ReWild chat with Pandora Thomas

ReWild chat with EARTHseed founder Pandora Thomas

Pandora Thomas is a passionate global citizen who works as a caregiver, teacher, farmer, designer and speaker. 

In March 2021 she set up EARTHseed Farm, a 14-acre solar-powered organic farm and orchard located on the ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo Peoples of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria in Sonoma County, California.

As the EARTHseed website reads, “Our mission is to employ restorative practices rooted in AfroIndigenous legacies to live in the right relationship with our Earth and more than human kin, while healing generations of historic harms”.

We caught up with Pandora to see the farm and ask her what she thinks it means to ReWild Yourself? 

Voice For Nature: What is Rewilding for you?

Pandora: The exciting thing about this idea of rewilding is that we’re already doing it. COVID gave us this interesting opportunity where people had to slow down and start to build deeper relationships with things in their lives, like the zone zero, which is right outside your home.

So many people have started to appreciate the wild within the developed areas that they live. And even in your own spirit, like, wow, people are leaving jobs. And like what is that piece of me that has not been told what to do? Who to be for me? It’s that level of rewilding. What does it look like when we let what society or social media or rules say, and we find the best place to really hear that voice inside?

[ReWilding] is not indoors unless it’s indoors immersed with nature and it’s literally with our more than human kin. It’s in the places on this planet, that’s still beat to a drum. It’s in the place that have been the least amount manufactured by humans and it’s everywhere. It can literally be outside your window, like the birds flying by who still live under their own journey. Monarch butterflies who continue to travel the route that for thousands of years their ancestors traveled, you can see that no matter where you are.

So this idea of rewilding is that you do not have to go off somewhere to find it, it’s actually connecting to that wildness in our own soul that lets us be the beautiful mammals animals that we are and being with our more than human kin and just saying, you know what? Rewilding is everywhere.