Ethnobotany in Greenland and Iceland

I am planning a trip across the North Atlantic this summer to do an ethnobotanical survey of small scale permaculture and organic farms who are preserving and utilizing native biodiversity in small island communities.

I have been in touch with a number of people around the area who continue to tell me that traveling by boat cannot be done in that area. They also say that there are no farms or forests.

Well, I see this as a research and investigative challenge.


LISTEN TO THE MUSTN'TS
by Shel Silverstein

Listen to the MUSTN'TS, child,
Listen to the DON'TS
Listen to the SHOULDN'TS
The IMPOSSIBLES, the WON'TS
Listen to the NEVER HAVES
Then listen close to me --
Anything can happen, child
ANYTHING can be.

What Are People For?

For the last few weeks I have been reading and re-reading a 2000 collection of essays by Wendell Berry titled: What are People For?;  I read it to visitors who come for the coffee and wild food; I read it between classes and chapters of Fukuoka and Rushdie; I cannot stop reading.

Wendell Berry is an extremely well spoken and pissed off farmer living in rural Kentucky and writing about the state of things from the small scale farmer's perspective.  In this book he addresses everything from the industrialization of sex to the agricultural policies in the US which have driven migration of rural people to urban areas. He shows a number of fantastic examples of what a good life looks like and he questions some of our deep seated assumptions about life in the 21st century.

Reading this work I find myself drawn to the fields and the woods. I spend more time planting and harvesting than I do reading or preparing for classes.

Several of Wendell Berry's essays are available to read online from North Glen. The good people at Powell's Books In Portland Oregon have written a synopsis of the work and have copies available.The reviews are a fun read here too. Interscience has posted a brief response to the title essay What Are People For?.  Brtom has some links and an interesting response to Wendell Berry's controversial article 'Why I am not going to by a Computer'. Berry's follow up to this essay is Sales Resistance.

Shirley Nicklin's award winning photo Maturity and a poem by Wendell Berry.

Eating Wild

The spring has sprung and here in Witzenhausen we are all filling our refrigerators and cupboards with wild foods. With field guides and bags in hand we head off into the woods daily and collect things to eat. The abundance of edible wild things is overwhelming here, including fresh birch leaves, spruce, girsch, nettles, wild garlic among other things. Soon the fiddle-heads will spring up  and the fresh buds, flowers and early berries will be here. 

There are more resources online today for help with this each time I look. It is great to see the work that is going on now with The Forager's Press LLC.  Roy Reehil and the people there are making a huge amount of information available for everyday people interested in eating wild things.

Check out the 'Wild Food Field Guide'

Permaculture on the Fringe; Lewes Road Community Garden

I was in England a few weeks back and met some of the squatter community in Brighton who have occupied an old small gas station lot and called it the Lewes Road Community Garden. They are putting together a nice little permaculture garden there with raised beds full of trees, vegetables and flowers. This space grows a little food but serves the double role of community space in an otherwise busy area of Brighton with nothing but shopping centers and busy streets. - The squatters, with leftist zines and heads full of ideas and a copy of the adverse possession law called squatters rights, are stationed in the space where the attendants must must have once looked over the books and collected the money.

It occurred to me while having tea up in the station attendants space that these permaculture squatters are the wild yeasts of our civilization. They are called 'Crusties' in England and are generally frowned upon but they are the radical roots of our civilization. They help to maintain the most crucial aspects of our humanity and should be honored for the work that they do. They are revolutionaries, willing to suffer tremendously (sleep without heat through the winter and make small battles with the police) to preserve small patches of wildness and community like this garden at an abandoned gas station.

