Collage of images by Michael Krahn and Bianca Ackermann
Summary
Are agriculture and biodiversity always at odds? In the late 1970s, a radical environmental movement rejected this dichotomy — rebuking conventional farming in favour of holistic & mutualistic principles, with the dual promise of plentiful food and a vibrant ecosystem.
When Permaculture was first articulated, it emerged from a simple question: why don’t our food systems look more like forests? In the tropics, traditional Indigenous agriculture integrated perennial foods crops so densely that their gardens had often been mistaken for jungle.
Inspired by these techniques, permaculturists adapted forest gardening for the temperate world. But, in their enthusiasm, they too may have been missing the forest for the trees.
Wherever you are, whatever you're going through, we hope you find solace by spending some time with us — in the garden.
Entering the forest garden (Lhemqwatel) with Dr. Chelsey Armstrong
Chaquawet Willie Charlie and Stephanie Leon Riedl
How it feels to be on Future Ecologies (w/ typical conifer forest in background)
An excavated ancient cooking pit
The carpet
Show Notes
This episode features David Holmgren, Chelsey Armstrong, Morgan Ritchie, Stephanie Leon Riedl, Hannah Roessler, and Willie Charlie.
Music by Thumbug, Scott Gailey & Yu Su, Cat Can Do, Satorian, Museum of No Art & Mehrnaz Rohbakhsh, and Sunfish Moon Light.
This episode was produced by Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski.
There are lots of researchers who we didn’t get a chance to include in this episode. We want to specifically acknowledge the work of Natasha Lyons, Michael Blake, Jesse Miller, Alex McAlvay, Dana Lepofsky, Nancy Turner, and Marion Dixon Wal'ceckwu.
Special thanks to Meg Ulman, Su Dennet, Emma Sise, Mark Sutherland, Brandon Hocura, Naomi Okabe, Michael Yadrick, and Cassandra Allan.
Ready for more? Check out Treehugger Podcast’s episode on Forest Gardens.
And as always, this episode was made possible with the support of our amazing patrons.
Citations
Armstrong, C., J. Miller, A. C. McAlvay, P. M. Ritchie, and D. Lepofsky. (2021). Historical Indigenous Land-Use Explains Plant Functional Trait Diversity. Ecology and Society 26(2):6. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-12322-260206
Armstrong, C., Dixon Wal’ceckwu, M., Turner, N. (2018). Management and Traditional Production of Beaked Hazelnut (k'áp'xw-az', Corylus cornuta; Betulaceae) in British Columbia. Human Ecology. 46. 10.1007/s10745-018-0015-x.
Bartlett, C., Marshall, A., Marshall, M. (2007). Integrative Science: enabling concepts within a journey guided by “Trees Holding Hands” and “Two-Eyed Seeing”. Two-Eyed Seeing knowledge sharing series, manuscript no. 1. Institute for Integrative Science & Health, Cape Breton University, Sydney.
Lyons, N., Hoffmann, T., Miller, D., Martindale, A., Ames, K., Blake, M. (2021). Were the Ancient Coast Salish Farmers? A Story of Origins. American Antiquity. 86. 1-22. 10.1017/aaq.2020.115.
Lyons, N., Ritchie, M. (2017). The Archaeology of Camas Production and Exchange on the Northwest Coast: With Evidence from a Sts'ailes (Chehalis) Village on the Harrison River, British Columbia. Journal of Ethnobiology. 37. 346-367. 10.2993/0278-0771-37.2.346.
Mollison, B., Holmgren, D. (1978). Permaculture one: A perennial agriculture for human settlements. Tagari Publications.
Xa'xa Temexw Shxweli [Sts’ailes Lands Department] Land code: www.stsailes.com/lands-planning
This episode includes audio recorded by Troutpack, iwanPlays (2), SamuelGremaud, richwise, duniapanggung (2) (3), Spyboticer, sniperous, AlienXXX, SDLx, Roulaine, lwdickens, filmmt, ekzem, patobottos, jorickhoofd, maxthrower, jonasrocha, costaipsa, inchadney, dobroide, klankbeeld, and reinsamba protected by Creative Commons attribution licenses, accessed through the Freesound Project, and by Pierre Giraud, accessed through the Sounds of the Forest Project
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Future Ecologies is recorded and produced on the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the WSÁNEĆ, Penelakut, Hwlitsum, and Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and other Hul'qumi'num speaking peoples, otherwise known as Galiano Island, British columbia, as well as the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓əm) Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil-Waututh (Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh) Nations - otherwise known as Vancouver, British Columbia.
Transcription
Introduction Voiceover 00:00
You are listening to Season Four of Future Ecologies.
Adam Huggins 00:07
This is the first time we've recorded in like, a year?
Mendel Skulski 00:10
More than a year.
Mendel Skulski 00:12
Your chair is so squeaky.
Adam Huggins 00:13
I have such a creaky chair. Okay I'm gonna be really careful.
Mendel Skulski 00:17
The whole point of recording in person is to be less stiff.
Adam Huggins 00:20
We should probably introduce ourselves right at the top.
Mendel Skulski 00:22
Okay. Hey, my name is Mendel.
Adam Huggins 00:25
And my name is Adam. And this is Future Ecologies.
Mendel Skulski 00:28
Although today we're doing a little bit more than future ecologies.
Adam Huggins 00:32
Yeah. Past, present, future.
Mendel Skulski 00:33
The whole gamut.
Adam Huggins 00:34
So, I wanted to start with a little exercise.
Mendel Skulski 00:38
Okay.
Adam Huggins 00:41
Deep breath. I want you to picture yourself in a forest.
Mendel Skulski 00:47
Okay.
Adam Huggins 00:48
The first thing that comes to mind, what are you seeing?
Mendel Skulski 00:52
I see the boughs of the trees. I see... light streaming through it.
Adam Huggins 00:58
Tell me what you smell.
Mendel Skulski 01:00
I smell the spicy aroma of different saps. I smell... a smelly rotten mushroom.
Adam Huggins 01:09
What do you feel?
Mendel Skulski 01:11
I feel a little mist raining down on me from the water on the branches.
Adam Huggins 01:18
Taste anything?
Mendel Skulski 01:19
What do I taste? I feel like I taste some of the minerals from the rocks in the air. A little bit of the dirt. A little bit of the rot.
Adam Huggins 01:32
When you look straight up, like, what are you seeing?
Mendel Skulski 01:34
I see cedar branches and fir needles.
Adam Huggins 01:39
And what can you hear?
Mendel Skulski 01:41
Some chipmunks fighting. Maybe a flicker pecking. Some birdsong
Adam Huggins 01:48
Yeah.
Mendel Skulski 01:48
Some trickling creeks.
