Free Food Can Feed the Local Food System Community Food Forests are often promoted for contributing to locally available fresh food and the local food system. However, they are also open to the public for free harvesting and many local food systems rely on economics to function and provide local…
Background I’m giving a little tribute today to the recovering Nalini Nadkarni, who is an amazing woman and ecologist. She has focused on tropical ecology and the ecology of trees most of her career. Maybe I admire her because my original passion in life was tropical forest ecology and I…
Food Forests are Motivated by Social, Environmental and Food Justice… Are Those Intentions Sufficient? One Day is Not Enough We’ve marked this day on our calendar’s to remember Martin Luther King, Jr.’s activism for equal rights for all. A struggle that is on-going, not only in the United States, but within…
Today I am thinking about what role community food forests will play in the future of our food system. I think our food system is often described as what is really a supply chain of planting and growing a crop through all the linear stages of consuming to disposing…
The 18th and Rhode Island Food Forest in San Francisco, CA was started in 2008 on Portero Hill.
Here is a video of Kevin Bayuk, co-founder, talking about Permaculture Design at the Park:
Bee Keeping in the Food Forest:
Also here are some videos taken over a span of years that show the garden’s progression:
This video is in French taken in 2010:
Also in French taken in 2010:
Taken in 2013:
Can community food forests offer one strategy to create meaningful change? I am writing a chapter on community food forests (CFFs) this morning for potential inclusion in a book on re-enlivenment of cities. Reflecting on the role of CFFs it is evident that the cultural, socioeconomic and political context of…
This Thing Called Permaculture Permaculture was a term first coined in the 1970’s by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren to describe techniques they believed supported a more permanent form of agriculture. There is plenty of information available on the web that can provide more information on the history of permaculture…
Starting Blindly I started my research last summer by visiting community food forests on the East Coast. In order to categorize what the food forests looked like physically in terms of number of species, structure (how many layers) and the functional role of plants, I used some standard vegetation sampling techniques.…
This weekend I will be presenting community food forest research through a poster at Harvard’s Just Food? Conference. – http://foodbetter.squarespace.com/food-justice-conference/
Just Food? A conference exploring the intersections between social, economic, and environmental justice and the food system. Check out the video below I made in light of this conference. The first video is in English and the second is Spanish.
ENGLISH
SPANISH
The funding will help support travel to multiple sites across the US so we can produce a more comprehensive book!