Transcript: SEVERINE VON TSCHARNER FLEMING on the Commons to Which We Belong /214
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Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today I'm speaking to farmer, activist, and organizer Severine von Tscharner Fleming.
Severine von Tscharner Fleming The direct relationship to an ecosystem in place seems to me like a very profound pathway for personal accountability.
Ayana Young Based in Downeast Maine. She runs Smithereen Farm, a MOFGA certified organic wild blueberry, seaweed, and orchard operation which hosts summer camps, camping, and educational workshops. She is a founder and board member of Agrarian Trust and current director of the Greenhorns, a 13 year old grassroots organization whose mission is to recruit, promote, and support the incoming generation of farmers in America.
Well, Severine, thank you so much for joining me today. It's so lovely to speak with you dear friend. And I'm really excited to get into these wonderful topics with you.
Severine von Tscharner Fleming It's a pleasure.
Ayana Young Well, in preparing for this interview, I learned that around the world, churches own millions of acres of land, much of which could be tended to. Globally, it is estimated that the Catholic Church owns almost 200 million acres of land, making it one of the largest non-government landowners in the world. And simultaneously, many advocates for land redistribution point out that in the 20th century, formerly enslaved people and their descendants owned 15 million acres of land in the United States, but the vast majority lost title due to discriminatory practices at the United States Department of Agriculture. And of course, in the United States, most of this land is owned by settlers...I am not the first person to think about these glaring inequalities - but I wanted to bring this up for us to really sit in and explore this area of farmland transfer a little further...I think we can agree that imposing colonial narratives of ownership upon the land isn’t the solution, but history has complicated our solutions... I wonder if you can speak to how farmland transfers can not only return lands to those who are committed to tending it but can also work to acknowledge land theft throughout this country’s formation?
Severine von Tscharner Fleming Wow.
Well played. Yeah, there's a very succinct hashtag called land back. That is about land return and the request for land return as articulated by in that case, Indigenous activists and organizers who have studied their history and who are engaged in the practice of returning themselves to the land as well as having the land returned to their care and stewardship, and the return of our relationship with land, obviously has political and economic and social and ecological implications and, and those different spheres of relation, relationality, and the rebuilding of relationality, obviously, are what's at stake for humanity as a whole.
You could say that land return and returning to land, and remembering that we need to return to a more land based livelihood and live inside of accountability with ecological systems is the great project of the coming century. And, you know, my work has been with young farmers for 13 years as an organizer, and trying to help young people get into agriculture, especially agro ecological, restorative, agroforestry, permaculture, organic farming vegetables, and pasture poultry, and pork and chickens and orchards and local food systems. And that's all part and parcel of that meta project, which is returning to an ecologically sensible, sensitive relationship with our local, local landscape with the commons to which we belong, with the watershed and the foodshed being really discoverable in the sense of the colonial project, by people in ships, traveling through the ocean, powered by the wind and arriving in the places where that wind took them and naming the harbors and the points and the capes and the landforms, New England and cape discovery. And in that discovering, in that settlement pattern, really identifying the places on the landscape where they could capture value for their funders back home and/or the portals through which more settlers would funnel and claim land.
And the justification that was given in that story, obviously, was a terra nullius, the Catholic Church sanctioned at that time, the claiming of Indigenous lands because those peoples who belonged to that land and to whom that land belonged, were considered, well they were not Christian, they were Indigenous and they had their own animist and highly diverse spiritual practices. So that sanctioning by the Catholic Church makes your question particularly poignant because through that process, the through the colonial process, the Catholic Church itself, came to own a tremendous amount of land, as you say, and not only the Catholic Church, you know, many churches, most all churches have some land even if it's just a parking lot. And because of the tax law in the United States, churches can hold land without paying taxes. So they're, in some ways really well positioned to hold land for a long time and, and some of them hold land for very good purposes. There's wonderful examples of partnerships between young- well we made a little film actually about some wonderful food activists, food access activists doing food pantries, and food kitchens and food justice work, who are farming on land owned by the Catholic sisters, the monastic land. But yes, it's a wonderful tangle of topics. As soon as we are entering this conversation of decommodifying land and reconstituting our human relationships to harmonize with the needs of the land, the will of the land, and meeting the wants that we have more locally and in a way that's respectful and accountable. So let's do it. It’s a century long project.
