Hey Folks,

I’ll be archiving this site soon and moving on to Rewild Portland. Please subscribe to the new blog at www.rewildportland.com/blog. Thanks for reading all these years.

Hey Folks, I’m doing a fundraiser for my non-profit Rewild Portland. Check out the video and please donate!

[ http://player.vimeo.com/video/35235942?title=0

DONATE HERE

Hey Folks,

It’s been quiet around my site over the last year. I’ve been working a lot, but also building my non-profit Rewild Portland. To see all the cool stuff we’ve done, follow our blog here:

http://www.rewildportland.com/blog/

Hey yall,

I’ve got a bunch of copies of my book that I want to get out of my life. I’m selling them for $5 a pop plus shipping.

You can read about my book here.

Buy it for only $5 here:

Hey folks,

Our awesome forum www.rewild.info is moving and getting a face lift. All the content is still there, so don’t worry. Check out the new site:

www.rewildportland.com/Conversations

I have had little time to do much these days with the amount of time that I work. Three raccoon hides have sat in my garage for months and months waiting for the membrane-scraping step in the hide tanning process. I noticed them in the garage the other day and saw something amazing.

It appears as though the ants in my garage are eating away the membrane layer and leaving behind the skin. Take a closer look:

Do you know what this means? It means I won’t have to do the work! Everyone hates trying to scrape the membrane off a raccoons back. If the ants do this, it will save me a tremendous amount of time. It also makes me wonder how the hide will turn out after I tan it. Looking at these ants do their thing, it appears they are taking off exactly the right amount of membrane and not getting into the skin at all. This may not be the case. They may eat their way through. But either way, I’ll learn a valuable lesson. Anyone else used ants or bugs or other living things to do this kind of work?

A while back my friend Maggie asked me to teach her a bit about the ins and outs of eatin’ roadkill. We went on a fun adventure and found a squirrel which she then skinned, gutted, cooked and ate. She wrote a very nice and funny article. Go out and pick up issue #15 of Meat Paper.

http://www.meatpaper.com/

Hey folks. It’s been a couple years since I updated my wordpress software. This site will be experiencing some tech problems for a little while please bear with me.

Windshield smashed. Tires slashed. “SNITCH” written on the side of the car. No insurance coverage. Had to get a rental car to make it to LA in time for my reading. If you feel inspired to help me out, please donate through paypal by clicking on the tip jar link to the right of this post. Thanks to all the generous people who have already contributed!

Hey there friends,

Thanks so much for all your help with the tour and making it possible. I may update this page if things shift around a bit, so please be patient and check back for changes. Here are the following stops that I plan to make:

Bellingham, WA

Monday June 20, 2011 from 7:30pm to 9pm
Fertile Ground is hosting my tour stop in Bellingham.
The Old Foundry
100 E. Maple St.
Bellingham, WA
Facebook Event Page (please share it!)

Seattle More Bellingham, WA!

TBA
Tuesday June 21st, 2011
I’ll be doing an English Ivy pull and basket making skill-share.

Olympia, WA

Wednesday June 22nd, 2011 3pm-5pm
Last Word Books
211 4th Avenue East
Olympia, WA 98501
Facebook Event Page (please share it!)

Eugene, OR

Friday, June 24th 6pm-9pm
Maitreya EcoVillage
1641 West Broadway
Eugene OR
Facebook Event Page (Stay Tuned!)

Oakland, CA

Saturday, June 25th
11am-5pm Skill Share
6pm-11pm Reading and Barnyard Dance
Place for Sustainable Living
1121 64th Street
Oakland CA, 94608
Facebook Event Page (please share it!)

Los Angeles, CA

Monday June 27th 5pm-7pm
Stories
1716 West Sunset Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90026-3225
Facebook Event Page (Stay tuned!)

Santa Barbara, CA

Tuesday June 28th, 3pm-6pm
Rocky Nook Park
610 Mission Canyon Road
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
Facebook Event Page (please share it!)

Portland, OR

Saturday July 2nd
Rewild Camp
Join the Rewild Portland mailing list to find out where!
Facebook Page (please share it!)

Hey Yall,

I don’t know if you have noticed it or not, but Rewild Portland’s “Rewild Camp” has been off the hizzy lately (that means very fun and populated with cool skillz, people, food, music and sharing)! Check out all the crazy pics of our adventures over at our Blog: www.rewildportland.com/blog

 

A picture says a thousand words.