An excerpt from Bread and Puppet's Radical Cheese Manifesto
...THE NEED
FOR HUMAN FERMENTATION.
THE CALL FOR FERMENTATION IS PRIOR TO THE CALL
FOR UPRISING BECAUSE UPRISING NEEDS ALL THE
WILD YEASTS OF THE MOMENT TO BE WHAT IT IS.
HUMAN FERMENTATION CONCERNS THOSE
PARTS OF THE HUMAN BODY
THAT ARE NOT GOVERNED BY
THE GOVERNMENT
LIKE THE GUTS AND THE
GUTSY PART OF THE BRAIN.
IN THIS DEMOCRACY WHICH
TEASES CITIZENS WITH
THE POSSIBILITY OF
DEMOCRACY...

Biofach 2010 'Organic and Fair'

Hello from the Biofach 2010 in Nuremberg Germany. Here inside things are much quieter than in 2009. There are some 200 less exhibitors and several hundred less visitors. Hall three is closed entirely this year and there are actually places to sit at the various cafes around the 'Fair and Bio' section of the fair. This is a win and a lose for everyone. Maybe huge business like Wal-Mart and McDonalds will leave organic alone if the market falls a little bit, on the other hand small organic producers and communities are looking at tougher markets and less income for their labor.

This years Biofach is about walking around eating and looking for people to learn from about the livlihoods of the farmers and high biodiversity production systems. There are a number of coffee, cacao, brazil nut and cashew farmers here from Latin America and Africa who are eager to discuss and have the hands that produced the food products we are discussing.

This years theme for Biofach is 'Organic and Fair' and has managed to draw a huge crowd of people who are eager to network and discuss the issues regarding the processing marketing and sales of these food products but a dirth of people who would like to discuss the actual production. I am headed to a discussion on wild collection this afternoon and then to a climate change discussion and hope to learn more there.

Agroforestry

Well written Michele! Thank you for an excellent topic for discussion! No one could reasonable disagree with the premise here - Farmers are the biggest environmental champions and preservers of biodiversity in the world and they deserve recognition for that role. Farmers are, undoubtedly, the key to the preservation of nature and civilization.

Of course this 'green' agriculture is not a universal rule. Historically in the US and presently in many developing countries the conversion of wild to farm land plays the opposite role. The planting of crops for grain fuel and feed in the place of native forests and wild lands is an overwhelming net loss of biodiversity. Agriculture's role in the eutrophication of rivers and lakes, the poisoning of non target non crop species and the ...

I believe that connecting those dots between the environmental movements and agriculture means promoting more organic and agroforestry systems. I am currently working on a project to look at agroforestry systems as a mechanism for greater agricultural and natural biodiversity and would love to hear from anyone who has any input here.

Humanure; The potential for composted sewage in Organic Agricultural systems

This morning I am pondering the potential use of human manure in organic cropping systems. The loss of all the basic essential soil elements and organic carbon could be significantly reduced through the application of composted human sewage. In most of the world the industrial waste water is now separated from the residential. Could this heavy metal and chemical-free composted sewage be used on organic fields?

In Global Development of Organic Agriculture: Challenges and Prospects the authors hint at the potential for the use of composted human wastes claiming the tremendous benefits to the soil. This topic is also hinted at in the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) Growing Organic Web Pages. Reclaiming these lost of nutrients in the urban sewage treatment systems could easily be enough to renew the fertility of the world's agricultural soils.

Most people do not agree.  The Environmental Working Group (EWG) strongly recommends that sewage sludge NOT be allowed in organic systems claiming the content of dangerous chemicals, detergents etc. In Eco Living Solutions the authors are strongly against the use of human wastes in agricultural systems claiming high chemical and heavy metal content. In many places around the world, including Nova Scotia, farmers, activists and political parties are fighting against the use of sewage sludge on farmland.

The primary problem with this discussion is that much of the data is from 1988 or older. Urban sewage treatment systems have changed significantly in much of the world since then. Opening up this debate could help re-design the way sewage is treated and recycled. The benefits to farm systems, food production and the poisoned and over-nutrified aquatic eco-systems could be significant.
-----
Here is a regularly updated list of other things Cory writes