A wild idea: Rethinking the climate tech career

Who: Jessica

What: Writer and wild forager

Where: Sierra Nevada foothills

Why: To reconnect with life

When I began looking for people working in climate to profile, I imagined that many of them would be technology entrepreneurs, launching startups and inventing cool new things to solve our climate problems. But I also wondered about finding people on alternative paths, ones that don’t involve a 9-to-5 in front of a computer. So I was excited to discover that Jessica, who previously worked at the same tech PR firm as me (though at a different time – and with Julia!), had just written a book about Why We Need to be Wild.

It’s been my own experience, and probably yours as well, that going out in nature has beneficial effects. Beyond just “forest bathing,” I’ve spent time backpacking in the wilds of Yosemite, Desolation Wilderness, Kings Canyon National Park and beyond. After only a day or two away from screens, I find that I feel more relaxed, happier and better able to think creatively. (In fact, I had the idea for my parks project, Warmly, while hiking the Rae Lakes Loop.) I always return from backpacking trips with the conviction that we are meant to spend most of our time out walking around in nature. Then, of course, I go back to sitting at a computer most of the day.

So Jessica’s book deeply affected me, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to speak with her about her process of untangling herself from the high-stress, app-addled culture of technology work. I hope her story can inspire others, including myself, to find ways to disconnect from the digital and reconnect with our true nature – getting as wild as we can manage in this world. After all, nature is basically the original form of technology, and probably still the best.

What do you believe technology can do? These days, reading about the rapid shift to clean energy can lead us to believe that technology will save us. Whether it’s pulling carbon from the atmosphere or mining lithium to store energy, there’s no shortage of technical approaches to generating energy and affecting emissions. But are these options what the planet really needs?

For hundreds of thousands of years, humans evolved as hunter-gatherers, living off the land without destroying it, generating pollution or traumatizing one another. Writer Jessica Carew Kraft initially turned her educational background in sustainable design and anthropology into advocacy for sustainable technology and green building. However, working in technology soon led her to a degree of skepticism about the power of technology: “It was actually through working more intensively in tech and advising startups” that she realized “We’re just creating all this tech and we believe tech is going to create the solutions for our gigantic catastrophes and all of those are unproven.” So she went on a quest to reconnect with nature and the skills that helped humans survived for millennia before agriculture, much less the iPhone.

A mind abuzz

When Jessica was working off of Sand Hill Road, the famed location of so many Bay Area venture capital firms that built our tech-obsessed generation, she would walk in the parking lot. She saw few other people out there, and although native species were present in the landscaping, they were planted “in orderly rows” that would never occur in nature. One day, walking through this “groomed landscape,” she found a group of bees and just stood and watched them, realizing “They have a purpose, creating an incredible project–and I’m meant to be like that bee, in beautiful social harmony, working on things that are completely natural.”

“[Bees] have a purpose, creating an incredible project – and I’m meant to be like that.”
- Jessica

Her work at the time various involved technology companies that were riffing on nature, inducing it to do what we want by changing enzymes or reprogramming genomes. She had low Vitamin D levels, was anxious and depressed and had started to realize that the more technology she was around, the worse she felt. “The less technology” she used, “the more joy, health and sanity” she experienced. So she began looking for more of those feelings.

What she found was a community of people who’ve devoted themselves to learning and practicing various forms of what can be called rewilding, natural skills ranging from foraging to knifemaking to hide tanning – and even roadkill processing. By attending large community gatherings and forming relationships with practitioners of these skills, Jessica deepened her understanding of ancient skills and found new forms of happiness, then wrote about it. Jessica’s book chronicles her quest to find the skills to survive in nature, learning how to hunt, gather/forage and simply survive out in nature without relying on hundreds of dollars of REI gear. Her journey is honest, compelling and at times raw, a thought-provoking contrast to the clean corporate narratives that both of us have been paid to prepare in our technology careers.
The more time Jessica spent in nature, the more she realized that “the idea that humans are separate, industrial and apart from nature didn’t make a lot of sense.” After all, we all came from the same place. She realized “I want to be human again” and she began a journey of “trying to recapture early human skills” from the Pleistocene era.

