Tuesday 27 October 2015

Gathering “wild” food in the city: rethinking the role of foraging in urban ecosystem planning and management



Rebecca J. McLaina, Institute for Sustainable Solutions, Portland State University, Portland, USA
Patrick T. Hurley, Department of Environmental Studies, Ursinus College, Collegeville, USA
Marla R. Emery, USDA-Forest Service, Northern Research Station, Burlington, USA
Melissa R. Poe, Northwest Sustainability Institute, Seattle, USA

(Received 12 February 2013; accepted 30 August 2013)

Abstract:
Recent “green” planning initiatives envision food production, including urban agriculture and livestock production, as desirable elements of sustainable cities. We use an integrated urban political ecology and human–plant geographies framework to explore how foraging for “wild” foods in cities, a subversive practice that challenges prevailing views about the roles of humans in urban green spaces, has potential to also support sustainability goals. Drawing on research from Baltimore, New York City, Philadelphia, and Seattle, we show that foraging is a vibrant and ongoing practice among diverse urban residents in the USA. At the same time, as reflected in regulations, planning practices, and attitudes of conservation practitioners, it is conceptualised as out of place in urban landscapes and an activity to be discouraged. We discuss how paying attention to urban foraging spaces and practices can strengthen green space planning and summarise opportunities for and challenges associated with including foragers and their concerns.
Introduction:
Introduction On a mild October day, a group of six people gather by the entrance to the Schuylkill bike trail on the outskirts of Valley Forge National Park in Pennsylvania, eager to learn about the edible plants and fungi found along the trail. Several are members of an area “meet-up” devoted to learning about wild foods, but only three have any real long-term experience with collecting wild foods. The others have browsed during hikes, walks, and other rec- reational outings, but are keen to learn more about foods they can find in this peri-urban setting. Our guide, who is more accustomed to leading tours closer to Center City Philadel- phia, introduces us to several edible weeds in the vicinity of the trailhead, including common dandelion (Taraxacum spp.), common plantain (Plantago major), blue chicory (Cichorium intybus), and a species of violet (Viola spp.), beginning a tour of wild plants that are known for their edible, medicinal, and, in a few cases, craft or fibre uses. Typical of the region’s bike trails, our route through the county park that adjoins the National Park takes us along a historic rail line and power line easements. We move along the forest frag- ments, wooded fence lines, and open fields characteristic of the urban–suburban countryside in the Philly Metro area. Many of the plants we see (e.g. blackberry (Rubus spp.), stinging nettle (Urtica dioica), common mullein (Verbascum thapsus)) would hardly be thought of as key species of conservation concern but harvesting them is a prohibited activity on county parkland. A few – berries in particular – can be legally harvested just across the river in the National Park. In many ways, the tour represents a direct challenge to the govern- ing management regime of the area’s public parks. At a time when urban foraging is growing in recognition within the popular media, one might ask what this tour and this group’s activi- ties reveal about a practice that is often thought of as belonging to far-flung rural places? Moreover, in what ways does this tour open our eyes to an increasingly more visible, if not more common, activity in the city?
...
Urban and peri-urban landscapes are known to support foraging. For example, African- American basket-makers in the greater Charleston, South Carolina area, have maintained longstanding natural-resource-based livelihoods through harvesting strategies that make use of newly organised access arrangements that subvert traditional landscape meanings (e.g. entranceways to subdivisions, commercial shopping areas, and roadside and median beautification strips as harvest sites) as well as through non-sanctioned gathering in so- called fringe ecologies (Hurley et al. 2013). Likewise, previous research on urban NTFPs points to the ways that foraging may challenge existing management philosophies, through non-sanctioned harvests in parks, as well as highlighting the importance to harvest- ers of roadside vegetation and weedy species in ruderal1 landscapes such as alleyways, street planters, and other public rights of way (Jahnige 2002, Gabriel 2006, Grabbatin et al. 2011). The productive use of urban plants appears to be characterised by diverse and changing access strategies, in which foragers seek formal, informal, and non- sanctioned modes of access to the plant species on which they rely.