Ayana Young You’ve described agrarian trusts as a means to “emancipate the land from commodity structure” and I know many of our listeners will really have an interest in this conversation as so much thought swirls around the notion of ownership when it comes to the land; that land needs to go back to its original stewards, that land ownership is actually central to obtaining some means of sovereignty in the immediate, and of course, that land cannot and should not ever be owned by an individual. Can you share with us how the Agrarian Trust plays with notions of land ownership and how beyond the legality of it, land trusts are steps towards loving and caring for land through communal ownership?
Severine von Tscharner Fleming So, in very practical terms, what we're talking about is sovereignty and self determination of communities. And the people who are actually with their bodies working in some form of food production, subsistence gardening, foraging, wild harvesting, gathering firewood, and providing for human needs, through interaction with an ecosystem. And it just bears mentioning over and over as we get into these abstractions, and I'm going to tell you about our community land trust model and tax structures and everything is, yes, more of us need to be doing it ourselves. And especially in this moment when there's a lot of unemployment as there was in the last economic fall-down time. I think a big big message that I want to foreground in this conversation is this movement, this land movement, this farm movement, this wild harvest movement, this tending, this habitat restoration, this ecosystems amelioration, this butterfly supporting movement needs human bodies. And we are really excited for new people who have maybe not been part of this before to join in. We welcome you, please come, it won't happen without our work without our physical work.
So the Agrarian Trust was founded after, I think about 10 years of work in young farmer organizing, and young farmer organizing to connect young farmers with each other with policy advocacy to try and get more funding for professional training for low interest loans from the government for activating the educational networks so that when farmers could get really good access to apprenticeship training, and classroom training, and meet each other and navigate their way into the profession, and it's all very positive, and Greenhorns, and the National Young Farmers Coalition continue to exist as those portals, but what we ran into, over and over within the life story of all of our community members, all the farmers that we met ,was a central problematic structural issue, which is access to land is incredibly challenging, even in a country as big as ours, and where so much of the land is what you could say, underutilized or, potentially available. Like if you just look at it, as you're driving by, there's a lot of land here compared to, you know, Europe or Asia. And so despite that kind of appearance of there being plenty of opportunity, and plenty of space, and all these beautiful small towns with main streets that have vacant storefronts and and despite all this appetite, and hunger and demand for locally produced food, and for CSA 's and local eggs, and everything, that that project of actually getting onto land, turns out to be quite a project.
And it boils down to relationships, it boils down to transactions, it boils down to lease agreements, purchase agreements, loans and debt and negotiation with neighbors. And it boils down to money. And so five years ago, Agrarian Trust began as a kind of multi stakeholder swirled community discussion that was hosted by Paicines Ranch, and was facilitated lovingly. And essentially what we did was sit around and co-create what we thought would make for the best habitat, legally, culturally, socially, habitat in terms of a land agreement for the kind of young farmer enterprises and organic enterprises that we see happening. And so, Agrarian Trust basically based itself on the community land trust movement, and envisioned a form of land holding, commons-based, that learns from the rules of commons management that were articulated by Elinor Ostrom, who is a scholar of the commons and an economist and Nobel Prize winner in 2009. She studied Alpine commons, she studied fish commons, she studied the highly coordinated Balinese rice gardens and their irrigation rituals. She was studying the way that humans in relationship care for and administrate land and ecosystems held in common. And basically what it means is that there's an accountability structure that isn't just one person, one deed, and a set of rights. In fact, it's the rights that are associated with the land that we hold are highly constrained. You don't have the right anymore, once land comes into the agrarian trust, to degrade and destroy it. You don't have the right to export and mine from the land. And you don't have the right to develop that land for commercial purposes, you have the right to produce food for the local community. And you have support from that local commons of humans who are involved in the Governance Committee, but also the larger community of humans, who are interested in the restoration of that land in the diversification and intensification of life of that land.
