Title: Essential Bushcraft
Author: Mears, Ray
Published by: Hodder & Stoughton
Year: 2003
Date reviewed: 02.04
ISBN: 0-340-82971-0

Despite the titles of Mears’ popular TV series “Extreme Survival” and “World of Survival”, this is not a survival handbook. If I understand Mears correctly, he draws a distinction between “bushcraft” and “survival”. Bushcraft is an end in itself, a way of life. It involves a lifetime of study and practice, and gives a person the knowledge and skills to exist in, travel and explore the remote parts of the globe – a back-to-nature objective which for Mears is an end in itself. In a survival situation, when by definition life is at risk, having these skills obviously increases the chances of coming out alive, but this is not Mears’ main purpose in living the bushcraft life.

This book is an abridged version of his “Bushcraft”. After reading it once, you won’t immediately be able to go out, light a fire without matches, build a comfortable warm shelter in the woods, and live for a week on roots and fungi (which I’d secretly hoped – well, maybe not the roots and fungi bit). What you might do, though, is feel you know where to start if you wanted to set out down the road of learning these skills. Along the way you’ll have picked up useful tips on knife-sharpening, knot-tying, and how to select the right axe for your next wilderness trip. (Mears’ tip – “The further north that you travel, the more important the axe becomes”.)

There is a strange mix of practicality and spirituality in Mears’ bushcraft. A section on spoon-carving ends with a picture caption “Hand carved spoons are both beautiful and functional, and bring memories of the place and company in which they were carved”. Mears, I suspect, is a more complex character than we see in his TV programmes, but there’s no doubt he is a master in his chosen way of life.