SEED Mountain Beyond Mountains: Restoration Liberation

SEED Mountain Beyond Mountains: Restoration Liberation is the seventh blog in a series of articles from the 14th edition of the SeedBroadcast agri-culture Journal.  Due to the rapidly changing and challenging times of COVID19 we have postponed the printing of this issue until later in the year but hope that you can access this poignant and timely edition on line and past issues here. 

Thank you Lee Lee and moria

 June 26 2020

I have been thinking about what to say about this article in relationship with the outbreak of COVID19 and the ensuing protests. Frankly, I'm in Maine and so very distant from the direct experience of the worst of the impacts. Beyond a smattering of small-town protests, we are playing host to a wave of entitled folks who are escaping quarantine in cities, just as the wealthy in Europe escaped the plague by heading out to frolic in the countryside. There is a lot of stress in our small towns that these urban dwellers may be bringing the virus with them. The concern is well placed as Maine experiences a high amount of respiratory illness, being downwind from many industrial zones. The inequity we see here is economic more than racial, and the fear of the potential impacts dominates local concerns over the actual impacts suffered by urban populations. Certainly, the pandemic and ensuing protests have laid bare the inequity we have as a society. I hope the light continues to shine in a way that increases our capacity to build a more socially just system. Before the protests began, the pandemic also shed light on the cracks in the industrial food system.  I'm proud of the rural resilience demonstrated by our farms through their ability to provide during this time of scarcity and have been thinking about how this local food security can inspire areas that have localized food networks that have been unraveled or altogether decimated. I was deeply moved to hear of the rush on seeds and found it to be the impetus for a widespread interest in seed saving in our community. It has spurred on a collaboration between multiple conservation and rural organizations to team up and promote seed saving to a degree that had not been present here before, which is very exciting. We will be developing open source educational material that should be able to assist other communities to practice saving seeds. Distributing seed saving instructions with produce from the local food pantry & posting educational signs in the new public garden is where we are starting. 

Like many, I have also spent a lot of energy homeschooling my eleven year old son during this time. It can be hard to explore racial issues in an area with very little racial diversity. Taking the Slow Food approach of activism on a platform of celebration, I decided to celebrate Juneteenth with a trio of his friends as a way to touch on the historical context of the protests that we were seeing on the nightly news. We grilled jerk chicken, corn and yams, set off big fireworks, and around a bonfire I asked if they knew what we were celebrating. They did not. I explained how on June 19th, 1865, word came to Galveston Texas that all slaves were freed...a full two years after the emancipation proclamation. I expressed that it was important to celebrate freedom - everyone's freedom, not just our own. They agreed with big smiles and happily proceeded to roast marshmallows for smores. It seems a small gesture, especially in thinking of my youth in Denver where I was introduced to the holiday through Grace Stiles, founder of the Stiles African American Heritage Center in Five Points. These gatherings were huge and festive...a true celebration. But I feel that it is important to bridge gaps of understanding, no matter how small the group. The trio of tween boys come from conservative families. On the surface, there may apparently be political rifts. But as we dig a bit deeper, we often find overlapping core values. Instead of dwelling on differences, I feel it is essential to focus on how we may be aligned so that we may build the bridges that make up the fabric of a truly diverse society. 

 Lee Lee, June 26 2020.

Papillon' by Atis Rezistanz sculptor, Getho Jean Baptiste

SEED Mountain Beyond Mountains: Restoration Liberation 

Lee Lee + moira williams

There is an extraordinary practice of preservation maintained in the face of extreme economic challenges along the Grand Rue, in central Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. After the massive earthquake in 2010, from which these communities have yet to fully recover, the UN delineated ‘Redzones’ around the city as areas too poor or dangerous for foreigners to work. As a result, the neighborhoods that have needed the most assistance have been largely ignored by non-governmental relief and aid organizations. As artists, we are not required to follow these guidelines. London based photographer and curator, Leah Gordon, established the Ghetto Biennial in 2009. A decade later, she completed the 6^th edition themed Revolution, after nine months of aggressive street protests against government corruption that started in February of 2019. The evolution of our SEED work there not only compliments the theme, but demonstrates that it is indeed possible, if not vital, to incite restoration liberation around seeds in what has been described as a ‘post-apocalyptic’ scenario.

