How To Spark Rewilding Cultures

One day my friend Tony and I decided to see if we could make a bow-drill from scratch at a local park we traveled to often. We played around in the log jam for a few minutes and gathered up all the pieces we needed. All but cordage, which would involve more labor. I knew where a small patch of nettle grew and we decided to venture over to the patch, since nettle bark makes great cordage. However, just at the end of the log jam I saw an unfamiliar weed growing up through the rotten limbs.

Instead of walking all the way to the nettle field, we decided to experiment with this never-before-seen plant. We sat down and began looking at it. I cut one stalk and tried to peel the bark the same way I knew for nettles. This didn’t work out too well. I felt about to give up when Tony began to pound it. He had better results than simply breaking and peeling the way I had done with mine. I too began to pound and experiment. Than Tony said, “I give up. Let’s go.” Just as I discovered that a combination of the breaking and peeling with the pounding worked really well. In 30 minutes I had 5 feet of strong cordage. Without Tony there, I would not have made any discoveries. In fact, if Tony hadn’t gone out with me that day I probably wouldn’t have gone out at all.

The process of rewilding increases dramatically and speedily with a culture of it, with friends. Sharing of information, experiences and experimentation improves everyones understanding and perception of the natural world. In order to create a culture of rewilding or to intensify the one you already have, you need the tools to do so. Rather than a classic field guide with survival skills and lists of edible plants, this chapter focuses on the cultural creative aspects of rewilding. Not the “how-to make a bow-drill fire” but the more important, “how to make friends to rewild with.” Not how to treat people, which Willem Larsen has done a great job of explaining at his site, but simply how to attract people. I hope that this chapter will give you some of the tools I have discovered to help me in creating a community of rewilders here in Portland OR.

REWILD CAMP: The Networking Event & Skill Share

The best way I know of bringing people together revolves around a networking event. A party, a skill-share, a potluck, a discussion. I created the Rewild.info website to work as a nexus not only for online networking, but for spreading rewilding events in the real world. The Rewild Camp works as a skill-share, discussion and party for people who wish to rewild.

Don’t Spend a Dime!

The idea behind the rewild camp involves bringing people together, rendezvous style, without anyone having to pay an entry fee to learn and share skills or network. You can eliminate most monetary expenses with a little brainstorming. Someone will spend money for the event, you just don’t want the organizers or the participants to. For example, if you use public bathrooms at a park instead of renting them yourself, the park service pays for the bathrooms through tax dollars.

Community building barter can also play a role in running a free event. For example, rather than renting someones land, why not offer a day of labor to care-take the land? At the Portland Rewild Camp we had 45 people. Some rendezvous like Rabbitstick draw 400 people. What kinds of work could you do for someones land in one day with 400 people? A lot. Like set up a humanure compost system so you bring soil to their land, and not have to pay for port-a-potties. Get it? I have said elsewhere that people who don’t pay for something don’t understand the effort that goes into it. The payment at a rewild camp does not look like money since the idea involves inspiring communities, the exchange that happens here looks like stories, skills and fun.

Marketing

Marketing works as a kind of art form. It works as a communication tool to find like-minded people with whom you want to network with. Everyone practices marketing. Think about the clothes you wear; the bands you like, slogans and politics, colors, etc. The idea behind marketing involves telling people what you believe in and what you think of yourself in order to attract or repel people. The most important part of building a rewilding culture involves marketing it; attracting people so you can bring them together.

Name and Phone Number

For any kind of person to take your event seriously, you’ll need a name and phone number for them to call. E-mail works, but a phone makes people think of you as “real” not an anonymous e-mail address without a voice or a face. It says, “I take this seriously, I make my phone number available.”

Website

The next step in running a Rewild Camp involves creating a website for it at www.rewild.info. This will help you to direct people to a place where they can get more information on the event than provided in your marketing materials. This service does not cost anything. A free website helps a lot with marketing your event. Plus, by creating a page for your rewild camp on the rewild.info website we further syncretic rewilding and everyone benefits.

To create a page for your event, search the wiki using the title of your camp. For example “Rewild Camp Portland 2007.” When it does not find the page, you will see a text in red that says, “Create this page.” You can create the page from there. You will need to register in order to edit the wiki, which you can do first, or when you create the page for your Rewild Camp.

Identifying Your Demographic

We all know not everyone wants to rewild. It would make no sense to market to people with little or no interest in rewilding. Therefore, it helps tremendously to know who to target for marketing. To run a decent Rewild Camp that focuses on creating a community of people who want to survive the collapse, you first need to target people who believe in the collapse of civilization and the undoing of domestication. This may work as the most important part of marketing; reaching the right people.

You must identify groups who probably have members who like to rewild. This includes a wide variety of people; naturalists, permaculturists, college students, trackers, primitive survivalists, ethnobotanists, etc. Ask yourself, what groups out there have these kinds of people? Search the internet for the organizations. Flip through the phone book. Ask your friends. The more time you spend finding these organizations the more success you will have in attracting people of like mind.

Copy

Copy refers to the words you have written to attract people. The key to writing copy involves making it attract the demographic that you want to attend the rewild camp. You will use this copy in your press release and your internet marketing and it will also give you an idea of what to say if you make or receive phone calls.

The Press Release

Many people have called me a media whore, and rightly so. I have a special knack at capturing the attention of the media. The media simply works as a free marketing tool for your event, so why not use it? With the right wording and interest written into a press release, the media can play a huge part in getting the word out without spending a dime.

Local publications can work tremendously for free marketing. Identify every small and large local publication you can. Go to their websites or look them up in the phone book and write down their addresses and their e-mail addresses.

