Ep 27: Arthur Haines on Rewilding Ourselves

Welcome to the Rewild Gear Podcast. Modern life, society, and responsibilities have domesticated us, but now it's time to rediscover your adventurous side. Whether that's camping, hiking, hunting, fishing, or just spending time in the great outdoors, this is the podcast for you. Join us as we get back to the wilderness and rewild.

Welcome to the Adventure Made Welcome to the Brave Podcast.

I'm your host, Seth Spears, and I am here today with Arthur Haynes. And I have been excited about this interview for a very long time, ever since I heard him interviewed along with future upcoming podcast guest Daniel Vitalis about ancient skills and foraging and so many things. So Arthur is a hunting and recreation guide, forager, ancestral skills mentor, author, public speaker, and a botanical researcher. He grew up in the western mountains of Maine, a rural area that was home to swift streams known for their trout fishing, something that I did a little bit of recently. He spent most of his childhood in the Sandy River Valley hiking, tracking, and foraging. Arthur now runs the Delta Institute of Natural History in Canton, Maine, where he teaches human ecology, focusing on the values of foraging, wildcrafting, medicine, and primitive living skills. He continues to spend a great deal of his free time practicing his skills as a modern hunter-gatherer, a topic that I'm very excited to dig into. In 2017, he authored A New Path, a comprehensive work on nature connection and rewilding, detailing how to incorporate ancestral practices into modern living. And as a research botanist for the Native Plant Trust, he completed an inclusive flora of the New England region titled Flora Nova Anglia and has authored over 20 publications in peer-reviewed journals and books. He also has a very popular TED Talk that is available on YouTube and has a popular YouTube channel as well. Arthur, welcome to the show. So happy to have you here.

Thanks for inviting me, Seth.

Yeah, totally. So I'm really excited just to talk to you about your background and what it means to be a modern-day hunter-gatherer. That's a term that we think of in kind of like an ancient or a much more primitive time period when that's how humanity lived. But that's not something that we typically think of in modern-day life. So I'd love to get your just description of what that means to you.

That's a really good question, Seth, because when you see people discussing hunting and gathering, particularly in modern forums, what they often focus on is the food aspect of it, which is where the title of the name comes from, right? Hunting and gathering. And that we are attempting to, if you will, return to our biological norms to get the foods that our species are evolved to eat. But it's, it's worth mentioning without trying to destroy everybody's enthusiasm that we are as far from hunter-gatherer cultures as we could possibly Yes. We're, you know, right? We, we lack so many of the other aspects of hunter-gatherers, which could include their communal aspects, their communal living, very, a very village mind, if you will, where people were living for the collective, not for the individual. And that collective can be both the human community as well as the natural community that the humans are embedded in. These were important facets of their living. And we often don't even entertain the ideas of, say, the spirituality, the animistic religions that hunter-gatherers had. We don't often build the very tools from our place that we use in the hunting and gathering. You know, many of us, we might go buy our hunting weapons that are put together from pieces all over the world. And then we go out on our landscape With this idea of trying to acquire this food. And I think one of the— I could potentially summarize the difference or try to summarize the difference between hunter-gatherers then and those of us who are trying with, you know, trying as best we can to become something more than just a domesticated human that lives in the village. There are these 2 ideologies that really prevail today. One is a control ideology where we want control of what's around us. That might be— well, I mean, there's a, there's 100 ways that we could go into discussing this control ideology. It comes even from our subsistence patterns. We're going to tell the land to grow this here now. And this comes from the way that we cultivate the plants, the way that we have domesticated the animals that we've taken all over the globe. And And we're not going to participate, which is the other ideology that we could talk about, with the local landscape. We're going to be content with the foods that are here. We're going to be content to be cold, to be hungry, to be uncomfortable at times. We're literally going to participate in this local ecological fabric, if you will. And I think that's one of the things, one of the many things that needs to be shed for humans to once again to actually rewild, for humans to actually become a wild organism again, is to fully embrace a participation ideology rather than still thinking that we need to have some control over the various facets of our life.

And that's very hard in this modern society in which we live because I like to call it a microwave society because we want everything right now. We're so used to having strawberries in the dead of winter or a food that we wouldn't naturally get in our particular locale just because we've modernized things so much with air travel and whatnot that it's so easy.

Yeah, I like to think that this industrial society that we are all embedded in, whether we want to admit it or not sometimes, I've heard our society referred to as a culture of progress, which I really like that name. I guess that's sort of a name that I I kind of came up with a bit when I heard hunter-gatherers referred to as a culture of memory, where that connection to the memories of the ancestors and the place were so important. We're just, we're sort of abandoning everything that's happened before us and just trying to move forward. And of course, as my wife would point out, when we lose the focus on how we got here, we simply plow forward with the same mindset running ourselves into the same problems. Einstein and others have spoken about this idea that we cannot solve problems from the same mindset that got us into the problem. And there's these 4 things that this culture of progress does really well. And I call them the 4 C's. We pursue comfort above many other things. We pursue convenience. Um, that, that rapid acquisition of everything that we want in our life. Um, the, the universal remote control that will power our entire home so that we don't have to get up off the couch anymore. Right.

That's it.

We have put so, yeah, we've put so much research into the remote control while the polar ice caps are melting and threatening food production around the world. It's just, it's amazing. Right. So comfort, Convenience. The third one is class, which stands for the social hierarchy that we all have to admit exists in this culture of progress. We all want to ascend that, even if it's somewhat subconscious, because we know that as we go higher up in this human hierarchy, there are privileges associated with it. There are opportunities that open up to us. There's financial opportunities that open up to us that wouldn't otherwise exist. So, we're all trying to accomplish this as much as we might be trying to step aside from it. And the last one, the last C is no culpability. We want no responsibility attributed to us for our actions. We always want to blame, well, what else was I supposed to do? Or I don't have any options. You know, the, the, our plastic clothing and our plastic packaging, something that despite how, how much we try, we simply can't get away from it without an enormous communal effort to do so. And we're leaving this massive amount of xenoestrogenic trash for later generations to deal with, but we don't want any responsibility for it when in fact it's all heaped Upon our shoulders and the shoulders of the people, the generation before us when this polymer age began. And that's just one example. But these are all things that we're influenced by, even— and again, I'm not trying to say that there aren't those of us who are trying to shed, you know, shed these weights that we're bearing. But they're there. They've been sort of put into our minds from a very early age. And now we take those things into the wilderness with us.

Mm-hmm.

And if we just go into the wilderness, if we go forward in rewilding, looking for comfort, for convenience, you know, for class, that's the ego. Look what I made. Look what I did. Look at this picture of this buckskin. Look at this picture of this basket. Look at this animal I killed. You know, that's how we ascend that social class within the rewilding circles. And that no culpability for any of the decisions we make. We're simply taking the problems of industry into the wilderness with us. And so hopefully that all makes sense that these are the things that have been rattling around in my brain and my wife's brain lately that we've been discussing.

