this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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Nature and Gardening
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All things green, outdoors, and nature-y. Whether it's animals in their natural habitat, hiking trails and mountains, or planting a little garden for yourself (and everything in between), you can talk about it here.
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Most people aren't trying to make their back yard into a forest though.
Martin Crawford, Dave Jacke, and Eric Toensmeier have said that forest gardens are any garden of three or more "layers"/elements planted in such a way as to function like natural forests. It's definitely worth pursuing in whatever scale you achieve
In the absence of humans, nature actually does kinda have its own raking mechanism: fire! By treating any fire as bad and suppressing it as much as possible, we have created a gigantic fuel load that creates much hotter, more dangerous fires when a fire does inevitably start.
Just be careful not to project too much onto nature. The layman's idea of nature is pretty heavily biased because of our assumptions (and this obviously can be very different depending on the input culture). There is a strong dualism of culture vs nature and most of our idea of nature is produced in differentiation to our culture. For example, when people see human industrial technology as evil, nature is suddenly natural, chemical-free, mother earth, in harmony, sustainable, etc. But neither technology inherently evil nor nature inherently sustainable or better. Natural systems break down all the time. I would think that for a system of limited ressources sustainability would need some sort of planning capacity?