The Rewilding Podcast w/ Peter Michael Bauer

Episodes

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  Minimalism in Rewilding 19.10.2026 1h 5m

  Rewilding, in essence, is about existing in the congress of all wild things. This requires minimizing our disturbances to our ecosystems and maximizing the potential of their regrowth after. Minimalism is one form of limiting consumption, which is a form of minimizing our disturbance to the environment. Minimalism can come in various shapes and sizes and methodologies. Minimalism is one way to put rewilding values into practice. I was contacted by some folks who put together a zine on minimal...
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  Regenerative Agriculture & Pastoralism in Ireland w/ Future Oak Farms 06.07.2026 1h 10m

  Hunter-gatherers relied on megafauna for their subsistence. Those material conditions no longer exist: most land is under the control of state or private individuals and most of the megafauna are extinct. Rewilding looks to hunter-gatherers as an inspiration for adapting modern subsistence practices as best we can, to be more like that of our evolutionary past. While domestication was a stark turn away from hunting and gathering, pastoralism as an existing subsistence strategy is ripe for pot...
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  Everyday Anarchism and the Rewilding Podcast 11.05.2026 1h 7m

  This episode is a crossover with Graham from Everyday Anarchism and Peter from The Rewilding Podcast. We conversed about rewilding, everyday anarchism, and a few of the connections between rewilding and anarchy. Everyday Anarchism https://www.everydayanarchism.com/ The Rewilding Podcast https://www.petermichaelbauer.com Support the show
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  Hierarchy & Collapse w/ Luke Kemp 20.04.2026 1h 13m

  How hierarchy forms and gets stuck in a feedback loop is something that many people have a hard time grasping. Today I’m speaking with Luke Kemp, author of the book Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. The book does an incredible job of outlining aspects of rewilding that I have been teaching for many years, in a succinct way that illuminated more things I hadn’t factored into the big picture. In this episode Luke and I have a wide ranging conversation, covering vario...
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  Accessible Anthropology w/ Andie From Ancestral Habits 06.04.2026 54m

  If you’ve been looking for ways to engage with anthropology that are fun and easy to grasp, this is the podcast episode for you. Rewilding requires learning from humanity’s diverse past in order to shape our present and future in a way that is reciprocal with the land and each other. Anthropology can feel daunting and inaccessible to many people. From academic jargon to studies behind paywalls and the occasional pretentious practitioner. Social media provides a potential space for culturally ...
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  Rewilding 101 Documentary Film Series w/ Calen Kennett 03.04.2026 50m

  You often hear me speak about my rewilding 101 classes on the podcast. In this episode I’m speaking with my long time friend Calen Kennett, about our current project, which involves turning my class into an 8 part documentary film series and online companion course. We launched a kickstarter on April 1st to fund the project. We recorded this epsiode via instagram Live, so the audio is not as good as my normal podcast. If you want to help propel cultural rewilding to the forefront of public co...
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  How to Start a Friction Fire the Communal Way w/ Ian Walton Larner & Aoife Ni Lodainn 09.02.2026 1h 44m

  Rewilding is a community effort. Many ancestral skills today are created with an individualist mindset, friction fire being one of them. But in older times, people worked together to create fire, understanding that community and togetherness was an important part of their survival. Such methods were known as the Neid Fire, Fire Churn, Tine Éigin, among others. Apprenticing to fire is a humbling experience, and learning to do it in tandem with others is a magical experience. To talk with me ab...
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  Running an Outdoor Youth Program w/ Neal Ritter 26.01.2026 1h 18m

  Every once and a while I am happy and stunned to find an educational organization that makes me feel envious at the clear impact they are making on kids' lives, and the fun they are having along the way. For me, finding inspiration in other organizations that are keeping ancestral skills alive is an important part of running your own organization. Particularly, those that serve the next generation. In this episode I chat with Neal Ritter, a co-founder of the Laughing Coyote Project, a non-pro...
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  Solar Punk and Rewilding w/ Andrew Sage 17.11.2025 1h 3m

  Rewilding reconnects people to a regenerative relationship with the lands where we dwell. Many people live lives that are dramatically linked to technological modernity. A return to a less technologically dependent life is not possible (for them). Solar Punk offers a potential “transition” type of living that could help soften the blow of a collapsing industrial technological system–or may even represent a kind of sustainable futurism. To talk with me today about this is Andrew Sage. An...
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  Am I Rewilder Enough? w/ Sheila Henson 07.07.2025 1h 5m

