Introduction Voiceover: You are listening to Season Four of Future Ecologies.
This is first time we've recorded in like, a year?
More than a year. Your chair is so squeaky.
I have such a creaky chair. Okay I'm gonna be really careful.
The whole point of recorded in person is to be less stiff.
We should probably introduce ourselves right at the top.
Okay. Hey, my name is Mendel.
And my name is Adam. And this is Future Ecologies.
Although today we're we're doing a little bit more than future ecologies.
Yeah. Past, present, future.
The whole gamut.
So, I wanted to start with a little exercise.
Okay.
Deep breath. I want you to picture yourself in a forest.
Okay.
The first thing that comes to mind, what are you seeing?
I see the boughs of the trees. I see... light streaming through it.
Tell me what you smell.
I smell the spicy aroma of different saps. I smell... a smelly rotten mushroom.
What do you feel?
I feel a little mist raining down on me from the water on the branches.
Taste anything?
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.
When you look straight up, like, what are you seeing?
I see cedar branches and fir needles.
And what can you hear?
Some chipmunks fighting. Maybe a flicker pecking. Some birds song
Yeah.
Some trickling creeks.
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?
Mhm
Okay. So change of scene. Now picture yourself in a garden.
Okay.
First thing that comes to mind.
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 –
That what you see.
Yeah.
What do you smell?
Oh, rose bushes and flowers of different varieties. I smell a little bit of rotting fruit on the ground. I smell rich compost.
That almost like alcoholic kind of like –
Yeah
– anaerobic. It's that like very particular smell of municipal compost.
Yeah.
What do you hear?
I mean, if I'm in Strathcona gardens, I probably hear trucks backing up. And air compressors. Nearby traffic fire engines.
Yeah,
Yeah.
What do you feel?
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.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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.
Forest and garden.
The garden that I picture is actually really specific too.
Where's that?
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 BBridges 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
it's got like little hoop houses, pathways, rows of vegetables between them
Okay
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 –
Right.
– 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?
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 –
That is the low hanging fruit of the fruit world, right?
Probably the lowest.
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.
Beautiful.
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.
He knew what he was doing.
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.
Who would have known?! Food can grow!
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." 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.
You don't have to choose
You don't have to choose. You can have your food forest and eat it too.
Amazing. Introduction Voiceover: 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. 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.
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.
This is David and he was right in the middle of this crucible, at college studying Environmental Design,
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.
By chance he would meet, and then later move in with his future collaborator, a teacher of his named Bill Mollison.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, you couldn't see gardens for the plants at the time, but –
That's fair.
Yeah. But David and Bill, they become fascinated by this idea of forest gardens.
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.
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.
Right.
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.
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.
Okay, so for those of you haven't guessed yet, we are talking about the origins of permaculture with David Holmgren.
Hello, I'm David Holmgren, co-originator of the permaculture concept with Bill Mollison back in the 1970s.
For the uninitiated, Permaculture is usually thought of as a form of holistic organic gardening, or something like that.
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
how we organize our lives, both at an individual level right through to a societal level.
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.
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.
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.
Absolutely. Yeah. And that's appropriate, because, you know, that's kind of where this all started.
Yeah.
And I'm really grateful to David and Bill for sparking this conversation for so many people, including me. 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.
Yeah.
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.
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.
Food forests: they've been here all along.
It's about time we got to know them.
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.
Who turns that down?
Definitely not us. It feels amazing to be out here again. Oh, feels amazing to be off Galiano Island.
Feels amazing to be in the shade.
Hey!
Hello.
How's it going?
So good.
So nice to meet you!
I'm like a little star struck!
Is that right?
Yeah, are you kidding?
We're feeling the same way!
So which...
I'm Mendel.
Mendel.
Adam.
Adam.
This is Dr. Chelsey Armstrong: archaeologist, historical ecologist and Assistant Professor in Indigenous Studies at Simon Fraser University.
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.
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.
Yeah.
There was Douglas fir trees and western red cedar, some big leaf maple, and an assortment of the typical understory shrubs, you'd expect
Mostly ferns.
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.
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...
And then it hit us.
This place is wild!
Isn't it?
It feels immediately different from what we were just walking through.
