00:01:31.020Hey for the wild world, it's Molly here, media director of For the Wild.
00:01:37.940I want to take a moment to get real with you.
00:01:40.060This podcast takes a lot of heart, a lot of work, and we do it because we love it and we believe in our generation.
00:01:46.800To keep this podcast going in a good way, we need your support, which is why we launched Drip.
00:01:53.340Drip is an ongoing crowdfunding campaign that allows you, our beloved listener, to subscribe to our work on a sliding scale of anywhere between $2 and $100 per month.
00:02:05.460And in exchange, you can receive access to bonus material and deeper ways to engage with the content and the team.
00:02:12.420So if each of you who are listening to this episode right now value it at just $1, we
00:03:35.640Someone was listening, someone who cared, never despaired
00:03:41.340Someone to lean on and someone to trust
00:03:45.980Who needs your assistance and finds your disgust
00:03:50.500Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today we are speaking with Stephen
00:04:06.880Martin. Stephen has more than 30 years experience living co-creatively with the earth, practicing
00:04:13.660traditional living skills of growing food, building, and healing. Stephen created living
00:04:18.880Stone and Green Bloom in 1986, Toronto's first green landscaping company. In 1996, he started
00:04:27.720the Algonquin Tea Company, North America's premier bioregional tea company. He has given talks and
00:04:34.040run workshops internationally for more than 20 years and taught plant identification and
00:04:38.980wilderness skills at Algonquin College for 11 years. In 2014, Megan and he started the Sacred
00:04:45.900Gardener Earth Wisdom School. Stephen released his first book, The Story of the Madawaska Forest
00:04:52.560Garden, in 2016, and his second book, Sacred Gardening, was released in June 2017. Well,
00:05:01.340hello Stephen, welcome to For the Wild. Hello, thank you for having me on, and
00:05:07.540greetings to all the folks out there, and blessings your way for giving us your time to listen.
00:05:14.180Your books so eloquently illustrate how it's possible to live in an intimate relationship with the land. This co-creative relationship in which human is not the leader, but must be slow because letting the land lead requires humility, restraint, and really the ability to listen.
00:05:36.100all things that modern civilization lost touch with long ago and you've come to call the way
00:05:43.460that you make relations with the more than humans who nourish you co-creative integrated polyculture
00:05:50.500so would you explain what this means and how your principles and practices
00:05:55.400compare to those of modern permaculture i kind of um i'm a little wary of stepping on feet
00:06:03.440especially when permaculture was one of the things that kind of led me to doing and working with the
00:06:11.380land the way i do now but of course like a lot of our initial attempts at kind of an alternative
00:06:19.180form of something it's deeply flawed it has to do with us always being at the center
00:06:26.560and that it's always about us and it's really our plans that i have the biggest problem with
00:06:33.140in general it's a little bit harsh but i i equate it to fascism the way that we approach the land
00:06:41.060is everything has to be on our terms you know all the plants that are there have to be there for us
00:06:47.780and and so on and so on so just from the start you can see it's a radically different way of
00:06:55.740approaching the land and it really is an indigenous form of agriculture initially i
00:07:03.080learned from anishinaabe people here in north america so and in mexico and i kind of pretty
00:07:10.300much associated it with turtle island with this continent but you know as you do more research
00:07:17.340and you talk to more people you start to realize that again i'm a little wary to use the word
00:07:23.900universal because i i know that that's a word that's been misused and it's kind of a cop-out
00:07:31.300to say that oh this is all the same or all these religions or all this or whatever is the same
00:07:36.220so i don't really mean it in that sense but there is some universal parallel
00:07:42.720approaches that people take all over the world and it's pretty obvious when you're on the inside
00:07:49.860and you're working with the earth there's no mystery to it it's all to do with intimately
00:07:55.740understanding the plants and the cycles and the birds and the animals and then essentially
00:08:03.060fitting yourself into that groove right if you think of a jazz ensemble or something like that
00:08:09.900like they're already full-on playing and then we'll come along with our little teeny instruments
00:08:16.740i've never made this metaphor before but um you start to see that like we really
00:08:23.940interrupt an orchestra that's already in the middle of its movements and so if you've ever
00:08:31.980kind of entered into a jam that's already rolling you understand perfectly that you have to start in
00:08:37.600such a small subtle way just to hook into the groove and start to feel the movement of things
00:08:45.220and then it's like it draws you in you don't step in you stand at the edge of it and you sing your
00:08:53.700sweet little song and you hope that nature will accept it and draw you in and there's no choice
00:08:59.980involved it's not it's not something we have to choose and then i guess there's a choice to go
00:09:05.540along with it or to reject it you know for your your rational mind or your industrial mind to
00:09:10.940kick in and then suddenly go oh we were floating off a little bit too much there into whatever that
00:09:16.460other dimension was and let's all come back because you know let's face it we all spent
00:09:22.74012 years in school or 16 years in school learning how to come back to the point and
00:09:29.200it has its uses and its purposes but clearly it's not what life's about
00:09:34.080entering into the flow of things is not something that people understand you know and again maybe
00:09:42.360if you're a surfer or a jazz musician or something like that then you get it because it's something
00:09:47.600you live all the time where there's something bigger that you're riding much much bigger you
00:09:54.540know than you and uh as you said in the intro you know have some humility and take it slow
00:10:01.640your gardening philosophy speaks to that you were a forager before you were a gardener and
00:10:12.320similar to traditional agroecological methods of indigenous peoples all over the world
00:10:18.000your approach increases the biodiversity of edible and medicinal plants within the natural landscape
00:10:25.080And I want to ask, do you think your gardens are supporting the resiliency of native forest in which they are embedded?