And so, this all sounds very philosophical. When it boils out on paper, what it means is, we're a land trust, and we have now 10 incorporated local land commons, with two more coming, and we have accepted land gifts. We have fundraised for land purchases, we have negotiated bargain sales, and essentially the land and the land communities who approach us come in and participate in the land commonig process, as facilitated by the Agrarian Trust, legal team and advisory team to hold this land available and make it available and keep it available for Community Supported Agriculture and community supporting agriculture.
And of course, I refer you to the Agrarian Trust website to learn in more detail how you might participate, as a farmer, as a donor of land, as a land holder, as a land neighbor, as the someone who knows and is in relationship with landowners. Because as we, I'm sure, can all appreciate each farmland unit, each bounded parcel has its own kind of history and destiny and karma and complexity. And so as we're working to heal, and reconnect with the logic of the larger landscape and think more like the butterflies who scuttle along in the sunshine on the south facing wall and think more like the water that pours through from the mountain to the sea. And, you know, remember the legacies and the structures and the architecture and the vernacular and the identity that's associated with our settlement of this land in the kind of US history terms. But that there's the kind of an unfurling, that's inferred by this practice. And it also comes with a certain kind of magnetism, certain magical possibilities. And I guess the only thing I can say is having observed the kind of raw data of all of these parcels and people and the trying and the effort and kindness to make this land available for the kind of farming that it can be, that there's a will force that shows up. And it's been a slow process, getting Agrarian Trust started. But then it's been a really quick accelerating process, as each of these land commons starts to fulfill its mission, and the relationships crystallize and the kind of gossiping fairies participate in some way. I struggled to articulate, but I want to encourage everyone to know that the conspiracy for land liberation brings with it some very special power.
Ayana Young I love that you said that. And I feel that as well. I’d like to explicitly talk about the commons with you and its importance, and I think the language around the “commons” can immediately turn people off as it’s so often associated with the tragedy of the commons - but lately, I’ve been really inspired by what can become of our collective commitment to the commons as a means to stave off expanding global land privatization, wherein governments are putting more and more land and natural resources into the hands of developers. I wonder if you might discuss a bit about why the revitalization of the commons is actually a very powerful framework for us to draw inspiration from?
Severine von Tscharner Fleming Yes, the Tragedy of the Commons is an article that was written by Hardin, and he later corrected or clarified that he was talking about the tragedy of unmanaged commons. And that the confidence we need in order to manage the commons we share; the atmosphere, the forests, the watershed, the rain, the sea, the commons we share are bounded by invisible, and a multitude of boundaries. So there's this belonging that happens on many, many scales. And in the same way, we were talking about the kind of architecture and vernacular and cultural identity of settlement that, you know, started in the point of the harbor and where the boat arrived, and then went up rivers and set up dams, and made railroads, and you know, articulated a logic pattern across the landscape that was about, you know, extraction and financialization of natural resource economies, and then connectivity and trade. That logic pattern that now kind of exists as our built world, lays over another kind of logic pattern that we can tune into, and that logic pattern is the commons and they can be made more transparent when they are culturally understood as that.
So, you know, in the United States, right now, the public lands and the public forests, National Forests, are described as public and as a commons. But in practice, the right to log and the right to graze, are essentially leased off for a very low price to private contractors, or private entities, or companies, or ranchers, or logging companies. And then the practices that happen on that land are, you know, not terribly well managed, and not very careful. And so, again, even in the place where we would want to refer to a kind of, having confidence in our commons in terms of, you know, our reverence for public lands as a nation and scenic beauty and the national parks, well, if you kind of scratch under the surface, what you discover is that mining and mineral rights, sales and exploitation of publicly owned lands, especially under this current administration, is going on in a scale that it's like Buffalo Bill out there, in terms of the ecocide.
But if we're talking about the commons, and we're talking about referring to the commons and discovering the kind of logic of the commons to which we belong, it's, I think it's helpful because it reminds us of the accountability that obviously is lost in an economy, like our contemporary economy, but which is inherent in any sustainable or regenerative or, you know, frankly, just plain old, resilient way of living in the future. And so, you can really easily just start with your naked body, wearing a mask, and what it eats and what it drinks from and where, you know, where, what it where, when it goes pee where that pee goes. And, you know, just from the very basic human scale, where is my river? What watershed am I a part of? Who are the farmers that are feeding me? What is the land that is feeding me? Where's the water that irrigates that land coming from? What's the forest that's, that's holding that water on the landscape? And those ways of relating to our home place help us to identify the places of intervention and the, the, you know, to be really tuned in as we say, in our Earth life film we say tune in, tune into your home place and learn kind of the history and the destiny of that homeplace as a way to orient your own reengagement with that commons.