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,
Like an orchard, almost? Nicely spaced and just -
Except that my orchard is not going to look this good 150 years after I let it go.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, like like things like hazelnut, right, which I think you're grabbing right now.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
A modified landscape full of perennial stuff that you can eat. You know, forest garden.
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.
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..
As Chelsey was explaining how this Hazelnut-Crabapple forest garden is embedded in a larger, diverse food producing landscape...
And so they're all very different. But yeah, we're looking more at the orchard like iteration. Yeah.
We started noticing that there were all of these little depressions between the trees.
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.
My name is Morgan Ritchie. I've been Sts'ailes' heritage research archaeologist for about 12 years now.
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.
What you can see already right off the bat, though, is that you see this kind of clean sand there.
Yeah
This this is just like flood... flood sediments. And then you see the really thick layer of charcoal?
Indicating, of course, that there was a fire here.
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.
Morgan and his team think that these cooking pits were used frequently over long periods of time.
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.
I was gonna say, I've dug holes.
Yeah.
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.
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.
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.
Lhemqwatel means "the good place to pick... things".
Tells you what you need to know.
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.
This is Stephanie.
Stephanie Leon Riedl.
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.
I am the Lands Executive Assistant for Xa'xa Temexw Shxweli, which is Sts’ailes Lands Department.
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.
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.
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.
Effectively zoning and civic planning.
Yeah, all the boring stuff.
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.
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.
And Stephanie hopes that it won't be long before Lhemqwatel – this place of plenty – is officially designated, and tended, as a forest garden.
Yeah, it's a good spot. People hold it in high regard.
You can't restore these places without like understanding exactly why they exist in the first place.
Exactly
Looking around, I'm like this place looks delicious. I'd sit down here and like, you know, cook something.
Oh, yeah, I do all the time. Grab a snack, take a seat on the carpet.
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.
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.
More on that, right after this.
I'm Adam.
Mendel.
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.
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
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.
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, Ova-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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Kind of like strawberries, huh?
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.
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.
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.
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.
And so there's kind of this layered multi-species thing going on with the maintenance of these places.
That's permaculture, right?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
In David's telling, Bill Mollison was working closely with Indigenous communities in Australia as he was formulating what would become permaculture. 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.
Which is... it's a totally fair point.
Yeah.
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.
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.
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.
Hi, Adam. My name is Hannah Roessler.
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,
Usually kind of wearing an archaeologist ethnobotanist hat at that point, yeah.
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.
Congratulations.
Thanks! Anyway, we had a lovely chat about our early 20s.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
She tells Doña Ines all about permaculture design thinking, and food forests, and the ethics, and the principles.
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.
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?"
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.
Not every young permaculturist gets their head set straight this early in the game, and in such a gentle way.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Right, like, how can you enter the space responsibly instead of, I don't know, bursting through the wall screaming "oh yeah!" Like, like the Kool Aid man... Right?
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
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.
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.
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
to listen to what origin stories, and language, and place names, and even governance systems are actually telling us about how the world works.
And in that spirit, I'd like to bring us back to Sts'ailes for one last introduction.
Chaquawet te skwíxs, tèlí tsel kw'e Sts'ailes. My traditional name is Chaquawet, and people know me as Willie Charlie.
Willie helped us understand the worldview that produced these gardens in the first place – to help us see with the other eye.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. The area that we're in is called Lhemqwatel. I understand Lhemqwatel means a place of everything.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
Better yet, if you know someone who can make introductions.
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."
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.
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.
It's an invitation to think about every ecosystem a little differently.
And that invitation goes out to more than just permaculturists. It's also an important one for academics.
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.
Archaeologists, ecologists, and other people who are working in academia, you know, hey, look around you, and try and find these patterns.
So slow down, take a seat on the carpet. Ask and listen.
There are gardens and gardeners everywhere.
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?
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
This episode was produced by myself Adam Huggins.
And me, Mendel Skulski.
With the voices of David Holmgren, Chelsey Armstrong, Morgan Ritchie, Stephanie Leon Riedl, Hannah Roessler, and Willie Charlie. 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.
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
Special thanks to Meg Ulman, Sue Dennett, Emma Sise, Brendan Hocura, Mark Sutherland, Naomi Okabe, Michael Yadrick, and Cassandra Alan.
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.
Alright, that's it for this one. Bye for now.