Ep.123 The Myth of No Farms, No Food | Reclaiming Our Role as Ecosystem Engineers

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Hello, hello, hello, everyone.

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Welcome back to another episode of Reconnect With Plant Wisdom.

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It’s me, Tigrilla.

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Gardenia.

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This episode is so powerful because it completely reframes something that we have been indoctrinated to a certain extent, we’ve been taught since we were little, especially if you grew up in North America, you have lived with these series of myths.

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And Elspeth Hay really just cuts through it and talks about the myths around food and what it means to be part of your ecosystem and how the ecosystem where you live needs you.

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Not this idea that we as human beings are separate and that we should be like e- you know, staying away from nature and not entering into it, but that instead, we need to find our place in it.

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And specifically, we need to find our place in the ecosystem as beings of nature who are part of the web of life and that includes feeding and being fed and this whole relationship, and all of this for her started with an acorn.

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Yes, acorns are edible and there is so much that we are going to be going into.

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You are absolutely love it.

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And more importantly, we’re gonna bust one of the biggest myths out there, which is the name of this episode, because this is episode 123, The Myth of No Farm and No Food with Elspeth Hay.

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I hope you enjoy.

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Welcome to Reconnect With Plant Wisdom.

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I’m your host, Tigrilla.

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Gardenia, nature inspired mentor, certified life coach, and the founder of the Naturally Conscious Community.

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For over a decade, I’ve been known as a world ambassador for plant advocacy, working closely with plants to share their practical wisdom to help you consciously embody the elements of life that nourish your evolution.

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In this podcast, I delve into ancient and modern knowledge from biology to spirituality about the wondrous ways of plants.

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Together, we’ll explore how ecosystem thinking helps you overcome limiting beliefs, understand the true nature of relationships, and live an authentic, impactful life.

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Elspeth, I, um

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When, when you and I first spoke, I loved that you made a comment ’cause I, I gave you my little spiel that I always give everybody that r- my podcast is all about like working with plants and you were like so excited, so, so excited and I was l- I loved it.

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So before we start and we kind of dive into everything that you have discovered about, you know, acorns ’cause that’s like the core of your love, um, please tell everybody who is Elspeth.

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I am a mother, and a journalist, and a gardener, and now a basket weaver.

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That’s a new part of me.

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Uh, and I live on Cape Cod in the middle of the Cape Cod National Seashore, which is out into the Atlantic about 90 miles, uh, in a big oak and pitch pine forest that’s mostly protected, and I love it there.

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I’m feel really lucky to be there.

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Beautiful.

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And, uh, and I already have a few, like, like, I had a few questions jotted down, but now as you’ve s- just in those few words, you added a few more to me.

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But you also

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You’re, you’re not just a journalist, you’re an author.

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I mean, you’ve, you’ve authored a book which is very much connec- connected to plants.

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Can- you know, the- t- tell us about the book.

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Yeah, the book just came out.

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I guess I’m still getting used to adding author to the to the line-up.

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Add it to your repertoire, girl.

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Um- It’s yours, you’ve earned it.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, it’s only been like a, a week or 2 that the book’s been out in the world, um, as of this time that we’re talking.

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So my book is called Feed Us With Trees, Nuts, and the Future of Food, and it’s been about a 5year journey doing the research, putting together pros- proposal, and writing.

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Um, and it all started when I learned that we can eat acorns and this oak forest around my house that I’d always seen as an impediment to food production ’cause it’s all protected and can’t be cleared for farmland, suddenly I started seeing things in a really different light and a lot of stories that I had held my whole life just started unraveling and rewriting, uh, and going in all new directions.

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So-

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yeah, it’s been a pretty fun ride.

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I like how

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I, I, I, I love how you just said, you know, “This forest that I look as an impediment because it can’t be cleared for agriculture” which in my mind, I’m like, “Thankfully.

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Thankfully.”

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But, but I guess I had never thought about it as the opposite, you know, the idea of people who do want to create farmland because they think that that is the way to add and to feed and all of a sudden, you’re like here’s this forest in the middle of it.

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How, how did you even start with this?

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Like how did you start going down this rabbit hole?

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Yeah.

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Well, so I grew up in Maine in a community that had a lot of farmland, so I was, um

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You know, I grew up going with my parents to the farmer’s market, I knew a lot of farmers as a kid, and I knew sort of the good and the bad of farming.

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I learned as a kid, you know, what industrial agriculture was doing to our land and our water and our air and it made me incredibly sad that this most basic need, like our need to eat food, was destroying wild places and the habitat of other creatures.

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Uh, but it was also a little bit of a double-edged sword ’cause I also really enjoyed, obviously, all the food that these farmers were growing and going to the farmer’s market.

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And so when I moved to Cape Cod to this place that has.

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almost no farmland becau- it, you know, for a few reasons, partly because, like, 70% of the land in my town and on the Outer Cape is protected, but also because it’s so sandy that even where people do have land, it’s pretty hard to grow row crops.

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I just sort of was looking, you know, looking for the farmer’s market, looking for the locally produced food, and there is some, but I always thought, “Oh, the forest is just in the way, you know?

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We can’t have that here.”

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Um, and I, someone sent me

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So I became a reporter, a journalist for the radio station here and my beat is food and the environment.

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So I’ve been talking to people about food and the environment for more than 15 years and no one had ever mentioned eating acorns, and then a friend sent me this TEDx talk by a woman in Greece named Marcy Mayer, and she was originally from California, and she said that acorns are edible and they’re a superfood, and one of humans’ oldest foods, and I was like, “Wait, what?”

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And so-

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that was kind of what started my journey, and I went completely down the rabbit hole, like, started reading everything I could find about people eating acorns, you know, all different cultures, and then from acorns expanded into other tree nuts, so chestnuts and hazelnuts and walnuts.

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Just couldn’t stop reading, basically, and, and talking to people and trying to learn more.

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Yeah, the whole thing of acorns, I’ve, um, I’ve heard it over the, over the years in different, from, from different people in different ways because I live in an area that is very chestnut-rich, and most- Mm-hmm.

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people think that the chestnuts here are actually native, but it turns out that they weren’t, and when, in around the 18, 17, 1800s there was a massive famine, and a duchess in the area discovered the whole idea of the superfood that is chestnuts, not only chestnuts but chestnut trees and, uh, everything that comes from, um, that, from that particular plant.

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And so she ended up encouraging them to be planted all over the place.

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So this is an area that’s very rich in them because, as you said, they’re a superfood, it’s, like, really nutrient-dense, it’s good brain food we call it here, and then the tree, uh, also grows very tall, very straight, so great for poles, for, um, vineyards, and other kinds of things.

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And, um, the only problem is that the chestnut leaves are very acidic so then when they fall down, they actually create, like, the ecosystem doesn’t know how to handle it, so you have to kind of treat- Yeah.

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the whole thing differently.

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But we also have a lot of oak and nobody around here, even though we talk a lot and we gather and we have, this is, you know, we do Chestnut Festival and, you know, we have everything from chestnut flower to, you know, eating chestnuts in so many different ways.

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One of my favorite, favorite, favorite things is butter and chestnuts which they do up in the mountains here.

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It’s, like, delicious- Oh.

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but nobody really talks about the acorns.

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It’s kind of like this art.

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In part I had heard, but I’d love to hear from you more as, it’s because also you have to, you know, you have to work at it to eat an acorn.

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It’s not like pick it up and, you know, maybe boil it for 5 minutes like you do a, a chestnut and you can eat.

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Like, w- why do you think that it’s been this lost art and, and the fact that these are edible plants, you know, that in so many different ways?

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It really depends on where you are.

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So when I first started talking to people about acorns, I thought, “Oh, we’re talking about acorns, right?

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An acorn is an acorn.”

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But of course that’s not true.

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There’s hundreds of different species of oaks and all of their nuts are a little bit different.

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So the first acorn, uh, eaters who I started getting to know, um, were in present day California, so I got to know an indigenous man named Ron Reed.

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He’s a medicine man, biologist, uh, and his people, the Karuk people, have eaten acorns since time immemorial as a staple food, so one of their biggest foods.

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Uh, and it turns out that the acorns from the tanoak tree where he lives are much easier to leach.

