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Ep.123 The Myth of No Farms, No Food | Reclaiming Our Role as Ecosystem Engineers
65 Plays13 days ago
What if everything you’ve been told about food and farming is a myth?
In this conversation with author and journalist Elspeth Hay, we unravel the “No Farms, No Food” narrative and explore how humans can reclaim our place in the ecosystem. From the overlooked nourishment of acorns and chestnuts to the history of colonization and lost commons, this episode reframes humans as keystone species—ecosystem engineers with a vital role to play in regeneration.
✨ Listen + Resources ✨
🌱 Expanded Show Notes
🌱 Join the Naturally Conscious Community
🌱 Feed Us With Trees by Elspeth Hay
What You’ll Learn
🌱 Why the “No Farms, No Food” story is rooted in colonial trauma
🌱 How tree foods like acorns and chestnuts can transform food systems
🌱 Why humans are meant to be ecosystem engineers—like beavers and oaks
🌱 How to begin rediscovering your role in your local ecosystem
👤 Guest Spotlight: Elspeth Hay
Elspeth Hay is a journalist, radio producer, gardener, and author of Feed Us With Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food. Living on Cape Cod, she explores regenerative food systems and how humans can rebuild lost relationships with keystone species like oak. Her work reframes food not as extraction, but as collaboration with the ecosystems that sustain us.
Learn more about Elspeth’s work
✨ Chapters ✨
00:00 Introduction
08:06 Origins of the “No Farm” Narrative
16:19 Historical Shifts in Food Systems
24:48 Modern Challenges in Agriculture
32:53 Community and Local Food Connections
41:04 Cultural Stories About Farming
49:10 Biodiversity and Ecosystem Roles
57:10 Closing Reflections
59:43 Get Feed Us with Trees
🔗 Connect & Explore More
🌿 Website
🌿 Contact
🌿 Shop Eco-Conscious Partners
Socials
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▶️ YouTube
🎵 Credits
Opening + Closing music by @Cyberinga and Poinsettia
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, hello, hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Reconnect with Plant Wisdom. It's me, Tigria Gardenia. This episode is so powerful because it completely reframes something that we have been indoctrinated to a certain extent.
Humans and Nature: A Single Ecosystem
00:00:20
Speaker
We've been taught since we were little, especially if you grew up in North America, you have lived with these series of myths and And Elspeth Hay really just cuts through it and talks about the myths around food and what it means to be part of your ecosystem and how the ecosystem where you live needs you. you
00:00:45
Speaker
Not this idea that we as human beings are separate and that we should be like, you know, staying away from nature and not entering into it, but that instead we need to find our place in
The Myth of No Farm and No Food
00:00:55
Speaker
it. And specifically, we need to find our place in the ecosystem as beings of nature who are part of the web of life. And that includes feeding and being fed and this whole relationship. And all of this for her started with an acorn.
00:01:11
Speaker
Yes, acorns are edible and there is so much that we are going to be going into. You are absolutely love it. And more importantly, we're going to bust one of the biggest myths out there, which is the name of this episode, because this is episode 123, the myth of no farm and no food with Elspeth Hay.
00:01:33
Speaker
I hope you enjoy.
Introductions of Tigria and Elspeth
00:01:36
Speaker
Welcome to Reconnect with Plant Wisdom. I'm your host, Tigria Gardenia, nature-inspired mentor, certified life coach, and the founder of the Naturally Conscious Community. For over a decade, I've been known as a world ambassador for plant advocacy, working closely with plants to share their practical wisdom to help you consciously embody the elements of life that nourish your evolution.
00:01:57
Speaker
In this podcast, I delve into ancient and modern knowledge from biology to spirituality about the wondrous ways of plants. Together, we'll explore how ecosystem thinking helps you overcome limiting beliefs, understand the true nature of relationships, and live an authentic, impactful life.
00:02:19
Speaker
Elspeth, when you and i first spoke, I love that you made a comment because i I gave you my little spiel that I always give everybody that um my podcast is all about like working with plants.
00:02:31
Speaker
And you were like so excited So, so excited. and i was I loved it. So before we start, and we kind of dive into everything that you have discovered about, you know, acorns, because that's like the core of your love.
00:02:46
Speaker
um Please tell everybody who is Elspeth.
00:02:52
Speaker
I am a mother and a journalist and a gardener and now a basket weaver. That's a new part of me.
00:03:02
Speaker
ah and And live on Cape Cod in the middle of the Cape Cod National Seashore, which is out into the Atlantic, about 90 miles in a big oak and pitch pine forest that's mostly protected. and I love it there.
00:03:19
Speaker
I feel really lucky to be there. Beautiful. and And I already have a few, like, like I had a few questions jotted down. But now you've just in those few words, you added a few more to me.
00:03:33
Speaker
But you also you're you're not just a journalist, you're an author. i mean, you've you've authored a book, which is very much connection connected to plants can you know, the tell tell us about the book.
The Edible Acorn Revelation
00:03:44
Speaker
Yeah, the book just came out. I guess I'm still getting used to adding author to the lineup. Add it to your repertoire, girl. It's yours. You've earned it. Yeah, ah yeah it's only been like ah a week or two that the book's been out in the world um as of this time that we're talking. So my book is called Feed Us With Trees, Nuts, and the Future of Food.
00:04:04
Speaker
And it's been about a five-year journey doing the research, putting together pro proposal and writing. um and it all started when I learned that we can eat acorns and this oak forest around my house that I'd always seen as an impediment to food production because it's all protected and can't be cleared for farmland.
00:04:29
Speaker
Suddenly I started seeing things in a really different light and a lot of stories that I had held my whole life just started unraveling and rewriting and going in all new directions. So yeah, it's been a pretty fun ride.
00:04:44
Speaker
I like how I... I love how you just said, you know, this forest that I look as an impediment because it can't be cleared for agriculture, which in my mind, I'm like, thankfully, thankfully.
00:04:58
Speaker
but But I guess I had never thought about it as the opposite, you know, the idea of people who do want to create farmland because they think that that is the way to add and to feed. And all of a sudden you're like, here's this forest in the middle of it.
00:05:10
Speaker
How did you even start with this? Like, how did you start going down this rabbit hole? Yeah, well, ah so I grew up in Maine in a community that had a lot of farmland. So I was, um you know, I grew up going with my parents to the farmers market.
00:05:26
Speaker
I knew a lot of farmers as a kid. And I knew sort of the good and the bad of farming. I learned as a kid, you know, what industrial agriculture was doing.
