One Year Later

I started writing Renewing the Commons one year ago today, on November 30 2010.  So I want to briefly mark that anniversary and say, a huge thank you to everyone who’s read and commented here.  It’s been really, really rewarding to receive feedback and build connections with so many people.  The comments conversations around shifting the invasive species paradigm were especially rich.

I think the blog’s cast a really nicely broad net while still maintaining a focused mission and perspective.  And one thing I’m excited for in this coming second year is to do more “site reviews” of places where people are doing hopeful work, a la the Waterworks Forest post from a few weeks ago.  I’m also excited to host some guest posts – let me know if you’d like to submit a short piece that’s connected in some way to the overall story I’m exploring here.

In other news, Young Farmers Conference 2011 starts tomorrow!  I can’t go this year, but I’ll be following the #YFC11 tag on Twitter, and my friends Ethan Roland and Benneth Phelps will be presenting on applying permaculture and carbon farming to larger-scale agriculture.  Go hear them speak if you can!

I remember a packed end-of-conference discussion session at YFC two years ago in which the National Young Farmers Coalition was birthed, practically out of thin air, in the span of about 20 minutes.  Less that two years later they’re a national force, in the New York Times, etc.  One lesson I take from this is that if enough people who are flexible enough in their thinking, have enough world-changer skills and capacities, and have common enough goals get together, some seriously cool shit can happen very, very quickly.  And I do think the younger generation has some advantages in terms of flexible thinking, process skills, and common vision, and that’s one reason why big, electric social-capital events with lots of under-30′s (like YFC and StartingBloc) are so powerful.  So enjoy and rock out if you’re going!  It’s a pretty exciting time in the world of agriculture and food, and there’s room for many, many people to be involved and contribute.

The Designer Has Not Yet Become the Recliner

There’s a big conversation going on right now on a regional permaculture listserve I’m part of, broadly about where we’re at in the permaculture “movement”, as it were, and where we might be going.  It’s great stuff to be hashing out.  And since I have tree crops on the brain these days, it brings to mind this classic moment in Bill Mollison’s early movie, The Global Gardener, where Bill lies down in a hammock in the middle of a lush, superabundant tropical food forest, and says, “And this is where the designer becomes the recliner.”  Everyone laughs!  And we get the message – perennial food is about doing less work than what’s needed for annual crops.  Sounds great, doesn’t it?  That image (and others like it) is a big part of what drew me and many, many other people into the world of permaculture design and regenerative agriculture.

Thirty years after that movie was made, though, the core original promise of super-abundant, low-work food forestry – remaking the Garden of Eden, as Dave Jacke so elegantly puts it in Edible Forest Gardens - remains, in many ways, unfulfilled.  The title of this post says it – the designer has not yet become the recliner.  We don’t have huge, productive agroforestry commons feeding thousands of people yet.  We have scattered small-scale forest gardens that at best supplement the diets of their gardeners’ families, and an even smaller and more scattered handful of experimental larger-scale tree crop systems that have mostly not begun to yield to their potential yet.  The “danger of falling fruit” and staple-crops vision of J. Russell Smith (link is to full-book PDF of Tree Crops, in the public domain) is still a long ways off.

So why is that?  It’s instructive to look at a few multiple potential reasons (all of which I think play a part):

–It takes perennial food systems a long time to mature to the point of being overyielding, low-work polycultures – decades in many cases.  We don’t have these in the Northeast right now because we don’t have any examples that are big enough and old enough yet.

–The promise of food forestry is as yet unfulfilled in northern temperate climates.  The tropical world already has large, diverse, superabundant tree crop gardens in every region and subclimate.  Partly that’s because the tropics are so freaking favorable to staple tree crops (go salivate over some of the tropics-related links at Eric Toensmeier’s place and you’ll see what I mean), and partly it’s because the traditions of food forestry in the tropics have been in many regions relatively uninterrupted.  In contrast, European coppice agroforestry was mostly interrupted in the 1700′s, and North American tending the wild practices were almost completely interrupted continent-wide by the end of the 1800′s.  It’s been a long, steep relearning process for most people in most of the northern temperate world as a result (small-scale Russian perennial food gardening being a notable exception).

