00:01:50.180I've heard a lot of definitions of rewilding.
00:01:52.720some folks talk about it in terms of going back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle while others like
00:01:59.360Dave Foreman talk about it in terms of a conservation or a restoration method involving
00:02:06.100bringing back the large mammals of the Pleistocene epoch or or there's the the psychological
00:02:12.020rewilding. Miles Olson who was a recent guest talks about the spark of spontaneity so there's
00:02:19.680all these definitions floating around and I'd love to hear your definition and what type of
00:02:25.720rewilding do you think is possible given the obstacles of modern civilization? I think all
00:02:32.900of our definitions of rewilding are actually the same, but the way that the depth that we choose to
00:02:42.460fully follow that definition is different. And what I mean by that is rewilding just means
00:02:48.140undoing domestication or, you know, especially like in conservation biology, rewilding is
00:02:56.260reintroduction of species. It's trying to return a habitat to its quote-unquote wild state.
00:03:05.100And wild is the opposite of domestication. So to what extent are we going to follow that thread?
00:03:12.840and I'd like to say that you know a lot of conservation biologists they're on this kick
00:03:18.040right now of introducing apex predators like the wolf but they don't recognize humans as one of
00:03:24.520those apex predators which is very unfortunate and that's where in my mind human rewilding is
00:03:30.740part of their ideology but they haven't quite reached it yet and part of that I think is
00:03:35.500because you have people like um George Monbiot or Monbi I don't know how to say his last name
00:03:42.600Yes, yes. He and a lot of those folks don't have the backing of study with indigenous peoples, because obviously in Europe, human culture, as central to the ecosystem, disappeared a long time ago, or didn't disappear, was destroyed a long time ago.
00:04:03.460So whereas around the globe, you have more contemporary or modern indigenous people that have all these practices that show how to fit into an ecosystem as humans.
00:04:15.720So, you know, as far as rewilding goes, they haven't quite hit the human component where then you have people that are, you know, from sort of the perspective I come from where I'm looking around at this culture.0.99
00:04:49.100And so from my perspective, if we want to live a sustainable way of life, we need to
00:04:53.220return to the way we were living before the advent of agricultural civilization.
00:04:59.020And I don't mean return in the exact same way.
00:05:01.440obviously the world has changed so it's not uh going back to the way things were it's a moving
00:05:08.100forward or just uh i don't even really like looking at things as going back or forward we're
00:05:13.360just changing the way we're living to mirror the techniques of land management that our ancestors
00:05:19.460were doing for millions of years that didn't destroy the planet or cause the largest megafauna
00:05:24.640extinction the sixth largest megafauna extinction um and i think there's going to be a merit
00:05:31.280of all of those forms of rewilding, whether it happens sort of on an institutional level
00:05:37.940or if it happens just kind of grassroots level, I think at some point all of the research
00:05:45.860is going to point to that and everybody's going to end up coming together.
00:05:49.960There's this thing that I say to people, which is that all paths lead to rewilding.
00:05:55.500Even if you look at like the paleo diet, for example, which a lot of people are starting
00:05:59.900to come to rewilding from that end of things now because you realize that our diets are messed up
00:06:05.880well when were our diets not messed up before the advent of agriculture so then you start looking
00:06:10.520at all these other aspects of our health and then that links to the ecosystem and then you realize
00:06:15.200that hunter-gatherers were not destroying the planet so then it it expands your idea into
00:06:20.660rewilding not just something like the paleo diet so from my perspective rewilding is to return to
00:06:27.460a more self-willed state. It's the process of undoing domestication. And the way that I go
00:06:33.520about doing that is by educating people on prehistory and how our ancestors lived
00:06:38.540before the advent of agriculture and how contemporary indigenous people still practice
00:06:45.220those traditions around the globe where they haven't been colonized or completely destroyed.
00:06:49.520At some point, whether it's peak oil or peak water, we're almost forced to rewild. Before that happens, what are some tangible things that people can do to rewild, whether they're living in an urban environment or in a rural environment?
00:07:09.480I think the most important thing in rewilding, whether it's in an urban context or a wild context, is to start replanting native plants, and in particular, edible ones.
00:07:22.240They're going to be the most climate change-resistant plants or most adaptable to climate change because they're used to the areas they're in.
00:07:33.160So they're used to fluctuations in climate, whereas non-native plants are going to be a lot more susceptible to climate change.
00:07:40.980But also, part of the thing is that it's not just plants, it's also insects.
00:07:45.660There's a relationship between plants and insects and everything.
00:07:49.880You know, people are like, I don't need to plant native plants.