Ayana Young Culturally previous generations in settler societies have placed such an emphasis on securing material wealth and protection to pass on to their children; property, paid education, trust funds - yet, I think younger generations actually haven’t found satisfaction in this material wealth. And of course, I want to recognize that it is absolutely a privilege to be the recipient of generational wealth, no doubt, but at the root, this legacy is devoid of purpose. I came across some sentiments you shared on the legacy that land tending leaves; both in the joy that is created in the present and the legacy of care...What are the implications of inheriting thoughtful places and leaving thoughtful places as we carve our lives post-capitalism and, to get more nuanced, how does this process also require a great deal of un-settling our ways...because I’m certainly not saying that inheritances within farming families have somehow been inheritances outside of capitalist mentalities...
Severine von Tscharner Fleming You know, they say in farming, married or inherited and that's because gaining access to land in a country like ours is such a challenge. And, you know, I would like to acknowledge that there are also many young farmers who have managed to wiggle their way through the chinks in the fence and lease, a small amount of land, you know, work with a nonprofit partner with a landowner work in, you know, the margins of someone else's farm, have a capacity to pay a mortgage, you know, finally be able to buy land. So I want to make sure that we don't ignore the people who spend 30 years of their lives navigating successfully this kind of normative pathway to land ownership.
However, it feels like beyond ownership, there are and of course, the renegotiation of what ownership pathways might be through means such as the agrarian trust, or other community finance options, and co-investment options and initiatives, of which I hope there will be many in the coming years. You know, there are also political ways that we could be approaching the improvement of land use in the civic sphere. And, you know, the NRCS, the National Resource Conservation Service, gives grants to pick to put hedgerows and redo native plantings, and they give grants for mitigating runoff from dairy barns, and they give grants for fencing and they give grants for greenhouses and they're really, and they're very focused on habitat for you know, sage hens, and prairie birds and migrating birds and everybody. But, uh, but they're also very focused on, you know, private property and ranch, you know, ranch owners and farmers. But there are actually so many places on the landscape that provide opportunity for restoration, opportunity for local food production, and opportunity for resilient society that are not family farms, as they're kind of traditionally understood by many of our institutions and much of the kind of cultural identity of land care in like, you know, rural discussion and discourse.
And so that kind of civic reclaiming of places like schools, like churches, like cemeteries, like libraries, like sides of the road, and the emergence of kind of new places of production within, especially along the urban edge could come about through other means than, you know, purchase and community finance and, you know, all this stuff that we're talking about with generational succession and purchase and a lot of the momentum that's possible for making habitat for young farmers and making habitat for community gardens and making habitat for pollinators can happen in a negotiated way with institutions that are not “the family farm”, and as a whole other conversation, but I think that it's very important in whenever we're talking about one kind of project or organization or approach like Agrarian Trust, which I'm happy to talk about for years, that I want to make sure that I'm not excluding what I see, as you know, 15 other totally viable pathways to achieving land care in the situational contexts that present themselves variously in this highly diverse landscape. And that, you know, especially what I'm observing with the flight of families who can, from cities during COVID, and the kind of resettling of those humans in city proximate country communities, is one version of resettlement, and there's ownership problems that come along with that, because then you know, Raytheon employees are much better able than young orchardists to afford ownership of that land, obviously, and you know, anybody who's buying a second home sanctuary is definitely going to be able to outbid anybody who's trying to farm. But if those communities understood that they're in an area, so close to a city where the land is so valuable for food production, then there would be an option for those municipalities to give tax benefit to those who produce food, and to make it more punitive in a tax way the kind of anti-social behaviors that can sometimes happen or anti anti-nature behaviors or, you know, it's not just going to be tenure, I think it's also got to be a larger cultural project to demand of our human community that we hold ourselves accountable to the region that we're a part of, and that if we're in a river bottom, and we're growing, we have a beautiful land for growing vegetables, that we will share that land with those who want to grow vegetables, and that this kind of bounded and discreet entitlement, that constitutes kind of normal land ownership behavior has just got to be renegotiated because the the movement of people and the and the disruption of our weather systems are going to force our hand and the initiative and the kind of visionary helpfulness of people who are willing to start an experiment with food production strategies in all the nooks and crannies of productive potential on the landscape really need and deserve to be welcomed and cherished. So I think it's not just about farm families and supporting farm families with succession, although that is a major, major project for this country to undertake. And, you know, the statistics are very clear on this 70% of American farmland is owned by people over the age of 65. Many people who live in the cities now are actually connected through generational inheritance to rural lands and farm lands which are leased on their behalf, often to larger scale operators, many of whom are leasing a lot of land and producing, you know, the commodity food systems that have become the norm as a result of us farm policy, soybeans, and corn and wheat, and animal feed, and hay, that are giving us the American diet we have today. And so there are many people who, who are making decisions in this next, you know, 10-15 years that will really define what happens to the American food system as they take on this land that they newly own or as this land that is newly for sale becomes either financialized or bundled as an investment or consolidated and concentrated in ever larger holdings.
