Week28: Coffee Shop Rewilding

If I lived in this region as a native 500 years ago I would spend a lot of this time indoors telling stories and working on some crafty project or another. Perhaps I would have already dried and packed berries and salmon into cedar boxes to munch on during the cool, moist winter months. Because I don’t have an 8,000 year old culture here, and people have not participated in making this land fruitful (aside from catastrophic agriculture) in several hundred years, I don’t feel so guilty about not having a cedar longhouse over-flowing with dried and smoked foods. Rather, I continue to suckle from the dioxin-filled teet of civilization and dream and plan for how to make the most of the next growing season. Call me whatever you want. You won’t tell me anything I don’t already know of my situation; I live a hypocritical life. You will see this unfold as the cold weather sets in and I hunker down in coffee shops to read, think and write about rewilding (while checking my myspace!).

This week I did a lot of writing and computer stuff. I’ve started organizing my book, Born To Rewild. I worked on a 5 minute power-point presentation on rewilding for IgnitePortland (another social technology gem from the techies). I also worked on an introduction speech to The Road Warrior, which I will introduce at the Eco Sicko film exhibition. I began to brainstorm ideas for my rewilding installation at the D.C. Arts Center for their December show called, “The New Future” (My role in the installation: The Survivalist). I received a phone call from a reality tv production company asking me if they could pitch an Urban Scout reality tv show this fall/winter to a few cable channels. Of course I said yes! Could you see little ol’ Scout as the host of a reality tv show? Genius. I even gave them a name for my show: Urban Scout’s Crash Course. Get it?

Though I have all these art projects lined up and a possible television show of my own, I still need to get a job. So I have to fill out my first job application in… three years! I refuse to do television commercial work again, which I did for two years before I started this project. I never had to fill out a job application for that. As long as you had a cell phone, a car and a brain, they would hire you. After a few jobs my name had circulated enough that I just had to wait for them to call me. My job before that? New Seasons Market Deli Clerk. Guess where I will submit my first job application? At least I live in Portland where minimum wage provides more than most states, and organic foods come in abundance.

The What a Way To Go film screening happened on Wednesday night, and it felt good to meet up with the filmmakers and meet some people outside of my core group of peeps. I felt the potential for some awesome friend-making and conversations, but the conversation ended abruptly since the church had to kick us out. Oh well. Gabe, if you read this, send me an e-mail!

My reading list for this winter has quadrupled. My plan involves reading as much about how the natives modified the environment here for the better, reading about permaculture and horticulture and finding a middle ground which I can than create a plan with my mother and step dad for their small property. I found this awesome quote from Keeping It Living that I want to share:

A growing body of archaeological evidence likewise confirms that, in many different times and in many different places, plant cultivation persisted alongside other subsistence strategies for millennia without demanding a transition to agriculture (despite an abundance of evolutionary models that have suggested the contrary). In many cases past and present, hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies and low-intensity plant cultivation can be “overlapping, interdependent, contemporaneous, coequal and complementary” (Sponsel 1989:45). Past attempts to categorize all the world’s peoples as “hunter-gatherers,” “pastoralists,” or “cultivators,” it seems, represents heuristic efforts of limited value that often conceal as much as they reveal.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again and again that it strikes me that to most people, learning to hunt and gather simply means knowing how to make a bow and arrow, and what berries to eat, but not how to encourage more growth of the plants and animals you consume. The quote above shows just how civilization labels indigenous peoples to make them seem more stupid and inept. Stewardship has everything to do with hunting and gathering, and I thank the authors of this and many other books on methods hunter-gatherers used to encourage the livelihood of the things they ate.

—

Show your support and appreciation for Urban Scout