00:08:00.020um a great example is right now i've i keep mentioning this because it's a great example
00:08:05.560um through our partnership with portland parks we found out that uh through sorry my organization
00:08:11.820rewild portland is a non-profit and we do a free class on the last saturday every month
00:08:16.400and um every once in a while we do a food every spring we do stinging nettle as a food
00:08:22.080and we wanted to do it in the parks and they told us that we could do the skill share but
00:08:27.560that we couldn't harvest from the parks, and that's because the biologists have been studying
00:08:31.480the butterfly populations, and the admiral butterfly lays its eggs on the baby nettles
00:08:36.580as it's coming out of the ground. Well, that's not that big of a deal to forage for some,
00:08:41.880but you have a thousand urban foragers going to the same parks, and each of them take a handful
00:08:46.920of nettles, and what they're doing is decimating this population of butterflies. So how do you
00:08:54.460combat that you know there's this idea that plants exist in a vacuum they don't realize
00:08:58.320that they're killing a butterfly which is a pollinator which is all you know there's all
00:09:02.580kinds of interwoven animals and plants in an ecosystem and so what we do is to plant back
00:09:10.240more nettles i mean nettles are really kind of like a weed you don't really need to plant them
00:09:14.120back unless you're living in an urban environment where they've been removed because people don't
00:09:18.840like them. The populations of butterfly are probably doing better outside of city limits
00:09:25.000where nettle is still growing all over the place. But then you have elevation change,
00:09:29.560which may affect the insects. So anyway, one of the things that we do at our Skillshare,
00:09:34.340which is in an urban setting, is to transplant nettles from the wild and give them to people
00:09:41.060to take home and plant in their yards. And that's going to encourage people to be more aware of
00:09:47.640plants. It's going to give them land tending ethic, and it's going to provide more habitat
00:09:52.840for butterflies. So it's not like you have to do just kind of one thing. The idea from my
00:09:59.860perspective is to overlap as many things as possible to get people interacting and rewilding
00:10:05.740from many different layers. You brought up a few good points in your last response. One,
00:10:12.800biodiversity brings resilience to an ecosystem so continuing to plant more and especially plant
00:10:20.220more than we take is really important um but also this idea of over harvesting because wild foraging
00:10:27.180has kind of gotten this pickup in modern culture and people are really excited and of course it is
00:10:33.280exciting it's beautiful to be able to go and find wild foods and forage them but i think most of the
00:10:39.940time we don't realize that because we're so in this consumptive mindset that we can always go
00:10:46.520to the market and we can always buy more that oh you find a patch of chanterelles or nettles and
00:10:51.380you could just take them all and it's you might not think further than that but I'd love to you
00:10:56.580know dive even deeper into the issues of over harvesting over foraging and how we can be
00:11:04.180respectful when if we do choose to do those acts and what are some of the endangered species that
00:11:10.920you see of wild foraged foods and what does it mean to tend the wild how indigenous people were
00:11:18.020able to forage for wild foods without pushing it to its limit um cool a lot of questions um so
00:11:27.760So overharvesting is a major issue because as foraging becomes more and more trendy, obviously it's affecting the local ecosystems and in particular urban systems where you might have a thousand people.
00:11:49.380And, you know, it's a good foraging ethic to not take everything that you see, to just take, you know, a third of an area of plants or leave some behind.
00:11:58.020You know, that's a classic foraging ethic.
00:12:00.100But the problem is if you're doing it in a setting where there's a thousand other foragers and they're all coming out to the same places, they might not see each other, but they're all thinking, oh, I'm just going to take a handful of this.
00:12:10.120And then the entire patch is decimated.
00:12:12.500Um, an example of ecosystems, not necessarily being over harvested, but, um, transformed through colonialism is the Willamette Valley where I live, um, in Portland was historically or pre contact, uh, an Oak Savannah that was managed by native people.
00:12:34.280um you know the northwest is kind of known for its trees but it's funny because the valley
00:12:42.100actually didn't have really many evergreen trees and that's because the kalapuya native people who
00:12:47.440live here were burning it every year to prevent the growth of douglas firs but encourage and
00:12:55.480maintain oak savanna which produce acorns which uh were a staple of their diet and you know there's
00:13:03.700this distinction between hunter gatherers and agriculturalists and people have this idea that
00:13:09.600hunter gatherers sort of aimlessly wander the landscape in search of food they don't realize
00:13:14.480or recognize that they're consciously managing the landscapes that they are a part of one of
00:13:20.940the biggest ways they do that is through fire and it's a destructive force but it also returns
00:13:26.680nutrients to the soil um obviously you know you can see where mycelium love after a burn that's
00:13:35.640not too heavy um that's often places where people will go to get like morals and things like that
00:13:40.820are in recently burned areas um and that's because the ground is growing back it's building more soil
00:13:49.640after the catastrophe but then it also creates mixed forests so you wouldn't burn down an entire
00:13:57.240forest you'd burn a little section of it and you create an ecotone or an edge between habitats
00:14:04.380now you're created two kinds of habitat which is where biodiversity flourishes is on edges
00:14:10.600it's basically working with forest succession it's mimicking catastrophe but then allowing
00:14:17.840the forest to rebound all the way to a climax forest of old growth trees. Whereas agricultural
00:14:24.440farming is only recognizable to Europeans as the real kind of farming because of its destructive
00:14:31.960nature that's visible on the landscape. And instead of fire, which agriculturalists begin
00:14:37.320using fire and eventually, and still use fire actually, but eventually use tilling soil with
00:14:43.440the plow, which goes very deep, destroys the rhizomal connections in the soil and allow the
00:14:51.340soil to blow away and get flushed away in rains. So when you have those two different systems,
00:14:58.400and one people have been using agriculture for so many years, they don't even understand what
00:15:03.720land tending would look like if you weren't dragging a plow through a soil and creating a
00:15:09.280monocrop but instead letting nature return to a climax forest because agriculturalists we subsist
00:15:16.500on primary plants wheat and grains and those things require a field habitat to grow so we have
00:15:25.060to instead of just burning down a forest we burn it down plow it and then keep it that way by burning
00:15:30.720it and plowing it every single year whereas hunter-gatherer land management is sort of
00:15:38.080working those gardens along a nomadic circuit.
