Robin on Sea Kale Root

Nice one Robin. About time foragers started talking seriously about this stuff, especially when it comes to harvesting roots (which most often kills the individual plant).

I think it’s about building alliances with the plants you consume and the communities they belong to – as D.Jensen says: ‘If you consume the flesh of an Other, you now take responsibility for the continuation of the Other’s community’. If outsiders move in and attempt to disrupt that community, to strip-mine it of the ‘resources’ they have identified as valuable without showing any intention of sticking around to embed themselves firmly (and lastingly) in that matrix, then IMHO you have to consider introducing a militant insurgent aspect to your alliance to stop that from happening & defend your community. This is, after all, what empire culture / civilisation has always been about: move into an area, take what you want for export back to the black-hole cities, repay the natives with guns, whiskey (disease, schools, religion, genocide…) until they’re dead or just like you. Then, when the region is totally exhausted, use it for real estate, build another black hole and start over. Carefully tended ecosystems become enslaved to serve the demands of a distant, ever-hungry metropolis. Writes Kat Anderson in a section of her classic Tending The Wild titled ‘Plows, Dams, Saws, and “Hooved Locusts”‘:

During the early twentieth century, California’s natural resources continued to be harnessed for economic growth, with predictable reulsts for native plant and animal populations. Clearcut logging expanded into previously untouched forests, large areas of rich bottomland were converted into agricultural systems, and the numbers of livestock grazing the grasslands, woodlands, and deserts increased.

Agriculture boomed. More and more acres of former native plant habitats were put to the plow, and landownership became increasingly concentrated, with huge operations worked by groups of seasonal laborers living in company towns replacing family farms. By the mid-1920s California had surpassed Iowa to become the nation’s leading agricultural state. The boom was fuelled by innovations in agronomy, new crop varieties, the development of more efficient farm machinery–and in particular the complete reshaping of California’s hydrological systems to suit the needs of agriculture. Streams were diverted and dammed and aqueducts built to create extensive irrigation systems. The dams and diversions “tamed” the waterways, but they also destroyed many remaining salmon runs and drastically reduced the habitat for waterfowl and riparian vegetation. The number of livestock continued to exceed the capacity of the range well into the early 1900s. One sign of further deterioration was the shift in vegetation from grasses and forbs to shrubs and the accompanying disappearance of culturally important plants. In 1932 the Surprise Valley Paiute in northwestern California told the anthropologist Isabel Kelly that many of the plants with edible roots could no longer be found. Kelly reported that the meadowland covering the valley floor in aboriginal times had been almost completely replaced by sagebrush and cultivated land. Another sign of deterioration was the reduction of plant cover on the rangelands, which exposed the soil to erosion. Some areas were almost completely denuded of vegetation, except for the occasional non-native weed.

To protect livestock in California and other western states, an extensive government campaign was begun in 1916 to trap and kill predatory animals. The gray and red wolves were entirely exterminated. Mountain lion populations declined as the cats were poisoned and hunted, practices encouraged by a state bounty put into place in 1907. Between 1907 and 1933, 6,990 mountain lions were killed in California.(pp.115-6)

Every indigenous culture facing this onslaught fought tooth and nail to resist being metabolised along with their land in this way because their lives and cultural identity depended on it. For me, wild foods offer a path back to true indigenity, a deeply felt sense of belonging to a particular place. But this comes with responsibilities and the likelihood of having to pick up the same fights where the original indigenous peoples left off (assuming they’re no longer around in one form or another).

Conclusion: wild foods aren’t for everybody. They’re place-based beings who may or may not choose to make themselves visible and/or available to local people who have the time, energy and devotion to learn about them and harvest them in a sensitive, respectful way, making sure to give back more than they take – in this way developing long-term relationships with particular plant communities and the ecosystems in which they’re situated. (Lately I’ve been exploring how this might work with another plant harvested for its roots: Burdock. I dug up another two plants just the other day from the same patch I visited last year, re-seeding the loosened soil with nearby burrs and mulching over with nearby leaves, giving any new seedlings the best possible growing conditions, with any luck…)

All best,
Ian

PS: lol’ed very heartily at the botanical gardens comment