Conscious Stewardship

Email message excerpt from Toby Hemenway, January, 2007:

If there is one thought I'd like to make clear in a natives/exotics discussion, it's that separating the land that sustains us from the rest of nature means the death of that nature. Traditional peoples may have small plots for grain, but in general their gardens don't look different, and don't behave differently, from the rest of nature. If we say, as our culture has, "this land is the place we trash by growing food on it, and that land is sacred for nature," then you are locked into the eternal and losing battle with those who want to convert more sacred land into production. That's a losing battle, since it consists of holding actions and permanent losses, never permanent preservation. Land that isn't obviously productive for humans will always be valued less than land that is. But if we stop making the distinction between the two, then monoculturing land becomes almost impossible. You're not likely to cut down a rain forest that also shelters your home and provides your food. And we've got millennia of wisdom showing that people can live in the forest and prairie, caring for it and being cared for. This is the central message of permaculture that is contained in the infelicitous term "multifunctional." A foodshed must also be habitat, and an ecosystem.
 

Email message excerpt from Nick Routledge, January 17, 2007:

This is fertile territory. Once we embrace Toby's observation that separating foodsheds from the wild is not only an arbitrary but an inherently destructive distinction, then the usual frames of the exotics issue are transcended in a flash. All of a sudden, the question of how we move our landscapes toward deeper ecological integrity is revealed as one and the same as asking how we move our foodsheds toward deeper ecological integrity -- which, of course, critically brings in the deeply personal issue of how we transition our own diets toward deeper ecological integrity. Diet and landscape are reunited. The veils of issue-separateness fall. The simplistic reductionism of "exotics vs natives" is transcended by the insights of holism.