Re-Wilding or Eco-Wilding
Civilization and empire must be abandoned.
Eco-wilding or re-wilding refers to the return to our human propensities—to be eco-centric and fully potentiated. Urban Scout (2015) gives us a definition:
“Rewilding refers to the action of participating in the social and economic renaissance of humans who use the preexisting social and economic models of our hunter-gatherer-gardener ancestors to recreate the sustainable relationship that humans had with their ecosystems and relatives for millions of years before the recent advent of agriculture, empire, and civilization. (Scout, 2015, p. 4)
But then he revises the definition:
“Rewild, verb: to foster and maintain a sustainable way of life through hunter-gatherer-gardener social and economic systems, including but not limited to the encouragement of social, physical, spiritual, mental, and environmental biodiversity and the prevention and undoing of social, physical, spiritual, mental, and environmental domestication and enslavement.” (Scout, 2015, p. 6)
Lest you have a positive view of civilization as a human advancement, this is his definition of civilization:
“A catastrophe created when a human culture practices full-time agriculture, causing their populations to spiral into a cycle of exponential growth, social hierarchy, soil depletion, and genocidal expansion that leads to an eventual collapse of ecosystems, biological diversity, and culture” (Scout, 2015, p. 37).
Urban Scout tells us that empire forces people into domestication and prevents rewilding. A critical challenge is recognizing the prison the system puts us in:
“As soon as you begin to act outside the system, you are breaking its rules. Being somewhere you do not own or have permission to be is “trespassing,” eating food without paying for it is “stealing,” hunting without the proper license and above the state-sanctioned amount is “poaching,” simply sleeping somewhere is “vagrancy” or “squatting.” Planting a garden in useable, unused space is vandalism as well as trespassing” (Scout, 2015, p. 34).
Prior to the implementation of “private property” in the last millennium, such actions were rarely illegal in the world. In fact, Jesus of Nazareth ‘broke’ all these ‘rules,’ as he was anti-empire.
Civilization keeps going because its myths and structures go largely unchallenged, even in the face of collapse. Technologies trap us with their efficient power while disconnecting from relationship and understanding. From plow to cart, to car to jet. Technology destroys autonomy, making us slaves to the technology and its owners. We could say that technology makes us stupid. “More power plus less understanding equals a world of super-powered, infantile rednecks” (Scout, 2015, p. 28).
We forget how to wander on Earth. We forget how to respond to the allurements of Nature. We forget how to make a living as Earth’s partner instead of dominator. We forget our wild nature.
Civilization believes in ‘eat or be eaten’ but Scout points out that in reality one must nurture the entities on which you rely, or you will die when they die. We have symbiotic relationships with the other-than-humans so we need to learn to tend their lives. On the land we watch over, we encourage the insects with native plants, no-mow May, and song.
Re-wilding is not optional if humans (and many other creatures) are to have a future. We must re-wild, reversing the ongoing onslaught of civilization to domesticate everything. E.O. Wilson wrote that we should set aside half of Earth to remain wild. Certainly, one must learn how to live outside of empire.
As we untether ourselves from domestication, we must realize that our eco-wildness has been underdeveloped. We may feel instead the urges of ego-wildness. That is why we need wise elders to guide us on re-wilding. The elders are all around us in Nature. Finding a sit spot to return to day after day to get acquainted with the life there starts to open us up to re-wilding. Go barefoot. Hug or lean against a tree. Say hello. Listen.
“While industrial society has the collective momentum of nearly seven billion humans, wild aliveness has the collective momentum of everything else in the universe. Tap into that.” (ibid, p. 38)
REFERENCES
Loorz, V. (2021). Church of the wild: How Nature invites us into the sacred. Broadleaf Books.
Olson, M. (2012). Unlearn, rewild: Earth skills, ideas and inspiration for the future primitive. New Society Publishers.
Scout, U. (a.k.a., Peter Bauer) (2015). Rewild or die. Self-published.
Thank you. Quite a different concept of dewilding I had in my head... we must successfully dewild, food forest, desettle carefully and with planning so that we do not lose essential knowledge and skills... we must desettle and debilitating in order to rebuild communities and avoid the anarchy that could come with desperate populations and failing infrastructure and supply chains...
Ah, the question remains, can we build the base amongst our fellow Earthlings that amounts to the number sometimes called 'Most of Us', and at other times 'Enough of Us' ~ who will come to understand that we need and must agree to engage one another within the strictures of a few fundamental moral codes (e.g., codes like this one: "We are They") ~ if we are to halt the voracious destruction of the ecological bases that allow life to thrive on Earth, and to do it without losing our minds and becoming a species guided by other fundamentally amoral codes (e.g., like the ones that guide homicidal maniacs and the very rich).
But having glanced through the wiseguy wisdom of "Urban Scout" (aka, Mr. Bauer), I think he needs to revisit his position found in his chapter on 'Sarcasm vs. Rewilding'..yes, of course, we all agree that our uses of sarcasm and humour(s&h) work best when engaged in Generous Humour, and we know that s&h can also be activated by the homicidal tendencies of the powerbrokers and their couch potato followers...BUT, without humour we are all lost, so what's the point of even being here, or so sez some of us who don't buy into any of the conjobs about these various make-believe and mostly male deities who are behind the scenes of our realities calling themselves the Creator(s), while they (ahem, i mean They) are living it up on the Streets of Transcendentia.
Without laughter ~ every day ~ I'd have been the guy on the cliff who gets to yell the punchline of the joke told in John Prine's song, "The great John Garfield blues". And when humour is used wisely and more boldly by "professionals", including scientists, doctors, lawyers and chiefs, so that regard for the bullies dissipates into nothing, and their bought and paid for slave-followers will begin to lose respect for the monsters in charge (be they generals, ceos, cfos, presidents, prime ministers, office managers, bankers, film producers, celebrities, etc), we haven't a chance of getting back to looking into each others eyes as we talk to one another, and at distances wherein we can let them know if they need to use mouth wash.
Scout/Bauer needs to rewrite that chapter, so to help point out for the rest of us what are the steps we need to take, scaffolds climb, that will help us find the ways and means of using humour and sarcasm to take down the rulers of the roadshow to doom. Because if we have to do it with guns and dead bodies in piles, we all lose. So...how to laugh away the rules of the madhouse, and live local everywhere, always guided by the moral codes that count ~ like this one from Walter de la Mare:
"Let no night
Seal thy sense in deathly slumber
Till to delight
Thou have paid thy utmost blessing..."