Wildness, Work, and Pre-history, with Peter Michael Bauer
How did our pre-civilization ancestors "work"? What does it mean to be held captive to capitalism, and can we find ways to be more free? In this very rich conversation with anthropologist and rewilding catalyst Peter Michael Bauer, we address these questions and discuss:
*Where we are in the cycles of decline and the collapse of civilization (and why collapse can be a good thing)
*What “work” looked like for our hunter gatherer ancestors
*How we can bring our adaptive, wild nature into the contexts and communities we live in today
To connect with Peter, visit: Rewild Portland and his Patreon page.
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Under the embedded player, you’ll find a written transcript for the show.
Megan: Welcome to A Wild New Work, a podcast about how to divest from capitalism and the norms of modern work and step into the soulful calling of these times we live in, which includes the call to rekindle our relationship with the earth. I'm Megan Leatherman, a mother to two small kids, coach, writer, and amateur ecologist living in the Pacific Northwest, and I'm your host today.
Hi friend and welcome. I'm really glad that you are here today, that we're sharing this time. We are now in the height of summer, summer's in full force, and I'm curious how your balance is feeling right now, how heat and water are balanced in your life, in your body. Can we be so hydrated, so conscious, so aware and attuned and aligned with the demands and challenges of these seasons, these times that we can actually rebalance the earth in some way by rebalancing ourselves?
I think sometimes about how going slow in the summer season is different than going slow in the winter season, but they have a similar sort of tenor, pace. You know, in the winter, we have to cultivate warmth, right?
It's not in our environment. We have to build the fire. We have to move. We have to rub our hands together. We have to keep it and create it and feed it. In the summer, warmth is all around, and actually it can be overbearing, it can be too much, and so we have to keep and cultivate that coolness, that water, that ice, and that our attention is very well spent when we're in process with that and moving slow in a way that honors flow and hydration and not overdoing it, which can be hard in the context of our culture, which is just like A culture of heat stroke, essentially. And it's hard to talk about because it's so over talked about, you know, that it's hard to find, like, new language for it, but we all know, I think we all sense, that the summer, and when it's in its fullest form, these extreme Days of heat, the fire, we recognize that as an outgrowth, a natural outgrowth of the culture that we live in and the pace of life that we ascribe to or are forced to ascribe to at times.
And I'm just curious what your days might look like if you really went at the pace of your own hydration. If you really went at the pace of your own body's flow, your creative flow. It's probably very different than what overculture might demand of you, what the workplace might demand of you. And I know this isn't straightforward, and it might even feel kind of cliche or like "Blah, we all know we're supposed to go slower and why, whatever," but if any piece of that resonates for you, if any piece of the summer season and the slowness that's being offered to you, if that resonates, and I encourage you to just try a few things, try one thing, try to experiment with what it might mean to go at the pace of your body.
Going slower also is really helpful in allowing us to see more clearly the beauty, the abundance that is here in our lives right now. If we're going, you know, at full speed through the orchard, then we might not notice all of the peaches that are ripe, all the plums. We might be going too fast to really appreciate them and soak in there.
Going slow at this time in the summer season can also show you where you're naturally drawn, where there is that flow, where your talents are, and how they might want to take shape right now. It may not mean that you get really creative and do a lot, like in the spring or in the fall, but can you sort of dream into them and sort of, float into them and out of them and float closer maybe to the work that you want to be doing right now in a way that honors your bodily form and your need to stay cool and hydrated.
Going slower is easier to do when you're in a slow environment, environments that match the pace that you desire, whether that's out in nature, away from fast moving cars or notifications. It's easier to go slow when you're around other people who value going slow or who are grounded. It's easier to do this when we're without our devices, right?
And you know, maybe slow isn't even like the right word to use here, because if we think about it for just a minute, while moving at the pace of your body is slower than cars and the internet or planes, it's also just like the pace of life, you know. We feel like it's slow now, but we evolved within this pace, right?
The sun's journey across the sky every day hasn't changed very much since humans emerged onto this planet. So maybe it's just that there's this real pace of life, which is just the pace of your body and the pace that you might reconnect to if you go camping or you spend time outdoors or if you step out of the flow of modern life and modern work.
That's just real life, and then we're in some other fast lane that really shouldn't be the dominant way of living. And in times like this, when our way of life is so obviously counter to the way that the other plants and animals are moving right now, I think a lot about what our ancestors did, how they lived, how they survived over hundreds of thousands of years, because they worked with the natural rhythms, not against them.
Their pace was just the pace of life. And at certain points in the year, that might've been a little faster when you're gathering a lot of berries or gathering things for shelter or firewood. And it may have been slower at other times, like in the summer when it's too hot to be out in the noonday sun, you know, working a ton.
So all of this sort of feeds into what I am so delighted to share with you today, which is a conversation with my guest, Peter Michael Bauer.
Peter Michael Bauer is an anthropologist, experimental archaeologist, historian, and lifelong community organizer. His work focuses on the social and environmental impacts of the Neolithic Revolution and how understanding these impacts can provide us with solutions to the sixth mass extinction. Since the early 2000s, he's been an integral catalyst in the human rewilding movement. His work in rewilding has been recognized. both locally and internationally. He's the author of Rewild or Die, the founder and director of Rewild Portland, and the host of the Rewilding podcast.
I'm really excited to share this conversation with you.
I have taken Peter's Rewilding 101 class and have really benefited from his work for years now.
So I hope that you love this conversation as much as I did. Before I take you there, I will read us our opening invocation and we can just sort of settle into this time. So wherever you are, you can take a deep breath and just feel your body and space. May each of us be blessed and emboldened to do the work we're meant to do on this planet.
May our work honor our ancestors, known and unknown, and may it be in harmony with all creatures that we share this earth with. I express gratitude for all of the technologies and gifts that have made this possible, and I'm grateful to the Cowlitz and Clackamas tribes, among many others, who are the original stewards of the land that I'm on.
Alright, Peter, thank you so much for being here today.
Peter: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Megan: I'd love to start by hearing a little bit about how you got here to this work that you do now. I know the path sort of gripped you at a young age as an adolescent, but what are some of the sort of major milestones that have led you to where you are now?
