School of Sustainability

Three thousand years of chestnut trees, taught in six weeks

On 13 August, on Instagram Live, Dr Lyla June Johnston sat down with Gaia Education to talk about what her doctoral research keeps turning up: that large parts of North America were not wilderness when Europeans arrived but tended land, worked continuously and deliberately for a very long time. Her examples are concrete. Chestnut groves along the eastern United States, managed by Indigenous nations for some three thousand years. Clam gardens engineered on the sea floor. Fire regimes that kept entire prairie ecosystems in health.

Johnston's argument is that these were sciences - tested, transmitted, refined over millennia - and that their absence from what most of us were taught at school was not an accident of oversight. Her own framing is direct: human hands and brains, she says, are "tools given to us to enrich the earth" rather than to enrich their owners. Whether or not one shares the theology, the land record she cites stands on its own.

The conversation was, in part, an invitation. Indigenous Sciences, her second course with Gaia Education, runs online for six weeks from 7 September 2026, with Pat McCabe (Woman Stands Shining) as guest speaker, covering food systems, land stewardship and the worldviews underneath both. The source is a short promotional piece, so the detail of the research itself - how the groves were worked, where the clam gardens survive - is not in it; what it records is that the conversation happened, and what it ranged over.

Gaia Education · Read the source