Adam Huggins 01:50
That's about the same thing that I picture when I picture a forest. Like, when I put myself in that place, I'm in that kind of, like, rich moist Pacific Northwest forest, right?
Mendel Skulski 01:59
Mhm
Adam Huggins 02:00
Okay. So change of scene. Now picture yourself in a garden.
Mendel Skulski 02:05
Okay.
Adam Huggins 02:06
First thing that comes to mind.
Mendel Skulski 02:08
Raised beds... Like, walkways. Maybe some, you know, well-defined plots. You know, there's there's one plant here and there's another there. There's hedgerows and –
Adam Huggins 02:22
That what you see.
Mendel Skulski 02:23
Yeah.
Adam Huggins 02:24
What do you smell?
Mendel Skulski 02:26
Oh, rose bushes and flowers of different varieties. I smell a little bit of rotting fruit on the ground. I smell rich compost.
Adam Huggins 02:37
That almost like alcoholic kind of like –
Mendel Skulski 02:40
Yeah
Adam Huggins 02:40
– anaerobic. It's that like very particular smell of municipal compost.
Mendel Skulski 02:44
Yeah.
Adam Huggins 02:46
What do you hear?
Mendel Skulski 02:48
I mean, if I'm in Strathcona gardens, I probably hear trucks backing up. And air compressors. Nearby traffic fire engines.
Adam Huggins 02:56
Yeah,
Mendel Skulski 02:56
Yeah.
Adam Huggins 02:57
What do you feel?
Mendel Skulski 02:59
I feel relaxed. I like the garden. I like the sheer density of plants that's possible in, like, a city block, right? Like something that you could walk across in 30 seconds. And suddenly, it's going to take you 20 minutes to go to the same distance. Because you're stopping every five feet to examine this berry and that flower and it's like, you hardly run into the same thing twice.
Adam Huggins 03:23
Yeah.
Mendel Skulski 03:23
Yeah.
Adam Huggins 03:24
So if you were to ask me with my very squeaky chair. I have a very similar picture to you in my head of both of these places.
Mendel Skulski 03:32
Forest and garden.
Adam Huggins 03:34
The garden that I picture is actually really specific too.
Mendel Skulski 03:36
Where's that?
Adam Huggins 03:37
I go back to this place called the Homeless Garden Project. It's in Santa Cruz, California outside of Santa Cruz. It's on this flat coastal dune, that's just above the ocean at Natural Bridges State Park. It's really beautiful. It's almost always foggy. With a little bit of sunlight filtering through. We're talking about what you smell and hear and feel right? You can like see the dunes, you can kind of see the expanse of the sky leading towards the ocean. You can smell the salt on the breeze. And you hear seagulls – like you hear... you don't hear vehicles. You hear like, shorebirds, and just the wind because it's a windy spot. But, you know, what you're seeing is like pretty typical of any market garden you could imagine: it's got like little hoop houses, pathways, rows of vegetables between them
Mendel Skulski 04:25
Okay
Adam Huggins 04:25
And the reason that I go to this place first is because it's the first place that I ever did anything resembling gardening. Back in my early 20s, my girlfriend at the time convinced me to go volunteer with her at this place, because they accept volunteers at the Homeless Garden Project. And you know, the volunteer coordinator set us up in this little row of strawberries. This row of strawberries had, you know, the classic plastic row cover over the top, to keep weeds from coming up and to create heat for the strawberries to grow. And then little holes dotting down the plastic row cover with strawberry plants just poking out of each individual hole, right? And all of these strawberry plants had little runners coming off of them. Runners are a strawberry plants way of making more strawberry plants. You know, they can do by seed, but they can also do it vegetatively –
Mendel Skulski 05:13
Right.
Adam Huggins 05:14
– via what are botanically called stolens. They're little creeping stems that run over the surface of the soil, and they look for another place to root. And so the volunteer coordinator got us to clip the runners, because it takes energy away from the production of the strawberry plant, right? So we're just going down this row and clipping all the runners off of these strawberry plants. I know it sounds like really, it sounds really simple and kind of like monotonous task, but I had never experienced this idea that like, you could take a plant, and then take a part of that plant, and then grow another plant. And that plant is a strawberry plant! Do you know I mean?
Mendel Skulski 05:46
Yeah, it's so immediately desirable and delicious. And like, why wouldn't I do that? Why wouldn't I take a piece of this, and –
Adam Huggins 05:52
That is the low hanging fruit of the fruit world, right?
Mendel Skulski 05:54
Probably the lowest.
Adam Huggins 05:55
Exactly like, we're down on our knees, clipping these strawberry runners. And it just blew my mind that you could do that. We ended up actually asking them, if we could take a bunch of these runners home, we put them in like a little bundle, we took them home and I built my first garden bed. And we planted these little strawberry runners and they grew into strawberry plants.
Mendel Skulski 06:12
Beautiful.
Adam Huggins 06:13
So that was literally the first gardening I ever did. Anyhow, the point of this story, going back to that strawberry bed, is that I was having a life changing experience there. And we looked down the row and there was this other guy down there. And he was just on his own, doing the exact same thing that we were a bit farther down the row. He was doing a lot faster. It was pretty clear to us that he was like a little bit older than we were and a little bit more experienced.
Mendel Skulski 06:39
He knew what he was doing.
Adam Huggins 06:39
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And we're like, oh we want to go be near that person. So we worked our way down the row, and, you know, introduce ourselves and all that. And I really, like I don't recall much about our conversation with him. Until we got to this one point where like, I'm sharing with him how excited I am to be there. And how amazed I am that you can just like grow food like this.
Mendel Skulski 06:59
Who would have known?! Food can grow!
Adam Huggins 07:01
You know, obviously not me. And I'll never forget this. He, he looks over at me. And he's like, "Yeah, this is all right. But it's not a forest garden."
Adam Huggins 07:19
For the second time that day, my mind was completely blown. I was like, What is a forest garden? And why has nobody ever told me that not only can you like grow food – like this, you know, at a scale, which seems reasonable to human being – but also like you, you could grow food, but in a forest! I've talked about a bunch of formative experiences in my life on this show. But that's a moment that I'll never forget. And I feel like it leads directly to where I'm standing today. And so much of it begins with this simple idea that a forest and a garden can be the same thing.
Mendel Skulski 07:58
You don't have to choose
Adam Huggins 07:59
You don't have to choose. You can have your food forest and eat it too.
Mendel Skulski 08:03
Amazing.
Introduction Voiceover 08:05
Broadcasting from the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, this is Future Ecologies: exploring the shape of our world, through ecology, design and sound.
