Facing Ourselves, Facing Biodiversity
Wilderness Club General's founder on the importance of disrupting the toxic system in order to regulate your body and the Earth alike.
Welcome to The Link, a bi-weekly newsletter making the connection between “regenerative farming,” and you—city slickers, country mice, and everyone living in the in between—every other Sunday.
Anyone who has ever lived in New York City has had their big apple moment. After purchasing some expensive winesaps, macouns, or granny smiths from the nearest farmer’s market, you find the last open seat on the subway, contentedly gazing down at your mesh tote bag filled with ones sourced from somewhere upstate when the unthinkable happens. The stranger holding the handrail above you takes a big sneeze all over them. And you. Maybe your moment wasn’t apples, but human hair, levitating off of the subway platform as the F train approached. If neither of these moments are ringing a bell, I’m jealous. Living in big cities is not unlike being a Daria in a sea of microbes, and navigating how to regulate your nervous system in the collective soup of stressy energy can feel like a fool’s errand. Tiny towns are no different in completely different ways. The minute I quit NYC for the third and final time (don’t ask) and drove home to Texas, I softened. My access to nature transformed my general life outlook. I found a way to discover more balance and not worry about things like whether or not the Kenny Rogers Fried Chicken sign would disrupt my sleep patterns anymore.
If you’re just dropping into this weirdo newsletter for the first time, this is a place where you’ll constantly find the connection between yourself (wherever you live) and regenerative farming. It’s also a place where we’ll explore circularity: what it is, why it’s important, and all of the ways that you can enter into it at whatever pace you like.
And if you’ve been at this party for a while now, we’ve been gossiping about the issues with the term “sustainability,” made connections between gut health and soil health, unpacked why time isn’t linear, and nerded together out on the importance of shrooms in your life. (No White Claw was involved). All of these topics are simultaneously about you, your community, and regenerative farming, because biodiversity is sexy, baby. Today’s newsletter is no different, and despite the hand sanitizer-inducing introduction (I’m sorry), I’m excited to explore what it means to examine our own, beautiful, messy, burnt out selves and what happens when we commit to healing our bodies and its direct impact to the land with a brilliant expert.
I first learned about Wilderness Club General through one of my sisters, who was looking at my face one day and said something along the lines of, “stop buying garbage face wash and use this instead.” Our family has a gentle way with words. I ordered a bottle of their cleansing salve, and without this rapidly turning into an influencer post that tells you to go buy their products with my 20% off code in the next paragraph, I was genuinely surprised. My face began to look naturally glowy every morning, and I looked forward to washing it at night. (I’ve not always been good at the Stevie Nicks approach to self preservation). I ordered more products, and noticed the connection between how much better I started to feel and holistically looked more like myself from using things like the Frank Mud and Halo Lip Serum. All of the ingredients are simple, natural, and high quality, sourced from farmers and artisan-made natural goods. And with the simplicity of the packaging (there’s no labels), a built-in circularity program, I wanted to learn more about the person behind the internet’s holistic general store.
And as it turns out, Wilderness Club General founder Fegan Carter has had many big apple moments that deeply impacted her health and her destiny. Living in New York City literally made her sick, and as her health worsened, she was forced to examine the toxicity of the environment around her, from her living space to the air pollution to the things she was putting on her skin and bringing into her apartment. She made the choice to leave the Big Apple in 2020 for Oklahoma (her original home) and Wilderness Club General was born.
I recently sat down with Fegan to unpack how the choices we make around ourselves and to the planet should be treated as an active sense of self awareness, how biodiversity and wellness are interconnected, and how circularity is an invitation that binds us to the choices that we make for ourselves and our communities.
In your own words, what does the term regenerative farming mean to you?
Regenerative farming is an extremely reverent practice that I am so drawn to learning more about. You can almost compare it to a visual of us humbling ourselves before the earth and asking it to nourish us again. We’ve lost ourselves in industrialism and mass production and as a result, much of the soil has lost itself also. In a parallelled, poetic demise, society has, therefore, gotten far off the path of consuming nutrient dense foods grown with true bio-diverse soil and this has changed our own internal biodiversity. Regenerative farming mends our food ecosystem’s very broken relationship with what still has the potential to be a very nutrient dense Earth. Taking care of our soil and enjoying nutrient dense foods grown with respect for the Earth again is what it’s about; returning to communing with the very land we care for and rely on deeply. It’s a practice that requires much giving before anymore taking.
Tell me the story about how Wilderness Club General got its start.
