My Internet 3 Year Anniversery!

Hello readers. Guess what? April 1st will mark the third official year of my blog! Crazy, huh? After 3 years I’ve finally published my collection of rewilding articles. I’ve begun to move away from general rewilding philosophy and gotten much more into specifics of creating rewilding culture. I’ve also got a much more keen idea of rewild camps and how to get others inspired to run their own. Over the next year my personal focus will rest on four major topics. Boxing, banjo, basketry and Chinuk Wawa. I’ve worked on these four things for a while now, and you haven’t heard much about it here because I keep the more personal stuff, well, more personal. So you probably won’t hear much more about it, but I’d just like to share what I work on in my “own time”. Aside from that, I think I will put some more general passions down here to work on over the next year on this blog and over at www.rewild.info:

1. Fluency Game @ Rewild Camp

I have started running the Fluency Game at rewild camp as a way of using the Rewild Camp as a sandbox for creating a curriculum for my rewilding workshops and future “unschool”. You won’t see much of my writing on these experiments here, as I have decided to keep that discussion going over at www.rewild.info.

2. Trapping and Hunting

I will continue to write about my experiences trapping and hunting… or trying to do those things. I have still, never successfully killed anything (other than a few thousand mosquitoes!).  So I have found a couple people who know about trapping and plan to trap them! As my friend Miles says, “Really, though this may sound like some kind of asceticism, your mentors and teachers are the creatures you are going to be trapping.” So true!

3. Bark-tanning Rabbit Hides

Miles wrote a really great blog about bark-tanning that has really inspired me to keep working on it. My friend David has taught me quite a bit, and I hope he can show me a bit more. My friends at Rabbit Revolution have given me a bunch of hides to practice with. I also plan to work with them and learn a little more about raising rabbits and all of that.

4.  The Rewild or Die book tour

I’d like to throw a book release party and tour fundraiser here in Portland for me to print a bunch of my books and do a west coast tour. I’ll probably do this sometime in early summer. I’d like to go to Vancouver B.C., Seattle, Olympia, Portland,  Eugene, Ashland, San Fransisco and Los Angeles. At each city, rather than do a reading from my book, I want to run a mini rewild camp. So basically I will need to make a mobile rewild camp, which thanks to my experiments in Portland, pretty much already exists. Material costs will definitely change what I can do.

5. More philosophy of rewilding

I have a bunch of blogs in my queue. Some feel almost done, others half finished and most just exist as place holders for large concepts I haven’t started working through. But I’ll share the list here with you now to give you some idea. I’d like to move away from the “vs” element of the philosophy back to my other witty titles I used to use for things. Although, silly puns don’t help the content show up on google searches. As you can see, many of these titles still have the “vs” in them. I might change the titles and I might not. We’ll see.

• “My Favorite Band” vs. Rewilding
• Colonization vs. Rewilding
• Urban Scout vs. Rewilding (part 2!)
• “Community” vs. Rewilding
• “Solutions” vs. Rewilding
• Avatar vs. Rewilding
• A Refusal to Grieve
• Ask Urban Scout: Where do I start?
• A Hypochondriac’s Guide to Handling Roadkill
• Bark-Tanning Farmed Rabbit Hides
• English Ivy Medicine
• Aliens vs. Rewilding
• Ask Urban Scout: Community Service in Rewilding?
• “Trapper’s Delight”
• Urban Scout Discovers Lost Ishmael Chapter!
• “Management” vs. Rewilding
• Journaling vs. Rewilding
• The Restoration Proclamation
• The Economy of Rewilding
• Captain Cascadia; the Bioregional Patriot
• All One Job: The Economic Thread

As I look back at the last three years I feel pretty good about them. Especially about the last year. In the last year my health has really gotten better and I have co-built a culture of friends and family that support rewilding. I really look forward to this next year and the possibilities that lie ahead. I really feel like my life just gets better and better. As much as I hate the city, I really get a lot out of the culture here. I’d like to get out of the city for good within the next year, and have the ability to tap into it for the cultural aspects. We’ll see. Wish me luck and thanks for all the support over the years!

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