Unlearn, Rewild
Miles Olson's Unlearn, Rewild is Thoreau-like in that the author translates philosophy into action, but Olson's book is much more readable than Walden
is. On the other hand, a modern audience will probably find Olson
more radical than Thoreau, and Olson does have a rose-tinted view of
hunter-gatherer cultures (going so far as to posit that rape was
virtually unknown in North America before European contact, which seems
like a hard fact to prove). However, even if the philosophy in the
first half of the book turns you off, I hope you'll flip to the
primitive-living skills in the second half since Olson presents each
project in such an inspiring and engaging way.
So, what is Olson's
radical philosophy? He believes we all need to "rewild" --- to
return to Stone Age technology and food-gathering methods, spending time
alone in nature to cleanse our minds and unlearn. Olson writes
that domestication is "killing the wildness." He believes that
only hunter-gatherers who depend on limited, place-based natural
resources can keep their populations small enough and their wants
ungreedy enough that they can live lightly on the earth.
Practicing what he
preaches, Olson spent years living with a group of friends in
scavenged-materials cabins on squatted land on Vancouver Island.
As I'll explain in later posts, he dumpster-dived, ate roadkill, and
harvested wild foods like dandelions. He believes that you can't
opt out of the system without breaking the rules unless you're a "lone
mountain man," and Olson clearly believes that society with other people
is one of our inherent human needs. So he recommends squatting
with friends in a marginalized environment (especially on the edges of
cities and towns).
As enticing as I find
some of the skills Olson presents, his belief system seems fundamentally
flawed. Like him, I believe that hunter-gatherer societies had a lot going for them, but the
big reason we changed over to agriculture (in my opinion) was because
our population expanded to the point where we couldn't feed ourselves as
hunter-gatherers. Unlearn, Rewild
does include a chapter on non-pharmaceutical birth control, but Olson
stops short of talking about overpopulation as the driving force of our
ecological problems. Maybe he thought that would have been too
radical?
| This post is part of our Unlearn, Rewild lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Jonathan --- Funny that we found entirely different parts of the book helpful!
Maggie --- I'm not ready to lend it out yet since there are still several projects in it I want to try. But you can look at it in person sometime if you want....