Once, when you left your garden untouched, unweeded and unmown, judgy neighbours averted their eyes when they walked past. Then someone had the bright idea of calling it “rewilding” and suddenly everyone was doing it.
That might be a slight exaggeration, but rewilding – allowing nature to do nature while humans stayed the heck out of it – has been a growth industry for some time. Its key text is probably the 2013 book Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life by British environmentalist George Monbiot.
It’s a passive, hands-off activity and when it works properly, a sustainable ecosystem is restored with the plants, insects, various critters and other natural components returning to their natural state of balance. It can be seen happening everywhere from backyard gardens to the likes of the Southern Alps, where woodlands have been the focus of a rewilding effort.
So much for nature. It was probably inevitable that someone would come up with the bright idea of a brand extension for rewilding and thus it has come to pass that rewilding humans is now an option. There are books, podcasts, websites and bossy, shiny people on social media telling you how to do it.
For an initial taste, try the YouTube channel “Primitive Technology”, which has nearly 11 million subscribers, most of whom probably stay indoors to enjoy watching someone else do things like knock up a Tiled Roof Hut: “It should be obvious to most that this is not a survival shelter but an experiment.”
ReWild University – yes, really – is founded on the premise that “our culture delivers the message that we are all flawed and that various products will fix our lives”. It goes on to explain that we are all flawed and our lives need fixing – just not with products.
“Rewilding isn’t about trying to go back to living as hunter-gatherers,” according to ReWild University. Rather, “it is about examining our cultural paradigms, seeing how they affect our physical, mental, and emotional health, and reclaiming our birthright as human beings”. Frankly, hunter-gathering sounds like the easier option.
Staff are Kenton and Rebecca Whitman. He has 31 years of martial arts experience and great abs; she is into “personal entrainment with individual plants” and “primal childrearing techniques”. Courses offered include Forest Monk Training (pending) and Surviving Civilisation. No doubt the whole planet is their campus.
If that’s too soft for you, Jessica Carew Kraft is your woman. She is all for living a hunter-gather lifestyle, tried it for a year, and has written Why We Need to Be Wild: One Woman’s Quest for Ancient Human Answers to 21st Century Problems. She says there are challenges: “Hunting and fishing without proper licences is illegal. Harvesting food from public or private land is trespassing.” Like everyone in the human rewilding movement she is opposed to the number of products that fill up our lives and use up resources. You can find her book on amazon.com.
Is Carew Kraft’s absolutist approach too hard for you? Fortunately, there are listicles like “15 Ways to Rewild Yourself” on gatherandgrow.com. Some of these ways are super easy and fun and can be done from your living room. For example, “Make a list of the things that make you feel alive, grounded, free, nourished, and authentically yourself.” And there’s nothing that says you can’t include wine or a mohair throw in your list. Or surround yourself with “natural textiles”, which you can order online and have delivered right to your door.
More seriously, the philosophy behind rewilding is that we have too much stuff in our lives and it would be good for us and the planet if there was less of it. Which seems plausible with a planet on fire. Complementing that is the notion that becoming more involved with the natural world is good for us physically and mentally. There is a growing body of evidence that our biology flourishes from connection with nature. There are things outside ourselves that we can’t see – or buy – but can access simply by being more aware of the world around us.
Anyone taking steps to restore their gut or skin microbiome is practising a version of rewilding. If regular folk can see that through the forest of wild verbiage that accompanies most “human rewilding” messaging, they will definitely be doing themselves some good.