00:10:34.400Well, if you read the book, then I guess you're asking that question about the property at the Madawaska.
00:10:41.700In which case, there's some really interesting and really lovely kind of things.
00:10:47.820I talk about this, I think, in the book, where it was kind of unintentional, but it's a long story.
00:10:54.900But I created a clearing, I introduced about 100 different species, and then I watched what happened over the years.
00:11:03.280And in the early years, essentially, I'd created a salad buffet for all the animals in the forest.
00:11:11.840Because, of course, in older growth forests, like mature hardwoods and stuff, there's actually very little to eat.
00:11:23.660it's really transitional lands where we can forage a lot more so you know i introduced this buffet
00:11:31.620of all these lovely plants and indeed they were disappearing as high as a rabbit could reach
00:11:37.320because there was a rabbit hole right in the center of the site that i'd created and i guess
00:11:44.440it was pretty much his site so i was thinking the second year i was like oh geez maybe this
00:11:53.200all has to happen bigger and then you introduce the predators as well and on and on in that kind
00:12:00.080of way of thinking but of course i i don't jump to things anymore so i was just rolling this around
00:12:05.220another year or two pass and a fox moves into the rabbit hole and suddenly all the the predation on
00:12:12.880the ground stops basically i realized i'd kind of created this what i call a green bomb so it was
00:12:22.120like waves that went out into the ecology from the fecundity of this little co-creation so yeah
00:12:31.080i guess to answer your question for sure it's enhanced the area massively and i i suspect the
00:12:38.200real estate is quite valuable for the foxes and for well for the bears and for the deer and for
00:12:46.220the moose and for everyone who frequents it I think it's very valuable another little brief
00:12:52.640story it's also so lovely is that the moose in that area are heavily stressed by it's not Lyme
00:13:02.860disease but it is something that ticks carry and it kills the moose but it doesn't kill the deer
00:13:07.840so they're under a lot of stress and you can see it if you run into a moose in early spring they
00:13:13.980look rough so anyways what i realized at a certain point is that the moose were all coming and
00:13:19.180self-medicating in my garden so they were taking like the wild quinine and echinacea but in
00:13:27.600medicinal dosages like they weren't clearing it out they were just kind of nibbling at it every
00:13:32.160day and stuff and so it was also like a living pharmacopoeia for all the animals right in the
00:13:38.480in the forest there so it's quite beautiful if we do something small but it has integrity
00:13:47.760how it really does ripple out into everything i love imagining this pharmacopoeia in the middle
00:13:57.700of a forest that our non-human relatives frequent for their ales that's so beautiful and i was
00:14:07.300thinking about the rabbit and the fox and the deer and what would happen to these small gardens
00:14:16.680if they weren't fenced because I know where I live that if even an apple tree with no apples
00:14:23.780isn't fenced a deer will come and and really eat all the fresh new leaves which actually it just
00:14:29.820happened to me a couple weeks ago so I'm wondering how is this garden able to evolve with
00:14:36.160the browsers and the ungulates and and all the the creatures that do eat the green
00:14:42.280yeah it's a good question and and the truth of it is the fruit trees have been devastated
00:14:48.140from the bears and the deer in the area but i don't know if it's clear from the book but i i
00:14:56.500don't actually live there now and so the garden in a sense have made it as an offering or maybe
00:15:04.380in a less romantic way as an experiment just to see what will happen i did have gardens though
00:15:11.820there that i protected from the four-legged ones and again it's knowing how they think about things
00:15:20.040like for deer in particular now again this might not be possible on on the scale your scale but
00:15:27.600they absolutely hate horizontal trees so when a tree's fallen in the forest
00:15:34.220and it got all those little branches and everything they hate that they just they
00:15:39.160see it coming and they make a big circle around it so when i made my initial gardens in the forest
00:15:45.140there i had to clear trees anyways and so i made this horizontal deterrent and you know it worked
00:15:54.740incredibly well and there's a few little tricks with deer as well that you can do with
00:16:00.260little hoops of wire coming out of the ground about three foot hoops and they're in arcs
00:16:07.400away from your garden and there's something about and they overlap the arcs overlap so
00:16:14.200i don't know if you can picture that but there's something about deer won't jump
00:16:18.760distance they can jump height but if something's crowding in on their their forelegs they always
00:16:27.280back up and then they they just take a pass on it and again with all of these things with the
00:16:32.800wild animals the big trick is that they don't get a taste in the first place because once they
00:16:38.620actually get into something in your garden then oh it's pretty it's pretty hard to turn that one
00:16:45.740around right and even year to year they know that ah yeah in the spring there's those buds that
00:16:51.660taste just like ripe apples which if you've ever eaten an apple bud the the early leaves and the