Yeah. No, and that makes a lot of sense. And I'm— I think we're totally in alignment there. And I'd like to get into a little bit more about what you see as the solution to those or how we can kind of transcend some of those things. But first, I'd like to get a little bit more about your background as far as how you actually got into this work from an early age, it sounds like, but into today where this is like your life's mission.

Yeah. I mean, I was very fortunate as you read in the intro to this podcast that we're going to be or that we're recording now. I grew up in a very rural area that had rivers we swam in where the water was potable. You could literally drink the water while you swam.

Wow.

And I was, I was very fortunate. You know, that's not, that's not the upbringing that most people had. And I'm going to be very clear not to use the word privileged because this is the base condition for humans to have clean environments to be in. So I was fortunate but not privileged. Everybody should have had access to this. But decisions made by previous generations have taken that away from many people. But, you know, I also had things that, shall we say, drove me to the wilderness even more often than I would have gone myself. And that includes a parenting situation with sometimes physical, but more kind of an emotional abuse, so that the wilderness was my refuge. And it buffered the amount of harm that would have occurred to me had I stayed indoors in proximity to a person that, you know, I'll just be frank, did not like my person very much.

Hmm.

And it had to do with a stepparent. who, you know, I was not biologically theirs. And so that's part of the story is that, you know, I, I was in the wilderness to escape trauma as much as I really enjoyed being there. And it's where I found calmness and solace. And I, and I simply loved the landscape that I grew up on. I'm fortunate in that way. I'm here now Following this, as you kind of mentioned, kind of a life's mission, I would say, I have to admit that that answer is partly because of grief. And I want to be really clear, there's different people would use grief differently. And I'm not trying to necessarily follow anybody's version of grief, but I'm going to tell you exactly how I mean it. Grief isn't despair. It's not desperation. And it's not depression. It's something that you feel, and literally its origins do refer to a weight to bear because of your love of something.

Mm-hmm.

And I personally don't feel that you can grieve something if you don't love it. And likewise, if you love it, you probably are going to have to grieve for it at some point because those feelings go hand in hand with me. And I want other people to bear this weight that I feel. Because we can all see what's happening to our wilderness areas, to our oceans, our rivers, our mountains. It's not— you really would have to have your head stuck in the sand to not know what's going on. By some estimates, we're down now to only 3% of the remaining wilderness left in the world.

Wow.

And you might say, whoa, that seems really low. And that's because while the forest may still be standing, those top predators may be missing now. There were keystone species that were once present that are no longer. If I were to use the Downland, Maine, where I live, yes, we have lots of forest in this land, but the wolf is gone.

Hmm.

And that was a very important predator of The caribou, who are also gone from this state. The mountain lion is gone from this state. The wolverine is gone from this state. And we could keep going. You know, the passenger pigeon is now gone from the world, and there were breeding colonies here in Maine. So while we have the skeleton of the natural community still here and fairly functional, because a lot of the cooperative connections between the organisms still exist, Some of them are missing. And so we might— we, we could literally say that Maine has no wilderness remaining unless those species are brought back. Of course, I would also argue that without the humans, without the wild humans, it's also not wilderness. And nowhere in North America— let me back up— nowhere in the lower 48 United States are there true living hunter-gatherers, which could make a case where there is 0% wilderness in the lower 48 United States because we were an important part of the landscape.

Yeah.

And so that causes me grief. That's a terrible weight to bear to think that those species no longer roam here in the way that those species were evolved to roam. And I want other people to feel feel that so that we have more people who understand the time and the place that we're in. And maybe through that grief, we could potentially come to understand that we can't remain in the control ideology. We really have to step out into that participation ideology that is literally our biological norm. I mean, if I know that this is a very contentious topic, but if you don't mind, I'm going to bring up the COVID-19 scenario to discuss this.

The Earth.

Yeah, the Earth has set boundaries and limits. The oceans, for example, were limits on what one continent could do to another. Well, we figured out how to cross them. So we eliminated that boundary. We started growing food in really intense ways, but then we depleted the soils, particularly of certain nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, but nitrogen being one of the big ones. The Earth said, you can only grow so much in the soil. And we said, no, we developed the Haber-Bosch method to to pull nitrogen out of various substances so we could put more of it into the soil. Now we could continue growing intense amounts of food in one location, but we never think about the consequence of that. We herald it as this wonderful thing because there'll be no starvation, but the population grows. The Earth then sets another limit for us and it says, okay, your population has grown to what we might describe as absurd levels at various times in various places. So now what's going to happen is plagues, infectious disease, it's going to knock your populations back to something that the land can support sustainably. And we said, no, we developed a vaccine and we got on it very quickly. And we shamed everybody into taking it. And we We had people taking the vaccine even before it had gone through actual approval. And we got it done. We got in control and we, and we've slowed this pandemic down without any thought of the consequence of what does it mean to have more and more and more people on the planet? The Earth keeps erecting limits and we keep saying, I'm going to bust through and take control of these limits with no thought about the consequences. Not until we are a population that would say, the pandemic is coming and it's going to be terrible. It's going to be heart-wrenching and there's going to be this grief. But it is something that maybe, it just maybe is something that our populations need to experience on a regular basis, potentially, to make sure that we are within the Earth's limits. That's what a participation ideology is. And as you can understand, Seth, we could not be further from accepting that maybe pandemics play a role in the health of humans and the wildernesses that they rely on.

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I've actually had a similar thought process myself, just thinking about all of the pollution that we've put forth, how we've destroyed our waterways and our soils and destroying some of our old-growth forests and all of these things. Mother Nature's always going to win. And so at the end of the day, you know, there's— and throughout history, there's either been a war, pestilence, famine, pandemic, something that has kind of brought things back to a different type of relationship where it has reduced some of those issues going on. And we haven't had anything like that in a very long time. And so, you know, it very well might be Mother Nature just saying, hey, enough is enough.

Yeah, I mean, it's certainly true that this world will go on and it will exist without humans here. But part of, part of the grief that I experience is that I love humans. I love being a human. I'm not a xenophobe who thinks that all the humans should just in mass suicide kill themselves off to protect the planet because we're part of the planet. That's like asking one of the beneficial microbes in our gut flora to say, okay, you all have to go away. And like, you're part of me. I can't lose you because I don't function in the same way without you. And the same is true of humans. We are a special creature and we experience and we celebrate creation in a way that's completely unique. It's in— and Likewise, the white-tailed deer, the coyote, the beaver, the moose, it doesn't matter what species we bring up. They all celebrate creation and bring forth their own song into this world, if you will, in their ways. I don't want humans to go away. But I do wish— what I grieve for is that thing that humans want to control. so much of the planet without looking into the, the long-term consequences of what that control actually means for us and for all the other species we share the planet with.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And since humans have been the ones who have tried to take control of all of this to improve our growing conditions or to make sure that we get all the foods that we want no matter the time of year or location, and have caused some of these issues, I think that it may also be our duty to come up with the solutions for it. Would you agree? And if you do, what do you think the necessary steps would be to take in order to help do that?