–As we’ve discussed here in multiple previous posts (here and here, for example), there are big structural obstacles to financing larger-scale regenerative ag enterprises, especially growing tree crops.  What I want to add to the previous conversation is how significant super-cheap fossil fuels, and major, ubiquitous externalizing of social and ecological costs, are to these structural obstacles.  It’s really, really difficult to do agriculture in a way that’s both truly healthy for people and the planet, and profitable and capitalizable, because of how cheap food is on the commodities markets thanks to the oil/subsidies/externalities perfect storm.  It’s not easy being green, or being socially/economically just and responsible, and we shouldn’t pretend that it is.

What we do know, though, is that forest gardening in northern temperate climates works.  It produces diverse, healthy, low-maintenance perennial food from early spring to early winter, with moderately high work and moderately low yields initially, but with work decreasing and yields increasing gradually over time.  Moreover, perennial agriculture still does all the cool things we’ve always talked about (stabilizes soil, moderates microclimates, sequesters carbon, creates and diversifies habitat, reduces the need for chemical inputs and tillage, etc.) and is slowly but surely starting to emerge into the agriculture/food mainstream as a practice to be taken seriously (for example, this and this from recent NYT).  That’s a pretty darn good medium-to-long-term value proposition if you ask me, and we shouldn’t lose sight of the power and reality of that original motivating vision, even as we recognize how much further we have to go to reach it.

As a related bonus, a (very incomplete) mind map of productive land use economics.  Thanks to Gregory Landua of Gaia University and Nova Monda Chocolate (holiday gifts!) for the conversation that led to this:

“So much time, so little to do…”

Agroforestry All Over

Agroforestry makes it into the New York Times:

HELENA, Mont. — On a forested hill in the mountains north of Montana’s capital, beneath a canopy of pine and spruce, Marc and Gloria Flora have planted more than 300 smaller trees, from apple and pear to black walnut and chestnut.

Beneath the trees are layers of crops: shrubs like buffalo berries and raspberries, edible flowers like day lilies, vines like grapes and hops, and medicinal plants, including yarrow and arnica.

Turkeys and chickens wander the two-acre plot, gobbling hackberries and bird cherries that have fallen from trees planted in their pen, and leaving manure to nourish the plants.

For the Floras, the garden is more than a source of food for personal use and sale. Ms. Flora, an environmental consultant and former supervisor for the United States Forest Service, is hoping it serves as a demonstration project to spur the growth of agroforestry — the science of incorporating trees into traditional agriculture.

What’s really interesting about this description is that it goes way beyond “conventional” agroforestry (silvopasture, forest farming, windbreaks, alley cropping, etc.) and into the more complex ecosystem-mimic designs of permaculture-bsaed food forestry.  The article doesn’t make this distinction – which in some ways is super cool for something so ecological and integrated to be presented as agroforestry’s public face.  Like it!

This also happens to be very related to how I’m thinking about my next major research and writing project – a manual on agroforestry practices for the Northeast I’ll be spending next year writing with the support of a USDA/Forest Service “Northern Forests” grant through UVM.  Without giving too much away early on, I’ll be rethinking the “taxonomy” of agroforestry practices and writing a decision-making framework for agroforestry systems based on goals and some specific ecosystem patterns.  I’ll also be delving into financial and legal strategies for starting up long-term regenerative agriculture projects, with specific successful models and case studies, to address the challenges we’ve been talking about here around financing and regenerative agriculture.  Previews and snippets of this work will probably appear periodically on the blog next year.  So stay tuned!

More on Regenerative Ag and Beginning Farmers

I gave a well-attended talk at a local church a few days ago on future directions for agriculture.  Some big themes included:

• The future will in all likelihood not look like the free-energy “prosperity” of late 20th century, because of peak oil and climate change in particular.
• Short-term views of land history create a “shifting baselines” situation where it’s hard to notice long-term declines in ecosystem health and missing partners (like keystone species or traditional human management practices) in a bioregion.
• There are lots of well-understood regenerative (and usually perennial) farming practices that increase  resilience and ecological health across the board.  Ex’s: rotational grazing; tree crops; silvopasture; keyline design; etc.  These practices will become more and more important as food systems and economies relocalize.
• Currently, there are serious financial barriers for beginning farmers, and especially beginning farmers who want to use these regenerative practices.  Land is priced super-high for housing, the younger generation is drowning in student loan debt, banks won’t give loans for business plans that include what they perceive as “risky” or untested farming practices, perennial agriculture needs even more long-term land security than annual agriculture to even begin to make sense financially, etc.  Land access & tenure issues discussed previously on the blog here.