Peter: You know, I mean, I think the the biggest one was when I was 16. I read this book called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, and You know, it propelled me into a career in environmental activism, I guess. I don't know if you want to call it that, but, you know, ancestral technology and anthropology and all kinds of things.
That book kind of covered a lot of the history of civilization in a really simple way. And after that I wanted to delve into like the specifics and so it really was because I think it was so simplified it inspired me to like go deeper in anthropology and prehistory and really try to untangle, you know, the the complexities of how we got to be where we are. Like, what is the sixth mass extinction and how is it how did we get to this point?
You know, a lot of people don't even know that we're living in the sixth mass extinction on the planet in the history of the planet and that it's caused by people. And so, you know, we know things like climate change and maybe some people are familiar with ocean acidification or ecological die off, but a lot of people don't know like the overall driving things that caused those to begin with, you know, starting all the way back in the so called Stone Age.
So kind of just teasing out all these different, you know, sort of like a snowball, right? Like, what was the thing that initiated all of this to kind of happen? And then what can we do about it now? You know, those are, those are the questions I've been asking since I read that book. And probably even before that, I think that that book was really just a catalyst for me as a young person to really just dedicate my life to this.
And then I think, you know, the second Point was I was really into filmmaking as a youth, and that was going to be my like career path was filmmaking, and I loved acting.
I love directing and writing movies and stuff. And I created this character that was sort of a hunter gatherer like Figure living in Portland, even though it's, you know, a city and, you know, all the challenges that come with that. What would it be like for a character to live as a hunter gatherer here by themselves?
And I would go out sort of performance artist style in character. And one of those times I was walking down the street and I was like wearing a loincloth, you know, and like covered in mud for fake sort of camouflage or whatever. And this guy saw me walking down the street and like pulled his car over.
And, you know, again, I'm just being character. So he would ask me like, what are you doing? Like, well, I'm a hunter gatherer, you know, and I'm a preemptive post apocalyptic anarcho neo paleoist. I believe that civilization is going to collapse in my lifetime. So I'm living as though it's already happened so that when it does, it won't really be a big deal.
Yeah, he was just kind of blown away that this could be real. And because I, you know, I was, I was acting essentially, he, he really did believe that I was this person. And when he drove away, I just kind of, my heart sank a little bit. And this kind of sucks that this isn't real, and how can I make this real?
And so I think that was sort of the second half of this, you know, the things that have catalyzed me is to try to understand how to make this sort of mythological character a reality in a sense. And one of the, one of the reasons, Why it was not real or that it couldn't be real is that singular, you know, a hunter gatherer is not really a true hunter gatherer if you don't have a tribe. You know, we evolved as socially organized animals. And so pretty quick in my journey, I realized that if I was gonna actually be able to do anything kind of like this, it would have to be in a collective. And so that's why I kind of changed gears a little bit and started Rewild Portland, which is a non profit that I run now and I've been running since 2010. So I think those are the main catalytic catalyst moments for me.
Yeah.
Megan: And how do you make sense of your work? Does it feel like, I mean, do you use any terms like a calling or a vocation? Is it just a job? Like not just a job, that can... not to put judgment on it, but like, I mean, it seems like something that's just been with you since you were born, like, do you feel like you've had a choice, I guess, or has it been like you've been, you've been in the flow of this thing?
Yeah. I mean,
Peter: I guess that's, that would be more or less, I think how I would phrase it, like being in the flow of this thing. I don't like the word work, I don't like the word job, and I don't like the word labor. I don't know. It's not that I don't like any of them, it's just, you know, they all mean different things to different people.
And it's really hard to kind of like have an idea of what we're talking about without a kind of first kind of saying any of that stuff. I mean, it's definitely a job some days, right? Like, I have to do things I don't want to do. I have to hit deadlines. I have to be concerned about finances. There's all kinds of stuff that play into what I do.
But at the end of the day, like, we're a nonprofit. You know, so we're not profit driven, we're community driven, and I think that plays into a huge component of the work itself, so I'm not, you know, there's like a economic concept of enoughness instead of growth, and I think about that a lot in terms of what I feel inspired to do. You know, accumulate wealth so much as it is to just keep doing whatever this thing is that I'm doing that makes me feel like, I don't know, gives my life meaning on some level, you know. When I was really in to mythology in my late teens, I watched Joseph Campbell's interviews, "the power of myth" with Bill Moyers and one of the things that Joseph Campbell talks about in there is that it's like, phrase, you know, follow your bliss.
That was something that he talked a lot about. And one of the components of that was like, I'm not going to remember it exactly, but, you know, when you follow your bliss, like you might be suffering and all these different kinds of ways, but you always sort of have this refreshment of that you're doing the thing that you are here to do.
And so even if it's uncomfortable, even if it's, you know, it feels like you're not going anywhere. Sometimes you have that, that refreshment, if it's actually the thing that you want to be doing. And I think for better or worse, I've never been able to not do that. I don't know if it's because of, you know, neurodiversity or what, but if I'm not following my bliss, I feel like a caged animal, and it doesn't work for me.
And so, you know, I think I walked out of seven jobs before I was 21 and I've dropped out of five schools, five different schools. So there's definitely like a component for me of like just, you know, some people might call it like ADHD or I don't know, there's different, you know, pathologizations of these different kinds of abilities with the brain, but you know, executive dysfunction is something that if I'm told to do something, and it's not really something I have any interest in, it's really hard for me to do it.
It used to be a lot harder when I was younger. Now I can pretty much kind of see most avenues of how it connects or correlates to something that I'm interested in. So like, for instance, because I dropped out of high school, I never went to college. I wanted to understand how to cite papers in academic circles.
So I took a Writing 121 class a couple of years ago, and, you know, the assignments that they were given, it was funny because we had to write a paper about KitKat bars or something, you know, and we had some article that was given to us. I remember thinking like, wow, if I had been given this in high school, I would have never done this, but like, I can think of a million ways that this, this article intersects with all the different aspects of rewilding that I think about on a daily basis, and so it was actually really easy for me to put something together that correlated to that, which I find interesting now. But because I think I just, it was that desire to follow the thing that I'm interested in that made me realize how many threads it was connected to and then being able to find threads into so many other things.