00:15:41.760So it's not that they're nomads that wander,
00:15:44.400it's that they're nomads that work the same areas year after year,
00:15:49.600traveling in a giant hoop, basically, on the landscape,
00:18:14.400I was just thinking about fire ecology and how we've been conditioned to be extremely fearful of fire and fire is the enemy and Smokey the Bear and all of these images from childhood that come up with fire.
00:18:32.720And recently I was studying fire ecology up in Canada and it was so interesting to understand the history that these forests of the Pacific Northwest evolved with fire and fire did foster biodiversity and food for the indigenous hunter gatherers.
00:18:51.340and if you have these tree farms where there's a monocrop tree and they're really tightly
00:18:58.460squished together they have all of these limbs coming out which create ladder fuels which then
00:19:03.760can create crown fires you know we're seeing these more destructive fires because we're stopping the
00:19:09.940natural occurrence of fires plus we're monocropping them now an old growth forest a fire sweeping
00:19:16.560through an old growth forest their bark is so strong that they can withstand fires and usually
00:19:21.820the fires in old growth are ground fires because you don't have all of the fuel that has been
00:19:27.480building up so it's an extremely interesting topic that we should re-establish into our
00:19:35.180modern context and not be so fearful i mean of course not being nomadic anymore we're building
00:19:41.280these houses right in where you know a natural fire could occur which is like another step of
00:19:47.920not really working with the land as it is but trying to force our exactly desire on the land
00:19:54.480and also when you were talking i was visualizing how to tend the wild on a large scale you know we
00:20:01.480have huge industrial agriculture millions of acres it's not going to continue to be able to
00:20:07.220produce food in the way it has been for the last hundred years so do you how do you see a transition
00:20:14.000from going from monocropped industrial agriculture to a tending the wild type perennial system
00:20:23.560um it's difficult to kind of gauge that because there's so many barriers there's just so many
00:20:33.340different kinds of scenarios i mean right now people who own property are practicing these
00:20:39.600kind of controlled burns native people on reservations are practicing these kinds of burns
00:20:46.500um and and not just burning but obviously all the other land management techniques replanting
00:20:52.500seeding but on a large scale i have a difficult time seeing how it's going to happen as long as
00:21:02.740empire exists because even just right now we're not even talking food we're talking water now
00:21:10.080water is way more essential than food in a sense you know you'll die three days without water food
00:21:15.800you can starve a couple of weeks to a couple of months so water is a lot more primary than food
00:21:23.920And right now in the Columbia River Basin, we're fighting against Nestle, who is trying to get rights to a natural spring on public land so that they can create a bottling plant, which is disgusting in my mind.
