles, bull kelp, driftwood forts), and my baby years in Kansas City, Kansas (fireflies, cicadas, crispy grass, lightning). I live with my husband and two little daughters, and we homeschool/unschool/don’t go to school. I wandered into this community by following some friends here, particularly friends connected to Rewild Portland, and I’m glad I did.

[Lummox]

Hey. I’m a middle aged musician and I escaped from my native Philadelphia many years ago. I’ve had a lifelong interest in woodlands and conservation. These days I can spend a fair amount of time outdoors. I’m breaking in a new hip and hiking, fishing, hunting and just generally hanging around in nature keep me sane and happy. I can’t call myself a rewilder but many of the ideas here appeal and resonate. Planning my first true “rewilding” activity for this coming spring…since moving back to the east coast ( Vermont ) I’ve been picking lots of ramps, a wild alium that creeps up limestone hillsides each year in the early greening. This year, instead of simply leaving some plants alone in each patch, I’ll be coming back later to reseed the beds. Not much but perhaps a worthwhile start.

In a few years we’ll be moving back to the Portland Oregon area and my “agenda” here involves, in the long run, getting involved with the Portland rewilding community as a way of learning about the native plants there. We lived in Beaverton during the years leading up to my hip replacement, while I was on a cane, so I spent little time in the woods of Oregon. I hope to rectify this in the long run.

[Anneke]

Greetings from the Low Countries, just a few meters above sea level, where the turf (peat soil) has been removed and the land is so flat that I can see the red sun rise and set. In my studies I always felt at odds with its linear concepts; an introduction to hunter-gatherer skills showed me ways that feel more natural. My path has since led me to different ways of (re)connecting people to nature.

With a half hundred circles around the sun behind me, my husband and I are seeking to restore our plot to a more natural state. Certainly our two cats that grew up here show a much more varied scala of expressions and behavior than any I had in a more urban/domesticated setting. It makes me happy and thankful when people learn to see that difference and how to make that happen for themselves.

[Mona_Rose]

Welcome, Anneke! Being half-Dutch, I am very interested to hear from folks in the Low Countries! While I have not yet had a chance to visit the Netherlands, my impression is of it being a vastly domesticated/tamed region. Extremely curious to know what that means for folks living there with an interest in rewilding. I live in Oregon, but by way of New Zealand where my dutch Grandparents emigrated in the 1950s.

[Mona_Rose]

Also, welcome Wylden/Michael! I think you know Ande and Kayla? I hope that things are going well for you and your family up in WA, and I’m looking forward to reading anything you might like to contribute to the forum!

And welcome Lummox! Looking forward to meeting you at Rewild Portland events when you make it back to Oregon.

[Frederique]

Hello!
I am Frédérique, originally from Paris. I escaped city life 4 years ago and moved to wilder Scandinavia. I now live on a small island in the Baltic sea where I am converting a former orchard turned suburban garden into a food forest. I am learning “permaculture” by myself, through free online sources and practicing at home.
I love forest walks, bird watching, sun bathing, swimming.
I try reconnecting to wilderness by barefooting, wearing no clothes at the beach (in summer), gathering wild food (herbs, berries) and observing my 3 cats (born at home from a feral mother).
I hope to learn a lot from all of you :-*

[Herve]

Hello all!

another frenchman-citizen-of-the-world ;D
My name is Hervé. Originally from Paris, I currently live in London. Two kids, and I travel the world for a living.

I came to rewilding from a long maturation process, which started on 2007 when i first saw a “peak oil” chart. I then moved onto permaculture, which led me to question what was supposed to be an adequate human diet. That led me onto the paleo sphere, then recently the rewilding movement appeared to me to be the missing piece to give some logic to the whole ensemble.

Seeing how far along most of you are on this path, i’m also hoping i’ll learn from you all.

[AlexNormand]

I’ve been meaning to get on this forum for a while but was one of the unlucky folks who had trouble registering.

I grew up in a small village of about 1,500 people in eastern Québec. I used to really like walking in the woods, getting my feet wet stepping in the small streams and dreaming of building a cabin there. I also liked walking on the rocky beaches of the St-Lawrence river (which we called “the sea” because you really couldn’t see the other side from where we lived). But I was also conflicted. I hated how people were riding their motocrosses and ATVs, abusing the landscape and making me feel unsafe. I also felt like I was the strange bird with all the other kids living with both their parents, a house and a car while I was living with my 2 siblings under the care of our single mother in the only apartment building of the area. My father was diagnosed with schizophrenia when I was only a few years old and I couldn’t find it in myself to share this with potential friends. So I felt like I didn’t belong there and wanted to move to the city where anonymity and diversity were commonplace (and ended up living in Montréal for several years).

