“The best time to plant an oak tree was thirty years ago. But the second best time is today.”
Our Mission
The mission of the Rewilding Conference is to unite the many individuals, groups, and institutions who are working hard under the banner of “rewilding” to restore the earth’s ecosystems and the human place therein.
What Rewilding Means to Us
In this introductory video from our 7th Annual Rewilding Conference, Founder Peter Michael Bauer explains the origins, meaning, and intentions behind the cultural rewilding movement–and how we use the term here.
January 24–26, 2025
Portland, OR
The Annual North American Rewilding Conference is a hybrid conference with the majority of it taking place online with some in-person meetups and watch parties. The conference is part speakers, part Open Space, and part hands-on land tending. It is a think tank of some of the continent’s most inspiring rewilders and rewilding projects, as well as a social networking opportunity for rewilders. Here you will find individuals and grassroots organizations collaborating on a range of rewilding-related fields including ancestral technology, decolonization, wildlands restoration, ethnobiology, reintroduction of species, social and environmental justice, traditional ecological knowledge, and much more. This event is brought to you by Rewild Portland, a nonprofit organization serving the Portland area and the rural and wild areas beyond. Proceeds from this event go to the speakers and to supporting Rewild Portland's mission to promote cultural and environmental resilience.
What is Rewilding?
Rewilding is the process of creating autonomous, place-based, regenerative subsistence cultures. It is rooted in social and environmental justice: in order to shift our culture to a regenerative subsistence model, we must dismantle the social systems in place that prevent people from doing so. At its core, rewilding is about restoring the health and vitality of our minds, bodies, relationships, communities, and ecosystems.
A note on the word wild: Though it carries many connotations, wild comes from the word willed. The “wild” things were and are the willed things: things that exist outside of civilization’s domination. This is why the myths of civilization simultaneously demonize and romanticize the “wild”; civilization hates and fears what is out of its control, yet also desires and fetishizes them (think: wild stallion). It is this attempt to control that which cannot be controlled that leads to destruction of ecosystems, health, and human relationships. Rewilding is, therefore, an attempt to return to lifeways that work with the flows, the wills, and cycles of nature rather than waging an all-out war to control them.
Conference Schedule
Friday, Jan. 24, 9 am–5 pm (PST) || Speakers
9–10 am | TBA
10:30–11:30 am | TBA
11:30 am–1 pm Lunch
1–2 pm | TBA
2:30–3:30 pm | TBA
4–5 pm | TBA
Saturday, Jan. 25, 9 am–5 pm (PST) || Open Space
9–10 am | Open Space Intro
10–11 am | Session 1
11 am–12 pm | Session 2
12 pm–1:30 pm Lunch
1:30–2:30 pm | Session 3
2:30–3:30 pm | Session 4
3:30–4:30 pm | Session 5
4:30–5 pm | Open Space Closing
Sunday, Jan. 26, 9 am–5 pm (PST) || Open Space
9–12 pm | Field Projects
12 pm–1:30 pm Lunch
1:30–3:30 pm | Keynote
3:30–5:00 pm | Conference Closing
Conference Facilitator & MC
Peter Michael Bauer is the founder and director of Rewild Portland. He has been the main facilitator of the Annual North American Rewilding Conference for every one of its 8 years. As an anthropologist, experimental archaeologist, historian, and life-long 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 2000’s, he has been an integral catalyst in the cultural rewilding movement. This usage of the term rewilding is seen as a principle, or a lens, that helps people move through the world in terms of regeneration and reciprocity. His goal has been to amplify how the cultural rewilding movement works to create resilience through the return to place-based, regenerative subsistence strategies, inspired by those that exist outside of–and those that existed prior to–the formation of agrarian states. In the mid 2000’s he created the first international online rewilding forum (now archived at discuss.rewild.com), wrote a book on rewilding called Rewild or Die, and founded the organization Rewild Portland. Today he is the host of the popular podcast, The Rewilding Podcast w/ Peter Michael Bauer.
