Survival ecology & multispecies cities. Happy Manidoo Giizisoons (Little Spirit Moon) - 30 Dec 2023

Honouring my spirit helpers. Painting by Christi Belcourt

Happy Manidoo Giizisoons, Little Spirit Moon (a few days late)!

“The first snow has many stories to share. Today Nokomis “grandmother” has spoken to us. Nokomis has begun to unbraid her long white hair letting it flow over her shoulders in order to cover her sleeping earth and water children. Turtles, frogs and other water beings are resting deep in the mud. Their body temperatures have lowered and they sleep until the wakening of spring winds and sun…

Nibi, “water” begins to form a winter blanket of new ice. Water beings and plants rest quietly and return again in the whispering wind songs of early spring. The awensiinag, “animals” are sporting their winter coats of thick fur.  The water animals; beaver, mink, muskrats, and otters have gathered a supply of winter food around and near their lodges. The summer winged ones have returned to their warmer climates and the winter bineshiinyag “birds” fill the day with their language of songs. The woodpeckers tap their messages in the forests.

During the time of Manidoo Giizisoons, we were taught to be quieter in our journey.”

Marilyn Capreol, Shawanaga

First Nation Ojibway band member, Huron Robinson Treaty

Portsmouth Community Little Forest

Observing the land. Restoring habitat. Making our work accessible to a diverse public. Healing the soil. Helping trees migrate. Coexisting with adjacent urban spaces. Fostering partnerships for urban naturalization. Educating visitors and volunteers. Building our community. These are the Portsmouth Community Little Forest’s principles in action.

Read Nathan’s full write-up for the 2023 Portsmouth Community Little Forest.

Gifting pocket forest pots & pocket meadows

Joan just turned 65! Jim, wanting to make the event special, had the wonderful idea of an ecological centrepiece for each table... hence, Pocket Forest pots!

Pocket Forests are mini-ecosystems — songs, poems, love letters to the land — which help revitalize the urban landscape. They bring the magic of the natural world right to your doorstep, attracting birds, pollinators, insects and other wildlife, along with a riot of colour, sound and smells. And because everyone (even trees!) needs friends, we included three species, three layers (tree, understory, shrub) in each Pocket Forest pot along with a seed package for a soft-landing (a lovingly hand-collected, hand packaged pocket meadow).

Joanne, with help from Jim and Anne, hand-painted each pot to illustrate some of the species and their relationships. 16 pots. 16 unique Pocket Forests. Keystone. Wingbeat Woods. Buzz Worthy. For the Birds. Living Fence. Invasive Replacer. Butterfly Banquet. Wet Feet. Awesome Autumnal. Rocky Roots. Small but Mighty. The Originals. Walking Forest. Food Forest. Green Guardians. Peaceful Pines.

Read more about Pocket Forest pots & Pocket Meadows.

We were also honoured to award a Food Forest Pocket Forest pot (designed and painted by Joanne) as a prize for this fabulous, hopeful collaborative art project created by a group of seven students in the School to Community program at LCVI during the Youth Imagine the Future Festival.

Jordan DeRooy, School to Community teacher, accepted the Pocket Forest pot — planted with Chinquapin Oak (Quercus muehlenbergii), Pawpaw (Asimina triloba) and Rosa Carolina — on behalf of the seven students. We’ll be meeting with the LCVI garden club in the spring to facilitate a workshop, plant the Pocket Forest and begin a collaboration towards a full-size edible little forest at LCVI.  

We also gifted a Food Forest Pocket Forest Pot, designed and painted by Joanne and planted with Basswood (Tilia americana), Pawpaw (Asimina triloba) and Rosa Carolina to Ted Hsu, MPP for Kingston and the Islands.

