Urban Scout has a wisdom and intelligence far beyond his years. He is helping us move away from this culture of death and toward a sane culture that will not kill the planet.
- Derrick Jensen, author of Endgame
When I feel like surfing a bit nearer the edge, I check out Scout’s latest. It’s irreverent, angry, informative, and sometimes he’s not even nice. Urban Scout is out there exploring and inventing rewilding and contemporary tribal skills with style, and I admire that he doesn’t claim to know it all. Scout always takes me down an unanticipated path. We civilized folk have forgotten what he’s trying to remember for us.
- Toby Hemenway, author of Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture
Urban Scout combines passion, intelligence, and a quirky sense of humor, and puts it all at the feet of the most important cause any of us could undertake–rewilding ourselves, our environments, and our relationships. And he even manages to look cool while doing it.
- Jason Godesky from the Tribe of Anthropik
It’s the Urban in Urban Scout that’s key, I’d say. Reminding us that we can make a start from wherever we are, on the joyful trek away from civilization. This site is rich and wide-ranging. Full of stimulating takes, methods, communications - not forgetting some humor. Bravo!”
- John Zerzan, author of Against Civilization
When the dust clears and the skeletal remains of our cities begin to deteriorate, there will still be Twinkies, cockroaches and Urban Scout. And that’s reason enough to celebrate. When the apocalypse hits, I’d take the loincloth-clad Urban Scout over Will Smith any day.
- Andy Kryza from the Willamette Week
The Post-Apocalyptic, Anti-Hero… with a blog.
Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world.
-Joseph Campbell
My parents named me Peter but people ’round these parts call me Urban Scout or just Scout for short. I believe that Civilization will collapse in my lifetime. In response I have decided to walk away from this culture and learn to hunt, gather and garden for all of my necessities. In short, I live as a hunter-gatherer wannabe in search of meaning and tribe in the time of ecological and cultural collapse. As a multi-disciplinary artist I feel I have a duty to mythologize this process to inspire others to join the rewilding renaissance. I write stuff, makes videos, take pictures, make designs, teach classes and use this blog as a public exhibition space.
At 16 I began to independently study the structure, history and future of our civilization. After reading lot’s of books on environmental devastation and anthropology I came to the conclusion that civilization will not reach a point of sustainability, but come crashing to the ground in a short matter of time. If I wanted to survive, I needed to learn how to hunt and gather and live with the earth. This became more than simply an idea; it became more like a religion. Over the last decade I have practiced and instructed people in these ancient skills through organizations like Cascadia Wild, Friends of Tryon Creek, Audubon Society and TrackersNW. Even though I teach these skills, I still feel vastly ignorant to what even a young child in an indigenous culture would know and sense of their own environment. I decided to undo the process of my domestication yet remain within the largely domesticated urban environment of Portland, Oregon.
As you may imagine, many physical, emotional, social, philosophical and existential difficulties arise as I attempt to rewild myself from a total city slicker born and raised to work as a wage slave in a coffee shop, into the lifestyle of an indigenous hunter-gatherer living off the land in a sustainable way. Indigenous children had the abilities to survive in the wilderness without their culture for several weeks at the age of around 9 to 12 years old. Unlike those kids, I don’t have the luxury of a million year old sustainable culture to immerse myself in for 9-12 years to prepare myself for such a rite of passage. Basically I work towards making an immersion “curriculum” for myself, imitating what I know of hunter-gatherer cultures. I do not believe a person can take a few lectures on survival or primitive living and then go do it. I believe it takes years of practice, generations in fact. I have created as close as I can the safety and security children in primitive cultures had while slowly, carefully and respectfully learning to survive without those comforts.
I do not intend to replicate the kid from the book Into the Wild or the guy in the documentary Grizzly Man or the TV show Survivor Man or Man vs. Wild. Cheating death, extreme situations, running away to live alone in the woods or “making it back out alive” stem from a civilized fear of nature and lack of community. I understand the elements can kill and I will not let myself freeze, starve, get eaten, die from sickness, etc. I take baby steps toward a primitive lifestyle; slowly but surely leaving civilization behind . Therefore my health and hygiene, like that of the wild animal, lie at the top of my priorities.
You might think that leaving civilization behind implies leaving the city. However, I cannot run away to the wilderness because my family and friends cannot join me out there, and I cannot live without them. Humans, I believe, have evolved over time as socially organized animals. A lone human, hell even a dozen humans in the woods doesn’t come close to our socially designed way of living. A lone bee cannot live without its hive. Humans can function, but not truly live, without their tribe. My tribe lives in Portland and the surrounding area. Therefore when I say I have left civilization behind , I speak of course, about the culture or economy of civilization, not the physical space in which civilization resides (the urban jungle). Though I do spend lots of time in the country and wilderness as well.
I built this website to catalog my urban-hunter-gatherer-grower adventure. Part fact/part fiction, part man/part myth, in The Adventures of Urban Scout I try to use the comedic irony and novelty of our situation as a clever disguise to cloak and spread a truly sustainable world view, for a time beyond our own. I never, ever take myself too seriously (purity gives me writers block!). Here you may find a photo guide to skinning and cooking a squirrel, a rant about “Science vs. Tracking,” a Q&A about apocalyptic safe sex, read my book in progress about rewilding, a review of the latest media concerning the collapse of civilization or simply a weekly journal about the trials and tribulations of going against the grain.
As much as I would love to immediately abandon the monetary and food economy that traps us in civilization, I don’t have those skills. Why else would this project exist! So for now I need funding, which I find through donations or “tips” from readers like you, ads on the site, my Ye Olde Anti-Civilization Shoppe and running rewilding workshops through TrackersNW and yeah, I work the occasional wage-slave job. I also need lots of emotional and social support, which you can give by registering and dropping your comments here for me and others.
I hope you get a kick out of my project, even if you don’t think that civilization will collapse in our lifetimes. For more about me, check the links below. Thanks for reading!
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