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Trust in nature – and stop raking up your garden leaves
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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Nature and Gardening
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I've never seen anyone rake s forest floor and the forest seems to be just fine. Nature has been doing it's own thing for a couple years and seemed to have figured out what works.
Us humans could learn so much about the world if we spent more time observing it in action. Instead we spent our time bending it to our will. Disrupting beautiful complexity while blissfully unaware of future consequences. Replacing nature with unadaptable machines that are high in maintenance. Machines which are prone to wearing out and breaking down. Replacing nature with our own complexity that doesn't break down as nicely as a leaf or branch.
Nature in action is beautiful in it's own right. No one should be judged for spending their precious time on this world observing nature. It's a wonderfully complex and adaptive machine with many moving parts and doesn't require any synthetic lube to run.
Most people aren't trying to make their back yard into a forest though.
I don't believe I was advocating for everyone to grow a forest on their property.
Personally, I'd love nothing more to have a forest garden in my backyard since it's been brought up.
Martin Crawford, Dave Jacke, and Eric Toensmeier have said that forest gardens are any garden of three or more "layers"/elements planted in such a way as to function like natural forests. It's definitely worth pursuing in whatever scale you achieve
In the absence of humans, nature actually does kinda have its own raking mechanism: fire! By treating any fire as bad and suppressing it as much as possible, we have created a gigantic fuel load that creates much hotter, more dangerous fires when a fire does inevitably start.
The indigenous people of Australia used fire is a part of their land management. It helped clear the land and managed land between crops, regrowth and wild animal populations. Also, some seed pods require fire in order to open thier pods. Otherwise the seeds won't be released. I had the opportunity to live in Australia for two years and got to learn about some of this.
This video nicely illustrates what has been learned about pre-colonial land management by the indigenous people.
To me, it appears they had a deep understanding of the land. Something that had been developed through careful observation and passed down through traditional knowledge. Knowledge that had been disrupted and destroyed. Leaving behind so many broken people.
It deeply saddens me to know that such intimate knowledge of the land had been destroyed. It makes me wonder just how much local knowledge has really been destroyed through colonialism or other expansive and destructive forces.
Even with all that said, we today can still learn from these people. We can still learn from the land around us. We can draw inspiration from all this in order to build a sustainable future. We can start building our own knowledge again to pass down to our future. It doesn't have to involve raking our leaves and shipping it somewhere else that's out or sight and out of mind.
My hate for mowing and raking runs pretty deep.
Just be careful not to project too much onto nature. The layman's idea of nature is pretty heavily biased because of our assumptions (and this obviously can be very different depending on the input culture). There is a strong dualism of culture vs nature and most of our idea of nature is produced in differentiation to our culture. For example, when people see human industrial technology as evil, nature is suddenly natural, chemical-free, mother earth, in harmony, sustainable, etc. But neither technology inherently evil nor nature inherently sustainable or better. Natural systems break down all the time. I would think that for a system of limited ressources sustainability would need some sort of planning capacity?