Kincentrically Rewilding Central Virginia
The Wildland
Let's Cut The Crap. No feedlots. No antibiotics. No hormones. No grains. No preservatives. No herbicides. No pesticides. No cover-crops. No vaccinations. No castration. No fungicides. No separation or weaning. No plastic. No spot-spraying weeds. No fertilizers. No dewormers. No forced breeding. Free to roam hundreds of acres at a time. Only nature ... only pasture and forest from birth through life to death.
The Wildland is a pioneering kincentric rewilding project in Central Virginia that is challenging what it means to be wild and how we, the mammal Homo sapiens, and not we, the industrial capitalist and savior of the world, can help heal Earth, together, as Earthlings.
Rewilding is in vogue today and many rewilding projects begin as moving companies—they work to remove unwanted animals, peoples, and Earth’s actual chaos and then work to import native species to grow and run about within their prison yards of exclusion fences. To heal rivers, they buy beavers. To heal beavers, they buy rivers.
In place of this rewilding and regenerative mythology (that humans can control our way forward), The Wildland is a co-creative crescendo of extended families that, through interspecial and intergenerational genomics and relationship burst, slowly and ever slightly, as a land-race of symbiotic life. It is home to wild cattle, goats, sheep, chickens, and horses, alongside nesting black bear families, river otters and beavers once again in the Piedmont uplands, and mountain lions and their bobcats, coyotes, and other friends running at their heels.
The Wildland is a home of life and not a home made for life.
Wildland Evolution
A land let go
2017
2023
Modern Problems
What is Rewilding?
Rewilding is in vogue today.
It is understood as a progressive approach to conservation. But it leaves ecoligcal and social justice at the gate, beyond its game fences. It understands Earth not as our shared Mother but a damsel in destress who just needs humans, her estranged child, to get out of the way. The standard rewilding penchant is a strange process of control.
We are suffocated by the work of modern life and we are bored with nature's actual beauty and so rewilding has become a moving company: we busy ourselves with removing unwanted animals, people, and Earth's actual chaos and then work to import native species to grow and run about within our prison yards of exclusion fences.
To heal the rivers, we buy beavers. To heal the beavers, we buy the rivers. To heal the grasslands, we bring in ancient breeds of cattle (or Bison) that look wilder than the ones we have today. But these ancient bovines bawl like everyone else and come in modern trailers and they come ready to be told where to go.
All you need to rewilding is a title and money (beavers and rivers are expensive).
But we are to Neanderthals what our poodles are to wolves: soft, unnatural. And Earth just laughs at our attempts.
Ancient Pathways
What is Kincentric Rewilding?
Kincentric Rewilding is an invitation. Earth (not the earth) often throws diamonds and gold up from her womb as an experiment, to see what our species will do. Cut and color combine clearly under her ultimate heat and the malleable memory of exploded stars reach out from the mud and nod their head and inquire: here I am, this is me, who are you?
Kincentric Rewilding is an invitation and it cannot be anything else. It is not something we do, we create, we perceive as needed. It has nothing to do with climate change, a better world (as if humans were the masters of enslaved meadows), and it has nothing to do with forcing our modern ideas of "regenerative" upon Earth.
Like ghostly and tired question marks reaching for the sky, Earth's ancient life now unearthed from its long, silent, icy inertia, once again bathing and nodding at the surface, asks: this is me, are you still you?
Like exhausted commas hunched below the words of the world, modern bodies unleashed from the pleasures of death, our frail forms inquire: is this really me? Still?
What Earth does is give witness: you exist—pure, raw, sacred— and you are not nothing. Live, she says. Take back your life. Dream, your grandchildren are waiting. But all we see are diamonds and gold and pain and work and the need to save, to regenerate, to heal—to do these things at all costs. Mine and save to heal and heal to save and mine, ricochets the warden’s call. Our industry deepens, our dungeon walls thicken. We continue falling forward, in regimental form, glittering with gold and heads bowed not to dictators but dictations. We parade through city streets, we barely acknowledge one another, our eyes locked in lockstep and stare above us, to the left, above the crowded masses, to the platform, at the chancellor. We have a war to win. We have things to do. We have a busy life to attend to.
So goes Earth’s saving army.
In some general sense, there occupies a moral wistfulness and an intellectual onanism in the busied and hurried groping of a doer, a miner, a savior of the world. An apprentice of the panoply of dust and shadow, we yearn for the bustling meanderings of public life: a place to prove ourselves, a place to deliver our dopamine hits, a place to show off our gilded, diamond rings.
An Invitation, A choice to become
Wildness, or "the wild" is the autonomous acceptance of the basic conditions as they are. She is presentness.
Many take possession of her spirit to describe that which lives over there or beyond that hedge or fence. Others capture her and force her to lead wilderness walks as if she can only be found if you pay her to guide you from your suburban and consumeristic lives.
Wildness is who we become when we accept life as it is and not push for life as it could be. Wildness is found in the present and the autonomous acceptance of the magic that is here, in this moment, waiting for us.
Kincentric Rewilding is an invitation back to this presentness, this curiosity. It is running with the land, as the land. When you run behind a herd, you can steer them, push them in this direction or that. When you run in front of them, you can manage their speeds. But, when you run with them, you waive all of this goodbye, your control, your visions for the world, your mastery over the outcomes, and simply become what you already were: them, us, Earth and its Earthling.
In this way, Kincentric Rewilding is also the forgoing the visions we
have—regardless of our desires.
Kincentric Rewildin is a relational land ethic of letting go but not stepping back, of rewilding ourselves with the land, as an energetic and increasingly singular body. It is an ongoing act of co-creation and life being fully and deeply lived.
Wildland Evolution
A land let go
2017
2022
2017