Mendel Skulski 08:49
So we've got the simple idea that food systems aren't limited to fields of annual crops, things like corn and soy and wheat, but rather that there's a whole world of possibility in growing perennial foods: diverse species layered over each other, as in a forest. This dual promise of plentiful food and vibrant ecosystems makes for a pretty compelling meme – propagating itself from person to person. Spreading a bit like the runners on a strawberry plant. But where did this meme begin? To tell that story? We have to go back to the 1970s. To Hobart, Tasmania.
David Holmgren 09:33
At the fringes of the world – Australia's smallest state and smallest capital city at a time when Tasmania was really one of the crucibles of modern environmentalism.
Mendel Skulski 09:47
This is David and he was right in the middle of this crucible, at college studying Environmental Design,
David Holmgren 09:54
And I was interested in how landscape architectural design and agriculture and ecology could come together. I could see overlaps and intersections between any two of those, but not between three.
Mendel Skulski 10:10
By chance he would meet, and then later move in with his future collaborator, a teacher of his named Bill Mollison.
David Holmgren 10:17
And one day, he just casually suggested: well, if nature creates some sort of forest most places on the planet as a sort of optimal ecosystem – of course, not everywhere, there's grassland ecosystems and heathlands, but most places, some sort of forest – he says why does our agriculture, if not look like a forest, at least function like a forest? And, I said oh yeah, that's a – that's a good question.
Mendel Skulski 10:44
Bill and David weren't aware of any examples of this kind of forest-based agriculture where they lived. So they turned their attention towards the equator.
David Holmgren 10:54
In the tropics, agriculture, at its essence was really based on perennial foods and food forests that look like... analogous to tropical and subtropical rainforests, so much so that early ethnographers often didn't realize that they were in actually garden cultivated systems, when they thought they were moving through some wild forest. Because their perception of what agriculture was – was so different.
Adam Huggins 11:28
So these early European ethnographers, they were kind of like me in my 20s, right? They couldn't see the food forest for the trees.
Mendel Skulski 11:36
I mean, you couldn't see gardens for the plants at the time, but –
Adam Huggins 11:40
That's fair.
Mendel Skulski 11:41
Yeah. But David and Bill, they become fascinated by this idea of forest gardens.
David Holmgren 11:47
That idea is where each of the layers of the forest – canopy, and understory, and vines that grow in that forest – are all, if not food plants, then they're directly useful to people.
Mendel Skulski 12:06
David and Bill published their thoughts in 1978. And they were as novel and impactful to contemporary environmentalists, as they were when they reached you back in Santa Cruz.
Adam Huggins 12:17
Right.
Mendel Skulski 12:18
But it went beyond just growing food in forests. It was the seed of reconceptualizing how we relate with nature, germinating into a radical and all-encompassing movement.
David Holmgren 12:30
Maybe if Mollison and Holmgren had stayed focused on selecting new varieties of oaks, this vision of the potential of trees to actually be a foundation for human food supply, then we might have contributed more effectively to that one thread. But as hopeless generalists we saw, of course, how all this is connected to everything.
Adam Huggins 12:58
Okay, so for those of you haven't guessed yet, we are talking about the origins of permaculture with David Holmgren.
David Holmgren 13:05
Hello, I'm David Holmgren, co-originator of the permaculture concept with Bill Mollison back in the 1970s.
Adam Huggins 13:13
For the uninitiated, Permaculture is usually thought of as a form of holistic organic gardening, or something like that.
David Holmgren 13:21
Yeah, I suppose permaculture means many different things to different people. And it's infused through popular culture. It's almost a household word you might say. But it's really a design system – a design system for both resilient and sustainable use of nature: where we get our needs through agriculture and other aspects of working relationship with nature. But it's also concerned with the consumption side of the equation: how we organize our lives, both at an individual level right through to a societal level.
Mendel Skulski 14:01
Permaculture is organized into a set of principles and practices, with the goal of integrating every aspect of a local ecology into a productive, regenerative, and self-sustaining food system. But as David is quick to note, so many of the ideas that he and Bill popularized, including forest gardening, they have really deep roots.
David Holmgren 14:24
Permaculture drew on, not just modern innovations in ecological thinking, but its prime sources were Indigenous and traditional cultures of place that existed sustainably for centuries before the explosive and problematic nature of industrial modernity. Of course, permaculture ended up growing from that to... to some extent being a theory of everything, which you know, can be seen as one of the critiques of it.
Mendel Skulski 14:59
But in spite of that proliferation of ideas, I think that most modern permaculturists still recognize food forests as a foundation of the whole movement.
Adam Huggins 15:11
Absolutely. Yeah. And that's appropriate, because, you know, that's kind of where this all started.
Mendel Skulski 15:16
Yeah.
Adam Huggins 15:16
And I'm really grateful to David and Bill for sparking this conversation for so many people, including me.
Adam Huggins 15:22
But... one of the like, unintended consequences is that newly initiated young permaculture practitioners – like myself, back in the day – we've attempted to grow food forests in temperate climates, by basically trying to mimic practices that many of us have only ever read about from ethnographers, who were themselves writing about Indigenous food systems in the tropics.
Mendel Skulski 15:45
Yeah.
Adam Huggins 15:46
And even more typically, like one step further removed by reading popular permaculture books written almost exclusively by white male authors, who then discuss practices that are based on ethnographers writing about Indigenous food systems in the tropics.
Mendel Skulski 16:02
And with that, we've kind of reached the critical irony, because it turns out that there have been forest gardens here in the temperate world all along. Or at least, right here in our backyard: in the coastal rainforests of British Columbia. It's just that many settlers, scientists, and permaculturists have been as oblivious to these Indigenous food systems as early ethnographers were to those in the tropics.
Adam Huggins 16:31
Food forests: they've been here all along.
Mendel Skulski 16:35
It's about time we got to know them.
Adam Huggins 16:42
So we got in touch with the researcher who's been documenting these temperate forest gardens, and she invited us for a field trip to go visit one.
Mendel Skulski 16:50
Who turns that down?
Adam Huggins 16:51
Definitely not us.
Adam Huggins 16:54
It feels amazing to be out here again. Oh, feels amazing to be off Galiano Island.
Mendel Skulski 17:02
Feels amazing to be in the shade.
Chelsey Armstrong 17:07
Hey!
Mendel Skulski 17:07
Hello.
Chelsey Armstrong 17:08
How's it going?
Mendel Skulski 17:09
So good.
Adam Huggins 17:09
So nice to meet you!
Chelsey Armstrong 17:09
I'm like a little star struck!
Adam Huggins 17:10
Is that right?
Chelsey Armstrong 17:12
Yeah, are you kidding?
Adam Huggins 17:12
We're feeling the same way!
Chelsey Armstrong 17:15
So which...