Megan: Yeah, it's really important for people for everyone to find something that's a large enough container that it can hold their interests and whether it's just their life or a certain area of study like you've found.
But yeah, I don't think Most people are, or anyone really is wired to do things they don't want to do all the time, but you're right, there's different levels of tolerance for that. So you've mentioned some of these big words already, you know, sixth mass extinction or civilization. Can you just sort of ground us in how you work with some of these big themes? Like what does hunter gatherer really mean? What does civilization mean? Rewilding? Let's start there and then we can sort of expand.
Peter: There's been a lot of sort of breakthroughs in terms of anthropology in the last couple of decades. And in fact, you know, the last hundred years - anthropology has not been around forever.
It's very recent in terms of human history or the written record. And so, you know, I mean, 150 years ago or 200 years ago, this is just an example. They started to find, well, for thousands of years, they found stone tools in farmer fields in Europe, you know, stone axes and things like that.
They were so far removed from the human hands that had made those things that they believed that they were made during thunderstorms by the gods. Like they didn't even realize that there was a time period where humans were using these stone tools. This is, you know, thousands of years into the iron age.
And it wasn't until anthropology was invented in the United States and they were starting to document hunter gatherers here who were still doing flint mapping and things like that before they realized no, actually these things were made by humans and it took another like 100 years for people to actually know and believe that that was true.
And this is not that long ago, right? We're talking a hundred years ago is when people finally were like, okay, yeah, I guess stone tools were made, you know. But if we think about, you know, evolution, if we think about like the different things that we've began to understand only within the last couple of hundred years versus thousands of years of human history, so much of our culture's mythology, a lot of people don't understand that every culture has a mythology.
Every culture has an origin story and not just the biblical ones, but even unspoken ones. For instance, the term civilization, often people will use that term as a synonym for civil society. So, if I were to say, for instance, that I'm against civilization, people might think what I'm saying is that I'm against, like, humans having any kind of society or government or anything like that, right?
And that's not true. Civilization isn't a synonym for society, it's a specific kind of society. And so when we look at the dictionary definition of civilization, it says a type of human society that has writing and as well as what they call oftentimes in the dictionary, they'll say complex political or social political structure, which generally speaking means hierarchy.
So, If a culture has writing and a hierarchy, they're labeled a civilization. Now, there have been no societies in the world that have invented writing that didn't also have agriculture as a staple form of subsistence. And that's because writing is a kind of technological adaptation that we see arise when humans start storing foods in mass quantities.
And that is only possible through, essentially, grain production. And so, you know, in the archaeological record, there's no, there's no evidence of societies creating writing or written systems prior to their own invention of agriculture. And so when I say civilization, I'm talking about a specific kind of society that arises through particular subsistence practices and cultural strategies, right?
That contrasts with Horticulturalists and hunter gatherers. Hunter gatherers are essentially people who do exactly what that says. They hunt and gather for their subsistence. They don't farm. They don't grow food specifically. And there's a continuum there, right? There's a continuum between just hunting and gathering, like not growing any of your own food and then growing all of your food or most of it, right?
In anthropological terms, if a society that's being studied gets 50 to 60% of their staple calories through agriculture, they're going to be labeled an agricultural society. Oftentimes, those are the ones that then we see develop writing, and the writing usually develops because they are, it's essentially mathematics.
They're coming up with a system to catalog the food storage and then unequally distribute it because we have a hierarchy at that point, which means there's an elite class that's controlling the food production and controlling the food supply. So, you know, the very first written record - the code of Hammurabi. It's a written record of slaves and agricultural product and things. So there you go right there, right? The very first oldest written record is one of a hierarchy with slaves and the surplus that those slaves are producing for an elite class.
The other kind of element that is important in this understanding is that none of this is inevitable.
There's a, there's a kind of myth that we have in our society, and, you know, some people call it like the myth of progress, that these things were inevitable, that all hunter gatherers would have eventually figured out how to farm, and then done so because it's a better way of living. None of that is true.
We know through the archaeological record that farming is disastrous towards human health and environmental health and that these societies collapse over and over and over again, whereas hunter gather societies, which are smaller scale and adaptable and don't overexploit, per se, their environments, tend to find equilibrium within their environments and don't collapse at the scale of agricultural societies.
This isn't inevitable. All sort of social changes happen because of environmental changes. Humans have to find new ways of living because of different things that are in, they're interacting with in the environment. There's no like linear progress. It's just adaptation in the same way. You know, people will say things like they'll use the word devolve, devolution.
There's no such thing as devolving. There's no such thing as devolution. It's just evolution. Evolution means Adaptation. It doesn't mean simple to complex. It doesn't mean complex to simple. It just means transformation and adaptation to changing circumstances within an environment. And the same is true of cultural evolution.
Whatever we're doing, we're doing it because we're adapting to changes. The idea that it's been a form of progress is essentially a kind of myth that maintains the status quo within that society. So the idea being that we're living better lives now than we had in the past is a way of the culture itself keeping itself alive By tricking people or convincing the people within that society that these are the way things need to be or should be and that we're better off. But we know now through scientific study, we're not better off. We're living in the sixth mass extinction, so human civilization and agricultural production specifically has destroyed ecological systems all over the world.
Our population has exceeded, you know, the carrying capacity of the land, and the majority of megafauna have gone extinct. And now, you know, the biomass of humans and our agricultural products are the dominant form of life on the planet. And that's unsustainable and it just keeps getting more and more unsustainable because the more it's sort of like a game of Jenga, right?
If you have all of these ecological blocks as a foundation and you're slowly pulling them all out, eventually the whole thing is going to collapse. And we've seen this over and over again all around the world with other civilizations. The reason that we are in the civilization right now is that they've come up with technological adaptations to things that would have caused us to collapse in the past.
So multiple times civilization has been in collapse and been essentially rescued or the collapse has been stayed through certain kinds of technological adaptations, but those adaptations are finite. The discovery of oil was a huge band aid in a sense to collapse, which only made things worse in the end by allowing us to, you know, basically terraform even more and destroy even more through the industrial revolution and now cause massive climate change.
So it's kind of like that, that old nursery rhyme, or song - The woman who swallowed a fly, I don't know why she swallowed a fly, you know, then she swallows a spider to catch the fly. She swallows a bird to catch the spider, a cat to catch the bird, a dog to catch the cat and on and on until she eats a horse and dies.