Hey friends,

I will be going on my book tour in mid-late June and I need your help. I’ll be doing readings in:

Monday June 20th Bellingham

Tuesday June 21st Seattle

Wednesday June 22nd Olympia

Thursday June 23rd Portland

Friday June 24th Eugene

Saturday June 25th Arcata or Ashland (need help here!)

Sunday June 26th San Francisco

Monday June 27th Santa Cruz

Tuesday June 28th Los Angeles

Wednesday June 29th Santa Barbara?

I need help securing venues and with promotion. I have my travel expenses covered through the kickstarter, this includes food and gas. I’ll be staying with friends in each city. If you have any connections with local book shops or colleges, newspapers or radio shows or local groups that can help promote the event please let me know! Thanks for all your support!

A commenter on my blog once wrote, “I really appreciate the points you’re trying to make, but the muddled language is getting in the way.” A reviewer of my book said, “Ultimately, I would have preferred a more consistent, coherent assessment of the potential roles of rewilding in overcoming the horrors of civilization. The topic is too important to get lost in errors and F-bombs. Perhaps Scout should have stayed in school a little longer, if only to polish his writing skills.” While another had this to say, “My final criticism is with the use of offensive language, as demonstrated above: I can deal with any amount of “fuckâ€Âs in an appropriate context, but sometimes the author uses the word so much that its power as a sharp linguistic tool is blunted, almost to the point of parody. I also winced at the use of the word ‘Whitey’ with reference to light-skinned people: there’s really no need for that.”

I just don’t get this fucking obsession with proper whitey-English literacy bullshit.

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Hey Friends,

Time is running out for my kickstarter. I’d love to go on a book tour, but unless I can raise enough, I won’t be able to go. Please help out by making a pledge. I have some awesome rewards for pledges, so you’ll be getting cool shit too. Thanks for all your help so far!

Click Here to Pledge

Scout

That’s how my friend Drew described his project to me, of interviewing people on his website. I loved the premise and so we had a conversation. Check out his interview with me here:

http://www.mohdi.com/2011/03/08/urban-scout-conversations/

Pledge $20 or more to my book tour

If you pledge this amount, you enter a raffle of which 3 winners will give me a topic to write a 400 word essay on “Whatever-you-want vs. Rewilding.” This will be published on my blog www.urbanscout.org AND will be printed in Rewild or Die volume II due out in 2012!

Hey there friends. In order for me to go on a west coast book tour I’ve got to raise $5,000. I’m using the Kickstarter online fundraising platform for artists. The way Kickstarter works is simple: offer rewards as incentives for people to pledge money to your project. If you don’t raise all of the money you set out to raise in the time frame you gave yourself, you don’t get funded.

This is important: if I don’t raise $5,000 by March 31st, I will not be going on a book tour any time soon. This is why I need your help! I’ve got some pretty amazing rewards so it’s not like you’re not getting some cool shit out of it yourself. Check it out here:

[ https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/13979723/urban-scouts-book-tour/widget/video.html ]

Check out this new blog I wrote over at www.rewildpdx.com.

I have opinions, sure. And yeah, I talk about them. A lot. But mostly with close friends and rarely do I debate them. I’ve never liked debate. The emotional stakes in debate rest way too high for my enjoyment. Debate does not imply a conversation where two sides try to find a middle ground, or where a curious open-minded person learns something new, but rather how each side can continuously argue back and forth trying to prove the other person wrong. If someone concedes to the other, it means they admit to their “wrongness”. The feelings of shame and embarrassment that come with “wrongness” emotionally prevent people from actually coming to terms with another. To debate means to refuse acceptance.

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A while back an anonymous person mailed me a giant rock with an insulting remark attached to it. I interpreted it as a form of intimidation and I called the police. They sped over to my house, took finger prints off the rock, crime scene photos, interviewed all of my neighbors and roommates, interrogated the Fedex employees, ran the prints through the database, enhanced the security video feed to get a perfect image of the perps face and put an APB out across America. They apprehended the suspect almost instantaneously and imprisoned them for the rest of eternity, justice served.

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My fatigue has swelled to an insane amount in the last couple months, with headaches and nightmares too. I’ve spent most of my time in a mental battle trying to fight my way out of the brain fog… to no avail. I change diet, I change supplements, I change exercise routines, sleep schedule, and nothing much changes. Maybe I do have Raccoon Roundworm after all! Wouldn’t it be nice if I had health insurance and could get a spinal tap so I could find out that I have an incurable disease that will kill me in a couple months to a couple years? That would be awesome. Perhaps I should be thankful I don’t have health insurance: ignorance is bliss right? Wrong! Not when it’s ignorance of what is making you feel like shit. Enough doom and gloom and paranoid hypochondria… let’s talk about all the fun I’ve been having!

