The Rewilding Podcast w/ Peter Michael Bauer

Peter Michael Bauer

Are you looking at our society racked with disconnection, poor mental and physical health, social injustice, and the wanton destruction of the natural world and asking yourself, “What can I do?” Join experimental anthropologist Peter Michael Bauer as he converses with experts from many converging fields that help us craft cultures of resilience. Weaving together a range of topics from ecology to wilderness survival skills to permaculture, each episode deepens and expands your understanding of how to rewild yourself and your community.

  1. How to Start a Friction Fire the Communal Way w/ Ian Walton Larner & Aoife Ni Lodainn

    FEB 9

    How to Start a Friction Fire the Communal Way w/ Ian Walton Larner & Aoife Ni Lodainn

    Rewilding is a community effort. Many ancestral skills today are created with an individualist mindset, friction fire being one of them. But in older times, people worked together to create fire, understanding that community and togetherness was an important part of their survival. Such methods were known as the Neid Fire, Fire Churn, Tine Éigin, among others. Apprenticing to fire is a humbling experience, and learning to do it in tandem with others is a magical experience. To talk with me about this, I’m chatting with Ian Walton Larner and Aoife Ni Lodainn (Lowden) .  Ian is passionate about rubbing sticks and started the Sacred Hearth Friction Fire project in 2016 to share skills and knowledge. Ian's primary focus is using friction fire within ritual and holistic practices drawing upon folklore, traditions and story. Fire has been key in the evolution and development of our species and Ian feels fire deserves to be welcomed in a respectful and honouring way. Ian is based in Bristol, South West England, UK Aoife is a facilitator of ancestral & land-based courses, workshops & ceremonies. A big part of Aoife's work has been in uncovering & remembering the old traditions & relationship between people and fire in Ireland & Scotland.She is a devoted apprentice of fire, having tended sacred fires all over Ireland, the British Isles & beyond for the last 10 years. Aoife is an advocate for the healing, purifying & unifying nature of fire, how it can directly heal us, and create a space naturally for community to be formed. She is a Director & steward of the Shieling Collective, a grassroots project focused on reviving traditional skills & ancestral lifeways in the Highlands of Scotland. Show Notes: Ian's Links Sacred Hearth Friction Fire Website Sacred Hearth Friction Fire Instagram Aoife’s Links https://linktr.ee/aoifededanann?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio https://www.instagram.com/aoifededanann/ slinasinsear.com theshielingcollective.com Other Notes Hearth and Campfire Influences on Arterial Blood Pressure: Defraying the Costs of the Social Brain through Fireside Relaxation https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10429110/ Support the show

    1h 44m
  2. Running an Outdoor Youth Program w/ Neal Ritter

    JAN 26

    Running an Outdoor Youth Program w/ Neal Ritter

    Every once and a while I am happy and stunned to find an educational organization that makes me feel envious at the clear impact they are making on kids' lives, and the fun they are having along the way. For me, finding inspiration in other organizations that are keeping ancestral skills alive is an important part of running your own organization. Particularly, those that serve the next generation. In this episode I chat with Neal Ritter, a co-founder of the Laughing Coyote Project, a non-profit teaching earthskills in Colorado since 2007. Neal is happily a generalist, aiming to be above average in as many skills as possible. He is known for playing capture the flag with exuberance, and laughing loudly. Most importantly, he lives with his wife and two kids (who homeschool) on a twenty acre homestead they have the privilege of caretaking. Notes: Laughing Coyote Project Boulder Outdoor Survival School Support the show

    1h 19m
  3. Solar Punk and Rewilding w/ Andrew Sage

    11/17/2025

    Solar Punk and Rewilding w/ Andrew Sage

    Rewilding reconnects people to a regenerative relationship with the lands where we dwell. Many people live lives that are dramatically linked to technological modernity. A return to a less technologically dependent life is not possible (for them). Solar Punk offers a potential “transition” type of living that could help soften the blow of a collapsing industrial technological system–or may even represent a kind of sustainable futurism. To talk with me today about this is Andrew Sage.  Andrew is a passionate writer, artist, and YouTuber hailing from the vibrant island nation of Trinidad & Tobago. As an ardent anarchist and firm believer in power to the people, Andrew has dedicated his efforts to invigorating imaginations and encouraging people to create a better world in the shell of the old. Notes: Andrew’s YouTube Andrew’s Website The Problem with Civilisation We Need To Be More Tech Critical Annual North American Rewilding Conference Beyond Civilization by Daniel Quinn Martin Prechtel Interview Peter Gelderloos; We have all the solutions Support the show