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So acorns have to be processed.

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Like you mentioned, they have these bitter tannins in them-

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which on the one hand, are kind of cool because they’re an amazing preservative, so acorns have this food safety storage life that is almost unlike anything else.

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They can last for decades in their shells, just waiting to be cracked.

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Um, but on the other hand, it’s a pain in the butt and you have to get the tannins out in order to eat them because, just like olives, right?

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So olives have those exact same compounds.

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Probably where you are, more people have tried to eat an olive straight off the tree and had the terrible experience of realizing how incredibly disgusting and bitter it tastes-

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and spitting it out.

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Um, but obviously that hasn’t stopped us from making olives a major food.

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A staple food.

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Yeah, yeah.

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So but the thing about tannins is that they’re water soluble, so, um, it depends on what you’re making, right?

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If you’re making olive oil, the tannins don’t get into the fat, so you can just press the olive- Right.

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and get that oil out without any tannin.

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But if you’re making table olives, you have to soak them in brine and, or you can use lye, and the same is true actually, I started learning when

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Cause I would say, Ron, you know, how do you process your acorns?

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Oh, we just pour water through a few times and then they’re sweet.

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And then I would try that with my acorns and it would be like, uh, no they’re not.

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They’re still-

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really bitter, they don’t taste good at all.

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Uh, and as I started talking to more people in different places, I learned that people in different places, uh, created different techniques to deal with the tannins because some tannins are more stubborn than others and they leach differently.

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They, you know, they come out into water differently.

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So the answer is that I think we’ve lost a lot of really s- place-specific knowledge and in some places, it maybe made more sense for the acorns to be fed to pigs because they were just so hard to leach and such a pain in the butt that it wasn’t worth it.

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In other places, it made more sense to make acorns into flour.

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In other places, people actually

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There is acorn oil.

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It’s this incredible orange color and you can press it out of the acorn for some of the more oily species.

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And so, and then in other places, people would leach the tannins out with lye, just, you know, and lye sounds kind of scary, right?

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It’s this, like caustic- Exactly.

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uh, experience, but it’s used in traditional corn processing for nixtamalization.

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It’s used in olive processing, so it’s actually not that crazy to use it in acorn processing.

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It’s just a skill that we’ve lost and forgotten.

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E- and I find that so interesting to, to think about how a, how acorns who on one level, because, you know, w- working so long with plants, right, oaks are, are just the cornerstone, like a keystone species in so many different places, and even iconic for so many people.

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Like there is this high level of recognition of an oak, and also of an oak’s purpose in maintaining an ecosystem, right, the idea that you have this oak tree that carries out different functions throughout the course of, you know, that, that plant’s life where starting with nutrition and food and the acorns for the squirrels and the small animals and then all these other functions that start to grow out of that as the tree grows in size, right, um, opening little holes

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for lots of different species that can use the body, the root systems, the leaves.

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Like there is just this entire ecosystem that is created around oak and they’re revered, revered by us as humans in so many stories and, you know, folklore and stuff like that.

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And yet this part of the food element, the element of the, the oak directly nourishing us in so many aspects has been lost, and I just find it

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Yes, I know it’s hard, but as you said, so are olives.

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Like it’s not the, it’s not like

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and there’s lots of other kinds of, you know, plants out there that e- even the chestnuts themselves.

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Let me say, as a person who spends almost every year in the chestnut season collecting chestnuts and working with them, they’re pretty

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those husks are dangerous, man.

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You’ve gotta come up with a technique.

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Some people use the foot technique.

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They, like step on the husk and then with, you know, can like sneak in there to grab the nuts out.

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Other people have like thick gloves.

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Like there’s techniques to do this, so it’s not the easiest food either, and yet for so many, so many of us, the idea of anything edible that is oak based just seems, you know, lost, completely lost, and I, I’m, I’m still shocked about it as I think about it more and more.

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Yeah, I mean, it’s, it, that was kind of what drew me in in the first place was my parents were bird watchers and so I had spent my whole life, you know, learning about bird habitat and how important th- this tree was for wildlife, and there are so many efforts where I live to restore wildlife habitat.

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You know, we have to have these trees for wildlife, we have to keep this land protected as a forest for wildlife, and I think that what’s been lost from the conversation is that that’s also human habitat and- And that humans are wildlife too.

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Yeah, and we don’t, uh, we don’t talk about ourselves as having a habitat, and I think that, um, you know, I had this experience of going down to Pennsylvania, which is about 6 or 7 hours south of where I live on Cape Cod, and there was a man there named John Hershey in the 1920s who, as part of a recovery from the Great Depression, started experimenting with these fruit and nut tree nurseries, um, and he was actually

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part of the Roosevelt Administration during the economic recovery from the Great Depression, and they were sending these trees out to these devastated communities and, you know, they were devastated economically but also environmentally from a lot of clear cutting.

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And so his thought was, Hey-“

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we can basically create human habitat by sending these trees out, restoring the area ecologically, and restoring it in terms of food production for people who are starving right now.

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And it actually reached the highest levels of American government for a while.

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It fell apart, he got cancer, and World War II started, but for about 10 years there, it was this big thing.

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And so I heard that story, I got interested, and I heard that some of the trees were still standing, and I went down to, um, what people were calling North America’s oldest food forest, and, um, I would add North America’s oldest European American food forest-

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cause there’s indigenous food forests everywhere, but, uh- G- g- good points, good point to make.

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Yeah.

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Uh, but it was really cool.

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So we’re, like, standing next to a nail salon, right, and there’s these super old American persimmons, and then at the church there’s these huge burr oak trees, huge chestnut trees, just all scattered throughout suburbia, um, and it was kind of the first example that I had seen of someone trying to actually create human habitat in, you know, at the time it wasn’t as suburban, but he really took the landscape around

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his little town and was like, Let’s create a habitat that’s for both humans and wildlife and livestock.

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Like, let’s actually look at all the elements of life in this community and try to feed all of them with these trees.

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And when I started talking to the people down there, cause there’s this group who’s been working to save the trees, one of them said something that really kind of upended my understanding of our food stories and my own food history, and he was like, Yeah, you know, humans need habitat, and so many of us here who are Euro-American are refugees from our home countries where we lost access to traditional lands

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and traditional food production methods, and I was totally confused when he started saying that.

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That’s not a history that we talk about in the U.S.

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You know, I grew up as a little kid with the story that my ancestors came here because it’s a land of opportunity, and that story, I mean, it’s told in school, it’s told again and again and again and again, and so I was sort of, like, weirded out when he said that, like, Oh, we’re all refugees, I was like, What?

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Like, What are you talking about?

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But when I started looking back through the history, he was totally right, and this whole land of opportunity story is kind of one written to cover up, I think, the real trauma of a lot of Euro-Americans who immigrated here, um, in the early, like, 1600s, 1700s, 1800s.

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So yeah.

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I don’t know.

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We can go deeper into that, but that was- I, I would love to go deeper into it because as a person who, you know, I also grew up in the United States.

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I grew up in South Florida where, you know, it’s on one hand, the idea of fruit trees are everywhere, you know, the y- w- when I was a kid, the idea of buying mangoes and avocados was, like, never came into our consciousness cause people would show up at school with these giant bags filled with them saying, Please take them.

157
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There’s just so many.

158
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They’re, they’re breaking our cars.

159
00:19:50,591 –> 00:20:03,831.0000000002328
Like, you had to know where to park your car to make sure to make sure that they didn’t come, because they’re huge there, like, the avocados are really giant, and so are the mangoes, and they would, of course, land on your car and break your windshield or, like, dent your hood and stuff, so-

160
00:20:03,831.0000000002328 –> 00:20:07,419
during the season you knew not to park in those areas.

161
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And, of course, we also have lots of coconut trees, and so there’s certain things, uh, that were embedded into- that still are embedded into the landscape, and that, you know, it’s common to see somebody climb up to a coconut tree, grab a coconut, bring it back down.

162
00:20:22,119 –> 00:20:36,540
Um, and even though we still buy them, but it’s- you know, we have all these places, Palacio de Jugos, which is like this big location that makes all kinds of different juices because there are, you know, sugarcane and all the other kinds of fruit that’s there.