00:21:42.100I just dislike any kind of part of empire or civilization in general, but it's particularly
00:21:48.420disgusting because we're in a drought at the moment. Oregon, California, Washington,
00:21:52.620we're all in droughts. And meanwhile, there's a corporation that the government is just giving
00:21:58.600the rights to clean water, to then charge people money for, which to me is just sort of the
00:22:06.140quintessential insanity of this entire culture that our government is actually just partners
00:22:12.960with the corporations who are destroying the planet. And we don't really have the power
00:22:18.020to stop them on a scale that they need to be stopped. This is the problem with climate change
00:22:24.700as well. We're powerless to really change the governments because the governments aren't set up
00:22:29.220to change the way we need them to. And so I don't really see a way forward that doesn't include
00:22:36.360a revolution of some kind. And I don't think that a revolution of a changing of hands of a leader
00:22:42.020or a change of a government system is going to be adequate. I really don't see a massive change
00:22:49.000happening until the entire thing collapses and people have to create these changes on a smaller
00:22:56.060scale within their own communities because the system just isn't set up for a large scale kind
00:23:01.980of a change which is really unfortunate for us because it's the most intense destructive era
00:23:08.800that humans have ever lived through aside from maybe when our population declined to about 10,000
00:23:15.36090,000 years ago before we left Africa you know I can't think of a of a time that's sort of been
00:23:23.860more critical for the human species than that um than our near extinction 90 000 years ago
00:23:31.700but of course there's so much more extinctions happening now that it won't be surprising
00:23:37.920if we end up on that chain um of course i wouldn't like that to happen but i think in order for that
00:23:45.240not to happen there's going to need to be massive change and that change is going to require a change
00:23:52.040of power and a change of power is a revolution so it's difficult to gauge you know what are we
00:23:58.080doing now to kind of get ready for that because in my mind it's there's no question that it's going
00:24:02.440to happen it's how are we going to be prepared from now and how are we going to move forward
00:24:08.560from now so that as that transition happens as that revolution happens there will be a chance
00:24:14.600for humans to relearn these old skills so that as we go through it we'll be able to continue on
00:24:21.700beyond whatever major transformations and transitions are going to happen in the next
00:24:25.900thousand years with climate change with diseases with the transformation of power from an empire
00:24:32.400to something else any big stress on our environment and culture is going to require and cause change
00:24:40.380so i can't really say what one scenario is going to be over the next but what i do in my mind is
00:24:47.200try to plan for a way that will be able to exist through any possible future so say i'm completely
00:24:55.400wrong civilization continues everything is fine what is our next step and how could i plan it in
00:25:03.100such a way that it would also be for the complete collapse of our system say tomorrow and that to
00:25:10.320me is just following these principles of land management on a level you have people that work
00:25:14.800in the system and people who work outside of the system so in my mind when i created rewild portland
00:25:20.020i wanted it to be an organizational model for how to move forward through economic collapse through
00:25:27.920ecologic collapse through peak oil energy crisis how can we create a model that if the hit the fan
00:25:34.900so to speak and they really needed to start looking at transitional models where are they
00:25:39.920going to look and so rewild portland has been you know quote unquote within the system um not
00:25:46.520necessarily looking to reform a system but working within the system's boundaries to the extent that
00:25:51.860we can so that when a change like that happens and people are looking for models they'll be able
00:25:56.760to see one that exists and then use that a piggyback on it you know uh use us as a as a sort
00:26:03.000of a council, um, for moving forward. And if that doesn't happen, then rewild Portland has already
00:26:11.440created a grassroots community that can also move forward through a disaster, regardless of whether
00:26:18.140the city's looking to us as a model or not. And for the audience who may not have researched
00:26:26.820rewild Portland before this interview, would you mind us giving us a description of the organization
00:26:32.360the kind of things you do there and what you how you see people shift after taking
00:26:41.200classes with you or being involved in this community cool so rewild portland is a 501c3
00:26:48.980non-profit organization and our mission is to promote cultural and environmental resilience
00:26:53.460through the education of earth-based arts traditions and technologies that was sort of
00:26:58.700the broadest way I could think for people to kind of understand what rewilding means.
00:27:04.320And what we do is community building, education of ancestral skills, and ecological restoration.
00:27:13.160And we try to connect all three of those things together seamlessly or integrated in each of our programs.
00:27:22.160An example of one of our flagship programs is English Ivy basket weaving.
00:27:28.020So we teach people how to remove an invasive species, restore native habitat, and then
00:27:32.600at the same time, weave a basket with it.
00:27:35.580So we're keeping alive ancestral traditions of basket weaving.
00:27:39.460And at the same time, we're able to restore habitat.
