Survival v. Bushcraft - What is the difference?

"Survival" is the stuff you pretend you are going to do in the off chance that what you pretend might happen.

"Bushcraft" is simply a brand name for traditional skills, whether utilizing bamboo poles from the hardware store and sap from the decorative balsam fir outside work or a ramshackle debris hut down by the river to carve spoons in with your expensive Swedish hatchet :)
 
Bushcraft is a means

Survival is an end

A means (bushcraft, navigation, first aid, gear selection, stove craft) to an end (survival, recreation, A-to-B locomotion, comfort).
 
I don't see bushcraft and survival as a binary either/or choice, more that the two are points on a spectrum and there is a balance between each method of doing things, based on the mindset and the skill level of the individual.
I think that another difference between bushcraft ad survival is the use of, and management of the available resources. A bushcraft mode of thinking is either a minimal or no-trace activity. Fire scars are minimized, shelters are broken down when left, or are made without synthetic materials to contaminate the environment. Resources are used efficiently and stewarded, such as spreading green shoots and seeds if ecologically called for. Survival is fast and dirty, get it done mentality. Living at all costs, so efficiency is not as big a consideration. Some people are always in survival mode with some skills. "Light the fire NOW, so use the big firestarter sawdust candle thats in the pack along with the highway flare". Others are almost always in bushcraft mode, "I need the fire now, because I'm wet and getting hypothermic, but here is some birch bark I picked up earlier in the day, and there is a standing dead spruce tree 10 yards back up the trail, by that big rock that will make a nice reflector"
Or survival guy finds he forgot his spork for his de-hy meal, hacks off a stick to scoop it into his face. Bushcraft guy spends the cooking time carving up a small spoon that will forever be a reminder of his carelessness and might become a regular bit of his kit. But those are not exclusive situations to me, I think we all fall somewhere in between, depending on a lot of factors, and sometimes we have to change gears.
 
For me bushcraft is fun and comfortable, practicing skills and enjoying nature. Survival is not comfortable or fun. I see survival as a battle or struggle to live. Survival doesn't have to be related to a end of days scenario either. I seen people survive horrible situations, such as cancer. Survival is a mindset.
 
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Ideally, Bushcraft should involve mastering the creative mindset and adaptive tool usage skills required for almost any primitive living scenario. For me, Bushcrafting is just a new-fangled name for authentic camping or woods-living When you went camping you brought the bare minimum and made everything else you needed, from utensils and shelter to whatever was required for hunting, cooking, hide-tanning and long-term outdoor food preparation and storage. Most people's lives won't allow for regular long-term excursions like this anymore, so "Bushcraft" has evolved into a shorter-duration activity, but the heart and soul of it should still be developing the mindset and abilities required to live on your own in the woods without distress, for extended periods. The Boy Scouts and any given grandfather used to teach this stuff 40 or 50 years ago, and it was used much more frequently back then. TV and the internet have brought the marketing and dramatization to the mix and so we get our current slightly sensationalized flavor.

Survivalism always seemed, to me, to be more based in planning for fantastical scenarios surrounding governmental collapse or civil unrest. Not really focused on usable skill-sets so much as anything-goes extreme situations and behavior. In many cases, the exact kind of behavior that would get you killed or injured pretty quick. I don't mean to offend anyone here, that's just the flavor of survivalism I've encountered. Survivalism and Bushcrafting could blend together, in my opinion, but Bushcrafting is more mundane stuff while Survivalism is almost a role-playing scenario in many instances. If you shift to simple survival skills rather than survivalism, the gap gets smaller.

Being prepared is more a mindset and skill-set than having 400 MRE's, 25000 rounds of 5.56 ammo, and a bug-out bag with a Busse Battle-Mistress and some bdu's. More about assimilating the Improvise, adapt, and overcome mentality. That used to be long-term camping and little-b bushcraft.
 
gadgetgeek spelled out a lot of my thoughts.

My main beef with the "survival" mindset it the focus on gear fetish rather than skills and experience developed recreationally. If you have a pile of kit you never use, it's not going to be much handier when you can't look up how-to's and manuals on your phone.

In my case, if I need to grab a bag and get out of Dodge I'm just going to take the same things I take camping. Since I already have a good idea how much I can comfortably carry and how far I can carry it, the bag has already been pared down to the essentials. All the gear has been used many times before so I know it works and I know how to use it. That whole "Two is one, one is none" mindset has been worked out of the system already so I won't be weighing myself down with fantasy items like hollow handle knives with sawbacks and bottle openers/wire cutters along with four different cooking options, three water purification kits, ten pounds of fire starting toys and a shedload of "cordage."