And the technology is kind of like that, the way that we're going about this. If you think about like, you know, the amount of climate change that has happened from the industrial revolution, which were all solutions to problems caused by overconsumption to begin with that only allowed us to consume even more while simultaneously pumping carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere that had been stored in the soil for millions of years.
And so it's, yeah, it's just this sort of snowball in a sense of things that have been happening for thousands and thousands of years. And, you know, a lot of people think agriculture and civilization were invented in the so called Middle East or the so called, you know, formerly fertile crescent. But it's actually something that's been invented all over the world over the last several thousand, you know, 10,000 / 20, 000 years and has risen and collapsed and risen and collapsed.
And we've just sort of been in this interesting cycle of people coming up with this idea, becoming captives of it through whatever means, and then having systems collapse. And so it's not unique to the so called Middle East as a form of technology that spread from there or unique to Europe in terms of the, you know, colonialism, of capitalism' s expansion in the 1400s or whatever. This is a environmental problem and a cultural problem, like essentially a Pandora's box that's been affecting societies around the world for probably 20, 000 years or more.
Megan: And what's your pulse on where we are in sort of the arc of collapse here right now? And I know it's on a linear track, but yeah, anything you want to add about like where we are in that process right now?
Peter: So, the word collapse is interesting. There's a great book that I recommend everyone read if they want to understand the sort of mathematics of collapse, and it's called The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter.
But, you know, to me a collapse is the same thing as a decline. You know, civilizations have both collapses and declines. As all sort of ecosystems or anything can have, you know, cyclically. A decline is like, you know, 100 year span of people being hungry a little bit, maybe there's there's a thing called attrition where it's not an overnight collapse slowly over hundreds of years, population declines.
Right. And we've seen this with the Hohokam civilization in Arizona, you know. Initially they started to see the archaeology of this place and thought, "Oh, this was another collapsed civilization." But the more research they've done, the more they've realized that it was a slow decline of about 200 years. And then people just stopped going around there.
In terms of where the sort of global civilization is, it's hard to say because every particular environment is different. Every country is different. Every locale is different. I mean, you could think of like certain cities like Flint, Michigan, for instance, in the United States has collapsed in the 90s or 80s, you know. There's abandoned houses there, entire abandoned neighborhoods, right? Where, you know, nature has reclaimed the places that were built by civilization. So it's hard to kind of say one way or the other in terms of, of that scope of things. Obviously, I turn on my tap water at my house and I get clean water coming out of it.
Flip the light switch and the lights come on, you know. I go to the grocery store, maybe they're out of eggs this week. That's kind of weird. Didn't used to happen. You know, this kind of thing, right? Or you know, the pandemic happens, there's no toilet paper. There's all these different weird things that are going on. Gas prices are increasing.
So, you know, what's the difference between a collapse, which is really like a massive population decline within a short time, like 10 years. The bubonic plague, for instance, you know, I think the, the death rate or mortality rate of COVID was like 0. 3% initially. It may have ended up Being less than that.
Whereas like the bubonic plague was 50%. So, like, you know, in four years, half of Europe's population died. Four years, right? That's a collapse, whereas the, the pandemic here, the coronavirus, you know, that was a decline. It was not the level that we think of with pandemics. I mean, imagine how much our structures shut down and got disturbed from 0. 3% mortality rate. Imagine what a 50% mortality rate would do in today's world. It's kind of ludicrous to even try to wrap your head around that, right? I mean, that's what, of course, everybody was afraid that that was going to happen because oftentimes, that's what happens in a pandemic, but we've got enough technologies now that allow for rapid adaptation to some of these things.
And thankfully, you know, COVID wasn't as deadly as other pandemics have been, but that's not to say that there won't be more. You know, I mean, I think that's the thing. Civilization goes hand in hand with pandemics. There's another really great book called Against the Grain: a deep history of the earliest states by James Scott.
And there's a whole chapter in there where he talks about the correlation between population density, animal agriculture and pandemics. You know, you put a lot of people in one spot, they live in filth because they're not nomadic, so the poop, you know, is accumulating and disease accumulates and they're domesticating animals.
And so it's really easy for a disease that has affected an animal to jump across that barrier and kill people. And so, you know, for the first 5, 000 years of agricultural settlements where they were using animals, there was disease after disease after disease until essentially the people living there were like superhumans.
They were immune to so many of the different kinds of diseases that come from animals that essentially to colonize most of the world, they didn't really have to even do much except just go there and spread the diseases, which is what happened here in North America, obviously, and South America as well, Central America, australia, you know. Those diseases were, were a huge factor in expansion of civilization as well as its decline. So it's just interesting bits of history in that, in that respect. But in terms of where we are today, it's unknowable. You know, if you would ask me this when I was 16, the, you know, the week after I read Ishmael, I would have said, Oh my God, civilization is going to collapse next year. I gotta go learn to survive in the wilderness so I can live through the collapse of civilization. That's just not how a lot of things work, you know, I mean, maybe in certain pockets, there might be a thing, and maybe there will be a global collapse on a scale we haven't seen yet, but even then, there's always going to be collapse and decline, collapse and decline, right? There's going to be rapid things. There's going to be a small recovery and then maybe another collapse or decline and then a recovery and then a decline, and it's just going to kind of go down and down and down until it's not possible to do this anymore.
Megan: Thanks, I guess! No, really. So most of us are familiar with what work or labor looks like in civilizations because we still live it today. But what does it look like in the context of a hunter gatherer community and, you know, work might not even be the right word, but how do people spend their lives or sustain themselves? Like, if somehow everything transformed and we were living that way today instead of, you know, these nine to fives or the jobs that we're in, what would work look like?
Peter: So, I mean, you know, I'll just define work as acquiring, you know, subsistence, right? Like, how do you get the food that you need for your body to keep going?
How do you get the calories? What are the different intricacies of that, both social and technological, for instance. You know, making bows and arrows or making a gathering basket or making a digging stick to dig up roots and then going and doing it socially, right? Cause if you can do it cooperatively, that makes it more efficient.
