Ecology

Our work with the land seeks to explore, through both action and reflection, how we might live in a way which is more ecologically responsible. Central to these explorations is the recognition that humans are always and inevitably members of multispecies ecological communities, the troubling of the boundaries between agriculture and ecosystem restoration, and the exploration of ways to meet human needs which also increase the fertility and health of the systems we are a part of.

Thus far these explorations have manifested in the development of a significant syntropic inspired agro-forestry system - Dalziel - which is thriving on land that was previously degraded and compacted, as well as the planting of many trees and plants on other parts of the site including in dense Miyawaki inspired systems with young people, and as part of experiments in dryland reforestation in collaboration with Semillistas.

In the coming years we aim to continue to develop and expand our ecological practice, with a core focus on water retention landscapes and the implementation of further complex forest systems, and an overarching aim of producing an increasing proportion of the food and materials used on site while reducing erosion and run off, growing top-soil and supporting increasing biodiversity.

As we engage in explorations of ecological responsibility at a local scale, we remember and acknowledge that at a wider scale we remain profoundly entangled in unsustainable, ecologically catastrophic systems and structures that subjugate and oppress people and land to economic growth and profit. In the context of neo-liberal modernity, which we are all deeply enmeshed in, these sorts of contradiction are unavoidable. Disrupting the desires, patterns of thought, and ways of being and relating that are produced by, and reproduce these systems is both more difficult and more important than planting trees.