Survival Vocabulary

Reader Contribution by Jason Drevenak
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Television has certainly changed the images we conjure when we hear the word survival. Maybe you think of strategies to vote someone off the island surrounded by tiki torches, or former military operators with handheld cameras eating caribou genitalia, or maybe even bikini-clad families stockpiling canned peas for the apocalypse. I think there are a ton of labels, a huge number of lifestyles and a confusing array of skill sets that I would like to try to explain and sort out. My wife and I run a Bushcraft school and I find that there are no labels for what we do that make it clear to people what to expect, so I think some definitions are in order.

‘Bushcraft’ vs. ‘Survival’

There are two basic schools of thought for this whole genre – bushcraft and survival – and the difference is all about timing. Lets start with survival. This generally refers to either urban or wilderness skills that allow you to manage some sort of emergency situation for a few days until you are rescued or walk out on your own. A typical survival course will cover skills that will allow you to stay alive for a few days like building a shelter, making a fire, navigation, rescue signaling, and food procurement. “Preppers” are survivalists. In the event of some kind of apocalyptic disaster, survival skills are going to be valuable. That’s not to say that some preppers haven’t stretched their survival window well beyond the typical 72 hour “rescue window” with technology and stockpiling, but survival by it’s very definition is still limited.

Now we get to my personal favorite, and most of what we teach at our school. There is no one accepted word for it but I use “bushcraft.” I also like re-wilding, primitive skills, sustainable living and earth skills. Homesteading, though slightly different, shares a lot of the same skill sets, but has a farming component to it. Folks aren’t typically thrust into bushcraft situations. Those of us who practice bushcraft willingly walk into the forest. These skills are for after the “rescue window” has come and gone. These are the skills you need to build a sustainable life outside of the hyper-manufactured, hyper-money-driven system most of us live in. We tell our students that bushcraft lets you replace “survive” with “thrive”. Many of these skills are learned from ancient cultures in North America and around the world. Again, there are those who live off the grid in a yurt and grow their own grains, and there are those who enjoy learning to create fire with sticks on the weekend, and there’s everything in between. While we focus on bushcraft, we also teach survival skills, and we have teamed up in the coming months with a local prepper group to host a celebration of outdoor skills From Primitive to Prepper that we’re very excited about.

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