Community Food Forest Goals
Community food forests are a fairly new idea, incorporating elements of urban agriculture, urban forestry, permaculture, and the community garden movement. What a food forest, whether private, institutional, or community/public, does will vary a great deal depending on local circumstances; the shape of a given food forest will flow from specific goals as well as from the givens of land, climate, local ecology, and available inputs and resources. The following list is not meant to be exhaustive description of what our food forests might be able to facilitate, but rather as a starting point for the possibilities that we can explore and towards which we can build.
Direct local food production and distribution: perhaps the most central goal of any food forest is to provide food–particularly fruit but also certain types of vegetables (and potentially the full range of garden vegetables), as well as nuts, mushrooms, and herbs for culinary and medicinal purposes; cut flowers also figure into this equation, with a robust food forest potentially providing sustainable populations of wild or semi-wild blooms for community gathering. While no single food forest is going to solve problems of food availability single-handedly, it can indeed provide healthy and tasty produce to populations who might not otherwise have any such access at all, and it can begin to address these problems in its additional roles as anchor sites for other activities and projects. Unlike a traditional community garden, a food forest can be browsed by anyone, and will support high levels of use; it can further encourage people to expand their horizons in terms of fresh and locally available food, whether through accessible farmers’ markets or through urban foraging for semi-wild fruits and other edible plants (which will be further supported by deliberate pedagogy, on which see below).
Recreational and socially oriented green space: the southern tier of Chattanooga is severely lacking in accessible green spaces, to say nothing of high-quality and ecologically and socially rich green spaces. Only a handful of public parks are located in these neighborhoods (and in adjacent Rossville), and those that do exist remain relatively meager in terms of facilities. Each food forest would be a de facto public park, providing different sorts of appropriate recreational and meeting and gathering spaces, and giving area residents a very different park experience than the standard model of closely clipped grass fields with a few trees and landscaping. As dynamic places, the food forests would offer new experiences and sights to neighbors as they matured and grew and changed, providing beautification for neighborhoods to boot, especially when repurposing otherwise vacant lots.
Community formation and equity building: these are some of the most diverse neighborhoods in our region, with a wide variability in terms of income gradient, languages spoken at home, and socio-cultural backgrounds. Bringing different distinct communities together in a democratic and open way, over the shared issue of access to and use of the land itself, is a potentially powerful way of mitigating social stresses and bridging divides–but also building real equity and access, giving power and resource allocation to the people who actually inhabit these neighborhoods and who will themselves care for and enjoy the fruits of the land. One of our central goals will be to ensure that the land used for our urban agriculture and ecological restoration sites will remain in long-term trust to the communities who use these places, and so help to avoid potential dynamics of displacement in the future.
Ecological services: while there are many vacant lots and riverine corridor across our neighborhoods, it is worth noting that mere lack of use does not automatically equal robust ecological dynamics or resulting ecological services such as support of pollinators, rebuilding of soil, filtration of water and air, or support of other forms of urban wildlife and biodiversity. As is true virtually everywhere on the planet in the twenty-first century, aggressive invasive species are a constant presence and threat, and will frequently overwhelm unmanaged natural spaces, preventing the formation of subsequent ecological assemblies absent human intervention. Our food forests will act as anchors and refugium for ecological restoration, both active and passive, providing robust and diverse ecological services simultaneous to and convergent with the food, social, and other benefits provided for humans.
Agricultural, ecological, and cultural/historical education: the pedagogical potential of the initiative would be threefold: first, our overall coordinating organization, the Food Forest Coalition of Chattanooga, would work to reach local households, particularly those of lower-income residents, who were interested in gardening, permaculture, home-scale food forests, food preservation, and the like, and do hands-on teaching and facilitate peer-to-peer instruction that would help small-scale producers increase yields, households to conserve energy and better store and utilize food, how to safely and effectively forage urban wild plants for food and medical uses, and so on. A crucial part of this plan would involve perambulatory teaching, using a diversity of instructors and especially drawing upon local gardeners and producers. Ecological teaching would be related, with a stress on cultivating individual household and neighborhood public spaces in ecologically sensitive ways conducive to restoring habitat in a manner congruent with human needs and capabilities. Such pedagogy would also involve instruction in existing and historical ecological systems and their plant and animal assemblies native to our region. Finally, both our teaching and our instillation signage would be integrated into a historical awareness of agriculture and ecology in our area, incorporating historical ethnobotany on the plant names and uses employed by the Cherokee and other native peoples in the region, as well as the history of agriculture on the part of later residents of the land, whether of European, African, or Mesoamerican descent. All of the above forms of pedagogy would also be realized in part through interpretive signage and rotating temporary exhibits based in our core food forest installations.
Community nursery stock and seed library: home-scale agriculture is already practiced by many people in our communities here in and around Chattanooga, in particular in the neighborhoods intended for food forest installation. This project will aim to not only bring together home-scale producers and share expertise, seed stock, and resources, but to also directly provide perennial plants in the form of seedlings and graft stock for planting. Perennial fruit bearing plants are generally fairly expensive when purchased from nurseries, which can be a real impediment for lower income residents; plus not everyone in our neighborhoods has easy access to motorized vehicles, nor is the knowledge necessary for grafting especially widespread.
Environmental remediation and climate benefits: a century of heavy industry left many Chattanooga soils and waters polluted in deep and persistent ways, and while pollution is not as severe as it was a couple of decades ago, many pollutants persist, some of an industrial nature, others of the quotidian sort found in any city lot, such as lead derived from paint. Food forests can not only provide a way to grow healthy food with minimal or no effect from such pollutants, they can be designed in such a way to actively remediate and heal polluted soils and waterways, and to prevent future routes of pollution through control of runoff, reduction of pesticides/herbicides, and the routing of landfill-destined materials into compost and other uses. In terms of confronting anthropogenic climate change the benefits are somewhat more abstract: certainly the gardens themselves will act as sequestration sites for carbon, though given their size this direct benefit is probably pretty minimal, likewise the cessation of things like fossil fuel powered grass cutting have small climate benefits, while localized food production can help to reduce methane-producing food waste and vehicular transport. More significantly, the formation of local green spaces that act as in-neighborhood destinations and anchors can encourage reduced vehicle use and more localized forms of production, education, recreation, and the like, building-blocks in developing infrastructure far less dependent on fossil fuel use. Bringing residents into closer contact with living ecosystems from which they directly and tangibly benefit in the form of fresh food and enjoyable green spaces is also vital in encouraging individual and community investment in other solutions, in highlighting the value that healthy food and ecological systems have for all of us.
