A More Human Approach to Nature Preservation and a More Nature Approach to Human Preservation!
Were you aware that there are more than 8 New Jerseys worth of lawn grass and 5 New Jerseys worth of paved surfaces crisscrossing the lower 48 states, leaving few islands of biodiversity where great expanses once existed (Tallamy, 2007)? Doug Tallamy’s writings have inspired many people to take responsibility for this and consider landscaping their property with the native plant species that maximize biodiversity. Throughout his books he makes the strong argument that restoring biodiversity is a matter of life and death for us, revealing with clarity and humor the vulnerability of our environment in its current fragmented and degraded state. Before allowing his audience to wallow too much in any feelings of anger and depression, he suggests an incredible solution, to cut lawns in half nationwide and restore them with native plants. Doing so would generate 20 million acres of refuge for biodiversity, larger than every national park combined, dubbed with the aptly name of Homegrown National Park (HNP). “Our National Parks, no matter how grand in scale are too small and separated from one another to preserve species to the levels needed. Thus, the concept for Homegrown National Park, a bottom-up call-to-action to restore habitat where we live and work, and to a lesser extent where we farm and graze, extending national parks to our yards and communities”, says the HNP website. Considering our culture’s obsession with lawns as a status symbol, this would necessitate a shift in our culture in order to be possible, which is what exactly what Tallamy suggests we ought to focus our efforts on changing.
I believe that adapting our culture to live in harmony with the natural world is our greatest solution to the environmental challenges we face. I’m in agreement that our survival as a species is one of the most important reasons anyone could give for why we might change our lifestyles, however I feel there is a more tangible and efficient pathway to the hearts of our communities, despite being admittedly less urgent. Food. … I know “food” is not a sentence.
Another inspiring, yet lesser known, writer that published a new book in 2023 is Jared Rosenbaum. His book, Wild Plant Culture: A Guide to Restoring Edible and Medicinal Native Plant Communities, cuts right to the heart of everything I have been interested in and pondering about in the environmental space for about 5 years, beginning with my introduction to the writings of Samuel Thayer, but more on this later. Rosenbaum shares a similar message to that of Tallamy about the importance of restoring our natural ecosystems to greater biodiversity by planting native species, though he contributes the additional human motivation of getting to eat the edible species and cultivate a deep relationship to the natural world. Interestingly, Tallamy contributed these words of praise shown on the inside cover of Wild Plant Culture:
“Rosenbaum’s work is an uncommonly thorough reference book, a primer on plant ecology, restoration biology, and the medicinal and edible properties of the Mid-Atlantic plants from his region. Much more than that, it is though provoking, aspirational and the first chapter alone is worth the price of the book. Jared is taking a risk here. He is hoping that we are smart enough to recognize and act on the wisdom clearly outlined in these pages. I trust that he is right.” – Doug Tallamy
The term Rosenbaum uses to describe the practices he describes, ecoculture, is introduced in the first chapter of his book. This concept of cultivating and managing wild edible plants for both biodiversity and human use raises two questions in the minds of modern people, one of which Tallamy might be hinting at with the final words of his testimonial above. First, environmentally minded individuals might ask if its harmful for humans to harvest edible plants or other useful products from natural ecosystems. Second, agriculturally minded individuals might ask whether our natural ecosystems can really provide us with food in any meaningful enough quantity to make cultivating them worthwhile with our increasing population?
These questions and more are elegantly addressed in the book Incredible Wild Edibles: 36 Plants That Can Change Your Life, by Samuel Thayer, in which the term ecoculture was first coined and defined. In his chapter titled Ecoculture: Tending to Wildness Thayer makes the claim that nature is productive, economically viable, and produces good food crops, citing maple syrup production and managed blueberry barrens as examples of ecoculture systems that haven’t been lost in modern society. He acknowledges that native ecosystems do not produce everything we want, everywhere we want it and that they can be extremely variable in their production of human food, but that the same is true of agricultural systems. He states that the belief in nature’s unproductivity is mostly the unexamined dogma of a civilization looking to justify their destruction of natural ecosystems. He concludes that we won’t know the true productivity of ecoculture until it is practiced.
