Renowned ecologist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer invites us to see foraging not as extraction, but as connection. When we engage with the land through traditions like berry picking or sweetgrass harvesting, we don’t just witness nature, we fall in love with it.
by TheMuseumOfScience
12 Comments
I 100% agree with her in theory, but if you look at how our more popular national and state parks take a beating, I would be worried that these places would be stripped clean instantly. Look how hard it is to manage You-Pick orchards and fruit farms already.
Oregon and huckleberry season comes to mind, they grow like weeds along the highways. So people are pulled over all over the place during season and just talking to neighbors while they pick.
I wish we would emphasize to people just how easy it is to pick berries in your own back yard. I think people just don’t think of berry bushes at all (or fruit trees and perennial veggies for that matter) when they are planting their suburban flower beds, or they are intimidated by the idea. A lot of food bearing plants are just as gorgeous and easy to maintain as the common plants used for landscaping!
This is absolutely true. The more engagement people get with the natural world, develops more support for preservation.
Great idea. Berries (red huckleberries in particular) were the gateway to my native plant journey.
i love robin wall kimmerer! her book “braiding sweetgrass” is one of my favourites 🙂
Huge disagree with the OP. As people move around, they plant foods that are familiar to them. I know many immigrant gardeners try to take foods from their home countries to grow in the US. And those plants that are easiest to grow often have invasive potential because of seed production, wider tolerances, etc.
When you teach people to forage without emphasizing biodiversity and conservation, you get avid proponents who will encourage cultivation and spread of invasive albeit high value Himalayan blackberries, garlic mustard, curly dock, and others. While you would hope that these foragers learn to appreciate native plants, instead they take joy in Japanese honeysuckle and wineberries and conflate those invasives in our forests with what is “natural”
Worked well for me with wild black raspberries on my grandparents’ 60-acre retired dairy farm in Pennsylvania, but not everyone grows up with that kind of privilege.
This is spot on
Perusing the wooded area just across my lot line, I found what I think is elderberry and definitely wild grape. Probably riparian/frost grape. I know there are mulberry bushes back there, (probably alba) that the animals strip! I mean they eat everything. I wouldn’t have known what I was looking at before I got interested in natives. I don’t need to forage anything, but it’s good info to have.
This whole interview was wonderful. [Museum of Science Interview](https://youtu.be/ChdCy162c4o?si=szoc2JcFD0irwZB_)
Not a big fan of her most recent book. Felt like an ecologist trying to theorize on economics and build some argument that giving someone berries will change society. All a little too “fluffy” for my taste. Yes we need to help people experience nature. There’s a lot of ways to do that.