School of Sustainability

The chestnut groves that were never wild

Some seabeds were gardens. Among the systems Dr Lyla June Johnston gathered through years of doctoral research are clam gardens - places where the ocean floor itself was engineered, worked by Indigenous Nations so that shellfish became a harvest people could build their lives around rather than a luck they stumbled into. She spoke about them in a recent live conversation with Gaia Education, drawing on research into regenerative land management from Indigenous Nations around the world.

Further inland, and for far longer, there were chestnut groves along the eastern side of North America tended for three thousand years. Not wilderness, and not orchards in the fenced European sense either - stands of trees managed and handed down, generation after generation, until the keeping of them was simply what a community did. Neither the gardens nor the groves were incidental. Each was deliberate management, carried out on time and at landscape scale, and each ran for longer than most nations have existed.

Johnston's harder question, put honestly in the conversation, is why so few of us were ever taught any of this. The write-up of the event does not carry her answer - it records the question and points to the video. What it does carry is her reading of the human animal, unfashionable and worth sitting with: that our big brains and opposable thumbs are "tools given to us to enrich the earth", not to enrich ourselves.

The conversation doubles as an introduction to Indigenous Sciences, her second course with Gaia Education, built on that research. What this account cannot give you is the texture of the work itself - how a clam garden was made, who kept each grove through the centuries. The source is a dialogue and a course announcement, not a field manual. For the doing of it, the course, or the nations themselves, are the places to go.

Gaia Education · Read the source