00:27:43.660And at the same time, throughout the weaving class, we build a community of people that
00:27:49.380are, you know, weaving is one of the greatest sort of community building things because
00:27:53.040you're just hanging out with people in the forest chatting for hours while you're working on
00:27:57.760projects together so you're having this shared experience bonding but then at the same time
00:28:03.640you're able to create a deeper connection with people through conversations and all these kinds
00:28:07.880of conversations come up during the classes as well of you know what is rewilding and how are
00:28:12.340we doing it and so i always use the english ivy as sort of a flagship description of what we do
00:28:18.420but we do a free class on the last saturday of every month that's in partnership with portland
00:28:22.780parks. And we switch from a wild edible food to a craft to a community skill. So an example would
00:28:31.840be for our food, we do acorn processing in the fall. And for all of our food classes, we don't
00:28:38.920just teach what's edible and how to eat it. We teach how to plant it back. We teach an ethic of
00:28:44.360restoring those species and keeping them living. And then through our skills, we do things like
00:28:51.120knife sharpening basket weaving hide tanning kind of all the sort of old ancestral skills
00:28:57.180and then for our cultural skills it's more about community building like
00:29:01.460how children can be mentored in a nature-based setting or how indigenous people mentored their
00:29:07.340children how to create a ritual together and what that means and why that's important
00:29:13.660one of our upcoming themes is nature-based therapy so how to be in nature and connect
00:29:19.940on a deeper level um so all these things kind of go hand in hand and are interrelated so it's hard
00:29:28.160to kind of isolate all these aspects of rewilding as their own thing since it's a complete basically
00:29:34.740you're creating an entirely new culture so you have to have all these different elements that
00:29:39.460all play together um and that's kind of what we're doing with rewild is to inspire people to create
00:29:46.920a new culture. And you also have, well, first of all, thank you for doing this work. I love the
00:29:56.820English Ivy, restoring, learning these techniques, building community,
00:30:04.440stocking your functions. It's beautiful, the work that you do. And I hope more people get on board
00:30:10.780with Rewild Portland and see your model and potentially start things like this in their
00:30:15.640communities and their cities because it'd be incredible to have larger networks of this
00:30:20.380happening and really building those wider connections totally which you do again on
00:30:26.960your website rewild.com which seems to be able to spread to even wider groups yeah originally um
00:30:34.400you know i tried to do this project where i was going to live like a hunter-gatherer for a year
00:30:39.940in the city and I wanted to catalog it so that it would inspire other people to do that as well
00:30:46.520um and so I created a blog I created a sort of an alias alter ego urban scout um which was
00:30:54.920not which I consider one of my muses it's not really my voice but it's a voice that I hear
00:31:00.540um and so I created a blog and within about a week I realized that it was going to be impossible
00:31:06.240for me to do this. And not impossible for everybody. I'm sure there's plenty of sort
00:31:11.540of rugged individualists, survivalists out there who could pull off living as a hunter-gatherer
00:31:17.620on their own in a city environment. And there's people who do it. There are homeless people who
00:31:21.960do that. That's how they live. But for me, I wanted a hunter-gatherer culture, not just doing
00:31:27.560it by myself. And I wanted the way of life. To me, the way of life isn't surviving by myself
00:31:33.160in the woods or in the city or wherever. It's living in a tribe. Humans evolved as social
00:31:38.940organisms, socially organized, much like a pack of wolves or a beehive. So we have this incline
00:31:47.100to live together and to work together. I'm a very social person. I have to be around people.
00:31:54.400I'm also kind of a recluse, but I need to be around people. And trying to do this project
00:31:59.900by myself just didn't really pan out. I started writing about rewilding, writing essays, and I
00:32:06.180eventually compiled them into a book called Rewild or Die. During this process, I realized that I
00:32:12.340wanted to connect people around the world to encourage them to rewild as well. Part of my
00:32:20.320blog was this website, rewild.info, which now is actually just at rewild.com. It's an international
00:32:28.040forum for discussing rewilding and all of the aspects that are involved with that after doing
00:32:36.560that for years we realized that i'd spent all this time focusing on encouraging people around
00:32:42.480the world to rewild that i hadn't focused enough time here on my local community and that was sort
00:32:46.880of the drive for me to create rewild portland so for the last few years i've focused on rewild
00:32:52.400Portland. And now we're doing a site redesign for rewild.com and using it to promote rewilding on a
00:33:00.400larger scale again. It never went away. It just kind of faded for a little while while we were
00:33:05.320all kind of doing our own rewild projects. And it's picked up quite a bit again. And now that
00:33:11.420rewild Portland is super successful in my mind, I'd like to be able to use rewild.com as sort of
00:33:19.120a platform for people to connect about rewilding in English-speaking countries, I should say.
00:34:14.700We're back with Peter Michael Bauer, founder of Rewild.com,
00:34:41.860where there was an essay blogged recently called Decolonizing the Primitive Skills Movement
00:34:47.600by an author going by the name On Stolen Land, and I'd like to bring it to the table and get
00:34:54.340your response, Peter. Quote, historically, the desire to live on indigenous land and to feel
00:35:00.840connected to it bodily, emotionally, spiritually, has been the normative function of settlers,
00:35:07.100says Scott Morganson in his essay Unsettling Settler Desires. He points out that so-called
00:35:15.220alternative settler cultures occupying and traversing stolen indigenous land variously
00:35:21.500characterized by squatting, hoboism, anarchism, neo-paganism, communalism, and other sub- and
00:35:29.940countercultural practices are in fact an extension of colonialism, including the back-to-the-land
00:35:36.900primitive skills community, primarily because there is little critique questioning our continued
00:35:42.940occupation of stolen land and responsibility as colonizers. Morgensen says that historically
00:35:51.040non-natives became settlers by adapting indigenous dwelling sites, travel routes, place names,
00:35:58.780modes of gathering or cultivating food, and spiritual knowledge and practices.
00:36:02.980Participants in such alternative settler cultures, including the primitive skills community, often appreciate indigenous culture and pursue supposedly indigenous ways of life, supposedly in solidarity with indigenous people.