Seth, that's such a complicated question. It's a simple wording question, but it's such a complicated question. And while I'm not disagreeing that I think we have a role here, that we have a responsibility. There's no disagreement with you. I do have to agree with my wife, the person that I talk about these things the most. So I'm bringing up Sarah frequently here. I'm going to present 2 scales of issue. Okay.

Please.

We know that our nighttime environments are often too bright. We've lit up the nighttime sky with streetlights and cars and electronics and nightlights and all of this stuff. And we know that that impacts our health in the long run. It affects our sleep cycles because it creates alertness in our bodies that makes it difficult to fall asleep. Now that impacts our melatonin production, which impacts our susceptibility to cancer. of these bright nighttime environments.

So we—

that's a fairly simple thing. We don't have to ponder how did we get here. We can just make our nighttime sleeping environment, our bedrooms or wherever it might be, dark.

Yeah.

And just get to it. Get rid of all the lights, get rid of the electronics, get rid of the Wi-Fi, make a nice, wonderful hobbit hole somewhere. that is a calm sleeping environment that is nice and dark so that we're able to sleep as humans were meant to. But the scale of the problem that you raised in your question, which is the important one that threatens all of us, is so complex and so multifaceted That to just immediately move to a solution, we're likely to still not fully understand how did this all occur? How did these— this complicated knot get tied so that we could start to unravel that knot? I'm not suggesting that we're supposed to be inactive on all fronts and just Think about it forever. But I do think it makes a lot of sense that we stop what we're doing and literally just ponder all of the ways that humans came to be in this position, which doesn't just come from the foods that we've eaten and the domestication that's occurred and the loss of wilderness. But comes from the very stories that this industrial society has shared for a long time, even if they're not as prevalent right now. For example, again, bringing up my wife, Sarah, she's really interested in studying right now the stories that are found in the Holy Bible. Because our society, even if Christianity is waning tremendously, as we know it is, we still have so much of that built into the way we think and the way we go forward with our dominion, with our control ideology over the natural world, with the way we consider ourselves to be the most important species, right? The way that we even consider, in some cases, our species to be the only one with a spirit or a soul. We're the only ones that have afterlife. I mean, all of these things have come through from those writings. And it and it's influencing what we do today. But to to actually provide some answer to your question, I do think ultimately that we need to step back into this participation ideology to the extent possible. And that doesn't mean that we're going to be completely wild hunter gatherers. We're not. We eat a lot of wild food, and we really cherish and value that food. But we're also dependent on the local organic. And that's going to have to be part of the solution for a time because our landscapes are fragmented. We're burdened with bureaucracy of hunting rules and regulations to make sure that there's game for the next year based on the sheer number of people, although hunting has declined tremendously even here in Maine in this rural state. I mean, over the last— and I don't remember the exact amount of time, but over the last 20, 30 years, maybe 40 years, we have half the number of hunters number of hunters in this state that we used to.

Wow.

I think we've dropped from 10% of the population down to about 5%. Don't hold me exactly on those, but those provide a rough figure to help understand what's happening in this state. We're moving more and more toward, I don't want to go pick blackberries, I just want to buy blackberries that somebody picked. And that, that failure to want to do the work, to have the story of the food to share at the table, as opposed to I went to the supermarket, is one of those things that we still need to unravel. But hopefully I've given some answer there. I think the control ideology is going to be really important for us to really look at carefully and see all of the places that we do this in our lives. But at the same time, maybe take a break from the immediate solution depending on the scale of the problem, right? This food is bothering your stomach and causing gut dysbiosis. Don't wonder about it for 10 years. Get the food out of your diet. Take care of the sensitivities. But when it really comes down to thinking about what our society is going to do, we need a lot more time understanding how we got here.

Yeah.

But ultimately, I'm not this person that thinks we're supposed to walk off the precipice. I do think that ultimately, we should come to some type of solution. And that solution will not be the same in every part of the United States, for example. We live in different landscapes with different people. The solution may have similar qualities that we're looking for, Healthy landscapes, healthy human, healthy population levels, whatever it might be. But it's going to look very different in Maine than it does in Florida. They're vastly different places. No more homogenous solutions. Also part of the problem.

Yeah. I'd like to talk a little bit about the rewilding concept. And, you know, we can, we can get into rewilding humans, which I'd like to touch on that a bit, but also when it comes to rewilding different locations and geographies and especially different flora and fauna. And obviously, as you're well aware, the whole concept of rewilding in the modern parlance came from the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone. And so we've seen how successful that has been for the most part. And like you mentioned earlier about how many different animals— there's no longer wolves and carrier pigeons and caribou in Maine. So there's this trend to reintroduce some of these animals into these locations where they previously were, but that's not without consequences. Because some of them, whether they're predators or prey, that entire symbiotic relationship, if you don't have all of those things in play, which I don't know that we ever can anymore because of what we lost, there's ramifications to that. So I'd like to get your take on that. And also when it comes to more of the plant side, there's so many invasive species now where they've been brought into different locales where they never should have been. And so they've taken over. So some of those native species may not even survive now. So just kind of like to get your thoughts there.

Yeah, I mean, you're right, our landscapes have changed, and depending on the part of the world that you're in, the landscape may still have many of the same species. Maine, for example, when you get into our western and northern parts of the state where some of the wilderness areas still remain, there's a fairly low proportion of non-native plants. They do not change the character of those natural landscapes particularly. But we're talking about smaller wilderness that's bisected and trisected and so on by roads. You know, we don't have roadless regions anymore, even within our wilderness areas, because the paper companies who log the forests to be able to get pulp for paper mills have essentially built a multimillion-dollar, maybe billion-dollar road system throughout our wilderness areas. And so you can essentially access most of Maine now within a day's walk from the nearest road. They're just, there aren't places that take 5 days to cross anymore, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

