One of the key aspects of wildness is adaptation. Being able to change and adapt to different needs, in different environments, is a cornerstone of resilience. While a large part of this involves getting to know the land where you dwell, it helps to know multiple landscapes. It can teach you how to think on your toes and figure out how to do things in new ways. While rewilding leans more toward longer term ancestral living within a culture, and survival is more about meeting immediate needs in a context removed from culture, survival skills are a necessary base that culture builds on top of. In this way, people into rewilding should consider practicing survival skills in multiple environments, as a way of building the foundations of resilience. To talk with me about this today, is Tom McElroy from Wild Survival Skills.

Tom McElroy has taught Survival and Primitive Skills to more than 15,000 students worldwide over the past 23 years. During his twenties Tom spent an entire year living 'off the land'. He built and lived in a shelter made from forest material, rubbed sticks together to make fire, purified water naturally and hunted, fished and gathered his own food. Tom has taught at various schools around the world, including Tom Brown Jr.’s Tracker School. He holds a bachelor's degree in Anthropology and Geography from Rutgers University and a Master's in International Policy related to Indigenous Peoples from the University of Connecticut and has studied with indigenous people all over the world.

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Wild Skills Survival

Desert Island Survival

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I’m fond of saying, “There’s no one right way to rewild.” A friend once asked me, “Sure, Peter. But is there a wrong way?” I wanted to do something fun for this episode that I haven’t delved into much before in this space, so I invited my friend on to talk about the “wrong” ways to rewild. Don’t be fooled by the candy bar image, I love elements of contemporary society that are in some ways more aligned with ancient ways… But what I abhor is when people water down rewilding to make it less about escaping from the captivity of civilization, and instead, focus simply on making captivity more comfortable while the world burns.

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Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths in Subcultural Evolution

Rewilding, Dispatched

"Urban Hunter-Gatherers" Chapter excerpt

Cambodian genocide

After the Revolution

Ecotopia

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When some human societies made the shift from wild, procured foods to domesticated, produced foods there is a corresponding decline in the health of those people in the archaeological record. Today, the majority of people eat domesticated staples, and our health has taken a huge decline on a global scale. Wild foods are an important nutritional component to the human diet. Rewilding can mean rekindling the relationship to wild foods that humans have historically had. To talk with me about this on the Rewilding Podcast, is Monica Wilde.

Monica Wilde, known as Mo, is an ethnobotanist and research herbalist. She lives in Scotland in a self-built wooden house where she's created a wild, teaching garden on 4 organic acres, encouraging edible and medicinal species to make their home. Mo holds a Masters degree in Herbal Medicine, is a Fellow of the Linnean Society, a Member of the British Mycological Society and a Member of the Association of Foragers, which she helped to found in 2015. She has been teaching foraging and herbal medicine for several decades. Mo wrote the award-winning book The Wilderness Cure: Ancient Wisdom in a Modern World, in 2022, that imparts what she learned from her year of living on only wild foods. Afterwards she started the Wildbiome® Project - a citizen science study tracking the health changes seen on wild food diets. The next arm of the study is in April 2025.

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The Wildbiome™️ Project Results

The Wilderness Cure

The Ethnobiology of Contemporary British Foragers: Foods They Teach, Their Sources of Inspiration and Impact

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