Staying put and helping my neighbors is a far more successful strategy in any realistic catastrophe than running for the hills. This summer, my 72 y.o. mother was out of power for a week after a vicious windstorm blew trees down, closing roads and downing lines over a very large area. She just set up the camp stove on the back porch for cooking and carried on. She had plenty of water jugs to fill in town for drinking water and a lake out back for washing water and bathing, so it was not much more than an inconvenience for her. Society didn't break down, the power just went out for a while. Neighbors helped clear each other's driveways, tree removal companies had a literal windfall, and everyone just got on much as before. The fact that my mother had what she needed as far as gear along with experience using it meant that she was not one of those folks on the news crying for the cameras about how tough it's been "with the disaster and all."

Was my mother's coping strategy "survival skills" or simply camping skills, i.e. "bushcraft"? She didn't rely on a truckload of still-in-box specialized gear the way a lot of "survival planning experts" recommend, it was just stuff laying around because it actually was used recreationally.

I'm not writing this to say "look how smart I/my mom is," (although I am proud of her) I'm responding to the OP's "survival vs. bushcraft" query. IMHO it's not about "survival" or wilderness, it's about being comfortable with many ways to do things. Really, it's just a knife. Call it a survival knife, hunting knife, bushcraft knife, camp knife, or just "my knife," if you've never used it to make a fire the name isn't going to help.

Sorry for the novel :)
 
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I see survival as two different things. First, it's the act of or attempt to continue living in harsh environments. Your boat sinks, your plane crashes, you're caught in a natural disaster, etc. You must continue to live in extreme circumstances without all the conveniences and resources you're used to.

It's also an activity this is increasingly practiced. Bushcraft might be part of that activity, as is hunting, camping, etc., etc. Whether it's lightweight backpacking, a night in the woods with minimal gear or tactical training, it's both preparation for a true survival situation and increasingly a recreational activity. Maybe prepping, survival training or whatever are more accurate. But I have a survival kit I take with me when I'm off roading or fishing. I use it for practice and I'll probably never use it. It might help me survive someday but building and using the kit are a form of recreation. Bushcraft is just one form of that recreation.

In the context of knives (or just about any gear), there are survival knives designed to accomplish a lot of tasks in common survival situations. But in a survival situation, the best survival knife is the one you have. If it's a $15 Chinese folder, it's a survival knife.
 
They're both about skills rather than gear.
Our ancestors survived and "bushcrafted" with sharp bits of stone.

There's a lot of overlap between the actual skills, but bushcrafting tends to put more emphasis on making stuff.
However, in a survival situation you may be making things too, whether it's a gurney type of thing to drag an injured person out with, or carving a spoon to pass the time (and keep sane) while search and rescue locates you.

Most of the skills are really the same though...although I'm sure a slew of "bushcrafters" and "survivalists" will disagree. :)
 
Bushcraft is the selection, use, and progression of tools, skills, and philosophy for deliberate woods living.

Survivalism is the selection, use, and progression of tools, skills, and philosophy for conditions of absolute necessity.

Very similar definitions, perhaps too much so for some. However, we see in the advancement of skills that the two categories merge together. One will choose his kit based on what he needs to deliberately live in the woods while also taking pieces of gear necessary to survive, just in case. Another will choose his kit as if there were no difference between bushcraft and survival, and the observer would not be able to tell any difference - the man would appear to only be surviving, but for the individual this is true bushcraft. For him, the very purpose of bushcraft is to become better at survival.

In truth, we are always surviving. The human is a peculiar animal who abstracts and romanticises himself, and sees living as something separate from his survival. But we are merely distancing ourselves from the realities of survival, and adding layers of complexity to what survival really is. The difference becomes clear in comparing the primitive hunter/gatherer to the modern city dweller: the hunter/gatherer has a small carrying bag, a tool and a weapon, wanders through the forest as if he is one with it, his clothes are made from the land he wanders, and he gathers or hunts the food he needs while having to endure the dangers of the animals and plants wandering with him in the forest, skill is involved in all aspects of survival, there is almost no demarcation line between what he crafts and what he endures to survive; the city dweller has an endless assortment of gear scattered throughout man-made caves/tombs that cannot even be accounted for much of the time, he carries tools but does not know that is what they are, he fears and even shuns weapons, funnels through the city as if he is the only thing in it while ironically being the same as everything else, his clothing comes from some mythical unknown place and is generally extracted from accumulated death or black oil, his food arrives in a similar manner and he generally has no clue what it looks like before it arrives in a metal or plastic can, his skills are either non-existent or crude and only apply to objects which come from the single energy source he has no idea of, and he calls this life but has no inclination of his actions threatening survival itself.

