It strikes me that learning bushcraft is the practice of shortening your personal supply chain. You substitute outsourcing through consumerism with the ability to manufacture your needs from the materials at hand. The supply chain is shortened because the number of hands through which the raw materials pass from collection and consumption is shortened.
Learning bushcraft increases your knowledge of conversion of raw materials into items for personal use. This may mean that you can make what you need from the things at hand without the need to purchase them. Since not regions are equal in their ability to sustain human life, the available materials may not be sufficient to provide for all wants. In this case the bushcrafter carries supplemental materials. It’s the definition, selection, and use of these supplemental materials upon which most survival courses focus.
Instructors convey to their students their experiences in using these materials in specific settings. The goal being to give the student sufficient knowledge of short supply chain life to meet specific challenges and the confidence to innovate in novel circumstances.
Living with a short supply chain is something that most humans have done until fairly recently. My mother’s family were farmers. They lived with a fairly short supply chain. It was not as short as their predecessors, as they used tractors to prepare and tend the fields, but much shorter than is mine.
I am working to reduce the length of my personal supply chain. I’ll not easily surrender the freedom of my automobile, the lights in my electric powered home, or even the easy communication of my internet connection. But I do try to keep a six-month food supply (nonrefrigerated), grow my own vegetables, and gather the bounty of our local wildlands.
Since many areas of the world have short supply chains, it may be possible for some of us to live such a life. Most short supply chain life is accompanied by impoverishment. It might be possible and their standard of living is not to be envied. There are places however that support a short supply chain and a much higher standard of living. In general, these people are farmers or craftsmen with nearby demand for their produce and crafts.
I enjoyed this documentary on one of the Japanese Satoyama (rice-paddy countryside) villages, narrated by David Attenborough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNz_9BRm_5c
The specific village is not named, but it is on the shores of Lake Biwa. In these villages, the Japanese have decided to preserve their traditional way of life.
Here is another glimpse of the same Japanese country life by Begin Japanology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMHGEEkCwU
In this film the crew used much of the same footage as the BBC video to present a slightly different view of satoyama life. Begin Japanology emphases the countryside village nature of the satoyama. I was interested to note that the rice fields are tended both by hand and machine, and even more interested to see that logging plays an important role in satoyama life. Life in the satoyama is not quite as primitive as portrayed by the BBC.
Life there isn’t for everyone so there is a problem with sustainability; not many young people want to forgo the attractions of the city for a simple and sometimes demanding lifestyle. Living a life with a short supply chain is hard work, so most practitioners eventually choose an easier path.
The first step on this path, as with all of life’s paths, is to define a goal. My goal in living life with a shorter supply chain is to enhance my experience of the local ecosystem by integrating my life more closely with it. Among other things, this means living with the seasons. I think this integration makes my bushcraft practice much easier; as I know what to expect from the weather and the environment.
I live in a countryside village in southwest Washington state. Since we don’t grow rice here, it’s different from the satoyama. The primary crops in our village are wheat and trees; or they were, now they are houses, but that is another very sad story.
As I write this it’s November; late fall. By this time the garden’s harvest is made and preserved. The tomato and squash vines have been pulled and the beds covered with leaves. This year was the first summer in four years that yielded a significant tomato crop. I missed the collecting acorns from the large Oregon White Oaks near our home. Ordinarily, by this time they would be a month into their drying.
Autumn is also the time of the hunt. Every fall, a portion of the Pacific flyway migration passes over our house, resting in the marshes and fields along the river as they make their way south. Nearly every evening we go to sleep to the sounds of coyotes on the hunt and wake to the sounds of waterfowl hunters; all feasting on the many ducks and geese. Despite snow in the mountains, black-tail deer and Rocky Mountain elk hunting seasons are ongoing.
A major fall event is collecting and sorting the leaves that sheltered our home from the summer sun. Since our yard contains a mix of native and imported species our leaf fall season is quite long. In a normal year leaf fall starts in early October and extends to December—it started early this year. During that time, we rake the leaves from the different species into separate piles. We spread the Birch and maple leaves directly on the raised beds. The cherry and sweetgum leaves are tougher and nontoxic so they are used to mulch our tender plants. A few of the walnut leaves may be held back for dye but the rest are discarded. We mostly leave the fir, hemlock, and cedar leaves where they fall; but some are spread around the hydrangea for their acid.
Late fall is also the time for harvesting dogbane for cordage, oceanspray for arrow shafts, tule for mats, and wood for the winter’s green-wood carving projects. This year the rains came early. The stems of dogbane are mottled with early season mildew. To make things worse, the tule browned before we cut it. We’ll be doing other things this year.