00:16:58.560buds do taste like apple they're actually sweet and really amazing tasting so you can't blame them
00:17:04.960and um it is their space right we always have to remember that it's their space we're the
00:17:12.560trespassers here so it's such an individual call for you for your space and i think that's that's
00:17:21.420the message is that there is no kind of general rules you have to negotiate with those animals
00:17:27.360in that space and maybe you plant a tree for them maybe plant something else for them even salt
00:17:34.720licks lots of other things can act as deterrents for them eating your stuff because you making an
00:17:40.820offering to them, as opposed to just being an intruder in their space and laying out this
00:17:46.740delicious food for them. Yeah, I have been co-creating some experiments out here in the
00:17:55.240temperate rainforest with these biodiversity enhancement test plots, or you could call them
00:18:01.960forest gardens as well. And thinking about browsers and thinking about just how to share
00:18:10.940the biodiversity to hopefully spread the biodiversity into other segments of the forest
00:18:17.160is something that I've been really full in right now. And so hearing your experience and
00:18:23.980how to share with the wild ones, because they are going to be the ones that will really spread the
00:18:31.060biodiversity but also not allow them to wipe out the populations at the same time trying to balance
00:18:38.480that is a really it's definitely something that i'm doing a lot of research on right now so i
00:18:42.640appreciate hearing your thoughts and you know something that you had brought up earlier was
00:18:48.320that the thing about having this living reciprocal relationship with the land it's not replicable
00:18:55.460from place to place. What one patch of forest asks of humans may be drastically different from
00:19:02.800what another patch, just a few hundred yards, is asking. And I'm thinking back to a passage in your
00:19:08.400book where you tell of a planting of your first forest garden. I'll actually read a bit of what
00:19:14.760you wrote. Quote, because the landings were already depleted and had been clear-cut and bulldozed,
00:19:21.320I felt it might be okay with the forest, or somehow good karma, to garden on these spots,
00:19:28.040to reclaim and recondition the abused areas. After meditating on a couple of these log storage areas,
00:19:35.620I clearly received a go-ahead from the land to put my first intensive garden in one of those areas,
00:19:41.360end quote. And I'm curious, this time the forest said yes, but could you tell us of some times
00:19:48.660when the forest said no even in that example you know the one place was a real no by all visual
00:19:56.720appearances it seemed like a good place but i definitely gotta know it's like when you're
00:20:04.040harvesting wild plants the same thing holds true for making gardens for me it's the idea that
00:20:11.060okay for this period of time i'm gonna inhabit this space co-inhabit this space cohabit
00:20:18.200cohabitate but it's with the understanding that i will give it back to to the owners of the land
00:20:25.780to the wild in time for sure and it's the same like when you're picking a wild plant it's like
00:20:32.120okay this is my turn this is your turn to give me your body and then the time will come for me to
00:20:38.960give my body to you so i think that's real important is that you have that longer vision
00:20:44.980And it goes on beyond your life, beyond our time, and maybe even beyond your people's time to a time when the land will have its way, that this is just part of this cycle, that it's not forever ours.
00:21:01.800We're not laying ownership forever claim to it or anything like that.
00:21:09.180And I talk about that in the book, that it is how Indigenous people farmed the land. For arguably, you know, 40,000 years, we've been doing this thing where we could feel the fertility of a spot. In a fairly benign way, we would figure out a way to get rid of the trees.
00:21:28.480So we'd either flood the area or we'd swing in the trees, which is when you take the bark off around them, because you can't grow crops without sunlight.
00:21:37.720So there would be a clearing, then it would be used for a certain amount of time.
00:21:46.520They didn't keep animals and they didn't use their fertilizer.
00:21:49.380And later in history, when the Plains people did have horses, they would actually garden in the areas where the horses were during the winter, but they'd actually take all the feces out of the garden because they felt it contaminated the garden.
00:22:06.480so complete opposite to our way of thinking it was just working with the energy and the land
00:22:14.140the way it was and then as soon as that would start to wane then they'd find another spot
00:22:19.660they'd give it back to the wild and i think you know this is this whole idea our agricultural
00:22:25.980early agricultural humanity was dramatically different from hunters and foragers is just not
00:22:32.840true because i've lived it i understand that it's a continuum it's all part of the same thing you
00:22:39.660can garden in a perfectly harmonious way just like you can hunt in an absolutely terrible way
00:22:46.240it actually has very little to do with the action that you're doing
00:22:50.140it has everything to do with the approach that you're taking and what's behind it
00:24:46.940You said that you added hundreds of pounds of mulch from the forest
00:24:56.640and a ton of silt from the riverbed to your first forest garden.
