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Wild Abundance Essentials Program

Local Earth Skills School Featured on National Geographic Channel

How far do you have to go to get-back-to-the-land? The National Geographic Channel’s new series, “Live Free or Die,” examines a growing movement of people living in radical harmony with nature. The show profiles individuals who forage wild food, fashion clothing from animal hides, and live in shelters built of forest debris. National Geographic describes the series as an exploration of “America’s most remote subculture,” but if you live near Asheville, NC this emerging movement is not so far away.

Several days of filming took place at Wild Abundance, a school for land-based living located twenty minutes from Asheville. Founder, director, and homesteader Natalie Bogwalker is featured in “Live Free or Die” along with show standards, Thorn, Tony and Amelia, locals who regularly collaborate with Bogwalker to teach eco-homesteading, permaculture, and primitive skills.

“Our goal is to provide individuals with the education, inspiration, and information to live in greater balance with the web of life,” says Bogwalker. “We marry modern desires with historical wisdom — domesticated lifestyles with wild remembering.”

Wild Abundance has just announced the 2015 curriculum for its Essentials Program. The 160 hour course runs from March to November and explores the fundamentals of eco-homesteading. Students begin with knife skills, garden planning, and seed starting. They then learn to make fire-by-friction, forage edible and medicinal wild plants, and harvest timber with horse power. This is followed by tours of local homesteads to discover natural building techniques. In the fall, they move to food preservation, seed saving, basket weaving, ethical slaughtering, and bone tool making.

The classes are designed to appeal to a wide range of people and fit into a full-time work or school schedule. “One of my favorite things is bringing different people together,” says Bogwalker. Participants vary from suburban mothers wanting to become more comfortable taking their kids camping, to professionals working in landscape design or alternative medicine, to twenty-something wanderers learning to forge a debt and desk free existence in the wilderness.

Bogwalker, who holds a BA in Ecological Agriculture, is also the founder and director of the renowned Firefly Gathering, a festival of classes and workshops dedicated to natural living that attracts hundreds of visitors to the Asheville area every summer. Bogwalker’s efforts contribute to the expansion of Asheville’s defining earth skills scene.

While the National Geographic Channel is available in about 70% of American households, the Wild Abundance Essentials Program invites us to turn off the television and explore the living wilderness in our own backyards.

The 2015 Wild Abundance Living Essentials Program begins on March 28. For more information or to register, visit www.wildabundance.net.

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