00:36:18.740It seems that gathering the fruits of the wild should be a sustainable and perhaps politically neutral alternative to the destructive forces of large-scale agriculture and resource extraction.
00:36:30.960But Dakota activist Wazia Tawin brings up an excellent point.
00:36:36.080If colonizers are practicing sugar bushing or wild ricing within Dakota homeland, while most of our people live in exile, they become just the latest wave of colonizers exploiting indigenous resources at indigenous expense.
00:36:50.300end quote oh well you know it seems that everyone alive today was born into a fragmented
00:37:00.260conflict-laden world and we yearn for the wholeness and groundedness that we've lost
00:37:07.180but it's true that we also have to look beyond our own personal agenda and ask ourselves what
00:37:14.400are we doing to tear down these obstacles that keep native people in a state of exile from their
00:37:19.360lands and ancestral ways. The author suggests, if I can read on for a moment, that you, quote,
00:37:27.980understand your colonizer status and take a stance. Retrace your own indigenous roots.
00:37:35.040Understand and work to undo white supremacist and patriarchal conditioning. Establish respectful
00:37:41.800communications with native tribes and embrace indigenous values while maintaining a critical
00:37:48.180eye for cultural appropriation, unquote. I do agree with the suggestions, but I'd like to hear
00:37:55.820your thoughts on this idea that the rewilding movement is tainted by neocolonialism.
00:38:03.260Yeah. It's a big one. Yeah. I am still navigating, I mean, I think it's kind of a thing where this
00:38:14.840conversation is almost a never-ending conversation i want to make rewilding accessible to as many
00:38:24.380people as possible and i want to make sure that i'm using whatever privilege i have to give back
00:38:32.700to the people whose land this is and give back to the people whose ancestors tended this place
00:38:39.800in a sustainable way for as long as possible
00:38:49.260So there's an element that I disagree with in that essay.
00:38:55.140It's not even that there's a disagreement.
00:38:57.520It's that I feel like there's yes and.
00:39:00.760In improvisational theater, there's this idea
00:39:03.040when you're improvising with someone else on stage
00:39:05.720that you never say no to the other person.
00:39:09.100So when the other person improvises something that adds to the scene, you're never supposed to say no, because that cuts off the flow of improvisation. You say, yes, and. I often kind of take this idea and apply it to conversations of complexity such as this.
00:39:26.360in my mind rewilding is not neocolonialism although there are people who rewild in a way
00:39:36.600that is neocolonialism because they haven't analyzed the kinds of things that we're talking
00:39:42.500about because they haven't begun this conversation it is about returning to a way of life that
00:39:49.880everyone lived that's sustainable that is a stateless non-colonist perspective
00:39:56.980to me neo-colonialism is starting a new colony of the same sort of ideas so you know like a
00:40:04.360permaculture village is that neo-colonialism if you buy private property and you start a
00:40:11.600permaculture village or something on it to me that's kind of the same as start buying a property
00:40:16.060to do a rewilding project on it you're participating in colonialist culture to
00:40:23.400start your own little privileged colony in a sense at the same time however it's not the same
00:40:30.400as uh i don't think you can equate it the same as somebody who just buys property to like
00:40:37.220put a cattle ranch on it or a factory farm if people are trying to restore a habitat
00:40:45.540to the, or if they're using their privilege in a sense, for example, if they're born with
00:40:50.360white privilege and they're able to have more access to land, for example, and they use
00:40:56.420that to buy the land to then return to native habitat, I have a hard time seeing how that's
00:41:03.360neocolonialism, in particular, if they go out of their way to do things such as create
00:41:09.120collaborative process between native cultures for like access to that land and access to
00:41:14.460the resources for example like basket weaving materials or native foods and things like that
00:41:19.660to me it's all about creating collaborations that make it not neo-colonial but that's
00:41:28.340it's a difficult area to navigate because i think you know there's the decolonization movement
00:41:34.940which from my understanding of it and from what i've read and i plan to interview um a couple of
00:41:42.780the people in it to gain more clarity to see how rewilding and decolonization can come together
00:41:49.760but in my mind decolonization isn't necessarily anti-state it's more about having autonomy so
00:41:59.860indigenous autonomy from colonialist ideas so they would have their own government similar to
00:42:09.940i guess a reservation but on their actual land decolonization literally means to stop farming
00:42:18.340or to stop tilling the soil colony the word colere is latin it's roman and it means to till the soil
00:42:27.180so again we're we're roping back around into what rewilding means to stop farming to stop those
00:42:33.360destructive practices of agriculture however it's not necessarily what it means to indigenous
00:42:40.640people who are decolonizing it has more to do with um i think ending the culture of occupation but
00:42:47.280not necessarily ending the the state the culture of of a state and so in that regard i don't know
00:42:54.080where the collaboration can happen which is why i need to investigate it further and it's a
00:42:58.620conversation is going to go on forever. You know, I have plenty of Native friends who tell me that
00:43:04.580ancestral skills are everybody's birthright, that anybody who's trying to return to this
00:43:11.360ancestral way of life is decolonizing. And then I have friends who, on the totally other end of
00:43:18.000the spectrum, who basically want anybody who doesn't have an indigenous ancestral heritage
00:43:24.260in the united states to leave so you have like this extreme spectrum of what that means and i
00:43:31.340don't particularly judge any of those perspectives i mean if i were indigenous to this place
