Daniel Vitalis

This interview was conducted by Alison Ramsay as part of our Back to the Wild Summit on Sustainable Living

We are all driven to become the best version of ourselves.  And to do this we think we need to try out the latest and greatest fad diets, fashions, products, superfoods and even pharmaceutical drugs that promise to enhance our health and happiness.

As we surf the net on our iPhones, iPads and MacBooks looking for the answers to love, life and an end to loneliness, deep in our DNA and just outside our door, quietly ever present is an answer to health, vitality and interconnectedness.   Time and time again the beauty, wonder and power of nature inspires and heals us physically and spiritually.   It teaches inner calm, perspective and brings us a feeling of well-being.

It speaks to the wild nature that is inside of us.  But in a world where technology reigns and the dollar is king, in a consumer driven world where nature cannot be bought and bottled and sold, so is therefore largely forgotten, we experience a great disconnect from this wildness.

But thankfully there are people out there like my next guest who have made it their life passion to shed new light on old wisdom and help us to understand again why we should switch off, unplug, ditch the fancy footwear and honor the rhythms, cycles and elements of nature to reawaken that wild creature that resides in us all.

Alison:

Daniel, thank you so much for being here to get a little wild with us today. Daniel Vitalis: Hey, and it’s great to be here and I really loved that introduction. Alison: Great. Thank you. So I know you have gone really deep in your exploration of rewilding and have a lot of amazing knowledge to share.  But let’s just begin at the beginning with a bit of an introduction into rewilding.

What is rewilding?  And why is it something we should consider doing to enhance our long-term health.

Daniel Vitalis:

You know it’s so interesting when we think about ourselves as a species.  You know human beings – we tend to get into a mindset like we are visitors on planet Earth and like we’re not really as much a part of it as we are observers here visiting, or even exploiting the earth, but not so much part of it.  Not the same way that the other animals are, not the same way that the plants are and the fungi are and the microbes are.  It’s almost like we have an us or them mentality.

Now, the reality is I think when we look at ourselves more objectively for a moment, we see there’s a lot of similarity between us and all the other organisms of the planet.  It’s not hard to see the resemblance between ourselves and maybe some of those relatives of ours, the great apes, and we can see these tremendous differences.  But we also see that there’s a lot of similarity.

And we see that our needs are very similar to so many of the other species, particularly the mammals.   And again as we move toward those primate animals – so similar.   We see that we need the same kind of foods and we need the same kind of environmental factors and we’re born from our mother’s womb and we nurse from our mother’s breast and we’re raised in community.

And we’re so similar in so many ways.

It’s almost as if in order to prove our difference we’ve divorced ourselves more and more from nature over time – as time’s gone on.

And we’re at this point today where we are frantically trying to figure out a solution to our diminishing health.  Not just physical health, but also our emotional health and our psychological health.   And we’re frantically looking for answers and we’re willing to take extreme measures in order to try to find – re-establish that homeostasis, that balance we’re looking for.   But we keep looking in the places that we’ve been looking.

We keep looking to things that divorce us further and further from nature.  So we keep trying more drugs, different drugs, newer drugs.

We explore new ways to slash and burn our bodies in a hope to cut away what’s bad, you know what’s hurting.  We explore more and more ways to augment ourselves.

We isolate ourselves more and more from nature.  We seal our houses up more, we climate control more, we remove ourselves more and more and isolate ourselves more and more, not just from the natural world but even from each other. And re-wilding is sort of a different approach.

It says, "Hey, wait a second!"

We come from the natural world.

We may not remember it very well, but it’s where we come from.  And even just a walk out in the forest on a trail brings us a kind of inner contentment and joy and a sense of belonging that nurtures something in us that a lot of us have lost.  And rewilding says hey, maybe the path back to health, back to happiness, back to psychological health has something to do with us re-entering the natural world again and beginning to honour and respect our needs for nature and the things, the food, the water, the air, the sunlight that comes from nature.

So re-wilding is – for me what it is, is it’s an approach, it’s a strategy, it’s a path toward health that believes in and respects the natural way for humans rather than gushing over technological quick fixes.