Tags
bees, books, design, ecology, food, permaculture, planning, revegetation, seeds, soil, trees, water
Years before there was talk of locavores and 100-mile-diets and omnivore’s dilemmas, I came upon Gary Nabhan’s book Coming Home to Eat, a personal account of his experiences striving to solely eat food produced in his home bioregion of the US-Mexican borderlands in southern Arizona. His observations as renowned desert ecologist and ethno-botanist redefined how I thought about food and sustainability and accompanied me on my own sustainable food explorations for years after.
I get the feeling that his latest book, Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land: Lessons from Desert Farmers on Adapting to Climate Uncertainty (Chelsea Green, 2013), may be another companion for us in our adventures on the farm. While Growing Food is as practical as its title suggests, it is permeated by Nabhan’s respect for the insights of cultures deeply connected to the land, and his belief that communities connected to their bioregion are the most resilient in the face of environmental change. Continue reading
In The Biggest Estate on Earth (Allen & Unwin, 2011), historian Bill Gammage describes a detailed vision of Aboriginal land management prior to European colonisation of Australia. While many Australians have a broad sense that “fire-stick farming” was (and is) a tool used by Aboriginal people, The Biggest Estate on Earth begins to fathom how finely tuned Aboriginal fire use was. With fire as one of a suite of tools, Aboriginal people across the Australian continent carved the landscape into a mosaic of ecosystems, each harbouring plants and animals of differing sensitivity to fire, each maintained to maximise ecological diversity and each nested within the other to increase the ease of hunting or harvesting. For Gammage, Aboriginal land management across the continent was directed by three main principles: “ensure that all life flourishes; make plants and animals abundant, convenient and predictable”; and to “think universal, act local”. 
Yarnauwi Farm 