This aspect of it is part of a philosophy most won't want to touch, but it is necessary if we are to truly understand the difference between bushcraft and survival. Society and culture took a severe turn in the modern era and many people lost all connection to what the needs and realities of survival are. In other words, the rural community has traditionally been that bridge whereby humans were always in touch with the reality of survival. There was no real demarcation between daily life and survival because limited connections to the urban environment and a non-surplus of resources always left some threat which people would have to be prepared for. Much of bushcraft is simply an entertainment and academic pastime for urban dwellers, and this cultural aspect creates a much larger rift between bushcraft and survival than there actually is.

To clarify this we can add a third category, that of woodcraft. Woodcraft is the set of skills necessary for crafting wood into tools, daily living, and the living environment itself. Up until very recent history people had to care for their tools, repair them, and even build their long-term homes. An important difference here is the level of skill involved. Generally speaking, the knowledge and skill necessary to make your own tools is much higher than using them. In reality bushcraft is a focus on temporary living, the skills are employed for very basic beginnings of woods living. Much like a zombie film, just as it gets interesting, just as the group begins to survive, it ends. In this sense bushcraft is an unfinished project of woods living, just as it starts to get interesting it ends. The show Alone illustrated this well as it was a group of bushcrafters attempting to survive, and they simply did not have what it takes, not even close.

An opposite illustration comes from a story Mors Kochanski uses to illustrate his philosophy of clothing. (My version is probably way off, but the idea is the same.) An Inuit woman becomes lost out on an iceflow and is unable to make it home before dark. She has to endure the night, but for her this is easy because she is dressed for the environment and only has to wait out the night. For most people today this would be a serious survival situation, but for her it is just part of living. The art of the wilderness is contained in living and survival itself. And in many ways I think bushcraft is an attempt to get this feeling back.

It is necessary to consider how these words are defined and how they change over time, how they are imagined compared to their reality. What is survival and how has it changed as compared to ideal survival? And what is bushcraft and how has it changed compared to ideal bushcraft?
 
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One aspect of survivalism is that it is wrapped up in ideas of apocalypse, doomsday, collapse, dystopia; it goes by many names. Survivalism gets ridiculed as mental illness or the unskilled delusions of the paranoid partly because of this, it is seen as less than bushcraft. But a major aspect of survivalism is missed if we malign it in this way. Within many of these stories of apocalypse is the idea that once we are forced to survive we can once again begin to truly live. This is the romantic seed in all of these stories and much of it has to do with the fact that our society is focused on base survival, or worse, less than survival. This is clear in the idea of the living dead, we are not even surviving, 'We are the walking dead.'

If we look to something like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs we see that the majority of these pillars of life are provided for us, without thought, effort, or meaning; no skills required. This does make people like the living dead, they wander and return to places merely out of habit. They do not have to think and survival is provided for them. The effect of this is to debase the meaning of life, remove responsibility from the individual, and disconnect individuals from one another. Without providing for ourselves, our family, and community directly the meaning in our lives is reduced. This effects all other aspects of society as well, because without the basic primitive needs and the meaning derived from them we begin to lose the meaning in other aspects of culture, philosophy, and religion. Without the base the rest of the structure cannot be built.

The Road speaks to the religious return of meaning in an apocalyptic event, as having to care for the son in such an impossible situation shows us the true depth of the love of the father for the son. The impossibility of the situation intensifies all that he must teach him for good living in opposition to evil. He becomes responsible for his own survival and his son's life, and it is this necessity of survival which forces the deeper ideas of life and its meaning. For us, we can see that there are aspects of survival which are necessary which may not even be a consideration in bushcraft. For example, care of the family, philosophy of life, the ability to endure, consideration of life in the future, procreation, and so on. If we consider what aspects are not present in the other form then we see that survivalism is actually a larger group of skills and knowledge than bushcraft, at least until the two forms meet and become one.
 
Wilderness survival is the same as bushcraft. I don't think of wilderness survival as having a goal of getting out of the wilderness. Isn't bushcraft a phrase made popular by British campers?
 
"Survivalism" does not encompass all of teaching, studying and practicing wilderness survival.