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Anarcho-Primitivism: The Green Scare in Green Political Theory - Michael Becker


Abstract:
A deep philosophical divide concerning the very foundations and purposes of civilization splits mainstream and radical environmentalists. This paper focuses on Paul Taylor's "Respect for Nature," arguing that his biocentrism is actually a disguised "civilization" or "civ-centrism." Taylor defines "nature" as pristine ecosystems; humans, given their capacity for autonomous agency and planning are unique in creation. Arguing in this fashion, green political theorists like Taylor choke off a tension between civilization and primitive cultures, a tension which has been central to the development of western social theory. In doing so they help lay the philosophical groundwork for technological totality. By contrast, anarcho-primitivists highlight the civ-prim tension arguing for radical resistance to bedrock notions and institutions of civilization. The further removed the primitive, either in consciousness or in actual fact of the destruction of primitive cultures and their land-base, the greater the liberatory impulse to destroy civilization becomes.
Introduction:
Today, the fall from grace is evaporating, evan as metaphor. The shot at primordial redemptionthreatens to slip into the simulacrum. The magnitude of alienation from nature and the extent ofmediated life is colossal. Falling away from primitive origins has led, finally, into an abyss ofartificially reproduced existence and meaninglessness. But, the hyper-technical recognizes nothingexternal to it; the threat is thus not dis-closed. It is as if the captains of the Titanic not only fail to seethe icebergs but refuse to recognize the sea.

Department of Political Science
California State University, Fresno mikebe@csufresno.edu

Paper presented at the Western Political Science Association Annual Conference San Francisco, California, April 1-3, 2010


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Monday 26 October 2015

Monday 19 October 2015

CONTEMPORARY HUNTER-GATHERERS: Current Theoretical Issues in Ecology and Social Organization - Alan Barnard

The Original Affluent Society
 
The ethnographic studies of the early 1960s led not only to the destruction of the old model (that of Steward and Service), but also to the generation of new ones. One such model emphasized the economic and social advantages of hunting and gathering and completely reversed the exaggerated assumption that fora­ gers were perpetually on the verge of starvation, had little leisure time, and therefore failed to develop the forms of social organization associated with supposedly more advantageous means of production. On the contrary, foragers were more affluent than the armchair speculators had realized.

The data came from many societies, but probably none had more impact than the work of Marshall and Lee. Marshall’s famous “Sharing, Talking, and Giving” paper emphasized the exchange relations which redistribute wealth among the !Kung. Lee in tum supplied the concrete evidence for !Kung leisure: the fact that each adult !Kung spends only two or three hours per day in activities directly related to subsistence. Initially this finding was derived from only a very limited period of detailed observation and based on a rather narrowly defined notion of “subsistence activity.” But it was significant nevertheless, given the expectations of those who had assumed (without any evidence at all) that hunting and gathering were labor-intensive activities.

Although Lee, Marshall, and others provided the data, the most articulate formulation of the theory of hunter-gatherer affluence was that of Sahlins. He distinguishes two kinds of affluence: “the Galbraithian way” and “the Zen road to affluence.”

The former is the conventional concep­tion which assumes that man’s needs are great but his means limited. In this sense affluence is measured only in terms of goods produced or procured. Such a concept is applicable to the way in which people in market economies think, but not to most hunter-gatherer world views. Instead, foragers are prime exponents of “the Zen road to affluence.” They do not value ·the accumulation of material goods. They are affluent because their needs are few and are easily satisfied by a relatively meager amount of labor time.

Sahlins attacks the ethnocentrism of earlier writers. Bourgeois ethnocentr­ism, he says, has led scholars to overemphasize material wealth in their formalist definitions of affluence. Likewise, neolithic ethnocentrism has given us a misleading picture of the development of agriculture. Far from reducing the amount of labor, the Neolithic Revolution demanded more labor than had previous, foraging lifestyles.
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wood burner







wood burner 1






Mycelium - an identification walk



17:10:15
 
What : A group walk in The New Forest led by Martin Bailey,

Why : Learning and identification strategies.