Grand-mères du Grand Rue 
Starting off by working with grandmothers in 2013, we prepared traditional Creole meals together in the minimal ‘kitchens’ made up of a portable, charcoal powered stove, a couple pots, a few utensils and a bucket that materialized out of single room dwellings and set up in a corner of the tangle of footpaths that weave through the neighborhood. Sitting still for hours while preparing meals allowed for the discovery of dynamic ways people moved about the neighborhood, revealing purpose and intention that is not always evident when moving around a place ourselves. Traditional recipes were recorded as we prepared a series of pop up dinners shared by the visiting artists and members of the Atis Rezistans collective. Through the process, we learned which ingredients were essential to Creole cuisine, ultimately leading to an ongoing effort of working with plants, seed saving and food security.

Tchaka 
As an initiation for the Gardens of the Grand Rue project in 2015, we prepared Tchaka to honor the patron of agriculture, Azaka. This particular recipe was used as a framework for a narrative written to explore the complexities of the relationships between Haiti and US food policy. Deconstructing the ingredients used in this porridge made up of pork stewed with the three sisters of corn beans and squash, the tale examined the decimation of the Creole Pig by the USDA which led to mass deforestation for charcoal production, the burning of genetically modified corn seed donated by Monsanto after the 2010 earthquake and the emerging threat of hybrid seeds, which imperil an already fragile local food system. Together with members of the TiMoun (Youth) Resistanz, we started planting seeds to see what could potentially grow in these densely populated areas. For example, Joumou (the local pumpkin) has a wonderful way of trailing across jagged rooftops that are pieced together with scavenged corrugated iron. Aside from vegetables that are happy when trellised, we found that trees thrive best in the cramped conditions, and that other ground crops need more space to effectively grow, much less preserve seeds. We were introduced to SAKALA, an organization that cultivates a large-scale, urban permaculture garden growing atop a former industrial pad in Cite Soleil. In an attempt to establish food sovereignty, preserve cultural traditions and improve food security, there is an acute interest in growing out seeds to preserve the strong Haitian heritage centered on agriculture. We are still learning how to effectively accomplish this in the dense urban areas, but recognize SAKALA as an important component to increasing the capacity of urban Haitians to preserve heirlooms in these increasingly dense urban areas. This community garden has the breadth to actually preserve seeds and we are looking forward to establishing a functioning seed library in this infamous Redzone. After being awarded first place for foreign projects for the biennial that year, we focused on SEED themed work in 2017 as we produced a series of workshops, performance and installations rooted in the crosscurrents of collaborative works which augmented existing practices of plant preservation.

Revolution 
For the Revolution themed 2019 biennial, we started exploring historic connections between the former French colonies of Acadia and Haiti, looking at the entangled mobilities laid in place during these early days of colonialism and how these associations persist today. We are looking at the relationships between plant-human and non-human relationships held sacred by indigenous communities, and how these relationships guide the healing of the land in both places. In consideration of the role plants played through the Haitian revolution we are sharing how plant-based practices in both geographies may inform each other as we navigate our way through food sovereignty, sacred/medicinal relationships and rewilding efforts. We are interested in counter-practices that push against industrial agriculture and hybrid seeds.

White Pines from Dawnland

The tall, straight trunks of Maine’s white pine trees were marked and severed from the landscape by French settlers to build ships that carried lumber to Haiti. Hawthorn trees were equally struck from the land, stripped of their thorns then used as nails in the same ships to Haiti (Hawthorne is resistant to rot unlike pine). Both Pine and Hawthorne trees carry sacred/medicinal relationships with Wabanaki tribes in the Northeast. Both trees were used to construct plantations that in turn, served as frameworks against which the Haitian revolution took place. Tracing the ghosts of White Pine and Hawthorn trees, we are looking at the functional differences between in-tact plantation grounds versus fragmented land passed down equally through generations of families after the revolution. Although former plantations were founded on frameworks of oppression, they were structured as polycultures that maintain diversity of plant life essential to the preservation of heirloom crops today. 

