Bushcraft

When Brigit asked the BGI newsletter team to introduce a series of videos on bushcraft, our first thought was ‘How relevant are bushcraft skills to the BGI's aim of showing people how sustainable living can be easy, healthy, inexpensive and fun?' Certainly, if you have a wood within easy reach and are happy to trap, skin and prepare a rabbit and cook it over an open fire using dead wood you have gathered, then your meal will have a very small footprint indeed. However, not many people have a handy wood on their doorstep, and fewer would be happy to catch and prepare their own rabbit!

Yet recently there has been a great deal of interest in bushcraft, also known as woodcraft or wilderness skills, partly because of the popularity of Ray Mears' television programmes such as Ray Mears' Bushcraft, World of Survival and Extreme Survival.

So what is the attraction of bushcraft, and what is its role in living a more sustainable life?

I think the answer lies in the fact that we so rarely get up close to nature and use it directly to provide our needs. The food we buy in supermarkets bears little resemblance to what we would find in the natural world - when did you last see a lettuce or tomato growing on your countryside walk? Yes, we may see mushrooms aplenty, but how many people would dare to pick one and eat it for fear it may be a poisonous variety? People who happily eat meat from the butcher would be horrified at the thought of killing and preparing a wild animal, dealing with all those ‘messy bits'. So we need our shops, we need the people to process our food for us. We also need our cookers, our central heating, our warm beds... just about everything we use and rely on has been processed, manufactured, assembled, bought and sold several times as it passed from producers to manufacturers, to wholesalers, to shops... This means that we are completely dependent on the huge ‘system' underlying our lives. Without the system, how could we possibly survive? We are as dependent, in our own way, as a newborn babe.

Well, some people don't like that dependency. They want to know that if for some reason the infrastructure we rely on should collapse, they could manage to a greater or lesser extent to look after themselves. They could feed and clothe themselves, make a shelter, light a fire and keep themselves warm, and make everything they need out of what nature provides, assisted only by basic tools like a sharp knife. Not only this, but they would respect the environment that supplies their needs - people who rely on wild plants and animals need to protect them at the same time so will not pick too much of a single species, or hunt an animal to the verge of extinction. This is the way many indigenous people live but something that those of us in the ‘civilised' world have lost sight of, maybe because the people who gather the resources do so for money, and not for individual survival.

Living so close to nature cannot fail to give you a deeper sense of connection to it, of being part of that world, of its rhythms. You aren't something above it, using it and exploiting it, but part of it, taking what you need without harming, and giving something back. Life is so much simpler - you need to eat, drink and keep warm, possibly keep yourself safe from other predators (not normally a problem in Britain!), and anything you achieve over and above that is a true joy. Anyone who has ever taken the time to see the beauty in the bark of a tree or felt the satisfaction of making their own jam from blackberries gathered from the wild will understand what I am saying. Food isn't something that materialises as if by magic in a shop, it is something that the earth provides for us, and we can take that gift from it without the need for any number of intermediaries who are really just feeding the vast economic machine which pervades our society.

So, maybe you are unlikely ever to reduce your carbon footprint via your forays into your local wilderness, and maybe the idea of trapping a squirrel is enough to turn you vegetarian, if you're not already, but why not check out the Natural Bushcraft website and its inspirational videos, and learn to see your local open areas in a whole new light?

Judy

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