Homelessness as Rewilding
Urban Scout, Rewild or Die! (2008) We can imagine people who experience chronic homelessness as poorly domesticated. Civilization robs them of the tools, knowledge, resources, and freedom to be successful hunting-foragers but the skill set is the same. By encouraging people who are homeless to be horticulturists, we can improve their food security while they begin to build the wildness infrastructure that will allow others to transition to sub- and urban foragers. Homeless people who choose to live in nature are a marginalized population of hunter-gatherers who are deprived of the natural world in order to make their existence as unpleasant as possible. The phenomenon of homelessness is treated like a flaw of capitalism but it is actually a feature of it, an object lesson about the dangers of being on the wrong end of inequity.