00:25:01.300And I'm wondering, how did you make those decisions?
00:25:04.940Yeah, well, the silt for the riverbed was really so that I could have water.
00:25:09.780In the summer, I had to dig a pond, essentially.
00:25:14.120And so when the muck came out, rather than just slopping it on the side, I took it in buckets and I walked it up the hill to where the garden was.
00:25:22.240But it's a good question, you know, and for me, all of those decisions are still incredibly painful and difficult to make.
00:25:32.640Once I make the decision, you know, I've learned that it's good to execute it with confidence, but making the decision is arduous for me.
00:25:42.160and deciding to even cut down a tree or we're building a traditional structure here and so
00:25:49.820i know that that piece of land is going to be compromised by by what i've put there for
00:25:56.960hundreds of years maybe possibly so the debt that i feel in the taking is so painful that
00:26:04.860any of those decisions are just they're brutal and a lot of the time it takes me years
00:26:10.460to come to something because even though i know it has to happen i wait till whatever the trees
00:26:16.600completely shading half the garden or something and then something at some point kind of says
00:26:23.500it's okay and this is one of my teachings too is that we all have so much shame about0.97
00:26:29.200our ecological and cultural destruction i'm generally saying we like white people but i0.91
00:26:36.960I think we in the first world, we could say, have all done our good fair share, no matter what our skin color is, of consuming and taking and wrecking unwittingly.0.90
00:26:47.860So we're all filled with this shame, but then it gets misplaced into things.
00:26:53.900And so, again, I don't want to offend people, but you become a vegan or animal rights person or something like that without even understanding that there's a way of working with animals.
00:27:06.960That's not only ecologically sound, but that was sanctioned by divinity.
00:27:13.740All our early relationships with plants and animals came from the gods directly and the goddess directly.
00:27:21.040So there's nothing profane or degrading about the very nature of agriculture.
00:27:29.980And this is my big teaching for people because I see it clear as a bell.
00:27:33.760the western mind or the dominant mind this developed world mind is so addicted to creating
00:27:45.140prescriptive formulas as if theories and certifications can teach you how to grow food
00:27:51.380or attend medicine and as a byproduct we make compromises and justify the heavy input of
00:27:58.920external resources, as long as they follow our so-called holistic or organic methodologies.
00:28:07.480And I think about how we abandon the life underneath our feet when we cover the ground up
00:28:13.820and dump topsoil from somewhere else on top of it, and then question why there aren't thriving
00:28:20.380vegetables two months later. And I think about ancient sphagnum bogs that take millions,
00:28:27.900maybe thousands of years to form and that they are being dredged of their peat or the kelp or
00:28:35.780the lime or the wood chips you know everywhere we are stripping lands of their living fabric
00:28:41.080to feed our short-sighted visions for productivity yet quote people need to make money so no one
00:28:49.060stays in one place or has access to land that isn't totally exhausted and the earth is
00:28:55.520overwhelmingly degraded and simply cannot support 7 billion wild crafters or co-creative
00:29:02.160polyculturalists for that matter. So, Stephen, I'm wondering, how would you encourage people
00:29:09.540to use as minimal resources as possible, given these difficult circumstances?
00:29:16.340Well, again, it's 10,000 battles, and you can't fight them all, you can only fight the one that's
00:29:22.180basically on your lap and so you change what you can right we all know plastic is like this huge
00:29:30.180huge problem so try eliminating as much as you can but somewhere down the line your food is
00:29:36.380touching plastic almost guaranteed unless you literally grow everything yourself and keep it
00:29:42.380in crocks and keep it in jars and which is pretty much what we do here but you know i also have kids
00:29:47.960and stuff so we do shop and do some of those regular plastic consuming things but you know
00:29:56.600i i think i take your first point that the world can't handle a million foragers out there no way
00:30:04.020but i actually would disagree with your second point that it could handle a million co-creative
00:30:09.260growers because if i think of just what i do on this property and really just on a few acres is
00:30:17.540really all i'm mostly interacting with and i generate food for many many families not just
00:30:23.520my family but many many other people and i think it's actually as close to an answer as we're gonna
00:30:31.980get which is you know i try to include this in the books this vision of just a million people
00:30:39.300doing this co-creative thing doing this dance with the earth and each one of those having this again
00:30:45.960this multiplicity of spin-offs again just to stretch it out even further it's not just in
00:30:51.900this dimension it's in the soul and the spirit dimension that we've damned ourselves over and
00:30:57.700over and there is a redemption there and the redemption is in the moment and how we're acting
00:31:04.280in the moment and then the earth can grant us back the fecundity and i've seen this happen
00:31:10.580on my land here and other lands where i've worked that it takes years but that something happens
00:31:17.440and then as you said that thing that she doesn't give us much anymore she can give us in a second
00:31:24.300if the energy of place is such that it's ready for it or it's ripe for her then she steps in
00:31:32.120and then suddenly you have bushels and bushels of food and people people do this forage and feast
00:31:39.160or people from the school who I'm showing around the land here,
00:31:42.440and they're just kind of like, you have endless amounts of food.
