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August 17th, 2023
There is a concept in permaculture about shifting from consuming to producing as a way to engage with landscapes. In our society, we do a lot of consumption. Just by existing, our houses consume electricity, receive food trucked in from elsewhere, and use all sorts of energy, fuel and chemicals to manage landscapes to look a certain way.
Yet other paradigms exist. In the book "Tending the Wild" the author M. Kat Anderson describes several insights from observing indigenous land management principles from the many native tribes of California who cultivated a relationship with the land over many generations, including the fascinating insight that:
"...one gains respect for nature by using it judiciously. By using a plant or an animal, interacting with where it lives, and tying our well-being to its existence, you become intimate with it and understand it. The elders challenged the notion I had grown up with - that one should respect nature by leaving it alone - by showing me that we learn respect through the demands put on us by the great responsibility of using a plant or animal."
And Anderson goes on to share how some many native plants benefit and thrive from a certain level of human "disturbance" or "interaction." A completely contradictory concept for many of us who grew up with the notion that native plants thrive when left alone.
"Interestingly," continues Anderson, "contemporary Indians often use the word wilderness as a negative label for land that has not been taken care of by humans for a long time, for example, where dense understory shubbery or thickets of young trees block visibility and movement. A common sentiment among California Indians is that a hands-off approach to nature has promoted feral landscapes that are inhospitable to life. 'The white man sure ruined the country,' said James Rust, a Southern Sierra Miwok elder. 'It turned back to wilderness.' California Indians believe that when humans are gone from an area long enough, they lose the practical knowledge about correct interactions, and the plants and animals retreat spiritually from the earth or hide from humans. When intimate interaction ceases, the continuity of knowledge, passed down through the generations, is broken, and land becomes wilderness."
Similarly theologian William Cavanaugh reflects on modern American consumerism today as "characterized by detachment" or "detachment from people, producers, and products." He suggests one way to counter the many issues with consumerism today is by "cultivating more particular attachment to place, people, and production" and by asking: "When does an exchange lead to a flourishing of the consumer, producer, and all parties involved?"
Production or producing in this sense, is not to be conflated with the type of production that happens in factories with externalized costs, exploitive conditions, and destruction of a resource base. Instead it is a production that exists amidst mutual flourishing of all parties involved. Plants seem to do this effortless by enhancing the world around them from their root tips to every growing leaf: growing food, fiber, medicine and fuel while simultaneously supporting ecosystems, filtering water and air, and building soil.
This type of shift can happen even in small ways in our homes, backyards and neighborhoods. What if we began to think of what we could produce in our homes, landscapes and backyards? Could we shift to producing some of our own nutrient-dense food? Could we work along microbes to shift organic waste and debris to become a resource to build living soil? Could we produce protein in the form of eggs or mushrooms or even insects as protein for wildlife or chickens? Could we produce some of our own income being in stronger relationship with the land? What about medicine for a neighborhood with plants like elderberry, echinacea, or peppermint? Could we produce our own electricity? Could we produce edible or native plants to increase biodiversity in a neighborhood?
As Tao Orion writes in her book Beyond The War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to Ecosystem Restoration, "America's most celebrated wilderness areas were once people's homes, and many of our most prized native plants are remanants from gardens and orchards. Native plant lists from every state or region in the United States show an abundance of perennial edibles, medicinals, fuel and fiber plants, as well as pollen and nectar sources. Georgia's native plant inventory includes American chestnut, Allegheny chinquapin, hackberry, five species of hickory, hawthorn, hornbeam, honey locust, saw palmetto, red mulberry, eighteen species of oak, pawpaw, persimmon, sassafras, serviceberry, wintergreen, redbud, sourwood, and black walnut.
"In Michigan the list includes milkweed, strawberry, lobelia, bergamot, modding onion, boneset, wild ginger, and blue cohosh, grown among linden, elderberry, black cherry, sugar maple, nannyberry and highbush cranberry." (pictured below from left to right: highbush cranberry, black cherry, and caterpillar on common milkweed)
"In Arizona, natives include cat's claw, agave, chia, mesquite, ephedra, ocotillo, hackberry, perennial chiles, barberry, palo verde, prickly pear, pinyon pine, lemonade berry, jojoba, wolfberry, and yuccca throughout the landscape." (pictured below from left to right: barrel cactus, emory oak, and saguaro cactus fruits)
Orion also emphasizes, "This proliferation of useful plants throughout the Americas was not a matter of chance but of purposive guidance by the people who lived in the region for millennia. These plants came to be known as native, wild, and natural, but in fact were intentionally cultivated. Like any garden, these species were carefully chosen, maintained, and propogated over generations until eventually the entire landscape was full of useful plants. European colonists, who were accustomed to fields of annual grains and pulses along with domestic animals, seemed to have no idea what they were looking at when they encountered these diverse perennial landscapes."