Relearning what nourishes

Hunting and gathering are among the most fundamental early human skills. While these days we can get annoyed if the food we ordered on a whim using an app doesn’t arrive within 30 minutes, the emergence of agriculture several thousand years ago began to create a culture that was “all about dominating and controlling and not living in harmony with a nature that feeds, clothes and shelters” us, Jessica says. While permaculture and organic farming can seem like solutions to the climate crisis (and are surely part of mitigation efforts), agriculture itself is a significant reworking of how land naturally functions, and a major contributor to climate change.

Learning to forage can be empowering, but it takes a long time: “learning all the skills to successfully find food takes about twelve years in forager culture,” Jessica writes, adding, “Grown men and women don’t reach their peak productivity in terms of hunting or gathering until their twenties and sometimes their forties.” In contrast to app coding boot camps and given that most of us in the modern world didn’t take foraging alongside biology and algebra, we’re likely to take even longer to become proficient with food procurement. And even the most knowledgeable and experienced foragers face obstacles.

While foraging might seem like a free way to get a good meal, it’s frequently illegal. Even indigenous people are often barred from their traditional cultural practices like foraging or fishing, or have to get permits to do what their ancestors did freely for millennia. As Jessica puts it, bluntly, “Anything super sustainable is illegal,” including using human manure for fertilizer or harvesting rainwater. The bureaucracy is typical of a society that’s overengineered itself to the point of people being unable to recognize nourishing foods outside of a grocery store. As Jessica writes in the book:

“It was becoming clear to me that rewilding meant not only learning wild skills but resisting the system that deprived us of these skills. When the Ohlone were expelled from their oak groves, when the Squamish lost access to old-growth cedar and salmon, when freed Black slaves were cut off from their former hunting grounds, these people were denied their birthright to live close to the earth. For all people, learning and teaching others to find food, make fire, shelter, and clothing, and walk the land with kin are the most important things we can do in life. Our ancestral traditions, wherever they came from, seemed to provide a path to flourishing.”
- Jessica

Unfortunately, many of us have lost these traditions, whether through time or enforced prohibition. Where they are returning, they may require expensive training. “We shouldn’t have to pay to learn what we all used to be taught by our people,” one bone tool teacher told Jessica. In a similar vein, indigenous activist Deana Dartt resists the idea of decolonizing and “advises focusing on ‘reindigenizing,’ in which the goal is to recognize the worldview of Indigenous knowledge and perspectives and to ‘incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing and doing.’”

There are many complicated class and race issues that come up with rewilding Jessica notes that many of the attendees at the camps and classes she attended were white, and stories throughout her book touch on the difficulty of making a living off the land. Jessica herself acknowledges that her former partner’s law career helped financially. Some people profiled in the book had wealthy spouses or received money from settlements or inheritances, and some prominent wildcrafters have flashy websites and offer expensive classes. At the same time, practicing these skills does help: Jessica describes how these rewilding communities felt prepared during covid, as “they are their own essential workers,” capable of supporting themselves in important ways. And of course, there is value in the community and the skills.

Rewilding parenting

While her rewilding journey didn’t start out oriented at them, reconnecting her kids with ancient traditions was a significant aspect of Jessica’s journey. When thinking about a career, kids are often seen as a hindrance: you need to drop them off, pick them up, arrange their care, shush them during important calls. Take Your Kids to Work day aside, there are typically limited ways for young people to engage with many types of work, and I’ve heard from many moms whose kids pretend to take meetings and work on the computer. My own asks for my silence during “meetings” in a way that gives me a sinking feeling about how career collides with parenthood.

In contrast, Jessica was able to take her kids to many ancestral skills gatherings, where they learned new things, connected with other kids, and had the chance to be free out in nature. Unlike structured playdates that take weeks of text messages to arrange, these experiences were easier to figure out and more nurturing and educational for the kids themselves. Wilderness schools and similar organizations exist around the country and can help provide a taste of outdoor living.

Jessica writes that, at the Acorn Gathering of natural skills practitioners, “Babies and toddlers weren’t trapped in strollers or carriers or car seats; they were naked and free, grabbing on to whomever wanted to play with them. Kids with tangled hair and unwashed hands played instruments, picked flowers, and ran wherever they wanted. This looked nothing like our life in the city and our highly scripted routines of going to school, the playground, and the grocery store, always strapped in, wiped clean, and smeared in sunscreen.” While idyllic, there is certainly something powerful in getting kids out in nature, with as little interference.

