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Ancestral skills are all the elements of culture that help people live in the long run. In contrast to survival, no one living in an ancestral context is in need of rescue, nor are they just “surviving.” Humans who use ancestral technology are often highly adapted to their ecosystem. They live in relative comfort and are not suffering. Ancestral technologies are generally the tools and culture one can create from the land where they live, indefinitely. Rewilding is a socio-political movement that looks to the past for answers to our future. The experiment of the last few thousands years of sedentary agriculture has led to the collapse of our ecosystems and to gross inequality and injustice. Rewilding seeks to correct this by learning from our ancient past. Rewilding places survival and bushcraft skills into a modern context but through an ancient lens. You don’t have to practice survival skills or bushcraft to do rewilding, but they are fun and have a lot to offer. 

Wilderness survival skills are a specific set of skills that are useful in a survival context. Many television shows today often conflate wilderness survival with ancestral technology because producers (and even practitioners) do not understand the appropriate context for the skill. A survival context is when you have been removed from your culture and are in an unfamiliar place with little to nothing and need rescue—for example, you’ve been in a plane crash and are lost in an unfamiliar wilderness. Survival skills can keep you alive long enough for rescue. Survival skills are by definition short-term. You want, and need, to be rescued.

One of the most important skills is improvisation: being able to use the materials available in any environment, whether “natural” or “synthetic,” to create what you need. We often refer to modern technology as “transition” technology, knowing that while it is available today, in the near future it may not be. Improvisation allows us to blend ancestral technologies with modern technologies. Boulder Outdoor Survival School defines bushcraft as “the skillset used to live in the wilderness using traditional and improvised tools and available natural materials.”  Bushcraft differs from “survival” in terms of the context. While survival is about living long enough to be rescued, bushcraft is about choosing to live in the wilderness for as long as your skills can sustain you.