The Campaign
Forest Gardening is Beyond Just an Amazing Concept – it’s a Campaign!
Are you looking to take forest gardening to the next level?
“My vision is to inspire and educate individuals about the benefits of forest gardens from climate change to relocalization of food and medicine sources and creating sanctuaries of human settlement in our communities. To do this, we will help eager-to-learn participants and interns design and install these living systems.”
“The goal is to have 10,000 forest gardens in Carolinian, Canada, by the end of 2017. And multiple to one million by 2020.
I have no doubt we will get there as the realities of relocalization campaigns continue to expand.” ~Shantree Kacera
I believe that an essential aspect of stopping energy descent and global warming is relocalizing community resource requirements worldwide. Food, water, social interaction, fuel, and energy can all be created or accomplished locally. As a forest garden educator, I see the aesthetic that people here in Southwestern Ontario want. This cultural landscape aesthetic is devastating, energy-intense, reasonably useless, impractical and unnatural. My goal and vision are to accelerate the paradigm shift in this bioregion in the way that individuals view the aesthetics of landscapes and empower landowners to realize their precious land as a functional and well-designed part of their lives, a base of their resource necessities and a solution to global scale concerns (i.e., Climate Change, environmental destruction, etc.)
The objective is to train as many forest gardeners as possible to be confident designers and installers of these living systems. As we change the community aesthetic, the market for food forests should start to spread to larger and larger scales. This will require many knowledgeable and experienced forest gardeners to undertake these projects. One part of this goal is to help the forest garden movement get out of the cycle of always offering advanced training to inspired students and interns, which requires a lot of capital. We want to be able to provide affordable training and courses to individuals. We need to get the forest gardening movement out of the financial groove and help provide the right livelihood for those who want to make a career out of forest gardening.
Along with this is transitioning rural farms and orchards to more diverse and perennial food forest garden systems. The other desire is to transform vacant city lots and public parks into food forest garden systems that deliver a surplus of resources for local neighbourhoods and wildlife. This is happening and expanding as part of our work here at The Living Centre, and we will continue to thrust for more and more of this in our campaign.
We need enthusiastic individuals to be part of this solution. Join us in reforesting your bioregion.
“Few of us are in a position to restore the forests. But tens of millions have gardens or access to open spaces, such as industrial wastelands, where trees can be planted. and if full advantage can be taken of the potentialities available even in heavily built-up areas, new ‘city forests’ can arise…” ~Robert A de J Hart was the pioneer of forest gardening in the UK in the early 1960s