With regard to the question of ethics and sustainability of harvest, Thayer states nature is resilient, nature is flexible, and nature includes humans. He supports this claim with the observation that every ecosystem goes through a process of succession and thus has a wide range of possible communities, each of which is good, wholesome, and vibrant. Thayer says, “Plant communities are adaptable. In response to disturbance or abuse, they heal, produce, balance, replace, and grow perpetually. We stop this growth only through extraordinary measures: the ceaseless application of hard labor, heavy machinery, or chemical warfare” (Thayer, 2017). He continues to say that our obsession with untouched wilderness in the name of sustainability, “denies the humanity of the people who long inhabited this land before Europeans arrived”. Thayer concludes that the foundational principal at the heart of the worldview of ecoculture, long understood by indigenous communities around the world, is that we humans are a part of and belong to the natural world.
It’s important to note that Thayer and Rosenbaum alike recognize that, despite the newness of the term ecoculture, it is an ancient practice that spans the planet. Their writings draw heavily on the work of researchers like Robbin Wall Kimmerer, M. Kat Anderson, and Nancy Turner, who have produced a substantial body of evidence that suggests the verdant “wilderness” found on this continent by the European colonizers, described by the likes of John Muir as being full of incredible beauty and bounty, was in fact the result of an indigenous land management practice unrecognizable to the newcomers as a system of food, medicine, and material production. This land management style utilized techniques such as burning, pruning, removing competition, broadcasting and planting seeds, transplanting, and harvesting in ways that increase production, among many other things. These foodscapes were unrecognizable as such because they served the same functions as natural ecosystems, because … they were natural ecosystems.
What benefits can ecoculture provide the modern world? Imagine what a boon it would be for Homegrown National Park if we could restore native habitats on agricultural land. Before Europeans arrived some of the most productive ecosystems in the world, from a perspective of both native food and biodiversity, were the midwestern prairies. “A single acre of intact grassland can sequester 2 to 5 tons of carbon per year”, (Rosenbaum, 2023). When you start feeling angry about the destruction of the amazon rainforest, don’t forget that we’ve virtually obliterated the prairies here, home to countless wild beings and staple foods described in the book Edible Wild Plants of the Prairie by Kelly Kindscher: An Ethnobotanical Guide. This book also describes some of the vibrant cultural traditions and lifeways that were destroyed along with the natural ecosystems that were intertwined with and inseparable from them.
Even if our current and future agriculturalists don’t adopt ecocultural practices, there is the possibility that private property owners will be more motivated by the opportunity to cultivate healthy food that they can harvest while they’re appreciating the intricate and infinite beauty of the creatures that flock to the haven they have created, fueling an ever deepening connection and communion with the incredible gifts of nature, which include us, whether we think it or not. Sorry for the run-on sentence there!
Finally, our parks and preserved lands would benefit from managing for this good food, medicine, and materials and allowing the cultures that generated such a bounty to regain access. We’ve made efforts to restore fire and wolves to Yellowstone yet have been slow restoring access and land rights to indigenous people, to the detriment of the ecology of our preserves. More than anything, if an ecoculture mindset rubs off on our modern selves, we would be well on our way towards the cultural shift that Doug Tallamy says would need to happen if we’re going to ensure a healthy and thriving future here for generations to come!
I’m planning on doing and promoting ecoculture as my life work … if you couldn’t tell.
Rosenbaum, J. (2023). Wild Plant Culture: A Guide to Restoring Edible and Medicinal Native Plant Communities. New Society Publishers.
Tallamy, D. W. (2007). Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants. Timber Press, Inc.
Thayer, S. (2017). Incredible Wild Edibles: 36 Plants That Can Change Your Life. Forager’s Harvest Press.