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOH0VfaNXqA

My friends Eugene and Shusli (along with Red Willow) did a pilot for their new radio show Tillicum Wawa on KBOO and in it they interviewed me and my friend Eric Bernando about our Chinuk Wawa classes. We talk a bit at the begining and more later on. Also on the show is Robert Miller, a lawyer and law professor at Lewis and Clark College, author of “America, Discovered and Conquered.” Listen to the podcast here:

http://kboo.fm/node/24987 

After listening, please send an e-mail Chris Merrick, KBOO’S program director and let him know that it was awesome!
program@kboo.org

Now that I’ve decided to make my living from teaching rewilding skills, I find myself in a conundrum. How much money do I charge for my classes? Can you really put a price on information that everyone needs in order to save the planet and live a good life? As it turns out I have found that, yes, you can.

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With the creation of my rewilding non-profit, I have delved back into the curriculum development with my best friend Willem that we began oh-so-many years back when we first dreamed up the the rewilding immersion program. Only this time, we come armed with one of the most powerful learning tools ever created: the Fluency Hunting Game. What the heck does Fluency Hunting Game mean? Well, the fluency hunting game also goes by the name “Where Are Your Keys?”â„¢, but developed under that title as a way of rapidly learning language. We’ve taken it out of the context of language and broadened it to any skill. In a sense, all skills have a language of their own.

The list of skills that we have started building Fluency Hunting Games with already looks quite daunting: American Sign Language, improvisational acting, disguises, Western boxing, Kali stick fighting, qigong, Old Time Music, basketry, archery, leather-work, hunting, trapping, wild-crafting, foraging, Agile team skills, fire ecology, pottery, animal tracking, flint-knapping, hide-tanning, writing and solving riddles, rewilding philosophy, rewilding anthropology, seeking our ancestral histories, creating memory palaces for photographic memories… the list goes on and on.

We have given ourselves  a two year window to build hype, focus on developing Fluency Hunting Games around all of these skills and to give people plenty of time to think about the program. I will devote more time to writing and shooting video to explain and show what our program can do for you and for the planet. This means my time here at this site will greatly decrease. To stay up to date on the progress of our program, and to continue to read more of what I think about rewilding, tune into our new website: www.rewildportland.com

Poseur Hipster Douchebag or Inner-Dimensional Reptilian Shape-Shifter?

I’ve had a couple people ask me lately if I “believe in aliens”. This subject used to fascinate me as a child. I read all about UFO’s, exhausting the school library and moving onto the public library. I even spotted a few of them hovering above my elementary school. I had a passion for anything paranormal. Later in life that translated more to the spiritual side and towards animism. These days I hardly think about aliens, so when someone asked me if I believed in them I had to think about it for a second.

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I finally broke down and started my business for teaching rewilding. We offer a free skill-share every Sunday (Rewild Camp) and will be starting up Saturday workshops that will cost a little cash and are developing some longer term programs to start next year. We are a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization operating as a subsidiary of Mythmedia. Check out more at www.rewildportland.com and join our mailing list to hear about when/where Rewild Camp is going on each week, and also info about our upcoming workshops.

Thursday September 9th in Bend, OR. I will be speaking about tending the wild and rewilding at the Real Food and Sustainability Conference, opening for Lierre Keith and later sitting on a panel. Check out the website here:

http://realfoodandresistance.wordpress.com/

—

Wednesday September 15th, Portland OR. I’ll be doing a book reading at Reading Frenzy. ” Urban Scout will read from his book, teach a few rewilding tricks (like fire-by-friction, natural cordage, coiling baskets and mind-blowing sensory expansion), and wrap things up with a Q&A.”

http://www.readingfrenzy.com/

This week I made a bone awl for my friend Leslie who lives in North Carolina. I also worked on sharpening my knives but I can’t seem to get a super sharp edge no matter how many times I run the knife along the sharpener, nor the angle that I hold the knife. I don’t understand why I can’t get these effing knives sharp. It would make sense if the knives themselves couldn’t hold an edge because of shitty forging, but I’ve tried even my best knives. Why can’t I get it right?!?

