I got to read a story about a food forest in an actual food forest
Hello! I have two exciting events next week for folks in the Bay Area: tomorrow, Sunday the 6th, I’m reading at BayCon, and on Thursday the 10th, I’m hosting Stir — a new reading series in SoMa. And the timing didn’t work out for me to get this into my last newsletter, but I also did an unexpected reading in Austin, Texas a couple weeks ago, at an actual food forest, and I have thoughts! Or feelings, mostly, that I want to try and articulate. Since a lot of my fiction is directly relevant to food forests, I thought I’d do some of that articulating here for you.
The reading was at Festival Beach Food Forest in Austin, and it was my first time in the city. It was a public launch party for the second issue of Tractor Beam, which is a soil-themed solarpunk (“soilpunk”) publication that my story “The Flowers Where 580 Used To Be” appeared in a few months ago. I didn’t know anyone who was going to be at the event, except through a few emails, but I was so curious to see a real food forest in person, after researching and writing about them for years.
For some context, The Wildcraft Drones, my debut book that’s coming out next year, is a collection of short stories that all take place in a shared timeline, where most of North America has been rewilded as an AI-managed food forest. There’s a lot more context on my guest post at the Asimov’s blog, which accompanied my novelet “The Roots in the Box and the Roots in the Bones” (included in The Wildcraft Drones). The short version is that I started with a question: What if we could rewild all industrial agricultural land, and still have enough food for everyone? And because it was 2015 when I first asked it, and I was very new to a lot of concepts, my answer included autonomous drones and everyone moving into walled citystates. As I explored these answers through various narratives that never made it into the collection, I learned about all the very numerous and eco-fascist problems with those solutions, and the collection in its final (pending proofreading) form is an earnest exploration of how and why the initial premise goes wrong, and eventually what version of it goes right. It’s a world working through the problems I worked through writing it, and the concept that still fully captivates me, that I would still start with if I was writing it for the first time now, is the food forest.
We can, in fact, rewild all agricultural land and still have more than enough food for everyone currently on the planet. I’m completely convinced of that now, and more and more people are learning about food forests and native edible plants every day. Flying drones, with a few still science-fictional advances, remain a good alternative to heavy agricultural machinery for managing it — but human beings, as it turns out, evolved for the purpose and we are already exceptional at it, when given the time and the cultural resources to do so.
If you have ever felt the urge to bring a plant or pet into your home, moved a bug off the sidewalk, or broken off the tip of a branch along a trail (and perhaps been scolded for it by a well-meaning nature lover) then you understand the instinct for maintaining ecosystems. We are built for it through and through, and my region of focus — California — was historically more bountiful than I ever imagined, back when maintaining it was the primary activity of its inhabitants. I recommend Tending the Wild by Kat Anderson for a thorough account.
So I get to Austin a couple weeks ago, and I get to this food forest. I’d seen it on the map: a little green triangle in the corner of a park, near a freeway. It might be the smallest collection of trees I’ve ever heard described as a “forest.” But there it is, existing, when so remarkably little land is used this way, when so much is stacked against there being public land at all.
The project began in 2015, the same year I first conceived of my science fictional, continent-spanning version. While I was typing that first draft of that first vignette on a train leaving Baltimore, volunteers in Austin, Texas were organizing to transform a corner of manicured lawn into a biodiverse forest where anyone can walk through the shade and forage for figs, herbs, grapes, pecans and more. It’s not wilderness any more than pre-colonial California (and so many other places) were wilderness — it’s a natural ecosystem that human beings are an integral part of, that feels “wild” because of how many other species we share it with.
While I was there, I saw birds and butterflies, a bee sleeping in a flower, children playing, strangers getting to know each other, and elderly folks drinking lemonade. There was music, and awkward standing around, and quiet wandering, and real people who I’d only known through screens, who I could finally have a realtime, unmediated, unrecorded conversation with. It felt really nice, even through my baseline social anxiety.
Thinking back on it now, from the concrete heart of San Francisco, it makes me feel exactly the kind of longing that I wrote about in the story I read to everyone there.
“It made it more special, somehow, but sad, too. Every lot I walked by was depressing before, but now I saw what it could be. If only.”
That story — “A Lot Full of Weeds” — isn’t in my upcoming collection. It relies on magic, not technology, and there’s no drones, and it’s just one empty Tenderloin lot that gets transformed, and it’s really much more about housing than I think the Austin food forest audience was prepared for. I realized how very San Francisco the story was while I was reading it, remembering all the phrases where its first audience had laughed or nodded, but these Texans didn’t, and how I hadn’t seen a single obviously unhoused person in Austin, and how the volunteers might feel about unhoused people moving into their carefully maintained food forest. Just because a place is designed for open foraging doesn’t mean it can support camping. I honestly don’t know what the housing situation is in Austin, except the obvious gentrification, but to my knowledge there is no major city in the U.S. that is solving the crisis directly, by giving people a place to live without conditions.
Maybe that comes next. Maybe it starts with public space, something we unanimously value in the form of parks and sidewalks. And maybe the next step is places for public foraging. And maybe sometime after that, when we’re used to the idea that there should be not only free places to walk our dogs and have picnics, but that anywhere you go, there should be free food and water. Maybe after those become expected again, instead of special and miraculous, we can finally get to the idea that wherever you go, there should be a place to sleep for free. Other places do it. Other places never stopped doing it.
Walking from the hotel to the food forest along the river, I saw benches with narrow mattresses on them, and I wondered who was sleeping there at night, if they were forced to leave, if they had the bare minimum they needed to survive or if they were being treated the way San Francisco treats its homeless now, with constant aggression and sweeps, never being allowed to stay in one place without being harassed by the police, having what little you own — including prescriptions, paperwork, clothes — all taken and thrown away by the people who are supposedly sworn “to serve and protect.”
A little food forest in the corner of a park by a freeway is a start. A lovely start.
I feel so much frustration at how slow these efforts are growing, how few of them there are, how small the visions sometime seem in the face of so much need, a monster of need that grows exponentially every day.
But one little food forest is like a seed. It’s growing. It’s being cared for. It’s just big enough, now, to care back.
I can’t wait to see what it grows into. I hope I live to see it grow up over the branded skyscrapers, and the police stations, and the detention centers, and every building where “leaders” are making “decisions” they have no right to, and tear them all down.
Til next time,
T. K.