Collective Responsibility8thDecember
I was recently requested to stop teaching about wild foods anywhere in Marin public park lands. I highly respect the superintendants of both the MMWD and Marin Open Space, who chose to have an intelligent conversation with me about the matter rather than tell me straight off that I’m not allowed to do something.
If you’ve ever been to one of my wild foods classes, you know that I make it clear harvesting is not legal on public lands and only point or touch plants. Both superintendents felt that even teaching people about the possibility of using plants was a high risk activity, as people were likely to come back and harvest in these locations whether I told them it was legal or not.
A couple years ago I might have been more rebellious with them and insisted on making someone wrong and someone right. I might have said the laws were misinformed or silly. But now, I fully recognize the importance of this situation for everyone and clearly see the reasons for these laws.
I have often thought about what an immense responsibility is placed on the very few people who are in charge of caring for our remaining wild lands. Protecting it each day from herds of uninformed people, dealing with dwindling water supplies, invasive plants, erosion, pollutants and on and on. All that with a dwindling budget. Wow! What would you do if I was a decision maker in that situation?
It used to be that every single person in California, took care of the earth that they lived on. Not necessarily because they were told to but because their life depended on it. They knew exactly how much to harvest of a certain plant to increase it’s productivity rather than decrease it or drive it to extinction. Stories of respect and the interconnected webs of life were deeply woven into their lives from a young age.
Today we have chosen to assign that care-taking responsibility to just a few people, perhaps so we can stop thinking about it and do other things, or because most of us wouldn’t know what to do with the land if it was our responsibility. That choice and lack of information comes with a high price. No longer can our children build a shelter out of wood they find in the park or pick berries from a bush. It’s actually illegal.
Let me just say that again: it’s illegal for children to pick berries in the park.
How did we get to this point? And now that we are here, how do we reclaim the collective responsibility of taking care of the very earth that feeds us and holds us? How do we re-acquaint ourselves with the plants and animals that sustain us, so we remember that our well-being directly and very clearly depends on theirs and can therefore no longer be compromised?
We’ve lost the direct connections and so we constantly forget. We forget that the ingredients in our antibiotics are fungi. That our food needs healthy soil to grow. That the water that comes from the tap comes from a lake. We forget that we are one, inter-connected system where the well-being of each part affects the well-being of another. No wonder one of my favorite authors, Martin Prechtel, calls us “the shimmering amnesiacs.”
Please help us remember so that one day it will no longer be a risk to let people harvest their food and medicine on these lands again. So that our children can swim in clear creeks, pick berries and learn to listen to the land. Perhaps just that remembering will be enough to create change.
Upcoming collective remembering events...
Survival Sundays Hunting Tools Dec 13 Berkeley, CA
Walk on the Wildside: Fungi Forage Jan 3 Marin County
Mushroom ID for Beginners Jan 9 East Bay, CA
Youth Next sessions of our Home School and After School youth programs begins Jan 11
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Daniel Foor Dec 09, 2009 9:55 AM
Nice post! Thanks for doing this great work. I can empathize as I lead groups of people doing earth-honoring ceremony on public land. They're illegal in the sense (like picking berries) that technically one often needs a permit for an event involving money or in some cases events that are just formally promoted in some way, and a permit not only costs money but can require having an insurance policy of up to $1,000,000. So, in this case it's a kind of benign civil disobedience to do ceremony without a permit. I imagine many plant/nature educators are engaging in a similar kind of civil disobedience by doing teaching without a permit, often for modest fees. In any case, my question for you is this: why not just include in your curriculum (if you don't already) a piece on the ethics of wild harvesting, similar to what herbalists teach with wild crafting (e.g. not taking too much from a certain spot, maybe asking permission from the beings themselves, assessing the local ecology including location in the park). Although the knowledge you're sharing certainly could be abused, one could argue that *not* sharing it is also high-risk if there is an unforseen situation that calls for survival skills. Anyhoo, just a thought. It's a tricky situation. Thanks for doing what you're doing. Daniel www.ancestralmedicine.org |