So we do have changed landscapes and it's only going to get worse until start valuing these landscapes as having really important functions, potentially for future beings that aren't even alive yet. Because I would sort of argue that we're committing violence right now on future humans and future other-than-human persons by continually degrading and reducing the size of the wilderness areas that exist. I want to be clear that my path that I wrote about in the book A New Path was never an assumption that we're all supposed to run off and live in a bark wigwam and eat exclusively wild foods and live as wild humans and eschew everything that industry has to offer because it's not possible right now. This idea of the lone human marching into the wilderness and just living it, it literally is an impossibility that that's ever going to be a reality because we are a communal species. We do need other humans around to simply take on the various roles that are required for wild living. My idea has always been, as the title suggests, a path, a path that we try to get on and that we go further with each generation potentially. In my generation, you'll never see me living exclusively in furs, you know, in a shelter, hunting with a wooden bow that I made myself. Now, have I built shelters and slept nights in them? The answer is yes. Have I made hide clothing? The answer is yes. Have I made wooden bows and hunted with them? The answer is also yes to that. But that doesn't mean that I have brought that all together into a holistic form of living because Because I lack the community and I lack a place to do it. Right now, we're very fortunate. We sit in the middle of— if you drew a very funny-shaped line, it's about 9,000 acres of forest. And we started trying to conserve, and I want to make clear, not preserve, but conserve the forest, which does mean that there's interaction with this forest. And just that there's a general understanding that if we don't have a place to rewild to, then rewilding becomes almost impossible, especially again for the future generations who may have greater skill level and a greater desire to participate on that landscape. So the rewilding in the East is different than the rewilding in the West. In the West, there are million-acre blocks of national forest land that are already available. That's not the case in the East. We've been colonized much longer here and the landscapes are more fragmented, but we need communities everywhere because the community in Maine is different than the community that would be in Montana. There's different plants, there's different animals, landscape features, our rivers harbor different species. And so again, we need a Again, the qualities might be the same if we were to look at similarities on a higher scale, but the details will be very different about what humans might do in one landscape than another. I'm a huge advocate of humans interacting with the landscape with full recognition that there are consequences to this, because remember, we're going into the wilderness with our ideas of comfort, convenience, class, and no culpability. However, we need humans to keep interacting with the wilderness in a softest way as they can. And that does not mean no death. We're heterotrophs, we kill organisms to eat them. We need to focus on the collective and stop focusing on the individual animals that are killed.

Hmm.

This is words that are coming to you based on, you know, the vegan nightmare comments that I get on social media when they see that, you know, something has been killed by me. You know, it's such a focus on the individual, the ego, the individual, me, I, and there's no concept of there is a collective of deer or bear or moose. And that is the most important thing that we focus on. To make sure that there will always be individuals of them in existence. So we're going to go forward into the wilderness, taking all of our biases and our indoctrinations that we have learned, and those cause harm. But the greatest harm that comes is to lose out on that firsthand experience in the forest, on the prairie, On the mountain slopes. Because when we lose out on that, we have no ability to love those landscape features, which means we won't grieve their loss. And without, without that love and that grief that comes together, we become apathetic toward the wilderness, which only allows the corporations and our own greed, if you will, Because we're the one driving the purchasing of the corporations to tear that mountain down for metal ore to make another phone or whatever the case might be. I understand this. There's consequences to people going into the wilderness, but there is greater consequence to people staying in the city.

Mm-hmm.

Because the city will eventually expand to encompass the remaining wilderness areas. And that will be, that will be the greatest travesty of our time when we live on a planet that is just this technological concrete and steel, you know, civilization that reaches from one pole to the next.

Sure.

Deep, but necessary to say. Yeah.

So something that I've been pondering quite a bit, especially in this era of COVID and over the past year, there's one of— with all of the lockdowns and social distancing and all of that stuff going on, one of the things that people can still do is get outdoors and spend time in nature. And so we've seen a resurgence of travel and vacationing to our national parks and wilderness areas and things like that. But that's not without consequences. You know, there's more pollution and litter and things like that. There's also a resurgence of people leaving the cities and moving into the suburbs or more wilderness areas. And so that urban sprawl is something that is extending, extending the city or the more urban environment. And that's also affecting our flora and fauna and animal life and the carrying capacity for a lot of those species. Where's the balance there?

Well, I think you've raised a really good point, Seth. And the point is, with nearing 8 billion people on the planet, there is no balance. Whether— we always focus on whether or not we can feed 8 billion people. And we're doing it right now, essentially. And you might remark that, you know, there's this proportion of people in this place that are going hungry and whatnot. But for the most part, we are actually feeding the world's population. And people talk about, well, if we adopted these permaculture principles, we could feed 20 billion. And if we adopted the algae diet, we could feed 80 billion. Look at the problems that this, this time experiences with climbing toward 8 billion people. Now imagine more than that. The point is, is with this number of people, There is no solution. Now, that doesn't mean that I'm saying that we don't ultimately try for something, given time to think about how have we gotten here.

Mm-hmm.

And I don't know how long that takes. I'm not saying that we're supposed to spend— we're going to do exactly 6 weeks of wondering and study, and then we're going to move forward, or exactly 6 years. I don't want to be a defeatist, but I do want to be a realist. And with this amount of people, I'm not sure anything can work in the long run. All we can do is drag out the death. And we recently had a friend who was a place-based skills instructor. And I use that very specifically because the social justice those crews have now started attacking the word primitive skills as both a theft from Indigenous people and a derogatory term for their highly advanced cultures. So, you know, but this is the time that we're in. Identity politics is taking the front stage while ecocide runs rampant because we're so focused on what the human experience is.

Yeah.

that we can't put ourselves in the shoes of any other organism anymore. But, but we had a friend who recently died of cancer. And he would come to the gatherings that my wife organized. His name was Charlie Paquin. And he was a student of Eric Callahan. And some people listening may, may know Eric Callahan. He was one of the most amazing place-based skills instructors and this napper who would shape stone into blades and points and other kind of really eccentric shapes, using only the tools that would have been available to the people who made those shapes. So he was essentially recreating their tools with their tools, not using modern tools to just build something that looked like, you know, these, these indigenous artifacts that were used for hunting and butchering animals and everyday living. And he avoided the health problems that he knew he was experiencing for a while. And when he finally went in to get things checked on, he learned that he had pretty late-stage cancer. And then everything started, right? All of the chemotherapy began and the different treatments. And we'll try this one. This one's not working. And he told us, sitting around a fire one night, That what happened is it literally just dragged his last days out. His days of being diminished as a person, his strength, his mind, his vitality. People were making money off him. His whole death, his whole dying was about people making money off him. We're going to heal you with this. We're going to bury you here. We're going to do this to your body, but it all costs money. And I can't help but think our solution seeking, which is a very normal thing, particularly for the male gender. And I'm not trying to condescend on it or judge it. I think it's a normal thing. We want our friends, we want our families to be alive, and we want them to continue living and to be happy. This is a normal thing, and I don't want to judge it. But as we seek solutions from that same mindset, are we not just doing what happened to my friend, our friend Charlie Paquin, whose life was simply dragged out at the end when the quality was potentially so diminished that we, you know, maybe Maybe there are places that we need to let things run their course. I don't know. I don't have the answer. But I hope that what I'm saying is making some sense to you or the people that are listening.

What comes to mind for me there is that one of my philosophies has always been quality over quantity, which seems like a complete dichotomy from this modern American ideal of mass-produce quantity over quality. I recently, earlier in the summer, I spent some time in Sicily and just had an amazing experience. My family is Sicilian originally, and so I've been trying to get there for over 20 years. And every time I go to Europe, I never want to leave. And so I had someone ask, what is it about Europe that calls you so much that you enjoy? And I started thinking about it, and it came back to In Europe, they measure time differently than here in America. Everything is stretched out so much further. They think about things in a much longer timeframe, whether that's the cathedrals or the buildings or the roads.

