From the archive
18 Aug 2026
Along the eastern side of what is now the United States, people tended chestnut groves for three thousand years. Not wilderness, not untouched forest - a worked landscape, kept in production across more generations than most institutions on that continent have survived decades. On the coast, others built clam gardens on the ocean floor, engineering the shallows to grow shellfish. Inland, fire was set deliberately and often, keeping whole prairie ecosystems in the state they needed to be in.
Dr Lyla June Johnston spent years of doctoral research on land management systems like these, assembled from Indigenous Nations around the world, and she is direct about why they are absent from most people's schooling. On 13 August 2026 she talked through the work in a live conversation hosted by Gaia Education, an education organisation that runs online courses, ahead of Indigenous Sciences, her second course with them - six weeks online, beginning 7 September 2026, with Pat McCabe (Weyakpa Najin Win, Woman Stands Shining) as guest speaker.
Her framing is worth sitting with: human hands and human judgement are not intrusions on nature but tools that landscapes were shaped by, for millennia. These were not conservation but agriculture and aquaculture of a high order, run continuously. The published account is brief - a summary, not a transcript - so the research itself is only sketched here.
Take one piece of ground you know - an allotment, a wood edge, a field - and find out who managed it before the present regime and how. The county record office, tithe maps and the local history society will get you back two centuries in a weekend; old orchards, coppice stools and ridge-and-furrow will take you further.
Gaia Education · Read the source