Fast-forward to adulthood, I was (and still am) living the life of a privileged white man. I have two kids (8 and 4 years old) who have already learned to live and depend on an urban environment. I’m a software engineer and I think that everyone working in technology is paid too much for the value we provide (which, in a lot of instances, would be negative value). I started learning about rewilding through my learnings about nutrition/paleo/health when I got some early signs of retinopathy in my left eye due to complications of type 1 diabetes. I got that reversed pretty quickly by changing habits and that proved to be very enlightening because the current prescribed way to dealing with type 1 diabetes wasn’t working well at all for me. When you start to doubt one thing that you’ve taken as a given all your life, it’s easy to start questioning more!

I got some introduction to rewilding through Unlearn, Rewild which I bought used at a festival with books about the environment and through Daniel Vitalis’s Rewild Yourself podcast (which I got disinterested in at some point but found useful for some time). I’m not sure which one came first but meanwhile, I was also reading every night trying to go deeper and finding some direction. I forgot to mention that I was living in San Francisco at the time, having moved in 2012. I felt stuck in what I could do because my ability to roam the land/live in the United States was tied to my employment. I felt stuck so we started planning to head back to Canada where we would be a little more free. I’ll spare you the details but we decided at the last minute to stay in the United States, find a new home and accepted to spend a few years locked in the world of a 9-to-5 job while going through the green card process that would allow me to stay without being tied to my contribution to the economy. So last summer, we traveled in our Volkswagen Vanagon on the west coast in search of a place to settle down and we finally ended up in Portland, in great part because of the rewilding community here.

I still struggle everyday with not having the opportunity (unless I were to decide to break the rules) to leave my job and reconnect with nature and live what I’ve been reading and aspiring to. But the biggest challenge for me is sharing this desire with my kids while still living in the city. I want them to learn to live a real life, which means not learning to live as a member of the civilization/system dependent on it. But everyday, they’re learning to get better at living in an urban environment and that probably means more things to unlearn later. We often feel isolated because of our different way of looking at the world (although I’m not sure I can say that about our kids yet) but we also feel isolated because we’re still very new to the area and we’re not as comfortable speaking English, French being our first language. This isolation, you might imagine, creates tension inside the home from not having a group of people to talk to/hang out with.

Fortunately, I got to know a few very nice people through Rewild Portland (, Peter) and I’m hoping we make more friends going to the free skills share/members hikes/classes. I’m also going to be doing rewild 201 in February which I’m very excited about.

Oh and I haven’t put too much thought in my username of boarkid. I’ve been using this at work after we joked after seeing the picture from a terrible zoo in the 1930s where people were riding animals. Apparently, the kid looked like my son which prompted colleagues to speculate that this was a picture of me as a young boy (disregard the fact that I was born in the early 80s and not the 30s). I started using “boar kid” after that. And when came time to pick a username, I was thinking that boars are cool now so I might just stick with it.

Looking forward to learning and sharing from everyone here!

Update: I decided to drop boarkid and change my username to my real name to make my identity clear. I’m thinking it might be better if I eventually meet more of you in real life

[PeterMichaelBauer]

Welcome boarkid! Thank you for all your help with this site migration.

[jeriahbowser]

Greetings fellow rewilders. I know some of y’all in person, and I look forward to meeting more of you as we engage in this journey together.

My birth-parents named me Jeriah, and I have yet to find a better symbol that encapsulates my identity. If you have any ideas let me know

I was initiated onto this path by way of the High Deserts of Pinyon Pine, Juniper, Sage, Coyote, Rattlesnake, and Sage Grouse - the bioregion of the Colorado Plateau and the ancestral lands of the Hopi, Pauite, Shoshone, Ute, Havasupai, Dineh, Zuni, Hualapai, and White Mountain Apache peoples.

I have been fortunate to have worked as a wilderness therapy guide over the past decade, which means that I facilitate wilderness immersion experiences for radically domesticated humans. It is this work and the land itself which introduced me to a way of being that exists outside of civilization.