Orion goes on to even describes John Muir's famous views of nature at Yosemite in his own historical context. Muir wrote on viewing the abundantly rich landscape in Yosemite in 1867 that it was 'as if Nature, like an enthusiastic gardener, could not resist the temptation to put flowers everywhere.' A beautiful scene, and yet Muir didn't realize, as Orion writes, that "...the Yosemite Valley had been home to the Ahwaneechee people, a branch of the southern Sierra Miwok culture, for thousands of years prior to their forcible removable in 1851, sixteen years before [Muir] happened upon [that] field full of flowers." That beautiful field as Orion argues, was in actuality "... the result of consistent, thoughtful, and protracted stewardship by generations of people inhabiting an ecosystem full to the brim with edible, medicinal, and otherwise useful plants."
It is a fascinating shift of our view of humans and nature. And our own place in the ecology of the world around us.
For me one of the greatest ways I tap this shift is with foraging. When I harvest a bounty of wild black raspberries or Juneberries (as I did earlier this summer), I often feel overwhelmed with gratitude for this gift. The sheer volume of production that is possible from a single plant humbles me. It stirs a feeling of deep gratitude and a desire to want to give back. When I actively forage for black raspberries, for instance, I start to notice the invasive vines that smother them, and take a moment to remove some of them to increase the harvest again next year. When I forage for pawpaws or hickory nuts, I notice the bittersweet vines strangling or weighing down the branches. I find myself taking a moment to remove vines here and there cutting them back or removing them by the roots. I find myself wanting to learn more about these plants, where they grow, and how to support propogate more of them in places where they once were.
Is it possible more edible species aren't in our woods, fields, and landscapes because no one has planted them? Squirrels and bluejays are tree planters, but they can only plant nuts if they first exist in their range (about 5 miles). If a tree disappears from a region or a forest is fragmented enough, it is near impossible for these "natural" tree planters to jumpstart the process without 'help.'
And did you know nut trees like the Chestnut tree produces most abundantly when it is dying? Instead of holding in its life force to struggle through another season, it faces outward and pours itself into life-giving nuts full of essential protein. Most will get eaten. Squirrels and bluejays and other animals know the value of such a gift and they harvest it. They cache and bury the seeds - to eat later - but the very nature of their work unintentionally plants more chestnuts. We can do the same. And we humans can go one step farther by noticing plants of exceptional quality or disease resistance and choosing to re-plant them. With disappearing species like butternut, chestnut, pawpaws, and even some oaks, identifying qualities of disease resistance is especially important!
I think about what we risk if we don't participate in this gift. Think of old apple trees whose harvests fall unused to the ground year after year. The more fruit that is left on the branches or on the ground, the more pests and diseases accumulate at its feet. Pests come to take advantage of stressed trees and a harvest no one else is using. The tree struggles. It succombs to disease and more active pest pressure as pests overwinter in the fruits at the tree's feet, and come back stronger each year. The tree may struggle on or it might weaken to the point it will die. Dying from no one noticing or harvesting its fruit? What a contrary notion to abundance than we have in our culture!
We have a view that we humans ruin, destroy, suck the life out of things just by living... and yes, we have done that in many cases... but we also suck the life out of things by not participating in our landscapes. By consuming only and not participating in producing or harvesting. By refusing abundance, we choose scarcity. An apple or black raspberry that is harvested is healthier and will ironically produce MORE. Black raspberries left on the plant rot or mold and it sends a signal to the plant to stop producing more berries... the task of seed production is complete, it says to itself... no need to expend excess energy to produce more! The more we harvest the fruits, the more robustly and enthusiastically they produce and grow.
And so often we can't even keep up with the harvest. Is it possible, we are scared of abundance? Or the responsibility that comes with participating in producing?
Recently I collected my first Mayapple fruits (fruits are ready in August... not May as the name suggests!). Mayapple plants are toxic except for the fully ripe fruit. They are a beautiful ephemerals that can grow in shade in the understory of forests eventually producing a fruit that tastes like a tropical starburst candy. You can't harvest a lot (the fruits are small), and one certainly wouldn't want to overharvest these tiny gifts in such a way so there are none for future.
As I collected some of the fruit to try for the first time this year, I found myself making a commitment or perhaps it was simply a promise to fully participate in this gift I'd been given: I will plant these Mayapple seeds from the fruits I took. In exchange for the gift of the fruit, I had a renewed love of the plant and seeing more of it in the landscape. I started noticing where Mayapples grew... under what trees. Under what conditions did they grow?
Noticing is the start.
Foraging goes beyond noticing into participating. And once you accept the gift, you find yourself wanting to also produce, too, like those ever-giving plants... return the surplus of what you were given! To continue to spread those gifts. Cultivate the garden.
Producing is also not about separating ourselves from our world, but building layers of resilience and connection. It is a chance to more intimately get to know the human and non-humans world around us. We don't have to produce absolutely everything we need on a single piece of land, but it's important to at least participate. To produce something. And consume what we do more mindfully. With more cultivated attachment to people, place and things.
It can happen in many ways: creating community space, growing edible fruit or a veggie garden, having pollinator support or low-maintenance meadows, growing soil, creating some of your own electricity, making a portion of your income off of some part of the landscape, or seeding a micro nursery for under-represented plants for biodiversity.
The Shift. A mindset or paradigm shift for us as individuals , neighborhoods and communities to subtly move into a space of flourishing, connection and resilience. Mindful producing to see the landscapes, people and communities around us thrive!
Resources:
Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources by M. Kat Anderson
Beyond The War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to Ecosystem Restoration by Tao Orion
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