00:05:37
Speaker
to our land and our water and our air. And it made me incredibly sad that this most basic need, like our need to eat food was destroying wild places and the habitat of other creatures.
00:05:51
Speaker
ah But it was also a little bit of a double edged sword because I also really enjoyed, obviously, all the food that these farmers were growing and going to the farmer's market. And so when I moved to Cape Cod to this place that has almost no farmland because you know for a few reasons partly because it's like 70 of the land in my town and on the outer cape is protected but also because it's so sandy that even where people do have land it's pretty hard to grow row crops i just sort of was looking you know looking for the farmers market looking for the locally produced food and there is some but i always thought oh the forest is just in the way you know we can't have that here um
00:06:30
Speaker
And I, someone sent me, so I became a reporter, a journalist for the radio station
Cultural Practices of Acorn Processing
00:06:36
Speaker
here. And my beat is food and the environment. So I've been talking to people about food and the environment for more than 15 years.
00:06:43
Speaker
And no one had ever mentioned eating acorns. And then a friend sent me this TEDx talk by a woman in Greece named Marcy Mayer. and She was originally from California and she said that acorns are edible and they're super food and one of humans oldest foods. And I was like, wait, ah so what?
00:07:07
Speaker
And so that was kind of of what started my journey. And i went completely down the rabbit hole, like started reading everything I could find about people eating acorns,
00:07:19
Speaker
you know, all different cultures and then from acorns expended into other tree nuts. So chestnuts and hazelnuts and walnuts just couldn't stop reading basically and and talking to people and trying to learn more.
00:07:33
Speaker
Yeah, the whole thing of acorns, I've um i've heard it over the over the years in different from from different people in different ways because I live in an area that is very chestnut rich.
00:07:45
Speaker
And most people think that the chestnuts here are actually native, but it turns out that they weren't. And when in around the 1817-1800s, there was a massive famine. and a duchess in the area discovered the whole idea of the superfood that is chestnuts, not only chestnuts, but chestnut trees and everything that comes from um that, from that particular plant.
00:08:06
Speaker
And so she ended up encouraging them to be planted all over the place. So This is an area that's very rich in them because, as you said, they're are superfood. It's like really nutrient dense.
00:08:16
Speaker
It's good brain food. We call it here. And then the tree ah also grows very tall, very straight. So great for poles, for vineyards and other kinds of things.
00:08:28
Speaker
And um the only problem is that the chestnut leaves are very acidic. So that when they fall down, they actually create like the ecosystem doesn't know how to handle it. So you have to kind of treat the whole thing differently.
00:08:42
Speaker
But we also have a lot of oak and nobody around here, even though we talk a lot and we gather and we have this is, you know, we do chestnut festival and, you know, we have everything from chestnut flower to, you you know, eating chestnuts in so many different ways. One of my favorite, favorite, favorite things is butter and chestnut, which they do up in the mountains here. It's like delicious, but nobody really talks about the acorns. It's kind of like this art in part I had heard, but I'd love to hear from you more as it's because also you have to, you know, you have to work at it to eat an acorn. It's not like pick it up and, you know, maybe boil it for five minutes like you do a chestnut and you can eat.
00:09:20
Speaker
Like, why do you think that it's been this lost art and and the fact that these are edible plants, you know, that in so many different ways? It really depends on where you are. So when I first started talking to people about acorns, I thought, oh, we're talking about acorns, right?
Challenges of Acorn Processing and Historical Context
00:09:37
Speaker
An acorn is an acorn.
00:09:39
Speaker
But of course, that's not true. There's hundreds of different species of oaks and all of their nuts are a little bit different. So the first acorn ah eaters who i started getting to know um were in present day California. So I got to know an indigenous man named Ron Reed. He's a medicine man, biologist, and his people, the Kurok people, have eaten acorns since time immemorial as a staple food. So one of their biggest foods.
00:10:09
Speaker
ah And it turns out that the acorns from the tan oak tree where he lives are much easier to leach. So acorns... have to be processed. Like you mentioned, they have these bitter tannins in them, which on the one hand are kind of cool because they're an amazing preservative. So acorns have this food safety storage life that is almost unlike anything else. They can last for decades in their shells, just waiting to be cracked.
00:10:36
Speaker
um But on the other hand, it's a pain in the butt and you have to get the tannins out in order to eat them because just like olives, right? So olives have those exact same compounds. Probably where you are more people have tried to eat an olive straight off the tree and had the terrible experience of realizing how incredibly disgusting and bitter it tastes and spitting it out.
00:10:58
Speaker
um But obviously that hasn't stopped us from making olives a major a stple food. food. ah Yeah. So, but the thing about tannins is that they're water soluble. So um it depends on what you're making, right? If you're making olive oil, the tannins don't get into the fat. So you can just press the olive and get that oil out without any tannin. But if you're making table olives, you have to soak them in brine.
00:11:26
Speaker
And or you can use lye. And the same is true. Actually, I started learning when because I would say, Ron, you know, how do you process your acorns? Oh, we just pour water through a few times and then they're sweet.
00:11:37
Speaker
And then I would try that with my acorns and it would be like, and no, they're not. They're still really bitter. They don't taste good at all. And as I started talking to more people in different places, I learned that people in different places ah created different techniques to deal with the tannins because some tannins are more stubborn than others and they leach differently. They, you know, they come out into water differently.
00:11:58
Speaker
So the answer is that I think we've lost a lot of really so place specific knowledge. And in some places it maybe made more sense for the acorns to be fed to pigs because they were just so hard to leach and such a pain in the butt that it wasn't worth it.
00:12:15
Speaker
In other places, it made more sense to make acorns into flour. In other places, people actually, there is acorn oil. It's this incredible orange color, and you can press it out of the acorn for some of the more oily species.
00:12:27
Speaker
and so And then in other places, people would leach the tannins out with lye. And lye sounds kind of scary, right? It's just like caustic. Exactly. But it's used in traditional corn processing for nixtamalization. It's used in olive processing. So it's actually not that crazy to use it in acorn processing. It's just a skill that we've lost and forgotten.
00:12:51
Speaker
And I find that so interesting to to think about how a... how acorns who on one level, because you know, working so long with plants, right? Oaks are are just the cornerstone, like a keystone species in so many different places and even iconic for so many people.
00:13:10
Speaker
Like there is this high level of recognition of an oak and also of an oak's purpose in maintaining an ecosystem, right? The idea that you have this oak tree that carries out different functions throughout the course of, you know, that that plant's life, where starting with nutrition and food and the acorns for the squirrels and the small animals and then All these other functions that start to grow out of that as the tree grows in size, right?
