The title of this post is the same as the title of this video by Bauer (who I am going to just start calling PMB going forward).

His YT channel has been around for at least 16 years and he has about 750 subscribers.

This video is three or four years old and has less than 700 views.

These numbers are criminally low in light of the usefulness of his work. But that offers a certain twisted hope, for myself. I consider the guy an important thinker and even something of a role model, but if even he can be saying such meaningful things without achieving a mass audience, then maybe there’s nothing wrong with me after all. (Something like that.)

The first part of the video goes over what rewilding is from a few different perspectives, including the etymological. To be wild is to be willed. To be domesticated is to be dominated, and have one’s will tamed or even broken, as with a horse. Incredibly distasteful though it may be, you and I live brokeback lives, mainly because it’s much more comfortable and safe to be a slave, one way or another, to the oligarchs and to some notion of what it means to be … Civilized.

On this side of the glass, we live as beloved lap cats, while on the other side of the sliding door, out on the concrete inches away, there are free cats shivering, grateful for handouts but not grateful enough to surrender their wildness. (Just as I am grateful, to my Patreons, it occurs to me suddenly … )

***

This section is my paraphrased musing on the part of the video that starts here

What is Civilization?

Civilizations require:

–Writing, and math, both essentially evolved from methods of keeping track of how much grain and agricultural surplus is stored
(and whose Property it is; thus, onto money and economics and … )

–“Complex Political Structure … which is basically a way of whitewashing slavery, and hierarchy” (This is where centralized wealth and the unequal stratification into classes like peasant and noble come into the picture, and so on into self-justifying meritocracies of the educated and uneducated, the virtuous hardworking and the lazy losers, the leaders and the followers, et cetera)

Collapse (or Fall of Empire) occurs when people abandon civilization for something they feel is more advantageous, and begin to reconsider, for whatever reason, the bad bargain of Domestication, and instead adopt a more willed, wild, and autonomous way of living.

Otherwise known as Anarchy, or just Something Better.

To rewild is to abandon civilization, choosing not to lead, or follow, but to instead get the hell out of the way.

***

Bauer points out that there was no such thing as a ‘weed’, until the agriculturalists began to wage war on native ecosystems by struggling to convert them into neatly plowed and profitable fields.

In my own earliest writings on the subject, performed for a graduate class in Nature Writing, I made the similar point that our textbook on the subject only began with essays from the 1600s, with writers you’ve never heard of, and then moved from there to Thoreau and on up to Bill McKibben.

I postulated that the concept of Nature itself did not exist until that time. Before feudal estates and then the Industrial Revolution took hold of us like a mental illness, most everything was Nature, so there wasn’t any need for the word. Only after Anti-Nature grew and spread out of control did we need to point and say: Look, over there, at the remnant of unspoiled parts. Let’s call it Nature then. A Wilderness, a wildness, a National Forest or National Park, a posted Recreation site, a ‘game reserve’, a designated birdwatching area, or some wasteland that no one can figure out how to profitably exploit, not even with cows.

Now, Nature is little more than a trope used to sell hiking boots, Subarus, promises about freedom …

And, we pray, lots and lots of coffee and t-shirts besides, well and reverently aware of the paradox and the flaws in consistency without ever falling off, Dear Goddess, into full hypocrisy and greed.

Amen.