    1h 3m
  4. Am I Rewilder Enough? w/ Sheila Henson

    07/07/2025

    Am I Rewilder Enough? w/ Sheila Henson

    Am I Rewilder Enough? w/ Sheila Henson Do you feel like a poseur when it comes to rewilding? Do you have guilty pleasures you can’t give up? Are you too overwhelmed to start rewilding? You’re not alone. In this episode I chat with my friend and Rewild Portland board member Sheila Henson about the judgments we face from others and (more often) ourselves that we perennially face in rewilding. From how we dress to our day to day choices, shame, guilt, and confusion can paralyze us or drive us away from going deeper into rewilding. But rewilding isn’t just the way you look, or what you do; it’s the stories we tell ourselves about the world and our place in it. How can we break the spell of purity and fundamentalism as we try to create more regenerative ways to live? Listen in to hear what Sheila and I think about this important topic. Sheila Bio: Sheila received her BA in History and an MA in Education, spent twelve years as a behavioral respite worker for children with special needs, working for many of those years at the Serendipity Center in Portland. Today she is an ADHD Coach, and is a well known and respected educator on tiktok. The drive to understand how to be kind, collaborative, and restorative within our social and ecological communities led her to Rewild Portland, where she now serves on the board of directors, heading up our transformative justice committee. Sheila and I also co-teach a Rewilding Your Health class through Rewild Portland. Show Notes: Sheila’s Website Sheila’s TikTok Sheila’s Instagram -- Camilla Power’s Book The Evolution of Culture Guerrillas in the Industrial Jungle: Radicalism's Primitive and Industrial Rhetoric by Ursula McTaggart Depression & Rewilding w/ Sheila Henson In 'Dopamine Nation,' Overabundance Keeps Us Craving More Support the show

    1h 5m
  5. How Hunter-Gatherers Learn w/ Dr. Gul Deniz Salali

    05/05/2025

    How Hunter-Gatherers Learn w/ Dr. Gul Deniz Salali

    For millions of years, and in some places still today, hunter-gatherers raise competent and capable children. They do this while navigating challenging environments, with predators, dangerous tools, and most notably: without any school. Contemporary societies have created learning environments that are a mismatch with the expectations of our genetic evolution: we weren’t meant to sit in boxes all day. The system of compulsory education that spans the globe and shapes our perception of education was designed in the 1700’s specifically to create dutiful factory workers for rising nationalism. They were not designed based on human evolution or human needs, but the needs of capitalist entrepreneurs looking to increase obedience and efficient producers of wealth for them. So then, if not in schools, how are we best adapted to learn? What does learning look like in societies without schools? If hunter-gatherers represent the way of life most closely to that which humans evolved in, what do they do to educate their children and prepare them for life as an adult? What can we learn about ourselves by studying these societies? To talk with me about this topic is Dr. Gul Deniz Salali. Dr. Salali is a PhD in Evolutionary Anthropology. Since 2013, she has been conducting anthropological fieldwork with the Mbendjele BaYaka hunter-gatherers in the Congo rainforest, studying their social learning, cooperative childcare practices, and the cultural evolution of their plant knowledge. Her research projects explore the learning of ecological knowledge, childhood and childcare, and cultural evolution in hunter-gatherer communities. Notes: Dr. Gul Deniz Salali Website Raising Tomorrow- BaYaka Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods and Global Perspectives on Child Development Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta Hunt, Gather, Parent Making by Tim Ingold Mothers and Others by Sarah Hrdy Support the show

