I would rather that my spark should burn out
in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom
of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.
— Jack London
My guest today is Ken Ilgunas, nature writer, adventurer, rewilding advocate, Substacker, podcaster, psychotherapy grad student, group fitness trainer, and shaggy lawn evangelist.
Ken’s adult life, from graduating college until just a small number of years ago, was basically a series of solo adventures. He went out into the world, natural and not-so-natural, and walked it. And walked and walked, and boated, and hitchhiked, and drove and hopped trains and whatever other mode of transportation was available. He met wild people and wild animals.
Along the way he wrote various books, including Walden on Wheels, about, among other things, living in a van down by the river while in grad school; Trespassing Across America, about an often quite illegal sojourn along the proposed Keystone XL pipeline route; This Land Is Our Land, about the lost but maybe someday to be regained American right to roam freely across lands both public and private; and A Walk Across Suburbia, which is about a three day walk across suburbia, in this case the specific suburb where he grew up.
I met Ken a few years, when he was already ensconced in the more domesticated phase of his life– married, father of a very cute daughter, and homeowner in, and civic minded resident of, a small, tidy village just a few train stops out from Edinburgh, Scotland.
Ken’s now working on a book proposal called The Future Wild, which is about both current efforts to re-wild the world in various ways, homespun and science fictional, and also what the natural world might look like if we give it a few hundred years to reassert itself, perhaps with some help along the way.
In this episode we talk about the new project, his hitchhiking trip in his early 20s from Alaska to Buffalo, New York. We talk about American Prairie, the three-point-two million acre re-wilding project in north central Montana that almost nobody has heard of, which Ken hiked across last year with his nephew and which he describes as maybe the boldest conservation project in the world. We talk about de-extinction of species like wooly mammoths revival, direwolves, aurochs, all that Jurassic Park shit. We talk about whether depopulation is bad news or good news for the planet, whether environmentalism has been its own worst enemy, and whether a right to roam could ever come to America. And we spend some time on what it’s actually like to be a very hardcore introvert who has, over the course of his forties, had to negotiate between the part of himself that just wants to disappear into the wilderness for months at a time and the part that wants a family and a home and a steady job.
What I most dig about Ken’s work, and Ken as a person, is that even as he’s utterly clear-eyed about environmental threats, current and future, he walks the world with a real wonder at what it still is and what it might still become.
Eminent Americans is produced in collaboration with the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis and distributed through its publication, Arc Magazine.
Enjoy this conversation with my comrade in wandering Ken. Peace.
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