Rewilding seeks to reverse the domestication of humans and return them to a pre-civilized state of existence by reintroducing innate knowledge, such as familiarity with plant and animal species. It is associated with green anarchism and anarcho-primitivism, which view human civilization as negative and unnatural.
Rewilding, when taken in the context of modern human society, refers to a process by which the domestication of people is reversed. The philosophy behind rewilding is based on the idea that, over time, changing human civilization has led to the domestication of the human being. Rewilding practices seek to reverse this domestication and return humans to a pre-civilized, savage state of existence.
Within the theory of rewilding, domestication is viewed as negative, the effect of unnatural influences brought about by the constant and cumulative modernization of society. Rather than viewing modernization and civilization as the progress of human society, rewilding theories view these forces as a digression from the natural and proper state of human life.
Rewilding views the natural state of humans as the pre-civilized, savage, primeval state of life, in which complex social structures, technology, and other markers of civilization have no place. Rewilding criticizes these modern ideas, along with most aspects of modern human home life that have nothing to do with pure survival.
As a practice, rewilding seeks to reverse the domestication of humans through the reintroduction of what is considered innate knowledge, what is thought to have been lost during the gradual domestication of the human species. This innate knowledge includes, for example, familiarity with plant and animal species. Rewilding considers the natural and innate knowledge of humans to be more related to nature and the wild itself. It seeks to return humans to their place in the wilderness, to return them to a wild state of holistic being.
Because of its rejection of society, or what is considered symptomatic of social domestication, rewilding has associations with anarchism. More specifically, rewilding can be related to green anarchism and anarcho-primitivism. Green anarchism is a combination of social, political, and philosophical theories that emphasize the importance of the environment and criticize humans’ digression from an environmentally sympathetic state. In this sense, rewilding could be considered the tool through which followers of green anarchism can reverse the negative effects of domestication.
Rewilding is also related to anarchoprimitivism in terms of viewing human civilization not as progressive, but as degressive, misguided and unnatural. More specifically, anarcho-primitivism ascribes to the negative aspects of modern society the symptoms of industrialization, technology, division and specialization of labor, and other departures from the original savagery of human beings. Anarcho-primitivism postulates the nomadic, primitive, hunter-gatherer lifestyle as the original and innate state of human life, and regards any digression from this state as unnatural and negative. Much like rewilding, anarcho-primitivism points to aspects of modernized society such as agriculture, hierarchy, and other types of social stratification.
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