00:13:39
Speaker
Opening little holes for lots of different species that can use the body, the root systems, the leaves. Like there is just this entire ecosystem that is created around oak.
00:13:51
Speaker
And they're revered, revered by us as humans in so many stories and, you know, folklore and stuff like that. And yet this part of the food element, the element of the the oak directly nourishing us in so many aspects has
Food Forests and Historical Efforts
00:14:07
Speaker
been lost. And I just find it Yes, I know it's hard, but as you said, so are olives. Like it's not, it's not like, and there's lots of other kinds of, you know, plants out there that even even the chestnuts themselves, let me say as a person who spends almost every year in the chestnut season, and collecting chestnuts and working with them, they're pretty, those husks are dangerous, man. You've got to come up with a technique.
00:14:30
Speaker
Some people use the foot technique. They like step on the husk and then with, you know, can like sneak in there to grab the nuts out. Other people have like thick gloves, like there's techniques to do this. So it's not the easiest food either.
00:14:44
Speaker
And yet for so many, so many of us, the idea of anything edible that is oak based just seems, you know, lost, completely lost. And I'm, I'm still shocked about it as I think about it more and more.
00:15:01
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's it that was kind of what drew me in in the first place was my parents were bird watchers. And so I had spent my whole life, you know, learning about bird habitat and how important these this tree was for wildlife.
00:15:17
Speaker
And there are so many efforts where I live to restore wildlife habitat. You know, we have to have these trees for wildlife. We have to keep this land protected as a forest for wildlife.
00:15:28
Speaker
And I think that what's been lost from the conversation is that that's also human habitat. And humans are wild life too. Yeah. And we don't, um ah we don't talk about ourselves as having a habitat.
00:15:41
Speaker
And I think that, um you know, i had this experience of going down to Pennsylvania, which is about six or seven hours south of where I live on Cape Cod.
00:15:52
Speaker
And there was a man there named John Hershey in the nineteen twenty s who, as part of ah recovery from the Great Depression, started experimenting with these fruit and nut tree nurseries.
00:16:04
Speaker
um And he was actually part of the Roosevelt administration during the economic recovery from the Great Depression. And they were sending these trees out to these devastated communities. And, you know, they were devastated economically, but also environmentally from a lot of clear cutting.
00:16:19
Speaker
And so his thought was, hey, We can basically create human habitat by sending these trees out, restoring the area ecologically and restoring it in terms of food production for people who are starving right now.
00:16:32
Speaker
And it actually reached the highest levels of American government for a while. It fell apart. He got cancer and World War Two started. But for about 10 years there, it was this big thing.
00:16:43
Speaker
And so I heard that story, I get interested, and I heard that some of the trees were still standing. And I went down to what people were calling North America's oldest food forest.
00:16:56
Speaker
And um I would add North America's oldest European American food forest, because there's indigenous food forest everywhere. But ah good, good, good point. points Good point to make. yeah ah But it was a really cool. ah So we're like standing next to a nail salon, right? And there's these super old American persimmons.
00:17:16
Speaker
And then at the church, there's these huge bur oak trees, huge chestnut trees, just all scattered throughout suburbia. And and It was kind of the first example that I had seen of someone trying to actually create human habitat in, you know, at the time it wasn't as suburban, but he really took the landscape around his little town and was like, let's create a habitat that's for both humans and wildlife and livestock. Like, let's actually look at all the elements of life in this community and try to feed all of them with these trees.
00:17:57
Speaker
And when I started talking to the people down there, because there's this group who's been working to save the trees, one of them said something that really kind of upended my understanding of our food stories and my own food history.
00:18:12
Speaker
And he was like, yeah, you know, humans need habitat. And So many of us here who are Euro-American are refugees from our home countries where we lost access to traditional lands and traditional food production methods.
00:18:31
Speaker
And i was totally confused when he started saying that. That's not a history that we talk about in the U.S. You know, I grew up as a little kid with the story that my ancestors came here because it's a land of opportunity.
Colonialism's Impact on Food and Land Use
00:18:44
Speaker
And that story, i mean, it's told in school, it's told again and again and again and again. And so I was sort of like weirded out when he said that, like, oh, we're all refugees. I was like,
00:18:56
Speaker
Like, what are you talking about? But when I started looking back through the history, he was totally right. And this whole land of opportunity story is kind of one written to cover up, I think, the real trauma of a lot of Euro-Americans who immigrated here um in the early 1800s.
00:19:20
Speaker
So yeah, I don't know. We can go deeper into that. I'd love to go deeper into it because as a person who, you know, I also grew up in the United States. I grew up in South Florida where, you know, it's on one hand, the idea of fruit trees are everywhere.
00:19:35
Speaker
You know, the when I was a kid, the idea of buying mangoes and avocados was like, never came into our consciousness because people would show up at school with these giant bags filled with them.
00:19:46
Speaker
saying, please take them. There's just so many. They're they're breaking our cars. Like you had to know where to park your car to make sure that they didn't come because they're huge there. Like the avocados are really giant and so are the mangoes. And they would, of course, land on your car and break your windshield or like dent your hood and stuff. So during the season, you knew not to park in those areas.
00:20:07
Speaker
And of course, we also have lots of coconut trees. And so there's certain things that and that were embedded into, that still are embedded into the landscape and that, you know, it's common to see somebody climb up to a coconut tree, grab a coconut, bring it back down. um And even though we still buy them, but it's,
00:20:25
Speaker
You know, we have all these places, Palacio del Jugos, which is like this big location that makes all kinds of different juices because there are, you know, sugar cane and all the other kinds of fruit that's there. And and um ah but I remember that when my friend i have a friend of mine who spent the last 20 years of her life and when she moved to to South Florida, creating a food forest out of her home.
00:20:46
Speaker
And we've had so many discussions about like just. it's it is lost to a certain extent. And then here I am, I live in Northern Italy, where, as you said, like we don't we don't have i mean the biggest cities or Turin is about 45 minutes. I'm in the middle of the mountains. So 45 minutes to an hour away from me and and Milan is an hour and a half to two hours away from me.
00:21:07
Speaker
And so everything here is built like that. Like everything is around. ah I I'm so happy. No offense, no offense to you cows, but the cows finally moved over to the different pasture from the one in front of my house because their bells keep me up all night with the clanging and the clanging, especially when the bull gets a little spicy.