163
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And, and, um- but I remember that when my friend- I have a friend of mine who spent the last 20 years of her life, um, when she moved to, to South Florida, creating a food forest out of her home.

164
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And we’ve had so many discussions about, like, just- it, it, it’s- it is lost to a certain extent.

165
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And then here I am, I live in northern Italy, where, as you said, like, we don’t, we don’t have- like m- the biggest cities or- Turin is about 45 minutes.

166
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I’m in the middle of the mountains, so 45 minutes to an hour away from me, and, and Milan is an hour and a half to 2 hours away from me.

167
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And so everything here is built like that, like, everything is around- uh, I, I’m so happy- no offense, no offense to you cows- but the cows finally moved over to the different pasture from the one in front of my house because their bells keep me up all night with the clanging and the clanging, especially when the bull gets a little spicy and then there’s, like, lots of clanging all over the place.

168
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Ooh, oof.

169
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It’s craziness.

170
00:21:32,719 –> 00:21:58,879
But, you know, like, like once a year we have the wild garlic that surges in the area by the river, and so everybody goes down to grab- it’s like this giant population of wild garlic, and we all go and we grab our ears full, or we still have, like, um, where we spend one e- once a year creating the, the tomato sauce for the entire year, so giant production of tomato sauce plus all of the natural things.

171
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Persimmons, oh my goodness, we once had a work exchange that, that ended up harvesting- we had 2 persimmons trees in the house that I was living at at the time, and I think we ended up with like 90 or 100 kilos of persimmons from these 2 trees.

172
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Wow.

173
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Which was fantastic ’cause I love persimmons, and you have to wait so long for them to ripen completely.

174
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But, you know, it’s like- i- it’s just the way it is around here.

175
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It’s, it’s all over the place, it’s all around you, and so once you learn, you, you feel safe, you know where to get food, you know all these different pieces.

176
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And then you go to the- to the United States and you’re like, “Gotta go to a supermarket.

177
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Gotta go to a supermarket.”

178
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Yes.

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And that’s scary as hell for people because it means if you don’t got no money, you ain’t got no money, you ain’t got no food.

180
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And I feel like that is one of the major trauma points, one of that- one of those examples of that trauma of disconnection with nature.

181
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When I forget that I am th- I am nature, therefore it’s natural for me to eat from the natural world and to have that relationship with food in that way, um, that, that they feed me and I feed them and, and all of this piece, I feel like that causes so much trauma for people.

182
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And so our cities are built to instill trauma and separation, and that is just such a sad thing to see, that people flock to living in these cities, which have benefits.

183
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I, I, I have no problem with the density or with other aspects.

184
00:23:28,079 –> 00:23:58,259
But that disconnection, like you said, the fact that you can’t have orange trees in the middle of the street that you just pick as you walk, or, you know, that we don’t think anymore about the trees on our sidewalks and in 0 as part of our living ecosystem that we’re in relationship with and also we’re being nourished by, I feel like it just- it instills this need of, like, make money, make money, make money, make money, ’cause then you’re gonna starve and you’re not gonna be able to do anything and you’re not gonna have any food and you’re not gonna be able to- you know, all these types

185
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of pieces.

186
00:24:00,199 –> 00:24:13,299
Yeah, well, and when we look- when I started looking back at the history, ’cause I, I grew up with that story, you know, I call it- in the book I call it the no farms, no food story, just this idea that if we’re not creating farms, there’s nothing in the world for us to eat.

187
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We don’t have a habitat, we’re not like other species, you know, we have to destroy these wild places just to meet this need.

188
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And I started trying to understand, you know, once I saw, okay, that’s really not true, I started unders- trying to understand, well, then why do we think this, right?

189
00:24:29,918.9999999997672 –> 00:24:47,504
And I just followed my own ancestry back and back ’cause it seemed like, uh, when I started looking at it, that really was a story in communities like mine, where, you know, it was a lot of European immigrants fro- who have been here for a long time.

190
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And in more recent immigrant communities, people were still in relationship with a lot of these wild foods, still understand the world as edible, same as in a lot of indigenous communities.

191
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So I was trying to figure out, okay, where did we get separated?

192
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And the, the no farms, no s- food story, I started to realize as I read, was actually really intentionally written with the birth of colonialism and capitalism, and this sort of internal colonization that happened in England and Europe prior to the spread of colonization into, you know, North America, South America, Australia, all these other places.

193
00:25:28,739 –> 00:25:41,008
And the whole point of the story was that all these public lands, which were called commons in England, where my ancestors are from, were being privatized.

194
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And there was a- obviously, you know, if you’re taking something that belongs to the people where they have fed themselves for hundreds or thousands of years, there’s gonna be protest and there’s gonna be uprising, and people protested incredibly strongly.

195
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You know, I had learned about the history of the witch trials

196
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and had just been told, “Oh, that was a weird religious thing.”

197
00:26:04,706.9999999997672 –> 00:26:10,028
Well, actually, that was women protesting for rights to these former common lands.

198
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And being the, the way that they addressed that and tried to shut that down was by saying that, “Oh, they were witches.”

199
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And in fact, you know, tens of thousands of women were killed for the crime of trying to still harvest food or medicine or plant materials that they needed from these lands that they had once been allowed to harvest from, and that were suddenly being privatized incredibly quickly.

200
00:26:36,208 –> 00:26:42,107
Um, I have a map in the book of the amount of common land that was privatized in England.

201
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I think it’s

202
00:26:43,327 –> 00:26:49,927.0000000002328
I forget the exact dates on that map, but it’s in a, the span of about 100 years, and it’s like a fifth of the country.

203
00:26:49,927.0000000002328 –> 00:26:53,647
I mean, it’s just huge amounts of land being enclosed.

204
00:26:53,647 –> 00:27:14,648.0000000002328
And so, that movement came to be known as the Enclosures, and it came along with this incredible amount of propaganda to say, “Well, this is a good thing, because now we can feed more people, because the farmland is more productive when it’s privatized, and those natural spaces, those ecosystems that we had before really didn’t produce much.”

205
00:27:14,648.0000000002328 –> 00:27:16,307
Now, of course, that’s not true.

206
00:27:16,307 –> 00:27:17,188
That’s not true at all.

207
00:27:17,188 –> 00:27:26,188
I spend a lot of time in the book looking at the yield question, because that is some of the propaganda of the no farms, no food story that I had deeply internalized.

208
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Like, “Well, we have to have these farms, because wild spaces don’t produce enough food.”

209
00:27:31,427.00000000023283 –> 00:27:32,667
They produce way more food.

210
00:27:32,667 –> 00:27:36,027
A healthy ecosystem produces way more food than a monoculture.

211
00:27:36,027 –> 00:27:36,747
Yup.

212
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So we gotta be able to let go of that.

213
00:27:38,487 –> 00:27:52,687
But I think in order to do that, we have to look back at this trauma and the fact that when a lot of early European immigrants came to North America, they tried to recreate these commons, and did successfully for a time.

214
00:27:52,687 –> 00:28:16,206.99999999976717
There, before the close of the Civil War in the United States, any unenclosed land, so unimproved was the word they used, and that meant, like, it didn’t have a building or it didn’t have a fenced in farm field, that was a place where people could hunt, gather, fish, find medicine, water, um, you know, weaving materials, building materials.

215
00:28:16,206.99999999976717 –> 00:28:21,267
Anything they needed for life, they could turn animals out to graze there.

216
00:28:21,267 –> 00:28:42,267
And what happened here, which is an incredibly sad piece of our history, is this system, you know, that they had worked so hard to get back after having to leave Europe when that land was enclosed, then after the close of the Civil War when enslaved African Americans were freed, they were also feeding themselves from this common spaces.

217
00:28:42,267 –> 00:28:52,147
And white plantation owners who wanted cheap labor and who wanted the African Americans to still be forced to work on the plantations started

218
00:28:52,147 –> 00:28:55,208
That, you know, they were, had the political power as well and the legal power.

219
00:28:55,208 –> 00:29:11,487
And within a year of the close of the Civil War, trespassed lands in every Southern state changed so that, you know, the hunting and gathering and the fishing and all these subsistence activities became illegal, and then that practice spread north and it spread west.