SPEAKERS (Friday)
TBA
Mark Lakeman
For Instance: A Village of Insistence, Bound for Transcendence, Made Through Persistence
We walk past our own species in the long flat streets, looking away, resigned. Yet something ANCIENT stirs, disturbs, remains alive inside us. Does it remember? With enough light we could finally see that the veil of forgetting is quite thin. It doesn't take much to remember, just enough to get excited. Despite epochs of disruption and upheaval, structures and systems of control and division, we can always create.
Biography: For the last three decades, Mark has been an activist leader in the development of ecological community places across North America. Through his ongoing facilitative leadership in Communitecture, the City Repair Project (501(c)3), the Village Building Convergence, and the Planet Repair Institute, he has also been instrumental in the development of dozens of participatory organizations and urban permaculture design projects. Mark works with grassroots communities, non profit organizations, governmental leaders and educational institutions in many diverse communities.
Lee
Digging up the root of capitalism: A discussion on impermanence, Landback, water and land protection; removing greed and hoarding practices from our lives
Biography: Lee is a dedicated environmental activist and educator that has worked with a variety of nonprofits to strengthen communities and preserve waterways and land for future generations. They started Shared Spaces Foundation an NGO based in Seattle,Wa in 2020. They have led numerous project development initiatives, workshops and events, bridging marginalized communities through envisioning anti capitalist ways of engaging and protecting our natural environment. While sharing a range of practical skills related to environmental sustainability.
Lee is from the Sovereign Nation, Kindom of Hawaii and continues work there while residing in the Duwamish River Valley. They began working in the Duwamish river valley 14 years ago, teaching water safety on the Salish Sea and Duwamish river. Through their work on the river, they strengthened relationships with native communities, and have since developed a free access educational water program titled River Access Paddle Program (RAPP).
Through their work with Shared Spaces Foundation, Lee plans to continue sharing their knowledge and experience of sustainable building and environmental protection. Lee is a driven innovator who hopes to show others that through strong will and determination we can make a difference in the world and local communities by supporting and educating each other outside of institutionalized systems.
Andrew Sage
Rewild, Redistribute, Reimagine: Solarpunk Solutions for Urban Living
Description: How library economies and urban struggle guided by solarpunk principles can help us reimagine the future of urban life.
Biography: Andrew Sage is a passionate writer, artist, and YouTuber hailing from the vibrant island nation of Trinidad & Tobago. As an ardent anarchist and firm believer in power to the people, Andrew has dedicated his efforts to invigorating imaginations and encouraging people to create a better world in the shell of the old.
Open Space (Saturday)
At its heart, the Annual North American Rewilding Conference is set up for the Open Space portion of the conference. Open Space Technology is a non-hierarchical, organic, social collaboration tool best used to discuss and create solutions to a specific problem or issue. We have chosen to emphasize Open Space Technology because it is a way of rewilding a conference. Open Space does not operate like a traditional conference, in which only presenters or speakers give lectures or teach classes. While traditional conferences are structured so that a few people talk at you, Open Space allows us to generate discussions between everyone in the field of rewilding, from "experts" to enthusiasts, and at all levels, from institutional to grassroots. All participants arrive on the Open Space morning, create the topics, and lead the discussions. You can take part in whatever discussions you want. One of the most amazing things about Open Space is that it puts the known experts on the same field as the unknowns and laypeople. Everyone has something to contribute in a community, and Open Space is a way of pulling ideas out of the zeitgeist of the movement rather than expecting to only ever hear solutions from a few "thinkers." In an Open Space conference, everyone is equal and all ideas have an opportunity to be discussed, in real life, face to face with other humans.
