Peter Michael Bauer

Peter Michael Bauer (born 1982) is a Portland, Oregon-based environmental and primitive skills educator, rewilding advocate, and performer. Bauer is the founder of Rewild Portland. He is known for his performance persona "Urban Scout", through which he helped bring the rewilding movement to broader public attention in the United States during the 2000s.

Early life Bauer, a fourth-generation northeast Portland native, grew up in the suburbs of Portland. At the age of eleven, he earned his first Boy Scout merit badge for basketry.

At sixteen he and his friend, author Lisa Wells, dropped out of high school in 1998 and traveled to New Jersey to study under naturalist and survivalist Tom Brown, Jr.. Bauer has cited the novel Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn as an early influence to pursue what would become the rewilding movement.

In 2002, Bauer founded Mythmedia, a nonprofit dedicated to "creating cultural and environmental change through the arts." It functioned as a hybrid art collective, film forum, and community advocacy organization, running programs that included writing classes for homeless youth and a summer camp teaching wilderness and urban survival skills. dressed only in a covering of mud, soleless Adidas, and a rectangle of gray wool loincloth. He performed the character publicly throughout Portland, demonstrating primitive skills in Pioneer Courthouse Square, like lighting cigarettes with a bow-drill fire.

Events organized under the persona included The Silent Spring Fling, the Nuclear Winter Formal (an annual "preemptive post-apocalyptic" dance party) Bauer says, "rewilding is about returning to a more wild and natural state". archery,