By Robert Kunzig, ENVIRONMENT Executive Editor
In northwestern British Columbia, along the Kistumkalum River, there’s a place that looks like wild forest, but is not. It’s the tangled remnant of a “forest garden” created by Indigenous Tsm’tsyen people in a vanished village called Robin Town, abandoned in the 1870s after European settlers began logging the region. With the help of Indigenous elders, ethnobotanist Chelsey Geralda Armstrong of Simon Fraser University has been documenting many such gardens, hiding in plain sight all over British Columbia.
As Gabriel Popkin writes for Nat Geo this week, forest gardens today are more than curiosities: They’re cradles of diversity. The hazelnuts, berries, herbs, and other plants that the Indigenous people cultivated for food and medicine are still there, a century-and-a-half later—and still benefiting the ecosystem. The gardens support more animals like bears and deer, more pollinating insects and birds, and more kinds of plants than the “natural” conifer forests around them. “They’re actually enhancing what nature does,” Armstrong told Popkin.
Other research lately points toward the same conclusion: A lot of what European colonizers thought of as wild nature when they first encountered it was actually nothing of the kind. It was a landscape managed or at least heavily influenced by Indigenous people.
Nearly three-quarters of all land on the planet has been shaped by humans for at least 12,000 years, according to another study published last week, by Erle Ellis of the University of Maryland and his colleagues.
In the last few centuries, thanks to modern agriculture and industry, whose marvelous products we all depend on, the shaping of the land has become more of an intensive mauling. The extinctions that began many thousands ofyears ago as humans first spread around the planet—wiping out Ice-age megafauna like mammoths—are now spiraling out of control.
And yet the forest gardens of British Columbia offer a hopeful take on that crisis. The problem these days, the research on Indigenous stewardship is telling us, isn’t so much that humans have been destroying pristine nature; it’s that we’ve been badly managing nature that other humans once managed better. Our species isn’t irretrievably bad, and we don’t ruin everything we touch. We’ve been poor gardeners lately, but we’re apes with big brains: We can learn. Listening to people with long experience in the garden is a good way to start.
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