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Technology is the hallmark of humankind. Reliance on modern technology alone is a beautiful Siren. Resilience rises tree-like from deep roots nurtured by bright sunlight cast on primitive and historical methods. Somatic knowledge, your knowledge of movement and method trained through repetitions of primitive skills, your independent authorship of tools and fire and shelter, and further; your repetitions of progressing historical methods, your reenactment of motions and methods borrowed from our fathers; spreads wide and heavy your branches of personal growth. The mast of your tree of knowledge seeds future generations of resilience. Mastery of primitive and historical methods enables choice; you may choose modern convenience–you are not lost without it.

Integrating primitive, historical and modern technologies lends understanding, mind and body, unattainable otherwise. Holistic approaches to outdoor living skills recapitulate the phylogeny of technology. Along the way we discover function and meaning that fit our makeup and make us whole.

Immersion in wildlands is the native condition of Homo sapiens. We are the sum of selective forces found in nature. The demands of survival in raw nature require uncomfortable and exhausting exposures and we are adapted for these challenges and discomforts and we are adapted for escaping the same. We substitute behavior-based cultural adaptations for tooth, claw and fur. We seek shade from sunshine, cover from cool rain, and we wear clothing as needed. Above all, we make increasingly sophisticated tools and we invent communal and complex support systems. We have invented increasingly sophisticated technologies to separate ourselves from physical challenges and discomforts that labor native daily living. We pass these systems on to future generations for continued advancements, continued reliance. We have become the most successful species on earth through all time and all in a blink of mother nature’s eye (look at population growth and expanding niche). Our collective efforts have resulted in a wide gap between our adapted native selves and the demands of modern daily living. Many of us enjoy our modern comfort systems but we sense the hollowness in that gap and we seek to fill it with callused and conditioned direct experience in the wilds. Many others suffer undefinable angst and declining physical capacity that may be relieved with connection to the land and through the practice of holistic outdoor living skills.

Holistic skills are a tenet of Outdoor Readiness.

Tom Bain @BainOutdoors