220
00:29:11,487 –> 00:29:20,467
And, um, there was this incredible closing of the commons that we had worked so hard to recreate.

221
00:29:20,467 –> 00:29:41,708
Uh, so there’s a lot of trauma there and a lot of disconnect that, you know, when you go to school as a kid and you just hear, like, “Oh, we came ’cause it was a land of opportunity, and we have to have farms because they’re so productive,” and it’s like, “Wow, you just swept a lot of history under the rug.”

222
00:29:41,708 –> 00:29:41,947
Yeah.

223
00:29:41,947 –> 00:29:49,187
And maybe that’s why so many of us are so confused about our relationship with the living world around us.

224
00:29:49,187 –> 00:30:00,187
You know, I don’t even like to use the term, the natural world, anymore, because that’s just another way of drawing a line between us and all the other life in our ecosystems.

225
00:30:00,187 –> 00:30:02,087
And we’re not separate from it.

226
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We’re part of it.

227
00:30:04,034 –> 00:30:12,608
Yeah, and you’ve touched on so many different points, like everything from the history that we’ve been told and, and, and more of anything, the fear story that we’ve been told.

228
00:30:12,608 –> 00:30:13,775.9999999997672
Like, anybody who- Yeah.

229
00:30:14,359 –> 00:30:32,860
time either in, with indigenous cultures or who, you know, has survival training really learns that there, that this whole separation piece and that this whole idea of extraction and colonization and that, “Oh, we have to do it this way because if not, you know, like you said, we can’t survive.”

230
00:30:32,860 –> 00:30:34,360
Or any of these pieces.

231
00:30:34,360 –> 00:30:47,919
It’s actually just bull, and it’s, it’s everything that we’ve been told, unfortunately, that makes us like, ma- makes us dependent on somebody and, and that’s really kind of the focus point.

232
00:30:47,919 –> 00:30:51,920
Not only that, but I think, and I think what we don’t realize is that we think, “Oh, that”

233
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Some people think that, “Oh, well, you know, you’re just talking about the fact that people don’t want to go and fish or don’t want to do those things.”

234
00:31:01,879 –> 00:31:08,219
Sure, okay, there might be people who don’t want to, but the problem is, we’re all afraid of it, we’re, we, we don’t know how to do it.

235
00:31:08,219 –> 00:31:18,379
So therefore, you’re, you’re cultivating this whole point of, like you said, separation, division, um, fear, uh, worry, all these other pieces.

236
00:31:18,379 –> 00:31:35,679
And so not only have we eliminated history that was so important to remember and we’ve changed dynamics that irreparably harm others, but we’re perpetuating something that continues to keep people in a state of, of fear on a regular basis.

237
00:31:35,679 –> 00:31:54,199
And, and that, the truth of the matter is that when you h- at least in my experience living here as well, you know, people sometimes ask, you know, “Why is it that, for example, in certain European countries, people are healthier or they don’t, you know, they might eat what seems to be like enormous amounts of olive oil and other stuff and they’re healthier?”

238
00:31:54,199 –> 00:32:02,319
And I’m like, “Part of that healthier is because there’s not this gorging on other stuff because the communion with the land, y- you don’t

239
00:32:02,319 –> 00:32:09,899
If I’m going out and I’m killing a cow to eat meat, I don’t kill 7 of them, like just to have them throw around, right?

240
00:32:09,899 –> 00:32:11,279
I, I kill one.

241
00:32:11,279 –> 00:32:12,319
I eat everything.”

242
00:32:12,319 –> 00:32:16,779
If you’re from places like Sardinia or even Sicily, you literally eat everything.

243
00:32:16,779 –> 00:32:21,899
I mean, these people will like head, hooves, like every single thing.

244
00:32:21,899 –> 00:32:26,939
There is no waste because this animal gave their life, and the same thing goes with the plants, right?

245
00:32:26,939 –> 00:32:30,019
I don’t go off and cultivate in this way.

246
00:32:30,019 –> 00:32:36,579
And I also find it really interesting, I did a, my master’s project on a town called Matera, which is down in the south of Italy.

247
00:32:36,579 –> 00:32:42,299
It’s one of the oldest continuously inhabited, um, cities in the entire world.

248
00:32:42,299 –> 00:32:44,379
It’s, it’s a troglodyte culture.

249
00:32:44,379 –> 00:32:52,446
It’s a culture that was originally in caves, and you can still l- like go and, and live in the caves the way people did back in the, in the, in those times.

250
00:32:53,339 –> 00:33:02,559
And one of the things that we discovered as I was working on my project, which was really beautiful, is that you had 3 different types of quote unquote “gardening” or “agriculture.”

251
00:33:02,559 –> 00:33:18,799
You had outside of the city, um, you had the, the stuff that today we think of as agriculture, which is really more a combination of well cultivated things and hunter-gatherer, ’cause in that time it was kind of a little bit mixed.

252
00:33:18,799 –> 00:33:27,979
Like, we were starting to learn that, “Ooh, if I hunted and I gathered in this way, then it would come up on a regular basis, so therefore I could start to sort of cultivate it.”

253
00:33:27,979 –> 00:33:32,119
I wasn’t doing rows, but I was doing that, and that was always outside of the city.

254
00:33:32,119 –> 00:33:36,139.00000000023283
Um, inside of the city, you had 2 different kinds of garden spaces.

255
00:33:36,139.00000000023283 –> 00:33:58,979
One was the one closest to the house or the one that was in the common area, like in that, in that shared space, and in that area, there was, um, usually the stuff that you used in the kitchen often, like, you know, the herbs and the different kinds of herbs and spices that could be grown, th- those types of pieces that add on to whatever it is, the meal that you’re cooking.

256
00:33:58,979 –> 00:34:04,379
And then there was a pensile garden, like a garden up above that was the contemplation garden.

257
00:34:04,379 –> 00:34:05,599
It was the garden of beauty.

258
00:34:05,599 –> 00:34:16,519.0000000002328
It was the garden of relationship with the natural world where I could sit and I could just, you know, be in this environment that was, you know, part of it.

259
00:34:16,519.0000000002328 –> 00:34:29,59.00000000023283
And so you had these 3 different types of relationships, but each one of them required you to also be in relationship with, because when I would go out, I wasn’t forcing the plants to grow in this way.

260
00:34:29,59.00000000023283 –> 00:34:33,259
I was, you know, working with the plants to see like, “Oh, okay, where do you come up?

261
00:34:33,259 –> 00:34:34,179
How do I move?

262
00:34:34,179 –> 00:34:35,179
Where do I go?

263
00:34:35,179 –> 00:34:36,759
How can I concentrate you?

264
00:34:36,759 –> 00:34:39,639.0000000002328
How can I bring more of you into my space?”

265
00:34:39,639.0000000002328 –> 00:34:54,399
And you’re, it’s like a dance that they were doing in this outside part, and then in the inside, you had the ones that were specifically working very closely with you on your day-to-day food, and then that piece that was about, “Hey, we need downtime.”

266
00:34:54,399 –> 00:35:05,979
Human beings and nature take time to renew, to grow and all those pieces, and so that pensile garden was built for that particular piece, and I always found that so beautiful.

267
00:35:05,979 –> 00:35:29,999
I loved working on this project and discovering all these different aspects of it because it made us, it made me really think about how we’ve distorted the city garden and all these other pieces, but how, how much we’ve lost also that, that herb garden or that dyeing clothes garden, that garden that should be super close to me because it’s, it’s in relation to

268
00:35:29,999 –> 00:35:32,538.9999999995343
It’s the medicine, like you said with the witches.

269
00:35:32,538.9999999995343 –> 00:35:34,139
Like, it’s my medicine.

270
00:35:34,139 –> 00:35:35,538.9999999995343
It’s my dyeing.

271
00:35:35,538.9999999995343 –> 00:35:36,319
It’s my

272
00:35:36,319 –> 00:35:39,119
Dyeing as in dyeing clothes, not dying as in I die –

273
00:35:39,119 –> 00:35:40,499
just to be clear.

274
00:35:40,499 –> 00:35:44,619
Like, it’s what I use to dye clothes and what I, you know, use for cleaning.

