Rewilding aka Feralization

Rewilding is how we learn to live in a sustainable way as individuals, families, and as a larger culture. My friends also call this process feralization. It's not about going back to the stone age, but forward into a new age - not "The" New Age, mind you. As my friend Bruce Lerro likes to say "This is not the New Age and we are definitely not all one."

But that's exactly where globalization is taking us, to a monoculture that is unsustainable and dangerous to everyone involved - why? because our infastructure is more interconnected than ever before. The stage is set for a collapse of the civilization process that began 6000 years ago - and this is no longer fringe science, ya'll. Whether its gonna be thirty years or 150, the global civilization lifestyle is on its way out via peak oil, climate change, population boom, and the meltdown of industrial agriculture.

If you're a typical suburban-raised American like me, then getting food is about to get very interesting. When the dust bowl last rolled through 70 years ago, most Americans still lived on farms, and had a basement full of canned goods, a pen full of chickens, and control over their own water. Last I checked, 80% of us live in cities or suburbs and buy our salads in a bag. And don't get me started on the scarcity of water. Meanwhile, the sea levels rise...

So why wait? Let's start living the good life now. Collapse may or may not go down as prophesied by the apocalytic neo-Quinnians, but we're shifting the culture anyway - away from a world of ever increasing work and debt, and towards a future of abundance. As such, feralization is not about giving up on modern life, but giving back to our communities, human and nonhuman.

Check out this short video of Urban Scout discussing the basics of rewilding at a recent event in Portland:

and if Urban Scout's prognosis about civilization collapsing in the next fifty years scares you into never leaving home again, follow up with this video by Feral Kevin about his edible apartment balcony:

Basically, it makes me feel better to be prepared. We all have our own ways of going feral; there is no one right way. In fact, mono-ideas are just as bad as monocropping and monocultures as far as I'm concerned. I'm a dreamer and a writer, so my work involves sharing ideas, building communities and helping folks reconnect to their native dreaming intelligences. We are the ones we have been waiting for.