Why We Need to Be Wild

I interview my daughter about her transition from urban life in San Francisco to the life of an educator, naturalist, and wild food forager in the Sierra foothills. Her recent book, Why We Need to Be Wild, gives first-hand insights into how we can live healthier, happier, and more purposeful lives by relearning the knowledge and skills of hunting-gathering humans.

Robert Kraft: To begin, what is rewilding?

Jessica Carew Kraft: Rewilding is aligning our activities and habits and consumption more with our hunter-gatherer ancestry. It’s about integrating ancestral ways of life into our daily habits, revitalizing ourselves and recovering from the demands of contemporary life.

Rewilding rests on one fundamental fact of modern life: evolutionary mismatch. While we’re working hard to live our contemporary lives, we still retain the genes, physiology, and neurology of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and this mismatch can create profound disturbances, psychologically and environmentally.

Groups still foraging in the wild today, like the !Kung San, Yanomami, and Hadza people show how we lived fulfilling and sustainable lives for most of our human history.

RK: For many years, you lived and worked in San Francisco, one of the capitals of the technology world. What moved you away from high-tech urban life and toward becoming a naturalist and learning ancient skills?

JCK: While working with CEOs of tech startups, it became apparent that the techno-utopia we were striving for wasn’t succeeding.

My colleagues and I were stressed out, overwhelmed, under-slept, anxious, depressed, and taking psychiatric medications. And there were also obvious contradictions, such as Steve Jobs not permitting his children to use the iPad because he knew how addictive it was.

My own transformation arose from the pressure of being a working mom in an office. Every natural instinct felt stifled—being with my children, enjoying fresh air and sunshine, getting enough sleep, exercising, and socializing. And I had to get out.

I went in search of a direct connection to nature and ancestral ways of life, and I was lucky to find a new community of people practicing rewilding, primitive skills, and alternative forms of healing.¹

RK: Achieving happiness has been a central focus of philosophy and psychology ever since Aristotle. What is it about rewilding, about being a naturalist, about foraging that makes you happy?

JCK: Our focus on happiness only developed after the rise of civilization. It’s our birthright to be happy.

Decades of ethnographic research on hunter-gatherers and horticultural groups show that the people in these cultures were consistently content with their lives, and they expected to feel good. They didn’t suffer depression, anxiety, or addiction, and they didn’t label neurodivergence or unusual personality traits as deviant. Hunter-gatherer groups are physically active, and they excel at providing social support and acceptance for everyone in the group.

Exercise elevates mood, so when a culture has a baseline of movement, people feel good. Being outdoors, socializing in small groups, and finding free food in the environment is what evolution shaped us to do.

Only when a culture requires a sedentary way of life do people become aware that something fundamental is missing. And then they seek out happiness.

RK: For people who work daily jobs and live in residential areas, what activities can they engage in to enjoy a wilder life?

JCK: We can begin by reducing our time sitting inside and processing information on screens. Most people spend at least 90% of their time indoors, which contributes to a variety of illnesses because of a shortage of vitamin D, microbes, and healthy environmental stressors that our bodies thrive on. Just moving some of our regular activities outside can bring large benefits.

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Source: Courtesy of Robert Kraft

We can also start procuring wild food. Many common edible weeds in urban yards and public green spaces are more nutritious than what we find in the vegetable aisle of grocery stores. We can forage these wild greens and add them to salads and soups. Going apple-picking in the fall or fishing in the summer gives us the mental and physical rewards of foraging.

By learning a traditional skill that uses our hands, we can gain back some of the coordination and musculature that we’ve lost in the digital age. Activities such as chopping wood, weaving baskets, sculpting with clay, and knitting allow us to be creative and emerge with something we make.

If we process foods by hand, instead of relying on kitchen gadgets and machines, we welcome in the benefits of manual labor. My kitchen is now stocked with old-fashioned implements like a manual egg beater, a hand-operated coffee grinder, and a mortar and pestle. Every time I cook, I get movement and engagement with my food, bringing me closer to how we prepared food before the Cuisinart and microwave.

Rewilding is not all-or-nothing. Anyone, anywhere, can rewild various aspects of their lives.

Source: Courtesy of Robert Kraft

RK: What is attention restoration, and how can it be encouraged?

JCK: People actually concentrate better after spending time in natural environments. Singular attention to one task makes us fatigued. Going outside and engaging a more effortless kind of attention—letting our mind wander and become curious—restores our capacity to focus and replenishes our cognitive abilities.

We give recess breaks to young children, but the truth is, we all need multiple recesses every day, no matter what our age. That’s why many creative people go for a walk when they feel uninspired or unproductive. Getting away from a task is the best way to get back on task.

RK: How do you encourage people to become more comfortable in the wild, especially when they fear the wild?

JCK: Gaining familiarity with the species that live around us makes us feel more at home in nature. During the first COVID-19 period, my daughters and I learned about common edible plants and foraged our meals from the yards and parks in our neighborhood. Learning to survive on these species and make useful things out of them was a thrilling journey.

But it’s also necessary to learn about the possible threats in our particular patch of wilderness and how to handle them. I used to get rashes from poison oak before I learned how to identify it in the winter when the plant loses its signature trio of leaves. Similarly, with ticks (which I used to be petrified of), once I understood how to check for them and remove them swiftly, my anxiety was gone.

Taking a course in survival skills, going on guided hikes, or educating ourselves about snakes, insects, and poisonous plants can provide the necessary confidence to go into the wild more often.

RK: In advising people to move toward a wilder life, you say take baby steps and “take those baby steps barefoot.” Yet, this advice conflicts with the vast worldwide consumption of shoes.

JCK: Any aspect of rewilding presents a challenge to global consumer culture and some long-held cultural standards. (No shirt, no shoes, no service.) Shoes are essential in many human environments today, whether due to social propriety or the hazards of asphalt, concrete, glass, and metal, and I don’t expect most people to give them up. Yet spending at least a little time safely ambling barefoot on natural surfaces is a delightful practice to regain one of our most powerful human senses.