We’ll be organizing a rewilding unconference in Pittsburgh’s Schenley Park, 25-27 August 2007, leading up to the Pittsburgh screening of What a Way to Go on the “Get Tim and Sally Out of Debt Tour.”

Open Space Technology

This is an unconference. That means that there is an initial welcome session, and that’s where the agenda for the weekend is set. Everyone has to teach a session; no one simply an idle observer. There may be several sessions going on at each time; if you’re not teaching one of them, you can attend whatever sessions you like.

Open Space works best when the work to be done is complex, the people and ideas involved are diverse, the passion for resolution (and potential for conflict) are high, and the time to get it done was yesterday. It’s been called passion bounded by responsibility, the energy of a good coffee break, intentional self-organization, spirit at work, chaos and creativity, evolution in organization, and a simple, powerful way to get people and organizations moving—when and where it’s needed most.

And, while Open Space is known for its apparent lack of structure and welcoming of surprises, it turns out that the Open Space meeting or organization is actually very structured—but that structure is so perfectly fit to the people and the work at hand, that it goes unnoticed in its proper role of supporting (not blocking) best work. In fact, the stories and workplans woven in Open Space are generally more complex, more robust, more durable—and can move a great deal faster than expert- or management-driven designs.¹

See also:

• Jetsons More Primitive than Flintstones
• Hackers & Trackers

Introductory Session

Meet us for the introductory session at 11:00 AM on Saturday, 25 August 2007, along Panther Hollow Lake in Schenley Park, under the blue canopy. We’ll start with an introduction to the story of this land, what an “unconference” is, and what rewilding means, and then we’ll open it up to plan out the weekend’s activities.

What a Way to Go Screening

The Rewild Camp’s grand finale comes at 8:00 PM on Monday, 27 August 2007, with the Pittsburgh screening of What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire at the Holiday Inn Select University Center in Oakland. Discussion with producers T.S. Bennett and Sally Erickson to follow. This is part of the “Get Tim & Sally Out of Debt Tour,” $10 suggested donation for the screening.

Featuring interviews with Daniel Quinn, Derrick Jensen, Jerry Mander, Chellis Glendinning, Richard Heinberg, Thomas Berry, William Catton, Ran Prieur and Richard Manning, What a Way to Go looks at the current global situation and asks the most important questions of all.

Hundreds of my readers have told me that my novel Ishmael should be read in every high school classroom in the world. Naturally I’d be delighted to see this happen, but I really think it would be more to the point to have What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire seen in every high school classroom in the world! The two hours of this documentary are two hours that bring hope for the future of humanity by awakening and informing in the most profound yet lucid way imaginable.”

— Daniel Quinn

Rewilding

Rewilding is the process that reverses domestication, and it’s a multi-faceted process, so don’t be intimidated if you think you want to rewild but think you have nothing to offer at the Rewild Camp—you probably already have more than you know.

Primitive Skills

The most obvious, of course, is primitive skills: making stone tools, making a friction fire, making cordage, making clothes, so on and so forth. These skills are the foundation of freedom; you can never be free while you’re dependent on others for your needs. If you know how to build a debris shelter, how to use a bow drill, how to make cordage, or any other primitive skill, sharing it makes for an excellent session. You can expect quite a few primitive skills sessions at the Mountain Festival.

By the same token, don’t be intimidated into not joining us just because your skills are meager and you need practice, or even need to learn. That’s much of the point of the Festival; come practice with us, and learn from those who do know these skills. But these are just the foundation. As Tamarack Song put it:

We come from a technological society, so we naturally think that substituting primitive technology for civilized technology is our doorway. The only problem is that Native people are not into technology. They spend only a couple hours a day providing for their simple needs, and they mostly use simple means. Look at their tools—few and crude, and their craftwork—basic and utilitarian. What a Native person excels at is what I call qualitative skills—how to sit in a circle with your clan mates and speak your truth, how to find your special talent so that you can develop it to serve your people, how to use your intuition, the ways of honor and respect, how to live in balance with elders and women and children, how to speak in the language beyond words, how to befriend fear and live love. Without these skills, you will surely die. Or else you’ll go back to the life that shuns these skills.

• Example: A hands-on demonstration of using a bow drill to start a fire.
• See also: “Learning Primitive Skills“

Gathering & Anarcho-Herbalism

Closely related to primitive skills is how we relate to “the Green Nation”—the plants that provide us with so much food and medicine. The gathering part of hunting and gathering might leave the average rewilder a bit peckish, but wild edibles can easily supply our much more crucial vitamin and mineral needs. Morever, wild plants provide powerful and effective medicine and first aid. The key is an encyclopedic knowledge of the plant persons that inhabit your bioregion, coded into stories that maintain information about medicinal properties, taste, identification and poisonous look-a-likes in a narrative format well-adapted to human memory and recall.