It's why we evolved in a social organization. There's an anthropologist, Richard Lee and Marsh-, two different ones, Richard Lee and Marshall Sollens. In the 1960s and 70s, they extensively studied with different hunter gatherers around the world. And Marshall Sollens wrote a book called Stone Age Economics.
And then in the 80s, a man named John Gowdy compiled essays, one of which was from Stone Age Economics into a book called Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: a reader on hunter gatherer economics. What they kind of realized is there's two different distinctions of hunter gatherers. So yes, that word hunting and gathering means what it's implied - that people are hunting and gathering to get their food.
But there's actually two different kinds. One is called an immediate return hunter gatherer and another is called a delayed return hunter gatherer. And again, in terms of the spectrum of how much conscious manipulation of the land that you're doing, immediate return means that you're getting an immediate Pay off, an immediate return for the calories or energy invested in getting your food.
So the immediate payoff is you're eating that food within, you know, zero to three days. Right. You gather it and you consume it. You're not storing food. You're not refrigerating it. You're not drying it out. Maybe a little bit here and there, might cache a little bit - different than stockpiling or hoarding.
Delayed return societies - the return on your energetic investment or caloric investment is delayed. That means you're storing food. The delay means that that food is going to come back to you later on. In a delayed sense. So this means you're storing food. Maybe you're drying it, curing it, smoking it, freezing it, you know, rendering tallow or something, but essentially what happens with delayed return societies is that they tend to then have to guard the food that they've stored.
So in an immediate return society, you can just eat the things that you have and then you're free of it. Whereas in a delayed return society, you either have to carry everything with you or guard it from theft, not just human theft, but other animals, right, that want that food. In a immediate return hunter gatherer society, which is essentially the theory of, you know, our environment of evolutionary adaptation, meaning the environment in which humans evolved for 3 million years prior to food storage, which probably arose around 50, 000 years ago... this environment of evolutionary adaptation as an immediate return hunter gatherer, people only had to spend two to three hours a day to acquire the food that they needed to live. That doesn't include all of the so called what people might define as work. That's just the food acquisition time. So what that means is, Two to three hours of hunting and gathering, but it doesn't mean cooking the food.
It doesn't mean processing the food, doesn't mean weaving the baskets or maintaining your shelter or any of those things, right? Making the stone tools. It's just the food acquisition. However, when also surveyed in contemporary societies, agricultural people spend 8 to 12 hours a day Doing the same acquisition, not including processing the food, maintaining their tools, all of that stuff, 8 to 12 hours.
That's where the 8 to 12 hour workday came from within contemporary society. So hunter gatherers are oftentimes called lazy for not doing more work, which is just funny because again, why would you? You know, most people today who are billionaires or whatever who don't work or who work very little aren't necessarily called lazy. They're thought of as, you know, successful or something, right? And there's like Dave Ferris or whatever, right? That named the four hour work week or something along those lines. Oh, Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss, right. So, you know, there's, there's different sort of ideas around this kind of labor. I think this notion of being lazy is an interesting one because I think it actually stems from two things, potentially.
One is this idea of progress, that humans are supposed to, like, make something of themselves instead of just enjoy their lives the way they are. Then the second thing is a form of jealousy from a society that's enslaved and forced to work that amount of time. So it's become a sort of ethic that it, that you should be working, you know, and if you're not, then you're lazy.
And that might be, you know, somebody might be an atheist and still believe this, even if they have no idea that that originates probably from a religious idea that you have to work, you know, labor in this life to be blessed by the gods or God.
So, yeah, what did hunter gatherers do for work? That's the other thing, right?
So what do people do when they go on vacation? They go hiking, they go fishing, they craft things like baskets, like even the kind of work, what we would call work for hunter gatherers is like what people in our society tend to do for leisure. So their work is actually Another form of their own leisure, potentially, right? Being creative, there's no bosses telling them what to do... you know, the closest thing are these sort of micro hierarchies in terms of like a gathering or hunting party where people gather together around a particular person who might be a sort of quasi leader or like a temporary leader while they go out and on an expedition. And then when it's done, it's diffused. The food is distributed.
So, you know, they have and had still today, there are hunter gatherer societies that exist today, you know, very few, but they continue to set an example of, you know, of what humans could have been what we could have and what we probably were back in the day. You know, there's another thing that comes up around this conversation, like, oh, yeah, well, they only lived to be like 30 years old, right?
First of all, that's just simply not true. The human lifespan, it's been studied so much. Generally speaking, in a society where people are getting their needs met, meaning they're getting quality nutrition, quality sleep, there's a potential that hunter gatherer societies have a higher infant mortality rate, meaning that babies before the age of two can die. And so that can bring that so called average lifespan down to a mid range, right? So if you have more infant mortalities, it's going to make the lifespan, an average lifespan come down. But if you live past the age of two, you're probably going to live into your seventies, right?
Most likely, and maybe even older than that. You know, there were people living into their hundreds or like Native American elders here on contact that were hundreds, you know, within a hundred years old. You know, not only is the quality of work and the quantity of work better, their lifespans aren't this weird thing, you know, and, and, you know, the infant mortality is sad, but also, you know, there are different cultures who have different understandings of death and different understandings of being in connected to your place in particular ways and ways of dealing with the grief and washing the grief away that comes with things like that, you know, that we don't necessarily have in our society today. And they might find it just as disgusting, you know, hunter gatherer society that might have a higher infant mortality rate might find it just as disgusting that people in our society send off adults to war to die and, you know, by the millions.
So it just comes down to, you know, the notion of Cultural relativism really - that every culture has different perspectives on things and different ways of handling those kinds of things and different sorts of values. So to sort of project onto other societies without sort of evaluating your own isn't really a great way of discovery of, you know, having discovery around what it means to be human and the diversity of what that might look like.
Megan: Yeah, I mean, it sounds kind of idyllic in lots of ways, and I really appreciate that you confront some of the stereotypes that people have - you know, everyone was just in misery, starving all the time, and cold, and I think what I've learned from you today, and also in Rewilding 101, that's just not the case, but we can't all become hunter gatherers, right? Everything has changed too much. But where could we get, like, what about this could we pull forward and maybe here you can weave in some of your visions for where rewilding could take us. Like, yeah, what about that way or that history could we pull in now with what we've got here?
