Patrick T. Hurley

Gathering "wild" food in the city: rethinking the role of foraging in urban ecosystem planning and management

Recent “green” planning initiatives envision food production, including urban agriculture and livestock production, as desirable elements of sustainable cities. We use an integrated urban political ecology and human–plant geographies framework to explore how foraging for “wild” foods in cities, a subversive practice that challenges prevailing views about the roles of humans in urban green spaces, has potential to also support sustainability goals. Drawing on research from Baltimore, New York City, Philadelphia, and Seattle, we show that foraging is a vibrant and ongoing practice among diverse urban residents in the USA. At the same time, as reflected in regulations, planning practices, and attitudes of conservation practitioners, it is conceptualised as out of place in urban landscapes and an activity to be discouraged. We discuss how paying attention to urban foraging spaces and practices can strengthen green space planning and summarise opportunities for and challenges associated with including foragers and their concerns.

Finding a “Disappearing” Nontimber Forest Resource: Using Grounded Visualization to Explore Urbanization Impacts on Sweetgrass Basketmaking in Greater Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina∗

Despite growing interest in urbanization and its social and ecological impacts on formerly rural areas, empirical research remains limited. Extant studies largely focus either on issues of social exclusion and enclosure or ecological change. This article uses the case of sweetgrass basketmaking in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, to explore the implications of urbanization, including gentrification, for the distribution and accessibility of sweetgrass, an economically important nontimber forest product (NTFP) for historically African American communities, in this rapidly growing area. We explore the usefulness of grounded visualization for research efforts that are examining the existence of “fringe ecologies” associated with NTFP. Our findings highlight the importance of integrated qualitative and quantitative analyses for revealing the complex social and ecological changes that accompany both urbanization and rural gentrification.

Urban Foraging and the Relational Ecologies of Belonging

Through a discussion of urban foraging in Seattle, Washington, USA, we examine how peoples plant and mushroom harvesting practices in cities are linked to relationships with species, spaces, and ecologies. Bringing a relational approach to political ecology, we discuss the ways that these particular nature–society relationships are formed, legitimated, and mobilized in discursive and material ways in urban ecosystems. Engaging closely with and as foragers, we develop an ethnographically grounded ‘relational ecologies of belonging’ framework to conceptualize and examine three constituent themes: cultural belonging and identity, belonging and place, and belonging and more-than-human agency. Through this case study, we show the complex ways that urban foraging is underpinned by interconnected and multiple notions of identity, place, mobility, and agency for both humans and more-than-human interlocutors. The focus on relational ecologies of belonging illuminates important challenges for environmental management and public space planning in socioecologically diverse areas. Ultimately, these challenges reflect negotiated visions about how we organize ourselves and live together in cosmopolitan spaces such as cities.

Subversive and interstitial food spaces: transforming selves, societies, and society–environment relations through urban agriculture and foraging

By way of introduction, we turn to an excerpt from Ryan Galt’s field notes from a field trip taken by his undergraduate food systems class in November 2012: In a neighbourhood park in Oakland, in the East San Francisco Bay Area of California, we stand waiting for Max, a member of Phat Beets Produce, a collective of people dedicated to promoting food and social justice through food provisioning, activism, organising, and popular education. Max shows up, has us identify ourselves and tell everyone our favourite band and a favourite vegetable that starts with the same letter. He then explains to us the historical origins of the Black Panther Party in the neighbourhood, their role in creating what is now the nationwide school lunch program, and how some of the current efforts of the collective are aimed in part at creating a cultivated landscape that is literally carved out of the city park’s former lawns of Bermuda grass. Like other similar efforts around the country, this example of “guerrilla gardening” includes diverse vegetable beds, an area for compost, and planting fruit-producing (not just ornamental) trees that community members harvest. The produce at Phat Beets looks great, is well-cared for, and absolutely free to anyone who wants to harvest it. And harvest it they do: vegetables and fruits are being utilised by people coming from around the park. Max tells us stories about what this newly cultivated space has done for people in the neighbourhood. He then takes us to a building being renovated into a community kitchen at the Crossroads, a centrally located former commuter light rail junction next to main street. He tells us that its parking lot already hosts a regular farmers market and swap meet, and that the renovated building will serve as a community gathering place, a restaurant, and as infrastructure where local food artisans and vendors can create, sell, barter, and/or share their wares. Already a local seafood community supported agriculture (CSA) program has asked to use the space in the before-dawn shift, when little other use of the space will be occurring. This example illustrates a shift happening in many urban food systems, where millions of people are rethinking and changing how we use contemporary urban spaces in relation to food. In contrast to patterns of urban development over the past many decades, where generations of city planners have been blind to or fervently discouraged primary productive activities within urban boundaries, gardeners, farmers, and foragers are once again investing their work and resources into their communities, and in the process, (re)making urban spaces (see Hynes 1996, Lawson 2005 for a broader discussion of past movements). And these actors are getting a great deal out of it – food, relationships, well-being, economic savings, jobs and wages, a sense of self-efficacy, (re)new(ed) green spaces, environmental connections, and many other things. These practices and spaces are transforming selves and relationships, social and socio-ecological, at multiple levels.