Example: A demonstration on plantain: how to identify it, its edibility, some tips on preparing it, medicinal uses, and so forth, possibly with a story to help remember it.
• See also: “Herbo-Primitivism and Anarcho-Herbalism“

Tracking & Hunting

Then there’s “the Red Nation,” the other animals around us. There’s much more to this than simply hunting as we usually know it; primitive tracking is a deep exercise in empathy. As David Abram wrote in The Spell of the Sensuous:

Hunting, for an indigenous, oral community, entails abilities and sensitivities very different from those associated with hunting in technological civilization. Without guns or gunpowder, a native hunter must often come much closer to his wild prey if he is to take its life. Closer, that is, not just physically but emotionally, empathically entering into proximity within the other animal’s ways of sensing and experiencing. The native hunter, in effect, must apprentice himself to those animals that he would kill. Though long and careful observation, enhanced at times by ritual identification and mimesis, the hunter gradually develops an instinctive knowledge of the habits of his prey, of its fears and its pleasures, its preferred foods and favored haunts. Nothing is more integral to this practice than learning the communicative signs, gestures, and cries of the local animals. Knowledge of the sounds by which a monkey indicates to the others in its band that it has located a good source of food, or the cries by which a particular bird signals distress, or by which another attacks a mate, enables the hunter to anticipate both the large-scale and small-scale movements of various animals. A familiarity with animal calls and cries provides the hunter, as well, with an expanded set of senses, an awareness of events happening beyond his field of vision, hidden by the forest leaves or obscured by the dark of night. Moreover, the skilled human hunter often can generate and mimic such sounds himself, and it is this that enables him to enter most directly into the society of other animals.

General approaches to tracking would be appropriate, as might be an introduction to a particular animal. Perhaps a session on the American black bear, with its tracks and scat, its behavior, population, where it lives, what it eats, and how it behaves. Perhaps a session on bird songs and how to understand what they mean. Perhaps a session on mimicking animal calls. Or, perhaps you’re more interested in sharing the skills that apply after the kill: how to properly skin, dress, or butcher an animal, how to preserve meat, and so on.

• Example: All about the American black bear; its habits, its diet, its tracks and signs; how and when and where to hunt them, and why one would do so.
• See also: “Alpha Dogs, Wolf Packs & the Wandering Free Families“

Body Skills

A huge part of our domestication has been our alienation from our own senses. We no longer have a direct, synaesthetic experience of the living world around us. Any session or exercise that opens up our senses is very much part of rewilding; reawakening our synaesthetic senses and getting back in touch with our bodies are crucial elements of rewilding.

• Example: T’ai chi forms as a basic form of shamanic shapeshifting.
• See also: “Learning to Walk“

Rewilding Relationships

Actual wild peoples rarely speak of their technologies in the glowing terms we do; rather, it’s their modes of relating to one another that they invariably cite as the source of their wealth and prosperity. The major work of rewilding lies less in the perfection of skills than in developing rewilded relationships. Tribal, band and clan societies have a great deal to teach us about how to organize our society. How do you form a rewilded society? How do you raise your child as you yourself are trying to rewild? Jean Liedloff’s work is absolutely in rewilding.

• Example: A review of the Continuum Concept and “attachment parenting”
• See also: “Dysfunctional Culture“

Animism

What do you call a rewilded person who refuses to become an animist? Hungry. Animism isn’t a religion one believes in, at least not in the traditional sense; neither is it a belief that occult ghosts lurk behind everything. Rather, it’s the simple and radical acceptance of your experience of the world as true. Your direct experience of the world around you is that of a living world. We are trained to deny that; the animist simply accepts as persons everything in his world that acts like a person. Even our ability to percieve one another as persons is an exercise in empathy; animists simply aren’t as miserly with theirs.

• Example: A story about a particular plant, animal or mineral that encodes vital information about it into a narrative context, or the story of a particular place.
• See also: “A Brief Summary of Animism“

Rewilding Language

How we speak is a huge part of our problem, but it’s also a powerful tool to reconcile us with the living world. Working with language is an enormous part of rewilding. You could share some basic grammar and vocabulary from local native languages or pidgins, or perhaps lead an exercise in E-Prime, or begin a discussion on verb-centric speech.

• Example: Teach some basic grammar and vocabulary in Seneca
• See also: “The Ecology of Language“

Coping with Civilization

Trying to rewild in a thoroughly domesticated world can cause no end of problems. How do you relate to friends and family who don’t share your outlook? How do you deal with hunting regulations and camping laws that so often make rewilding more difficult? How do you account for the fact that you as a feral human need to worry about things no wild human ever did—like mercury in your fish or dioxin in your water? We face new challenges, and sometimes just a good understanding of the problem is enough to get a start. This is part of rewilding, too.

• Example: Overview and demonstration of primitive means of making water safe to drink.
• See also: “The Face of Anarchy“