Survival ecology and multispecies cities

“Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer

In the climate emergency, conservation must become survival ecology, Charlie J. Gardner & James M. Bullock. “Rather than seeking to maintain a world which will no longer exist, survival ecology acknowledges unavoidable change and seeks to shape the world that will: it looks to the future, not the past… The goal of conservation should be to retain, into the future, an Earth system in which life (including human life) can flourish. In other words, we must dynamically maintain, restore and create ecosystems to allow the biosphere to evolve, adapt and change such that it maintains itself in all its complexity during a time of rapid biotic and abiotic change. We must move from biodiversity conservation to survival ecology.”

Future restoration should enhance ecological complexity and emergent properties at multiple scales. James Bullock suggests reframing restoration in terms of enhancing complexity and emergent properties, defining complexity as “the number of components in a system and the number of connections among them.” Possible measures for site-specific and landscape-scale complexity supporting emergence include:

• Architectural/habitat complexity represents a measure of the three-dimensional niche space

• Species richness assessment  

• Food web complexity typically involves observing feeding relationships (e.g. pollinators and flowers or rearing parasitoids from hosts)

• Soil microbial community complexity

• Soundscape complexity

Trees as infrastructure. In this 5-minute video, Kate Raworth asks some powerful questions: How might our cities start to belong in the ecosystems that they’re situated in? How might we come home to the nature of this place? Can our city or neighbourhood match or exceed the performance of the wild land next door? Can we sequester as much carbon dioxide here as a nearby forest does? Can we store as much groundwater after a storm as a nearby forest does? Can we measure the wellbeing of people and planet in natural and social metrics in the terms of life itself? How do we redefine the language of power?

Climate adaptation actions for urban forests and human health, USDA Forest Service. While this report focuses on human health vs multispecies health, it suggests strategies for increasing the vitality and interconnectedness of  urban forest elements to support landscape-scale ecological processes (carbon sequestration, wildlife migration, pollination) and long-term ecological functions of urban landscapes.

Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) by the Internal Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) takes a landscape-scale, forward-looking, dynamic approach to resilience, emphasizing ecological functionality rather than simply planting trees. Guiding principles include: focus on landscapes, maintain and enhance natural ecosystems, support participatory governance, tailor to local context, restore multiple functions and manage adaptively for long-term resilience. What might a landscape-scale approach look like for our work here in Kingston? Here’s an example of a landscape-scale approach for pollinators in cities.

Make kin, not cities! Multispecies entanglements and ‘becoming-world’ in planning theory. Donna Houston explores questions like: How might we plan relationally? Who speaks for (and with) the nonhuman in place making? Do we demand an abandonment of the traditional idea that urban planning and participation are only concerned with the well-being of humans? And if so, what are the practical implications for urban planning and development? What new trajectories for urban planning and urbanism might these questions open up?

Design for multi-species cities. John Thackara discusses a design workshop that explored practical ways to make cities hospitable for all of life, not just human life. What would it mean to practice design in the knowledge that the well-being of humans, and non-humans, is inter-connected? Explore his reading/watching list.

Love letters to the Earth

Thich Nhat Hanh’s ten love letters to Mother Earth are an invitation to engage in intimate conversation, a living dialogue, with the Earth.

“Each species has its own language, yet as our Mother you can understand us all. That is why you can hear me today as I open my heart to you and offer you my prayer.

Dear Mother, wherever there is soil, water, rock or air, you are there, nourishing me and giving me life. You are present in every cell of my body. My physical body is your physical body, and just as the sun and stars are present in you, they are also present in me. You are not outside of me and I am not outside of you. You are more than just my environment. You are nothing less than myself.

I promise to keep the awareness alive that you are always in me, and I am always in you. I promise to be aware that your health and well-being is my own health and well-being. I know I need to keep this awareness alive in me for us both to be peaceful, happy, healthy, and strong…”

Each Little Forest we plant is a song, poem, love letter, to the Earth. To celebrate our 2023 plantings and prepare for our 2024 plantings, what if you composed a song, poem, or love letter to offer as a gift to one of the Little Forests and to Mother Earth?