And, you know, very concretely we as a movement of people involved in organic farming, we know where all the organic farms are, and we know who owns them. It's all listed in the directory and ensuring that those existing organic farms that are currently that kind of wellspring of regional food systems and that are the trainer's for new farmers and that are the places where we meet as a community for our picnic and our CSA, pickup. These farms, many of them, according to some surveys by some states, more than 60% of these existing current farming today, organic farms don't have adequate succession planning, and those current farmers need help with their exit strategy. And they need help with passing that land forward to the next, either generation within their own family or generation of next farmers who aren't in the same blood family. But for whom farming, that land is a life's mission. So just to say there are many points of access to participating in a helpful manner, when it comes to making sure that this farmland that we already have as organic, stays organic and Agrarian Trust has got tremendous amounts of resources and readings and strategies and approaches that are about succession planning and the kind of transactional strategies for land succession.
But beyond just kind of the land ownership and the pathway forward for these, you know, farm units that we have today, there's a whole other kind of renegotiation of tenure and access, that isn't to do with ownership. And I think that that's a place of very live exploration, and if we have to buy it, and if we have to operate under the terms and the valuation of contemporary capitalism, we can't do it. So land gifting in terms of ownership, land gifting into the Agrarian Trust, these are things that we are tremendously pleased to see occurring. But in order to actually succeed at doubling the territory that's growing organic food, or tripling the territory that's growing organic food or times 10, increasing the practice, the regenerative practices that we know are necessary for restoring our carbon cycle and healing the landscape. The pathways have got to increase and expand and it cannot happen on money terms, it's a lot of it's going to have to happen through gifts, through leases, through negotiations through coming together in new ways. And that's a very exciting subject. And I, I wish there were 15 scholars that I knew who were studying it, because I think emergent practices in that kind of land space are the hope for humanity. Because the places that we have, where we can eat still and where we can grow food and where we can heal in and we can restore productivity to these landscapes. These are these places really need care and as the planet Earth is suffering so much, desertification and extreme weather and flooding, and you know, farmland degradation, reversing those trends on the on the big acres, is one major project, but expanding out from the places of existing strength, and investing deeply and profoundly in those places that can be actively healed, is really the work, that is that's the Lord's work. That's the work. That's the work we need to be doing.
Ayana Young That is really exciting and I loved hearing some of these details around this work. And I, yeah, I can attest that there's undoubtedly a tremendous amount of excitement coming from young people when it comes to getting back to the land, farming their own food and seeking and starting acts of restoration. However, I do wonder what is the lifespan of this excitement, or when in its journey does it get stuck? Is this excitement translating into more farmers on the land? And what about the very troubles that arise when we seek to “live off the land”? What does living off the land mean under a system that has made it nearly impossible to subsist solely from the land? What are the nuts and bolts of living a sustainable life?
