While the world is speeding up, Claire Dunn urges people to slow down.
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Claire - who grew up in the Hunter but now lives in Melbourne - runs Nature's Apprentice.
This involves running workshops, courses and camps to reconnect people with nature and themselves. It also reflects the harmony that seems to naturally exist between the environmental and wellness movements.
"It's about fostering connection with the earth and the elements, with each other, the community and also listening to ourselves," she said.
"It's everything from earth skills, fire-making, string-making, learning bush foods, bush medicines and bush-craft skills.
"Then there's the skills of nature observation and awareness. Really sinking into a landscape and making relationships with the plants and animals and seasons."
She says people have become disconnected from the earth.
"We have increasing demands on us and a sense of information overload with all that's coming to us through social media and other networks," she said.
"We are basically overwhelmed, over-busy and overstimulated. What we really need is a return to a life that's simple. We can still have the complexities of modern life, but we really need to cut down on what we are taking into our system.
"And remember that we thrive with fewer and deeper connections with people around us and with our landscape."
This means connecting to the growing of food and to "a sense of knowing how the seasons change".
She urges people to observe the seasons and themselves.
"It's really slowing down so we can absorb and be enlivened by the myriad of life-forms around us, so we're not just glued to our screens."
She believes in linking modern lives with "the ancient rhythms of the Earth".
"Really feel the quality of the crisp air on an autumn morning. Stop to feel what it's like to have winter sun on your back. Have that awareness throughout the day of moving through space. What does it smell like, what does it feel like, how is the temperature changing, which way is the wind coming," she said.
Claire still calls the Hunter home. She has 10 nieces and nephews in the area. She worked as an activist for the Wilderness Society in Newcastle and the North East Forest Alliance from 2001 to 2007.
She became disillusioned and burnt out and subsequently spent a year off the grid in a wilderness survival program. This led to the publication of her book, My Year Without Matches. It's a story about escaping the city in search of the wild. She also wrote a column for a while in the Newcastle Herald's Weekender section.
She's been an eco-warrior for a long time. Her activism now takes a different form to her days with the Wilderness Society.
"I've come to understand activism in a much broader sense," she said.
"I realised the deeper issue was our disconnection from the earth. We're meant to be in a reciprocal relationship with it.
"Nothing will fundamentally change unless we shift the value structure from an industrial growth society to a life-affirming culture. That's where I feel like my activism is now."
She's a believer in the "rewilding movement".
"It's looking at a bigger picture. It's about regenerative design and returning landscapes back to their original form," she said.
"Humans thrive in communities linked to nature. It's about putting into place practices and projects where we live, in the cities, that can rebuild some of these connections."
Catching Rabbits
Speaking of wild things, our story on Bob "Minmi Magster" Skelton's teenage years in the 1950s sparked fond memories.
![Bob Skelton as a 13-year-old. Bob Skelton as a 13-year-old.](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/3AijacentBN9GedHCvcASxG/99a7814f-147d-4730-b158-e76555b3e144.jpg/r137_279_1384_1472_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
We wrote on Thursday about the Magster's days of eating wild duck, rabbit and hare and hunting on Hexham Swamp.
Merewether's Phill Duncan said he "loved the story from Bob Skelton".
"It brought back wonderful memories of doing the same thing as a kid in the '70s on the outskirts of Singleton," Phill said.
"I used to catch rabbits with traps. I'd take them home and the old man could skin them in about half a minute and mum would cook them."
He said his mum would bake them and they "tasted amazing".
His old man taught him to kill foxes as they were pests and "he loved Australian native birds".
"He knew what foxes did to the wildlife," he said.
"Those days are long gone from the suburban fringes. Imagine it now. The kid would be charged with having an illegal firearm or an illegal trap and some environmental group would find something else to charge him with. The parents would then be charged with some ridiculous law. My old man would be turning in his grave."
Compassion and Peace
Two fine examples of humanity caught our eye this week. The Newcastle Knights and the Newcastle Herald approached the Jarrod Mullen story with great compassion. And on Friday, Cat Stevens was trending on Twitter for performing his song, Peace Train, at a Christchurch memorial service.