Nut Trees, Democracy & The More Than Human World with Zach Elfers — WildFed Podcast #111

WildFed Podcast — Hunt Fish Forage Food

We’re joined today by Zach Elfers, aka @woodlandrambler of the Nomad Seed project.

Zach has a unique suite of skills and knowledge base that centers around the intersection of botany, horticulture, foraging, wild-tending and traditional ecological knowledge. As a member of the foraging community, Zach is going a lot deeper than mere plant identification or gathering. He’s looking at creating large scale, reciprocal ecological relationships between people, the plants, the land, and the rest of the non-human beings that we share the landscape with. And while this was a get-to-know-you kind of conversation, Daniel left it feeling like "this is the kind of thinking he hopes can start to infuse North American foraging culture over the next decade."

Our conversation quickly veered away from merely foraging and went into some of the challenging-to-traverse terrain of the socio-political aspects of our cultural relationship to the land and each other. Of particular interest to us is the juxtaposition of top-down vs bottom-up approaches to implementation. We look at indigenous vs colonial land management paradigms, and discuss possible roads back to a more long-term sustainable path of nature integration.

This interview gets into some of the high-level, big-picture thinking that we really enjoy. It’s a reminder that wild foods are about a lot more than what’s on your plate. It’s about how we relate to the landscape, to the creatures we share the planet with, and how we relate to each other too. Because food is so much more than calories. It’s a representation of how we choose to walk in the world.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/111