Dearest wildlings,
As the new season beckons, this little newsletter on rewilding is also entering its new era. While its humble curator prepares to migrate their own corporeal form across the earth (at the stately pace of a running warthog), Wild Thickets is expanding its horizons, too - reaching outward like a mycorrhizal network from the coasts of Vancouver1, British Columbia and into other wildish landscapes near and far.
The funny thing about rewilding, I’m finding, is that the restoration of degraded ecosystems is only one piece of the puzzle. Just as important, it seems, is the crackling whirl of cosmic co-existence that represents our own positionality in all of this - each of us but a small slice of the big, melting cake that is the human species in a more-than-human world facing climate crisis. We now know that concepts like rewilding hold many contradictions. We also know there is much work to be done if we are to heal. But what do we know about the murky terrains of rewilding ourselves?
One thing I am sure of is that the answer takes the form of a gentle beast - one who does not speak in the way our kind tends to, with one voice drowning out all the others. Instead, she responds in a many-voiced polyphonic melody, each speaking in its own tone, with difference honoured alongside collective means of being.
And so, once a season I disappear into the woods, hunting truffles in the form of email postcards from some of my favourite makers and thinkers across the oceans (more about them here). I ask each of them/us a simple question: How are you rewilding?
Without further ado, here is our first batch of postcards, sharing 25 latest traces from lives lived, as one season shifts into the next. May they provide nourishment and solidarity for your own wildish hatchings (and scratchings!) yet to come.
Until then, see you in the thickets…
❥, Dr KitKat
… 📬 🍄 📨 :
Gayatri has been expanding her regenerative food forest, and learning how to scale up community supported agriculture. She will be traveling from her no-dig / no-till garden in the Nilgiris, India to learn at an ecologically restorative no-till farm and market garden, Singing Frogs Farm, in Sonoma County, California. She’s been thinking a lot about renewing and rebuilding the soil and the soul, and finding that in the solitude of nature, we need a community of souls to thrive.
Jack has been designing Tölvera, an open source library for composing basal agencies. This summer, they will be Vibrating Bodies of Water Across Time in Seyðisfjörður.
Jess is submersed this year in somatic remembering with a global community of deeply rewilded women. She is touched by the work of A'ida Shibli; a queer Indigenous Bedouin feminist, ecological and peace activist who has inspired her to consider getting involved with the Tamera Peace Research and Education Center in Portugal. This summer she will be on Denman island, also known as Inner Island (Taystay'ich), the traditional Pentlach, K’omox, Sliammon and Kwakwaka’wakw territory, learning natural building techniques with Mudgirls Collective and her 12-year old son.
Tristan will be rewilding himself in the Mount Zirkel Wilderness of Colorado, seeking hawk wing mushrooms, rainbow trout and rejuvenative hot springs with three local compadres. He's been thinking about deep sea mining while building a documentary project following a marine biologist advocating against the practice, traveling the Pacific Coast from Alaska to Chile, meeting ocean regeneration communities along the way. Last winter he examined how gross domestic product can be reframed to rewild our economies.
Gabriela is re-learning how to grow a milpa, also known as three sisters, a collaborative crop-growing system originally from Meso America. She is focusing on the temporalities and lessons that each of the sisters - corn, beans and pumpkin - will make visible, while growing (with) them in the Landhof community garden in Basel.
Vincent has been producing media / installation under the monicker a flyingoctopus, and was most recently involved in creating an AI Noise Reduction platform on embedded devices for a famous four letter headphone/speaker company you’ve heard of. He is currently in the process of creating a new Art + Code curriculum for a school in Vancouver, and he plans to continue to decolonize his mind through activism and music, and to forever fight for the user.
Zjeau is thinking about how we can reserve space for permeable surfaces, ecology, and trees in light of new provincial housing legislation in British Columbia. She is planning to explore the backcountry after a multi-year hiatus; getting far off the beaten path into mysterious other-worlds is most exciting. She is learning how to challenge her inner ear, one of the body parts least exercised by adults. She continues to mull over the book Where Do Camels Belong, and would love to discuss it with anyone who has read it.
Jonathan will be working on forestscapes, exploring soundscaping as method for collective inquiry into forests as living cultural landscapes. As part of the EU SUPERB project across 16 countries, he has also been working on arts-based methods for situating forest restoration, and experimenting with recomposing forest video. You can find him at the Digital Methods Summer School, and a session on “recomposing sound and video” at 4S/EASST in Amsterdam in July.
Jaz is feeling like spring in a new city they moved during the last wintry season. They’ve started to invite others nearby with different ways of understanding the world to think, make, and learn together around ‘awe,’ especially how it changes us through art. In the coming season, they’d like to do this with those who may be further away in bodies and in thoughts.
