I’ve been a supporter and contributor to Cape Cod’s Food Forest Initiative, for example comments on the curriculum and connections to similar work in Nepal. The FFI’s mission is to “strengthen Cape Cod’s biodiversity and food sovereignty through edible public plantings and educational actions.”

The FFI is a non-hierarchical collaborative. It grew from from potlucks where members hatched ideas, then fulfilled them with wheelbarrows, shovels, mulch, mushroom spore, and plants from their gardens. The work is connected to insights of Restoration Agriculture but also Social Permaculture.

People in the FFI see the work as creating “food for people and Nature,” observing and documenting success of mixed agroforestry plantings, and seeking to involve people in a direct relationship with land, finding in the power lines the interstices where some freedom of action is possible. They offer workshops or seminars for middle-schoolers in efforts to use citizen science to extend a sense of the possible – for nutrition and human connection.