00:43:37.660i would probably be one of the people advocating for everyone who doesn't have it to leave
00:43:43.020um because i'm just super political in that kind of way but at the same time i don't have a place
00:43:52.680to go to there's this idea that everybody should leave here but then where do they go we're all
00:43:58.500orphans so i'm trying to find the area where decolonization and rewilding intersect because
00:44:05.520this is one of the most important conversations that i think we need to have to find that common
00:44:10.440ground well like you said it's a extremely complex experience and thought process and
00:44:19.500navigating through how to live with respect to the indigenous people whose land people now inhabit
00:44:28.060or respecting the earth when we're foraging and living off of her just walking consciously
00:44:34.520through this life and giving credit and appreciation and living with pure intention
00:44:41.800for sharing and stewarding um we are so entrenched in the system and like you were saying earlier
00:44:51.800you know if you have the privilege to buy land and restore it or if you have the privilege to
00:44:58.820be able to create an alternative culture that you can thrive in um you know do you not do that
00:45:05.920because you are on stolen land or where you know how where do you go what do you do what how where
00:45:12.960would you go if you left the united states when your passport's here i mean it's just so intertwined
00:45:18.760with this globalized government and power and control and capitalism it's like wow this is
00:45:26.860completely overwhelming to try to understand how to really live with purity and so i'm in that same
00:45:34.240boat. And I think many people are in that boat wanting to really be stewards of this earth and
00:45:41.840to the people and the animal and the plants, but not really having a clear path to do that on
00:45:47.300because it's not the mainstream. And we have a lot of these minor and amazing cultural
00:45:53.920alternatives happening that aren't necessarily connected. And so I'm really happy about
00:45:58.880rewild.com that you are trying to connect all these dots from all over the place so that we
00:46:05.340can build a stronger network to really come together. And on that note, in terms of land
00:46:13.620and trying to separate and trying to create alternative modes of power and governance,
00:46:20.520I wondered if you are involved in or could explain to us the Cascadian bioregion
00:46:28.180movement. And what is going on up there? What is this idea of Cascadia and separating from the
00:46:35.300United States? And do you think that's a good idea? Do you have any opinions on why that movement
00:46:44.880would work or wouldn't? I don't really have any opinions on it. The premise is that it's a
00:46:52.780bioregional state so you have uh instead of arbitrary lines you have lines of your state
00:47:01.760drawn based on watersheds and so the Cascadia watershed goes all the way from like British
00:47:09.720Columbia to Northern California um and the idea is that bioregions should be are able to be more
00:47:18.660sustainable because if your government is based on the bioregion it's linked to the land base
00:47:23.100and that means you're paying more attention to those aspects i guess um
00:47:28.760in my mind again when i think of sort of the inevitabilities of revolution and transformation
00:47:35.800i see the cascadia free state as a potential transition to whatever life we're going to live
00:47:44.800beyond that. But I don't particularly put very much stock in state-based governments,
00:47:52.720because I don't think that humans are meant to live on that scale. I don't really particularly
00:47:58.380care much for any kind of state-based government, even if it's more sustainable than what we have
00:48:03.980now. I have this feeling that there won't really be those kinds of entities in the future if
00:48:10.840agriculture becomes very difficult then our form of social organization is going to change very
00:48:20.160radically and in my mind things will revert back to ways of living before that era more
00:48:30.280village to village rather than a state-based uh government and if you're going village to village
00:48:37.440then you're not even looking at my uh bioregion you're looking at like microclimates
00:48:43.480in particular places i work with some of the people who do a lot of cascadia advocacy
00:48:51.440and so we have a lot of the same questions in regards to um neocolonialism allyship etc
00:48:59.380and we do some projects together from time to time but i'm not super invested in that idea
00:49:04.920i think it would be better than what we have right now well i think to open the door for people to
00:49:13.380even start thinking about watersheds is an important step because we've been so
00:49:20.820completely disconnected from even knowing what a watershed means when we are having our creeks
00:49:28.980and our streams and our rivers concreted over and getting our water from a tap you know water is a
00:49:36.500really important place to start considering what's going on around us who's in control of the
00:49:44.300resources and how do we protect not only for humans but for the animals and the plants and
00:49:52.340the earth that needs to have the water recharged in that land so i'm i think the watershed movement
00:50:00.060just just really getting back to that foundational life source that we all need to survive like you
00:50:06.460said earlier you know we need if we don't drink water within three days we could die so it's a
00:50:11.680pretty huge area of importance so with rewilding there's a lot of information now you know it's
00:50:23.040kind of trendy i was googling rewild the other day and there was this website that came up that
00:50:28.460you have to pay a fee and they tell you to go on a hike and it was like wait what's going on here
00:50:33.900but I really am appreciative that you have held the intention of rewilding to be community-based
00:50:46.000and raw it's not about just taking and it's not about personal gain or personal psychological
00:50:54.140empowerment or enlightenment it's connecting back to this bigger life force and giving back
00:51:02.240And I'd love to just, you know, just go a little deeper into some tangible ways of how we can all give back and rewilding.