Everything is built to last.

There's a certain quality aesthetic, the way that they have traditionally have built things and thought about them, as opposed to here. Let's get it up as quickly as possible. Let's build it as cheaply as possible because we're just gonna— tear it down and rebuild in 5, 10 years. And so I think it's that aesthetic and that philosophy of quality over quantity and thinking for the long term that is so appealing to me.

Seth, I hear you completely. And I think this is a really important point to make. Again, we're talking not about participation, but we're talking about control. I want to live a long life. In fact, I'd like to be immortal, right? This is the prevailing theme. There are people that think that humans can live forever. And when we, when we approach our living from this idea that the only good life was a long life, I mean, we're still just stuck right in the same mire that we've been talking about. And if you were to look at many health gurus, what is their primary marker of health? And it's longevity. It's not quality of years, it's quantity of years, just as you expressed it.

Mm-hmm.

My goal has never been to live a long life. I don't need to live to be 150 years old. I want health for the years that I'm present. which is why I follow rewilding, which for me is a path that tries to reacquire as many biologically normal activities for humans as possible, recognizing I'll never achieve the goal of full wildness, but I'm walking on this path with my family. And hunter-gatherers, those that were studied around the world, had an age of about 72. This was the mode, the highest point under the curve, where those who survived childhood, this is where the highest number of deaths began to occur at age 72. Boy, I'd love to have health until 72. It sounds wonderful.

Mm-hmm.

I don't need to live until some crazy age and then believe that there is a special place that is only for me and my kind, When I die, I'm happy to even think of my body becoming nourishment for all of the things that have nourished me. It's my time to give back. And so I do think this— the point you've raised is still part of this whole problematic ideology that we go forward with. And I can only imagine how wonderful it must be visiting a place where The idea of time has a different meaning. I mean, this is a constant source of stress for our family. Anytime we've got to be here at this certain time, and we've got to do this, and then we've got to get to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And it robs our day of its enjoyment and leisure and the ability to experience this particular place that we're in for as long as we feel like we need to experience it.

Mm-hmm.

I hear you loud and clear, Seth.

Yeah, exactly. That makes, that makes a lot of sense. Arthur, let's talk a little bit about ancestral foods versus modern foods, because we know that we've lost a lot of different, different types of foods over the years and plants and fruits and things like that. And I've heard you speak on this a little bit, but maybe just give a brief synopsis about this, about some of the ones that would be more common that people would, would know or understand a little bit about.

Yeah, I mean, the basic premise here is we humans lived on a landscape where we relied on the wild plants. And at some point, humans began tending wild plant populations. Now, that didn't mean that they were genetically modifying them, but they may have harvested at a particular time When, as they dug bulbs, they could replant the seeds from the mature capsules on the aerial portions of the plant. Or there may have been some passive weeding or burning or coppicing or whatever might have occurred to enhance these populations that humans relied on. And ultimately, we reached a point where some plants we began to change. We see this in species where, you know, the cultivated goosefoot, the pit-seeded goosefoot, Chenopodium berlandieri, the fruits got larger at one point in the historical, the archaeological record. We can see that humans started manipulating these things, or the sunflower fruits got larger. And we started valuing this size. And eventually, we started to really change things such that Many of the plants that we commonly consume today, like say corn, Zea mays, looks nothing like its wild progenitor. It couldn't be more different. Or one of my favorites, if you could see the eggplant, what it looks like today versus its wild progenitor, another species of nightshade, Solanum incanum. They're just, they're nothing alike. They're nothing alike in what they look like.

Yeah.

And they're nothing alike in the chemistry that's with inside them. Those plant compounds are what you'll hear me refer to as phytochemicals.

Mm-hmm.

And as we domesticated the plants, we made these changes without knowing. And we lost nutrition, especially mineral nutrition, but, but certain vitamins as well became horribly reduced between the domesticated plants and the wild plants. We changed the fatty acid profiles. We changed the fiber content. And as I've mentioned, we— one of the most dramatic things that we did is we changed the phytochemistry. We didn't want the bitters anymore. We didn't want any of the things that are bitters. But one of the things we have to remember is bitter isn't just a way that we identify something that could be toxic to us. Bitter is also one of the ways that we detect antioxidant, because some of the compounds that are very high antioxidants happen to also be bitter. And it's a way that we picked up on a food quality. So we changed all these things. And we hear about things like the 3 sisters, right? Corn, squash, and beans. This is back at a time when these were grown organically, and when they would have been considered They still had their seeds, right? They could be saved and planted in the next generations. But we know what happened. When we look at hunting and gathering communities that transitioned to the Three Sisters, they started dealing with all kinds of deficiencies, bone deficiencies, deficiencies in their immune system, dental caries and tooth loss. And it just, it goes on and on. And I won't get into all the details, but there's really good work looking at this in what is modern-day Kentucky. 2 groups, one complete hunter-gatherer, the other did some— That's where I'm from originally. Oh, interesting. Cool. And one that relied primarily on the Three Sisters. And they looked at their bones and their teeth and could examine a number of health deficiencies that came in those people once the reliance on cultivated foods. In fact, chronic disease is a relatively new phenomenon for Homo sapiens, for relatively modern Homo sapiens. So I'm not going back to like Homo neanderthalensis and Homo erectus and groups that were still working out their nutritional connections to the landscape. But I'm talking about when we look at the hunter-gatherers that would have existed on this planet, say 500 years ago or 300 years ago, or even more recent for some groups of people, chronic disease was almost unknown. That included cancer, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease. These things just didn't exist or, or were at a near zero incidence. And we know this because there are doctors, there are physicians and surgeons who spent their careers on what was at that time the frontier. We're talking the late 18— the latter half of the 1800s and the early 1900s. They lived with the indigenous. While they were finding tumors on the civilized people that lived amongst the indigenous, they were not finding tumors on the indigenous. And even more modern-day examinations of some of the hunter-gatherer groups on the African continent who are pretty disruptive Still show a near-zero incidence of cardiovascular disease, which I think kills about 25% of the adults in the United States. It might be higher than that. But you get my point. Our foods are not sustaining us. And while we have done a remarkable job in our Western medicine of dealing with acute health issues, we have the best trauma medicine in the world. We get into a car wreck, we can put people back together. Of course, it comes with a consequence, but we can do that. But when it comes to chronic disease, we've done more than drop the ball. We've promoted it at every decision that we've made. One of the reasons I am so grateful that I made life choices that led me to a place of knowledge about wild foods is the hope that I can live a life that is free of debilitating chronic disease. So I can have that quality of life until my time comes to give back to all of the things that have given to me. So one of the things that I try to suggest to people when it comes to these foods is, by every way of knowing, these foods do not sustain humans. Okay, now, does that mean that we should hate them and not have gratitude for them because we still get full bellies and we can still live? And, and so no, I'm not claiming that we should vilify cultivated Uh, foods and, you know, animals that are raised with, um, under domestication. But what I am saying is be really choosy about the foods you bring into your home if you have this ability. Look, look for heirloom plants, those that are closer to their wild progenitor. Look for animals that receive their biologically appropriate foods. And I'll warn you that Corn is not the biologically appropriate food for cows.