00:21:26
Speaker
And then there's like lots of clanging all over the place. Oh, Oh, it's craziness. But, you know, like like once a year we have the wild garlic that surges in the area by the river. And so everybody goes down to grab. It's like this giant population of wild garlic. And we all go and we grab our years full or we still have like um where we spend one once a year creating the the tomato sauce for the entire year. So giant production of tomato sauce, plus all of the natural things, persimmons. Oh my goodness. We once had a work exchange that, that ended up harvesting. We had two persimmons trees in the house that I was living at at the time.
00:22:06
Speaker
And I think we ended up with like, 90 or 100 kilos of persimmons from these two trees, which was fantastic because I love persimmons and you have to wait so long for them to ripen completely.
00:22:20
Speaker
But you know, it's like, it's just the way it is around here. It's it's all over the place. It's all around you. And so once you learn, you you feel safe, you know where to get food, you know, all these different pieces. And then you go to the to the United States and you're like,
00:22:35
Speaker
Gotta go to a supermarket. Gotta go to a supermarket. And that's scary as hell for people because it means if you don't got no money, you ain't got no money, you ain't got no food. And I feel like that is one of the major trauma points. One of that one of those examples of that trauma of disconnection with nature, when I forget that i am that I am nature, therefore it's natural for me to eat from the natural world and to have that relationship with food in that way, um that that they feed me and I feed them and and all of this piece, I feel like that causes so much trauma for people.
00:23:11
Speaker
And so our cities are built to instill trauma and separation. And that is just such a sad thing to see that people flock to living in these cities, which have benefits. I have no problem with the density or with other aspects, but that disconnection, like you said, the fact that you can't have orange trees in the middle of the street that you just pick as you walk or you know, that we don't think anymore about the trees on our sidewalks and and are as part of our living ecosystem that we're in relationship with and also we're being nourished by, i feel like it just, it instills this need of like, make money, make money, make money, make money, because then you're going to starve and you're not going to be able to do anything and you're not going to have any food and you're not going to be able to, you know, all these types of pieces.
00:23:58
Speaker
Right. Yeah, well, and when we look, when I started looking back at the history, because i I grew up with that story, you know, I call it in the book, I call it the no farms, no food story, just this idea that if we're not creating farms, there's nothing in the world for us to eat. We don't have a habitat. We're not like other species.
00:24:16
Speaker
You know, we have to destroy these wild places just to meet this need. And i started trying to understand, you know, once I saw, okay, that's really not true. i started under trying to understand, well, then why do we think this, right?
00:24:29
Speaker
And I just followed my own ancestry back and back because it seemed like... ah When I started looking at it, that really was a story in communities like mine where, you know, it was a lot of European immigrants for who have been here for a long time.
00:24:48
Speaker
And in more recent immigrant communities, people were still in relationship with a lot of these wild foods, still understand the world as edible, same as in a lot of indigenous communities So I was trying to figure out, okay, where did we get separated?
00:25:02
Speaker
And the no farms, no food story, i started to realize as I read, was actually really intentionally written with the birth of colonialism and capitalism.
00:25:15
Speaker
And this sort of internal colonization that happened in England and Europe, prior to the spread of colonization into, you know, North America, South America, Australia, all these other places.
00:25:28
Speaker
And the whole point of the story was that all these public lands, which were called commons in England, where my ancestors are from, were being privatized.
00:25:41
Speaker
And there was a, obviously, you know, if you're taking something that belongs to the people where they have fed themselves for hundreds or thousands of years, there's going to be protests and there's going to be uprising.
00:25:55
Speaker
And people protested incredibly strongly. You know, I had learned about the history of the witch trials and had just been told, oh, that was a weird religious thing. Well, actually, that was women protesting for rights to these former common lands. And being the the way that they addressed that and tried to shut that down was by saying that, oh, they were witches. Right.
00:26:18
Speaker
And in fact, you know, tens of thousands of women were killed for the crime of trying to still harvest food or medicine or plant materials that they needed from these lands that they had once been allowed to harvest from and that were suddenly being privatized incredibly quickly.
00:26:36
Speaker
um I have a map in the book of the amount of common land that was privatized in England. I think it's, forget the exact dates on that map, but it's in ah the span of about 100 years.
00:26:48
Speaker
And it's like a fifth of the country. I mean, it's just huge amounts of land being enclosed. And so that movement came to be known as the enclosures. And it came along with this incredible amount of propaganda to say, well, this is a good thing because now we can feed more people because the farmland is more productive when it's privatized.
00:27:08
Speaker
And those natural spaces, those ecosystems that we had before really didn't produce much. Now, of course, that's not true. That's not true at all. I spend a lot of time in the book looking at the yield question because that is some of the propaganda of the no farms, no food story that I had deeply internalized. Like, well, we have to have these farms because wild spaces don't produce enough food.
00:27:31
Speaker
They produce way more food. A healthy ecosystem produces way more food than a monoculture. we've got to be able to let go of that. But I think in order to do that, we have to look back at this trauma and the fact that When a lot of early European immigrants came to North America, they tried to recreate these commons and did successfully for a time. theyre Before the close of the Civil War in the United States, any unenclosed land, so unimproved was the word they used, and that meant like it didn't have a building or it didn't have a fenced-in farm field.
00:28:06
Speaker
That was a place where people could hunt, gather, fish, find medicine, water, um you know weaving materials, building materials, anything they needed for life. They could turn animals out to graze there.
00:28:21
Speaker
And what happened here, which is an incredibly sad piece of our history, is this system you know that they had worked so hard to get back after having to leave Europe when that land was enclosed, that Then after the close of the Civil War, when enslaved African-Americans were freed,
00:28:37
Speaker
They were also feeding themselves from this common spaces and white plantation owners who wanted cheap labor and who wanted the African-Americans to still be forced to work on the plantations started that, you know, they were had the political power as well and the legal power. And within a year of the close of the Civil War, trespass lands in every southern state changed so that you know, the hunting and gathering and the fishing and all these subsistence activities became illegal. And then that practice spread north and it spread west.
00:29:11
Speaker
And um there was this incredible closing of the commons that we had worked so hard to recreate. ah So there's a lot of trauma there and a lot of disconnect that, you know, when you go to school as a kid and you just hear like, oh, we came because it was a land of opportunity and we have to have farms because they're so productive. And it's like, wow, you just swept a lot of history under the rug. And maybe that's why so many of us are so confused about our relationship with the living world around us. You know, I don't even like to use the term the natural world anymore because,
00:29:53
Speaker
That's just another way of drawing a line between us and all the other life in our ecosystems. And we're not separate from it. We're part of it.
