Living in Nature - Inspirations and Vision
Over the years - in fact since I was at least 19 - I have grown a fascination, a desire, a curiosity and I think a goal to live in nature.
The wording “Living in Nature” is the best I’ve found to date. As much as living in nature feels like a simple concept to present, there are a lot of things that already exist in relation to that coexistence with nature, that Living in Nature is not.
Humans living in nature.
Survival:
I started learning the skills (or collection of skills) of Living in Nature by reading survival books. Purifying water with sand and charcoal, lighting a fire with sticks, all of that felt very right. However using a car as a shelter in a snowstorm or lighting a fire by mixing sugar and potassium permanganate felt useful, but not the thing that made me feel alive.
To this date I believe many people have an accession of Living in Nature via the way of survival. Surviving is a bleak goal. Living in Nature equates to thriving in serenity and relationship with the land. The goal is not to not die. The goal is to live.
Homesteading:
Homesteading may be the best compromise between living in nature and not renouncing the comfort of modern life. Living a comfortable home with a few acres around, it could be it. Chopping wood in the morning, feeding the horses in the afternoon and watching Netflix in the evening. That seems like a comfortable life I could want.
As soon as the question of living in nature is posed, an auxiliary question arises: that of technological reversal. It is hard to create a computer made out of bamboos. With that come the questions: how far back do we want to go? And a similar question which in fact may be entirely different: what degree of comfort do we want to reach? Which means what degree of effort? Which means where do we stop the technological reversal?
For homesteading, there is a natural comfortable XVI-XIXth century vibe that emerges naturally. Candle-lit evenings, horse-powered wood mills. The word homesteading has its roots in the U.S.A. so living like a cowboy, essentially.
Permaculture:
The XX-XXIst centuries have seen the rise and the limits of modern agriculture and its inability for the ecosystem to regenerate naturally. Green deserts and monocultures have been frowned upon to the benefit of systems regenerating the ecosystem such as permaculture and hugelculture.
The aim is to grow food and animals as efficiently as possible, as naturally as possible, on a small surface, allowing the ecosystem to do most of the work while we adjust the flows and growth.
Permaculture is appealing for its potential to be adopted by a large fraction of suburbans, favouring short circuits and intelligent designs. “Gardening for lazy people” as my teacher Penny Pyett used to say.
I’m all on board with permaculture and even received an accreditation in permaculture training. After a while, I wondered: what is the peak of the permaculture experience? The answer that came to me: going for a stroll every morning basket in hand, collecting fruits and veggies as they grow, but also feeding ourselves straight from the ecosystem we created for the sheer pleasure of it. Oh, so the goal is the pleasure of feeding from the ecosystem directly? That sounds like foraging!
Living in an Indigenous tribe:
As far as I understand, Australian Aboriginal people (at least on the East coast) were not solely hunter-gatherers. In Dark Emu, elder Bruce Pascoe explains why they are a people who also had recourse to agriculture. The thing is, if today agriculture has been associated with the povertisations of soils and ecosystems, Australian Aboriginal people were doing the exact opposite of that: ecosystem enhacements. I think about it as practising permaculture extensively, not on a small plot of land, but on the size of a territory. Rather than the smart initial design in permaculture, the ecosystem is replenished with a constant practice of tweaking the existing ecosystem. Such practices and ways of sustenance immediately call upon a key concept: custodianship. They who tread upon their territory shall be the custodians of this territory, and help make it thrive by their action. We hear this often in quotes like “If you care for Country, Country will care for you”. The immediate wisdom that resonates in these words is soothing and seducing.
So then, I should just go live with one or more Indigenous communities around the world who still live a traditional lifestyle? From a learning standpoint (the Skill is an important question too) that sounds like a wonderful experience - and I am still pondering whether it is something I should experience myself. Is this sustainable in the long run? It depends. Would the community have outsiders become insiders after a long enough time? Is it possible to live in a culture that is not ours without the prospect of reverting back to our original culture at some stage or in some way? I feel a great curiosity about those whitefellas who fled their condition soon after Australia’s invasion and went to live with Aboriginal people. We find similar stories in the USA and pioneers going to live amongst America's First Nations. The lifestyle is promising. The question of culture arises.
Living like a hermit:
What about living in nature while following this same lifestyle described above, but as a hermit? No. I am an extrovert. Humans have learned to become social to reduce the quantity of effort required to fulfil their needs. Not for me.
Human Rewilding:
The philosophy and practice of restoring ecosystems to their natural balance (a debatable concept) is known as Rewilding. It is a fairly recent stream of thoughts that aims to reinforce ecosystems by taking humans out of the equation and restoring the trophic chains within the ecosystem, for example by re-introducing predator species.
In the (often Indigenous) optic that humans are part of the natural world, and not separate from it (an intrinsic distinction where humans put themselves in the centre and nature around them is inscribed in the word “environment” - to which I prefer the term “ecosystem” - which is integrative and relational in what it evokes), one species that can be re-introduced in ecosystems are humans. Which means that humans need to relearn to live in nature (ecosystem).
Living in nature subscribes to the idea that humans live in the ecosystem. Ecosystem means “the home system”. Unfortunately, humans do not live in the ecosystem anymore, nor do they (by semantics) live in the environment. They live in a domesticated system and that system we can call “the anthroposystem”.
Living in Nature: what do we keep?
From Survival, Living in Nature retains that living in the ecosystem requires skills. From homesteading that there can maybe exist an anthroposystem that is not so aggressive and discting from the environment. From Permaculture that intelligent design helps ecosystems grow. From the Indigenous perspective, many things: the idea of custodianship, the everpresent care for the ecosystem and reciprocally the everpresent abundance of resources from the ecosystem (Age de pierre, age d’abondance). Also, the boundaries around an ecosystem form a territory: how big should the territory be? Should there be boundaries at all or should we roam in nature freely? And the question of culture: how do cultures and territories intersect?
From all of this, it appears to me that the most comfortable and satisfying way to live in nature would be to live as a group of 20-200 people migrating over a territory about 100km in size, feeding from the land as the seasons go and moving when the resources are exhausted (sustainably which is to say that the renewing of species has been taken into account).
Ancestral living
Low tech
Prehistorical living (or any-era living)
Camping
