MCLA recently awarded an Undergraduate Research and Creative Project Grant to Environmental Studies senior Alan Silverman so he can attend the 13th Annual Winter Conference of the Ecological Landscape Association. Silverman will attend the Permaculture Track, Friday, March 2, 2007 at the Mass Mutual Center in Springfield, Massachusetts. Presenting this track is David Jacke, author of Edible Forest Gardens, along with Jono Neiger. This track consists of four 1 1/2 hour presentations over the course of the day. Watch this blog for a report by Silverman, who has high hopes of picking up some interesting tidbits about the state of ecological gardening in Berkshire County and meeting some of the people who are making it happen.
Student Receives Grant to Attend Ecological Landscaping Conference
February 26th, 2007 · 2 Comments
Tags: Environmental Studies · MCLA
2 responses so far ↓
1 MCLA Student // Mar 16, 2007 at 7:14 pm
The conference was excellent. I attended four presentations by Dave Jacke. He’s quite the ecological landscaper. Although he is respectful of local ecology, he also believes in the edible forest garden, as well. So, he’s not totally into native plants. There aren’t that many that produce edible fruits. So he believes in using some exotic species that need control.
The really interesting event was the Friday evening keynote address, by Paul Stamets of Fungi Perfecti. Paul has performed a lot of research into the medicinal aspects of mushrooms as well as the mushroom’s ability to be the great molecular decomposer. He uses them in cleaning up landscapes. Mushrooms are one of the oldest forms of living matter on the planet and have not changed much at all in millions of years. He believes in the possibility of mushroom spores coming from the big bang and other planets may contain the same ’shrooms as our blue planet. He’s an interesting speaker to listen to. He knows how to work a crowd. There were several hundred people, possibly more than a thousand, attending the conference.
2 Dave Jacke // Feb 29, 2008 at 9:40 pm
I got a chuckle out of your review of my talks last year, but also think it is a bit of a misrepresentation of where I actually stand on native plants. I am not exclusively into native plants: I am totally into native plants, just not only native plants. How many native plants have you eaten today?
Anyway, if you read my book, you’ll get a fuller picture of my thoughts on the subject. Basically I think the native vs. nonnative vs. invasive debate has gotten too simplistic, parochial, demagogic, and unscientific for my taste. Time for a reality check. Agriculture is the most destructive force on the planet, so to plant a “natives-only” landscape and then go buy food shipped from Florida, California, or Chile is ecologically narrow-minded and a bad case of window dressing and pushing our own problems on to other people and places. If youresearch where things are at re: global climate change (for starters, plant hardiness zones have already moved significantly, see http://www.arborday.org and then search for “hardiness zone”), and it becomes obvious that the concept of returning species to their “native range” (a poorly defined concept if there ever was one) is a naive fallacy. Get used to it, everything is changing, and fast. “It is not the strongest species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” Charles Darwin.
I know the natives thing has gotten very emotional for people lately, and I understand. But we of the Earth’s richest 5% are some of the few who have the luxury of worrying about it in the way we do nowadays.
All of this is not to say that we don’t have problems and issues around the survival of “native” species, of which I am aware and concerned. But we need to balance this one issue with a whole host of others and put them all together into a more complete view of our ecological situation, and our ecological role.
Peace,
Dave
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