REWILDING COURSES
BOTH Live ONLINE ZOOM + IN PERSON Courses
each Course is Four sessions: One a week for four weeks
Length of sessions vary
COMING IN OCTOBER 2025
The word “rewild” has entered the mainstream as the latest buzzword. People are slapping the word in front of everything from shoes to vegan beer halls to garden shops to new age snake oil treatments, without much awareness of what it has historically meant to the movement who made it popular. Most people do not know there’s been a rewilding movement since at least the 1980’s. Different from the conservation strategy, a cultural rewilding began as an anthropological critique of domestication and the rise of sedentary, agrarian hierarchy and its deleterious effects on humans and the environment. For example, recent studies show that spending more time in nature, eating a “wilder” diet, and planting back native ecosystems is beneficial to human health and the health of the environment. However, rewilding is more than just a “back to the land” movement, and these are not “ancestral skills” or “survival skills” classes. We focus on the ideological side of rewilding: the hows and whys, along with its ecological, anthropological, and psychological principles and implications. Each class is designed to give you a set of tools to use in your day to day life to engage more with the world through a rewilding perspective.
What is cultural rewilding?
Fish evolved to breathe underwater because that was the environment in which they evolved. Take a fish out of water and they will suffocate to death. This is called the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation: evolution matches the things we need with the environments in which we live. If we are put into an environment that is mismatched with how we are best adapted, we may suffer in various ways. Cultural rewilding is about recreating or moving towards lifeways that we are better adapted to than contemporary society.
Contrary to what that majority of people believe today, overwhelming evidence shows that for most of human history (upwards of 2 millions years), we lived in small, cooperative bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers who did not even store food. “Work” was integrated into everyday life, enjoyable, and didn’t rule people’s lives. No one had bosses or deadlines or loans to pay back. Life was lived in the moment and in relative harmony with the landscapes and the other animals and plants that we shared our home with. This is what we mean when we interpret the word “wild.”
Only very recently has our environment become one of living in social hierarchies of competition and resource inequality, eating cancer-causing processed foods, melatonin-disrupting artificial light, spending most of the time sitting indoors, the burning of fossil fuels causing climate change, staring at little screens in our hands all day, losing our minds along with our eyesight. These are not aspects of existence that we evolved to with and we are suffering for it. Humans did not evolve in captivity and yet, like a fish taken out of the water, we are suffocating in this new, novel capitalist world. The “re” in rewilding is about acknowledging that we’ve strayed far from our environments of evolutionary adaptation and are working our way back–not to a specific time or place, but rather to the reciprocal relationships that we had in the past. Rewilding means learning from our ancient past in order to shape a resilient life for ourselves in the present and for future generations.
Why is it urgent?
We are living through the sixth largest mass extinction in the history of life on Earth, caused largely by human civilization. The world is being consumed by billionaires and we don’t have much time before the ecological fabric unravels. Rewilding is not a cute instagram lifestyle for connecting to nature. If you’re looking for an apolitical perspective, rewilding is not the movement for you. If instead, you are looking for a reality check and to push the boundaries of societal norms and buck against the authorities that are forcing us to consume the world to death, you’ve come to the right place.
Class Format
These graduate school-inspired courses will include lecture, group discussions, readings, and some homework. Be prepared to read materials between class sessions and share your thoughts and feelings around the topics presented in breakout groups and with the group at large. These classes are about social connection as well as knowledge. You may take the classes in any order you feel inspired to: just choose any that stick out to you most.
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In this course, you will learn the myths we’ve constructed about so-called prehistoric peoples, the problems that came with the transition to agricultural civilization, and the benefits of indigenous horticulture. We will look at the barriers that stand in the way of rewilding, the various ways and contexts in which people are rewilding, how to rewild in a way that is respectful across cultural boundaries, and take a look at how it is shaping up in the mainstream. This class breaks down old, outdated ways of knowing, and builds a new way of seeing the world. Rewild Your Mind will give you a broad understanding of how to make effective changes in your life and in the world.
How are you supposed to engage in life-changing rewilding projects if your poor mental health prevents you from even getting out of bed in the morning? If your back pain prevents you from doing much? If you experience fatigue? If you can’t focus? While this may be our most cliché “self-help” styled class, it’s deeply important to find ways to reclaim your health so that you can tackle life’s bigger problems. We recognize that all of us live in a world where our health prevents us from doing some of the hard lifting of culture change. This is why we have to start with ourselves.
Most modern environments have dulled our senses. We move from house to car to work building: from box to box. Rarely do we feel the cold rain running down our backs, the hot air of the summer winds drying our lips. Our sensory bodies are sheltered and lacking a real connection to the reality of sensory experiences that our bodies and souls are adapted to experiencing. We are feeling beings, and if we don’t feel the world, our senses atrophy and along with them our sense of self and connection. This course delves into the realms of sensory experience of the world as a human; what are senses, why do we need to experience them, and tricks, tips, and routines for expanding and connecting to the world.
Domestication begins with childhood. If we are to truly rewild, we must end the various ways in which children are domesticated and create a culture of wildness for children to grow up in so that they may thrive. But wildness doesn’t mean a complete lack of influence on how your children experience the world. Hunter-gatherers around the world have various cultural practices that assist their children in growing up to be strong, intelligent, competent adults who can engage in the world in ways that provide for themselves as well as members of their communities. In this class we explore the methods that prevent children from embracing wildness, and the kinds of practices we can put in place to encourage a deeper connection to themselves, the natural world, and society.
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