Defining Bushcraft

   I recently read a thread on BushCraftUSA discussing how to (and whether to) define bushcraft. The thread ultimately went nowhere but it got me thinking about what the word means to me. Most of my time is spent studying ecology and that experience thoroughly colors my perspective.  Ecology and bushcraft are connected. I think one would be challenged to define or pursue a functional and interactive relationship with the land without including some scientific understanding of ecological systems. This usually takes the form of animal behavior, plant ID, and a myriad of other natural history skills. I personally find it valuable to see bushcraft as existing within ecology or at least defined in ecological terms.
     My definition is based on the idea of the ecological niche. A niche is, technically speaking, an organism's n-dimensional hyper-volume in resource and condition space. What this means is that were you to graph a set of resources (stuff that gets used up ex. prey density) and conditions (stuff that doesn't get used up ex. temperature) the region of the graph that contained values under which a given organism can survive is its niche. It is just like drawing a cube on a 3-dimensional graph except instead of each each axis representing a distance in space they represent some resource or condition like hours of daylight, temperature, or nitrogen levels.
     For many organisms niche is defined by their biology. Plants, for example, have a range of temperatures, nutrient levels, and light levels under which they can function and little can change that. For organisms capable of behavioral adaptation on the individual scale niche can be altered by those behavioral adaptations. If a rural raccoon moves into a suburban neighborhood and learns how to access food in garbage cans, its niche is expanded by this knowledge. I haven't looked into attempts at applying niche theory to humans and I'm sure I'm too ignorant to do the job properly. Thankfully, we aren't doing science here! Regardless of the (probably significant) flaws in explaining humans cleanly with niche theory I find it to be a useful tool for thinking about bushcraft. I see bushcraft as behavioral adaptations to expand my ecological niche in ecosystems where humans are not the principle ecosystem engineer.  My goal is to use bushcraft to expand my n-dimensional hyper-volume as far as I can while excluding the idea of engineering ecosystems.

I'm sure I'll want to refine and change aspects of this in the future but, for now, that is how I see bushcraft.