  Am I Rewilder Enough? w/ Sheila Henson Do you feel like a poseur when it comes to rewilding? Do you have guilty pleasures you can’t give up? Are you too overwhelmed to start rewilding? You’re not alone. In this episode I chat with my friend and Rewild Portland board member Sheila Henson about the judgments we face from others and (more often) ourselves that we perennially face in rewilding. From how we dress to our day to day choices, shame, guilt, and confusion can paralyze us or drive us a...
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  How Hunter-Gatherers Learn w/ Dr. Gul Deniz Salali 05.05.2025 1h 15m

  For millions of years, and in some places still today, hunter-gatherers raise competent and capable children. They do this while navigating challenging environments, with predators, dangerous tools, and most notably: without any school. Contemporary societies have created learning environments that are a mismatch with the expectations of our genetic evolution: we weren’t meant to sit in boxes all day. The system of compulsory education that spans the globe and shapes our perception of educati...
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  Maintaining Peaceful Societies w/ Douglas Fry 07.04.2025 1h 35m

  For millions of years, evidence suggests that humans lived in relatively equal societies, where food acquisition and child raising were shared activities among community members both men and women, together. It is apparent that our environments of evolutionary adaptation, selected for humans with evermore prosocial traits. Domination and competition were minimized in favor of collaboration and partnerships of mutual aid. The idea that any human was superior to another would have been an absur...
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  Rekindling Ancestral Lifeways in Ireland w/ Lucy O’Hagan 10.03.2025 1h 22m

  Creating ancestral skills communities is central to rewilding. We need people sharing skills together, we need people tending land together. These communities don’t form over night. It takes time to build them. I spoke with Lucy O’Hagan in February of 2020, in one of my first episodes of the Rewilding Podcast. Now it’s February of 2025 and a lot has changed in the last five years. Their community has grown, our friendship has deepened, and I continue to be deeply inspired by their work. Last ...
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  Surviving Multiple Environments w/ Tom McElroy 03.02.2025 1h 9m

  One of the key aspects of wildness is adaptation. Being able to change and adapt to different needs, in different environments, is a cornerstone of resilience. While a large part of this involves getting to know the land where you dwell, it helps to know multiple landscapes. It can teach you how to think on your toes and figure out how to do things in new ways. While rewilding leans more toward longer term ancestral living within a culture, and survival is more about meeting immediate needs i...
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  The Wrong Way to Rewild 06.01.2025 1h 13m

  I’m fond of saying, “There’s no one right way to rewild.” A friend once asked me, “Sure, Peter. But is there a wrong way?” I wanted to do something fun for this episode that I haven’t delved into much before in this space, so I invited my friend on to talk about the “wrong” ways to rewild. Don’t be fooled by the candy bar image, I love elements of contemporary society that are in some ways more aligned with ancient ways… But what I abhor is when people water down rewilding to make it less abo...
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  Why We Need Wild Foods w/ Monica Wilde 02.12.2024 1h 8m

  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 thi...
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  Community as the Primary Survival Skill w/ Luke McLaughlin 07.10.2024 1h 19m

  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 p...
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  What is a Subsistence Economy and What Makes Them So Resilient w/ Dr. Helga Vierich 15.04.2024 1h 13m

  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 subsisten...
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  The Reality of Hunter-Gatherers w/ Dr. Robert Kelly 18.03.2024 1h 17m

  Rewilding is about seeking a reciprocal relationship to the environment and to one another. Material and cultural conditions kept humans in relative check with their ecologies for potentially millions of years, so what were they? If we are to understand this, we must hold up a lens and look at the diversity of hunter-gatherers (both past and present) to fully realize what their cultural and environmental limitations were–and are–today. Why did some abandon that way of life while others have f...
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  Rewilding Cities Through Place-making Permaculture w/ Mark Lakeman 22.01.2024 1h 19m

  City landscapes are perhaps the most decimated and human centric habitats in today’s world. These landscapes are in need of thoughtful rewilding. Cities are some of the most domesticated places, but also positioned in some of the most historically fertile places. Cities were built where they are, because these places had access to a diverse array of resources. Many think rewilding means running away to the wilderness–but that’s not the case. For one, this is not a practical reality for most p...