Viktor has been speculating with a group of people at the shores of the Thames about the imageability of cities for non-human critters. This was at the event ‘Meals Without Address’ of the Kitchen Research Unit at Goldsmiths, in which he led a small activity infusing Kevyn Lynch's proposals of navigating cities with a more-than-human perspective shift, by imagining non-human landmarks, edges, paths, nodes and districts.
Priscila will be making sure to have some single open flowers on her balcony, so that bees visiting her daily can easily access the nectar and pollen. She will be thinking how bees communicate through dancing, and will try to spot the 'round dance' which signals great pollen nearby, as as well as the 'waggle dance' which shows the distance and exact spot to other bees.
Hannes and his friends will be working in the nature garden as part of a community housing project in rural Thuringia. The garden is intended to promote socio-ecological co-living. It invites interaction between local residents, guests of the house, and the rich wildlife and flora in the immediate surroundings.
Ann’s summer will focus on rewilding oceans, and talking with people interested in the more-than-human across Europe, after a spring of organising events to inspire action and find kinship between humans. The more she learns, the greater her respect for seagrass.
Teresa is thinking about that word: Rewild. Returning to untamed states. Conservationists argue. Books titled "Feral". Missing links. Reintroductions. Restoration. Returning. All the Rs. To the self. Regulated space. The lolz of life's journey. Returning to local wetlands. Tuning into birds. Always acts of repair.
Liliana will be working on the SUPERB project, exploring how insights from queer ecologies and art can be brought to bear on forest restoration practices and policy in an European context, and how they can help to rethink how forest restoration is done in this context.
Arman is working on a hybrid poetry project this summer in collaboration with a fellow Iranian-diaspora illustrator to make a modern poetry codex in the style of 15-16th century illuminated manuscripts, with a (post-) modern and (post-) immigrant ethos.
Mauree will be rewilding and rediscovering her roots near her childhood home on North Vancouver island, trekking along the rugged Cape Scott Trail this summer. She aims to ground herself in community, foster legacy through connections and collect core memories, as she reflects on how finite life can be.
G will be thinking about increased centralized authority and opacity in government decision-making, and how to undermine those trends through access to information and freedom of information. They have been celebrating a return to pre-streaming music and the wild web with the Geocities-only release of Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee.
Gaoli will be working with the URA team and local governments in Huangyan and Chengdu, China to develop a rural-urban network for inclusive transformation-to-sustainability. She will also be moving into a new WG (shared apartment) in Berlin. As all roommates in the WG are vegetarians/vegans, she will try to start a plant-based diet. She looks forward to it!
Thiane plans to finally finish her doctoral thesis and start a new project with her collective, the Transfeminist Digital Care Network, to study and train about physical and digital care. She has been reading Denise Ferreira's book Homo Modernus.
Georgina has been thinking about getting to grips with her new back garden, beautifully attended to by the previous occupants but now having designs on being a jungle. Despite having studied plant sciences an extremely long time ago, she is a very inexperienced botanist, and is looking forward to figuring out… grass.
Janet is wildly excited about a 6-day silent meditation retreat on Cortes Island in August at a little natural retreat oasis called Hollyhock. She starts a 2-year mindfulness meditation teacher training certification soon, and this silent retreat is a prerequisite - but truth be told, she’s wanted to attend a silent retreat for many years, and can't imagine a better place. Somatic experiencing and mindful embodied practice is core to her personal rewilding journey. As part of her training, she’ll be offering free meditation sessions, so look out for those soon!
Lara is hoping to move from London to Cambridge, but unraveling roots grown over twenty years is proving to be a challenge. Here’s to new growth, as well as the reflections that come from a much-needed pruning.
Kit will be moving from Vancouver to Basel for currently-secret (and soon not-so-secret) hatchings with a new programme, which is wild to its core. Whilst riding everywhere by bike, they’ve been thinking about the tiny forests of Japan and Canada; Yuturi Warmi, the all-women patrol group currently guarding Ecuador’s Amazônia; Haruka’s feral 7-hour ride into deepest techno at Georgia’s (in)famous Bassiani; and Hvaldimir, the well-traveled beluga and alleged(!) ex-Russian spy.
Amanda will be fostering new ways to experience deep reverence. She'll be re-reading Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing, and is deeply inspired by the suggestion to connect with geo-location to reclaim autonomy over attention. She plans to learn more names of birds, their songs, and plants. As a child she used to love lying on the grass and imagining tiny worlds in the undergrowth, inside knots in trees and on the banks of rivers. This summer, she plans to revisit losing herself in time and imagination, visiting the tiny worlds we live and love among.