Whose Sense of Place? A Political Ecology of Amenity Development

Using a political ecology framework, this chapter examines the ways in which sense of place and amenity migration contributes to alternative residential development, which relies on uneven use of conservation subdivision features in the American West. Based on case studies from Central Oregon, this chapter demonstrates how senses of place and developer decision-making are tied to wider political economic changes. It highlights the roles that amenity migrants and developers—two groups that are sometimes identical—play in landscape transformations that simultaneously draw on a particular sense of place and commodify landscapes in new ways.

Gathering, Buying, and Growing Sweetgrass (Muhlenbergia sericea): Urbanization and Social Networking in the Sweetgrass Basket-Making Industry of Lowcountry South Carolina

Despite the visibility of natural resource use and access for indigenous and rural peoples elsewhere, less attention is paid to the ways that development patterns interrupt non-timber forest products (NTFPs) and gathering practices by people living in urbanizing landscapes of the United States. Using a case study from Lowcountry South Carolina, we examine how urbanization has altered the political-ecological relationships that characterize gathering practices in greater Mt. Pleasant, a rapidly urbanizing area within the Charleston-North Charleston Metropolitan area. We draw on grounded visualization—an analytical method that integrates qualitative and geographic information systems (GIS) data—to examine the ways that residential and commercial development has altered collecting sites and practices associated with sweetgrass (Muhlenbergia sericea [Michx.] P.M. Peterson) and three other plant materials used in basket-making. Our analysis focuses on the ecological changes and shifts in property regimes that result; we detail the strategies basket-makers have developed to maintain access to sweetgrass and other raw materials. This research highlights how land development patterns have disrupted historic gathering practices, namely, by changing the distribution of plants, altering the conditions of access to these species, and reconfiguring the social networking that takes place to ensure the survival of this distinctive art form.

Gathering in the city: an annotated bibliography and review of the literature about human-plant interactions in urban ecosystems

The past decade has seen resurgence in interest in gathering wild plants and fungi in cities. In addition to gathering by individuals, dozens of groups have emerged in U.S., Canadian, and European cities to facilitate access to nontimber forest products (NTFPs), particularly fruits and nuts, in public and private spaces. Recent efforts within cities to encourage public orchards and food forests, and to incorporate more fruit and nut trees into street tree planting programs indicate a growing recognition among planners that gathering is an important urban activity. Yet the academic literature has little to say about urban gathering practices or the people who engage in them. This annotated bibliography and literature review is a step toward filling the gap in knowledge about the socioecological roles of NTFPs in urban ecosystems in the United States. Our objectives are to demonstrate that gathering—the collecting of food and raw materials—is a type of human-plant interaction that warrants greater attention in urban green space management, and to provide an overview of the literature on human-plant interactions—including gathering—in urban environments. Our review found that very few studies of urban gathering have been done. Consequently, we included gathering field guides, Web sites, and articles from the popular media in our search. These sources, together with the small number of scientific studies of urban gathering, indicated that people derive numerous benefits from gathering plants and fungi in U.S. cities. Gathering provides useful products, encourages physical activity, offers opportunities to connect with and learn about nature, helps strengthen social ties and cultural identities, and, in some contexts, can serve as a strategic tool for ecological restoration. These benefits parallel those identified in environmental psychology and cultural ecology studies of the effects of gardening and being in nature. The literature on human-plant interactions also emphasizes that humans need to be treated as endogenous factors in dynamic, socially and spatially heterogeneous urban ecosystems. Spatially explicit analyses of human-plant interactions show that the distribution of wealth and power within societies affects the composition, species distribution, and structure of urban ecologies. Our review also indicates that tensions exist between NTFP gatherers and land managers, as well as between gatherers and other citizens over gathering, particularly in public spaces. This tension likely is related to perceptions about the impact these practices have on cherished species and spaces. We conclude that gathering is an important urban activity and deserves a greater role in urban management given its social and potential ecological benefits. Research on urban gathering will require sensitivity to existing power imbalances and the use of theoretical frameworks and methodologies that assume humans are integral and not always negative components of ecosystems.