Severine von Tscharner Fleming Golly, yeah well, when, when health care is so expensive and liability is such a concern and water tables are dropping, and urbanization continues to push land values and taxes up, then an economy that has been defined by cheap food policy is, in fact, a very challenging economy to run a small farm business in. And that's obvious to everybody who's farming and I think it's at least somewhat obvious to the organic consumer, that they would need to pay more for farming that is sane and sensible and kind hearted.
In many of the kind of life stories of the people who are getting into agriculture, what you'll discover is compromises and accommodations to the larger macro economic world. And that often means an off farm job. You know, and it often means working with, you know, within a very strong social group of either a family, you know, part family partnership, or cooperative, or kind of multi human unit of collaboration in order to share living costs and share health insurance, and, you know, just confront the world in good cheer, because it is so challenging. And, you know, the rents too damn high, overall. The value of natural resources is too low, the value of property is too high. And, and this is a macroeconomic context that, you know, was invented for a purpose and has been sustained by special interests, who are not at all committed to restoration. I just think it's healthy to acknowledge that, you know, farming is romantic, but it pretty quickly becomes obvious that that romance comes at a cost. And when you have livestock, you have dead stock, things go wrong, and the stakes are high.
But your question was, how do we sustain these humans who are entering this work? I feel like the answer to that is that these humans who are entering this work need to be bonded in with a large kinship network of supporters and allies, and need to be operating, you know, not to be trite, but you know, in community, and that the reconstituting of our community accountability and community embeddedness is actually a huge co-factor in the success of, of all these farms, that every farm is in itself, a social matrix and lives at the center of a massive kind of crystal pattern of humans who care and are connected and are engaged. And that that can provide a really powerful scaffold for the next farm that starts and for the next related food business and for the next initiative to confront the salmon farm that proposes to pump water from the aquifer and to put forward to kindergarten and put forward to emergency food drive and to respond to the crisis when it comes. And so to recognize that the farm as a unit and the farm farm or farm family or farmers who are participating are actually they're kind of like holding a certain role. And they're providing the food and they're the they're doing the feeder role but they are they are of the commons unto themselves they are a part of a bounded social entity that exists and is connected you know, your nutrition and through spirit to that land and the more of those spongy, diverse mutualistic accountable to each other informationally dense pockets of humans connected humans we have the better able we are to sense and respond to the crisis of our time. So I guess if you're a listener, and you don't feel like you're part of a farm kind of posse, I would say become part of a farm posse or deepen your part and know what part you play. Because there's something very very, yeah, I don't know again, here I am. Without Words. Again, there's something very powerful about belonging to such a group.
Ayana Young Yeah, I feel like community makes the impossible possible. And to have that type of support, emotionally, physically, and in so many ways, uplifts the spirit, but also creates a type of network that allows individuals to not be individuals. And that's so important in this work.
I do think that people these days, or at least speaking of the places in which we live, are much more nomadic, in some sense - to be local is to be foreign, which I do think somewhat hinders our ability to commit to acts of repair. As we talk about bounding ourselves to place and being in long relation with the land, I’d like to ask you about committing to tending the places that so many are overlooking, or have been deemed undesirable by the market? Why are so many acreages of forgotten space perhaps some of the most impactful areas for us to start making commitments to?
Severine von Tscharner Fleming Hmm, well, that gives me a chance to promote our restoration series called Earth Life, Earth Life TV, which is all about tuning in to the places of potential, on the landscape where we might intervene for the health of the life, and the health of the Earth life. And another thing that we just been putting together with HipCamp, which is a book called Habitat Everywhere, and it's about restoration, and habitat making on much more of that kind of fragment in the kind of little bits and fragmente parts of the already kind of already slightly shattered by contemporary land use, like like lawns, and side yards, and places nearby, where we already are either temporarily or all the time that are totally worthy of restoration and repair, and how, in fact, easy it is to get a pocketful of milkweed, and how easy in fact, it is to even as a renter, even as somebody migrating between, you know where my parents live and where I went to college and where my friends that I went to college with and I hunkered down during the pandemic, even in those kinds of life worlds gathering wildflower seed and planting and improving with mulch and cardboard and food scraps, the little rented place that's nearby us and either transplanting with a shovel from the wild place or coming in from a nursery with native plants, making those acts of restoration.