Peter: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of different sort of ways you could connect to that. The first kind of thing to note is that, yes, we cannot just go back to living as hunter gatherers, and that's not really what rewilding means, you know. I interviewed a psychologist who studies hunter gatherers, and he said this thing that I loved, which was that rewilding doesn't mean going back to who we were, it means coming home to who we are, and I think about that with the hunter gatherer thing; we don't necessarily have to be living as hunter gatherers to have this connection, this relationship to our place.
I think of the hunter gatherer, I think of immediate return hunter gatherers as sort of like the high bar. And then how close can we get in a contemporary context to that? And what are those barriers? The number one barrier is that we live in a society that holds us captive.
We have to participate in capitalism. If I don't pay rent or my mortgage, I get kicked out of my house. I'm living on the streets. And like in Portland right now, they've made camping illegal. So if I'm living on the streets and I have to set up a tent, I'm going to be arrested and then I'm going to end up in prison.
And then I'm actually like... Being held within a physical prison, and it's very obvious where that thread came from, right, but having to pay rent, having to pay a mortgage, these are essentially financial prisons in a sense, where we're collectively held at gunpoint - literally, whether you can see it or not, to participate in this economy.
I look at it as a form of captivity, and you can either make captivity more comfortable, or try to break out of that captivity, or both simultaneously, which to me is sort of the best of both worlds, right? Like, I think people can get caught up in trying to just make captivity more comfortable, because it's easier to do that. And that's where you see a lot of like capitalist solutions to things. For instance, let's say you find out, you know, in the environment of evolutionary adaptation, Humans did not poop in a sitting position, they poop in a squatting position, so you can retrofit your toilet with this thing called the squatty potty that wraps around your toilet, right?
That's retrofitting your prison cell essentially, and It's not really changing anything. It's just making toilets more comfortable, but it's not getting rid of the toilet, right? It's not like transforming the way we deal with defecating, right? And I think the same is true of all kinds of things.
You can look at health, right? Like, you know, the, the paleolithic nutrition was a serious science until it was co opted by mainstream paleo diet manufacturers and things. And now you have like candy bars for sale in the grocery store that say "caveman paleo," right? And they're not really following any of those Paleolithic nutritional principles that were outlined within the Paleolithic diet. And so that, to me, is like, again, this sort of like, making things more comfortable rather than trying to break out.
However, like, If you're so uncomfortable, you can't even think about how to get out of the prison or get out of captivity, you can't do anything. So you have to have a level of comfort in order to be able to think. So we need this sort of first aid. We need these sort of, you know, retrofittings that give us the ability to think or get out of bed. You know, I mean, I've suffered with depression for a lot of my life and executive dysfunction. So if I don't take care of myself, if I don't understand how to make my own life more comfortable, then I'm not even gonna get out of bed to try to, you know, figure out how to live a different way.
So there's a need for all of it, right? And I just, for me, it's easy, I think, for people to get caught up and stuck in the sort of like quick fix of just making things more comfortable. But how can we expand on these ideas, you know, how can we, if we know that living like a hunter gatherer was, you know, is how we have evolved, we're adapted to that way of life. What are ways that we can transform our lives today within the contemporary society to get closer to that? I think the first person that kind of broached this idea was, again, like my reading of Daniel Quinn. He never gave solutions, and that was one of the best parts about His work, I think, was that he just presented the problems and people would ask him, "well, what do we do?"
And he would say, "I don't know." I don't know you. I don't know what you should do about this problem that I've outlined here for you, right? Like, I'm not a solutions person. I'm a problems person. I'm outlining the problem so we actually know what it is so that then we can come up with a diversity of solutions, right?
But he did end up writing one book that had some ideas of things you could do, and it was like a huge disappointment because it was just so minor, you know, it was kind of like what I'm talking about here. This sort of not quick fix, but just not breaking out of the prison of whatever you want to call it, capitalism or civilization or whatever.
But the book was called Beyond Civilization: Humanities Next Great Adventure. And in that he Proposes a thing that he calls tribal businesses, which is essentially having a model of a business that is a non hierarchical model that is essentially fun. He equates it with a circus, right? So in a tribe, there isn't a leader, although, you know, civilization likes to pretend like tribal people had chiefs.
And so they invented this concept and then project them onto different people who then took up those mantles during the colonial time. And still today, A lot of indigenous societies do have hierarchies, but immediate return hunter gatherers do not. So, he equates it to the circus or to an immediate return hunter gatherer tribe, where everybody's, what he calls "making a living together," right?
So, like I said earlier, you know, this idea of Urban Scout being a singular hunter gatherer, I realized that was not the way to go, and that I actually needed a collective of people to do this kind of thing. I think that's a huge starting point in terms of thinking about how to get the sort of social aspects of hunter gatherer existence, right?
You know, there's lots of people doing health stuff. Huberman Lab podcast is probably one of the best for like a rewilding health, you know, I love that one. And it's very scientific based, which I like. But there's not a lot of people doing the social stuff or, or talking about, like, essentially, how do we transform our society to be regenerative and sustainable again, and, you know, everybody can do it on a micro level, but there are also like careers that are adjacent to rewilding, you know, so I have a list somewhere of, because people ask me all the time, like, especially younger people, you know, they're like, what do I do?
And if you don't want to, like, Completely abandoned society, which most people can't do or don't want to do because you may end up in a prison cell or whatever. What are the things that are adjacent? So during the decline and the collapse that we are experiencing, you can have a career or a job that is more aligned with the values of rewilding and the practices of rewilding so that you can continue to learn how to grow your own food or learn about history, learn about these different things.
I oftentimes will just tell people to like, you know, figure out what it is that you're passionate about, and then how do you bring in elements of rewilding into that thing, right? How do you leverage whatever position you're in or whatever power you may have, even if it's little, toward a rewilding value system, you know?
It's Hard to say, because it's just like a million different things that people could do. I think about, you know, I've worked as a barista. And I would just like chat with customers about things, you know, I ended up meeting a guy who was a nonprofit guy who bought coffee. He had a big nonprofit. He would buy coffee from me. When I was a teenager, and I was reading these books about all this stuff, and he had a big environment lecture series that was part of his nonprofit, and I gave him, you know, a book of one of these at the time innovative authors, and he Made that person come and be one of their speakers and it was the biggest audience that person had ever spoken to.