Gardening, Culture, and Nature Relationship
00:30:04
Speaker
Yeah, and you've touched on so many different points, like everything from the history that we've been told and and and more of anything, the fear story that we've been told. Like anybody who spends time either in with indigenous cultures or who you know has survival training really learns that there that this whole separation piece and that this whole idea of extraction and colonization and that... oh, we have to do it this way, because if not, you know, like you said, we can't survive or any of these pieces is actually just bull. And it's it's everything that we've been told, unfortunately, that makes us like makes us dependent on somebody. And and that's really kind of the focus point.
00:30:47
Speaker
Not only that, but I think and I think what we don't realize is that we think, oh, that Now, some people think that, oh, well, you know, you're just talking about you the fact that people don't want to go and fish or don't want to do those things.
00:31:01
Speaker
Sure. OK, there might be people who don't want to. But the problem is we're all afraid of it where we we don't know how to do it. So therefore, you're you're cultivating this whole point of, like you said, separation, division, um fear, ah worry, all these other pieces. And so not only have we eliminated history that was so important to remember, and we've changed dynamics that irreparably harm others, but we're perpetuating something that continues to keep people in a state of of fear on a regular basis.
00:31:35
Speaker
and And that... The truth of the matter is that when you, um at least in my experience, living here as well, you know, people sometimes ask, you know, why is it that, for example, in certain European countries, people are healthier or they don't, you know, they might eat what seems to be like enormous amounts of olive oil and other stuff and they're healthier. And I'm like, Part of that healthier is because there's not this gorging on other stuff because the communion with the land, you don't, if I'm going out and I'm killing a cow to eat meat, I don't kill seven of them, like just to have them throw around. Right. I kill one.
00:32:11
Speaker
i eat everything. If you're from places like Sardinia or even Sicily, You literally eat everything. I mean, these people were like head, hooves, like every single thing. There is no waste because this animal gave their life. And the same thing goes with the plants, right? I don't go off and cultivate in this way.
00:32:29
Speaker
And I also find it really interesting. I did ah my master's project on a town called Matera, which is down in the south of Italy. It's one of the oldest plants. continuously inhabited cities in the entire world.
00:32:42
Speaker
it's It's a troglodyte culture. It's a culture that was originally in caves and you can still like like go and and live in the caves the way people did back in those times. And one of the things that we discovered as I was working on my project, which was really beautiful, is that you had three different types of quote unquote gardening or agriculture.
00:33:02
Speaker
You had outside of the city, um you had the the stuff that today we think of as agriculture, which is really more a combination of well-cultivated things and hunter-gatherer, because in that time it was kind of a little bit mixed. Like we were starting to learn that, oh, if I hunted and I gathered in this way, then it would come up on a regular basis. So therefore i could start to sort of cultivated I wasn't doing rows, but I was doing that. And that was always outside of the city.
00:33:32
Speaker
um Inside of the city, you had two different kinds of garden spaces. One was the one closest to the house or the one that was in the common area, like in that in that shared space. And in that area, there was usually the stuff that you used in the kitchen.
00:33:47
Speaker
Often, like, you know, the herbs and the different kinds of herbs and spices that could be grown, those types of pieces that add on to whatever it is at the meal that you're cooking.
00:33:58
Speaker
And then there was a pensile garden, like a garden up above, that was the contemplation garden. It was the garden of beauty. It was the garden of relationship with the natural world where...
00:34:09
Speaker
I could sit and I could just, you know, be in this environment that was, you know, part of it. And so you have these three different types of relationships, but each one of them required you to also be in relationship with.
00:34:24
Speaker
Because when I would go out, I wasn't forcing the plants to grow in this way. i was, you know, working with the plants to see like, oh, okay, where do you come up? How do I move? Where do I go? How can I concentrate you? How can I bring more of you into my space?
00:34:39
Speaker
And you're it's like a dance that they were doing in this outside part. And then in the inside, you had the ones that were specifically working very closely with you on your day-to-day food. And then that piece that was about, hey, we need downtime.
00:34:54
Speaker
Human beings and nature take time to renew, to grow, and all those pieces. And so that pensile garden was built for that particular piece. And I always found that so beautiful. I loved working on this project and discovering all these different aspects of it because it made us it made me really think about how we've distorted the city garden and all these other pieces, but how how much we've lost work Also, that that herb garden that dying clothes garden, that garden that should be super close to me because it's it's in relation to it's the medicine, like you said, with the witches, like it's my medicine.
00:35:34
Speaker
It's my dying. It's my dying as in dying clothes, not dying as in I die, just to be clear. like It's what I use to dye clothes and what i you know use for cleaning. like it's like ah There's all these different elements that I used to get out of that. And we've lost it.
00:35:50
Speaker
we've We've lost it. And it's hard to reacquire because herbalism seems complicated for people. Oh, i have to memorize all these plants and I've got to do that. Where this was built out of relationship. You might not have ever known the official name of those plants.
00:36:06
Speaker
Yeah. I'm just thinking as you're talking, two things are popping up. The first is just how amazing it is to watch kids absorb this these relationships. like My daughters are 10 and 13, and I've been doing a foraging class at their school for the past, I don't know, since they were in kindergarten, just taking kids out after school. And all we do is walk around outside and they'll say, what's this? You know, we just talk about the plants and the fungi and whatever we run into, we just learn about it. Even if I don't know what it is, we look it up. We see what people have done with it in the past, what the relationship's been.
00:36:43
Speaker
And my younger daughter, especially, I think is just called into these relationships more. And, you know, I grew up knowing none of this stuff. And to her, it's kind of almost like boring. Like,
00:36:58
Speaker
well You know, what do you, someone will, cause she's, you know, she knows a lot more than some of the other kids and now, and especially now she's in, she's going into fifth grade. So she's like the big, big kid on at school. And I've told her like, okay, you can't really talk at foraging class because like, you're, you know, too much. You're, you're like, you're not the right audience. You're not the right audience.
00:37:21
Speaker
But it's really cool to see how much can shift in one generation. of just, and it's not like I know everything by any stretch of the imagination. You know, I've been in relationship with this place where I live now for about 20 years, but it's slow gaining knowledge. You know, I try to learn like one new mushroom a year, one, you know, but she's like a sponge and she's like, oh yeah, you can do that with this. You can do that
Traditional Practices in Oak Ecosystem Management
00:37:46
Speaker
with this. And it's like, and love watching her and thinking like, wow, two or three generations of that. And you've rebuilt so many things.