Right.

They eat grasses and forbs, high-quality grasses and forbs. That's what they're designed to eat. And if they're not eating that, I don't want to eat them. I want to drive the markets to do more pasture-raised, cage-free animal husbandry, because this is what is best for the animals, which makes them best for the people. It's a It's this win-win in many ways.

Yeah.

Also, look for plants that are minimally modified from their wild progenitor. That's not the eggplant. In fact, it's not corn. It's not lettuce. These are very, very different looking and tasting from their wild progenitors. But you know, when you go to the store and buy blueberries and blackberries and raspberries, There's changes and there's changes that have health consequences to us, but they're still mostly identical in what they look like and what they taste like. And they have a lot of the same health benefits, maybe just a little bit less of them. And so I call these minimally modified plants. And these are the ones that I seek to go after when we purchase things in the supermarkets the farmers markets, wherever it is. I want the ones that are closest to the wild progenitor. So when it comes to one of the great examples is kale and all of the relatives that are the exact same species, there's kale, romanesco, cauliflower, broccoli, kohlrabi, Brussels sprouts. It's all the same species. It's Brassica oleracea. You can, when you look at romanesco, when you look at broccoli, when you look at cauliflower, or Brussels sprouts, you can plainly tell there's no wild plant on your landscape that looks anything like that. For most people, they're bizarre looking. That's because they've been changed and they've been changed by human hands. They— we took what creation gave us and we modified them. We modified them to make more food. That was, that was our solution, make more better tasting food. But we didn't think about the consequence of making more better tasting food, right? Again, we lost those beneficial phytochemicals. We lost mineral nutrition. We lost vitamin nutrition. And that came back to impact us. We didn't think about the consequences. But if I'm going to eat Brassica oleracea, eat the one that most looks like the wild plants. That's the kale. And if you examine the nutritional studies, you'll see that kale is far more endowed with vitamins, minerals, and beneficial phytochemicals than the other species are. It's closer to the wild progenitor. So this is a strategy that we often use to help try to recover the nutrition. And I'm not trying to claim that humans only need to worry about depth of nutrition. There's a lot that we need to be healthy that's outside the realm of food. But when it comes to the physical nutrition that our physical bodies need, this, this wrapper, if you will, that sits around our soul, these are our strategies for trying to recover some of that so that we can hopefully stave off that chronic debility that seems to come with the cultivated foods.

Is there a list or resource where people could read up more on this as far as the foods that are the closest to their Originator as opposed to ones that have been modified?

There is, but what I did is because I made a list and I— this list is published in A New Path, which is still available. It's sold out and it's still available as an ebook off my website for people that might be interested in reading this book. But a list is a recipe. And if you don't live where I live, where these are the common foods that are grown, And you live, let's say, in China or Russia or, you know, Senegal or something, you might be stuck. Although they probably grow some of the same foods there now too. But the point is, I created a list of qualities to look for. This is how minimally modified plants differ from some of the really seriously modified plants that we have had in our diets for a long time. So that you, you, in other words, I've presented the concepts of how you would find minimally modified plants. And I provided the recipe. I hate recipes. I like providing concepts. Some people just tell me what to do, tell me what to do. But you want to know the concepts so you can apply a choice that you might need to make to your personal situation.

Great. Well, we'll definitely include that.

So it's there. Super.

Okay. We'll include that in the show notes for sure, for everyone that wants to learn more about that. Arthur, regarding primitive skills, so obviously you're an instructor in some of these. What do you feel like are kind of the basic skills that everyone should know? Just, you know, things that we've lost, and there's so many here, obviously, but just kind of the basics of what you feel like everyone should know?

Right. And as you might suspect, the answer would change depending on what landscape we're on. You know, here I live in Maine, we're in a water-rich environment. And the ability to find water, you can't not find it. Whereas if you were in the Sonoran Desert, the ability to find water would be very different. Fire is a skill that is important everywhere you go, though, whether you're talking about the Sonoran Desert or the Maine forests. It's the same. We still need fire. We need it for a host of things. It isn't just to stay warm or to cook food to make it safe to consume or to sterilize water, to shape wood, to create earthenware, to create adhesives that can hold things together, to keep us safe at night, to give us light. To illuminate our world. We could keep going with the reasons that we need to have fire. And it's— remember, fire has shaped our being. We are literally children of the fire. Our short digestive tracts that we have from having consumed cooked foods from before Homo sapiens was a species. The anatomical evidence of fire goes back, and in fact artifacts go back to Homo erectus. You know, several— we're not descended from Homo erectus, but we have a common ancestor with Homo erectus. It goes way back. The anatomical evidence suggests that controlled use of fire and cooked foods may date back 1.9 million years ago. The oldest artifacts indicating controlled use of fire are at about a million years old. Keep in mind, Homo sapiens is 315,000 years old based on our current understanding. So fire, the use of fire and cooking of food predates our species. We, we learned it from the ancestors of Homo sapiens. That's always a big one. I think that our culture is really big on making really cool things to show off on social media. And I get it. I do get it because It's so awesome when you make your first bow, you make your first arrows, you make these wonderful baskets. I do love seeing them, but I also try to have an understanding of what's going on. We're pumping up the ego. And, and so what I try to tell people, it's really easy to know what you should focus on. What do you go back to industry the most for? It's food.

Mm-hmm.

We eat 3 times a day, maybe more, maybe less, depending on, you know, your household. But food is one of the number one ways that we interact with the planet. And food is a euphemism for other lives, right? So we interact with the planet by consuming these other lives. I want to get good and have a skill set and a gratitude for the food on my landscape. And sometimes that means we need to manufacture hunting weapons or nets or baskets to put plant foods in, pouches, sacks, berry hooks, you name it. We need tools. We're tool users. We don't have, you know, big claws and huge teeth and those kinds of things that some other animals have. We've lost them because we've been toolmakers for such a long time. And so we may need to make tools to acquire our food, but we do use medicine and we do use clothing. And those are things that we go back to industry over and over and over for. We live in a house. We have a communal house that I'm in right now, and then we have a smaller home that's our private home. We don't go back to industry very often for homes, though we do go back to industry for the fuel. to light and heat them often. But so I focus much less on the shelter that I have as compared to the food, the medicine, the clothing, the things that we go back to industry over and over and over for. And so for me, that's the concept that I use as a checklist. What should I focus on? And I don't want to throw, you know, disposable lighters filled with a highly refined fuel away anymore. And so we start a lot of our fires, and they're not— this isn't exclusive by any means, but we start them with friction fire methods. This is to help us stay in shape for this method, but it also means that we're not throwing away plastic.

