Ask Urban Scout: On Definining Rewilding

Dear Scout,Who gave you the authority to define rewilding for everyone, everywhere? Just because you keep a blog and prance around in a loincloth doesn’t give you the right to tell us what rewilding means! Go fuck yourself!

I didn’t really define rewilding. I synthesized several definitions I found on the internet.

But for the sake of it, let’s do some word play here. Rewilding, the slang for re-wilding. An obvious premise sits in this word: giving something back its wildness. Of course, “wildness” means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But let’s go with Dictionary.com’s definition of re-:

a prefix, occurring originally in loanwords from Latin, used with the meaning “again” or “again and again” to indicate repetition, or with the meaning “back” or “backward” to indicate withdrawal or backward motion: regenerate; refurbish; retype; retrace; revert.

and wild;

1. living in a state of nature; not tamed or domesticated: a wild animal; wild geese.
2. growing or produced without cultivation or the care of humans, as plants, flowers, fruit, or honey: wild cherries.
3. uncultivated, uninhabited, or waste: wild country.
4. uncivilized or barbarous: wild tribes.

If we look at the first definition list above, the subtext of the definition of rewilding that I found online “to return to a more natural state; the process of undoing domestication” makes practical sense as the definition of rewilding.

Why do definitions matter? People must have a shared reality in order to work together in that reality. I once got into the most insane argument with a man who refused to share reality with me, claiming that “nothing is real” and that “there are no such thing as facts”. These arguments looked like little more than philosophical masturbation to me, than practical thinking for taking actions to create a sustainable planet. While I agreed in the philosophical sense with him, it didn’t help anyone to make choices in the real world. While I don’t believe in the concept of “facts” I do believe that we need to have shared observations of reality. We can observe that agriculture destroys the soil. If we can’t have that shared reality, we can’t work together to change our subsistence strategy to one that builds soil. Similarly, if we can’t have a shared reality of what it means to rewild, the word might as well mean nothing at all. The more we clearly define an idea, the easier time we will have using it for practical purposes.

In a sense, I will claim ownership of the term rewilding, in that my life’s work centers around caretaking the idea of what it means to return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, in its wholeness. I don’t think of rewilding as some new buzzword or some small scene of people or a wildlife conservation tactic. I see it as a complex lens, through which I view the world, that helps me to make decisions about how I want to live my life.

Now, some contention may lie in that I strongly advocate against running away to the wilderness. While I strongly advocate against it, I still see it as part of rewilding. Because my focus lies in fostering as much rewilding as possible, running away to the wilderness doesn’t effect much change. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its own merit, it certainly does! I also advocate for creating “rewilding havens”; land where people can work together to rewild. This differs from running away into the wilderness because people still focus on creating an interface with civilization to draw out its members, rather than shunning all of it and living as a hermit (which I also believe has its own merit).

When it comes down to it though, I don’t see one “right way” to rewild. Everyone has their own limits and passions. I will continue to do what I can to build a cultural momentum of rewilding, using the fullest extent and articulation of the practical, shared definition.

Posted: August 26, 2009 by

Category: General Blog

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4 Comments on “Ask Urban Scout: On Definining Rewilding”

  1. Heya Scout,

    Great response to your opening feedback.

    To Whom ever gave Scout the line: “Go fuck yourself!” …. methinks that you should go climb a tree!

    Thank you.

  3. Why do definitions matter? People must have a shared reality in order to work together in that reality. I once got into the most insane arguments with a man who refused to share reality with me, claiming that “nothing is real” and that “there are no such thing as facts”. These arguments looked like little more than philosophical masturbation to me, than practical thinking for taking actions to create a sustainable planet.

    I’m totally with you here, and oddly enough I’ve been witnessing arguments over what defines nature and reality a lot lately. You might call it “philosophical masturbation,” but I w*on’t even call it that; I call it “semantics arguments masquerading as philosophical arguments.” I also find it extremely surprising how many people refuse to accept that we exist in a common physical reality. It blows my mind.

    Anyway, I feel this is related. I just started reading Beyond Good and Evil:

    To study physiology with a clear conscience, one must insist that the sense organs are not phenomena in the sense of idealistic philosophy; as such they could not be causes! Sensualism, therefore, at least as a regulative hypothesis, if not as a heuristic principle.— What? And others even say that the external world is the work of our organs? But then our body, as a part of this external world, would be the work of our organs! But then our organs themselves would be—the work of our organs! It seems to me that this is a complete reductio ad absurdum: assuming that the concept of a causa sui [cause of itself] is something fundamentally absurd. Consequently, is the external world not the work of our organs—?

  4. Yeah – words are a balls ache. I got annoyed when my website link on Wikipeadia was moved from Rewilding to Rewilding (Anarchism)/Rewilding (Green Anarchism). Its not that I objected to Anarchism, Green Anarchism or even Anarcho-primitivism, I was really pissed off with the idiot who had re-jigged the page on rewilding, redefining it solely as rehabilitating captive animals (i.e. tigers) so that they could be returned to the wild. I should have re-written the entry, but you get sapped of energy by these wiki-change things that I just left a comment in History. As I said;
    “I have actually come recently to appreciate the increasing validity of the rewilding of people (Urban Scout is a good example), and it would seem in keeping with the thoughts of Aldo Leopold that in rewilding, we consider ALL the members of the land community – people, plants and animals”

    I see that you aren’t keen on being labelled an anarcho-primitivist. I looked at the Culture Change article and saw that you were described there as a rewilding ideologue. That hurts!

    Ideologue = a particularly zealous or doctrinaire supporter of an ideology
    Ideology = dogma
    Dogma = a belief or set of beliefs that a religion holds to be true

    I hate dogma, religious or otherwise. And I hate the consistent and often subjective bias against wildland and rewilding in Britain. That’s one of the reasons why my website is about self-willed land as it is a functional description, whereas the word wilderness is crawled over for its Anglo-Saxon etymology eg. wil, deor, wildor, wildeor

    You have to put down markers for a far more positive attitude towards wildland and rewilding in the face of that bias. Part of the problem is the varying understanding of what rewilding and wildland means, as is the case – and as you recognise – with the word natural. Ultimately though, our place in that “natural world” does not operate by semantics and, as you also know, it is the associations and processes, and the inspiration it provides, that better define it than words. But for now, keep putting the words together, Scout.