Nomadic. Yeah, there's a lot of moving a lot of humans moving. And, you know, and I think acknowledging to ourselves how this moving has been historically an experience and an expression of human desperation and a driver of ecological destruction. You know, that obviously trade and settlement and migration, voluntary in the case of settlers or involuntary in the case of some settlers and those who were made homeless by the Scottish clearances or the Irish potato famine or religious persecution that's connected to land and power. You know, it's not just those of African descent who had no choice but run away from a world order that was exclusive and violent. And the way that we run, and the energy that we carry as, as diasporas, or as nomads, or as vagrants or as ungrounded, young people very much informs the way that we treat and are able to treat the land. And so it's not just about carrying your own cup and not using plastic and, you know, having accountability with your food scraps, as, as a person, between homes and between lives, and especially in this pandemic time of so much kind of suspended in limbo, those limbo-y, I, I really commiserate with the limbo-y youth, and not knowing where they're gonna land, where they could join in, productively, and helpfully. But step one seems to be acknowledging to oneself that being on the road and eating junk food from fast food etc, is just inherently more destructive. And that is, that's a historical truth, as well.
So one thing I've been noticing in my own migration down from Maine to visit all the kind of partner organizations, the Maine Granger's and Maine Preservation and all these partner groups that we're going to work with on our summer camps next year. And just friends, all the friends to see on the way is that all these farm organisms, all these farm projects, have had a major influx of new humans like college roommates and sisters in law, and, you know, humans, humans joining because there's so many humans kind of cast adrift by the shutdowns. And it's hard. It's hard.
The good news is there's lots of jobs. There's lots of jobs in agriculture. And so those who hadn't maybe thought of themselves as doing that, might newly consider that. And of course, what I would hope is that in this next phase of recovery, and state investment in re-gaining our prosperity as a country, that there would be money made available through the state for work, restoration work, in much the same way as during the Great Depression, which was both an ecological and an economic crisis, that the planting of trees and the restoration of roadways and camps and National Park infrastructures and water and while they were very focused on dams during the WPA time, but it gives me a lot of hope to see that there are many conversations about restoration and public works, and even public funding going to towns to be assigned for Historic Preservation of civic buildings and churches. And I think that those pathways for economies that are based on restoration are incredibly valuable to focus on in this time. Shade trees in the city - neededm infiltration of runoff in the drains and in the gutters, in our towns - needed. So much intervention in the physical matrix of our kind of built environment. And the logic of that work is highly accessible to us. And it doesn't take that long of a training to get ready to be in a position to help. So I'm hoping that that's something that we start seeing more of, I feel that that must be what is going to happen next.
Ayana Young I love that vision. Yeah, there's so much work that is needed. And I hope that restoration in the right way is funded. And I think it will be and I think we need to be also very careful when we see the word restoration because like so many of these other words have been co-opted by the big green machine. And I've learned that the hard way and restoration and I think there are people that are doing it with a lot of integrity. And so for those of us who are looking for those types of jobs and life callings, we just need to be discerning when we're looking into it, but knowing that it is needed, and we need to stand up for the Earth, to do it with intention and integrity and a type of community involvement that's deep and meaningful.
In “The Greater We” edition of Greenhorns, you write in the introduction; “We who do not participate directly in violence that is committed in systemic ways to keep us comfortable and who therefore do not acknowledge or associate with the violence? I refute such we-ing. I suggest we replace it with: We the implicated, we the complicit. We the orphans of oppressive biocide, we the granddaughters of extraction. We, neighbors, and creatures nearby the supply chain. We, the most certainly impacted by the chemistry in our watersheds, and therefore in immutable alliance with one another.” And the terminology, granddaughters of extraction - is so powerful and resonant, as this next generation, or the generation after us, will also be children of extraction and will experience pain regardless of proximity. As a granddaughter of extraction; what has been your practice in making reparations to the land while also acknowledging your own limitations, how can acknowledging our complicity lead us into an “immutable alliance”?
