Little Forests Kingston

Meeting September 11

Agenda: Last month we brainstormed ways of influencing the city, capturing questions and ideas on Google Jamboard. Tomorrow let’s experiment with a different approach - backcasting where instead of starting from the present, we work backwards from our ideal future - to help us refine these ideas and our asks of the City and to help us identify projects or priorities.

• We’ll start with the future (we can refine before we start backcasting). For example, “By xx date, Kingston is a city in a forest”

• Optionally we could try sketching out day-in-the life scenarios from the future of a city in a forest from different perspectives (e.g student, bee, etc…)

• Then we’ll work backwards, asking “what would have to happen for that to be true?”

• Finally we’ll backcast to help us map out how we might get there. For inspiration, check out how Singapore has been moving towards their vision of growing a biophilic city in a garden.

When: Saturday September 11 10:00 am https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81195507009?pwd=cHdyaVpFUVNrRmVBYmdnR1lWcVZrQT09

Little Forests happenings

Saplings arriving October 18th: Verbinnen’s will be delivering approximately 1800 saplings to HWY 15 on Monday October 18th and we’ll plant the forests over the next couple of weeks. In advance, Stephen will mark off the forests in 1 metre grids using flags and string. We’ll be training a few planting coaches who, when we plant, can work with small groups of volunteers, to ensure the saplings are planted correctly. Let me know if you’re interested in being a planting coach!

Soil testing: Read Anna’s writeup of Astrid’s recent talk on preparing the forest floor. Astrid also came out to HWY 15 and Lakeside to walk us through testing the soil and to collect samples to send to A&L Labs so that we have a benchmark for soil health. Astrid showed us how to do a texture analysis, a smell test, Earthworm count, evaluate the colour, and for the brave she even challenged us to taste the soil.

Learning to listen to trees

“Like a stranger, they will not sit down and tell you everything immediately. Only when the rocks begin to know you will they tell you their story.” Leory Little Bear, Listening to Stones

Science as a Conversation: I’ve always thought of my relationship with my yard as being a conversation with the land. Craig Holdrege of The Nature Institute uses the metaphor of conversation to describe the Goethean approach to science. “The metaphor brings to consciousness that doing science is a back-and-forth between partners in an ongoing process.” Is our approach to Little Forests a conversation with the land?

Meeting Bloodroot: An example of a Goethian study of Bloodroot throughout a season. “Many habits of thought can get in the way of our seeing the drama of a plant’s life… To see the drama, I need to literally come to my senses and immerse myself in the variety of phenomena. I inwardly participate in the dynamics of process and transformation, and weave the instances of surprising formations into a growing picture of the plant. In all its expressions, the plant can help me leave normative abstractions behind. With an open attentiveness and an active mind, I can begin to participate in the wisdom that informs the plant world.”

A class called Tree at Harvard: Namirah sent us a link to this fabulous class offered at Harvard. From reading the description, seems like the approach is influenced by Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Goethian Science. Have you hugged a tree lately? How about grown one? Photographed one? Drawn one? Written about one? Imagine a semester devoted to connecting two organisms: a person (you) and a tree (not you). Interacting with a single tree, you will explore its individual history, evolutionary history, life cycle, leaves, bark, roots, flowers, cones, and architecture.

Ask a tree. Interesting in building your non-human communication skills? Try Provocation 6: Ask a tree by Annette Arlander and see the responses from people who’ve taken her up on her provocation. She shares her own interview with a pine in this video. From Designing the Pluriversity, a community-building activation space of provocations and responses.

The Intelligence of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmer: “That’s what I mean by ‘science polishes our ability to see’ - it extends our eyes into other realms. But we’re, in many cases, looking at the surface. And by the surface, I mean the material being alone. But in indigenous ways of knowing, we say that we know a thing when we know it not only with our physical senses, with our intellect, but also when we engage our intuitive ways of knowing, of emotional knowledge and spiritual knowledge. And that’s really what I mean by listening. By seeing that traditional knowledge engages us in listening. And what is the story that that being might share with us if we know how to listen as well as we know how to see?”

Returning the gift, Robin Wall Kimmerer: “Paying attention is an ongoing act of reciprocity, the gift that keeps on giving, in which attention generates wonder, which generates more attention—and more joy… Deep attention calls us inevitably into deep relationship, as information and energy are exchanged between the observer and the observed, and neither partner in the exchange can be anonymous. They are known; they have names… The world seems less like a shopping bag of commodities and more like a gift when you know the one who gives you the aspirin for your headache. Her name is Willow; she lives up by the pond. She’s a neighbor to Maple, who offers you the gift of syrup on Sunday morning pancakes. Paying attention is a pathway to gratitude… How can we reciprocate the gifts of the Earth? In gratitude, in ceremony, through acts of practical reverence and land stewardship, in fierce defense of the beings and places we love, in art, in science, in song, in gardens, in children, in ballots, in stories of renewal, in creative resistance, in how we spend our money and our precious lives, by refusing to be complicit with the forces of ecological destruction. In healing.”