00:51:11.980I think, again, learning native food plants and planting a native food garden in your place, there's so many different ways.
00:51:23.760Protecting your water from Nestle, there's giving back by planting more and there's giving back by preventing further destruction of habitat.
00:51:34.360And in my mind, planting more also means giving back to the native populations of your region, finding out a way that you can assist them in continuing to do their cultural practices.
00:51:50.280and i would like to quickly say since we were talking about that kind of before too that
00:51:57.020there's this idea of a white savior um where you have like a dances with wolves or an avatar where0.92
00:52:06.040indigenous people are saved by a white person and that's really distasteful and kind of disgusting0.65
00:52:12.920and so when i'm when i'm talking about helping them out what i'm talking about is asking them0.75
00:52:18.280what they want? How can you help them to keep their traditions alive? Sometimes that might
00:52:23.500involve, you know, donating money to a language program or just showing up and helping out at a
00:52:29.280planting or anything. But I think really it's just show up and listen and learn and become friends
00:52:35.560with individuals because everybody's different, you know? And so that's kind of why this
00:52:42.500conversation about how to be an ally is sort of all over the place because everybody has a
00:52:46.860different idea of what that means you know and so the best way to do that is to just start helping
00:52:52.700out and listen and become friends with somebody and then and then you'll be allies because you'll
00:52:58.160know how to help them and what they need i mean it's just to me it's just the respectful thing to
00:53:03.160do is uh plant back native foods help out native people and prevent further destruction from going
00:53:10.060on so any way you can look into doing that um i think those are the three sort of steps that i
00:53:17.560would take well thank you for bringing up the um this idea of the white savior because i think
00:53:27.420another way that the dominant culture has conditioned people is this power feeling of
00:53:36.220we have the answer. But whether you've taken permaculture courses, whatever community we're
00:53:43.580going into, step back and listen, be respectful, and ask questions. Don't just go in with the
00:53:52.440answer, quote unquote. Because again, that could be this neocolonialism that you spoke so eloquently
00:54:00.260about earlier. So just one more shout out, if you would mind listing the websites that people
00:54:06.820can be involved in and where to find Rewild Portland and more of the information that you're
00:54:12.000teaching. Rewildportland.com if you're in the Portland, Oregon area. Rewild.com if you're
00:54:19.940international and looking for stuff. We also have a Facebook group for that. That's the
00:54:24.120rewild.com facebook group um and then uh my personal blog is urbanscout.org and i'm just
00:54:32.040recently going to re-release uh the collection of essays that i wrote as urban scout called
00:54:37.680rewild or die um the original edition i self-published and was very i didn't have a copy
00:54:44.960editor because i couldn't afford it so the book was full of typos and misspellings and things
00:54:51.280And finally, I've had a copy editor go through it, and I changed a couple of things to make it a little less instigatory.
00:55:01.740Urban Scouts, the whole essence, I should say, is to be sort of inflammatory.
00:55:08.260I'm not really like that, but that's the muse that I hear that is Urban Scout.
00:55:14.140And so I kind of diminished that a couple years ago to start Rewild Portland because you can't really be inflammatory when you're trying to create multiple bridges between organizations locally.
00:55:28.220I'm doing a complete rewrite that's not going to be really the same book at all.
00:55:33.300But the book will be available here pretty soon, Rewild or Die.
00:55:37.780It'll be available on my website, urbanscout.org, or probably the big, terrible website like amazon.com.
00:55:44.140um but you know getting the word out it's uh it's a pretty funny little collection of essays
00:55:50.020about rewilding so i recommend it even though i wrote it of course i'm going to recommend it
00:55:54.680well i will second that i love the work that you do i'm so appreciative that
00:56:00.660you are being so active in this movement in this fight for our earth and i'd love to collaborate
00:56:10.460in the future with native plants and restoration and i'd love for any of the audience to get
00:56:19.620involved with peter right now and just what's going on in your area and try to start things
00:56:25.680in your area go to your local grange or your community center and just start bringing people
00:56:32.040together and we can all make a difference starting today thank you for having me on here this is
00:56:38.920awesome. I'm really appreciative of all your interviews. This is a great series. Thank you.