00:37:55
Speaker
relationships with a place. um And the other thing I was thinking about when you're talking about these garden zones is one thing that I got really fascinated by as I started learning about oak trees and humans eating acorns.
00:38:08
Speaker
um The friend I mentioned earlier, Ron Reed, who's the Kurok Medicine Man. So I went out to visit him in California and I was asking him a lot of questions about um how you you know, how they took care of the oaks, how they tended them.
00:38:22
Speaker
And it turns out that the traditional method of tending oak woodlands and oak grasslands, actually not just where he is, but in most of North America where these systems were prevalent, is with fire. And he kept telling me fire is medicine, you know, fire is prayer, fire is medicine.
00:38:41
Speaker
He told me about the world renewal ceremonies that his people host every year. where they intentionally light fires in specific places to keep the land healthy. ah And when I came back, I started looking at, and they had these zones, right, which is what reminded me. They had the zone close to the villages and the houses where they burned, you know, maybe every year to keep things kind of open and promote certain species. And then in the woodlands, they would burn on maybe a slightly longer rotation because they were trying to create different habitat.
00:39:13
Speaker
And when I got home, I was really surprised to learn that fire was also a part of my home landscape on Cape Cod and that there was actually a study, a prescribed fire study in an oak forest about a mile from my house.
00:39:25
Speaker
So I convinced them to let me go out on a burn and they were doing something similar, sort of trying to regain some lost knowledge burning every year in some plots, you know, every four years in some plots.
00:39:36
Speaker
And I ended up just going totally down that rabbit hole to thinking, OK, if I'm if I'm into these oaks um because they're having trouble regenerating because of fire suppression. So in a lot of landscapes, these places that, you know, if you go on the Park Service website for the place where I live, it will say it's natural and pristine.
00:39:57
Speaker
um words that suggest, you know, it's better if humans just stay out of it. But there's another little subset on the website about the prescribed fire program. And it's like, humans have burned here for thousands of years. And um these ecosystems need fire to regenerate properly.
00:40:15
Speaker
And so it's this other disconnect, this place where our trauma shows up of like, oh, no, these places are wild and pristine. Well, yeah, only if you erase all their indigenous history and ah that like... we don't talk about anything that happened to create them but um i ended up getting certified in prescribed fire and i've now been going on some of these burns in oak ecosystems and it's just so exciting to start to study all the little nuances right like you know the first day i show up and i had no idea what to do really
00:40:50
Speaker
Someone said, okay, just hold this drip torch and light this line. And then by like the fifth or sixth time, you're like, okay, I think they're going to say this because the fire is going to move this way. And these plants want it there, but these plants don't want it.
00:41:04
Speaker
And it just, it's given me ah real respect for the depth and the nuance of knowledge that it takes to really care for a place and get back into relationship with these species. And I've been thinking so much about how it's like, okay, it's taken like 500 years to for our relationships to get this out of whack and to be this disconnected.
00:41:28
Speaker
And we have to give ourselves like, I know there's an urgency and, you know, we we are in the midst of this climate crisis and this extinction crisis. But at the same time, it's like,
00:41:40
Speaker
we don't want to hurry back into old patterns. And ah so I've been trying to, trying to think of and kind of live this mantra of like urgency without hurry.
00:41:50
Speaker
Like, you know, it is urgent that we relearn these relationships, but at the same time, we don't, we want to rush it. Like you got to go at the pace of life and at the pace of relationship.
00:42:04
Speaker
And, um, I think, I don't know. I think that's, It's a good mental space to inhabit when I can when i can get there. And so that's something I've been thinking about a lot.
00:42:17
Speaker
but I love that phrase, urgency without hurry. and and As you said, it's it's all about this relationship. i keep I keep going around and trying with my my own work to go in different directions, you know trying to understand better what is going on and why is it that, how do I explain or how do I get to the point of understanding why this relationship with plants how has it changed my life and why is it so important for, for others to find their own? And it's all about relationship.
00:42:47
Speaker
It always ends up coming back to relationship. And the fact that, as you just said, i loved I loved how you were describing that after a while, you start to understand the nuances of who needs what, right? You know, Oh, these plants over here need, you know, you can tell that they're, they're asking for the fire to come because we need that support. And these over here instead are like, no, no, we're cool. Let us know.
00:43:08
Speaker
And when you're doing that type of you know, at the In the way that you're doing it, which has this indigenous sort of slant, this this feeling into it, which is where the no hurry it becomes so important.
00:43:21
Speaker
You do hear that, the whispers of those plants and of those other beings that. end up kind of showing you what the landscape looks like and that you, your role, the reason why you evolved with two legs and two arms and the ability to hit flint and create a spark is actually for this. And I think that that's the part that we, you know, get caught, getting caught up in the whole fear of the ego perspective. Like you said, it's like, oh, E.O. Wilson's half earth project, leave half of the earth completely untouched.
00:43:52
Speaker
But that's only because we humans are still kind of in this disconnection part. If you're in the connection part, then that let this let this part be includes humans also, because we're just another species that developed with different body parts and different abilities in order to do what maybe a plant being sessile can't do and can't do it when the plant is sitting and has can't run away and can't do it just the same as I can't move water the way a beaver can.
00:44:24
Speaker
Right. I rely on beavers to help me understand how the flow of water should be just the same as the forest relies on me for my ability to hit Flint and to create, you know, controlled fire or movement where many other species can't do that same thing.
00:44:41
Speaker
And I think that rather than us continuously as human beings. I mean, sometimes when I listen to a lot of the discussions around you know colonialism and eco-feminism and all this, um which i I love in principle, I just keep saying to myself, when do we start talking about what are the skills that we need to reacquire?
00:45:00
Speaker
in order to be part of not good stewards. I'd hate that description too, personally, because again, it implies me above you and you, you know, but how, what are the, what are the pieces that I need to learn and be a part of that I re-embody my wildness?
00:45:17
Speaker
And I figure out, OK, I have 10 fingers and 10 toes and the ability to run and eyes that do envision being my primary thing. What am I good for and what is it that I can bring to my landscape, given my anatomy, physiology, mentality and all these pieces that is different from the spider and the moth?
00:45:38
Speaker
and the wasp over here that's doing this and, you know, the oak tree over here and the chestnut and, oh, these grasses. And each one of us brings a different set of skills, chemicals that we produce, abilities for us to do that.
00:45:52
Speaker
And I just think we're missing the mark. And i so I love what you were describing about your daughter of like, not just learning, but learning in context as part of it. Because I do think that that's what we need to change.
