The human rewilding movement

The ongoing sixth mass extinction (and its components of climate change, ecological die-off, ocean acidification, etc) continues to be a growing threat to – and a result of – certain human cultures. These problems of global proportions press on us with urgency. The sciences exist, at least in part, to find solutions to problems of this kind and, more broadly, to the problem of ‘how to live in the world’. For good methodological reasons the scientific method encourages neutrality in this endeavour. However, applied science must, by its nature, break neutrality through experimentation, thus exceeding objective inquiry and interceding in the system being studied. Anthropology is one such science that can be used as a kind of praxis in what could be termed ‘experimental anthropology’. Through this experimental form of anthropological inquiry, a growing number of people have identified civilisation itself (not to be conflated with civil society) as the driver of mass extinction and have explicitly sought out and experimented with ‘alternative’ forms of subsistence and social organisation based on anthropological research concerning hunter-gatherer populations. In this article I explore this process within the context of the human ‘rewilding’ movement, specifically through the non-profit community organisation, Rewild Portland, as an ethnographic example of such iterative practices. I aim to show that cultural rewilding, as a form of experimental or applied anthropology that draws directly from hunter-gatherer research can be performed by lay people, in both a scientific and ethical way outside of the academy, and how the academy can better support this type of everyday science.