275
00:35:44,619 –> 00:35:50,579
Like, it’s like a, there’s all these different elements that I used to get out of that, and we’ve lost it.

276
00:35:50,579 –> 00:35:57,479
We- we’ve lost it, and it’s hard to reacquire because herbalism seems complicated for people.

277
00:35:57,479 –> 00:36:02,359
“Oh, I have to memorize all these plants and I’ve gotta do that,” where this was built out of relationship.

278
00:36:02,359 –> 00:36:05,520
You might not have ever known the official name of those plants.Yeah.

279
00:36:07,792 –> 00:36:10,791
I’m just thinking as you’re talking, 2 things are popping up.

280
00:36:10,791 –> 00:36:33,511
The first is just how amazing it is to watch kids absorb this, these relationships, like my daughters are 10 and 13, and I’ve been doing a foraging class at their school for the past, I don’t know, since they were in kindergarten, just taking kids out after school, and all we do is walk around outside and they’ll say, “What’s this?”

281
00:36:33,511 –> 00:36:39,351
You know, we just talk about the plants and the fungi and whatever we run into, we just learn about it, even if I don’t know what it is.

282
00:36:39,351 –> 00:36:51,811
We look it up, we see what people have done with it in the past, what the relationship’s been, and my younger daughter especially, I think, is just called into these relationships more.

283
00:36:51,811 –> 00:36:57,951
And, you know, I grew up knowing none of this stuff, and to her, it’s kind of almost like boring.

284
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Like don’t, you know, “What do you”

285
00:37:00,491 –> 00:37:18,211.00000000046566
Someone’ll, ’cause she’s, you know, she knows a lot more than some of the other kids n- and especially now, she’s in, she’s going into 5th grade, so she’s like the big, big kid on, at school, and I’ve told her like, “Okay, you can’t really talk at foraging class, because like you’re, you know too much, you’re, you’re like, oh me.”

286
00:37:18,211.00000000046566 –> 00:37:19,371
You’re not the right audience.

287
00:37:19,371 –> 00:37:20,720.0000000004657
You’re not the right audience.

288
00:37:21,511 –> 00:37:21,551
don’t know.

289
00:37:21,551 –> 00:37:38,331
But it’s really cool to see how much can shift in one generation of just, and it’s not like I know everything by any stretch of the imagination, you know, I’ve been in relationship with this place where I live now for about 20 years, but it’s slow gaining knowledge, you know?

290
00:37:38,331 –> 00:37:41,566
I try to learn like one new mushroom a year, 1, you know.

291
00:37:42,131 –> 00:37:46,651
But she’s just like a sponge and she’s like, “Oh, yeah, you can do that with this, you could do that with this.”

292
00:37:46,651 –> 00:37:56,751
And it’s like, I love watching her and thinking like, “Wow, 2 or 3 generations of that and you’ve rebuilt so many relationships with a place.”

293
00:37:56,751 –> 00:38:12,771
Um, and the other thing I was thinking about when you were talking about these garden zones is, one thing that I got really fascinated by as I started learning about oak trees and humans eating acorns, um, the friend I mentioned earlier, Ron Reed, who’s the Karuk medicine man.

294
00:38:12,771 –> 00:38:36,311
So I went out to visit him in California, and I was asking him a lot of questions about, um, how, you know, how they took care of the oaks, how they tended them, and it turns out that the traditional method of tending oak woodlands and oak grasslands, actually not just where he is, but in most of North America where these systems were prevalent, is with fire.

295
00:38:36,311 –> 00:38:36,491
Mm-hmm.

296
00:38:36,491 –> 00:38:39,231
And he kept telling me, “Fire is medicine.”

297
00:38:39,231 –> 00:38:41,831
You know, fire is prayer, fire is medicine.

298
00:38:41,831 –> 00:38:51,696
He told me about the world renewal summ- ceremonies that his people host every year, where they intentionally light fires in specific places to keep the land healthy.

299
00:38:52,331 –> 00:38:58,431
Uh, and when I came back, I started looking at, and they had these zones, right, which is what reminded me.

300
00:38:58,431 –> 00:39:12,560
They had the zone close to the villages and the houses where they burned, you know, maybe every year to keep things kind of open and promote certain species, and then in the woodlands, they would burn on maybe a slightly longer rotation because they were trying to create different habitat.

301
00:39:13,231 –> 00:39:25,168
And when I got home, I was really surprised to learn that fire was also a part of my home landscape on Cape Cod, and that there was actually a study, a prescribed fire study in an oak forest about a mile from my house.

302
00:39:25,671.0000000004657 –> 00:39:48,471
So I convinced them to let me go out on a burn, and they were doing something similar, sort of trying to regain some lost knowledge burning every year in some plots, you know, every 4 years in some plots, and I ended up just going totally down that rabbit hole too, thinking, “Okay, if I’m, if I’m into these oaks,” um, because it, they’re having trouble regenerating because of fire suppression.

303
00:39:48,471 –> 00:39:48,491
Right.

304
00:39:48,491 –> 00:40:02,231
So in a lot of landscapes, these places that, you know, if you go on the Parks Service website for the place where I live, it will say it’s natural and pristine, um, words that suggest, you know, it’s better if humans just stay out of it.

305
00:40:02,231 –> 00:40:02,711.0000000004657
Right.

306
00:40:02,711.0000000004657 –> 00:40:22,451
But there’s another little subset on the website about the prescribed fire program, and it’s like, “Humans have burned here for thousands of years,” and, um, these ecosystems need fire to regenerate properly, and so it’s this other disconnect, this place where our trauma shows up of like, oh, no, these places are wild and pristine.

307
00:40:22,451 –> 00:40:26,411
Well, yeah, only if you erase all their Indigenous history and, uh, like- Exactly.

308
00:40:26,411 –> 00:40:29,840
we don’t talk about anything that happened to create them.

309
00:40:29,840 –> 00:40:37,680
But, um, I ended up getting certified in prescribed fire, and I’ve now been going on some of these burns in oak ecosystems.

310
00:40:38,259 –> 00:40:45,020
And it’s just so exciting to start to study all the little nuances, right?

311
00:40:45,020 –> 00:40:50,079
Like, you know, the first day I show up and had no idea what to do really.

312
00:40:50,079 –> 00:41:03,696
Someone said, Okay, just hold this drip torch and light this line, and then by, like, the 5th or 6th time, you’re like, Okay, I th- I think they’re gonna say this because the fire’s gonna move this way, and these plants want it there, but these plants don’t want it.

313
00:41:04,360 –> 00:41:06,119
And it just

314
00:41:06,119 –> 00:41:24,699
It’s given me a real respect for the depth and the nuance of knowledge that it takes to really care for a place and get back into relationship with these species, and I’ve been thinking so much about how it’s like, okay, it’s taken, like, 500 years to

315
00:41:24,699 –> 00:41:30,999
for our relationships to get this out of whack and to be this disconnected, and we have to give ourselves, like

316
00:41:30,999 –> 00:41:42,359
I know there’s an urgency and, you know, we, we are in the midst of this climate crisis and this extinction crisis, but at the same time, it’s like, we don’t wanna hurry back into old patterns.

317
00:41:42,359 –> 00:41:50,979
And, uh, so I’ve been trying to, trying to think of and kind of live this mantra of, like, urgency without hurry.

318
00:41:50,979 –> 00:41:58,359
Like, you know, it is urgent that we relearn these relationships, but at the same time, we don’t, we don’t wanna rush it.

319
00:41:58,359 –> 00:42:07,419
Like, you gotta go at the pace of life and at the pace of relationship, and, um, I think

320
00:42:07,419 –> 00:42:07,779
I don’t know.

321
00:42:07,779 –> 00:42:08,592
I think that’s

322
00:42:09,659 –> 00:42:16,880
It’s a good mental space to inhabit when I can, when I can get there, and so that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot.

323
00:42:17,698 –> 00:42:19,999
I love that phrase, urgency without hurry.

324
00:42:19,999 –> 00:42:24,679
And, and as you said, it’s, it’s all about this relationship.

