When some human societies made the shift from wild, procured foods to domesticated, produced foods there is a corresponding decline in the health of those people in the archaeological record. Today, the majority of people eat domesticated staples, and our health has taken a huge decline on a global scale. Wild foods are an important nutritional component to the human diet. Rewilding can mean rekindling the relationship to wild foods that humans have historically had. To talk with me about this on the Rewilding Podcast, is Monica Wilde.

Monica Wilde, known as Mo, is an ethnobotanist and research herbalist. She lives in Scotland in a self-built wooden house where she's created a wild, teaching garden on 4 organic acres, encouraging edible and medicinal species to make their home. Mo holds a Masters degree in Herbal Medicine, is a Fellow of the Linnean Society, a Member of the British Mycological Society and a Member of the Association of Foragers, which she helped to found in 2015. She has been teaching foraging and herbal medicine for several decades. Mo wrote the award-winning book The Wilderness Cure: Ancient Wisdom in a Modern World, in 2022, that imparts what she learned from her year of living on only wild foods. Afterwards she started the Wildbiome® Project - a citizen science study tracking the health changes seen on wild food diets. The next arm of the study is in April 2025.

Monica’s Instagram

Wild Biome Project Instagram

The Wildbiome™️ Project Results

The Wilderness Cure

The Ethnobiology of Contemporary British Foragers: Foods They Teach, Their Sources of Inspiration and Impact

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Humans evolved in social, cooperative bands, using this cooperation as an evolutionary advantage. These days, rugged individualism still seems to dominate many outdoor activities from regular camping to bushcraft and even to rewilding. When people think of ancestral skills, they think mostly of the hand crafts like basket weaving, pottery, or archery, and not the invisible, social technologies like conflict resolution, mentoring, or practices of sharing. This is a challenge that many skills practitioners and leaders of schools and other community organizations often come across. If rewilding is returning to our human roots, then community building works as the primary ancestral skill. Everything else stems from this. Today to talk about this with me, is Luke McLaughlin.

Luke is the founder and director of Holistic Survival School in North Carolina. His work centers around connecting people to the natural world through ancestral living skills, to help remember how humans lived in balance with their environments in times past. He learned his skills working at a wilderness therapy program in the deserts of Utah. After spending hundreds of hours on the trail and helping hundreds of people, he witnessed firsthand how important these skills are for life lessons and personal growth. He has demonstrated his skills on the Discovery Channel’s show Naked and Afraid and their offshoots, Naked and Afraid XL and Naked and Afraid: Alone. Luke’s main focus is making deep connections and providing a life-changing experience through the Deep Remembering immersion program.

NOTES:

Venmo Luke, 6788

Holistic Survival School

Luke's Instagram

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To attain the level of resilience that cultural rewilding calls for, requires moving away from an economy based on extraction for profit that lays waste to local ecosystems and destroys ancient ways that people have lived from the land. To move away we need alternatives, and examples of how other people have found and maintained sustainability. How have humans lived in a myriad of ways for millennia without destroying their land and not living in greatly unequal societies? What is a subsistence economy and what makes them so resilient? To talk with me about this today is Dr. Helga Vierich

Dr. Vierich was born in Bremen, west Germany and immigrated with her parents to Canada, growing up in North Bay, Ontario. She began her studies at the University of Toronto in 1969. From 1977-1980, as part of her research, she lived in the Kalahari among hunter-gatherers in the Kweneng district with Richard B. Lee supervising. During this time she worked as a consultant on the effects of the extreme drought in Botswana. She was awarded her Ph.D. by the University of Toronto in 1981 and went to work as a Principal Scientist at the West African Economics Research Program, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (headquarters in Hyderabad, India). She worked as a visiting professor of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky from 1985 to 1987, then as an adjunct professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta from 1989 to 1997. From 1999-2022 she worked as an instructor at the Yellowhead Tribal College in Alberta. Now retired, she spends her time on a rural farm with her husband.

Notes:

• Dr. Vierich’s Website
• Why they matter: hunter-gatherers today
• Before farming and after globalization: the future of hunter-gatherers may be brighter than you think
• Changes in West African Savanna agriculture in response to growing population and continuing low rainfall

Photo by Vasilina Sirotina

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