00:31:47.300Like in every direction, wherever you look, there's food, right?
00:31:52.460And so if we all did that, and again, we consumed so little.
00:31:58.680I remember there was this big interview on CBC,
00:32:02.560which is the big Canadian radio, public radio,
00:32:05.280and this woman had gone a year without buying anything new for her baby and we just laughed
00:32:11.920our heads off because we thought i don't think we've ever bought new stuff for our kids they
00:32:16.200actually thought the dump was the store for the first seven years of their life we never buy new
00:32:21.880stuff again maybe some tools or some things that are going to really last but i just don't buy
00:32:28.280plastic i don't buy junk you know never for our kids not their clothes not their toys nothing
00:32:34.440everything's got to at least be secondhand and so i don't even think it's any kind of big thing
00:32:41.620the way we live but essentially if everybody lived the way we lived holy smokes there would
00:32:48.460be so much food and so much fecundity and so little consumption that's a big claim and i'm
00:32:55.860not saying in any way we're perfect but again it's the 10 000 battles and and maybe we've
00:33:03.220fought half them or something between megan and myself and there's still 5 000 to go right but
00:33:10.340we're working on it so there's your kind of optimistic answer yeah i appreciate that and
00:33:17.360i wonder what it would be like for a million people to be co-creating forest gardens and
00:33:25.560yeah oh my god can you imagine yeah and a lot of different planet it would be different
00:33:32.440You know, one thing that comes up for me is just access, perhaps a million people have access to land, but I don't actually know the statistics of how possible that is, perhaps definitely more possible in collectives and eco villages or collectively owned spaces or collectively shared spaces. Yeah, it's a really, it's a really beautiful vision.
00:33:58.060Oh, I was just thinking, you know, like, there's so much land, like the whole eastern seaboard right up from Virginia, right up to Quebec, the whole thing is forest growing back in, a lot of it is privately owned and lots of it is crown land, but it was all cleared.
00:34:16.480it was all farmland and it was exactly more or less where we have to go which is there was towns
00:34:25.140they were centered by rivers because you had power you had a mill and then so that was the center of
00:34:31.820town and then the farms spread out from it and there was none of these 500 acre or 2 000 or 20
00:34:37.820thousand acre farms everyone had 40 acres of bush and maybe 40 acres of fields or pasture
00:34:45.380that kind of thing and it's not like it's some obscure dream we pretty much had it down a few
00:34:54.000hundred years ago but industrialization and other powers that be kind of muddled everything up
00:35:00.600and so i do kind of feel like i mean imagine if the government actually supported these ideas
00:35:09.640for example there's millions of people that the government pays for their food pays for their
00:35:16.480housing pays for everything through welfare every year why not just give some people some land
00:35:23.960so they can actually grow their food create a living create community create cultures like
00:35:30.740again if the will was there or enough pressure i guess these lands were designated in a certain
00:35:39.460way but again the only time it can happen is when enough of us get together from first world rich
00:35:46.480people to buy the land to create a collective and then it turns in very often to this quite
00:35:53.080isolated that's what happened with the communes up here in my area in the 60s 70s and i guess a bit
00:36:00.800in the 80s there was at least a dozen or two dozen communes it was the land was low in price
00:36:06.420and everyone was like cool we're going back to the land we're going to create our own thing but then0.98
00:36:11.440they just create this little pocket and of course you just brought in all this shit even though you0.99
00:36:18.320think you know where it's at you brought in all the shit with you unconsciously and in a little0.52
00:36:24.060pocket you just start to fester and so almost none of these communes worked in any kind of0.87
00:36:31.260functional matter at all and it's still going on there's a whole nother wave of people trying to
00:36:37.240recreate the exact same thing and it's like no you need a bigger community you need a village
00:36:42.860that's the way things work right it can't just be five or whatever households it's got to be like
00:36:49.74040 or 80 households or i'm sure there's a number there and i'm sure people have studied it
00:36:55.560and i don't really know much about it the truth is but it just seems to me that it could be done
00:37:01.300if there was support from from the bureaucratic end of things and doing it in a private way is
00:37:09.240is very difficult very challenging and i'm not saying it shouldn't be tried i've tried it a few
00:37:15.260times and i commend people for trying it but just having a relationship with one other person i think
00:37:22.380we've all experienced it's pretty difficult so when you're in a commune you're with maybe 16 other
00:37:29.540people in your little pocket and it can also be extremely trying the interpersonal stuff and then
00:37:37.320you actually never get to the stuff why you created the commune which was all very practical
00:37:42.480and it makes sense on so many levels but the interpersonal stuff is big i've heard that from
00:37:49.380a number of people who have started commune-like situations where their biggest takeaway was
00:38:00.400the interpersonal relations and the traumas that people bring in and if you're not committed to
00:38:08.760working through those fissures or perhaps have the skills or even the desire to do that and you know
00:38:17.420for a number of reasons people don't have the capacity that that's something that they really
00:38:22.500speak to as being a deterrent for that type of living situation so thanks for sharing a bit about
00:38:29.340that and I want to talk more about restoration and for the wild this collective of soulmates
00:38:38.580that I get to work with every day we really have sat with the word restoration and we actually
00:38:44.800believe that this term restoration is actually outdated and there's no returning to some
00:38:51.140ecosystem of the past you know the earth is ever-changing and what early colonizer naturalists
00:38:57.880wrote in their books about native forests depicts only snapshots of living communities
00:39:03.100who are always in flux, shaping and being shaped by one another. Not to mention that we have been
00:39:09.860vectors for rapid species movement and are causing a mass extinction. So in this era of climate
00:39:17.100change, the biological palette is drastically different than it was 500 years ago. There may
00:39:24.660be no going back, but I cling to the idea that if we quiet our human supremacy significantly
00:39:31.580enough, we can still tune in and support the resiliency of the earth in these troubled
00:39:39.020So around here, we say renewal or reforestation instead of restoration.