Mendel Skulski 17:15
I'm Mendel.
Chelsey Armstrong 17:16
Mendel.
Adam Huggins 17:17
Adam.
Chelsey Armstrong 17:17
Adam.
Adam Huggins 17:20
This is Dr. Chelsey Armstrong: archaeologist, historical ecologist and Assistant Professor in Indigenous Studies at Simon Fraser University.
Mendel Skulski 17:29
We met in Sts'ailes territory: at the corner of the Chehalis and Harrison rivers, about two hours inland from Vancouver. The Sts'ailes reserve sits on a broad floodplain, surrounded by a rich variety of ecosystems: extensive marshes, coniferous forests, and beautiful views of the mountains flanking the river valley.
Adam Huggins 17:53
We drove to the end of an old dirt road. And as we got out, we were walking through this fairly typical West Coast forest, not unlike the one you described in the intro to this episode.
Mendel Skulski 18:04
Yeah.
Adam Huggins 18:04
There was Douglas fir trees and western red cedar, some big leaf maple, and an assortment of the typical understory shrubs, you'd expect
Mendel Skulski 18:12
Mostly ferns.
Adam Huggins 18:13
It was September. so the leaves were already turning and starting to fall, and the air was crisp. But despite the beautiful scene, we were engrossed in conversation with Chelsey, as she told us how she first realized how common these temperate forest gardens really are.
Chelsey Armstrong 18:29
It blew our minds because we knew it was happening up north. But then to get this kind of, you know, 700 kilometers south, it's happening here. Okay, something's going on...
Mendel Skulski 18:37
And then it hit us.
Adam Huggins 18:39
This place is wild!
Chelsey Armstrong 18:40
Isn't it?
Adam Huggins 18:40
It feels immediately different from what we were just walking through.
Mendel Skulski 18:44
We'd passed from the shade of this coniferous forest into a completely different landscape. It felt open and the sunlight was hitting our faces. And we were surrounded by all of these deciduous trees that we really weren't seeing at all before,
Chelsey Armstrong 19:00
Like an orchard, almost? Nicely spaced and just -
Adam Huggins 19:04
Except that my orchard is not going to look this good 150 years after I let it go.
Chelsey Armstrong 19:09
Yeah, it's so impressive that these places remain because these are productive forest, right? Conifers are going to come in, you know, after 20-30 years after disturbance, and yet... it hasn't happened.
Mendel Skulski 19:21
What Chelsey was saying is that there's no obvious ecological reason why the forest we were standing in shouldn't just be conifers like the one we were walking through a minute before.
Adam Huggins 19:33
But instead of conifers, we have all of these other species growing together. Species like salmonberry in the understory, and like Pacific Crabapple and Cascara in the canopy. Just lots of edible and useful plants all of a sudden.
Chelsey Armstrong 19:47
Yeah, like like things like hazelnut, right, which I think you're grabbing right now.
Adam Huggins 19:51
Right? Hazelnut. The canopy was mostly beaked hazelnut. A plant, which Chelsey informed us, was what clued her into Indigenous forest in the first place.
Chelsey Armstrong 20:02
I did a huge survey years ago like throughout the province, and they're an interior plant. Why are they on the coast and only at village sites. It's almost to the point where it's co-evolved with people.
Mendel Skulski 20:15
For example, there's a clear disjunct population near the town of Hazleton, which, as you might guess, is named after its hazelnuts. And the paleo-biolinguistic clues go even deeper. There are remarkable similarities between the word for hazelnut in Gitxsan and Halq'eméylem.
Chelsey Armstrong 20:35
the term in Gitxsan is sk'an ts'ak'. And ts’ak’ is the borrowed part. So, “nut” in Hul'qumi'num is ts’ak’. It's the same, and they're two totally different language families
Mendel Skulski 20:49
Meaning that there's no chance the two names are cognates. It had to have been a borrowed word, hinting it was a borrowed nut as well.
Chelsey Armstrong 20:58
And so became very apparent very quickly that hazelnut was part of a larger modified landscape, which includes, you know, Crabapple and Highbush Cranberry and Saskatoon Berry and Soapberry all the stuff you can eat, right?
Adam Huggins 21:15
A modified landscape full of perennial stuff that you can eat. You know, forest garden.
Chelsey Armstrong 21:22
A lot of the species in forest gardens might be locally available in the area. They're just not all growing together, except for these forest garden ecosystems. And so really what's happening is... we talk about the kind of caretaking and maintenance of these areas. And really, it's just that kind of optimizing what's already growing there.
Chelsey Armstrong 21:46
But, like forest gardens, say in the Neotropics, where we've borrowed the term, it's mixed kind of swidden, fallow intercropping and then arboreal management, all in kind of one system, and that... that is the forest garden landscape. And so here we're seeing this kind of orchard like area. But then over closer to the sloughs, there's management of different root foods, and things like Rice Root Lily, Wapato..
Adam Huggins 22:09
As Chelsey was explaining how this Hazelnut-Crabapple forest garden is embedded in a larger, diverse food producing landscape...
Chelsey Armstrong 22:17
And so they're all very different. But yeah, we're looking more at the orchard like iteration. Yeah.
Adam Huggins 22:22
We started noticing that there were all of these little depressions between the trees.
Mendel Skulski 22:26
Well, I mean, you might have noticed, I hadn't actually clocked them until we walked right up to one undergoing an active excavation. That's where we met Morgan.
Morgan Ritchie 22:36
My name is Morgan Ritchie. I've been Sts'ailes' heritage research archaeologist for about 12 years now.
Mendel Skulski 22:42
Standing over this extremely square hole he was digging, we asked Morgan to help us understand what exactly we were looking at, in all of these layers of Earth.
Morgan Ritchie 22:54
What you can see already right off the bat, though, is that you see this kind of clean sand there.
Mendel Skulski 23:01
Yeah
Morgan Ritchie 23:01
This this is just like flood... flood sediments. And then you see the really thick layer of charcoal?
Adam Huggins 23:08
Indicating, of course, that there was a fire here.
Morgan Ritchie 23:11
So these are cooking pits. We tested one of these last year, and we found 40 hazelnut shells or something like that – all charred, so clearly, they were cooking hazelnuts. And it and we radiocarbon dated it, and it's about 650 years old. So when we had that we realized, well, this probably been a managed landscape for at least, you know, 600-650 years. Look around you it's like all hazelnut trees, right? Hazelnut and crabapple.
Adam Huggins 23:39
Morgan and his team think that these cooking pits were used frequently over long periods of time.
Morgan Ritchie 23:45
Well when you have a band this thick, it could easily have been used, you know, twice or three times. And it just makes sense – you've done all the work to dig a pit. You're gonna want to use it.
