{"id":52398,"date":"2024-02-12T22:12:49","date_gmt":"2024-02-12T22:12:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wagingnonviolence.org\/cnv\/?p=52398"},"modified":"2024-02-16T16:39:20","modified_gmt":"2024-02-16T16:39:20","slug":"a-nursery-theory-of-social-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wagingnonviolence.org\/cnv\/2024\/02\/a-nursery-theory-of-social-change\/","title":{"rendered":"A nursery theory of social change"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Trees are always the answer. At least, that\u2019s the impression you might get from mainstream reports<\/a> on climate change. Apparently, trees will do just about anything. They could sequester all the carbon since the Industrial Revolution (so we can pump out more), clean polluted water and air, even replace annual crops and grow jobs and gender equity!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I sound dismissive, but I\u2019m not knocking trees or those who sing their praises. I love these rooted beings dearly, which is why I propagate lots of them. My friend Cornelius Deppe and I co-caretake Silver Run Forest Farm<\/a>, a nursery and folk school rooted in love and living soil. Those roots sprout out as agroforestry<\/a>, watershed health<\/a>, and restorative justice<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our nursery, we grow thousands of beautiful and useful plants that cross-pollinate food sovereignty and ecological restoration. Basically, we cultivate and celebrate tree crops in the image of the forest. We do that to tend the life and health of places defined by the shape of land and flow of water rather than colonial borders and capitalist properties. That way, we might remediate the toxins that pollute our souls, society and soil, from erosion to empire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These are bold claims for a small nursery in the Shenandoah Valley<\/a> of Virginia, but we should be honest about our convictions. Even so, treating trees as technical solutions \u2014 for climate or political economy \u2014 is ecologically illogical. Practically speaking, it doesn\u2019t work. Large-scale tree plantings often fail<\/a> because of wrong location, wrong species, little monitoring, and top-down decisions made on behalf of people the projects are supposedly meant to serve. The colonial overtones are barely greenwashed<\/a>: The vast majority of carbon emissions fume from the industrialized Global North, but the vast majority of tree plantations for carbon offsets break ground in the Global South. Who pays the price \u2014 and loses<\/a> the land \u2014 when trees die?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather than cutting emissions or redistributing wealth, elite regimes dump<\/a> huge sums of money to plant trillions of trees. An unprecedented flood<\/a> of government and grant funding is currently flowing towards agroforestry. But long-term plantings, for tree crops or ecosystem restoration, require protected land tenure and dignified workers. White people own<\/a> 98 percent of agricultural acres in the United States. This is the legacy of capitalist agriculture and colonial policies backed by state and vigilante violence. Funding for crops that require enduring land access mostly goes to those who own the land, not necessarily those who tend it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Cornelius
Cornelius propagating figs from cuttings. (WNV\/Jonathan McRay)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The obvious truth is that trees always grow in context. Trees sprout in specific seasons and soils, planted by someone on land claimed by someone, guided by social systems and cultural customs. Counting saplings without collectively organizing is a dead-end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I still want to plant lots of trees. But what should be planted, and how much? Those questions should depend on others: where, when, why, how and by who? New forestry research<\/a> shows an \u201coverwhelming scarcity of seedlings\u201d in the United States. Available stock often isn\u2019t sourced appropriately, meaning trees aren\u2019t locally adapted to geography and season. A 2021 report<\/a> concluded that U.S nurseries need to double tree seedlings to meet projected requirements for reforestation and carbon sequestration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The numbers are complicated because many trees resprout \u2014 so not all sites need seedlings, not all land is suitable for trees (which is one reason why enormous tree plantings fail), and this research doesn\u2019t directly address agroforestry and the negotiated need to share land between multiple uses. But what all this research clarifies is that massive monoculture tree planting doesn\u2019t work and<\/em> quantity and quality both matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A transformative way to plant trees<\/a> and tree crops<\/a> sees the forest along with the trees, as whole ecosystems instead of individuals. It addresses root causes from the local to the global, stems from clear goals coordinated with attentive care, and includes people affected by decisions in the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the early pandemic