I do a lot of writing about my experiences as a wilderness guide and rewilder; my essays, books, and projects can be seen at www.jeriahbowser.com.

While we currently live in the PNW (Corvallis OR), my partner and our furry children and I are planning on moving back to the Desert in the next few years, with the intention of liberating some land and creating space for rewilding projects to happen. I want to create space for wilderness healing in a way that is informed by anti-civ thought and fully breaks with the logic and processes of Psychiatry.

As a writer, I find myself influenced by anti-civilization anarchism, primitivism, deep ecology, neoluddism, animal and earth liberation, anti-modernism, ecopsychology, Jungian depth psychology, radical therapy/antipsychiatry, logotherapy, ecofeminism, animism, taoism, and wildism.

I appreciate online discussions and really appreciate meeting people face to face. Thanks to Peter and the Rewild Portland crew for hosting this space!

(also, this intro is my first attempt in writing in E-Prime, how did I do?)

[Willem]

Well done and well met Jeriah!

[Maddy]

Hey all!

My name’s Maddy, I hail from the shores of Queensland, Australia, and I decided to join this forum just today after lurking on and off for a few months. I currently study ecology in uni and work a day or two a week developing lessons for schoolkids. Eventually, I’d like to either do work in conservation or reforestation, or work for Parks and Wildlife as a ranger. I love the outdoors! I’ve been camping, fishing and spending time in the bush to some extent since I was a kid, but only in the past two years have I realised how important and incredible the natural world really is. I don’t know exactly what clued me in on the term rewilding, but I believe it was through natural movement and primal living channels. I’d encountered little ‘bits’ of rewilding concepts before, but realising that there was a whole framework that encompassed them all was an awesome feeling! My first introduction was Daniel Vitalis’s podcast (which I really enjoyed some of the earlier episodes of but eventually got turned off from). That led me to do some searching, which led me here!

I’m still a complete newbie at rewilding, and I expect to be doing a lot more learning than teaching. Some of the steps I’ve taken include pushing myself to go barefoot as often as possible (around my house and paddocks, on walks in the bush, at local shops - but not yet in the city), walking daily in natural areas and doing longer bushwalks once a week or so, learning to identify my local plant life, keeping chooks for eggs, growing fruit, veg and herbs, beginning to forage and getting more movement in my day. I also ride horses! It’s something I really enjoy and connect to my rewilding journey. I ride for friends who compete in endurance, which means that all my riding is done in the forest, and that I get to ride 40+ kilometres on occasion. I love it!

There’s tons, tons more that I have yet to do and learn. I look forward to encountering new ideas and broadening my horizons here. I can’t wait to get to know you all and share thoughts and discussions with you!

[DennisL]

Hi Everyone, My name is Dennis and I’m excited to teach, learn, and hang out with fellow Rewilders in person. I currently live near Corvallis (like Jeriah, whom I hope to meet up with soon) and I’d be happy to share skills with any nearby Willamette Valley/Kalapuya occupied territory people out there. Maybe I’ll see folks at Echoes in Time in July?

Current stuff I’m trying to learn: willow basketry, bow string making, and buckskin sewing/tailoring.

My bigger goals are creating Cascadian land projects where people can do full time immersion rewilding, and potentially multiple land projects. I’ve lived on rewilding land projects before (porcupine palace and wild roots), and wish to do this again with like-hearted accomplices. Towards that end I’ve been involved with the Feralculture Land Liberation project (http://forums.feralculture.com) in Alaska. But I’d like to start a more Cascadian-centric land trust/land project group in the near future, as I don’t plan on moving permanently to central Alaska (where the Feralculture project currently resides) any time soon.

Thanks for hosting this forum Peter and Willem! (I like the Discourse format too). Take care everyone, Dennis

[Hypocrite]

I am no one from somewhere. You can blame the world’s problems on me, for I am a homo sapien, born of other homo sapiens - the top apex predator and omnivore on planet Earth.

[Lummox]

Well, I won’t be in Vermont when the ramps come up…read a book, got my real info from a friend who works in forestry, but due to circumstances… We’ll be back in Oregon by the end of this month. I’ll plan on going after some invasive plants or some other useful forest maintenance chore there this spring. Weird timing but I will be on the Willamette for the spring salmon run.