Mountains Beyond Mountains

The indigenous Taino met the first free Africans who had escaped slavery into the dramatic mountainous landscape of Ayiti (Haiti), during the 1800’s. Ayiti means ‘mountains beyond mountains’ an expression from and of the land. Both cultures recognized one another’s interconnected, sacred relationships with the land. As a result, the Taino shared their knowledge of the land and the medicinal qualities found in Haiti’s endemic plants with the Africans. Plant, food and soil knowledge continues to be cultivated, interwoven with multiple cultural nuances, as interventions of restoration and liberation throughout the tightest corners of urban Port-Au-Prince. These same plants are tended as micro-gardens in pots and doorways around the Grand Rue neighborhoods. Choosing to augment these existing efforts, we support ongoing workshops with our collaborators that weave together recorded conversations, migratory bird song recordings, observational drawings, knowledge sharing and movement. 

Control
Moringa trees have provided Haitians essential nutrients during the ongoing petrol revolts. Moringa was brought to Haiti from Africa as seeds sewn into the hems of garments worn by Africans during their forced migration across the Atlantic. The trees thrive in areas where little else can grow, yet they do not become invasive. When people take to the streets, the city is literally shut down and it is as if the protestors must commit to a hunger strike as they try to hold their government accountable. The nutrient dense leaves from Moringa trees we’ve planted over the past five years have offered an important dietary supplement during the revolts, when there is limited access to food aside from dry spaghetti. If you control food, you control people. Haitians are particularly sensitive to this as their food security has been undermined by international policy, which is why they burned huge piles of genetically modified corn seed ‘donated’ by Monsanto after the 2010 earthquake. We continue to plant Moringa trees, and save their seeds to start establishing a nutrient dense Grand Rue. 

Restoration
In response to concerns that urban youth are being severed from the land, traditional plant, soil, health and cultural knowledge, we weave aspects of re-wilding into our SEED work to promote a whole-body ecologic revolution. We do this with seed saving workshops that unfold alongside art, citizen science and sound/movement sessions. We continue to share meals as the foundation of these creative gatherings, and demonstrate how to save seeds from the vegetable heavy meals. Paying close attention to the seasons, we prepare what is ripe and save the seeds. Establishing small nurseries, we invite TiMoun to germinate the seeds, tend their early growth and sell or trade the seedlings to broaden participation in the cultivation of urban micro-gardens. Informed by the progress of SEED work in Maine, we are establishing a preservation ring of ‘living seed libraries’ by calling on Haitian schools and environmental organizations to collaborate, exchange and inform creative acts that integrate arts into the conservation process.

Connecting the two geographies, we provide open source images and recordings of migratory warbler songs, and invite youth to study these migratory species. Encouraging students to mimic birdsong and create observational drawings that exist in the creative commons, we invite consideration of how Haiti maintains connections to the northeast both in bird migrations as well as the migration of laborers, who arrive in Maine and stay during the summer to tend agricultural fields. Using the SEED Barn in Blue Hill as a platform for creative engagement, we are developing programming around the peninsula through 2020 to explore our ongoing connection with Haiti in a way that echoes the larger north/south relationships. As summer visitors arrive in Maine to escape the heat of urban centers, a series of creative engagements will contextualize these historic relationships for North Easterners. Around the shared table, we will discover how localization at home supports food security abroad. At former shipbuilding locations, we will integrate movement to explore relationships with the land and sea. In consideration of migrations, we will invite our community to reflect on how we can better conserve beloved migratory birds by looking at ways to support land stewardship in places that host these birds in winter. Throughout each activity, we will disperse seeds that support native food-ways and pollinators as we educate on indigenous methods of tending the wild landscape. In the process we will creatively explore ways of integrating eco-cultural restoration in order to promote healing of the land and support human and non-human species with whom we share it.

Lee Lee is a visual artist who constructs community frameworks for participatory restoration projects and creative seed dissemination. She explores the impact of mobilities-centered culture and works towards localization to promote food security in both Maine and Haiti. Founder of the SEED Barn in Blue Hill, Maine, her award-winning gardens are a foundation of the network of living seed libraries that are used to promote native food-ways and heirloom preservation. She maintains a painting practice that currently focuses on representations of the wildlife supported by the plants she cultivates.
SEED :: Haiti 

moira williams’ often co-creative practice weaves together performance, bio-art, food, sound, sculpture and walking as a lived experience, while simultaneously connecting and creating opportunities for artists through curatorial projects. moira’s work aims to follow the logic of our symbiotic being in the world we share with bacteria, wild yeast, soil, water, animals, plants and one another. Works are meant to be lived, added to, shifted and moved over time and space - and may flow through moments to years. www.moira670.com

Haitian run organizations to support!

