The Social Polyculture of the Community Food Forest

Cultural Expectations, Negotiation, and Building New Agroecological Commons

Chattanooga, like any city in America or anywhere else in the world, contains people from a very wide array of backgrounds, not reducible to the usual socio-economic or ethnic or linguistic categories to which we tend to have resort. Or, rather, the differences that matter a great deal for the kind of community agroecological work we are trying to foster here are rooted in a diversity of relationships with and attitudes towards the natural world, landscapes, agriculture, and ownership and use patterns. Sometimes these attitudes and perceptions can be predicted based on broad parameters of identity, but not always. As we work to help different communities of people in our city and surrounding hinterland build flourishing agroecological commons—from food forests to community gardens to small farms—a crucial task for all of us involved is the cultivation of attention to and respect for this diversity, to work with and alongside people as they actually are, not as we might want them to be. The resulting tension is not easy, but it drives at the fundamental goals of our work and our vision for the future of this region and beyond. Let’s dive into what exactly that tension looks like, why, and how we are trying to work through it.

One of the key things we are trying to do is to cultivate—pun intended!—a quite different relationship to agriculture, land usage, and wider ecosystems than has been the norm in our industrialized capitalist world for a long time, especially in the so-called ‘developed’ world of which the United States has long been the core constituent. Cultivating a concern for agroecology¹ or for integrating permaculture ideas into everyday life are far from mainstream, and will sometimes sound (correctly!) quite radical to many people, unusual and not entirely intuitive at best. The work we are doing proceeds from a mixture of values and concerns that are not always shared among the general population, except perhaps at a very inchoate level. That is, few people want their soil or water to be polluted, and most people appreciate natural beauty at some level—but those widely shared values are not necessarily enough for people to jump to embracing the value of growing food without massive external inputs and toxic chemical applications, or to convince someone why surrounding most of our living and working spaces with vast expanses of closely cropped lawn grass might not be the most ecologically positive form of land use. There is then real need for education and for arguments in favor of certain things and against others.

At the same time, as a coalition of people and places our goal is not direct management and ownership of any individual site or project, but rather to help build the collective governance, expertise, and social structure necessary to carry things forward, indeed to get things off (and in!) the ground from the get-go. The community food forest—the symbol and centerpiece of our work, if not the only thing we are supporting—is a potent example of a new commons, not exactly identical to public land as we are used to thinking, but also not an exclusive private property. Rather, it is owned and governed by a community of people (existing in different scales, from a neighborhood or church to an entire town or city) who collaborate on its management and usage, deciding what goes where and how the resulting produce should be distributed. This entails a type of quite direct democracy and deliberation, a manner of doing things that has parallels in many people’s lives but is also somewhat different from our expectations given the chronological and cultural distance many of us have from historical commons. Again education and example are important, but respecting and indeed boosting agency on the part of participants is even more central.

And it is here, at the intersection of introducing and realizing new ideas about agriculture, land, and ecology on the one hand, and on the other cultivating community autonomy, personal agency, and direct democracy, that differing expectations and concerns become especially important factors. Sometimes we can find cultural expectations or memories that are very easy bridges to, say, the idea of a community food forest (which is in our region at least a basically novel concept in itself): for instance, in the American South at least many older people have distinct memories from childhood of working on farms that were surrounded by wild or semi-wild abundance. Field-bordering hedgerows made up of elderberry, Chickasaw plum, apples, edible wild greens, and so on were once much more common, even as they are more memory than reality today (why that is constitutes another essay!). For many people from a rural background of any sort the basic idea of finding sustenance in public or semi-public natural landscapes even today is hardly foreign, even as many of those practices have atrophied in recent decades. For Chattanoogans from the Maya highlands of Central America the term ‘food forest’ might not convey anything in itself, but community-owned forest set aside for collective foraging, and lightly managed for edible and beneficial plants, is something that has persisted to this day despite all of the other transformations and deformations carried out under colonialism and industrial modernity.