Sewing Environmental Justice into African- American Sweetgrass Basket-Making in the South Carolina Lowcountry

This paper contributes to the evolving definition of environmental justice by applying insights from the interdisciplinary social science literature in political ecology. While early scholarly environmental justice examinations focused on distributive outcomes of risk, more recent studies have expanded the field to include the analysis of the environmental decision-making and environmental dispute processes. Building on insights in political ecology, including recent research from the Third World that argues for the importance of considering the distribution of environmental benefits and access by marginalized groups, we examine the ways that rural development and urban expansion have affected the tradition of sweetgrass basket-making in the greater Mt. Pleasant area of the South Carolina Lowcountry. The case of Mt. Pleasant basket makers demonstrates that in-migration and associated land-use change are also associated with historical (and divergent) understandings of private property rights, resource access, and the special case of African-American heirs’ property. To overcome these challenges, more meaningful participation in land-use decision making processes by affected communities is needed.

Introduction: Why a Political Ecology of the U.S. South?

Management challenges related to therelationship between nature and societyare nothing new in the U.S. South. Tech-nical studies of rural sprawl (Wear andGreis 2002; Cho et al. 2003), coastal de-velopment (Allen and Lu 2002), environ-mental change (TNC 2005; Early 2006),and conservation have, at some level, ad-dressed such challenges. So, too, a num-ber of geographers have explored the rolethat particular human-environment re-lationships have played, for example, inurban development in New Orleans andthe distribution of environmental risks(Colten 2005). What then, is the purposeof calling for, and writing on, a politicalecology in the U.S. South? We argue thatpolitical ecology is more than a new termfor nature-society studies (though thenebulousness of the contemporary litera-ture might suggest otherwise), but funda-mentally about the relations of power andknowledge that emerge in the context ofparticular nature-society relationships.This is not to say that the studies citedabove do not engage with issues of power,authority and legitimacy, but to point outthat previous considerations often havecome in the context of separate literaturesand concerns, aimed at different audi-ences, journals and conferences, andtherefore do not truly speak the same lan-guage. While such intellectual hetero-geneity can be an important opportunityfor innovation, the absence of an integra-tive conceptual framing across these liter-atures creates a situation where studies inone literature contain moments of incom-mensurability with studies from other lit-eratures. In these moments, somethinggets lost in translation between, for exam-ple, a study of rural sprawl and a study ofthe politics of conservation.It is this outcome, these moments ofincommensurability that led us to thinkabout a political ecology of the U.S. South.By linking these papers under the headingpolitical ecology, we are able to see howthey speak to issues much larger than thecases raised in each individual paper. Inthis sense, we can move beyond illustra-tive independent case studies and movetoward a broader understanding of the is-sues and processes that shape the out-comes of socionatural relationships, bothin the South and in broader contexts. Thissort of systematic linking is necessary, if

Whose urban forest? The political ecology of foraging urban nontimber forest products

Drawing on case studies of foraging in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, we point to foraging landscapes and practices within diverse urban forest spaces. We examine these spaces in relation to U.S. conservation and development processes and the effects of management and governance on species valued by foragers. These case studies reveal the everyday landscapes of urban foraging and suggest that ideas about what constitutes the suite of appropriate human-environment interactions in the sustainable city are contested and accommodated in diverse ways.