Food Forest

If the Gaia metaphor is followed through to its ultimate conclusion, we will accept that every square meter of the Earth is sacred, and we will see the roofs of our Dens and other buildings as blasphemous if they are not green with wild exuberant Life. We will see every roadway as blasphemous if it is not covered over in wild exuberant Life. Perhaps the roads will pass between huge trees whose canopies form a single ceiling over all. Perhaps the roads will be buried under built structures that support growing plants. Certainly we will avoid roads surfaces like ash vault which pollute and drive away the life giving water that our world needs so much. The same will be true of our roofs. Perhaps we will keep our buildings small and spread out enough that a solid canopy of trees reaches over them. Perhaps we will build them solid enough to support the weight of soil and root and trunk so that the forest grows on top of our cities. Perhaps we will hang tiny buildings among the branches of trees. Perhaps we will teach trees to grow us rooms in which to live, like giant galls in their trunks and branches.

But now imagine where we will grow our food. Imagine that your region was a forest before agrarians came along and saw the land as property, as a resource to exploit, and cleared it for lumber and fuel and a place to grow crops.

This will be true for a huge portion of the world's population seeing as we have cleared a large fraction of the world's forests. To live by Gaia's laws is to grow those forests back. It won't be enough to grow orchards, not even organic orchards with shade grown ground crops, and not even permaculture orchards with a huge variety of native and wild plants all of which provide food for humans.

It means growing the forests back with the same variety of native species that were there before. Where I live it would be oaks, maples, beeches, birches, spruces, pines, hemlocks, balsams, white cedars, aspens, poplars, sumacs, ashes, willows and a huge variety of others. As that forest comes back you learn to do two things. You learn to eat the native plants and you learn to insert food plants into the mix. So yes, you make certain there is a good representation of native crab apples and choke cherries and plum trees and walnut and you learn to prepare beech nuts and maple syrup and birch beer and spruce beer. But you also add artificially selected breeds of apple and pear. Anywhere there is enough light, a clearing where a large tree was felled by a storm for instance or before the trees have grown tall, you add a large variety of vegetables. You add all of this the way permaculturists might, using mixed seed bombs that release their randomized seed load slowly into the environment keeping the food plants in higher representation than normal on the land.

Later on when the forest is climaxing and there is little sunlight filtering through between the huge trees, you may find novel ways to grow food in the forest. You might send small robots that can maneuver through the forest without damaging the vegetation to carry grafts of fruit and nut trees into the canopy and graft them into place high up where they can get plenty of sun. Then the robots will return to the canopy to harvest the fruits and nuts later. Bringing them back down to you to preserve and keep for the long winter and to eat fresh in the fall.

New technologies, we will embrace where they follow Gaia's laws. High efficiency solar panels can be placed high in the trees and from them, high efficiency (LED perhaps) grow lights can be dangled down to near ground level allowing sun hungry vegetables to grow on the otherwise dark forest floor. Because solar panels absorb and utilize a wide spectrum of light and because LED`s can be tuned to provide just the right narrow spectrum of light that plants need, it is actually possible to provide more useful growing light for plants by capturing sunlight with solar panels and then powering LED grow lights.

And when the deer come and eat the food you were counting on what do you do? There are several things that you do. You may hunt the odd one to eat. It seems cruel but it is part of the balance of nature. You are within Gaia's law if you hunt a few to eat but you are not within Gaia's law if you exterminate them or exclude them from "your" land. If you accept that diversity is beautiful and that deer are part of the diversity of Life, then you must recognize that fencing the deer out of your land is uglier than hunting the odd deer while sharing your food with them. You must accept that you will share your food with them and with rabbits and with mice. You will belong to the forest that you contribute to and a forest is not only made of trees and plants but also of the huge variety of animals that live in it.

But why did not the entire forest get eaten by deer back before agrarians came and cut it down? The answer, where I live, was coyotes, cougars and wolves. And so if you are to grow the whole forest back you must also grow the wolves and the cougars back. You will have to find a way to keep a small pack of wolves and if the forest you steward is large enough perhaps a few cougars. As long as we are few in number, we who live by Gaia's law, we will not be able to let the predators who share our forest wander onto the land that is seen as belonging to our agrarian neighbours. So perhaps we will install an electronic fence and collar these predator brothers so that they cannot follow the deer and the rabbits and the mice that escape from the lands we steward. For, if they visit the herds that our agrarian neighbours claim to own, then they will surely be exterminated. So the buried fence will allow the herbivores to pass unchallenged but the large carnivores will get a signal and then a shock if they try to leave "our" lands. By doing this we will enable the lands we steward to support a full ecosystem.

Now, as you walk through your neighbourhood, imagine living in a civilization that lives by Gaia's laws. You live under the cool shaded canopy of a continuous forest that stretches for thousands of miles in every direction. You may still drive cars once in a while but the roads never leave the shade of the forest except to disappear underground or under buildings. Public transit does the same. Even bike paths never leave the trees. Skyscrapers like cliffs pop up through the canopy but soil filled balconies support native plants and small trees clinging to the sides of the buildings like the trees that live along the escarpments. Small forests cling to inset microclimates on the roofs of the skyscrapers. Neighbourhoods of treehouses gently sway rocking their occupants to sleep.

Everywhere robots bring food to hungry citizens carefully balancing what they take and how they seed the forest in order to keep diversity even higher than the old native forests achieved. The air and water are clean. The climate is stable. The soil is rich. The citizens are happy. They are living a story in which they are not at war with their mother, Gaia. They are living a story in which humanity contributes to the surface area and volume that Gaia occupies and in which, in turn, Gaia nurtures humanity. They are living a story in which humanity helps increase both the biomass and the diversity of Gaia. It isn't paradise but it would be a good place to live. Together, we can build it.