Adam Huggins 23:54
I was gonna say, I've dug holes.
Morgan Ritchie 23:55
Yeah.
Mendel Skulski 23:58
Cooking in pits is not all that amenable to a quick snack. You've got to dig, obviously, make a fire, get some rocks nice and hot, and then stack bundles of food, and rebury the whole thing to roast and steam. It's a process that takes at least a few hours, or with foods like Camas, which needs to slowly caramelize, over a day.
Adam Huggins 24:26
And there were dozens of depressions like this throughout the site. As we were standing there, we were realizing that people didn't just come here to harvest. They came here to eat together. They were essentially having garden parties. And I guess it's sunk into me that this place was lived in, right? And cooked in. And cared for.
Mendel Skulski 24:47
The archaeological record proves that the people of Sts'ailes were using this garden for centuries, if not millennia. And although the situation obviously changed 150 years ago, this care for the land continues into the present day. We haven't mentioned it until now, but this garden has a name.
Stephanie Leon Riedl 25:09
Lhemqwatel means "the good place to pick... things".
Mendel Skulski 25:14
Tells you what you need to know.
Stephanie Leon Riedl 25:15
Yeah. And like now people know it is the place where the elk hang out, because we recently reintroduced elk into the traditional territory and they've been hanging out down here.
Mendel Skulski 25:27
This is Stephanie.
Stephanie Leon Riedl 25:28
Stephanie Leon Riedl.
Mendel Skulski 25:30
Funny enough, Stephanie and I actually know each other from our local mushroom appreciation society. But they met us here as part of their official capacity.
Stephanie Leon Riedl 25:39
I am the Lands Executive Assistant for Xa'xa Temexw Shxweli, which is Sts’ailes Lands Department.
Mendel Skulski 25:48
Lhemqwatel is located on Ed Leon Slough, which just so happens to be named after Stephanie's great granduncle. The cooking pits we were standing over are literally the places Stephanie's ancestors gathered to collect, process, and eat their favorite foods.
Stephanie Leon Riedl 26:05
These are all over – they're all over! Because I like to forage and and wander around in the woods, I will just come up on areas that I'm like that's... that's a pit right there.
Mendel Skulski 26:19
Sts'ailes is in the process of formally protecting and revitalizing these ancient spaces. The Lands Office, where Stephanie works, overseas land use projects, such as housing and resource management.
Adam Huggins 26:31
Effectively zoning and civic planning.
Stephanie Leon Riedl 26:33
Yeah, all the boring stuff.
Mendel Skulski 26:36
Except that, unlike most urban planning departments, everyone in the community has a direct connection to what happens on their territory. The Lands Office answers to the Lands Committee, which is made up of a representative from each family.
Stephanie Leon Riedl 26:50
And they helped us come up with some designations for different areas and what their traditional uses would have been, along with the work that Morgan has done through the archaeology sector.
Mendel Skulski 27:02
And Stephanie hopes that it won't be long before Lhemqwatel – this place of plenty – is officially designated, and tended, as a forest garden.
Stephanie Leon Riedl 27:12
Yeah, it's a good spot. People hold it in high regard.
Adam Huggins 27:16
You can't restore these places without like understanding exactly why they exist in the first place.
Stephanie Leon Riedl 27:20
Exactly
Adam Huggins 27:21
Looking around, I'm like this place looks delicious. I'd sit down here and like, you know, cook something.
Stephanie Leon Riedl 27:28
Oh, yeah, I do all the time. Grab a snack, take a seat on the carpet.
Mendel Skulski 27:37
The people of Sts'ailes are engaging with elders, archeologists and ethnoecologists to help write the laws of their land, codifying what was almost lost in the midst of colonization, and adapting to the needs of their community today.
Adam Huggins 27:53
And the research that they're doing here – It's a first step towards bringing back these kinds of traditional food systems. And it's clear that already, this work is beginning to bear fruit.
Mendel Skulski 28:04
More on that, right after this.
Adam Huggins 28:22
I'm Adam.
Mendel Skulski 28:23
Mendel.
Adam Huggins 28:24
This is Future Ecologies. Today, we're visiting an ancient, temperate, Coast Salish forest garden in Sts'ailes, and listening for what it can tell us about agriculture, permaculture, and other ways to think about resilient food systems.
Mendel Skulski 28:38
This story first came to our attention through the research of Dr. Chelsey Armstrong. She's been looking specifically at four separate Indigenous forest garden sites on the coast: two in the north in Kitslas and Kitsumkalum, and two in the south, in Tsleil-Waututh and here, in Sts’ailes, At all of these sites, the vegetation is a veritable who’s who of tasty native species.
Chelsey Armstrong 29:03
The suite of plants growing in these places are are kind of like the "duh" plants. They're the best tasting ones that that grow in the region. And so of course, you'd kind of make use of them. Things like Pacific Crabapple, Beaked Hazelnut, Wild Cranberry, Black Hawthorn, all sorts of Vaccinium and Rubus. So your Thimbleberries, Salmonberries, Alaska Blueberry, Oval-leaf Blueberry, Soapberry, Saskatoonberry, I mean, they just kind of the usual suspects in Northwest Coast perennial plant foods. These are the edible plants that make up a huge portion of people's diets. People we're not just relying on salmon. There's a whole host of other nutrients and carbs that need to come from plants. So it's this kind of mixed canopy system that looks vastly different from our typical conifer forests that we're used to coming across. And these places were managed by people. They would not exist without people.
Adam Huggins 30:03
One thing that is really important to remember is that none of these forest gardens has been actively managed for at least a century. Since colonization dramatically reduced the populations, and capacity, and access to land for First Nations people. The fact that these forest gardens are still quite clearly cultivated spaces, after all of those years, is really a testament to the resilience of their design. Like, think about what happens if you leave your own garden alone for a few weeks without weeding it at all. And then imagine leaving it alone for 150 years – and still being able to distinguish it.
Chelsey Armstrong 30:40
We would assume, given how quickly conifers forests tend to succeed in a lot of places, right? So you log a forest 20-30 years later, it's been replaced with conifer saplings. What we're seeing here is not the same kind of recovery to this, quote, human disturbance, which is the forest garden. These conifers aren't moving in. These gardens have been sustained for over 150 years since people left, or were forcibly removed from them. So it is interesting that they haven't been subsumed by conifers, because we assume that that's what would have happened, just like any other kind of human disturbance.
Mendel Skulski 31:20
Some of the evidence Chelsey has collected provides clues as to why these forest gardens are so resilient to change. She's used a metric that goes beyond simple biodiversity. Instead, measuring the diversity of functional traits.
