Our Vision, Mission and Creative Passion

About Ancient Earth Skills Online Academy

Our mission: To provide Earth-based, Ancestral Skills courses, and make them available in a modern form, with the goal to reach more people than we ever could in person, and ironically though the online format, get more folks outside learning from Nature than ever before.

We cherish the ancient skills all our ancestors practiced,

human skills far older than any modern culture, and the root of them all.

Things like making: fabric from animal hides or food from wild plants, fire by friction or rope from natural fibers, tracking and hunting kept all of our ancestors warm, clothed and fed at some time in our past, no matter where you are from.

We want the skills to stay alive, and to be accessible to everyone.

Though an online version cannot replace an in-person class in can provide you with the information you need and open the door to a lifetime of skill development.

Please Enjoy what we have to offer and contact us about other things you would like to learn, if you would like us to visit you, or register for an in-person class.

We make eating dirt fun!

Just kidding! No need to eat dirt, unless you lack a healthy biome.

Ancient Earth Skills Courses

Physical Classes

Come to us, or we will come to you.

Start the conversation! Register for a pre-existing class, or schedule a custom class. Reach out by sending us an email, give us a call, or even send a text if that’s what you prefer. We want to hear from you!

Online Classes

Become a student of

Ancient Earth Skills Academy

Join the our skills community and begin a whole new way of

Living with the Earth.

Click to Register

Our Faculty

Len Mackey

From the time he could walk Len was with his father Dennis, hunting, fishing, trapping, and tracking game in northern NY state. By 7 years old he had skinned his first deer and ran a small trap line for muskrat. He first began his study of yoga, sweat lodge, African drumming, and Reiki in 1999. In 2004 while pursuing a degree in photography at RIT, Len began working with BushMango Drum & Dance, and traveled to Guinea w. Africa, with MBemba Bangoura and Michael Marcus. See the photo documentary “Guinea Music” Len made of his trip here. Since 2012 Len immersed himself in the study of ancient skills and survival at Tom Brown Jr.’s Tracker School in NJ. This led him to Caribbean Earth Skills in St. Croix, Roots School in VT, and Belize in pursuit of jungle survival skills. He has been the recipient of NYS Arts Council, and National Endowment for the Arts grants, for 8 consecutive years. Len is the founder of Ancient Earth Skills. He is forever grateful to all his teachers plant and animal, kind elders and friends, and especially the Earth… “All I am, and all I have, is made of her.”

For a fun read: Len was recently featured on the St. Lawrence University website, in an article

Tracking with Len.