Restoring beneficial human touch to the landscape. Tending wild foods and wild hearts…

What is Edgewalkers Winter Social Forestry Camp?Edgewalkers is an emerging collective of semi-nomadic wildland tenders. Winter Social Forestry Camp is an experiment in regenerative wild-tending, where a small community of people comes together to work at restoring a landscape while living in reciprocal relationship to nature. Camped out in a temporary primitive village in the woods, we work on improving the ecological quality of the landscape throughSocial Forestry. We focus on tending wild plants and forests that provide sustenance as food, medicine, timber, and craft material. We are doing this work on wildlands held in public trust, in a mutually beneficial gifting relationship with land caretakers. This is the second year of our camp, and there will be 10 of us coming together for 10 weeks nestled in the mountains on the edge of the Cascades and Siskiyous in southern Oregon.

Our work: We tend and plant native plants with a focus on edibles and medicinals. We reduce forest fire fuel load by thinning in a pattern that mimics the forest shaped by historic fire regimes. We create wildlife habitat through leaving snags and brushpiles. We clear around heritage hardwoods, restore disturbed areas, manage invasive species, encourage carbon sequestration, and collect data. We work with fire as a restorative and renewing tool to help the forest, via controlled forest floor burns and fuel reduction burn piles.

Our perspective: Humans are a vital link in healthy ecosystems; our presence living in the wild is not detrimental if done well, but in fact is beneficial to the spirit & diversity of plants and animals that surround us. Contrary to popular belief, many of the most ecologically rich and diverse areas of the planet have become so in part because of longstanding co-evolution with indigenous humans, not despite our presence. We do not pretend that we know how to care for the land as indigenous people to this place have practiced, but we humbly seek to learn from the traditional knowledge of the people living in ancient relationship to this place.
 

                                    

Our lifestyle: In addition to stewarding the land, we love to explore the cultural aspect of rewilding, and to make beauty with our hands to sustain ourselves from the land – processing wild food and medicine, weaving baskets, transforming roadkill into food and crafts and tools, building round-pole structures from forest products, and much more! We live in canvas structures with wood stoves and fir bough floors. We butcher animals, cook on an outdoor fire, support each others’ emotional and spiritual development, and hold self-created rituals on each of the moon phases. We have trainings on learning to read the landscape and how to tend it well. We begin our work days with song. We prioritize hand tools and working with awareness as we cut down overcrowded trees.

Our culture: We are co-creating camp culture, including how we integrate our individual earth-based practices and spiritualities into our daily work, and how to slow down into human-scale time. Through consensus process and collaborative leadership models, we organize our time and learn from each other how to move through conflict in transformative ways, how to support one another in shadow work, and how to have real relationships with one another.

Our roots: We’ve garnered spirit and momentum through teachings of Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Wisdom, the ecological restoration movement, earth ancestral skills movements, and from fervent whispers by mentors Finisia Medrano and Hazel (a.k.a. Tom Ward, of Siskiyou Permaculture). We have grown from previous grassroots-organized community projects in rewilding, such as the RogueAbout, Camas Camp, Root Camp, Pine Nut Camp, Queer Forestry Camp, Free Cascadia Witchcamp, and more. We are nourished by our dear friends and mentors who have come before us and continue to hold us close, providing us with fertile earth from which to sprout.

Our Long Term Vision: Edgewalkers is a seed that we are nurturing to germinate towards building many semi-nomadic Regenerative Tending Cooperatives that work on long term stewardship contracts on private and public lands and comprise a large mutual aid support network between land projects.  The Cooperatives will help facilitate ecological diversity and fecundity in wildlands while also nourishing and supporting the communities of human beings who tend those lands.

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WHAT WE NEED:  

While many incredible restoration and rewilding projects currently exist, as far as we know, our project is unique in these ways: it is the seed for the creation of an economically viable culture and lifeway for rewilders; we are documenting and monitoring our work so that we can share our results; and we are deeply committed to sharing our knowledge through public outreach and education, building a bridge from rewilders to the greater community.

We really need your support to make Edgewalkers Winter Camp a success.

Your generous donations will help us cover expenses for our volunteer restoration forest tenders to live in the winter giving our gifts of labor to the land. We need food, shelter, and basic amenities. We will be purchasing infrastructure that we will continue using in future years. We need to purchase equipment to set up scientific monitoring plots, tools for forestry work, medical supplies, fire safety gear, and more!

Toward the vision of a sustainable economic way of life for rewilders, we want to provide basic stipends for our volunteers, in order to allow more of us to participate in the work of giving back to the land for longer periods of time. We are working to develop economic models which bring income from restoration work, value-added crafts, and education. For this beginning stage, we are asking for your help in supporting us as volunteers.

Any contribution helps.

All contributions are tax deductible.

Please help us pass the word to your friends and neighbors who you think might be interested, and share our campaign with your internet networks. 

We thank you from our hearts for helping us build the vision, and for believing in the possibility of a future where humans live in reciprocal, regenerative relationship with the land and each other.

Donate through the IndieGoGo campaign here!

All photo credits to rain crowe