00:39:43.920And I'm wondering, what do you think about the concept of land restoration and human
00:39:50.560needs and wants aside do you genuinely think or what do you genuinely think is the best thing we
00:39:56.680can do to create more possibilities for life to evolve autonomously well again i i think knowing
00:40:04.220the place in a really intimate and long-term way is essential so to come blundering in and just go
00:40:12.280oh this thing's happened historically here and and we think we can correct this by this and this
00:40:18.280is just it's almost as foolhardy as the way it got there in the first place when you know the
00:40:24.820plants and you know the trees then again very specific to the place specific to each situation
00:40:31.220and each plant and each animal involved you have to make the call and the way i can talk about that
00:40:38.040is here on the farm in golden lake it's not like in where the madawaska is which is quite isolated
00:40:45.800so there's no invasive species there at all it's a hardwood forest but here it's a farm it's 140
00:40:53.420150 years old been really really abused so of course all the the good wood has been taken
00:41:01.440long ago because they were loggers for 100 years who owned this house and what's grown back is is
00:41:08.540a mixture of kind of there is native species but there's also lots of ones that aren't from here
00:41:15.260that have come in in a pretty big way like manitoba maples is one for example
00:41:20.640i feel like even with the manitoba maples well there's part of me that goes these are going to
00:41:28.080take over i've seen places around toronto and stuff further south of here where it's completely
00:41:34.060happened they're wild places but they're completely invasive species it's all manitoba maple and
00:41:41.560strangling dog vine and all sorts of other stuff so you have to make the call one tree and one
00:41:48.540place at a time and for me the females of this species the manitoba maples have these keys
00:41:56.580so the keys are edible for us again if they're harvested at the right time you can pickle them
00:42:02.300so they can feed you all year there's endless amounts of them they feed a whole huge range of
00:42:08.840birds and then a lot of the wild species on the land here such as elm a little bit the tamarack
00:42:17.480and a little bit the birch I don't want to say things before it's actually happened and the pine
00:42:21.760are all under massive stress so the native plants because of the shifting environment
00:42:27.860may not actually be here in 200 years but the Manitoba maple will be so again it's it's a very
00:42:36.880complicated and in requires the intimacy you have to know how these trees grow you have to be able
00:42:44.120to have the foresight and the vision to be able to follow what the land is doing naturally and
00:42:50.480hopefully work with her so again you know like i cut down the male manitoba maples because you
00:42:57.700only need a couple of those around and they are overgrowing all my wild plums and lots of stuff
00:43:04.760that the animals and myself like but again it's tree by tree you make those decisions if you make
00:43:12.720a blanket decision about anything like this it's dachau it's complete fascism it's like when you go
00:43:19.660okay all white people are all jewish people or whatever they have to go like it's like no no0.87
00:43:24.700you never do that with anything you stepped way off the path by that point thanks for bringing
00:43:30.900up invasives, it's a debate that I've heard a lot of different thoughts on. Invasives are
00:43:40.200a challenging and contentious subject. Animate beings are demonized and eradicated through
00:43:47.860chemical warfare, and rarely is there an inquiry into what ecological function they may be filling
00:43:55.040or remediating or what human actions actually created the conditions in which they are now
00:44:01.100thriving in. And I read an article recently called Australasian Californian Forest Exchange
00:44:09.700where researchers examine the exchange of Monterey pine, Monterey cypress, and eucalyptus between
00:44:18.060california australia and new zealand and the intermingling of these trees has become naturalized
00:44:26.400in many places yet it's still viewed as destructive invasives you know they're the subject of
00:44:32.980environmental policy and intervention tactics ignoring for instance that eucalyptus provides
00:44:38.600a crucial resource for overwintering monarch butterflies and that their introduction is
00:44:44.100likely a factor in the recent evolution of their migration patterns. So I'm curious to hear more
00:44:51.560of your thoughts on the concept of invasives and novel ecosystems, which you started to bring up.
