Why we rewild.

Yellowstone Park during a forest fire in 2018

Humanity has existed as Homo Sapiens for around 300,000 years. The agricultural revolution happened about 10,000 years ago. (This is a bit of a contentious point. Different parts of the world adopted agriculture in different ways, and at different times.) That means that for 97% of human history all of us were hunter gatherers, who lived in symbiotic balance with nature. Humans were largely egalitarian, meaning everyone was roughly equal. We migrated with the changing seasons to follow the food.

When the use of sedentary agriculture began to be used widespread across cultures and time zones, almost immediately hierarchy began to form. This told people those at the top have the power and control the food, while those at the bottom due what they're told, or they don't eat.

This caused conflict and violence. This is where we see the first iteration of wealth. The people who had this wealth, wanted to keep it and were willing to use violence to achieve that goal.

The industrial revolution started in about 1760 and lasted nearly 100 hundred years. It was during this time that robber barons were beginning to show up. Folks like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan. These were people who were willing to kill and terrorize people in order to steal their land, resources, or labor. In less than 200 years Capitalists have nearly destroyed the entire planet. By putting profit above life, biodiversity has suffered a near fatal blow. Loss of Wild habitat is causing extinction after extinction. Not to mention the complete domestication of humans. We have lost our connection to the natural world. We have lost our ancestral skills and knowledge. We now exist on the knifes edge of survival.

This is where Rewilding comes in. We cannot go back, but we can take our collective knowledge and move forward in a sustainable way to embraces humanity as part of nature, not its' captor.