This last week marks my first year as Urban Scout. I have taken some time to reflect on what worked and what didn’t. I have listed my accomplishments and my failures and used that debrief to outline ideas and goals for intensifying my rewilding in the following year. I never made my full plan public, for fear that I would totally fuck it up. Of course, I did, and now I will share it with you so that you can laugh with me (or at me!). To say that I bit off more than I could chew sounds like a complete under statement.
Archive for March, 2008
I can’t help but feel like many people still have purist values when it comes down to understanding rewilding. I often hear people say “if you want to rewild, shouldn’t you go live out in the wilderness!?” Rewilding means un-doing domestication. Cities mark the most domesticated places in the world. Rewilding in the city has no contradictory values; it just means more work in some ways, less in others.
The other day I called my best friend Lisa, sobbing. I had just read the latest about the sea lions. If you read my article Civilization Out Of Cascadia Now! you’ll know the story, but in short, “they” plan to kill 60 (endangered) sea lions immediately to “save the salmon.” I hate this insane culture more and more every day. Sometimes it feels painful just to wake in the morning, only to have to continue to participate in devouring the planet. Sometimes, I just need to pour out tears and punch the walls and scream at the top of my lungs… then I usually call my friends. Lisa wrote this poem about me after we had our 1 millionth conversation that day, about the fucked-up-ness of civilization and how we wish to see its swift decline. I thought I would share it here.
My begging has finally ceased! I now have a job at One Green World, an awesome horticulture business out in Molalla.
First off, Boris… Thank you so much for your generous tip! You really saved my ass this month. SO thank you thank you thank you. Please people, don’t feel shy to drop me some dough. 
Continue reading ‘W50: New Year, New Look’
MARCH MERCH
Every month I come out with new anti-civ/rewilding merchandise. Click on the new March graphic to check out my store:
Guilt refers to the feeling we have when we make decisions that go against personal, cultural and mythological pressures. It feels like not doing what you “should” do. It works as one of the most powerful tools of social and cultural renewal. I do not think of guilt as a “bad” thing. I see it as a tool we need to understand. Rewilding goes against all of our life-long civilized programming. Anything we do to rewild could make us feel guilty. Of course, the culture of rewilding creates a new paradigm in which continuing to live in civilization would make us feel guilty since we know that civilization kills biodiversity. In a sense, rewilding involves crossing a threshold into two worlds. This creates a split cultural psyche, leaving us with weird schizophrenic behaviors; feeling both guilty for leaving civilization and guilty for not having left enough.
How can we define wild? Now understanding that hunter-gatherers greatly manipulated the environment, than where do we draw the line between wild and domestic? If rewilding means the process of un-doing domestication than we must examine and look at the words; wild, natural, unnatural and domestication as we have come to know them and their context in civilization.
Hey Folks, you may notice the site changing around for the next few days as I work on the new format and upgrades. Thanks for your patience.
-Scout
This week I have spent almost all of my time scouring the internet, thumbing through phone books and scouting around the town of Molalla. In my search for temporary work, I found a lot of precious gems.
The time has come, as it does for all desperate bloggers, for me to gum up my site with stupid cafe-press products, amazon book lists and all that other crap.
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