Chelsey Armstrong 31:35
We looked at four traits: seed mass, shade tolerance, pollination syndrome, dispersal syndrome, and what we found that the forest gardens overall had significantly higher frequency of large seeded fruits, which, yes, larger seed means larger fruit. That's the economically important part for humans. That makes sense. But also larger seeds are harder to self pollinate. And so they often require an extra hand, and in this case literally a human hand, to propagate – probably vegetatively. We know from the ethnographic record that people were moving cuttings and the like. You know, germinating, a hazelnut is like 1 out of 10, versus a cutting, it's like 10 out of 10.
Mendel Skulski 32:16
Kind of like strawberries, huh?
Adam Huggins 32:18
Totally. I mean, anywhere you look in the world, people are moving desirable plants around, and for all of the same reasons, right? Because they're delicious, or useful, or just beautiful. And usually, they're bringing them closer to home. So it really shouldn't be surprising that Indigenous people were doing the same thing here on the coast.
Mendel Skulski 32:38
Yeah, I mean, transplanting helps explain why so many of these sites have such a similar compliment of species. But Chelsey's trade study also revealed a high level of functional diversity, hinting at why these forest gardens have been able to resist encroachment for so long.
Chelsey Armstrong 32:57
They provide a suite of ecosystem functions that the peripheral forests don't. So maybe they're just making better use of their niche space. And that's kind of thwarting these conifer trees wanting to come in.
Adam Huggins 33:09
Essentially, the idea is that all of these diverse species growing together in this one place, are working really well to maintain a self regulating ecosystem. One that creates food, not just for humans, but for all sorts of creatures.
Chelsey Armstrong 33:25
And so there's kind of this layered multi-species thing going on with the maintenance of these places.
Adam Huggins 33:30
That's permaculture, right?
Chelsey Armstrong 33:31
That's permaculture. Totally! It just... and every little being plays a part. That's one of the things that, when I talk about us not discovering these, you know, scientifically that people have known about them for a long time, Kitslas and Kitsumkalum elders often talked about how old villages are the best places to hunt, because that's where all the deer browse. That's where all the berries are for bears, like they know about these places, having that kind of significance. We're just catching up.
Mendel Skulski 34:03
We left the Hazelnut and Crabapple grove to take a stroll with Chelsey and Stephanie at another site, closer to the river and close to an ancient Sts'ailes village. As we walked, we were reflecting on how these places were simply permacultural and had been so for centuries before that portmanteau of permanent agriculture was coined in the 1970s. Here in these different forms of forest gardens, plants and animals were thriving together – due to, rather than in spite of, human influence. So of course, we were curious to know how Stephanie felt about the popularity of permaculture today.
Stephanie Leon Riedl 34:48
Bless their hearts. I like the concept of it, but I find that a lot of permaculture practitioners don't attribute the knowledge that they've learned, or bring in the people who they've learned it from into the work. It's not recognized in a meaningful way. It's not applied in a meaningful way to Indigenous people. And so it really is just like nails on a chalkboard for me, because it's very extractive, in my opinion. I would like to see it less extractive, I think it has the capacity to be less extractive. But the way that I've experienced it has not been the case. There's really great stuff! I'm so glad that people are learning about how to be better in tune with their environment, and whatever. But people are part of that. And I feel like a lot of Indigenous people are getting left behind, in yet another area of life.
Adam Huggins 35:44
Stephanie gets right to the heart of the issue – of what makes me uncomfortable, even just like applying that term to what I do. And it's why sometimes I avoid using the word permaculture at all. It's a critique that goes beyond just forest gardens.
Stephanie Leon Riedl 35:58
First off, we exist. Second off, you're on our land. Third, if you want to restore this area back to the way it was before, like you need to involve Indigenous peoples you need to involve the original stewards of that land.
Mendel Skulski 36:12
We spoke to David about this. And he reiterated that permaculture owes its whole basis to Indigenous knowledge from all over the world. But he also wasn't going to take responsibility for other teachers and other practitioners failure to properly acknowledge that fact
David Holmgren 36:31
The... the rediscovery about Indigenous origins has of course led to all sorts of perceptions that permaculture was part of sort of colonial theft of Indigenous ideas, or quite validly that, in various expressions of permaculture, there's been inadequate acknowledgement of sources. But similarly people making those claims are often ignorant of, you know, what were happening at the origins, and Bill Mollison for example...
Mendel Skulski 37:04
In David's telling, Bill Mollison was working closely with Indigenous communities in Australia as he was formulating what would become permaculture.
Mendel Skulski 37:14
But permaculture became so popular so quickly, that he and David lost control of the narrative, and over whether individual practitioners acknowledge or even understand its origins.
Adam Huggins 37:29
Which is... it's a totally fair point.
Mendel Skulski 37:30
Yeah.
Adam Huggins 37:31
But I can't help feeling that, you know, as somebody who first caught the spark for forest gardening, from permaculture, as a settler, I think there's a clear responsibility to rethink how this knowledge is being shared and used.
Stephanie Leon Riedl 37:47
I have people who don't understand when they're working with land that we've been here forever, and that we've gardened here forever, and that, you know, pretty much everything that you see that's still intact, has our footprint in it. I think that people know that in their minds, but they don't apply it in their work.
Adam Huggins 38:07
Stephanie's words really stuck with me. So I got in touch with somebody who could talk with me about how people who profess to practice permaculture can do better.
Hannah Roessler 38:19
Hi, Adam. My name is Hannah Roessler.
Adam Huggins 38:22
Hannah is a professor at the University of Victoria, teaching an ethnoecology and a permaculture design class in the School of Environmental Studies. She's also an independent consultant, working with various First Nations to collaboratively design food systems,
Hannah Roessler 38:35
Usually kind of wearing an archaeologist ethnobotanist hat at that point, yeah.
Adam Huggins 38:40
I suppose this is where I should make an acknowledgement as well, which is that Hannah is now a colleague of mine at UVic, because I teach a class at UVic now.
Mendel Skulski 38:47
Congratulations.
Adam Huggins 38:48
Thanks! Anyway, we had a lovely chat about our early 20s.
Hannah Roessler 38:54
I guess we were just talking about how you and I both drank the Kool Aid of permaculture, and it was really delicious and exciting. And for me at the time, especially when I was first starting to learn about it, it was a way for me to engage actively in the world with you know, the environmental and social problems that were coming up and that I had been learning about in my undergraduate degree in environmental studies and anthropology and I, I was, you know, suffering from paralysis by analysis. And permaculture was a way to be actively engaged.
Adam Huggins 39:24
Hannah told me how when she first got introduced to permaculture, she had the opportunity to join her friend who had bought some land in Nicaragua, with the hope of turning it into a food forest paradise.
