An old video of our received a comment that stated there was no such thing as bushcraft in North America because we didn’t have any bush, only woods, and as such it had to be woodcraft.

Let me take this moment to say I don’t care what anyone thinks about the appropriate name for bushcraft, woodcraft, etc. I’m not hung up on names and labels.

In the 1980’s it was known as survival. In the 1990’s, it was known as primitive skills. In the 2000’s it was self-reliance. In the 2010’s, it became bushcraft. The skill set goes back thousands of years to our hunter-gatherer forefathers in prehistory. The terminology changes every few years. Thus the skills endure but the words are ephemeral; here today, gone tomorrow.

These days I see all of these terms as how city people describe a simple, rural life close to the land.

So call it bushcraft, woodcraft, fieldcraft, primitive skills, survival, or whatever else you want, I don’t care. Labels don’t really matter to me. They are useful for us to determine what we are talking about, and there their usefulness ends.