ARTHUR HAINES & THE DELTA INSTITUTE OF NATURAL HISTORY
A source for wild food and medicine instruction, primitive living skills mentoring, New England plant taxonomy and nomenclature, and natural history lessons.
“If you’re a fan of Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens or the work of Jared Diamond—those books that do a deep dive into just how radically our modern way of life has diverged from the evolutionary norm for our species…then Arthur Haines’s A New Path is a must-read.”
TAKE A CLASS WITH ARTHUR
Practicing and sharing a neoaboriginal lifeway—a synthesis of the experience and wisdom accrued over the past seven million years with evidence from contemporary scientific research—to foster awareness, connection, health, and self-reliance.
A major focus of the Delta Institute of Natural History is developing self-reliance that promotes awareness and eco-conscientiousness.
This necessitates drawing on technologies that were first perfected many millennia ago, in some cases, prior to the emergence of Homo sapiens as a species.
These technologies, often referred to as primitive skills or ancestral life ways, are the only technologies that have demonstrated they are sustainable.
Further, they nourished and healed the body, produced a healthy and vital next generation, and promoted connection to the landscape (rather than distinction from).
These outcomes were accomplished through an education system that fostered the development of important human characteristics, beginning with the perfection of nature-based skills, and progressing to thoughtful practices, ceremony, and, ultimately, service beyond self.
Connect with the Delta Institute to understand how these primitive skills are effective, timely, and rejuvenative.
Recent Blog Posts
One of the wonderful aspects of the biology of women is that they have clear signals of an entrance into womanhood (menarche) and the end of being a birthing mother and opening the door leading to grandmotherhood (menopause). Male biology has no such events, the transition from boy to man to grandfather it is a more gradual process that, in today’s world, is often unobserved, unguided, and unappreciated. In a land of perpetually immature or even feminized men, the idea of transitioning from each stage of life is not valued as an important aspect of masculinity. In fact, some groups have created distorted rites of passage, such as vandalism, theft, excessive drinking, and violence, in an attempt to recover some type of doorway that represents a passage through life stages. Without direction, boys do not become men or they do succeed, but it requires decades to coddle together some kind of maturation given that we are embedded within an culture that prioritizes self over the collective, privileges over responsibilities, and humans over the earth.