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(Urban Scout circa 2001)

I recently finished reading Muses, Madmen and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination. I really enjoyed this book. Both because it gave me a broader understanding of hearing voices, but also because it reminded me of so many experiences in my own life of hearing things.

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The internet feels rather lonely for a philosophical rewilder at the moment. The redirection of rewilding heavy hitters Jason Godesky and Willem Larsen into personal rewilding projects has seen a huge wealth of philosophy and the marketing of rewilding diminish. Rewild.info sits rather inactive even after switching back to its older, more familiar face. While in real life I see Willem everyday and have rewild camp every Sunday… I have to say life online feels rather lonely.

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Gabe, a commenter on my blog, asked me this:

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In the past couple of weeks I killed my first mammals. One, a rat I trapped without watching die, which felt strange and distant. For a deeper understanding of killing, I killed a rabbit at a rabbit slaughtering and butchering class this last week. I’ve often written about how I don’t see a difference in the killing of plants or animals. That both deserve equal respect. However, killing these mammals both changed and solidified my emotional experience and logical interpretation of killing.

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I missed a week of my Weekly Laundry list due to Echoes in Time and other busy things in my schedule, such as my training with the Portland Fruit Tree Project. You heard right, I signed up for their Harvest Leader position this year, which means I get to meet new people, learn a ton of stuff about trees, get free fruit, and help out those in need. Pretty awesome!

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My mullet started to get out of hand, and I felt that the time had come to cut it off. As my hair dresser (yes, I enjoy the experience of other people cutting my hair) cut it she jokingly asked me if I wanted to save a bit of it for magic or something. I remembered that I’ve wanted to make a paintbrush for making Rewild Camp name tags for some time now, and so I said “YES!”

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This week at Echoes in Time my friend David and I led a workshop on bark-tanning. I also played an amazing game of WAYK Chinook Jargon. Aside from the classes I spent most of the time sleeping off a severe hangover in my tent. A hangover due to to drinking too much whiskey one night early in the week with my ex-girlfriend Emily: Tracker of Plants (the artist formerly known as Penny Scout), in an attempt to reconcile the bad blood between us. Phew! What a week.

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This week I had to work a lot so I missed out on a lot of chances to work on my list. My soaking pool turned into a mosquito incubation chamber and we had to temporarily dismantle it. Oh man, did it think stink underneath the tarp! Rotting grass smells terrible. I also felt pretty sick after working all week, so I justified watching season 2 of Dexter, and made some hide glue. I also forgot how much I know about flint-knapping as I decided to impart what I do know to some of my peeps at rewild camp.

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I struggle with alcoholism. I sometimes have the urge to get completely fucked up drunk. At one time in my life I smoked more than half a pack of cigarettes a day. I sometimes binge on television shows and don’t leave the house for days, just watching entire seasons without so much as stepping out of my bedroom to take a piss or even eat a meal. I do this also with video games. I check my facebook way too much, even when I know I probably don’t have any reason to. Okay, so I’ll admit it. I have an addiction to certain aspects of civilization.

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I’ve volunteered at Echoes in Time for about 5 years now and this year I’ve decided to teach a few classes. I will do some awareness type games, a “Where Are Your Keys” Chinuk Wawa class, American Sign Language Animal Tracking class, bow-drill, and maybe some other stuff I can’t remember. Echoes presents one of the most cost effective ways of learning these skills and provides a place for social networking to make rewilding friends such as myself!

When: July 19-23, 2010
Where: Willamette Mission State Park just north of Salem, Oregon
Week Cost: $128/adult $68/children 6-13
Contact: www.echoes-in-time.com

A few years ago a local filmmaker made this short about echoes. I have a cameo!

[youtube t473l-Nz0ps]

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I’ve taken a few basket classes now, and of all the twining basketry books I think the two pictured above have the best information for newbies; great pictures and illustrations.  So many books on basketry read like mathematic equations; lots and lots of strange vocabulary with no accompanying photographs or drawings. Even so, I think I may have a WAYK “technique: dictionary addiction” but with field guides and how-to manuals. I looked in the book once, instead of looking at a previously made basket, and it fucked me up.

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Inevitably those-who-rewild will find themselves attacked as hypocrites by those who don’t understand rewilding: “If you hate civilization so much, why don’t you go live in the woods?” “You hate technology, but there you sit waiting for people to comment on your latest facebook status update.” “You want to live like a hunter-gatherer but you buy all your food at the grocery store!” “You talk shit on mainstream media, but you watch television!” And on, and on and on.

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