Registration is limited and required for this free learning event.

Learn to identify, regeneratively gather and harvest, and use various wild plants for food, medicine, tools and materials. Zack Rouda, from Rewild Maine, will bring us on a discovery tour around Town Forest. Bring your own basket!

Cultivation and maintenance of relationships with wild plants, and with other human and nonhuman creatures, is largely what sustained our ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years before the inception of industrial civilization. Plants offer support, shelter, material, food, and love in countless other ways. The health and survival of the planet is dependent on interconnected relationships.

Zack Rouda is the director of Rewild Maine. He grew up in Washington, DC, and was enamored by performance arts from a young age. After pursuing acting (in addition to a semi-successful career as a rapper), he became disillusioned by life in the city, and was increasingly curious about the history of inequality, exploitation and environmental degradation. He studied anthropology (and theater) at the University of Vermont, attempted and withdrew from a life in New York City, and finally came to Maine for an apprenticeship at Maine Local Living School, during 2013 and 2014.

In 2016, with support and encouragement from his friend, Peter Bauer (founding director of Rewild Portland), Zack began leading wild-edible-foraging tours and started teaching basket-making classes. In 2017, he recruited a board of directors to incorporate Rewild Maine as a 501(c)3 educational non-profit.

He offers this story as way to consider: We do not have to stay where we are put. We may give ourselves the freedom to recreate our lives to meet our needs, to replace ourselves where we want to be, to reconnect with our fundamental nature; to rewild.