And hey, wouldn’t you know it – in the next few days, I saw two great new articles about some of those very topics!  My friend Steve Gabriel reports on the Northeastern Silvopasture conference here.  And my friends over at the National Young Farmers Coalition have completed a nation-wide survey of young and beginning farmers that got written up in the New York Times here.  Both are short, quick, nutrient-dense reads.

Bottom line: it’s really, really great to have an ongoing public conversation about agriculture that’s not solely about the older paradigm of large chemical monoculture farms.  And the people who are working toward a socially just, ecologically regenerative farming paradigm need and deserve a lot of support, encouragement, and resources so that they can be wildly successful and our communities can be healthier.

Along those lines, Greenfield (MA) Community College’s emerging new Food and Farm Systems program is super exciting.  And the Carbon Farming Course is only two months away – come if you can!

The Great Plains Continue to Change

I’ve spent a little bit of time exploring Kansas and have a long fascination with the Great Plains, so articles like this one always catch my eye:

For generations, the story of the small rural town of the Great Plains, including the dusty tabletop landscape of western Kansas, has been one of exodus — of businesses closing, classrooms shrinking and, year after year, communities withering as fewer people arrive than leave and as fewer are born than are buried. That flight continues, but another demographic trend has breathed new life into the region.

Hispanics are arriving in numbers large enough to offset or even exceed the decline in the white population in many places. In the process, these new residents are reopening shuttered storefronts with Mexican groceries, filling the schools with children whose first language is Spanish and, for now at least, extending the lives of communities that seemed to be staggering toward the grave.

The last two centuries of the Plains have really been staggering, if you think about it.  A million square miles of prairie covered with buffalo herds, scattered with Plains grizzlies, threaded and patched by wildfires and floods and tornados and droughts and winters, intensively inhabited and used by native communities and nations.  All of that conquered and “civilized” in less than one human lifetime, then gasping for breath economically and ecologically ever since.   So much change so fast.

Places where civilization seems tenuous or thin are really interesting to me, and the changes and succession of people and economies and ecosystems that happen in those places as well.  And while I can empathize with the resistance to change that the white Kansans in the article express, I can’t buy into the super-short view of history that seems to be behind it.  Five or six generations is really nothing at the scale of deep time.  So I say, “bravo” for more people of more backgrounds choosing to bring their families and histories and language to (and, really in this case, back to) the prairie and make those places home.  Who knows how they’ll change the place and how the place will change them?

Past thoughts related to Kansas and connection to place here.

Ethnomycology Gets All Imperial

I attended a guest lecture today on traditional uses of fungi by northern (arctic and sub-arctic) native people from North America and Siberia.  The speaker had been doing field work with northern native people for over 20 years, and had incredible, beautiful images of traditional caribou skin buildings, bone tools, fur clothing, and fungi being used as medicine, smudge, psychotropics, fire carriers, and more.  It was super cool to learn about traditional uses of a huge variety of fungi, a topic that often gets overlooked in the usual focus on plants.

And while I watched I got really, really angry.  Because when the speaker (a white male scientist) referred to the spiritual practices of the people whose traditions he was speaking about, he spoke with what sounded to me like barely disguised contempt.  He emphasized the (out-of-context) aspects of those traditions that would sound the most ridiculous or superstitious/archaic to modern listeners at a university, and de-emphasized or omitted the traditional knowledge and long place-based history that’s behind those cultural elements.  To me, much of the talk came across as “look at these ridiculous beliefs these primitive people still have.  As a respected scientist, I’ll you what’s really going on.”  Ugh!

I haven’t gotten publicly upset here before, and don’t plan on making a habit of it.  And I know this is my interpretation, and may not have been what the speaker intended at all.  But it’s very, very common for members of an oppressor group to focus only on our intent, and to ignore the impact of our words and actions on members of targeted groups - and their impact on our perceptions and frameworks about those targeted groups.  In this case, I judge this type of presentation of traditional knowledge to be misleading and very problematic.  To review some basic things:

• The western, reductionist, scientific worldview is not the only internally consistent worldview.  Nor is it the only internally consistent worldview that’s based on long observation and interaction with the natural world.
• The worldviews and cosmologies of land-based people are not primarily a quaint set of folk beliefs.  Instead, they’re almost always an integral part of how those people have survived and prospered living in their landscapes for thousands of years.  They are also a living, changing body of knowledge and participation in history and place, rather than a static set of anachronisms.
• It’s very, very easy for western speakers (including scientists) to simplify and/or inaccurately portray non-western worldviews when representing them to a primarily western audience.
• A white, male, western scientist speaking to a mostly white group of western university students and faculty is in a very powerful, privileged position, and has a responsibility to represent non-white, non-western cultures and people accurately and respectfully.