    1h 15m
  6. Maintaining Peaceful Societies w/ Douglas Fry

    04/07/2025

    Maintaining Peaceful Societies w/ Douglas Fry

    For millions of years, evidence suggests that humans lived in relatively equal societies, where food acquisition and child raising were shared activities among community members both men and women, together. It is apparent that our environments of evolutionary adaptation, selected for humans with evermore prosocial traits. Domination and competition were minimized in favor of collaboration and partnerships of mutual aid. The idea that any human was superior to another would have been an absurdity. Contemporary forager societies also exhibit collective regulation of resources and power, diminishing anyone who may try to take more than their fair share or exhibit dominance over others. Only within that last 10,000 years or so, does the evidence show that a small number of societies turned to systems of domination, who then conquered the world and created hierarchies of rank, class, and everything else. Rewilding is an endeavor to live more closely to how we evolved to live, and in order to do so we must dismantle the mismatched environment that these dominating societies have created. How and when did this switch to domination happen, why did it happen, and is it possible to work our way back to egalitarianism? These are central questions to the rewilding movement, and they also happen to be the life’s work of anthropologist Douglas Fry, who has come on the podcast to discuss this with me.  Douglas P. Fry is a researcher at AC4 at Columbia University and Prof Emeritus at University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He earned his doctorate in anthropology from Indiana University in 1986. Dr. Fry has written extensively on aggression, conflict resolution, and war and peace. He is currently researching how clusters of neighboring societies, peace systems, manage to live without war. He has authored countless academic journal articles on the subjects as has written many books, such as Beyond War and The Human Potential for Peace, as well as serving as co-editor of Keeping the Peace: Conflict Resolution and Peaceful Societies Around the World and Cultural Variation in Conflict Resolution: Alternatives to Violence. His most recent book, Nurturing Our Humanity, is co-authored with Riane Eisler. Eisler and Fry argue that the path to human survival and well-being in the 21st century hinges on our human capacities to cooperate and promote social equality, including gender equality. Notes: Douglas Fry UNC Greensboro Faculty Page Douglas Fry @ Research Gate Nurturing Our Humanity at Bookshop.org Sustaining Peace Project Societies within peace systems avoid war and build positive intergroup relationships Mentions: Brian Ferguson’s “Pinker’s List: Exaggerating Prehistoric Mortality” The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler Hierarchy in the Forest by Christopher Boehm Bringing Down a Dictator Blueprint for Revolution Global Nonviolent Action Database Why Civil Resistance Works by Erica Chenoweth Support the show

    1h 36m
  7. Rekindling Ancestral Lifeways in Ireland w/ Lucy O’Hagan

    03/10/2025

    Rekindling Ancestral Lifeways in Ireland w/ Lucy O’Hagan

    Creating ancestral skills communities is central to rewilding. We need people sharing skills together, we need people tending land together. These communities don’t form over night. It takes time to build them. I spoke with Lucy O’Hagan in February of 2020, in one of my first episodes of the Rewilding Podcast. Now it’s February of 2025 and a lot has changed in the last five years. Their community has grown, our friendship has deepened, and I continue to be deeply inspired by their work. Last August I traveled to Ireland to attend the first ancestral skills gathering on the island, facilitated by Lucy through their organization, Wild Awake Ireland. It was a life-changing experience for me, which was something I really didn’t expect. If you haven’t listened to our first podcast together, I would recommend going back and listening to it before you listen to this one. In this episode, I hope to pick up the conversation from where we left off five years ago, ask Lucy to share insights from the last five years of building a rewilding community in Ireland, and share my own stories of visiting Ireland. NOTES: The Rewilding Podcast, Episode 4: Complex Contexts w/ Lucy O'Hagan Wild Awake Ireland Language Movement: an dream dearg Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape Wisdom Sits in Places Support the show

    1h 23m
  8. Surviving Multiple Environments w/ Tom McElroy

    02/03/2025

    Surviving Multiple Environments w/ Tom McElroy

    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. Notes: Instagram YouTube Wild Skills Survival Desert Island Survival Support the show

    1h 10m
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4.9
out of 5
81 Ratings

About

Are you looking at our society racked with disconnection, poor mental and physical health, social injustice, and the wanton destruction of the natural world and asking yourself, “What can I do?” Join experimental anthropologist Peter Michael Bauer as he converses with experts from many converging fields that help us craft cultures of resilience. Weaving together a range of topics from ecology to wilderness survival skills to permaculture, each episode deepens and expands your understanding of how to rewild yourself and your community.

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