I was 31, living and working in New York City in what felt like the most pivotal point in my career (burnt out as hell) when suddenly, the foundation of my health crumbled right beneath me. It was like one day I was myself and the very next day onward, I just wasn’t anymore. Without any explanation, everything changed at once. It was incredibly overwhelming. I’d go to lunch and eat the same caprese salad I’d been eating for weeks and come back from lunch feeling completely off kilter. It was a trip. My eyes would feel unaligned. My spine was out of whack. My jaw was tightening more and more everyday. I was getting rashes, lots of swelling. And just this general feeling of being unwell and not myself. I suddenly couldn’t use any of the products I had been able to use for the last 31 years. I couldn’t eat the foods I was used to eating. I had to throw most of my clothes away because the toxic laundry detergent I’d always used was nestled deep within the fabric. I was just a ball of inflammation.
Ultimately, I would come to find out just how absolutely toxic everything I was putting in and on my body and using within my home truly was. It just all happened to all come to a head because I had been exposed to a chemical in my apartment building for over a year and the toxin load my body was trying to manage just became too much. From that, I developed what’s called Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. I changed everything and essentially rebuilt my entire life. The first thing I did was leave the grind of working in NYC.
I drained my 401K and took time to learn about how to care for my new self and this condition. I discovered that non-toxic living is what my body was craving. It was a required path to healing after a year and a half of not recognizing myself internally and externally and feeling lost as to the root causes. Because the toxins in everything I was using and eating had left my systems overburdened and sick, I began making my own products to replace all the things that I could no longer use without any intention of selling, just desperation to be able to take care of myself without causing further harm.
During that season of putting myself back together, I was in search for what I call the great green balance. The wilderness was literally calling out to me. So I started a troop called The Wilderness Club based on this principle. We were a group of women who lived in NYC, wanted to unplug, and redefine wellness from what had become what felt like an inauthentic and non-inclusive space. Our troop wanted to get back to the basics of connecting with the wilderness again, moving outdoors to soothe our bodies and mental health. We took the train upstate and went on hikes in Cold Spring, NY. We learned outdoor skills; picnicked on Governors Island; went to a hot rowing session in SoHo; and did some deep journaling sessions in each other's apartments before I felt a quiet inward calling away from New York. So I started mentally making plans to leave and disband everything and right after that, Covid hit NYC. By June 2020, we relocated back to our hometown in Oklahoma. It was during this time that I had the idea to start Wilderness Club General. It was this brilliant combination of everything I’d been through since my illness started—this journey of discovering how powerful the impact of non-toxic living could be for the mind/body and The Wilderness Club all in one. It was this idea that people could find some of that great green balance right at home by using our rewilding products.
I really love the guiding principles of Wilderness Club General. They feel grounded in circularity and a guide book to climate optimism.
Our ethos is this simple call to own the responsibility of divesting from what’s been harmful to ourselves and the planet the entire time we’ve been here. It’s an understanding that the Natives did it right. The fragile balance of our great ecosystem literally relies on our commitment to thoughtfully co-existing with and on this planet. We are the consumers of virtually every resource here. Everyday we have the opportunity to consume less, consume well, and invest in the things we believe in in order to create the new ways of living that are undoubtedly required to remain here.
And likewise, when we invest in the things we want to see more of in this world, we’re equally divesting from the old machines that we don’t want to be a part of anymore. The power of choice is what our ethos is all about. Understanding that we are making a choice either way. When we have no regard for how we affect the Earth’s balance, we have no regard for how we’re affecting our own balance.
Once we are enlightened to the types of choices we want to make and how it all works together to ultimately create new ways of treating our bodies, homes, and the earth—we are living with a purpose that makes it all so much more meaningful. It makes buying a serum from a small brand committed to staying small and treating the planet and our bodies well feel like an extension of who we are in our very center, carrying out what we believe in and who we want to be. It’s just so many brands who get it. And they are attracting consumers who get it. So now it’s this community who understands that we’ve got to do it differently and genuinely—less offerings, more circularity, clean ingredients that haven’t been created in a lab from chemicals. It’s not about marketing. It’s not about having more. Or following the trends of big beauty. It’s about reconnecting with processes that worked before the big industrial boom, making it as simple as we can, and bringing what burns fire in your heart to the table your way to serve the greater good. It’s the way I try to show up in this space and connect with others like yourself who are showing up in their own way on this gentle journey backwards. It feels good. It feels purposeful. And it’s a shared path done a million different ways.
Our way just happens to be cultivating products that are made with raw ingredients alive with the Earth’s grounding frequencies that drop you back into your body. This world is a machine that can leave you unwell in so many ways. The root of my challenges were a dysregulated nervous system. I found that connecting my body to the grounding frequencies of the wilderness is the best medicine for my dysregulated nervous system. From that, my ethos for the types of products I would make for myself was born. The pulsing energy present in the raw Earth ingredients we use activates the pathways of the body and mind, creating a flow within that clears stagnation. This includes your energy pathways, nervous system, and lymph; which in turn cleanses your tissues and energy field. It calms your aura. This is our definition of holistic care. It’s mind/body/energy care through normal daily practices like cleansing and moisturizing your skin.
How is what you are doing guided by the land?