SAKALA 
Lambi Fund 

Haiti-centered organizations doing great work!

SOIL
Sadhana Forest 
Partners in Health 
Ghetto Biennial 

Tree Talk: Dr. Susan Simard. Sara Wright

Tree Talk is the sixth blog in a series of articles from the 14th edition of the SeedBroadcast agri-culture Journal.  Due to the rapidly changing and challenging times of COVID19 we have postponed the printing of this issue until later in the year but hope that you can access this poignant and timely edition on line and past issues here. 

Thank you so much Sara. 

We have added this quote and a link to the interview with Environmental Justice advocate Elizabeth Yeampierre. 

“When I first came into this work, I was fighting police brutality at the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund. We were fighting for racial justice. We were in our 20s and this is how we started. It was only a few years after that I realized that if we couldn’t breathe, we couldn’t fight for justice and that’s how I got into the environmental justice movement. For us, there is no distinction between one and the other.

In our communities, people are suffering from asthma and upper respiratory disease, and we’ve been fighting for the right to breathe for generations. It’s ironic that those are the signs you’re seeing in these protests — “I can’t breathe.” When the police are using chokeholds, literally people who suffer from a history of asthma and respiratory disease, their breath is taken away.” 

Elizabeth Yeampierre.

Unequal Impact: The Deep Links between Racism and Climate Change, Beth Gardiner

Tree Talk: Dr. Susan Simard

Sara Wright

Scientist Susan Simard is a professor of Forest Ecology at the University in Vancouver, British Columbia, who has been studying the below-ground fungal networks that connect trees and facilitate underground inter-tree communication and interaction. Over a period of more than thirty years this field scientist and her students have learned how fungi networks move water, carbon and nutrients such as nitrogen between and among trees as well as across species. Her research has demonstrated that these complex, symbiotic networks in our forests -- at the hub of which stand what she calls the "mother trees" -- mimic our own neural and social networks. This groundbreaking work on symbiotic plant communication has far-reaching implications that include developing sustainable ways to ‘manage’ forests, and to improve tree and plant resistance to pathogens. Although much of Simard's research occurs in forests, she has also studied the underground systems of grasslands, wetlands, tundra and alpine ecosystems.

 Under our feet there is a whole world of biological pathways that connect trees and allow them to communicate and share resources and information. Other scientists who study these networks (like Dr. Merlin Sheldrake) agree with Susan who suggests that the forest behaves as though it's a single cohesive organism.

 When Simard first studied forestry she discovered that the extent of the clear-cutting, the spraying and hacking away of aspens birches and other trees to make way for the more commercially valuable planted pines and firs was frightening. By the time she was doing graduate work scientists had discovered in the laboratory that one pine seedling root could transmit carbon to another pine seedling root, and Susan hypothesized that this kind of exchange was exactly what occurred in real forests. Although many believed she was crazy Susan finally procured funding for conducting experiments deep in the forest. She grew 80 replicates of three species: paper birch, Douglas fir, and western red cedar believing the birch and the fir would be involved in two-way communication underground while the cedar would not (cedar and maple have a symbiotic relationship of their own). To test her idea she injected two isotopes of carbon into the trees (in plastic bags) and within an hour the birch and fir exchanged carbon through their root systems.

The carbon isotopes revealed that paper birch and Douglas fir were in a lively two-way conversation. It turns out at that time of the year, in the summer, that birch was sending more carbon to fir than fir was sending back to birch, especially when the fir was shaded. And then in later experiments, she found the opposite. Fir was sending more carbon to birch than birch was sending to fir, and this was because the fir was still growing while the birch was leafless. The two species were interdependent.

Douglas fir and birch were conversing not only in the language of carbon but also exchanged nitrogen, phosphorus, water, defense signals, allele (gene) chemicals and hormones.

