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.

– – –

For musical credits, episode transcript, citations, and more:

https://www.futureecologies.net/listen/fe-4-1-forest-garden

🌱

Future Ecologies is independent and ad-free. This podcast is possible thanks to our supporters on Patreon

Join our community of supporting listeners for access to early releases, a rad discord server, and more

✨https://www.patreon.com/futureecologies ✨

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.

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,

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 HugginsFood 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.

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.