I interview my daughter about her transition from urban life in San Francisco to the life of an educator, naturalist, and wild food forager in the Sierra foothills. Her recent book, Why We Need to Be Wild, gives first-hand insights into how we can live healthier, happier, and more purposeful lives by relearning the knowledge and skills of hunting-gathering humans.

Robert Kraft: To begin, what is rewilding?

Jessica Carew Kraft: Rewilding is aligning our activities and habits and consumption more with our hunter-gatherer ancestry. It’s about integrating ancestral ways of life into our daily habits, revitalizing ourselves, and recovering from the demands of contemporary life.

Rewilding rests on one fundamental fact of modern life: evolutionary mismatch. While we’re working hard to live our contemporary lives, we still retain the genes, physiology, and neurology of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and this mismatch can create profound disturbances, psychologically and environmentally.

Groups still foraging in the wild today, like the !Kung San, Yanomami, and Hadza people show how we lived fulfilling and sustainable lives for most of our human history.

RK: For many years, you lived and worked in San Francisco, one of the capitals of the technology world. What moved you away from high-tech urban life and toward becoming a naturalist and learning ancient skills?

JCK: While working with CEOs of tech startups, it became apparent that the techno-utopia we were striving for wasn’t succeeding.

My colleagues and I were stressed out, overwhelmed, under-slept, anxious, depressed, and taking psychiatric medications. And there were also obvious contradictions, such as Steve Jobs not permitting his children to use the iPad because he knew how addictive it was.

My own transformation arose from the pressure of being a working mom in an office. Every natural instinct felt stifled being with my children, enjoying fresh air and sunshine, getting enough sleep, exercising, and socializing. And I had to get........

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