How Open Space Works
Participants create the agenda first thing on the morning of the Open Space. People are given the opportunity at this time to announce their session to the entire group. Sessions can be added any time during the Open Space, but the morning agenda creation is the only time people are able to announce a session to the entire Open Space. This is an opportunity to discuss your burning passions and questions around rewilding. At Open Space, it’s the participants responsibility to make sure the things they feel are most needed to be discussed, are. This means if someone else doesn’t bring up the topic you wanted to discuss, it’s on you to make it happen! There is no pressure to “teach” or be knowledgeable in the area you want to discuss: as a session holder, you simply must hold space for the topic. You can host a session on something you know nothing about, as a way to bring in people who are passionate about the subject and may have the answers you’re looking for.
After announcing their session topic, including when and where they will be held, participants then post them on the Open Space "Wall of Confluence”. The wall is a grid with a list of session times down one side and locations across the top. The Wall of Confluence contains the agenda and schedule.
Once the session announcements are over, the Open Space begins. Participants then choose which sessions they would like to attend. Open Space Technology has five "principles" and one "law." The five principles are: Whoever comes are the right people. Whenever it starts is the right time. Wherever it happens is the right place. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened. And when it's over, it's over. The one "law" is the law of two feet: if at any point during our time together you find yourself neither learning from nor contributing to the discussion, use your two feet and go someplace else. At the end of the day, participants come back together to share moments of the day.
Skills “Corner”
A small corner of the Open Space (a single digital room) is reserved for working on ancestral skills. This is a place to share, teach, and practice natural hand crafts. While dialogue and conversation are the central themes of this conference and not ancestral skills (check out our summer gathering Echoes in Time for a focused week of skills building), we offer this space as a way of grounding our dialogue through handwork. Come relax and work on a project, share something you are working on, or teach a mini skills session. You can, of course, work on crafts during any and all sessions of the conference. This space is simply dedicated to discussing and working on hand crafts at the same time.
Field Classes
On Sunday morning, we break the monotony of indoor conversations, get outside and put our hands in the earth. The focus of the field classes is to show that humans can be active agents of regeneration from their subsistence to their tool-making to classic conservation. How can humans create, or become active agents in, regenerative ecosystems across a wide range of places, from home scale to private property to public land? We offer a variety of planting and restoration activities. This hands-on component of the conference is a way of learning new techniques while giving back to various food security and sovereignty programs through assisting them by offering our physical labor.
KEYNOTE (SUNDAY) TBA
Testimonials
"Nowhere else in my world are people having the conversations that people at Rewild are having. This is not because people aren't dying to talk about these topics but because the conditions haven't been created in enough spaces. Environmental education that doesn't address the inner violence of colonial culture won't get past mere skills, and we can't simply bow-drill our way out of modern problems. I left the conference feeling a grounding sense of awe and gratitude—something truly special happened this weekend and I only wish we didn't have to wait another year to gather like this again." - Colleen
"The conference left me feeling inspired and connected to a large base of people working on radical change in our world. The culture was supportive and exploratory, with so much room for our human cracks. I felt encouraged at the way people listened and shared openly, allowing the depths of what we truly care about to be seen." - Heron
"What an amazing weekend! The simplicity and power of the open space format allowed for our individual and collective brilliance and inquiries to steer us. It was humbling to both contribute and listen to the intellect, heart, skills, songs, and stories of our community. I came home full of a richness of practical next steps, inspiration, and new friendships. I am so grateful to have attended and already added next year's dates to my calendar." - Leah
"The Rewilding Conference provides a truly unique chance to provoke thought and inspiration while nurturing mutual opportunity and community connection. This brilliant band of folks brave enough to peek through the looking glass are a hoot to boot! I am already looking forward to next year, and I am a serial conference avoider...THANK YOU!" - Rose
"How wonderful to gather people together for rich dialogue around rewilding and how to create that tangibly in all our spheres. Together we can shift our collective reality towards a wild and connected future." - Kim
This event is hosted by Rewild Portland, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. We do not have investors who make money from this event. Any money earned goes back into our mission to create cultural and environmental resilience through the education of earth-based arts, traditions, and technologies. Click here to learn more about our organization and our values.
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