Why take the time to learn Earth-Based Skills (wildcrafting, ancestral skills, bushcraft, etc.)? Truly there are so many reasons, but here is the core Wildtender take on the matter...
By learning and practicing Earth-based Skills we create pathways for meaningful engagement with the land and our wild kin. As our knowledge and abilities develop, we also establish new perceptual lenses through which we can view the living world with greater clarity, complexity and subtlety.
Consider also that by cultivating ancient crafts and skills, we participate in a continuum of experience that stretches back for centuries or perhaps millennia. Our “learning” is more accurately a process of remembering what it means to be a human being living in rich relationship with wild nature – as all peoples once lived. In this way, we not only experience place (landscape, plants and animals) with greater depth, but also self.