325
00:42:24,679 –> 00:42:34,480
I keep, I keep going around and trying with my, my own work to go in different directions, you know, trying to understand better what is going on and why is it that

326
00:42:35,339 –> 00:42:46,179
Ho- how do I explain or how do I get to the point of understanding why this relationship with plants, h- how has it changed my life and why is it so important for, for others to find their own?

327
00:42:46,179 –> 00:42:47,419
And it’s all about relationship.

328
00:42:47,419 –> 00:42:58,559
It always ends up coming back to relationship, and the fact that, as you just said, I lo- I loved how you were describing that after a while, you start to understand the nuances of who needs what, right?

329
00:42:58,559 –> 00:43:00,639
You know, Oh, these plants over here need

330
00:43:00,639 –> 00:43:07,719
You know, you can tell that they’re, they’re asking for the fire to come because we need that support, and these over here instead are like, No, no, we’re cool.

331
00:43:07,719 –> 00:43:08,659
Let us know.

332
00:43:08,659 –> 00:43:39,239
And when you’re doing that type of work at the, in the way that you’re doing it, which has this Indigenous sort of slant, this, this feeling into it, which is where the no hurry, uh, becomes so important, you do hear that, the whispers of those plants and of those other beings that end up kind of showing you what the landscape looks like and that you, your role, the reason why you evolved with 2 legs and 2 arms and the ability to hit flint and create a spark is

333
00:43:39,239 –> 00:43:40,519
actually for this.

334
00:43:40,519 –> 00:43:47,299
And I think that that’s the part that we, you know, get cau- getting caught up in the whole fear of the ego perspective, like you said.

335
00:43:47,299 –> 00:43:48,619
It’s like, oh, E.0.

336
00:43:48,619 –> 00:43:57,959
Wilson’s Half-Earth project, leave half of the Earth completely untouched, but that’s only because we humans are still kind of in this disconnection part.

337
00:43:57,959 –> 00:44:19,899
If you’re in the connection part, then that l- let this, let this part be includes humans also, because we’re just another species that developed with different body parts and different abilities in order to do what maybe a plant being sessile can’t do and can’t do it when the plant is sitting and has

338
00:44:19,899 –> 00:44:21,919
can’t run away, and can’t do it

339
00:44:21,919 –> 00:44:24,979
Just the same as I can’t move water the way a beaver can.

340
00:44:24,979 –> 00:44:25,239
Right?

341
00:44:25,239 –> 00:44:41,519
I rely on beavers to help me understand how the flow of water should be, just the same as the forest relies on me for my ability to hit flint and to create, you know, controlled fire movement, where many other species can’t do that same thing.

342
00:44:41,519 –> 00:44:45,719
And I think that rather than us continuously as human beings

343
00:44:45,719 –> 00:45:02,479
I mean, sometimes when I listen to a lot of the discussions around, you know, colonialism and eco-feminism and all this sp- which I l- I, I love in principle, I just keep saying to myself, When do we start talking about what are the skills that we need to reacquire in order to be part of

344
00:45:02,479 –> 00:45:03,619
Not good stewards.

345
00:45:03,619 –> 00:45:09,239
I’d hate that description too, personally, because again, it implies me above you, and you, you know

346
00:45:09,239 –> 00:45:10,179
But how

347
00:45:10,179 –> 00:45:23,999
What are the, what are the pieces that I need to learn and be a part of that I reembody my wildness and I figure out, okay, I have, you know, 10 fingers and 10 toes and the ability to run and eyes that do

348
00:45:23,999 –> 00:45:26,079
and vision being my primary thing.

349
00:45:26,079 –> 00:45:45,859
What am I good for, and what is it that I can bring to my landscape given my anatomy, physiology, mentality, and all these pieces that is different from the spider and the moth and the wasp over here that’s doing this, and, you know, the oak tree over here and the chestnut and, oh, these grasses?

350
00:45:45,859 –> 00:45:53,999
I mean, each one of us brings a different set of skills, chemicals that we produce, abilities for us to do that, and I just think we’re missing the mark.

351
00:45:53,999 –> 00:45:54,419
And I, I

352
00:45:54,419 –> 00:46:07,984
So I love what you were describing about your daughter of, like, not just learning, but learning in context as part of it, because I do think that that’s what we need to change, and it can change very quickly even if we go slow.Yes.

353
00:46:09,951 –> 00:46:10,311
Yes.

354
00:46:10,311 –> 00:46:11,991
I totally agree with that.

355
00:46:11,991 –> 00:46:22,512
And I think, for me, part of what was so exciting about the acorn discovery and the oaks and getting back into this relationship was there are kind of, like, these layers of it, right?

356
00:46:22,512 –> 00:46:25,531
Like the first layer was, like, Wow, we can eat acorns.

357
00:46:25,531 –> 00:46:26,371
That’s cool.

358
00:46:26,371 –> 00:46:31,091
Maybe we are a part of this place in ways that I don’t understand yet.

359
00:46:31,091 –> 00:46:34,731
And then the second layer was like, Right.

360
00:46:34,731 –> 00:46:36,691
Okay, and oaks are keystones.

361
00:46:36,691 –> 00:46:41,168
So if we are eating the acorns and we’re taking care of oaks, actually maybe we have, like

362
00:46:41,931 –> 00:46:43,911
We’re pretty important in this place.

363
00:46:43,911 –> 00:46:50,051
Like instead of just being bad for wild spaces or something that the landscape’s trying to get rid of.

364
00:46:50,051 –> 00:46:57,150
You know, we’ve all seen those post-apocalyptic movies or books where it’s like, Oh, the earth finally got rid of humans and it’s thriving.

365
00:46:57,812 –> 00:47:07,391
And then there was this other layer that, I think through conversations with Ron Reed and, and also the fire practitioners where I live, was like, Whoa, whoa, whoa.

366
00:47:07,391 –> 00:47:08,312
Wait a second.

367
00:47:08,312 –> 00:47:27,451
Not only are the oaks important ecologically, but actually in places all over the world, not just the Northern Hemisphere, but in almost every human culture in every place historically, a part of our job has been to create habitat for other species using fire.

368
00:47:27,451 –> 00:47:37,911
And if you look at the history of fire ecology, that’s true in Australia, that’s true in the Amazon, it’s true in the British Isles, it’s true all over North America.

369
00:47:37,911 –> 00:47:45,951
In this huge diversity of ecosystems, um, we are in the same category of keystone species as beavers.

370
00:47:45,951 –> 00:47:49,611
It’s, it’s great that you mention the beavers because we’re what

371
00:47:49,611 –> 00:47:51,971
So there’s different kinds of keystone species, right?

372
00:47:51,971 –> 00:47:54,311
So there’s, I don’t know, I’m

373
00:47:54,311 –> 00:47:57,631
I think your listeners are probably pretty plant-savvy so, you know-

374
00:47:57,631 –> 00:47:58,771
there’s bees, right?

375
00:47:58,771 –> 00:47:59,731
They’re mutualists.

376
00:47:59,731 –> 00:47:59,751
Right.

377
00:47:59,751 –> 00:48:05,091
So they provide pollination services and without those, the ecosystem can really collapse.

378
00:48:05,091 –> 00:48:10,971
Um, there’s plants like oaks that are this amazing food and habitat source that keep the food web humming.

379
00:48:10,971 –> 00:48:17,232
Uh, there’s predators like sharks where, like, if you lose the shark then it’s just overrun with prey and everything falls apart.

380
00:48:18,151 –> 00:48:22,251
And then there’s ecosystem engineers and we all know other examples.

381
00:48:22,251 –> 00:48:27,191
You know, elephants uproot and trample and in doing so, they create this regeneration in their path.

382
00:48:27,191 –> 00:48:28,511
Bison also, for the grasses.

383
00:48:28,511 –> 00:48:28,871
Yeah.

384
00:48:28,871 –> 00:48:34,331
And they’re stomping through it, end up creating regeneration and aeration for all of the prairie lands.

385
00:48:34,331 –> 00:48:36,051
Exactly, yeah.

386
00:48:36,051 –> 00:48:37,871
And beavers, we’re all familiar with.

387
00:48:37,871 –> 00:48:40,831
But actually, that is our category too.

388
00:48:40,831 –> 00:48:41,831
That’s our job.