00:46:04
Speaker
And it can change very quickly, even if we go slow. Yes, yes, I totally agree with that. And I think, for me, part of what was so exciting about the acorn discovery and the oaks and getting back into this relationship was, there are kind of like these layers of it, right? Like the first layer was like, wow, we can eat acorns.
00:46:25
Speaker
That's cool. Maybe we are part of this place in ways that I don't understand yet. And then the second layer was like, Right. Okay. And oaks are keystones. So if we are eating the acorns and we're taking care of oaks, actually, maybe we have like, we're pretty important in this
Humans as Ecosystem Engineers
00:46:43
Speaker
place. Like instead of just being bad for wild spaces or something that the landscape is trying to get rid of, you know, we've all seen those post-apocalyptic movies or books where it's like, oh, the earth finally got rid of humans and it's thriving.
00:46:57
Speaker
And then there was this other layer that I think through conversations with Ron Reed and also the fire practitioners where I live was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. Not only are the oaks important ecologically, but actually...
00:47:13
Speaker
in places all over the world not just the northern hemisphere but in almost every human culture in every place historically ah part of our job has been to create habitat for other species using fire and if you look at the history of fire ecology that's true in australia that's true in the amazon it's true in the british isles it's true all over north america in this huge diversity of ecosystems, um we are in the same category of keystone species as beavers.
00:47:46
Speaker
It's great that you mentioned the beavers because we're what... So there's different kinds of keystone species, right? So there's, I don't know, I think your listeners are probably pretty plant savvy. So, you know, there's bees, right? They're mutualists. So they provide pollination services. And without those, the ecosystem can really collapse.
00:48:05
Speaker
um There's plants like oaks that are this amazing food and habitat source that keep the food web humming. ah There's predators like sharks where like if you lose the shark, then it's just overrun with prey and everything falls apart.
00:48:18
Speaker
And then there's ecosystem engineers. And we all know other examples, you know, elephants uproot and trample. And in doing so, they create this regeneration. Bison also for the grasses. Yeah. And they're stomping through it and up creating regeneration and aeration for all of the prairie lands.
00:48:34
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah. And beavers we're all familiar with. But actually, that is our category, too. That's our job. We are supposed to be ecosystem engineers. And right now we're doing our job, but we're doing it really badly. Right. Like we're we're engineering terrible ecosystems because we've forgotten how to do it and how to be in relationship. Right.
00:48:56
Speaker
But that discovery for me and that understanding of like, wait, whoa, we are not just a part of this place, but like we have this critical job. And without us, things get worse for some other species that we've been in relationship with. And, you know, Ron would always say the oak trees are kin. And I thought, oh, well that's like a nice, less hierarchical way to look at the world.
00:49:21
Speaker
But the more I started to understand the history of humans and fire and oaks, I was like, oh, we're kin, like we've co-evolved together and we all have a job and we're part of a family.
00:49:32
Speaker
and it was like, okay, this is like, um there's so many layers and there's probably more layers to come that I haven't understood yet, but just that building and that,
00:49:44
Speaker
um you know, this sadness for myself as a kid of growing up with this idea that like the world would be better off without us. And I think so many kids today believe that and and think the world would be better off without people.
00:50:01
Speaker
And I think that if we can shift that understanding to like, no, the world would be better off if we were doing our job. And if we were back in right relationship with the ecosystems around us,
00:50:13
Speaker
It's just, it's a really profound difference in the way that I look at the world now. Absolutely. And I think if we, if we, as you're doing with your daughter, I also had um on a previous episode, Bridget Sherville, who we we had, ah who's actually in your neck of the woods. Also, we had a beautiful conversation because she wrote a book on parenting and the climate change.
00:50:36
Speaker
And a lot of it is this curiosity, this relationship with the earth. It's asking questions and and being able to kind of not say there's a right or there's a wrong, but more like, why are we doing it that way? And can we do it better? And how do we do it in more relationships?
00:50:53
Speaker
Because I think that that's a big element of all these different pieces that we're talking about. And it's it's such an important thing for us to experience because I feel like, you know, people are, the other day I was talking to a friend of mine who was talking to me about how, you know, he hates social media, you know, your typical rant and rave about your social media. And I was just like,
00:51:15
Speaker
Look, I'm an addictive social media, I can be in the sense that I grew up, my family can be a very, is an addictive television family and can be that. But what I discover about my family is, as and it took me a while to get here, is the happier and the more connected we are in general,
00:51:30
Speaker
Sure, we still watch a lot of television because you know we love the storylines and we get really into it. But we do it, first of all, in connection. But we don't do it all the time. We do it all the time when we're looking for it from escapism. And that's really what's happening for a lot of people.
00:51:43
Speaker
So it's not the tool, as always. It's all these other elements that we're talking about that... kind of almost don't give us the tools. I mean, I know that when I moved, especially when I moved here to to Dhammenhur and to this area of the of the foothills of the Alps and this, you know, super beautiful land, I was scared. I mean, i was scared because I didn't know how to walk in the forest like nobody had ever taught me.
00:52:12
Speaker
And I go out with this friend of mine who's a woods guide. And of course, he's like, you know, picking things and eating and this. And I still am, you know, when I go by myself, I'm very, I'm still very cautious because I'm a slow learner to this. You know, I don't.
00:52:26
Speaker
So there there are places that I know to go and certain, you know, achitola like over here and oh, the wild garlic over there. And oh, here's the asparagus. And I know that bungioppo some so many plants that I only know them in certain languages like Pungitopo grows. And when The shoot is very young. It's almost like an asparagus in the way that it's tender and over here. And and then I'll experiment with people who helped me. I've also helped raise pigs. I've helped slaughter pigs and goats like because it's part of it. But but it's only because.
00:52:56
Speaker
somebody held me by my hand and showed me. And if not, you retreat because you're like, I don't understand. And I don't want to get hurt. And the world is telling me that this is dangerous. It's telling me not to pick or, you know, don't don't get stung by this, you know, stinging nettle, which of course I've done, you know, in my early days, way too many times in trying to learn, Oh, what plant are you? Oh, stinging nettle. That's right. That's who you are. Like, OK, thank you.
00:53:24
Speaker
but i but I still think that when we are in that state of more connection, we just naturally find the right rhythm. we naturally become more curious to explore.