Hannah Roessler 39:35
It's kind of funny because it's sort of like a perfect example of where permaculture really gets critiqued, where it can be a very privileged pursuit. So, it's not very accessible. It's dominated by white community members, and often people will go to southern countries and buy cheap land to, you know, create permaculture dreams.
Adam Huggins 40:00
At the time, she was still pretty starry-eyed. But she was lucky enough to find herself chatting with one of the locals near the farm.
Hannah Roessler 40:07
This woman, her name was Doña Ines. And she was chatting with me outside her house and asked me "What are you doing in Nicaragua?" And I started to explain to her like, "Oh, I'm learning about permaculture", and, you know, "Permaculture is dot dot dot dot dot dot."
Adam Huggins 40:25
She tells Doña Ines all about permaculture design thinking, and food forests, and the ethics, and the principles.
Hannah Roessler 40:32
And she was so kind – just smiled at me and nodded her head, and listened very attentively, and looped her arm into my arm and asked me to come to her backyard and have a coffee with her. And I said, Sure.
Adam Huggins 40:45
And they sat down, and she brought Hannah some coffee. And she just turns around, and she says "So what you're talking about" like, "do you mean this?"
Hannah Roessler 40:54
And she just gestured around her. And I was, you know, immediately humbled and realize, Oh, my goodness, of course, we're sitting in exactly a forest garden. Thank goodness she was there to –to help me see that.
Adam Huggins 41:16
Not every young permaculturist gets their head set straight this early in the game, and in such a gentle way.
Mendel Skulski 41:23
Hmm, yeah. It seems like it's a pretty common experience for people to hear about permaculture, and just get enchanted with all of that possibility – that you can grow food and do it outside of the industrial agricultural status quo. And do it in this beautiful, healthy, ecologically interwoven way. It's no wonder so many people want to rush off and just try it out.
Adam Huggins 41:48
Yeah, I mean, I did. But unfortunately, that epiphany just doesn't come packaged with the understanding that all sorts of perennial food systems already exist – with their roots in communities.
Hannah Roessler 42:02
We're really dealing with super locally-based knowledge. And permaculture recognizes that in principle, but in practice, I'm not so sure how well I've seen that done by permaculturists. And coupled with the appropriation of Indigenous knowledge, even though it is acknowledged by the founders, it's not really acknowledged anywhere else. That's a real problem.
Mendel Skulski 42:26
So let's say you're the kind of person who's had a taste of the Kool Aid. And you're excited about the very real benefits that a design system like permaculture can offer. How do you tap into that in a way that benefits, instead of just extracting from, or ignoring Indigenous communities? How can you participate in revitalizing these forest gardens, rather than accidentally overwriting them?
Adam Huggins 42:54
Right, like, how can you enter the space responsibly instead of, I don't know, bursting through the wall screaming "oh yeah!"
Adam Huggins 43:05
Like, like the Kool Aid man... Right?
Hannah Roessler 43:09
First of all, it depends on what the community is going to ask for. Second, if a permaculturist is going to be working in that community, it might be really useful for them to explore this concept of two-eyed seeing
Adam Huggins 43:23
Two-eyed seeing is a concept put forward by Dr. Albert Marshall – a Mi'kmaw elder in Unama'ki, Cape Breton. It means allowing one eye to see with an Indigenous worldview, and the other eye with a Western one.
Hannah Roessler 43:38
And not really trying to mesh the two, or plug-in Indigenous knowledge into a Western framework (you know, or a permaculture framework), but instead trying to allow the existence of both together. And so I think that permaculturists could really use that approach: be really good listeners, and recognize that there's so much knowledge in communities. So, I think a lot of humility is involved.
Adam Huggins 44:09
The concept of two-eyed seeing is simple enough. But in practice, most of us are so used to looking at things with a Western worldview, that it's really easy to just pay lip service to that Indigenous worldview, without actually learning how to see with it or engage with it. And this is understandable, right? We we shouldn't expect to just be able to try worldviews on like pairs of shoes. But it does mean that it takes time and attention to learn how to see things differently: to listen to what origin stories, and language, and place names, and even governance systems are actually telling us about how the world works.
Mendel Skulski 44:50
And in that spirit, I'd like to bring us back to Sts'ailes for one last introduction.
Willie Charlie 44:57
Chaquawet te skwíxs, tèlí tsel kw'e Sts'ailes. My traditional name is Chaquawet, and people know me as Willie Charlie.
Mendel Skulski 45:06
Willie helped us understand the worldview that produced these gardens in the first place – to help us see with the other eye.
Willie Charlie 45:15
I think that all of our snuw'uyulh, all of our laws, and all of our si:wes, all of our teachings point back to this story. All of our social laws point back to the story.
Willie Charlie 45:28
Our origin story is this: before the world was here, the sun and the moon, they fell in love, said their emotions and their feelings towards each other. Where those feelings met was where the world was created. And at the beginning, that world was covered with water. And it was only through time and evolution that land formed. And that some took different shape and different form. Some became the winged, some became the four-legged fur bearing, some became the plant people and the root people, some became the ones that swim in the river and the ocean, and some became human.
Willie Charlie 46:07
But our story says that early in time, as the human we needed the most support to survive. And it was all our relations that took pity on us. And they give themselves to us. And they give themselves to us for food, shelter, clothing, utensils, and medicine. And that the only thing they asked in return was to be respected, to be remembered, to only take what you need, and to share with those that are less fortunate.
Willie Charlie 46:43
So all of our practices point back to that. All of our ways of harvesting, grooming, looking after, taking, or giving back, point back to that story. That's how you're supposed to look after all our relations.
Willie Charlie 47:05
We say we don't own the land, we are the land. For 1000s of years, everything that we are comes from the land. And that when we die, we go back to the land. We are this land.
Willie Charlie 47:20
The forest gardens, that we're calling it now, is one part of it. I don't know if they were created, but cultivated, or groomed, or shaped to be here. We believe that everybody is born with a gift. And that gift doesn't belong to an individual. It belongs to your family, and it belongs to the community. When you start a ceremony, when you go into anything, revealing your gift, your always pay your respect to all living things. And your gift comes to the surface. So it'd be the same with anything. It's already here.
Willie Charlie 47:59
The area that we're in is called Lhemqwatel. I understand Lhemqwatel means a place of everything.
Adam Huggins 48:18
What we took from our conversation with Willie was that, in all likelihood, the forest gardens of Sts'ailes were the result of people recognizing those gifts – in each other and on the land – and giving them the space and the resources to flourish. So, for the purposes of this episode, one big question remains: if we want to transform our food systems, and I think that we do, how do we put this knowledge into practice? Ethically, equitably, And effectively?