Sure.

Not as often, at least from this particular source. And so that's another way that we would have been going back to industry over and over and over. So hopefully the point is made. I led my household's needs dictate the skill sets that we have chosen to focus on.

Got it. Arthur, what is the biggest life lesson that nature and the outdoors has taught you over the years?

Oh, these questions, they're always so hard because as soon as you answer them, you can think of 6 other things that you wish you had said.

Of course.

I do think that it does— it goes without saying that there's humility that comes from being in these awe-inspiring environments. You start recognizing you're not the focus of the universe. And I think that's an important point. Grief that has come from the interaction with and the love for this landscape that I live on. And that's important. My wife and other authors that she listens to would argue that this is something that more humans need to do. More humans need to bear this weight so it's not shared by so few. It can be overwhelming right now. And if that weight was shared amongst many, the ecocide that this planet is experiencing The disillusion of the human community, especially with COVID-19. We're terrified of other humans now because they're going to make us sick and we're going to die.

Right.

All of this stuff. These are the lessons that the wild has certainly shared with me and many others. I mean, I'm— if I could download to you, Seth, and likewise you to me, the experiences that we have had in our forests and our rivers. I mean, there's a lot of just rapture and joy that I've had in those places. And I want to give back in some way. And I want to do more than just give up my body to nourish the microbes, the fungi, and ultimately the trees that will grow on top of my body. I want existence to know that I was grateful.

That's great.

And so I need to act. And that's the other life lesson is if we don't try to do something, if we make the decision to do nothing, then the dominant culture rolls on. And so So as I mentioned, that sort of jumping to a solution from the same mindset, that's not what I'm talking about. But we can certainly do things to slow the harm. For example, we could potentially join forces with other land trusts or organizations. Obviously, many people know The Nature Conservancy, which I'm not as big on as I used to be based on changes that they have made to their philosophy of late. But it stands as an organization that many people have heard of, who you can contribute your financial wealth, what you can spare with others, to buy land that could be conserved with, with human interaction so that the industrial harm cannot roll over it. At some point in the future, we may change our mind, but at least— Yeah. Letting that land not be cut flat, turned into a housing development, flooded for another hydroelectric project, whatever it is. It's not the solution, but it provides us an opportunity to possibly enact something in the future. I'll give an example of what I'm trying to say here. One of the organizations that I work for, the Native Native Plant Trust asks me each year to find globally and regionally rare plants, and we gather the seeds or the fruits, which get desiccated and stored at ultra-cold temperatures. Now, whether this is actually valuable or not in the long run, we could have discussions about it, but we gather under very strict protocols with how much we can take from populations so that we don't impact And what's the goal is to have that genetic material saved so that we can put it back if something were to happen to those plants.

Mm-hmm.

Well, you could argue that what's likely to happen to the plants is their habitat's going to be destroyed, so you have no place to put the seeds back. And that may be, but it all becomes moot if we don't have the seeds.

Sure.

We can at least argue about where they'll get put back if something happens. But if the seeds aren't there, it's all gone. So it's a— it's what we should be doing possibly is literally altering the way we live to something softer on this landscape that would protect the wild plants. But we're not really doing that. We're going to gather the seeds. So there's this, you know, whatever. But the point is, if we have the seeds, we can argue about what we should do with them. If we have natural landscapes left, we can argue about what we can do with them. But if we develop them all and convert them all into cities and towns, there's no argument. Or for that matter, cornfields or soy fields, we can't argue about it anymore. They're gone, at least for generations to come.

Mm-hmm.

And they're not just going to grow back. There will be tremendous species loss, because all of those complex interactions that were occurring will have been broken. And what comes back is vastly different than what was there. And in fact, what comes back may no longer be stable, because ultimately, the pollinators might be gone, or the seed dispersers or the predators or what have you. We don't even have an intact ecology anymore. There is no food web. There's just food strands, right, that get left if we demolish everything. So protecting land, it's not the solution. Because the solution is ultimately going to be humans changing how they view and interact with this planet. But protecting that land from industrial harm provides us future options. And I think that's a really important thing. And it's something that we've been doing here at Wilder Waters Community.

Yeah, got it. That makes a lot of sense. And that leads me into my next question about conservation organizations and environmental organizations. Who do you feel is doing just a great job that is really focusing on these things that we've been discussing and not necessarily getting involved like in the political side or anything, but Just it's boots on the ground and just taking the bull by the horns and actually doing really good work?

Nobody. I don't think anybody's doing a good job. I think people are doing the best job that they can do, but our conservation comes with, again, all of these biases and prejudices that we have had. You look at a lot of our national parks, they were set up under the belief that there was a wilderness that was untouched by humans. And so there should be no human interaction there. And in fact, we know that there were Indigenous populations on this continent that lived in these places, that altered and shaped these places, that tended these places. And in fact, the abundance of wildlife And the plant life included that we saw was partly based on their traditional ecological knowledge. There's almost no such thing as a wilderness that was untouched by humans, but we set everything up in this way. But now, if we say, well, okay, well, let's get the human interaction going again. Well, some people say, yeah, that's me with a chainsaw cutting trees and making money. Or that's the hunter saying, "I'm doing something primal," but we're hunting with rifles, hunting at ranges using magnified optics and relying on a chemical explosion to propel a projectile. Not judging it. I use a rifle and a shotgun for some of the hunting I do as well. But but it it's not quite the same anymore. And so I'd like to I'd like to see that organization who set up conservation. Conservation can be hands-on, where humans interact in a way that's guided by ecological principles, provided we can even know what they are anymore.

Yeah.

Such that both the humans and the organisms that we use for food or fiber or material for whatever crafting we're doing, that both are benefited in the long run. And most people can't wrap their head around, if you're killing it, you can't possibly be helping it. And I don't know that we have time to get into what a myth that actually is. There's just so much, so many stories that we could tell that dispel the idea that the individual death can't be beneficial to the collective of those organisms. But again, the humans interacting with that landscape guided by traditional ecological principles. That's what I want to see. And they participate, which means sometimes they go without eating. And any hunter knows that if they were to rely solely on their hunted foods, there would be days like that. When it's the women in my house, and traditionally speaking, in most places, who would be coming back with plant foods, and they would be feeding their families at least something night after night after night until those high-quality— I say high-quality because of the nutrition that is within the flesh, the organs, the marrow, the fat of the animals— came in from the hunters. But it was the women who fed people on a daily basis.

Yeah.

To actually participate would mean to sometimes go hungry and not just step up the technological proficiency of your weapon so that you're always successful. Yeah, that makes sense. That's my vision of rewilding.

That's great. Arthur, is there a book or books that have had just a drastic impact on your life?

