Humans have long engaged in a struggle to subdue and domesticate the world, and much has been gained in that process; but important things have also been lost.
The great hope of all life is to be wild: self-reliant, spontaneous, self-willed, self-regulating, local, authentic, and free.
Rewilding can be described as large landscape restoration and conservation.
Someday, in a more perfect world, all creatures will be wild.
Responsibility and freedom will not long be separated.
Wilderness is finite.
Wildness is infinite.
Humans could learn to respect the sovereignty of otherness.
To be loved is to be free.
We are the BeWildReWild Bohemians.
Bohemian: Open minded thinker, authentic soul, one who believes in truth, freedom, peace, and love.
Among the human causes of our worldwide ecological catastrophe are: war, animal domestication, people/product mobility, and our insatiable appetite for stuff that can never make us happy.
The goal of creating an ever more accessible wild nature (parking lots, rest rooms, boat ramps…plus trails for walking, biking, horseback riding, and ATVs) threatens what little wild nature remains.
In Deep Ecology all life has value separate from its usefulness to humans.
The shallow ecology view suggests that ecosystems should be saved only if they are of value to humans.
There are wild bees and there are commercial honey bees.
Humans must be at peace with what we have and where we are.
Rivers connect.
Rivers must live.
Wildness is a manifestation of trust.
Domestication is a manifestation of fear.
Humans can benefit by learning to trust and to be trustworthy.
Dogs and cats consume 30% of the meat products in this country.
TRUSTING WILDNESS frees both the enslaved and the enslaver.
We should never have straightened the rivers.
Reconnect-Restore-Rewild
The long term goal of rewilding is to create ecosystems which require only passive management by humans. This is based on an understanding that the reintroduction of keystone species can result in a stable, self-sustaining, self-regulating, biodiverse wild nature.
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Modern human behavior is driven largely by the twin fears of not being in control and of never having enough.
War is rooted in fear.
Imagine-Create-Advocate
To be local is to inhabit, to be at home, to be part of a place.
There is the wolf and there is the Pomeranian…only the wolf is free.
Our BIG RIVER CONNECTIVITY vision fills “a gaping hole” in the Wildlands Network connectivity map.
Wilderness is a noun.
Wildness is a verb.
Play to play, not to win.
There is too much money sloshing around the world.
For those who doubt nature’s ability to restore and rewild, consider what happened near the site of Manson, Iowa 70 million years ago.
The faster we CAN go the further we MUST go. How long did it take to get to Grandma’s house 100 years ago? How long does it take today?
Humans may temporarily destroy the wilderness of a place, but they will not destroy its wildness.
Romance is but a sliver of what it means to experience love.
The more we attempt to control our world the more we must submit to its dominion over us; and ultimately to a chilling realization that this process which seems so compelling is a boundary, tragically separating much of humanity from a greater appreciation of both wilderness and wildness.
Wild nature persists in spite of humans.
BIG RIVER CONNECTIVITY begins with little rivers.
The tragic circumstance of a domesticated creature is illuminated by the wildness of a wolf.
What consumers want to buy and the prices they are willing to pay determine what farmers produce and the methods used in that process.
Much of what is done in the name of conservation is really about entertaining humans.
The Mississippi River Watershed is ours to celebrate, to love, and to trust.
Technology leverages our ability to create or to destroy.
Problems are best solved by those living near them.
Our willingness to accept violence against others is contrasted by a shock felt when we are the mark.
Restoration is about the past.
Rewilding is about the future.
A photo of nature is not nature.
The more complex and centralized a system becomes the more it will favor a rich and powerful oligarchy.
My freedom depends on your freedom.
Two words so fundamentally important in the BeWildReWild Territory are wild and local. There’s a bit of wildness in all things. Wildness is always with us. By wild is meant: self-reliant, spontaneous, self-willed, self-regulating, local, authentic, and free. To be local is to inhabit, to be at home, to be part of a place.
