About Me

Greetings. I’m Michael Lynn Wellman.

I’m a spouse, father, companion, water protector, land tender, edge walker, outdoor professional, braider of connections, guardian of the wild, and doctor of rewilding.

The primary through-thread on my journey has been my love for the earth body, and especially moving my body intimately in rhythm with the earth’s body. I am kinesthetically emotive, and my soul connects with spirit in the backcountry. I especially love mountains and islands, climbing and skiing, and all forms of locomotion through wild spaces.

I specialize in accessing wildness through practices ranging from outdoor adventure, movement, and deep nature connection to entheogens, eroticism, and other expanded states. The long arc of my work is welcoming in a rewilding futurism in which regenerative place-based subsistence lifeways become the cultural norm once again.

I hold a PhD in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion from the California Institute of Integral Studies, as well as an MA in Outdoor Leadership and an MBA. I am a certified wilderness first responder and have numerous trainings including as a Consciousness Medicine guide, a Work That Reconnects facilitator, a RYT-200 yoga instructor, and a LEED accredited professional.

I arrived on this earth in this body during a mid-February blizzard on the shores of the Flint River. This time-place intersection is core to who I am. I am a lover of winter, deep snowpacks, and backcountry powder skiing. And of water in all its other forms.

I identify as a cis hetero white male who is leveraging my intersectional privileges in pursuit of collective liberation. I am pushing the edges of my identity through exploring my queerness, claiming my neurodivergence, and navigating invisible dis-abilities from a history of complex trauma, head injuries, and flirtations with death. Currently, I am most influenced by being in a queer interracial relationship with scholar tayla shanaye of Embody The Revolution, as we raise two white-passing children in rural ‘Murica.

Early life events that have deeply influenced how I move through the world include being born into a blue-collared General Motors Midwestern family and having firsthand experience of the impacts of outsourcing and globalization, growing up in the magik of a few acres of old-growth woods on a river in rural farm country and later watching helplessly as those elder one-legged kin were cut down, being raised in a large Irish Catholic family as a Pre-K - 12th grade Catholic school boy and witnessing my extended family embrace White Christian Nationalism, and leveraging education to climb the class ladder as a first generation college graduate and first generation doctor.

My professional career can be broken down into four broad phases: as a mechanical engineer with an MBA working in the “green” energy sector where I managed programs, budgets, and teams and learned the roots of the crisis went deeper than technology or economics could solve; as an outdoor professional in love with and humbled by the wild who also struggled to find my place in an industry rampant with privilege, hedonism, and substance abuse; as a scholar-activist performing auto-ethnographic research in frontline communities from water protection encampments to reskilling gatherings to earth-based ceremonies; and most recently, as a self-employed counselor, guide, and consultant.

Prior to returning to graduate school for my doctorate, I went on a walkabout of sorts. I spent fifteen months getting to know myself through my first psychedelic trip, solo amongst the redwood giants, a ten-day silent Vipassana retreat, numerous alpine climbs including Mt. Rainier and peaks in both the North Cascades and Olympics, multiple cross-country road trips, and three months living in the Himalaya living with yogis and visiting Everest Base Camp. It was during this time that my fascination with energy transitioned from the physical to the meta-physical.

Currently, I am the executive director of We The Earth, a nonprofit rewilding institute on the Yellow Dog River in the Northwoods. I balance the rest of my time between my private practice, advising local organizations, local activism-organizing, volunteering in my community, writing and continuing my scholarly pursuits, and playing in the outdoor with my kids. 

I am aligning myself with the our local Outdoor Adventure Therapy Services, have held advisory positions with the Lake Superior Living Labs Network, Protect The Porkies, and Citizens for Superior, have volunteered with the Fresh Coast Film Fest and Superior High Angle Rescue Professionals, and am a member of the Michigan Backcountry Alliance and Upper Peninsula Climbing Coalition.

My formal academic education:

  • PhD, Ecology, Spirituality, & Religion, CIIS, 2022

  • MA, Outdoor Leadership, Prescott College, 2025

  • Professional MBA, University of Utah, 2012

  • BS, Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan, 2007

Certifications include:

  • Wilderness First Responder, WMA, 2010 - current

  • Certified Therapeutic Adventure Specialist, AEE, currently pursuing

  • Guide, Consciousness Medicine, 2018

  • Permaculture Design Course, OAEC, 2015

  • Facilitator, Work That Reconnects, WTR, 2015

  • 200-hour Residential Yoga Teacher, Nepal, 2014

  • RYT-200 Yoga Instructor, Yoga Alliance 2011

  • LEED Accredited Professional, USGBC, 2008

Additional trainings in: Ecotherapy, Adventure-Based Counseling, Wilderness Rites of Passage, Nature Ritual, Holotropic Breathwork, Folk Herbalism, Art of Mentoring, Permaculture Design, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Social Permaculture, Social Ecology, and more.

Teachers/Schools I have studied with include: Joanna Macy, Don Hanlon Johnson, Stanislav Grof, Malidoma Somé, Kerry Brady, Françoise Bourzat, John Slattery, Jeanette Acosta, Starhawk, Maurie Lung, Kim Sacksteder, Occidental Arts & Ecology Center, Regenerative Design Institute, 8 Shields, Liberation Spring, Institute for Social Ecology, Rewilding Portland, and more