Rekindling your connection to nature may be the most rewarding thing you do in your lifetime; it offers lifelong learning in skills that bring you into close communication with plants and the land.
Water Purification is not just about expensive filters. For long-term survival, you need knowledge too.
I practice water-processing skills that are not based on the “Prepper” model: If you don’t have an expensive filter, can you improvise? Yes, of course you can
Water harvesting and purification: Rainwater as a survival resource. Rainwater requires filtration, chemical treatment, and boiling. The same is true of harvested fog.
Hydration in Heatwaves & Making Water Safe to Drink: Processing water is a skill requiring organization and planning.
Watering the garden: I used to use rainwater as my primary dry-weather water source.
I use greywater for deep-ground irrigation systems. But you also need to employ a reed-bed filtration system. My reedbed system is in the water container. Also, this system is only fed by the shower, and the soap is biodegradable.
Food: Can we forage during ecological collapse?
The short answer is no. The longer answer is yes, but we need to rewild on a grand scale and transform agricultural systems to harness winter floodwater. We can also learn ancestral skills.
I only teach foraging in person because there is nuance and sometimes specialized skill involved. You can’t learn a highly nuanced skill online.
Shelter: Your home (house) and a variety of shelter-building skills based on what is available in the environment.
My ideal camping setup is a hammock:
A hammock and a tarp: But it doesn’t suit everyone.
A shelter that can contain a fire
Shelters like this take 3-4 hours to construct. These were made with no tools. I only wore gloves. No string; the entire structure is woven together.
Shelter can be improvised quickly with some basic skills, tarps, blankets, and cardboard.
Firecraft
Fire-making skills: Knowing when it’s safe to have fires and when it isn’t. Knowing how to improvise and what plants make good tinder.
Tinder and accelerants come in all varieties, some natural and some made in advance:
The image below is a piece of fatwood harvested from a pine log.
Tinder boxes are a common item in the wilderness practitioner’s pack. The tinder box, coupled with knowledge of where the dry materials are found, even after weeks of rain. The tinder box can contain a variety of processed materials, and is often made from materials which could be used as tinder at a push.
Iron-Age fire: the Flint & Steel is how our Iron-Age Ancestors (Celts) made fire. It’s a highly skilled endeavor, but with a bit of practice and the right tinder materials, it’s learnable for most people.
Teach your children when they are young: He’s now 24 and an accomplished outdoorsman & Civil Engineer.
Firecraft is an exploration of plants as tinder and the means to process them to that end.
Sacred firekeeping: It can take years to learn this skill and all the associated skills, including foraging for the materials we need.
Sacred firekeeping isn’t just about “holding space”. It’s the firekeeper’s fire; ask before you add anything. Never assume it’s your fire to change.
Extended skills beyond fire craft: manufacture of glues and tinder boxes:
Some bushcrafters will tell you: any dry plant material that rubs into fibers works well as tinder. That’s not strictly true. The bark of the Sequoia (Giant Redwood) is gloriously fibrous but doesn’t burn at all. The Sequoia has evolved with bushfires. The bark is a natural fire retardant. We don’t imagine that trees could evolve to resist forest fires, let alone develop bark that doesn’t burn and insulates the tree’s sapwood from brush-fire heat. The exploration of plants as tinder is part of the process of joyful curiosity. The processing is human-level technology: breaking, grinding, drying. The time spans are hours. Your limbic system reaps the rewards.
Cultivating a deep connection to nature through skills
“Many people, especially men, find a deep connection to nature and each other by learning wilderness survival skills together in small groups. In fact, this learning process taps into the human brain’s natural connection to nature at a fundamental level and occurs subconsciously.” SolidatityPrepping.co.uk
The structure of the brain changes when we learn outdoor skills in the right environment and prosocially.
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