Does Foraging Build Community Resilience?
The Diversity of Resilience
There are many ways to improve community resilience, as you might’ve seen from all of Ffynnon’s activities! From a FarmStart, helping budding entrepreneurs find their feet in farming, to community meals bringing cohesion in our local towns, to sessions with young people, giving them experience of growing food.
Yet this diversity is only part of the story. There are many paths to resilience in our community of north Pembrokeshire, even when only focusing on a community’s access to food. Beyond farming, growing, and catering, is a wilder world of food resilience, that has been part of us for time immemorial… Foraging!
Foraging vs agriculture – different strengths of resilience
Our wild species may not compete with cultivated species and varieties in productivity, but they have one special advantage: they ask little of us. They need nobody’s help to grow – just being left alone enough will do it. And because they exist beyond our struggles to grow or purchase food to put on the table, they have a unique strength in the resilience of our communities.
In resilience, diversity is key. The more avenues that local, nutritious food can find its way to people, the more resilient that community.
A person that can leave their door, walk into the fields and woods and find things to eat, has an extra tool in their toolbox of food resilience. If they lose their job and cannot go to the supermarket that week, they can find some sustenance in nature. A community that has many people who can do that has a shield against major shocks to our incredibly complicated and vulnerable global food system.
Ecological respect when foraging
We should, of course, be cautious that people absorb the correct knowledge, as well as sensitive attitudes to over-harvesting and damaging nature. In times of plenty, it’s vital to forage sparingly, leaving enough for other creatures. In times of disaster, there would be downsides to a community harvesting heavily from the natural world – for example, effects on animals being able to forage enough food for winter. But if our survival depended on it, most would judge that an appropriate price to pay. Hopefully such a situation, from war or natural disaster, will never come to pass.
But in teaching people to forage wild foods, with a mind towards resilience in the face of system collapse, we also reap a number of other benefits along the way that have a bearing on more subtle levels of resilience.
The relationship between the forager and the foraged
The act of foraging can build internal resilience.
We, as foragers, are brought face to face with the resilient system of the natural world. By foraging wild food, we re-immerse ourselves in nature. It is true that our ecological systems are being tested by the onslaught of habitat loss, climate change, and poisonous and pollutant substances. But beneath that is found a remarkable ability to endure, to spring back, and adapt can also be seen amongst the stories of loss. It can show us what we can aim for in our human systems.
Furthermore, by intimately knowing the lives of plants – by understanding their growth, seasons, needs and special qualities – we enter a relationship of rootedness, a groundedness in the places we live. From this relationship comes an emotional and mental resilience that can help us overcome the sense of alienation and fragmentation that frequently accompanies our modern lifestyle. And by learning and sharing these skills as a community, we not only enhance our communal knowledge bank of how to find and cherish food, but we also develop the bonds and relationships between us as we do so.
Every new name, connection, friendship, is a success. It blurs away the curtain of anonymity that makes it easy to lose sight of the fact that we are a community, that we do have resilience. We always have been, and we always will be, even when in times of agricultural plenty and economic stress, we do not reach out and rely upon our neighbours and the land beneath our feet as we used to.
Foraging, like producing one’s own food, can be a thread that weaves together people, plant, animal, and the seasons of the earth, reminding them of their oneness.