In order to get their attention you must send them a “Press Release.” Basically a page or two of information about your event; the copy and your contact info. I have included a few example press releases in the appendix section.

You’ll need to both mail physical copies of the press release and send them via e-mail. E-mail costs nothing if you can use library computer. Mailing requires paying postage (unless you partner with a non-profit that has free postage). You can think of a way around this though, perhaps you could scrap up some free paper and deliver the physical press releases using your bike. You need to send physical press releases out at least 3 weeks before publication. This will vary your timing depending on monthly, bi-weekly, weekly papers. Don’t forget about television stations! Internet/e-mail press releases should be sent two weeks before print as a reminder of the physical press release. I have had the most success sending a physical press releases with a follow up e-mail reminder to. E-mail only press releases can work, but I have had minimal success with those. If you do only internet, make sure you send the press release twice, 3 weeks in advance, and two weeks in advance on the Rewild Camp.

Internet Campaigning

The internet also provides a great place for free marketing. Identify internet sites such as message groups and bulliten boards that fit your demographic or reach a large enough audience. Myspace groups, meetup groups, Indymedia, Craigslist community board.

Guerrilla Hand-billing and Flyers

If you can find a way to make them for free, do it. Like the press release, get them out early… but not too early. Posters will get covered by other posters or taken down by city officials, businesses and misdirected anarchists.

Partnering With Organizations

Partnering with an organization can bring in skilled instructors/contributors to the rewild camp. It also works in their favor as a week of free networking and advertising. By coming to the rewild camp and participating, whether teaching a skill or just helping organize it, an organization can expand awareness of their company by promoting their pay-for classes during the week. They can also meet other people with skills that they may hire as instructors. The idea behind rewild camp is social networking, with the theme of rewilding. We want to create social networks of rewilders. The camps are more about connecting people than teaching skills. Skills come easily when a network is in place. The rewild camp offers great marketing and connections for organizations as well as communities.

Safety and Security

Publishing your e-mail address and phone number and attracting attention can attract crazies. Keep this in mind when planning and make sure you have enough people you know and trust attending the actual event or screening calls or whatever. Don’t forget to protect yourself. Don’t take this part of organizing lightly. Make sure you have someone there who will rescue you from a barnacle, an asshole or just some random crazy.

Also brush up on the code of security culture: http://www.huntsab.org/safety.htm

Having some “bouncers” at the event and brushing up on security culture will make you more at ease during the event, but may scare you more! Remember, the idea behind building community involves building trust and sharing your personal stories. You can do these things without geoporadizing any secrets you may have. Don’t let safety and security make you distrustful of everyone. Trust me, I have done this (I have paranoid delusions all the time) and it doesn’t work well for making new friends. You don’t have to give everything away, but you also don’t have to hold everything back. Keep security in mind so that you feel safe to make new friends, not scared to.

Running the Event

As an event coordinator, you don’t really end up with much time for networking at the actual event. The main job of the organizer involves making sure everyone shows up. The organizer should tell everyone the things they need to know such as where the bathrooms lie, where they can eat, etc.

It pays to have someone with Open Space facilitation if you go that route. It just pays to have someone with any kind of social technology really. It makes things go a little smoother. You can run one without a facilitator, but it kind get off to a grinding start without one. Facilitators grease up the wheels and get things moving and people talking much quicker than without the facilitation.

Other than that, the actual event should run itself, by the people involved. As an organizer and/or facilitator have done their job and gotten enough people there to start chatting and sharing and making plans.

Remember that some people just don’t click, and not to feel guilty if you don’t feel like hanging out with people you don’t click with. Just because I share the same interests as many people in this town does not mean I will hang out with them. We need to click. Rewild camp kind of works like many blind dates all at once. You won’t know who shows up generally, so you take a gamble on people. Some relationships build, some don’t. Remember, diversity works best. Many groups doing similar things make a stronger change anyway.

Passion Not Expertise

You don’t have to have any rewilding knowledge or skills to run a rewild camp. You only need a passion to learn the skills and make friends with that same passion. The idea of a rewild camp involves not just teaching classes, but learning together. So in this way, as long as you have passion for a skill, you can let the field guides or even your imagination teach you. For example, say you want to make a bow-drill fire but never have and no one else has either. As long as you feel passionate about it, you can try it. The key to rewilding involves throwing away the fear of failure you had beaten in during compulsory schooling. Don’t feel bad about failing! People learn the most from failures.

Once upon a time a flower salesman had more flowers than they could sell. They couldn’t even give them away for free. He consulted a marketing guru who came up with an insane idea; two for the price of one. The flower salesman couldn’t sell enough flowers after that. This shows us how a marketing strategy came about: don’t fix it, feature it.

We can use the same technique here. For example, in the press release, you just emphasize the collaborative element of the camp, learning from failures together, etc. Emphasize that rewilding refers to a process, and that you don’t have to “teach” a skill, you only have to have the passion to hold space for learning the skill. Grab a field guide, grab some friends and experiment together. Tony and I found out how to process and make cordage from a plant we had never seen before. We did not have a teacher, just a passion to learn and have fun together playing in the woods.

Beyond The Event

Rewild Camp serves to create a surge of inspiration and community building. The goal involves creating a surge and keeping the momentum of rewilding present. Several tools will work for keeping the momentum. Once a community exists, I see no reason to maintain a presence at rewild.info other than cross cultural pollination. Bring it all down! Even rewild.info!

1. Create a localized e-mail list or phone tree.
2. Have regular Wild Foods Potlucks
3. Have regular foraging and habitat restoration trips.
4. Create a local rewilding calendar for people to post these things on. Physical or internet or planned regularly (every other friday, etc)

Go Do This Shit

Um, now you get off your ass and go start organizing a rewild camp!

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