389
00:48:41,831 –> 00:48:44,891
We are supposed to be ecosystem engineers.

390
00:48:44,891 –> 00:48:48,611
And right now, we’re doing our job but we’re doing it really badly, right?

391
00:48:48,611 –> 00:48:51,911
Like, we’re eng- we’re engineering terrible ecosystems- Yeah.

392
00:48:51,911 –> 00:48:56,048
because we’ve forgotten how to do it and how to be in relationship.

393
00:48:56,611 –> 00:49:10,311
But that discovery, for me, and that understanding of, like, Wait, whoa, we are not just a part of this place, but like, we have this critical job and without us, things get worse- Mm-hmm.

394
00:49:10,311 –> 00:49:13,911
for some other species that we’ve been in relationship with.

395
00:49:13,911 –> 00:49:21,831
And you know, Ron would always say that oak trees are kin, and I thought, Oh, well that’s, like, a nice less hierarchical way to look at the world.

396
00:49:21,831 –> 00:49:26,931
But the more I started to understand the history of humans and fire and oaks, I was like, Oh, we’re kin.

397
00:49:26,931 –> 00:49:32,158
Like, we’ve co-evolved together and we all have a job and we’re part of a family.

398
00:49:32,911 –> 00:49:34,851
And it was like, Okay.

399
00:49:34,851 –> 00:49:35,600
This is like

400
00:49:36,162.00000000046566 –> 00:49:36,711.0000000004657
I’m

401
00:49:36,711.0000000004657 –> 00:49:37,951
There’s so many layers.

402
00:49:37,951 –> 00:49:53,935.9999999995343
And there’s probably more layers to come that I haven’t understood yet, but just that building and that, um, you know, this sadness for myself as a kid of growing up with this idea that, like, the world would be better off without us.

403
00:49:54,531 –> 00:50:01,278.00000000046566
And I think so many kids today believe that and, and think the world would be better off without people.

404
00:50:01,951 –> 00:50:20,351
And I think that if we can shift that understanding to like, No, the world would be better off if we were doing our job, and if we were back in right relationship with the ecosystems around us, it’s just, it’s a really profound difference in the way that I look at the world now.

405
00:50:20,351 –> 00:50:21,899
Uh, absolutely.

406
00:50:21,899 –> 00:50:41,759
And I think if we, if we, uh, as you’re doing with your daughter, I also had, um, on a previous episode, Brigid Sherwill who we, we had a con- it was actually In Your Neck of the Woods also, we had a beautiful conversation cause she wrote a book on, uh, parenting and the climate change, and a lot of it is this curiosity, this relationship with the Earth.

407
00:50:41,759 –> 00:50:53,860
It’s asking questions and, and being able to kind of not say there’s a right or there’s a wrong, but more like, Why are we doing it that way and can we do it better and how do we do it in more relationship?

408
00:50:53,860 –> 00:50:58,779
Because I think that that’s a big element of all these different pieces that we’re talking about.

409
00:50:58,779 –> 00:51:06,779
And i- it’s, it’s such an important thing for us to experience because I feel like, you know, people are

410
00:51:06,779 –> 00:51:17,719
The other day I was talking to a friend of mine who was talking to me about how, you know, he hates social media, you know, your typical rant and rave about your social media, and I was just like, Look, I’m an addictive social media

411
00:51:17,719 –> 00:51:20,679
I can be in the sense that I grew up, my family can be a very

412
00:51:20,679 –> 00:51:23,099
is an addictive television family and can be that.

413
00:51:23,099 –> 00:51:38,679
But what I discover about my family is, and it took me a while to get here, is the happier and the more connected we are in general, sure, we still watch a lot of television because, you know, we love the storylines and we get really into it, but we do it, first of all, in connection, but we don’t do it all the time.

414
00:51:38,679 –> 00:51:43,419
We do it all the time when we’re looking for it from escapism, and that’s really what’s happening for a lot of people.

415
00:51:43,419 –> 00:51:52,399
So it’s not the tool as always, it’s all these other elements that we’re talking about that kind of almost don’t give us the tools.

416
00:51:52,399 –> 00:52:04,299
I mean, I know that when I moved, especially when I moved here to, to Dom and Her and to this area of the, of the foothills of the Alps and this, you know, super beautiful land, I, I was scared.

417
00:52:04,299 –> 00:52:10,339
I mean, I was scared because I didn’t know how to walk in the forest.

418
00:52:10,339 –> 00:52:12,139
Like, nobody had ever taught me.

419
00:52:12,139 –> 00:52:26,479
And I go out with this friend of mine who’s a woods guide, and of course he’s like, you know, picking things and eating and this, and I still am, you know, when I go by myself, I’m very, I’m still very cautious because I’m a slow learner to this, you know, I don’t

420
00:52:26,479 –> 00:52:38,699
So there, there are places that I know to go and certain, you know, Acetosella like over here and, oh, the wild garlic over there and, ooh, here’s the asparagus, and I know that Pungitopo, some- so many plants that I only know them in certain languages.

421
00:52:38,699 –> 00:52:47,839
Like, Pungitopo grows and when the shoot is very young it’s almost like an asparagus in the way that it’s tender and oh, over here, and, and then I’ll experiment with people who’ve helped me.

422
00:52:47,839 –> 00:52:54,559
I’ve also helped raise pigs, I’ve helped slaughter pigs and goats, because it’s part of it.

423
00:52:54,559 –> 00:53:00,099
But, but it’s only because somebody held me by my hand and showed me.

424
00:53:00,099 –> 00:53:07,119
And if not, you retreat because you’re like, I don’t understand and I don’t want to get hurt, and the world is telling me that this is dangerous.

425
00:53:07,119 –> 00:53:19,299
It’s telling me not to pick or, you know, don’t, don’t get stung by this, you know, stinging nettle, which of course I’ve done, you know, in my early days way too many times in trying to learn, oh, what plants are

426
00:53:19,299 –> 00:53:22,139
Oh, stinging nettle, that’s right, that’s who you are.

427
00:53:22,139 –> 00:53:23,059
Okay?

428
00:53:23,059 –> 00:53:24,139
Thank you.

429
00:53:24,139 –> 00:53:32,176
But i- but I still think that when we are in that state of more connection, we just naturally find the right rhythm.

430
00:53:33,019 –> 00:53:36,299
We naturally become more curious to explore.

431
00:53:36,299 –> 00:53:40,999
I still might not pick up a mushroom, I’ll call up my friend though and I’ll send them a picture and I’ll be like, Okay, I just

432
00:53:40,999 –> 00:53:44,299
Cause I hear mushrooms when it rains, like, I’m like, What’s this one?

433
00:53:44,299 –> 00:53:44,999
He’s like, Take it.

434
00:53:44,999 –> 00:53:45,959
What’s this one?

435
00:53:45,959 –> 00:53:46,639
Don’t take it.

436
00:53:46,639 –> 00:53:50,379
Like, okay, and little by little you learn, you know, over time.

437
00:53:50,379 –> 00:53:53,479
Field, field guides are your friend type of perspective.

438
00:53:53,479 –> 00:53:56,799
I have several books on the Batuzela Valley for that reason.

439
00:53:56,799 –> 00:54:06,159
And so, and then it becomes this game and i- and you feel so much more reverent also that it affects everything I do.

440
00:54:06,159 –> 00:54:35,399
I, I end up being more generous with my friends, I end up having more open and loving conversations, I create better connections, because all of these little elements kind of bring me back into, 1, I feel useful as a human being, I don’t feel like a pariah on this Earth, I don’t feel like I’m supposed to be knocked out and I’m supposed to just hide in my house with my computer because I’m not a part of the world, which unfortunately this message that we keep sending is doing that to people.

441
00:54:35,399 –> 00:54:42,559
It is like forcing them into a corner that is exactly what we don’t want for them because we keep telling them, You bad.

442
00:54:42,559 –> 00:54:43,459
Do not go outside.

443
00:54:43,459 –> 00:54:44,899
Do not touch anything.

444
00:54:44,899 –> 00:54:47,059
It’s like, uh, no, not that.

445
00:54:47,059 –> 00:54:48,299
That’s not the right message.