00:44:57.780And what do you think we can learn from invasives, quote unquote, in this time?
00:45:04.000I am definitely of that school that these things don't just happen. There's a strong theory
00:45:11.180linking certain plants like teasel and japanese knotweed that they come in specifically at the
00:45:19.500times when the the lime comes into the area when ticks and lime come in so just as one example that
00:45:28.740is completely ungraspable to our rational mind that somehow there's enough intelligence in the
00:45:36.080earth that we are actually being provided with the very plants we need some other really good
00:45:42.580examples are like plantain and broadleaf plantain and dandelions dandelion was extremely rare plant
00:45:51.400before europeans were here but it was heavily heavily used by indigenous people once it arrived
00:45:58.440and same with the plantain the white man's footsteps as they called it you know so there's
00:46:03.420lots of these plants that literally as we've come in as this colonial destructive force beauty is
00:46:11.620following in our wake from the earth this healing wake of plants is right on our heels coming in
00:46:18.080behind us and so things like dandelion which there's a multi-billion dollar year industry to
00:46:24.720get rid of them are the very very medicine we need in developed countries because it's liver
00:46:33.080and its urinary tract and it's cleaning toxins from our system
00:46:37.260and it's doing the exact, exact things that our destruction has caused
00:46:43.180in the earth and then in our bodies, the depletions.
00:46:47.260And so over and over again, what's seen as invasive species
00:46:52.180isn't to say that some of them aren't really destructive,
00:46:55.200but I think, again, our knee-jerk reaction has to be really checked.
00:46:59.300in my area here too there's a plant called purple loosestrife that was a european decorative plant
00:47:05.900it is a medicinal plant like most garden plants were originally all medicinal plants
00:47:11.340so it made its way over here and then it got into the wetlands and the government spent millions and
00:47:18.740millions of dollars and millions of human hours pulling this plant from the wetlands well
00:47:26.460two things happen it's like the coyotes there's certain animals and plants that the harder you
00:47:32.460push on them the more they breed and the more they actually grow and so not only were we doing
00:47:40.060the wrong thing to get rid of them but our whole theory was that they don't have predation over
00:47:45.760here they're gonna make the passages in the wetlands hard to get through and blah blah blah
00:47:52.460Well, the truth is the land is drying up here in North America.
00:47:58.060They're exactly the right stage plant and the right niche to come in in those environments.
00:48:04.540Now they stopped pulling it because it actually has natural pathogens, natural predators and stuff that have found it here, found it to eat, found it to breed with and all those things.
00:48:16.700So, again, even the ones that we're absolutely convinced is bad for the environment, 10, 20 years later, it looks different and maybe we were wrong. So that's what I think about that is just the knee jerk reaction. Really, really, we have to watch that.
00:48:34.780And of course, it is a form of racism. It is a form of puritanical thinking, to think that, oh, you know, just Native things should be here. It's like, well, how do you think they got here? And when do you think that happened?
00:48:48.620Like, the First Nations people are a perfect example. In my area, over the last 10,000 years, there's been three or four completely different First Nations people. So everything is moving and in flux. And yeah, animals help move things around, and we move things around, and there have been mistakes, but there's been also lots of surprises.0.99
00:49:11.820zebra mussels in the great lakes right it's pretty much cleaned the water these things that
00:49:18.180were considered a blight which of course it was a blight to industry because they were blocking the
00:49:22.980inflow valves and stuff but anyways yeah i could blab on for the rest of your hour about this so
00:51:14.380Well, no, I think we're getting them all over the world,
00:51:16.720these ones that make us stop coming up with these industrial solutions
00:51:22.720for things. Lyme disease is a perfect example where the industry is just baffled, right? They
00:51:30.320have no idea what to do with it, but herbalists know what to do with it, right? People who are
00:51:35.700connected with the plants and the animals and the disease itself understand that it has a place.
00:51:41.900It's come now for a reason. But again, we like to make things into the other. We like to make
00:51:49.460things into the dark thing that we're not. And, you know, of course, we're actually projecting,
00:51:55.960but it takes a lot to figure it out. I want to ask you a question about the moon. And there are
00:52:04.660so many forces incomprehensible to and bigger than us that sculpt the spaces in which we garden.