There are lots. You know, to get outside of an industrial society. And when I say outside of it, that's not really true, because here we are. I'm in this home. Here are the electronics that we're using. But to at least understand that it isn't necessarily all glory, that there are pretty substantial consequences to the planet and to the humans who live within this way of being. I had to read a lot of books and have an open mind to all kinds of information. And I just encourage people, be open, be open, be open. People are going to say things that might sound wacky at first. And, you know, 5 years later, it is your guiding light in your life. So just be open, listen, don't immediately attack them. Just be better at listening. But trying to get to answer your question, I mean, yeah, it was the Tom Brown Jr. books.

Hmm.

He was, he was the person who took me from somebody who wanted to shoot and hunt and catch everything to somebody who wanted to revere and live with the wildlife that is found here in this state. I want to be a good neighbor because of this person. And there's a lot of skepticism whether the stories about his friend Rick and Stalking Wolf, his mentor, are even real. I don't care. They were inspirational stories to me as a young teenager, and they changed the way I looked at the landscape. In Maine, most people view wildlife from a utilitarian or even an exploitation mindset, not one of a more naturalistic view where we're all part of the same web of life. And that's what Tom Brown Jr. did for me.

Great.

So I got to give that shout out, even though, you know, I don't know if they are the most important books to talk about in this day and age. And if you were to talk to my wife, you know, she would give a completely different answer that would be valuable. And I sometimes wish she was here with me on these podcasts because she would be, she'd be giving such a different perspective that I think people would really enjoy listening to that sometimes. But yeah, she would give a different answer and that answer would be just as valuable. Yeah, of course.

Is there a podcast that you absolutely love that you feel does a great job of explaining some of these topics that we've discussed today?

Yeah, I mean, I really like the Rewild Yourself podcast. But it doesn't exist anymore. And that's one that many people I know heard lots of great information on, got to first, quote, virtually meet me, that now have sometimes become friends that I'm with on this planet now. It's been really wonderful. I'm waiting, you know, also for this one that you're starting to really get going because I really want to start You know, listening to all of these podcasts and seeing all the other people that you ultimately interact with here, I think I think Wellness Mama is a really nice podcast. I I think a lot of people I bring that up that oh yeah, you know I was invited to be on the Wellness Mama podcast, and people are just like oh that's so awesome I love that, and they've gotten so much out of that. My friend Daniel Vitalis, as you may know, does the Wild Fit. podcast now where we get to touch on some of these topics. And I, I really like that one. It's one of my favorites. Yeah. And so those are the ones I don't listen to a lot of podcasts, literally just too busy. But when the topic comes up and I see there's a particular guest or something, I'll sometimes grab them. So I'm looking forward to where your guest list is going to go in the next year or so here.

Me too. There's a lot of evolution with it right now.

So it's—

Arthur, this has been a lot of fun today. Is there one piece of advice that you would like to leave with our audience?

I'm going to leave the piece of advice that I think my wife would most appreciate me leaving right now. And that is, don't jump to a solution.

Hmm.

Now, again, I'm not saying that you shouldn't, like we talked about, depending on the scale of what we're discussing, that you shouldn't, if you have food sensitivities, get rid of those foods in your diet, darken up your room, get some more movement in your life, start thinking about the nutrition you bring into your life, and so on and so forth. You do have to make make personal choices about how you're going to go forward. But really try to think about unraveling how you've come to this place that you are in your life and understanding that if you just say, oh, well, I'll just switch and do this, that you're likely still in the same mindset that got you there. Because ultimately, we need to look at this world and all of the beings within it. And in fact, those things that we don't give personhood, like mountains and rivers and prairies and gorges, we don't look at them in the way that our animistic ancestors would have. They're not imbued with spirit. They are spirit.

Mm-hmm.

And if you truly believe That if this tree or this rock, this particular feature was spirit, would you interact with it in the way that you do now? And so it's going to take some time to unravel how you got to that place that you are. And I do agree with her. I think let's start, let's start making our bodies stronger and healthy in the meantime. But let's really give our minds and our souls some workout before we just start jumping on the solution bandwagon. I think that is good advice. And I think she would be happy to hear that uttered here. If she were here, I think it's one of the things she would be offering. And express your emotions about the place we're in right now. Because if there's no balance between the intellect and the heart, we're just going to keep running into problems no matter what we do. So yeah, think about things longer than we do.

I think that's very good advice.

Thank you for that.

And thank you so much for being here today, Arthur. I've really enjoyed our conversation. And where can our listeners learn a little bit more about you?

Well, thank you, Seth, for inviting me to be here. It was, it was really great. And I hope that we get a chance to hunt with each other in the future.

For sure.

Yeah, I've recently done a little hunting in your part of the world. And I gotta say, I really enjoyed it. I, I have an appreciation, a fascination, and a gratitude for the feral pigs in your part of the world that typically gets overshadowed by, oh, they're causing ecological damage. And that may be true, but so are humans, and we're not running around thinking, you know, they all need to be eradicated. But anyways, I've really come to appreciate that animal and what it, what it can offer, rather than just immediately going to, oh, it's damaging, we need to get rid of it at all costs. They're just rewilding. They're doing exactly what we find ourselves doing They were, right? They're born into a life of being a feral pig and they just want to live. I'm born into the life of being an occupier of stolen land. I didn't want this. But that's where I find myself. And I just want to live a good life that— and get as close to an ecologically sound existence as I can. But where can— so anyways, this is why I want to come hunt with you. I'm available, you know, on the web, arthurhaines.com. I'm on Facebook. It's just my name. And of course, there's Wilder Waters Community and our nonprofit that is both on Facebook and has a website. There you'll interact primarily with my wife. We occasionally do classes, gatherings, and even apprenticeship programs where people come to learn about place-based skills with a focus on food and medicine and sometimes hide clothing, depending on the time of year and when people are coming or what people are coming for. They fit in with our community, which means that there's all kinds of communal chores and childcare and, you know, discussions that happen in addition to the, you know, just the glory of hunting and gathering. That's not all humans need to do to be healthy and live. But yeah, I'm easy to find. Just go with my name, Arthur Haynes, and you'll locate me.

Great. We'll definitely include those in the show notes for today's episode. Arthur, thanks so much for your time today. Have really enjoyed it. And I'll probably have to have you on for a second round here just because there's so many other topics that we could get into and dig into a lot further.

And that would be great. Yeah, I appreciate that, Seth. It'd be nice to take a topic and really dive in. I appreciate you letting me go wherever I wanted to go today, having that freedom to, to talk about some of those things that, you know, often just get glossed over. That was really nice. Thank you very much. Sure.

Thanks, Arthur.

Thanks for listening to the Rewild Gear Podcast. You can check out the show notes for today's episode at rewildgearpodcast.com. If you're ready to If you're ready to spend more time in the wild, our line of high-quality, minimalistic outdoor gear can help you do just that. Check us out at rewildgear.com.