“The point is, what do we need to restore communities and families?”
- Jessica

While the skills are important, Jessica says that they are also “not the point.” Instead, “the point is, what do we need to restore communities and families?” Probably not more screen time and text messages, or even sunscreen. I recently reminisced with a friend (while watching our kids play at the beach, an event arranged by text) about how often we got sunburned as kids. It probably wasn’t good for us, but we came through our encounters with the sun to encourage our own kids to wear hats. Is there something to that (digital and sun-)screenless survival?

Wild skills are powerful

Despite the seeming terror of living out in the woods alone, surviving with just a tarp and a knife and other sundry gear, Jessica has found that her fear and anxiety have decreased since she’s practiced more traditional skills and spent more time in nature. She criticizes the idea of scale, a watchword for every technology company, because scale is not natural – traditional “immediate return” societies can only match the carrying capacity of the land they are on. (And if the land is degraded, as it has been by human activity, that carrying capacity may be low.) Having heard “how will this scale?” in more meetings than I can count, I appreciated the opportunity to set down the gospel of scale and pick up new ideas about what works at human scale.

I’m also personally convinced that the pursuit of profit at any cost is what has landed us in the climate crisis. Traditional “immediate return” cultures practice hunting and gathering only to meet their immediate needs, rather than storing food for power or future needs. The concept of storing food relates to the development of new social relationships based more on power and hierarchy, which are often challenging and contentious.

“The rise of agriculture triggered a mass psychological shift from embracing wild randomness to needing reliability of the harvest,” Jessica writes in her book, and I wonder how this relates to our collective cultural experience of the randomness of COVID-19. While there were many negative aspects to that randomness, even beyond the loss of life from the pandemic itself, there was also something serendipitous about it. Many of us found ourselves noticing new parts of our neighborhood, often natural, and meeting (or waving at from a safe distance) new neighbors. We don’t have to wait for another pandemic to turn away from routine – we can take new routes on our walks, notice new trees, or try new skills. The world won’t end if we don’t stick to our 9 to 5.

Rewilding ourselves

I asked Jessica about the original idea of rewilding, or turning earth back to natural forces, which many conservationists say is necessary to help the earth heal. She mentions that “some advocates say humans have to be included in rewilding,” and there are “ecological ramifications of constant growth.” Many of the foraging and rewilding practices that Jessica explores in her book also require wilderness, not developed land. Rather than heavily managed agricultural lands, inundated with water and fertilizer to accelerate growth on an annual cycle, wildlands can be cultivated in ways that benefit humans and wild animals alike, with practices like controlled burning helping encourage growth that generates more plants useful to humans and also helps prevent devastating fires.

It’s a lot to ask for everyone to turn totally wild, and the lands we’ve developed probably couldn’t support so many people turning to them just yet. Jessica’s book does prompt important questions about what we need from nature, what it needs from us and what knowledge we need – beyond how photovoltaic cells work or how to store energy in rusted iron – to live together.

When I started this project, I was hoping to find new ways to think about climate careers. I was excited about clean energy, battery storage and other new technologies that may benefit–but will also take from–the earth. But ultimately, maybe we don’t need careers. As Jessica shows us, we need lives, and it’s better for ourselves and the earth if that life is more connected with nature than with infrastructure. Jessica says, “I would never want to impose my vision or impose any type of hierarchy”: she’s only offering her own vision and experience.

Jessica says, ”I want my career to be life,” and I don’t think that any of us can deny that we feel better when we turn away from our screens or punch off the clock and move into nature. So how can we make nature a more integral part of our lives instead of an afterthought? The decision has to be personal, but we can all look outside ourselves, and out the window, when we make it.

Where will you look next?

Some skills Jessica practiced:

Making clothes from natural fibers
Harvesting greens
Animal tracking
Roadkill processing

Some lessons from Jessica’s journey:

Try something new – learning an ancient skill can help you in modern life
Question your current path
Look to the past
Turn back to nature

Resources

Books

Events

Acorn Gathering (“Paleolithic Burning Man”)
Rabbitstick
Saskatoon Circle
Sharpening Stone

Education