That’s all I want to say about this for now.

In house news, a somewhat rewritten version of my post from earlier this year on land tenure and perennial agriculture is up on the Field Naturalist Program’s blog.  Check it out if you missed it the first time around!

Visiting the Waterworks Conservation Forest

I visited the “Waterworks” conservation forest of Vermont Family Forests in Bristol, VT with my Reading the Landscape practicum class last week and was very, very impressed.  Here are some highlights from a few different angles.

VFF director and forester David Brynn spoke with us at length about mainstream logging practices in Vermont and the different approach taken at the Waterworks.  Some key take-home points:

• Vermont tax law and the “current use” program is a huge structural incentive for continual logging using current market practices (i.e. “scientifically managed” forests to maximize short-to-medium-term financial income).   It’s very, very difficult for private woodlot owners to not cut, or even to practice more long-term, conservation-oriented forestry, because of how high property taxes are when woodland are taxed at their “development” value outside of the current-use program.
• More bizarrely, this is a significant improvement over the pre-current use landscape, in which non-wealthy landowners would have no option but to sell when the development value of their land went up.
• David presented the vision of “community supported forestry,” using local wood resources to meet local building and infrastructure needs with local skills and local people, and managing forests as commons resources by community organizations rather than as private woodlots.  He pointed out how some trees are very valuable resources for “localized” needs (like Hophornbeam for high-BTU firewood and mortise & tenon buildings) far beyond their cash market value as timber or biomass.
• The forestry practices at the Waterworks property have many overlapping goals, including education (they run chainsaw use and forest management workshops there), forest health (they leave lots of coarse woody debris and use uneven-aged management towards more old-growth-type conditions), and supplying local organizations with local community-managed timber products.  Great polyculture thinking here!
• One big organizational distinction about the Waterworks property is that it’s managed by a non-profit and open to the public.  David described how some local folks walk there every day of the year.  People hunt there, run place-based education programs there, and in the near future will likely be able to be buried there.  The whole project (about which there’s a lot more written at VFF’s website) is embedded in the culture and people of Addison County and the greater Bristol/Monkton/Hogbacks microbioregion.  A really inspiring example of place-based land use.

We climbed to a rare dry oak woodland/savannah on exposed Monkton Quartzite ledge, and surveyed across the Waterworks property’s watershed.   The eastern side of the watershed had been more heavily impacted by human activity before the land was purchased by VFF, and is the side on which forestry practices continue.  The west side of the watershed was in “wilder” condition at the time of purchase and has been unmanaged since other than a) the upkeep of trails and b) the biannual mowing of a large upland meadow for grassland bird habitat.   It was a stunning view from the ledges, the Chestnut Oaks were totally rad, and it’s so unusual to see a whole watershed being actively managed for both forest health and human economic products.

This watershed-level view brought to my mind the ahupua’a agroforestry systems of indigenous Hawai’ian people.  Extended family networks would manage a whole watershed from high mountains to ocean surf, growing both the agroforestry systems and the staple field crops that were appropriate in each microclimate, wrapping watershed by watershed around the whole volcano.  Much of this management changed with the Samoan and then English invasions of Hawai’i, but aspects of it remain in place to the present day and more is being brought back by land/culture renewal projects.

I’ve often thought about that image – managed watersheds encompassing a whole island, a whole bioregion, a whole way of life – as a metaphor for where we all need to be heading in our own local places.  We won’t be practicing ahupua’a directly except in Hawai’i or other similar Polynesian islands, of course, but the pattern of deep place-based caretaking for the land and the people simultaneously could (and needs to) exist everywhere.  And each place will express its own unique patterns of that caretaking on a larger scale.  I got a glimpse of this for the Northeast at the Waterworks forest – I think it’s one of the best rural examples of renewing the commons I’ve seen or even heard of in this region (Land’s Sake coming to mind as an agricultural/suburban example, and Neustras Raices and the Philadelphia Orchard Project as urban ones).

Big thanks and props to David Brynn and VFF for being humble, visionary leaders working at the economic-cultural-ecological edge.  Let’s do a lot more of this in a lot more places!