At the same time, we will encounter cultural expectations, aspects of memory, and so on that do not mesh so easily, and which can cause conflict or frustration. For most people under a certain age regardless of where they are from, picking fruit from wild or semi-wild trees is not at all intuitive, and picking fruit or harvesting edible plants in any kind of public space might sound dangerous or illegal or both! Concern over identifying trees and plants runs high among many people, the necessary knowledge sets usually quite rare. For people from an agricultural, rural background—and many of us in the South have such a background in some fashion or another, myself included—there are very strong associations with what agriculture—farming—is supposed to look like, such as vigorous tilling and fertilizer application. And for virtually everyone in America there is an often unarticulated but nonetheless very strong expectation to see well tended grass lawns pretty much everywhere; flower beds should be well-tended, dead plants and flower-heads carted off at the end of the season. And lying above and within all of these differences are the political, religious, and cultural beliefs, sentiments, allegiances, and so on, all of which intersect with issues of land and food and ecology in often unpredictable ways.

Other such concerns and expectations could be listed, almost ad infinitum, but these few hopefully give the gist. For the sort of agro-ecological work we are trying to do some of them pose easier challenges to negotiate—education can do a great deal to make people comfortable using and growing in shared spaces. But what do to with practices that run pretty counter to the kind of practices we are encouraging, such as tilling or pesticide use or lawn grass monoculture? The wrong approach is to simply dictate, as tempting as that can be. Conveying why we might want to try other ways of prepping garden beds, or why we might want to avoid pesticides, or why leaving grass un-mown or flower heads standing through winter—it might not be easy but it is vital, and has to be undertaken gradually and respectfully. Ideally in a given space there is room for multiple approaches, with negotiated spaces for different things, letting people make up their minds over time. Plus it would be absurd to imagine that any of us have it all figured out—all of these approaches and systems we are trying to articulate, permaculture, agroecology, regenerative ag, and so forth, are still pretty new and have much room for experimentation and refinement. As cliché as it sounds there is no one single right way to do things that applies everywhere; but for a given growing space there will be a right way, one that is worked out in relation to the land itself, the living things being encouraged to thrive there, and the social polyculture of the community of people guiding the process.

What this will look like on the ground will vary a great deal, especially since we are working with a wide array of communities. The dynamics of a church congregation planting a food forest on their property are not going to be the same as an elementary school doing the same thing. Existing rules, legal constraints, and so forth also come into play in different ways, or can be modified or explored in productive ways along the line. Some people and communities will bring distinct theological and philosophical concepts and practices with them, others will not. For almost everyone, however, the work of building new agroecological commons, whatever their particular shape and purpose, is experimental, using a scatter of existing cultural and other resources, but also developing new ones in the process. In so doing we find new ways of being in community with one another, exercising personal and group agency, and developing ways of living on earth that nurture many forms of life, develop solidarity and mutual care among other humans, refashioning the norms and procedures that we have for so long taken for granted. Because this is close to the earth work, work that respects and listens to the particularities and histories of people and place, the exact form will look different here from other places. Our food forests, and community gardens and small farms and agroforestry projects and all the things potentially feeding in and out of them, will speak their own vernacular, constitute a particular identity, composed out of diverse peoples who together share these ridges, valleys, mountains, rivers, and streams.

1. What is agroecology, anyway, you might wonder? A fuller answer—and why I at least really like it as a descriptive term—would require a post in itself, and probably will be one in the near future, but for the moment here’s a working definition from the Agroecology Fund:

Agroecology is an integrated approach that simultaneously applies ecological and social concepts and principles to the design and management of food and agricultural systems. Within a justice and rights framework, it seeks to minimize external inputs and optimize sustainable interactions between plants, animals, humans and the broader environment.

Terminology is part of the very cultural diversity and diversity of background and attitudes we are addressing here: we also make use of terms like ‘permaculture,’ ‘sustainable agriculture,’ ‘regenerative agriculture,’ and so on, each with its own particular historical background of development, sets of assumptions, and political and cultural baggages and contexts in the present.