00:52:12.220For instance, if you live on the northwest coast of Turtle Island, the forest is not purely
00:52:17.660terrestrial, but is inseparable from the ocean. And my mind goes to the way that plant growth
00:52:24.480oscillates with the moon. And I've heard you allude to this plant moon relationship in other
00:52:29.620interviews. And I'd love to hear more. How have you seen your forest respond to the moon's waxing
00:52:35.960and waning? Well, you know, all life, we were talking about that orchestra that's, that's going
00:52:42.420on well the moon is one of the conductors right it's calling the shots on everything
00:52:47.600so the flowering time the ripening time these things are all all really affected i i feel like
00:52:57.080the trees because they have a longer scale of life they're affected by many things in year to year
00:53:05.480and such but our annuals in particular and some of the not too long-lived perennials
00:53:12.580are really really affected by the moon where planting seeds transplanting trees for doing
00:53:20.240certain things i would be much more concerned about doing it with the right timing with the
00:53:26.760moon it's lovely i i was actually just at a little farmer's market yesterday and there was an old
00:53:33.380couple there and they were saying how they just finished all their planting because in our area
00:53:39.160traditionally people planted with the first full moon in june but this year the timing's odd we're
00:53:46.860not going to have a full moon but in fact this is the strawberry moon this is the the moon you're
00:53:53.160supposed to be planting on even though it's in the wrong month the moon that just passed or i don't
00:53:58.560know when this is going to be here but the moon in may was actually our june full moon and they
00:54:04.420knew it they weren't just going by the rules of the first full moon they knew that that would be
00:54:09.560too late to be planting there had to be something wrong and so they counted the moons from the
00:54:15.120december solstice and indeed this was the right moon to be planting on so i'm always thrilled when
00:54:23.280the older folks who grew up with this stuff still know it inside out like farmers in this area any
00:54:31.060that are worth their salt i'd say they all plant with the moon you don't plow your field up on the
00:54:36.600waxing moon because you're going to have 10 times as many so-called weeds you don't plant seeds on
00:54:42.940the waning moon because you're going to have a way lower germination rate and over a much longer
00:54:47.720period of time so i think it's in these kind of everyday things for me that i'm dancing with her
00:54:56.300and but you know there is lots of other ways too like the flowering all coincides with the full
00:55:01.440moon and the pollination so there's lots of kind of subtle ways that i don't even think i'm thinking
00:55:09.140about anymore i'm just so enmeshed in this environment that for me the calendar and all
00:55:16.860that stuff has no time has no real relevance i i completely go by the moon the plants the reptiles
00:55:25.300all the other things that are signaling what time it is and everything is signaling a time to do
00:55:32.440something right so like for example the fireflies will be starting very soon here now when they're
00:55:41.140starting this is the time for harvesting birch bark it literally peels itself off the tree it's
00:55:48.060an incredible thing and you just have to hit it at the right time about two weeks ago the oak leaves
00:55:54.560were the size of mouse's ears and that's when the morels come out exactly at that point so
00:56:01.780everything's so all mixed in that i'm not consciously except for seeding and plowing
00:56:08.300and stuff like that i'm not consciously really thinking about the moon i'm just watching all
00:56:12.780my friends here and where they're at with stuff and then i know when the right time to move is
00:56:18.820i love hearing that response from you uh just thinking about the oak leaves and the morels
00:56:28.280and being able to be in relationship with the land so closely that you start to notice the nuances
00:56:36.280that's really for me when my love blossoms that much more with a place and um this has been a
00:56:44.540really wonderful conversation and for my last question i have been really thinking about the
00:56:51.760apple and we don't often even know the origins of our food and medicine plants nor do we reflect on
00:57:00.140how significantly they've shaped us, our movement across lands, our bodies, our culture, our stories,
00:57:07.640our art, not trees come to mind or corn or wheat, even hemp or cannabis. But I've heard that you've
00:57:15.180been teaching about the apple. So will you share with us what you've learned about how apples have
00:57:21.660shaped humanity and vice versa? I use the apple as an example, one of the prime examples,
00:57:28.860Just because it is something that is so common, and it has these incredibly sacred, profound origins that are completely obscured, that we have no idea actually how the apple came to be.
00:57:45.380So archaeologists and people who know things have studied such things, and they say that it came from Kazakhstan, 4000 BC.
00:57:54.660the whole thing about that is at that time that was the edge of the world that was an unknown
00:58:01.580universe so we don't really have a history of what was going on there at that point but i think
00:58:09.640it's pretty clear and the more you read and the more you come to understand realize that the people
00:58:15.300who created the apple were goddess worshiping agriculturalists and they had such a deep intimate
00:58:24.180relationship with this being that they were able to co-create with the goddess into this incredible
00:58:33.440form and you think about apples and how actually strange they are in a way compared to any other
00:58:40.200like wild food or something like that and they've been in this form for a good 6 000 years and what
00:58:47.280i would say is probably for 10 000 years before that the origins maybe even before that it's just
00:58:55.860this example of the most common thing and yet we know nothing about it it's completely filled with
00:59:02.660mystery and it's pointing at the deepest mystery at the foundation of our culture it's absolutely
00:59:10.040thrilling and exciting and you don't have to go to other cultures we also have a sacred culture
00:59:16.940but we've lost it and we just have to look back far enough and feel our way and it's right there
00:59:23.800surrounding us we're sitting on it in fact it's it's everything our chairs our tables all of
00:59:31.080these things have mystical sacred origins that have been obscured by our history
00:59:36.940so that's a little bit about the apple well thank you steven so much for being with us
00:59:44.420and sharing a bit about your life and experiences in the forest.
00:59:50.320And if there's anything that you'd like to mention that you haven't already,