Skills often lumped under the label of "wilderness survival" can prevent a somewhat bad situation from getting worse or avoid it altogether.
 
Another piece of it may be that bushcraft as many of understand kind of has a certain artistic/romantic/historical/sentimental aspect to it. Generally, it is something that people choose to do because the enjoy it and want to experience being in nature and what have you not because the People's Liberation Army has rolled into town like in some John Millius penned movie. A lot of the stuff involved in bush crafting would be very usable in a survival situation, but perhaps not the most modern/efficient way to do those things. Fro many, if not most people, bushcraft is a hobby. I don't mean that in a derogatory way. It is an outdoor hobby/activity done primary for enjoyment like hunting or serious gamefishing.
 
it's older than that I think. That very topic came up when that guy who owns that other forum actually filed for copyright protection for the term "bushcraft" when used in the context of internet discussion/forums and started threatening competitors that used the word. .
bore said:
Wilderness survival is the same as bushcraft. I don't think of wilderness survival as having a goal of getting out of the wilderness. Isn't bushcraft a phrase made popular by British campers?
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jdm61 said:
it's older than that I think. That very topic came up when that guy who owns that other forum actually filed for copyright protection for the term "bushcraft" when used in the context of internet discussion/forums and started threatening competitors that used the word. .
Click to expand...

We used to call bushcrafters woodsmen or outdoorsmen. Go out in the woods, build fires, kill food, cook it, commune with nature, etc. Not much difference. Back then it was Coleman and Buck. Same thing, slightly different approach.
 
As posted earlier in another post, please do allow to quote myself:

comis said:
I think the confusing part is not about which blade is more suitable for what situation, but how different people perceive what the term 'survival' and 'bushcraft' are, and what they really do need in reality.

To me, survival is about finding rescue in an unwilling, emergency or even possibly life-threatening situation, ideally within the first 72 hours time frame.(It could be being loss in the wild, nature disaster, injury, etc). Bushcraft is the study and practice of wilderness skill to sustain life and thrive in an outdoor environment, which includes firecraft, shelter-building, hunting(or ways to procure and process food), cordage skill, etc.

No doubt there will be areas that will overlap, but the tools/skills may or may not be entirely the same. For example, having and understanding how your personal location beacon works could be vital in an outdoor survival situation, but it may not be the main interest when practicing bushcraft.
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My additional thoughts are:

1) Maybe we are in a knife forum, so we might emphasize more on the blade, but are we overlooking the importance of skill, preparation and other essential tools. What kind of tradeoff we may make if we are choosing the one-tool option chopper?

2) To me, outdoor survival is NOT just about what you bring and skill to use it, but it starts even before the trip. Good planning, adequate gears, letting people know your route, leaving foot prints, possible RV points, etc. I much prefer people put more attention on outdoor safety, than just the survival.

3) While we are talking about outdoor survival/bushcraft, how many of us do have a 'survival kit'/list of items and protocol that they use to ensure their outdoor safety?
 
Great thread!
Many good points are made out, nice to see this subject thougt over seriously by so many.
Calling it just marketing terms (what happens often when the subject somes up) is simplifying the matter imho.

What comes in my mind is that a big difference between the two is that bushcraft is a man made choice, intentional (so you bring the gear you need to the location you choose (how little as it may be, still by choice)) and survival is by accident, unintentional and you have to get by with what you have, where you are at that moment.
 
bushcraft.....camping / living outdoors utilizing skills learned. Usually an enjoyable time outdoors.

Survival..... staying alive in a dangerous, often life threating situation, normally not for fun or entertainment.
 
On the thought of woodsman or outdoorsman as a label rather than bushcrafter. I suppose one could contrast woodscraft against say urban-craft. In your city you know which areas to avoid, how to get around, times of day its faster to call a cab, or when not to park downtown. Which sort of places will probably have a decent sandwich or beer and which should be avoided. The survival kit is the visa card, and the streets are the compass. Some guys are very comfortable in the urban jungle, and some are more comfortable in the wilderness. Some are more able to cope in crisis in the wilderness, and some can handle anything in an urban environ, be it knowing which building is likely to have an AED behind the reception desk, which bridge to avoid if the core of the city needs to be evacuated or the like. We don't think of them as skills, just like many people spend a lot of time in the woods with no skills and mostly survive. Lots of people do the same in cities. A few guys here have the skills to do that in the deep jungle, or deserts. But there is living, thriving, and then out at the extreme end when things go wrong, surviving.
Just another angle to contrast it to.
 
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