Our goods are made with active ingredients you’d find out in the wilderness like mud, sand, and clay combined with high quality, artisan-made natural goods like organic extra virgin olive oil, floral essences, squalane, and plant-based melatonin and aminos. No pesticides. No chemicals or fillers. Just pure, quality ingredients, like making a good meal from scratch. When I make Wilderness Club General goods, that preservation of the wild’s frequencies within each product is a part of our quality control check. For example, when I’m making a batch of Frank Mud, I am pausing to feel its energy. Is it alive? Do I feel the Earth’s pulse in this batch? And ultimately, the Earth just hasn’t let me down. It’s always there. When it’s left undisturbed by chemicals, it shows up for us ready to rebalance us and create what I call “flow” within our minds, hearts, tissues, and systems. This pulse awakens and clears our pathways. It’s so good for us. And it’s nothing new. Our products are just essentially a way for us to reconnect with the wild’s frequencies from inside our homes and within our daily routines.
Why did circularity become a large component of your business?
I instinctively practiced a small form of circularity out of necessity when I was in the chaotic process of trying to learn how to heal my body. The top quality ingredients my body required were insanely expensive. They still are, of course. So I found ways to make one thing serve multiple purposes. For example, with organic cashews I can not only make cashew milk, but I can save the pulp and create a cashew cream that I use in so many different recipes like my homemade cream of mushroom base that I smother my salmon in. That was the start of me incorporating a small seed of circularity into my daily life. So when I started Wilderness Club General, it was just the most natural, logical way to operate from my point of view. We’re an online refillery and it only makes sense that we reuse the glass bottles we sell our products in. We encourage our customers to either reuse them at home, donate them to a local refillery or send them back to us in cases of 6 when they’ve collected enough. We email them a pre-paid label and they receive a discount code for their next purchase for participating in our circularity program.
Genius! And for those who are newer to the term, how would you define circularity?
It’s the idea that the life of a material or good is not over after a single use. Circularity is the recycling of a particular resource and using it again and again within an existing process and community of goods rather than using additional resources to carry out said process. In other words, it’s creating a family of resources and keeping those resources in the family. It’s Groundhog Day but with a material or good.
Groundhog Day with a positive outcome and no Bill Murray involved. In previous newsletters, I’ve touched on how certain health trends are completely disconnected from a key aspect of our wellness (soil health). How does what we choose in our skincare routine tie back to the land?
From my perspective, undisturbed is the key word when it comes to the food we’re consuming and anything we’re using for our wellness. The more undisturbed the ingredients are, the more power—whatever that ingredient’s power is. For example, a head of broccoli that was grown in soil that has not been disrupted by chemicals (fertilizers, pesticides, etc), has every chance of being far more nutritious (in the way that only broccoli can) than a head of broccoli whose energy and genetic makeup has been literally disturbed or severed by those things. This goes for every ingredient in everything we come into contact with. Preserving the sacredness of our food we allow into our bodies, the ingredients we put on our skin, and the goods we allow into our home is so important. Protecting the quality of what we are willing to expose ourselves to is what it’s about. And it’s all encompassing. The same way the chemicals on that head of broccoli disrupts its power, cellular structure and essence is the same way it will disrupt ours. And if we are not mindful, we find ourselves consuming and applying such toxic and foreign matter on a daily basis that disrupts our bodies, minds, and energy to the point of making us chronically ill. It’s all around us, happening everyday. Toxic laundry detergent. Toxic skincare goods. Toxic foods. Toxic perfumes/colognes and air fresheners. I could talk about this 24/7.
How do the choices we make around our bodies and the ingredients we use tie back to the land?
In a world where Amazon exists, it’s hard to fathom that the cargo shipping and the constantly getting 100 things shipped to us per month can’t go on forever. When we order something, we should consider the resources we are utilizing. All the paper for the shipping boxes, the plastic that is still very much a staple material used in packaging, the toxic ingredients and harmful emissions we dole out, collectively, when we use/wear toxic perfumes, harsh cleaning products, and laundry detergents. The Earth is suffocating and so are we. The only way to take responsibility for how much we are consuming is to live simpler. Use less. Demand less. Want less. Make what we can. Reuse, reuse, reuse.
Divest from toxicity. We must educate ourselves on what we have in our homes that contributes to the pollution of our health, the health of animals, and the air/nature. Study how big business and toxic ingredients used in most goods continue to affect the planet negatively—the air, water, food supply, natural resources. Know who you’re supporting when you purchase food and goods. Buy from local farmers at your farmers market. Seek out small brands with values that align with your wellness and the Earth’s well-being. Seek a life that is centered on not disturbing or disrupting your body or the Earth. Know your ingredients. Understand how it all works together.
Because ultimately, it all goes hand in hand—if the alchemy of the Earth is so in tune with us that it can rebalance us with its frequency. Then whatever hurts the Earth, hurts us. We’ve got to take care of each other.
Thanks so much for speaking with me!
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