446
00:54:48,299 –> 00:54:51,339
It’s not the right message like type of thing.

447
00:54:51,339 –> 00:55:07,699
So on that note as we start to kind of like close things down, what, what do you think in this journey that you’ve been on, what is the biggest, like what’s one message that if you could get it out, I know you wrote a whole book, and for sure go check out the book, it’s in the show notes, it’s called Feed Us with Trees.

448
00:55:07,699 –> 00:55:14,219
I will put the link for bookshop.org which of course then lets you support Elspeth and also support us at the same time.

449
00:55:14,219 –> 00:55:16,496
So please go and check that out right now.

450
00:55:16,979 –> 00:55:23,459
But if you have one kind of, uh, one of, one main message you want everybody to hear, what would it be?

451
00:55:23,459 –> 00:55:53,599
I think it would be that the ecosystem where you live needs you and it needs your presence and it needs you to figure out what your job in your specific place and in your specific ecosystem is as an ecosystem engineer, and that the fastest way to figure that out and the best place to start is to understand what the keystone species are in your ecosystem,

452
00:55:53,599 –> 00:55:57,939
what the keystone plants are, and then start learning.

453
00:55:57,939 –> 00:56:00,379
How have humans been in relationship with them before?

454
00:56:00,379 –> 00:56:02,739
What have those relationships been like?

455
00:56:02,739 –> 00:56:06,480
Uh, what makes sense now in terms of those relationships and-

456
00:56:07,059 –> 00:56:17,639
you know, it might be fire, or you might live in a marsh and, I don’t know, you might have a totally different, uh, role to play in your wetland ecosystem.

457
00:56:17,639 –> 00:56:18,000
Mm-hmm.

458
00:56:18,000 –> 00:56:20,919
Um, so I think that would be it.

459
00:56:20,919 –> 00:56:35,519
I think that’s what we, you know, if I could write a prescription for the world right now, I think that would be it, is just, uh, to get to know our places again and to figure out what they need and how we’re supposed to inhabit them.

460
00:56:35,519 –> 00:56:44,900
I think that’s the most beautiful thing and a message that we don’t say enough, the ecosystem where you live needs you.

461
00:56:44,900 –> 00:56:47,200
I think that’s just so fundamental.

462
00:56:47,200 –> 00:57:03,619
And again, it is a, a reframe from this fear-based, don’t touch things cause you’re, you know, an evil human being, but it’s more of, like you said, we are ecosystem engineers and we need to learn what is my engineering practice, right?

463
00:57:03,619 –> 00:57:06,479
What is it that I was brought here to do?

464
00:57:06,479 –> 00:57:10,859
I am drawn to this area to live probably for a reason, right?

465
00:57:10,859 –> 00:57:10,939
Exactly.

466
00:57:10,939 –> 00:57:25,379
Either because that’s my history and/or because I feel like it’s somewhere in my body and it calls me to this, so what is my ecosystem’s function, the service that I provide to the overall area where I live?

467
00:57:25,379 –> 00:57:29,439
And then carry that out, and I’m go- I guarantee you, you will feel better about life.

468
00:57:29,439 –> 00:57:31,079
You will feel much more- You will.

469
00:57:31,079 –> 00:57:36,239
connected to everybody and to everything when you start doing that.

470
00:57:36,239 –> 00:57:37,819
I mean, I, I guarantee it.

471
00:57:37,819 –> 00:57:43,179
I, I, I have no doubts about making that claim and, uh, you know, because

472
00:57:43,179 –> 00:57:44,079
So just try.

473
00:57:44,079 –> 00:57:44,379
Try.

474
00:57:44,379 –> 00:57:51,728
If it doesn’t work, let me know, but I am s- just, I’m completely convinced that it is what is going to change anything.

475
00:57:52,899 –> 00:58:17,839
Elspeth, I am so, like, I have loved this conversation so much because I feel like you touched on so many important aspects of that are, um, about this relationship with food, especially because I feel like as you start working with plants, um, your relationship with food also gets a little bit scary from the perspective of, you know, w- most people think that the more I work with animals, actually the less I’ll want to eat them.

476
00:58:17,839 –> 00:58:26,159
But, you know, i- it’s actually not always the case because as you said, once you learn your place in the ecosystem, a new form of relationship starts to happen.

477
00:58:26,159 –> 00:58:28,199
And I think that that happens with plants too.

478
00:58:28,199 –> 00:58:29,399
You start to work very closely.

479
00:58:29,399 –> 00:58:39,019
You start to realize that they’re sentient, that they’re alive, that they’re part of this integral system, that you’re part of the system, and all of a sudden, at first you’re like, Oh my goodness, what am I gonna eat?

480
00:58:39,019 –> 00:58:39,799
I’m gonna starve.

481
00:58:39,799 –> 00:58:43,550
I need to be, start doing photosynthesis cause I need to become a breatharian.

482
00:58:44,179 –> 00:58:45,979.0000000004657
Something has to change.

483
00:58:45,979.0000000004657 –> 00:58:56,839
But then I think what happens is that as you s- sort of settle into the ecosystem as part, I live here, I am part of this, and then, Where is my place?

484
00:58:56,839 –> 00:59:02,759
And where is my place in that food, in that chain of, of that web of life that’s being created?

485
00:59:02,759 –> 00:59:12,839
Because obviously just the same as I have this anatomy in order to be able to do something for the ecosystem to be of service, also my eating is of service, right?

486
00:59:12,839 –> 00:59:13,783
Mm-hmm.

487
00:59:13,783 –> 01:00:22,059
bring down the number of certain kinds of species. I create different sorts of relationships. I might end up cultivating something to create this ecosystem in a certain way. So I think that there are a lot of elements that is important. So I love that you kind of pass through the food as the channel in which to start to open people to this relationship. Thank you. It’s been a lot of fun. Yeah, it’s been great. So thank you so much. And for everybody who’s listening again, go check out feed us with trees with it, which is Elspeth Hayes, Hay apostrophe S because it’s not Hayes with an S. Hey, apostrophe s book, and the links are in the show notes for you to go and check that out. And of course, if you want to have more conversations like this, first hit the like and the subscribe and the follow and all those good things so that more and more people can Learn about this podcast and really start to listen but also come into the naturally conscious community and be a part of these discussions You know the reconnection with plant kin the human plant Relationships and everything that comes from it

488
01:00:22,059 –> 01:00:26,019
Yeah.

489
01:00:27,919 –> 01:00:29,239
Yeah.

490
01:00:30,659 –> 01:00:41,540
And we have continuous, like, stream of different events for you to not just be on this journey by yourself, so that you have more people who are gonna be holding your hands and who are also gonna be asking you questions.

491
01:00:41,540 –> 01:00:44,599
And so come on in and be a part of our ecosystem.

492
01:00:44,599 –> 01:00:50,959
So with that, we complete this episode, and I am just so grateful for everything that we’ve spoken about.

493
01:00:50,959 –> 01:00:54,718
And so remember, resist the urge to hold back your emerging green brilliance.

494
01:00:56,079 –> 01:00:56,624
Bye.

495
01:00:57,180 –> 01:01:01,059
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Reconnect With Plant Wisdom.

496
01:01:01,059 –> 01:01:11,440
To continue these conversations, join us in the Naturally Conscious community, your premier online ecosystem for plant reawakening and accelerated evolution and co-creation with otherkin.

497
01:01:12,034 –> 01:01:21,456
Here you’ll find expansive discussions, interactive courses, live events, and supportive group programs like the Plant Wisdom Book Club and the Sprouts Writing and Creativity Group.

498
01:01:22,099 –> 01:01:27,299
Connect with like-minded individuals collaborating with plants to integrate these insights into life.

499
01:01:27,299 –> 01:01:32,459
Intro and outro music by Steve Sciulli and Poinsettia from The Singing Life of Plants.

500
01:01:32,459 –> 01:01:36,059
That’s it for me, Tigrilla Gardenia, and my plant collaborators.

501
01:01:36,059 –> 01:01:40,240
Until next time, remember, resist the urge to hold back your emerging green brilliance.

502
01:01:40,799 –> 01:01:41,540
I’m out.

503
01:01:41,540 –> 01:01:42,079
Bye.