Chelsey Armstrong 48:52
When we started working with these places, like "This is so cool. This is amazing. Look how biodiversity is our and look at how much food production you're getting in one square kilometer in one year. Like it's it's insane." And of course you want to share that with the world and innovate it in a way that can be scaled up. But that scaling up of Indigenous knowledge has not worked out for a lot of people in the past.
Mendel Skulski 49:16
When people talk about scaling up Indigenous knowledge, the concern is that it can lead to commodification and decontextualization of these culturally-embedded practices. And that ultimately, there's real risks to moving too fast and screwing up. And David raises another concern about how narrowly we invest our future food security in perennial plants.
David Holmgren 49:42
Yes, well, it is very difficult in times of crisis of environmental – rapid environmental change, not just annual broad scale agriculture, but to some extent, tree crops depend on a relatively stable climate. And that actually the patterns of hunting, wild foraging, forestry, beekeeping, and livestock pastoralism are actually the highly flexible land uses that can deal with chaotic climatic change. And so I think there is some sobering recognition of vulnerabilities. You know, you are planting for some sort of future climate. And of course, we mentioned this in Permaculture One, about the importance of growing species that imagine until the climate in class, the climate changes. You know, we said that in 1975. But, of course, that is enormously challenging when you're talking about systems that take decades to mature and reach their full potential.
Adam Huggins 50:55
What David is concerned about here is the opposite extreme from where we are right now, where we rely, for the most part on annual plants for most of our food. Even so, I think that there's room and frankly, the necessity for building up all kinds of regenerative agriculture, from community gardens to small food forests, and, you know, scaling up to revitalized indigenous food systems – at the landscape scale.
Hannah Roessler 51:20
I think that forest garden systems are seriously lacking. I mean, we're so focused on the sort of annual market vegetable crops that I really wish that there was more opportunity to take large areas and convert them to forest gardens, and really do the experimentation that we need to do, and the learning around it, because it just takes time.
Mendel Skulski 51:43
Lucky for us, even in the face of an uncertain climate, we don't have to start from scratch. We just have to pay attention to the lessons all around us.
Chelsey Armstrong 51:55
One of the things that seems to be a reoccurring debate in the literature is this kind of incompatibility of biodiversity and agro-economic systems, right? That we can't have biodiversity and feed the world. We have to pick one. It's this, kind of archaic, but important argument. And I think what forest gardens show is that we can do both. These are just troves of information and practices and ideologies. It's part of what we're referring to now as Indigenous Futurities, where communities are trying to reconcile over a century of colonialism and erasure. And in order to bring certain things back, they need strategies that depend on things like forest gardens where there's intergenerational knowledge transmission, in a really like fun way: you get to eat the plants, you get to see them, you get to walk through them. It's a lot more fun than learning plant names in a classroom, right?
Mendel Skulski 52:56
I think anyone who's spent time learning about wild foods would agree that this is easily the best part. It's not just about learning what a cloudberry looks like. It's about holding the leaf in your hand, seeing what's growing nearby, smelling the ripening season. And cementing all of that knowledge with the memory of a delicious new flavor. And with every new flavor, a new acquaintance in the garden, a new connection with an old neighbor.
Adam Huggins 53:29
Better yet, if you know someone who can make introductions.
Stephanie Leon Riedl 53:33
You just start a conversation, and then the elders will be like "Oh, yeah, I remember". And they'll tell you a whole bunch of stuff that you never knew before about like eating shoots, and you know, picking bark. My my mom was like "I used to remember these trees, and I would just go to the tree and I'd just pull the sap right off the tree and, like, snack on it." and I'm just like "Okay, you need to show me these trees."
Adam Huggins 54:01
So instead of trying to replace these places with an idealized version of a tropical food forest, like I think many of us have been trying to do, maybe the best thing to do is to first ask whether the ecosystem that you're in is already producing food. And if so, how this process can be enhanced. Hunter told me about a time when she was working with one of our teachers, Cheryl Bryce, of Songhees Nation.
Hannah Roessler 54:28
And she said, you know, Hannah, but everywhere is a food system. And I kind of knew that, but I didn't really. It just sort of hit me in that moment of clarity. And so I started to really look at almost everything as a forest garden too... or trying to see if that model would apply.
Adam Huggins 54:49
It's an invitation to think about every ecosystem a little differently.
Mendel Skulski 54:54
And that invitation goes out to more than just permaculturists. It's also an important one for academics.
Chelsey Armstrong 55:01
You know, the first thing archaeologists do when they get to a site to excavate it, is they cut down all the vegetation. It's in the way. You know, archaeologists are not good botanists, never have been. And so I think marrying those two things allowed for this, this kind of work to be done.
Hannah Roessler 55:18
Archaeologists, ecologists, and other people who are working in academia, you know, hey, look around you, and try and find these patterns.
Mendel Skulski 55:27
So slow down, take a seat on the carpet. Ask and listen.
Adam Huggins 55:35
There are gardens and gardeners everywhere.
Willie Charlie 55:40
It's not us to say like "Oh, we're gonna use this land for that, we're gonna use that land for that." It's already there. How do we look after it? How do we protect it? How do we groom it – for what it really is already?
Mendel Skulski 56:08
Future Ecologies is an independent production, made possible by our supporters on Patreon. For links, photos, citations and more episodes, visit us at futureecologies.net
Adam Huggins 56:22
This episode was produced by myself Adam Huggins.
Mendel Skulski 56:26
And me, Mendel Skulski.
Adam Huggins 56:28
With the voices of David Holmgren, Chelsey Armstrong, Morgan Ritchie, Stephanie Leon Riedl, Hannah Roessler, and Willie Charlie.
Adam Huggins 56:37
And of course there are lots of researchers who we didn’t get a chance to include in this episode. We want to specifically acknowledge the work of Natasha Lyons, Michael Blake, Jesse Miller, Alex McAlvay, Dana Lepofsky, Nancy Turner, and Marion Dixon Wal'ceckwu.
Mendel Skulski 56:53
Music in this episode was by Thumbug, Scott Gailey, Yu Su, Cat Can Do, Satorian, Museum of No Art, Mehrnaz Rohbakhsh, and Sunfish Moon Light
Adam Huggins 57:09
Special thanks to Meg Ulman, Sue Dennett, Emma Sise, Brendan Hocura, Mark Sutherland, Naomi Okabe, Michael Yadrick, and Cassandra Alan.
Mendel Skulski 57:20
We always love hearing from you. So if you'd like to say hi, you can reach us at our website, futureecologies.net or on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @futureecologies.
Adam Huggins 57:34
Alright, that's it for this one.
Mendel Skulski 57:37
Bye for now.