Urban Forests for Food and Ecological Balance

The international community celebrated the
United Nations’ “Year of the Forest” in 2011.
The Vibrant Cities and Urban Forests Task Force,
convened by the US Forest Service, published their “National Call to Action”—a
vision for how urban forests can serve our cities’ needs for health, social
services, landscape design and economics. Now is the time to take this concern
about forests into all aspects of life, including as an egalitarian means to
feed people.

Food security
is threatened by numerous hierarchical systems that undermine sustainability.
Capitalism is perhaps the most glaring example—anti-ecological at its core due
to massive resource extraction and environmental degradation at the expense of
exploited labor and the natural world. Capitalism’s products, just as much as
its actions, lead us into a downward spiral of malnutrition from processed,
nutrient-deficient foods, sensational marketing and over focus on “shelf-life.”

Forest Gardening

Forest gardening offers one strategy toward
sustainability. Instead of relying on accepted practices of resource
development for unending economic growth, we can rely on nature’s systems to
readily meet our needs.

Locally, the Rahma Clinic
Edible Forest
Garden on South Salina St. is
seeding the idea of forests as urban food resources. Rahma (“mercy” in Arabic)
is a free health clinic. It is a project of the Muslim American Care and
Compassion Alliance (MACCA), which is an organization started by members of the
local Muslim community.

Permaculture
design principles, best practices for using nature’s systems to integrate human
needs into the landscape, are being used to develop the 1/10th acre site.
Reflecting the health mission of the Rahma Clinic, the forest garden will
provide fruits and perennial vegetables to be picked and eaten as an
alternative to the convenience foods found on most corners.

Forest gardens are unparalleled food systems. Temperate forests are
among the world’s most productive ecosystems, surpassed only by tropical
forests, swamps, marshes and estuaries, which are harder to come by in rust
belt cities. Forests are over twice as productive as single dimensional
agricultural or garden land.

Forests are
also extremely resilient, something desperately needed in our neighborhoods.
Resiliency, the sustained ability of a system to respond to disturbances and
retain function and structure, is exhibited throughout nature’s complex web.
Nature’s design showcases that system success and integrity are possible
without current environmental industrialization.        

The need for
natural processes is being increasingly recognized in our society. Rain
barrels, rain gardens, green roofs, porous pavement—as supported by Onondaga
County Save the Rain, are good examples of decentralized and ecologically
sound, though at times one dimensional, solutions. True resiliency is ensured
by practices that are multidimensional, not just physically—as forest gardens
exhibit with vertical tiers and horizontal intercropping, but also in
ecosystems and community services.

Transforming our Social Future

A forest garden combines the best of green
infrastructure’s ecosystem services with the edibles production of traditional
community gardening. It reduces inputs by local sourcing—transforming our
physical landscape into a permanent resource and shifting our community
landscape into one poised for ecological and social complexity. Hence, allowing
us to create resilient, stable food systems and empowering communities to
prepare for the major transitions to come.

The trifecta
of economic instability, climate change and peak oil present a massive
challenge to our generation and those to come.

As we
collectively move forward towards social cooperation, ending our domination of
nature must accompany this journey. By developing perennial food resources, we
also create perennial ecocentric forest resources and an opportunity for
increased comfort with nature. Permaculture design ethics, people-care,
planet-care and fair-share of surplus provides a framework for creating future
endeavors in the spirit of cohesive security among our neighbors. 

Frank is the President of the Alchemical
Nursery, serves on SPC’s Advisory Committee and works as a Certified Business
Advisor for the Small Business Development
Center at Onondaga Community College.