Severine von Tscharner Fleming Golly, Moses, woman, it's such a big, it's a process. I think, you know, where I am in the world is Passamaquoddy homeland. And I got swept up in a kind of fascination with an obsession with algae, wild seaweed, and participating in an intimacy with the marine world and the intertidal world. And so there I am up there with feral apple orchards growing out of the old stone walls that's now reforested, from clear cuts and historic logging, that was supporting the shipbuilding era. And so very literally, you know, we have our library in an Oddfellows Hall that was built in 1890, and that was built by the prosperity of shipbuilding and logging and cutting down the beautiful pine trees for masts, quite literally, for the King of England. And then papermaking and lath and plaster, rock, for lime and plaster and cement and the spaces that we inhabit, are so informed by the extractive project that was what drove this, not only not only the economy, but also human identity. And so that kind of, you could say that the culture of the sea and the normative expressions that are inherited by even locally owned, even culturally, you know, appropriate and embedded, you know, even, you know, familiarly acculturated fishing families, you know, it's taking too much fish.
And so the traditions that we are, you know, involuntarily, a part of are damaging. And so it's the, you know, when I come back to this landscape, why we went to Maine was to be in where I why I was magnetized by this place, which is Passamaquoddy homeland where we can range freely over, you know, 1000s of acres because there's so few humans there and there's so much self-willed, wild land to interact with, is that in the practice of relating to these self willed landscapes is an opportunity to kind of re-acculturate one’s self and I don't think that can happen easily. I don't think it happens fast. I don't think it's complete. I think, you know, my own virtue is not very high because I spent a lot of time flying around In the United States and driving around the United States, starting farmers coalition's and attending conferences, but that, that the direct relationship to an ecosystem in place seems to me like a very profound pathway for personal accountability and for tuning into what is happening, what all is happening, all the creatures and what's, you know, the timing, the wind that's blowing this seaweed up on the shore, the shore birds who are migrating in and eating all that arthropods, the time that is available to harvest the wet seaweed from the beach for the orchard tuning into the the this kind of synchrony of the world and the larger, wider world has been extremely extraordinary experience. And obviously, that's a very great privilege that I was through family support able to buy land in this place.
Now, one thing I can say is that land in those places is very, very affordable and buildings in places like downeast, Maine in northern, Northern, Northernmost New England are very, very affordable. And there are many places like that where for relatively little money, you can get buildings, you can get land, you can get forest, you can be, you can be out on the margin. And it's the margin is a wonderful place to be in this question. The margin feels like it's giving us so many of the signals.
And we're at the end of a peninsula, where every day during the changing of the tides, we have a phenomena called reversing falls. And it's a major title event. It's about 16 acres of whitewater when it's at full peak. And it's this turning and surging and reversal. It's this vortex. That, of course, is hugely generative of oxygenation. And you know, the chaos that makes the seals come and hunt and the birds come along and Eagles swoop down. The confusion is rich. Also, it seems like that's I don't know, the problem is once you get into these highly poetic landscapes, everything turns into metaphor, and it all becomes highly amusing. And when you're weeding your strawberry patch and harvesting your apples up and down and going out gathering the shiitakes every day and fishing and fermenting the fish and tending the oysters and, you know, you have plenty of time to be very romantic, and consider the poetic implication of everything and you know, and then you fall to bed exhausted. So what to say about that. Just that that's different from the kind of anxiety that I think has been an experience of my early youth and an experience of being a college educated person raised in the city and the experience of seeking purpose. And that, you know, my own personal activism and inquiry and you know, frenetic over exertion in the world has been informed I think, by that anxiety of being a daughter of extraction.
And I really hope that after a few more years of building oxen sheds and cooking eggs in the kitchen and everything and getting our, you know, our situation dialed in, so that we can feed a lot of people and live well and do good work. Maybe after a few more years, maybe a couple more decades of frenetic activity, I will be calm enough to leave in grace, but I think you know, it makes sense to be anxious, it makes sense to be afraid it makes sense, to worry and, and hoard and claw our way and, you know, that's that reflects our experience genetically and epigenetically as as, as as human creatures. So, having compassion for others who might arrive into your scene and who were in some way unbalanced or upset you know is the challenge and if you have the capacity to make a scene and make them home and make a sanctuary and be settled in a way that's compassionate and kind, then do it. You know, take responsibility for your capacity, if you have the capacity to lead and administrate and coordinate and farm and plan and host. Do it. We need you.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to another episode of For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by Handmade Moments. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Melanie Younger.