I apologize for the long months/years of silence. A lot has happened in the interim. Those of you who have been following me on this blog since the beginning will know that I am a jaded environmental scientist, seeking, but pessimistic about real solutions to address Western human environmental destructiveness. Throughout the course of my professional life, I have worked across public, non-profit, and private sectors seeking solutions but ultimately being traumatized by intimate experiences of ecological violence and frustrated by the failures of these traditional spheres to reverse or even slow the trajectory of global ecological cataclysm.
My disillusionment has finally led me to step outside the constructed boxes of the environmental science field orthodoxy to pursue a PhD in Transformative Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies. My proposed inquiry will employ co-operative action research to work collaboratively and equitably with the beings with whom I share a Land base in Asheville, North Carolina to restore a colonized and degraded ecological community and myself to flourishing wildness. In addition to working with the Land community to rewild itself, I will be eschewing all consumer products for one year and living exclusively on the gifts from the bioregion. By rewilding myself within an ecoregion as a subjective co-researcher, rather than as a detached and objective scientific observer, I hope to radically contest and provide an alternative to the centuries-old assumptions of the dominant scientific paradigm and provide a platform for the suppressed and marginalized voices of the more-than-human world.
I will be documenting my year of rewilding at www.yearofrewilding.com, and I welcome all to join me in this resurrection and
rediscovery of wildness. I hope to carry on our fruitful discussions there.
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