Category: Ecology
Humans Are Not A Disease On the Planet
You Are Not A Cancer In response to a comment that humans are cancer on the planet, futurist Stewart Brand replied, “Nah, cancer can’t stop asteroids.” One of the most destructive cultural narratives we hold is that humans are inherently destructive. That we’ll inevitably destroy the Earth and are a blight, disease, or cancer on the planet.…
Classroom Container Gardening
Start A School Garden With Pots and Containers One of the easiest ways to introduce gardening to students is through classroom container gardening. A significant obstacle to growing food in the classroom is finding a permanent space, but pots and containers allow any teacher to start small without a fixed garden space. Container gardening can…
Creating A Classroom Aquaponics System
Why Set Up A Classroom Aquaponics System? Lots of classrooms have plants and fish, but not many combine them into a symbiotic classroom aquaponics system. When connected, fish waste provides water and nutrients to the plants while the plants clean the water for the fish. Aquaponics systems contain a complete nitrogen cycle and symbiotic relationships but are…
The Long Tail of Agriculture
Agriculture is Missing its Long Tail Imagine we could arrange every food producer on the planet according to total productivity. On one end, we’d find highly productive industrial megafarms, and way down on the other end, we find marginal food-producing activities such as foraging or kitchen window herb gardens. Graphing our lineup of food producers,…
An Edmonton Root Beer Opportunity
Edmonton Has a Root Beer Deficiency In June 2016, the City of Edmonton enacted an Herbicide Ban with the aim to “eliminate non-essential uses of herbicides on city-owned land.” It’s been a year since, and despite the fact that some people are losing their shit, I’m proud of the City for sticking with their decision – going so far as…
The Watershed Diet
You Are Where You Eat If you are what you eat and you’re mostly water, shouldn’t we spend more time thinking about the source of that water? Move over 100-mile diet, let’s explore the watershed diet. A watershed is the area of land that captures, soaks up, and channels water toward increasingly large bodies of water. We think…
Cloned Fruit And The Magic of Grafting
Why Do We Eat So Many Cloned Plants? In 1868, Maria Ann Smith spotted an interesting apple seedling growing by a creek on her property. As the plant aged, it produced apples with green skin and tart flesh. Maria Ann Smith’s apple has been propagated thousands of times over the last 150 years. You know…
Nature Is A Verb – Your Parking Spot Wants To Be A Forest
Nature Is A Verb Imagine a parking lot: hot, grey, dry, and dead. Parking lots are uninteresting, uninviting, and inhospitable to life. And they are turning into forests. Nature is a verb. Even the most meticulously paved asphalt has imperfections. Expanding and contracting with the rise and fall of the sun, asphalt forms cracks. It’s even…
School Urban Agriculture Supports Local Food
Growing Food in Schools To Kickstart Urban Agriculture One of the best ways to kickstart a local movement is to provide early access to training. I saw this firsthand when culinary teacher and Pastry Chef Kelly Hobbs’ culinary students won more than 28 awards between 2009 and 2017. After graduation, a sizable number of them enrolled in…
The Nature of Cities
Why Cities are Good for the Environment Contrary to our cultural narrative, cities are good for nature. Why? Because cities are natural and governed by the same processes that create ecological systems. In fact, cities may be the most useful tool we have for tackling some of the world’s most pressing problems. One study out of Yale University reported:…
Gardening in Edmonton
Tending The Landscape I want to acknowledge the First Nations communities that have long lived and tended the land on which Edmonton stands. From passive actors, Indigenous communities were active participants who managed the landscape in ways that increased biodiversity and tipped ecologies in ways that benefited culturally significant plants and animals. For First Nations…
School Garden Challenges and How to Avoid Them
Avoid These 4 Common School Garden Challenges Over the past decant, I’ve seen a significant increase in schools interested in school gardens. School gardens are important teaching tools that support learning, local food, and resilient communities. Traditionally run as extra-curricular activities or horticulture classes, the school garden is a tool for differentiated instruction, problem-solving, and…