What Rewilding Doesn't Have To Be and What It Can Be

Rewilding doesn't mean taking off your clothes and running into the woods. Most people would die this way because growing up in cities doesn't produce hunter/gatheers.

Rewilding is a process of going back to the simpler processes of life. From going from factory farming to pasture raising animals to wild life farmers. From going from buying clothes from a clothing shop to making your own clothes to making your own fibers. From going from cell phones to telephones to mail to walking to your neighbor. From going from emailing your friends to talking to them on the phone. From going from the internet forums to real-life group meetings. From going to consuming to making. It's specialization to despecialization.

These steps have less of a carbon footprint, but they also have important implications for human health. Handwashing, sewing, walking, cooking yourself, growing your own food, foraging your own food require simple tasks and movement sedentary people suffer without. Just walking instead of driving has a great impact on your health. By procuring your own food you are taking part in the nature. By gathering more from wild food you understand the connection between food and medicine that you will understand from processing food yourself. Wild food by nutritional testing is superior and nutrition and your body will benefit from the nutrition that primitive people enjoyed for hundreds of thousands of years.

We live in a fractured landscape that needs healing and regeneration. Living as hunter gatherers today is impossible for large groups of people. It's possible for people to live as individuals and gather large amounts of food such as Arthur Haines, who gathers hundreds of pounds of wild rice and acorns for himself and his girlfriend. But the point is that the landscape needs a process of going back to simplicity and gratitude and connectiveness to the earth. Rewilding is a process of being grateful to accept simplicity and reject convenience. It doesn't meant that our lives become harder but our tasks become simpler.