Rationale

The human relationship with the wild comprises a complex of positions and actions:  attitudes, values, assumptions, interests, worshippings, uses, abuses, domination, reverence, exploitation, stewardship.  This “concourse” will ask attendees to confront themselves, each other, and our society in general regarding how we have lost the “wild” in Iowa specifically and our society generally, and how we can bring it back into our imaginations, our values, our actions, and our land. 

Much of the conference will be devoted to audience-centered discussion; our discussion leaders will come from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives.  With keynotes sounded by our visiting writers, Bill McKibben and Stephanie Mills, we will ask attendees to examine ourselves, individually and culturally, focused especially on the ways that we live in the world. 

The overarching tone and outcome of the conference is meant to be positive and optimistic:  we desire that attendees leave with a sense of hope and a set of ideas and actions that they will be excited to implement as we seek to “rewild.”  At the same time, we must confront our individual and our shared attitudes and actions that separate us from the wild and that harm or destroy it.  In essence, we must confront our domestication:  the ways that we have exerted control over the wild—our own wild natures as well as the wild of the natural world outside of our individual selves and society—through the way we build and expand our towns, cities, and road systems; the way we participate in an industrial food system; the way we alter nature for our own purposes—recreational, industrial, cultural, lifestyle; the way we express our relationship with the wild—imaginatively, spiritually, philosophically.  Through a combination of confronting our failures and realizing our possibilities, we hope conference attendees will come away from the program ready and excited to embrace change.