One of the threads I brought home from the excellent NDAL conference (New Directions in the American Landscape) this past week in Bryn Mawr, PA, is the idea of “tending.” Tending makes a lovely counterpoint to both the fantasy of a return to a human-free landscape and the dystopian future of total degradation that keeps us awake at night. The former is simply impossible to achieve: we are here (gratefully so), there’s a lot of us, and we’ve altered nature in enormously complex ways, so there’s no going back to an untouched, primitive planet. Natural armageddon appears as the inevitable tip of a trajectory launched millennia ago out of our very human curiosity, want, arrogance, ingenuity, and plain un-knowing. A driving ark of history so far is of course that of expansion, discovery, and conquest. The impulse is not a bad one: to know, map, classify and make use of what is out there is a basic human drive. We are curious monkeys; we need, we want, we take. 

Tending offers a way of modulating that impulse, of seeing the foolishness of boring holes in our children’s boats. Tending means fitting into the natural world because we are of it; it means striking a sane balance between taking and giving—perhaps not as much the kind achieved in red and black on ledgers as the dance of give-and-take that makes a good marriage or an enduring friendship. First Nations knew it, good farmers know it, and as it turns out even the Rain Forrest, our ultimate fantasy of an untouched wild, has been in fact carefully tended by indigenous nations. Taking is not an evil thing: we blessedly take love from others, sunshine on our skins, juicy raspberries, good music. We give love back to others, make our bodies and mind productive so they can hug, dig, dream, speak out, chop off, give birth and burry. The pulse of life is a loop of giving and taking that wants to keep on looping. On the one hand, some resources are finite, as are our lives. On the other, organic life, when it is not threatened, keeps on keeping on in the most generous way—1500 seeds in one apple tree’s season of apples! In the face of this mind-boggling bounty, we’ve felt little need for self-restraint. We have often been a most greedy breed. 

Some of the best afternoons of my childhood were spent bouncing around the Margeride forest with my grandmother, picking wild lowbush blueberries. I felt her unspoken heartache when our favorite patches had already been cleaned out by people who had come with combs to grab all they could. She thought the job was best done by hand, leaving some fruit behind for the birds and the neighbors. Hers was a tending model, and beneath it was the kind of reverence and humility that make for good lives and healthy communities. 

At NDAL, Jared Rosenbaum pointed out that ecology is a science of relationships, and that responsible foraging for edibles and medicinals is an essential way to reconnect with nature as an abundant provider. He’s inspired by the First Nations’ practices— coppicing, managed burns, seed sowing, transplanting—a model familiar to anyone who’s read great books like Braiding Sweetgrass and Tending the Wild. It speaks to me, the wandering offspring of a very long line of subsistence farmers who clung to their corners of infertile mountain soil, brought sheep to graze on heather, and kept pines growing in their woods, cutting one only when funds were needed for a wedding or a funeral. 

Ed Ikin, head of beautiful Wakehurst in Sussex, spoke of similar cultural systems in the U.K., where habitats were very much shaped by human hands. Heathlands, woodlands, and grassland were all stewarded in ways that aimed to strike a healthy balance between productivity and conservation. Thatched roofs, productive hedges, high-summer hay harvests… a picture of pastoral harmony underwritten, I imagine, by a deep knowledge of how and where things grow, how much to take and how much to leave, and indispensable cooperations across communities, families, and generations. 

Experimental knowledge and willing hands are at the heart of this Tending revival. At NDAL, Kate Kennen spoke of her creative design practice in the Boston area. She uses plants strategically in phyto remediation projects, where beautiful landscapes pull contaminants out of the air, soil, and ground water. Anna Fialkoff described ways in which her Maine-based seed bank aims to place native seeds in every hand across the state. Mike Saxton, of Shaw Nature Reserve in Missouri, spoke of burning, weeding, and seeding, old tools used to revive a land threatened by invasive plants and biodiversity loss. My favorite takeaway from his talk was his willingness to engage volunteers throughout the process, training them to help with controlled fires and equipping them with chainsaws when needed. There was a good dose of Midwestern common sense and bravado in his approach, and I can only hope it spreads to the Coasts. Andi Pettis, formerly of the New York High Line, now on Governor’s Island, shared candidly of her Sisyphean struggles with (human-designed and essentially impractical) topography and noxious weeds, and the unlikely assistance of a brave troop of New York sheep. Maisie Hughes, of American Forrests, talked of tapping into community expertise and wonderfully unscientific principles such as kindness and self-introspection when confronting landscape inequity. There were many other great speakers, all of whom, in one way or another, spoke of the soft place where human culture and ecological processes touch. That place, that work, are where it’s at. Hearing these voices filled me with a renewed sense of anticipation and possibility.