So there's just levels of influence across any sort of platform, even though I wasn't necessarily changing the coffee shop, I was working and it gave me an opportunity to connect with other people and share knowledge, you know, and I think that there's lots of opportunities like that in any kind of position that you're in.
It just feels awful sometimes to be stuck in a thing that you don't like to do, at least for me, it feels horrible. So you know, I can't, I can't speak to anybody else's passions other than to just, you know, again, I love the Joseph Campbell thing of follow your bliss. And sometimes that's painful and hard.
It's not easy. I dropped out of high school firmly believing that high school was the thing I was supposed to do in life and dropping out of it. And then, you know, Because of the propaganda around graduating high school and going to college and these sort of like mythological milestones that we've placed on people. It was super hard. I lost most of my friends. The self doubt is huge, right? But I think looking back, you know, my 16 year old self would be pretty proud of where I am at, you know, and I'm pretty proud of myself for keeping going and doing the things that I did. We'll see where it goes from here. I don't know.
Megan: Yeah, I really appreciate you keeping it complex and not, there's, I know there's not one track that each of us is meant to do. That's not even, nothing in the natural world works that way, right? Like we all benefit from just the diversity of choice and Yeah, it seems like what you're saying is sort of that each of us can find an edge for ourselves and that deep well that you mentioned at the beginning and like, and we can live there and that can sustain us.
I was thinking when you were talking about the social piece, how so much of the, in my world that I live in, like so much of the desire to be comfortable in captivity is really a barrier to social connection because, you know, among our friends who are like people who are pretty, you know, comfortable materially, like everyone sort of has everything they need, right? So, like no one needs to borrow our weed whacker or whatever. Like it's hard to build community when everyone thinks they're like self sustaining, you know, and how maybe collapse and decline will accelerate, and I think it already has, like will catalyze more community building because we can't all have, you know, our own pool or our own whatever, you know, thing that we fucking have.
So yeah, I'm just. It sounds like that's a really primary, foundational place to focus.
Peter: Yeah, I think over the pandemic, the phrase "mutual aid" gained a lot of currency and that term comes from an anarchist naturalist scholar from the early 1900s who wrote a book called Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, and it was a counter to Darwin's sort of survival of the fittest, competitive aspect of natural selection. And Peter Kropotkin, the author of Mutual Aid, goes through and just shows all of these different examples in nature of how species both, you know, within their own species practice mutual aid, but then also across species practice mutual aid and how that's essentially a more... It's a more common form of natural selection or product factor in evolution than competition, which does happen, obviously, and happens a lot. But if you were to compare the two, collaboration and, you know, cooperation are basically more the baseline than the competition, which is, you know, again, a very important and central part of evolution.
Wouldn't say that otherwise, but that mutual aid is, you know, a driving factor. And if you look at humans specifically, mutual aid is potentially one of the things that sets us apart from the other great apes. So, you know, human societies are way more egalitarian than any of the other ape societies that exist. And, you know, our relatives, the closest relatives we have, chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas, we branched away from them, you know, our common ancestor with them is maybe 10 million years old or so. And, you know, they tried to reconstruct what that ancestor looked like based on the behavior of all of us, all the different apes that exist today.
The unique thing, the thing that makes humans so much more human is our dependency or interdependency on one another. There's a really great book called Mothers and Others by Sarah Hardy. Well, it talks a lot about this, but also the sort of grandmother hypothesis, where calorically speaking, a human brain requires so many calories that two parents can't even gather enough to feed a child from infancy until the age of 18 or whatever. And so, you know, evolutionary biologists, the sort of Darwinists who don't understand that there's more to mutual aid or more to social organization than breeding ask how women could live past through menopause and live for a very long time without being Without having the ability to reproduce, as if that's the thing that makes a life worth existing in evolution, right?
But it's a question - why do we have this whole, you know group within society that lives beyond that scope? And these same anthropologists that I was discussing earlier that were looking at, you know The subsistence of immediate return hunter gatherers, more recently They've done an analysis on these societies and they found out that the breadwinners, so to speak, the people bringing in the most calories In immediate return societies around the world were grandmas who get up at like 6 a. m. and walk around, and just gather food and then bring it back to camp and process it.
And so even though high calorie items - animals - are more likely to be killed by, you know, men, even though both men and women and intersex people and everybody in between do hunting, in a lot of these societies, the majority of it, especially bigger game is taken by men and those things have more calories, the more consistent calories are plants. And those plants are more consistently and gathered in larger quantities by specifically grandmas. And so the interesting thing about this is that - it's called alloparenting in biology - there are not a lot of animals, mothers in particular, who would allow another animal, even if it's the same species, to hold their baby.
So like, you know, a chimpanzee mother isn't going to let another chimpanzee hold their baby, maybe, maybe for like a minute or a split second and probably only another female, right? But in human society, alloparenting is an intrinsic aspect of our, of our culture. And so that in and of itself is an example of the kind of cooperation and trust that humans have built over the last several million years since we diverged from chimpanzees and gorillas and whatever else, right? That's just one example. There's so many examples of what it means to be human in terms of food sharing specifically to sharing of food. I mean, we share parenting and we share our food.
Chimpanzees don't really share food either. I mean bonobos will like trade food for sex and stuff like that, you know, but humans, we intrinsically share food. It's one of the things that makes us unique, right? Is the sharing. And one of the things that you see in biology with gender egalitarianism is gender demorphism.
So oftentimes in societies where males are more dominant, size wise, they're bigger. So think about like gorillas. Gorillas are massive. They're like twice the size of a female. Whereas for the last million years, several million years, humans, men and women, have essentially... Almost become the same size. Men are still on average larger than women, but the percentages have decreased and decreased and decreased over millions of years, which which says that we've been becoming more and more and more equal over time.
This is the trajectory of our species. And so thinking about work, thinking about, you know, the way that we live, make a living together, it's intrinsic to us that we do this together and not by ourselves, and that we do this not, you know, together with a specific demographic, but that, you know, all of the demographics across our societies have been becoming more and more equal over time.
