Uncivilize

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A Year of Autonomous Eating - Rob Greenfield Dec 06, 2018

Show notes

This week’s guest is adventurer and environmental activist Rob Greenfield, whose societal-boundary-pushing projects have ranged from biking across the United States on a bamboo bicycle for sustainability (three times); to dumpster diving in thousands of grocery store dumpsters to raise awareness about food waste and hunger; to wearing 30 days’ of trash to create a visual of how much trash one American creates. Here, we focus on Rob’s latest extreme endeavor: Growing and foraging 100 percent of his food for One. Entire. Year.

From his 100-square-foot tiny home in Orlando, Florida (hand-built from 99 percent salvaged materials, natch), Rob shares the eating hows and whats of his aptly named Food Freedom project (think harvested salt and golf-course-foraged giant yams; oh, he also grows his own toilet paper). But with no shortage of self-reflection, Rob also digs deeper: into his own impoverished upbringing, the unintended consequences of living with no car or bank account or bills, and finding his true purpose in a life both inside and outside industrial capitalist society.

Some of what we talk about:

-What’s behind all the 1s: The launch of Food Freedom on 11/11 and Rob’s 111 possessions
-The plan to grow and forage 100 percent of his food for one year; building his 100-square-foot tiny house in Orlando (and why Orlando?)
-Staple crops, salt from scratch and the 160-pound yam
-How to make coconut oil; North America’s yerba mate
-The 11 months of prep that went into the project
-Rob’s philosophy on foraging and pesticides
-A sampling of the 300-500 foods Rob will be eating for the next 12 months
-Taking inspiration from subsistence cultures
-The paradox of Rob’s impoverished childhood: “We were consumers. My mom was a consumer; I was a consumer.”
-His awakening to “not living a delusional life”
-What it’s like to live with no credit cards, no bank account, no driver’s license, no car, no bills and no taxes
-Consumerism and mortality
-Rob’s vision for the future

The Woman and the Little Cabin That Could - Ayana Young Nov 14, 2018

Show notes

In her mid-20s and a few years past her ecology studies at Columbia University, Ayana Young’s life had the makings of an off-the-grid fantasy. She lived with her partner in a cabin on an organic farm on an Oregon mountaintop. She studied herbalism. Then, Fukashima happened. The two, no longer feeling safe, set off on a journey to find “the promised land”—that untainted wilderness where they could live out their days sheltered from the toxic threats of industrialized civilization. Instead, Ayana found herself awakened to the harsh reality of her anarcho-survivalist quest: that it had clouded her true calling of working in service of something greater than herself.

This week, I speak with Ayana about that remarkable journey and the “something greater” that resulted: her creation of the trailblazing For the Wild collective—which now encompasses the 1 Million Redwoods reforestation project, For the Wild podcast, and a new spinoff series birthed from a preservation campaign around the Tongass National Forest. (She helms this all from yes, her handbuilt cabin in the coastal redwood mountain range of Northern California.)

Some of what we talk about:

· The making of “the little cabin that could”

· “So lost and damn naïve when I started this endeavor”

· Ayana’s upbringing in suburban Southern California

· Living in an 1800s farmhouse in Pennsylvania and the birth of the For the Wild podcast(then Unlearn and Rewild)

· The cedar cabin in Oregon, the journey to New Zealand and the awakening to the Anthropocene

· The inevitable consumerist existence of cities

· Human supremacy

· The Bill McKibben question and “What are we really trying to save here?”

· The 1 Million Redwoods Project, biomimetic reforestation and learning how to have a reciprocal relationship with nature

· The off-the-grid fantasy versus Ayana’s life now

· “We don’t have the time to be arguing about small things anymore”

Music by Paul Damian Hogan.

The Biophilic Nature of Serenbe - Steve Nygren Oct 30, 2018

Show notes

In this first episode of our second season, I interview Steve Nygren, the founder of Serenbe—a microcosmic urban utopia set on 65,000 acres of preserved forest land, a mere 40 minutes south of Atlanta’s expanding sprawl. Yet to paint Serenbe as the latest picture of the New Urbanist movement (or as a green community, or a nature community, or an “agrihood,” as it’s been called in reference to the 25-acre organic farm the town is centered around) wouldn’t do it justice, as my family and I discovered when we called Serenbe home for two months this past summer.

Here, during an epic walk in the woods, Steve and I delve into the biophilic theory underpinning Serenbe’s design—along with the journey that took him from “having it all” in Ansley Park as a successful restaurateur to a life of deep nature connection for his family and Serenbe’s burgeoning community.