00:53:36
Speaker
I still might not pick up a mushroom. I'll call up my friend though, and I'll send them a picture and I'll be like, okay, i just, cause are mushrooms when it rains. Like, I'm like, what's this one? He's like, take it. What's this one? Don't take it. Like, okay. And little by little, you learn, you know, over time, field field guides are your friend type of perspective. I have several books on the Valticella Valley for that reason. And so, and then it becomes this game and it and you feel so much more,
00:54:02
Speaker
reverent also that it affects everything I do. I end up being more generous with my friends. I end up having more open and loving conversations. I create better connections because all of these little elements kind of bring me back into one. I feel useful as a human being. I don't feel like a pariah on this earth. I don't feel like I'm supposed to be knocked out And I'm supposed to just hide in my house with my computer because I'm not a part of the world, which unfortunately, this message that we keep sending is doing that to people.
00:54:35
Speaker
It is like forcing them into a corner that is exactly what we don't want for them because we keep telling them, you bad, do not go outside, do not touch anything. It's like, ah no, not that's not the right message.
00:54:48
Speaker
It's not the right message think type of thing. So on that note, as we start to kind of like close things down, what what do you think in this journey that you've been on? What is the biggest, like what's one message that if you could get it out? I know you wrote a whole book and for sure, go check out the book. It's in the show notes. It's called Feed Us With Trees.
00:55:07
Speaker
I will put the link for BookShock.org, which of course then lets you support Elspeth and also support us at the same time. So please go and check that out right now. But if you have one kind of of one of one main message you want everybody to hear, what would it be?
00:55:25
Speaker
I think it would be that the ecosystem where you live needs you and it needs your presence and it needs you to figure out what your job in your specific place and in your specific ecosystem is as an ecosystem engineer.
00:55:43
Speaker
And that the fastest way to figure that out and the best place to start is to understand what the keystone species are in your ecosystem, what the keystone plants are.
00:55:55
Speaker
And then start learning how have humans been in relationship with them before? what have those relationships been like? ah What makes sense now in terms of those relationships? And, you know, it might be fire or you might live in a marsh and i don't know, you might have a totally different ah role to play in your wetland ecosystem.
00:56:17
Speaker
um So I think that would be it. I think that's what we, you know, if I could write a prescription for the world right now, I think that would be it is just ah to get to know our places again and to figure out what they need and how we're supposed to inhabit them.
00:56:36
Speaker
I think that's the most beautiful thing and a message that we don't say enough. The ecosystem where you live
The Necessity of Human Involvement in Ecosystems
00:56:44
Speaker
needs you. think that's just so fundamental.
00:56:47
Speaker
And again, it is a ah reframe from this fear-based, don't touch things because you're you know an evil human being. But it's more of, like you said, we are ecosystem engineers and we need to learn what is my engineering practice, right?
00:57:03
Speaker
What is it that I was brought here to do? I'm drawn to this area to live probably for a reason, right? Either because that's my history and or because I feel like it's somewhere in my body and it calls me to this.
00:57:17
Speaker
So what is my ecosystem function, the service that I provide to the overall area where I live, and then carry that out. And I guarantee you, you will feel better about life, you will feel much more connected to everybody and to everything when you start doing that. I mean, I guarantee it. I have no doubts about making that claim.
00:57:41
Speaker
And, you know, because so just try, try. If it doesn't work, let me know. But I am just I'm completely convinced that is what is going to change anything.
00:57:52
Speaker
ah but I am so like I have loved this conversation so much because I feel like you touched on so many important aspects of that are about this relationship with food, especially because I feel like as you start working with plants, um your relationship with food also gets a little bit scary from the perspective of.
00:58:12
Speaker
You know, most people think that the more I work with animals, actually, the less I'll want to eat them. But, you know, it's actually not always the case, because as you said, once you learn your place in the ecosystem, a new form of relationship starts to happen. And i think that that happens with plants, too.
00:58:28
Speaker
You start to work very closely. You start to realize that they're sentient, that they're alive, that they're part of this integral system, that you're part of the system. And all of a sudden, at first, you're like, oh, my goodness, what am I going to eat? I'm going to starve. I need to start doing photosynthesis because I need to become a breatharian.
00:58:44
Speaker
Something has to change. But then i think what happens is that as you sort of settle into the ecosystem as part, I live here. i am part of this.
00:58:54
Speaker
And then where is my place and where is my place in that food and that chain of of that web of life that's being created? Because obviously just the same as I have this anatomy in order to be able to do something for the ecosystem to be of service.
00:59:10
Speaker
Also, my eating is of service, right? i I bring down the number of certain kinds of species. I create different sorts of relationships. I might end um end up you know, cultivating something to create this ecosystem in a certain way. So I think that there are a lot of elements that that that is important. So I love that you kind of pass through the food as as the channel in which to start to open people to this relationship.
00:59:37
Speaker
Thank you. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah, it's been great. So thank you so much. And for everybody who's listening again, go check out Feed Us With Trees, wi it which is Elspeth Hayes, Hay, Hay apostrophe S, because it's not Hayes with an S.
00:59:53
Speaker
Hey, apostrophe S book, and the links are in the show notes for you to go and check that out. And of course, if you want to have more conversations like this, first hit the like and the subscribe and the follow and all those good things so that more and more people can learn about this podcast and really start to listen, but also come into the naturally conscious community and be a part of these discussions. You know, the reconnection with plant kin, the human plant relationships and everything that comes from it, the learning and understanding what it means to be an ecosystem engineer. These are all the conversations that we're having on a regular basis inside the naturally conscious community.
01:00:30
Speaker
And we have continuous like stream of different events for you to not just be on this journey by yourself, but so that you have more people who are going to be holding your hands and who are also going to be asking you questions.
01:00:41
Speaker
And so come on in and be a part of our ecosystem. So with that, we complete this episode and I am just so grateful for everything that we've spoken about. And so remember, resist the urge to hold back your emerging green brilliance.
01:00:56
Speaker
by Thanks for tuning into this episode of reconnect with plant wisdom. To continue these conversations, join us in the naturally conscious community. your premier online ecosystem for plant reawakening and accelerated evolution and co-creation with other kin.
01:01:11
Speaker
Here you'll find expansive discussions, interactive courses, live events, and supportive group programs like the Plant Wisdom Book Club and the Sprouts Writing and Creativity Group. Connect with like-minded individuals collaborating with plants to integrate these insights into life. Intro and outro music by Steve Shuley and Poinsettia from the singing Life of Plants.
01:01:32
Speaker
That's it for me, Tigria Gardenia, and my plant collaborators. Until next time, remember, resist the urge to hold back your emerging green brilliance. I'm out. Bye.