Scientists already had learned that an underground mutualistic symbiosis called the ‘myco-net was involved in this exchange. Mushrooms are the above ground reproductive evidence of the underground fungal threads that form  mycelium, and that mycelium infects and colonizes the roots of all the trees and plants. And where the fungal cells interact with the root cells, there's a trade of carbon for nutrients, and that fungus gets those nutrients by growing through the soil and coating every soil particle. The web is so dense that there can be hundreds of kilometers of mycelium under a single footstep. Mycelium connects different individuals in the forest, not just individuals of the same species but also works between species, like birch and fir. Hub or “mother trees” (can be male or female) have the most powerful fungal highways. These trees nurture their young, the ones growing in the understory. In a single forest, a mother tree can be connected to hundreds of other trees each of which can send excess carbon etc. through the mycorrhizal network to understory seedlings, but especially to their own kin. Mother trees recognize and colonize their kin with bigger mycorrhizal networks. They send them more carbon below ground. They even reduce their own root competition to create space for their seedlings to grow. When mother trees are injured or dying, they also send carbon and defense signals to the next generation of seedlings helping the youngsters to resist future stresses. Through back and forth conversations, trees increase the survival rate of the whole community.

 What makes the forest so resilient is that there are many hub or mother trees and many overlapping networks.

Unfortunately forests are also vulnerable, vulnerable not only to natural disturbances like bark beetles that preferentially attack big old trees but also to clear-cut logging. It is possible to remove one or two hub trees but not many of them; there is a tipping point after which the whole system collapses.

Trees may not have nervous systems but they can feel what is happening and can experience something analogous to pain. When a tree is cut it sends out electrical signals like wounded human tissue does.

Thirty years ago Simard hoped that her initial discoveries would change the way forestry was practiced. She was wrong. Forestry practices remain the same everywhere. In 2014, the World Resources Institute reported that Canada had the highest forest disturbance rate of any country worldwide, and that includes Brazil.

Massive disturbance at this scale affects hydrological cycles, degrades wildlife habitat, and emits greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere, which creates more disturbance and more tree diebacks.

Worse, foresters continue to plant one or two species of trees for harvesting and weed out other trees like aspens and birches. These simplified forests lack complexity, and they're really vulnerable to infections and insect infestation. As climate changes this is creating a perfect storm for extreme events to occur.

Simard explains her frustrations with Western science. “We don’t ask good questions about the interconnectedness of the forest, because we’re all trained as reductionists. We pick it apart and study one process at a time, even though we know these processes don’t happen in isolation. When I walk into a forest, I feel the spirit of the whole thing, everything working together in harmony, but we don’t have a way to map or measure that." In her view her research and that of others is exposing the limitations of the Western scientific method itself.*

The one hope is that forests as complex systems have an enormous capacity to self-heal. Simard has demonstrated this capacity with recent experiments in which retention of hub trees, and careful patch cutting can lead to regeneration and recovering species diversity.

Simard leaves us with three simple solutions:

• Spend time in your forest, grassland etc – learn about local conditions of that particular micro-climate.
• Save our old growth forests – these are the repositories of genes, mother trees, and mycorrhizal networks. We need this information to be passed on to the next generation of trees to help them withstand future stresses (as of 2019 we have less than 3 percent of our old growth forests left)
• We must regenerate our forests with a diversity of species and genotypes by planting and allow for natural regeneration to occur.
• 
  

Because it is January, the time of year that bears give birth I want to close this essay with a bear – tree – carbon networking story. On the west coast in the Pacific temperate rainforests bears sit under trees and eat salmon leaving their carcasses behind. Researchers have discovered that the trees are absorbing salmon nitrogen and then sharing it with each other through the underground network. According to the Smithsonian this creates an interlinked system: fish forest fungi.

Someone forgot to mention the role that bears play in this story; the last sentence should read: bears, fish, forest, fungi.

*Postcript:

Using reductionism and the scientific mechanistic paradigm as a baseline – scientists can think, intuit, even sense but they can’t be allowed to feel. Our bodies carry our feelings/emotions. When we refuse to credit emotional intelligence as a form of knowledge we cripple ourselves. Without using our capacity to feel we can't help but distort our perceptions, skewing results – scientific or otherwise. We need all our faculties to problem solve efficiently…. Field scientists and ethologists like me probably have a better handle on this than most because we are looking at a more holistic picture.

It is not surprising that most of the criticism of Simard’s research comes from scientists who immediately throw out the accusation that the researcher is anthropomorphizing the moment feeling enters the picture.

Sara is a writer, ethologist and naturalist who is making her home between Abiquiu, New Mexico and Maine. She has indigenous roots, nature is her muse and inspiration. She writes for many publications most of which focus on nature and Eco-Feminism- the belief that what is happening to the earth is also happening to women.