The Everwild Way - Amanda Caloia and Elizabeth Wells Apr 23, 2018

Show notes

Our Season 1 finale is here! I can't imagine a more fitting close to our six-month journey than this interview with Amanda Caloia and Elizabeth Wells, two of the co-founders of EverWild—a Los Angeles-based community that connects city-dwellers to the wild through family adventures, conservancy projects, and a pioneering nature-immersion homeschooling program.

Amanda's and Elizabeth's journeys to create EverWild (along with Rebecca Chou, not featured in this episode) mirror so much of what we’ve been searching for on this show: a connection to nature, yes; but also a connection to true, human community. After all, the wild places we made our home in our ancient human past wouldn’t have been survivable without the tribe that surrounded us. As I’ve come to recognize over these past 22 episodes, we’re hardwired to be in the fold. While the loss of nature is palpable, community is that unnamable thing we’re grasping for in an increasingly virtualized and individualized world.

In my LA backyard (over foraged yerba santa tea, homemade pumpkin bread, and a smattering of airplane and mower noise), Amanda and Elizabeth and I chatted it up about the quest for the "perfect" place to live, surfing and skating (Amanda is a Longboard Girls Crew USA skater), homeschooling in the wild, and how they ultimately found “the EverWild way” of life.

Thank you all for your incredible support this first season! I wish you lots of time to “uncivilize” in your own life until I'm back again this fall.

The Astonishing American History of Cesarean Section - Jacqueline H. Wolf Apr 09, 2018

Show notes

In 19th-century America, cesarean section was a treacherous, last-ditch surgery that nearly always resulted in death of the infant and, half the time, the mother. Fast forward to today, where 1 in 3 American babies is delivered via surgical birth. But even until the 1960s, cesarean section was virtually unknown to the American public, says my guest today, historian Jacqueline H. Wolf, the author of the riveting new book Cesarean Section: An American History of Risk, Technology and Consequence. The book, which will be published this May by Johns Hopkins University Press, was funded by a three-year-grant from the National Institutes of Health. In it, Professor Wolf unfolds an astounding story: How, over the span of a mere century (and most rapidly, a few decades), industrialized America normalized surgery as the means of bringing babies into the world.

Some of you may recognize Jackie Wolf’s name from my book Unlatched (where she transported us to the death-by-artificial-infant-feeding epidemic of Industrial Age America). As a professor of the History of Medicine in the Department of Social Medicine at Ohio University, she is one of the foremost authorities on the history of breastfeeding and birth practices in the United States, having authored two prior books and numerous articles on the subjects in venues such as the American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Social History, and The Milbank Quarterly. I was captivated by my conversations with Jackie back then, and I hope you’ll be as captivated as I was by this one, here: From the story of the first cesarean in recorded American history, the myth of Julius Caesar and the racially charged past of early cesareans; to the rise of birth as a pathological process, Jackie Kennedy's role in all this, reclaiming birth in the 21st century (including how to avoid your own C-section) and more, you won’t want to miss this episode!

Emulating Our Wild Progenitors: A New Path - Arthur Haines Apr 02, 2018

Show notes

We want to believe that we are living at the pinnacle of human existence; that since hominins first walked on two legs, man has been marching toward our vision of modern civilization. But what if despite humanity's vast achievements, we left behind a way of life that not only served our species better, but actually defined us as a species? So posits my guest today, Arthur Haines, the author of the transformative new book A New Path: To Transcend the Great Forgetting Through Incorporating Ancestral Practices Into Contemporary Living. The book, and today's conversation, is centered around a remarkable premise (first conceived with Daniel Vitalis): that modern-day humans have become a domesticated sub-species of Homo sapiens, our once-wild progenitors. Our divergence from our biologically normal way of life has not only de-evolved us, it is at the root of our current epidemic of ill health and environmental degradation.

But given that we can’t turn back the clock to live as indigenous hunter-gatherers, where do we go from here? Arthur has spent a lifetime ruminating on that question, as a botanist, taxonomist, forager and ancestral skills mentor who runs the Delta Institute of Natural History in Canton, ME. In A New Path, he offers revolutionary answers. Here, we talk about the book that's being called "the bible of the rewilding movement," and putting theory into practice with Wilder Waters, the neo-aboriginal community Arthur and his family are creating on 150 acres of protected forest in the woods of central Maine.

Wild Beer and The Ale Apothecary - Paul Arney Mar 19, 2018

Show notes

Meet Paul Arney, the mad genius behind The Ale Apothecary, a wild-ferment brewery housed in a cabin in the woods of Bend, Oregon. Paul is a master brewer who honed his craft-beer chops for more than 15 years at Bend’s legendary Deschutes Brewery. Now, on his own land and with the magic of the microbial creatures and natural materials that inhabit it (think: black currants, tree parts and an ancient snow-melt aquifer), he has developed The Ale Apothecary into an idealistic, if not utopian endeavor: a hyper-local and sustainable brewery based on the past 10,000 years of our brewing history as humans.

