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.
Archive
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.
Many people have a difficult time understanding the differences between horticulture and agriculture. This may occur because some agricultural strategies cross over into horticultural strategies. Linguistically the term agriculture comes from the combination of the Latin words agri (field) and cultura (cultivation). Horticulture comes from the combination of the Latin words hortus (garden) and cultura. Cultivating a field vs. cultivating a garden. We can see the implications of agriculture’s mono-cropping primary succession plant obsession in its very origin. We can also see the implications of horticulture’s diversity of plants and smaller-scale style through its origins.
“Federal officials have called for killing about 30 sea lions near Bonneville Dam each year to keep them from gobbling a rising share of Northwest salmon that the government spends millions of dollars to protect.”
- The Oregonian Friday, January 18, 2008
Dear salmon. I have a confession to make. When I worked as a production assistant for television commercials, a friend called me for a job… on a political campaign advertisement.
This week I mostly did odd jobs, had meetings with grant foundations, volunteered to do a little building at the TrackersNW Headquarters (aka the “Scout Pit”). But the rewild camp at Porcupine Palace definitely high-lighted my week!
People have called me many names:
Self-serving new-age nihilistic pseudo-hippie/yuppie quack-opportunist poseur-hipster-douchebag green-capitalist-bastard egotistical-celebrity-anarchist tool that gives everyone douchechills with a BS agenda, a trust fund from granny, and an obsession with publicity.
A poster of Meta-filter asked the question: Urban Scout, sincere crusader for sustainability or poseur-hipster-douchebag?
Much of what I do involves performance art, so you could label me a poseur. I dress in (what I think look like) hip clothes, so you could call me a hipster. I often make egotistical jokes about myself and others, I could see why someone would call me a douchebag. On top of that I sincerely teach rewilding skills to people and educate people on the ills of agriculture. My life revolves around teaching sustainability. So you could call me a sincere crusader for sustainability. Can’t I have all of these qualities simultaneously? This “one or the other” mentality reflects back to artistotles “is” of identity; you can only “be” A or B, not both.
This question (although intellectually incoherent) haunts me because of the sheer number of people who attack me using this aristolian logic. Most often people say that I “talk” more than I “walk” without thinking about the importance and need for talking about things. People need to understand this stuff. I sacrifice my own relationship with nature by sitting inside thinking and writing so that people will learn why civilization doesn’t work and what does work. I get off on thinking about this stuff and writing so I don’t think of myself as a martyr. It just really upsets me when people don’t see the value of talking about things. I keep talking because of the shit I see in the media projecting a fucked up world view.
George Bush Jr. said during his State of the Union Address:
America is leading the fight against global hunger. Today, more than half the world’s food aid comes from the United States. And tonight, I ask Congress to support an innovative proposal to provide food assistance by purchasing crops directly from farmers in the developing world, so we can build up local agriculture and help break the cycle of famine. (Audience Applause.) [emphasis added]
Molly Strand interviews guests at Urban Scout’s 3rd Annual NUCLEAR WINTER FORMAL!
This week I have spent a lot of time devoted to finding a job. Craigslist.org makes me laugh. I have submitted several different resumes to many different companies. At times like this, when I practically feel like I need to beg someone for a job, I realize that a degree proves the most important thing you need to beg for a job. I don’t need a degree as an entrepreneur, but I sure as hell need one if I plan to work as someone elses bitch. Since I have done a little begging lately, I kinda wish I had one… But than again I can always lie about it and not have those lousy student loans to pay off. Lying seems like a much cheaper solution.
I owe almost everything I know about rewilding language to my friend, author and teacher Willem Larsen from the College of Mythic Cartography, from the day he introduced me to “ePrime” to more currently as his obsession with animist languages sends reverberations through the rewilding community with his invention of “ePrimitive” an even further in depth attempt at rewilding English. No one has done a more thorough investigation and experimentation into this than Willem Larsen. No one. We all owe him a great deal of gratitude. I feel honored to have helped Willem get his thoughts in this first ever accumulated work.
Continue reading ‘E-primitive: Rewilding the English Language’
Recent Comments