Open up almost any survival manual, and you’re likely to see a lot of drawings of bushcraft projects – primitive shelters, friction fire, traps, even how to build crude cabins. And most bushcraft books have at least a brief discussion about the value of bushcraft skills for wilderness survival.
Obviously there are a lot of blurred lines here, and some people even (incorrectly) use the terms interchangeably. Which begs the question… what is the difference between bushcraft and survival? Where do they intersect? And does it actually matter?
What is Bushcraft?
There are as many different definitions of bushcraft as there are bushcraft instructors. So here’s mine. Bushcraft is the art of living in harmony with the land and utilizing a few simple tools to unlock the resources around you to meet your needs. It’s the art of doing more with less. The term “bushcraft” is fairly new in the States, but the skills aren’t.
Bushcraft is what your grandparents would have called camping, and your great-great grandparents would have just called living. In times past, it might have been called being a hunter, or being a woodsman.
Bushcraft is living off the land in the truest sense, making shelter, furniture, and camp tools. It’s foraging, hunting, and fishing, and supplementing that with simple, pioneer-style foods. And it’s using old-school skills to reconnect with the ways of our ancestors, be it American pioneers or neolithic tribesmen, depending on how far back you want to go.
Bushcraft is an outdoor pursuit in the same manner of backpacking, hunting, or paddling. (And you can incorporate bushcraft skills into all of those, by the way.) It can be an occasional hobby or a full-blown way of life, but the bottom line is, people pursue it because they want to.
Bushcraft skills may not necessarily be the most useful or practical for survival, but the true value in bushcraft is the confidence that’s gained from knowing how to live comfortably with nearly nothing, and the intimacy you gain with the land around you.
What is Wilderness Survival?
Survival is, by definition, an emergency. People go on bushcraft campouts for fun. They don’t go out to have survival experiences for fun. Wilderness survival means that somewhere along the way, something went wrong, and plan A went out the window.
At its core, survival is about maintaining homeostasis – meaning, keeping your body doing what it’s supposed to do to keep you alive. That means knowing how to build a fire and secure a shelter to fight the elements and maintain your core body temperature. That means sourcing and purifying water so you don’t succumb to dehydration. It means knowing enough about wilderness medicine to keep the blood in your body, your heart beating, and oxygen in your lungs when 911 isn’t an option.
How you go about achieving these survival priorities does not matter. It doesn’t matter if you use a hand drill or a road flare to get a fire going, all that matters is you start the fire. There is no cheating in survival – any purist that says otherwise is full of it. You do whatever it takes to accomplish the task at hand to keep yourself and those in your care alive.
When I teach wilderness survival, I focus on the most efficient and effective means for you to get warm, get dry, and get out as fast as possible. These may not look as cool on Instagram as striking a flint and steel inside a primitive shelter or building a figure-4 deadfall, but I promise they’re a lot more valuable in the real world.
Where Bushcraft and Survival Intersect
Now that we’ve established that bushcraft and wilderness survival are different disciplines with different goals… what common ground do they share? The value in learning bushcraft for survival may be the confidence gained from knowing you can live comfortably when all you have is a knife, saw, some cordage, and a firesteel.
A good friend of mine who used to teach primitive skills (he would have called them ancestral skills) for SARCRAFT would always say that for our ancient ancestors, there was no such thing as a survival situation. The woods were their home. Drop a Cherokee brave anywhere in the Eastern Woodlands, and within a few hours he would have knapped a flint knife, found food and water, and built a fire and a shelter. And within a few days he probably would have built a bow to hunt with, and started using the stars and game trails to find his way back to his village.
Learning bushcraft can give you that.
The skills themselves can help bolster your survival capabilities in their own right. Knowing knots and lashings comes in handy if you have to make an improvised litter to carry your buddy out of the woods after he breaks his ankle. If you’re good with friction fire, you have an intimacy with the firecraft process that really can’t be gained any other way, and you’re a lot more likely to be able to build a fire when it really matters.
On the flip side, if you’re setting off in the woods on a bushcraft campout, you’d be wise to incorporate a level of preparedness for wilderness survival in case you’re not as good as you think you are… a small tarp, a space blanket, a water filter, a proper medical kit, waterproof tinder and extra fire starting methods, and some emergency rations can go a long way towards making sure things don’t go awry. You can always just pretend they’re not there if you don’t need them.
Why Does it Matter?
So at the end of the day… why does this all matter? Bushcraft and survival aren’t the same skillset, big deal.
Why it matters is that due to mixed messaging from books and videos put together by people with no actual survival experience, proactive people looking to prepare themselves end up focusing on the wrong things.
Joshua Enyart, who’s one of the best instructors around, is quoted as saying something that I very much agree with: “Every bow drill fire I’ve ever started was because I chose to, and I had a lighter in my pocket the whole time. If you’re relying on primitive skills to save your life, you’ve made a lot of wrong turns along the way.”
Bushcraft skills are great. But they’re often impractical for real-world wilderness survival. If my life depends on getting a fire started, I’m not going to stake that on my ability to make a hand drill set and bust out a coal with it on a cold, rainy winter night. I’m going to pull out a waterproof tinder stick and a mini road flare and send it.
The ability to whip out a cheap tarp and string it up in under two minutes when there’s a storm bearing down on you is infinitely more valuable than burning a few hours and hundreds of calories on a primitive shelter that’s still going to leak.
And having an emergency 3,000-calorie ration brick stowed away in the bowels of your pack is worth way more to keep your energy levels up than setting 27 deadfall traps with the hopes of one of them smashing a squirrel’s dome piece.
Like the t-shirt says, survival is simple… just don’t die. The basic survival skills that can keep you alive in a 24-hour-or-less scenario (which is 95%+ of real-world survival cases, by the way), can be taught in a 1-day class. If you really want to take a deep dive, that can be taught in a weekend. Monthly practice can keep your skills sharp enough to do the job.
Bushcraft, on the other hand, is a lifetime pursuit. There truly are no experts – even master woodsmen with decades of experience still learn new things all the time. It’s an incredibly rewarding pursuit too, and one that I highly recommend. There’s absolutely no feeling like your first successful bow drill fire. And if you get good enough to set out with a few minimal tools and a day later have a comfortable camp with a lean-to, elevated bed, cheery fire, and be kicking back in your bushcrafted chair cooking a fish you caught with the cane pole you made, well, it’s hard to beat that for building your confidence.
So if you’re new, my advice is to get your survival skills down so well you can’t forget them. Learn how to build a fire in terrible conditions with trashy wet wood. Get good at setting up an emergency shelter in the dark – if you really want to up the challenge, turn off your headlight. Bonus points if it’s windy and rainy. Learn land navigation. Take a wilderness first aid course. This way, no matter what you do in the outdoors, you have what it takes to make it out alive, and bring the people in your care with you.
Then, build your bushcraft skills if that’s something that appeals to you. You’ve got the rest of your life to learn, so take that deep dive and take your time doing it. Regardless of whether you’re trying to learn bushcraft or survival, we’ve got you covered. We’re here to help, so don’t hesitate to reach out!
Alex