For the overwhelming majority of that history, the beer we drank was wild (sometimes called sour)—a much different animal than the crisp (or hoppy or malty) libation so many of us think of when we hear the word “beer” today.* As I learned in this eye-opening conversation with Paul, even many of today’s “craft” breweries are still part of an industrial system of beer-making that arose only a couple hundred years ago. Here, we not only delve into the fascinating history of beer and its industrialization, but Paul’s ultimate vision to reclaim community, autonomy and our place-based experience of taste by rewilding one of humanity’s first beloved beverages.

*I owe my “discovery” of wild beer to my first taste of Ale Apothecary up in Bend, six years ago, and I’m never going back. I hope this conversation sparks your love for wild beer, too!

The Freedom of Forest Kindergarten - Erin Kenny Mar 12, 2018

Show notes

I am so excited to bring you this thought-provoking conversation with naturalist and educator Erin Kenny, an international leader in the forest kindergarten movement and the founder of Cedarsong Nature School -- the very first US kindergarten based on the based on the German waldkindergarten model. If you haven’t yet heard of waldkindergarten (or forest kindergarten, for that matter), it is very much as it sounds: an entirely outdoors-based early childhood education program which, in Cedarsong's case, goes on rain, snow, or shine on five acres of magical native forest on Vashon Island, a ferry's ride from Seattle.

But forest kindergarten is also so much more: Here, Erin and I talk about the crisis of nature deprivation confronting today’s generation of children and parents; why this unique style of education is a compelling and desperately needed solution; and the remarkable learning that emerges from the deep nature immersion experienced at Cedarsong. Amazingly, forest kindergartens are only just taking off here in the US (despite having existed in Germany for more than half a century and where there are now more than 1,500 in existence), so if you're eager to join this burgeoning movement as a parent or an educator, don't miss Erin and this eye-opening episode!

Re-creating the Village - Rachel Natland and Chris Morasky Mar 05, 2018

Show notes

For 99 percent of our human history, we lived in small, likely egalitarian societies—tight-knit hunter-gatherer bands of a couple dozen people deeply reliant on their community and on the surrounding environment, for their survival. So where does that leave we present-day humans, now navigating an increasingly virtualized and individualized world amidst the dizzying urban constructs (not to mention vast social inequality) we call modern civilization? In a word: searching, to return to the fold of community and nature in which our species evolved for hundreds of thousands of years.

My guests today, Chris Morasky and Rachel Natland, know that search well, and for decades pursued it on disparate paths: Chris, as a wildlife biologist who lived for more than 20 years in the wilderness and became one of the foremost Stone Age skills experts in North America; and Rachel, as a single mother who overcame her own inner-city childhood of abuse and addiction to become a spiritual mentor. Four years ago the rugged survivalist and the urban community-builder met, and the rest is history—and the future: Now a pair and living in Portland, they are restoring ancient egalitarian wisdom to the 21st century via their Wisdom Keepers school in Los Angeles and the Pacific Northwest. Hear their incredible life stories that brought them to this remarkable moment in time, their poignant vision for the future, and how they're re-creating the village with their don't-miss Elements Gathering in the ancient sequoias. Hope to see you there!

Eating Unprocessed and the Path to Food Sovereignty - Megan Kimble Feb 19, 2018

Show notes

Meet today’s guest, who might be called the Michael Pollan for the millenial generation: award-winning food writer Megan Kimble, now senior editor at Austin Monthly Magazine and the author of the book Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food. In this deep-dive journalistic memoir into her year-long journey of eating only whole, unprocessed foods, Megan set out to answer some seemingly straightforward questions: What does unprocessed mean in the modern world? Why does it matter? And how can we afford it in an age where time has become perhaps more precious than money? Yet the path to answer those questions proved anything but, sending Megan down the rabbit hole of our industrialized food system (spoiler alert: she slaughtered a sheep in the name of book research).

Now a few years down the road from her book journey and living in a new city (Austin, by way of Tucson), I was so excited to have the chance to check in with Megan to hear how she’s putting unprocessed into practice, as well as hear her long-term wisdom gleaned from a life devoted to urban food sovereignty. From food co-ops, equity crowd-funded breweries and tackling food insecurity to home mead-making, ancient bread-baking and respectful meat-eating in a modern society, this is a lively conversation you won’t want to miss! Enjoy!

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