Sustainable Wildcrafting: Take a Little Food, Not Too Much

When I go for a walk in the forest, I love to grab a few needles off a branch. Sometimes I peel a salmonberry branch and chew on it. It's sweet and lovely and tastes just like spring. In ten days, I'll be off hunting for a new delight, something that is not often found in my neighborhood: stinging nettles. Armed with gloves and pruning shears, I'll harvest these iron-rich morsels and turn them into a delicious soup, I hope.

I love eating wild plants. I love eating them from the roadsides, provided they aren't too dusty. I love eating them on the fringes of urban land, on unused or underused lots that have grown wild. And yes, I love eating them in parks, in spite of the no touch policy that exists in our parks today.

A no touch policy makes sense, in a way. We are not supposed to remove anything from our parks because if everyone did that, the park would be damaged. Parks are for people, but they are also hotspots of diversity in urban landscapes that are otherwise challenging for wildlife.

Once, we thought of parks as havens for nature. They were unspoiled, untouched places, places of wilderness that were supposed to be museum pieces in a way. While we paved over most of the other parts of our cities, our parks were there to act as a refuge for the plants and animals that used to live in the areas where our houses now stand. Parks were a moral insurance policy to assuage our guilt for cutting down trees and removing natural habitat.

But what is the human role in the park? Parks are managed creatures whether we like it or not. They are managed through neglect or through proactive actions, but they are impacted by people. People walk through urban parks, people plan for urban parks; people build stairs and walkways in urban parks.

So why can't people harvest small quantities of food in urban parks? We are afraid. We're afraid that our parks are too small and our populations are too big to sustain a harvest of wild food. We are also afraid, quite rightly, that allowing harvest in a park will allow harvest in excess, for profit, without thought of the ecosystem.

This is all true. But it is also true that we've lost so much contact with our wild places that we no longer think about them as places that contain food, and we have no idea how to prepare our native foods. My proposal? Like many countries of the world where subsistence wild crafting and wild food harvests exist, we redevelop parts of our urban environment into wild food forests. In addition to urban farming, we should encourage the growing of native plants and an understanding of their uses, so that we can connect with our forests as a living part of them.