Megan: That's encouraging. Thanks. Could you help us kind of expand the possibilities for where could we go in the next one to two generations? Like, if you had like an ideal vision that was still sort of rooted in reality, where do you hope we could get if we really focused on mutual aid and leaned into, you know, some of the themes you just talked about, like, where do you think we could get to?
Peter: Yeah. I feel like I'm an optimist on some level and oftentimes when I talk about the collapse of civilization, people think I'm a pessimist because they think the collapse of civilization is a negative. But what I'm saying is I'm an optimist because I think the collapse of civilization is a positive net gain.
That doesn't mean that people dying is a positive thing or that that's an inevitability. So if I were to Imagine a world that would be the ideal transition scenario from where we are today to something else, I would see it like the Hohokam decline, right, where it's a transition over a long period of time. Where people stop reproducing on a larger level, which essentially means That we allow space for the other species to exist on the planet.
I imagine that resource distribution would be very different than it is today. I don't like political labels, but if we were to like adopt contemporary political labels and project them onto hunter gatherer societies, you could call them, you know, anarchists or primitive communists or, Even like primitive socialists or something along those lines.
So I think if there's going to be a transformation on any kind of scale, it's going to be a decentralization instead of a hierarchy. It would be something decentralized. So local everything - coming back more and more local. Is that going to happen? I don't know. But you know, collapse is the window, or the doorway rather, to transformation.
There's two books that I'm - one I'm currently reading so I can't speak to it much yet - but it's called The Great Leveler and it's essentially about how all of the great wins in equality and cultural transformation have happened through you essentially, revolution. And that the idea of slowly moving the needle doesn't really work.
The other book is called Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit, and it's about the powers of communities that arise during disasters. So those two books are kind of informing, you know, how I sort of look at what I do and what I think there's a kind of combination of like passing a torch. So like keeping a flame alive for the time when the right conditions come up where it can take, you know, where it can actually ignite and transform society. So on some level, I see myself as just sort of a catalyst waiting for the opportunities, waiting for the material conditions to arise that will then create bigger scale transformations. So there's just kind of a maintenance of a thing while also trying to promote it as much as possible, because who knows?
Yeah, so I don't know. It's hard to even imagine what a transformation for me, what a transformation would look like, because I'm so my nose is so like in the dirt, so to speak, like I'm just no, you know, to the grindstone or whatever, right? Like I'm, I'm just doing stuff. And on some level, I think that, you know, the popularity of rewilding increasing, the more we do things, the more we just kind of get the ideas out there, the more other people will come up with solutions for their own environments, their own local systems, and maybe they don't call it rewilding, who cares what it's called, but it's for resilience, and it's for wildness, and how do we just keep on that thread, you know, and not get distracted. That's the big thing. Not get distracted with the quick fix. Right. And I don't know, I don't know how that works. I'm just doing the things. I don't, I don't even know. It's funny, cause I don't really have a, I don't really have like a long term vision in that sense.
I think it's, it's sort of too big for me to even try to wrap my head around.
Megan: You're an immediate return visionary.
Peter: Yeah, the payoff for the work I'm doing, I have no idea what it'll be. Yeah.
Megan: So what are some of the edges for you? Like, where do you feel like you're being stretched or, you know, what are your wild edges right now, I guess, in the work that you do?
Peter: I mean, I think it does come down to that sort of That idea - the vision of like, what do you see, you know, like, what do I see? I think this is just constantly a challenge for me is like, is what I'm doing, actually doing anything? That's sort of always a thing that's out there. And then I'm always thinking, is there a way to leverage the system that exists to do more? Is there a way to be more effective? Is there, are we at the point of material conditions where things could get more intense? And should I be a catalyst for that? I don't know. You know, Rewild Portland has grown sort of beyond my managerial abilities. So, you know, I'm hiring assistants and hiring staff to take on different projects.
And then for me, you know, I would really love to be able to step away from the organization and focus more just on the storytelling. On this anthropology, on like breaking down this kind of stuff for the general public who doesn't understand it because it's not in mainstream media. How many mainstream media writers know anything about prehistory or humans? None of them, right? And then you have major shows on Netflix like the Ancient Apocalypse show, which is just laughable to any archaeologist, who is basically just, you know, making stuff up and then saying that archaeologists just don't like him because he's controversial when archaeologists don't like him because he's a liar because he's not scientific.
So, and it's like archaeology loves discovery. So the idea that they would be hiding anything or anything like that is just laughable to anybody who's actually in the field. So, you know, anything like that to me, I think that's my, that's my sort of trajectory in life is to be a storyteller of sorts and translate out a lot of the scientific literature that's under lock and key and academic institutions and translate it out to a public that is unaware of a lot of this information in hopes that they'll Be able to transform their lives in society in a way that benefits everybody, including other than human creatures that exist with us here on the planet.
Megan: Thanks. And thanks for doing that for us today.
Peter: Well, I hope it made sense. You know, the more it's one of those problems, the more I know, the less I know how to translate it even in and of itself. So, you know, the curse of knowledge is what they call it in the marketing world. Like, when you know your own product so well, but you don't know how to tell it to an audience, right?
Megan: Yeah, I think you did great! You haven't lost touch.
Peter: Not yet.
Megan: Is there anything else you want to make sure you mention before you share just how people can connect with you and follow along?
Peter: Yeah, if people want to follow me. I'm on social media, just Peter Michael Bauer. Facebook, and Instagram, and Tik Tok , I guess. I don't use that one much, but, and who knows, maybe the government will ban it. And then I've got a Patreon for my podcast and some of my writings and videos and stuff around rewilding. And then I have a class called Rewilding 101 that I offer both online and in person in Portland.
Megan: Awesome. Yeah, I definitely recommend Rewilding 101. It was a really helpful entry point. So yeah, hopefully people will check that out. Thank you so much, Peter. Really.
Peter: Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you.
Megan: Okay. My friend, I hope that you loved that episode. I encourage you to connect with Peter's work and to check out his class, Rewilding 101, and to also check out his podcast, The Rewilding Podcast .
I hope you take such good care that you continue stretching into your edges and limits of hydration and rest and moving at a pace that feels natural to you right now. I will be back with you next week. I hope you Have a lovely, lovely week and i'll see you on the other side