swirl of 2020, we dug up plants from growing beds for our spring nursery season. Without proper planning, we had way more produce than purchases. We needed to move hundreds of healthy unsold plants before they woke from dormancy. Instead of potting them, we reached out to trusted friends and networks as a form of mutual aid<\/a>: Please take our trees because we don\u2019t have places to plant them! The response was quick, positive, and abundant. We transplanted everything to backyards, community farms, nurseries, nature preserves, land trusts and landback efforts up and down the eastern woodlands of Turtle Island, or what we now call the U.S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We jokingly called this last-minute appeal our own version of a CSA, but instead of a community supported agriculture it\u2019s a community solidarity agroforestry. We treat it like a wholesale contract with crowdsourced funds, affording us a fair amount of collaborative decision-making power to determine where our trees go. It\u2019s also a way for us to imitate those trees, who give away a quarter to half of their sunlit energy through their roots to feed the underground economy of the soil. Photosynthesis might be an analogue of redistribution. Since 2020, we\u2019ve given away nearly 8,000 trees, shrubs and cuttings (along with a percentage of our proceeds) <\/strong>through trusted networks and a radical underground of growers who know that restoration depend<\/a>s on reparation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The scale of social change necessary to protect land and the humans that love it is planetary, and our scale is clearly not enough. But seeds start somewhere. So many gorgeous efforts resist and remediate the crises of global racial empire<\/a> and the capitalist circuit that feeds it, from solidarity economies to cooperative structures to forest defense allied<\/a> with abolition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the same global systems that devour fossil fuels and sacrifice zones also consume efforts for reform and revolution. Radical practices like agroecology<\/a> and agroforestry are captured and coopted by capital, served back to us with the vibrant politics pruned out: Plant more trees, we\u2019ll talk about labor and land ownership later. Trees have high growth potential, so venture capitalists are looking for short-term profit from long-term agroforestry, turning species that are in the commons into speculative commodities. If you can\u2019t beat the movement, put a price on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also like trees\u2019 growth potential and don\u2019t mind harvesting the economic fruit of our labor, but I want to keep agroforestry rooted in food sovereignty and tree planting rooted in biodiversity. Maybe we need to scale up<\/a> tree nurseries rather than simply scale up tree plantings. Like woodlands and workers movements, we could do more through cooperatives and collectives. We could scale up agroforestry through people-power organizing, popular education and participatory action research, learning lessons from global farmer-to-farmer movements.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Chinese
Chinese Chestnuts for seed and flour (WNV\/Jonathan McRay) <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Our Forest Farm is part of a small collaborative experiment<\/a> wondering what this could look like in our niche \u2014 and how we might meet tree needs to feed society and soil by photosynthesizing hoarded capital into joyful flourishing economies. A vertical cooperation<\/a> of upstream growers and downstream planters and processors could weave a food web like mother trees and mycelium into an Eastern Woodland Nursery Alliance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even in this urgent time of the world, we can\u2019t move faster than the \u201cspeed of trust\u201d<\/a> if we\u2019re planting possible futures. Trust and trees grow at similar speeds (and share the same linguistic root), slow when necessary, fast once roots are down. We\u2019re slowly convening listening sessions with land stewards and nursery growers to ask questions about scale and species and structures for nurseries rooted in local geography, agroecology and economic justice, so we can widely share responses and resources. This feels like the most important and satisfying aim of our nursery and any alliance of trees: propagating power to give away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What would a theory of social change look like that grew from the power of plants? We grow plants because we love them and their vital place in the world. We also grow plants because we want to grow power that feeds us and the blessed land. Plants and power propagate from layers of roots and shoots of seeds, the established and emergent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our nursery sprouts a working theory of social change, both how a nursery can support social change but also how social change might move like a nursery. In this case, theory isn\u2019t abstract concepts but a liberatory practice<\/a>: What we imagine is possible and how we enact it. Paying attention to plants and people power, a nursery should:<\/p>\n\n\n\n