Wendy Talaro (wtalaro)

For the last two years, I have been an ecological garden/landscape designer by trade. Although as a service professional one works with a client's desires and budget in mind, I never lost sight of the need to adhere to natural patterning. As I worked with clients, I observed that there were common themes in the misperceptions they had. Some of them expected to be able to treat plants in the garden like furniture in a house - move everything around at will as aesthetics and desire alone dictated. Still other clients expected edible plants to perform miracles of high production with commercial size and quality produce without being willing to provide those plants optimal conditions or to furnish the space or nutrients the plants needed. Eventually I became aware of the root of all the bizarre expectations people - not just my clients - have of nature. Reverence is fundamentally absent, as is a visceral connection to nature's rhythms and processes, even among those who profess to be very interested in sustainability and in 'greening' their lifestyles. My knowledge and skills as an earthworker were desired but simultaneously devalued. There is a deeply ingrained social perception of inherently less value in the labor, knowledge, and skills of those who work with their hands and the land. (And if you doubt my assessment, take a cursory perusal of Dept. of Labor Occupational Outlook Handbook.) One of my roles in this lifetime is to heal these misperceptions and the social inequities that follow in their wake.

I co-teach a workshop christened 'Urban Ecoliteracy'.  Urban Ecoliteracy is more than learning practical skills. It's about becoming native to place – this place, right where each of us lives now. After taking a Permaculture intensive in the late 1990s but finding application difficult in an urban context, I wrestled with how to make Permaculture accessible to others without watering it down. Through flashes of inspiration and the school of hard knocks with clients, the content of Urban Ecoliteracy eventually gelled. With the intent of healing our collectively damaged relationship to place, my colleague and I teach participants the principles of ecological design, the process of environmental regeneration, and landscape reading skills while covering a grounded (but not dumbed down) foundation that gardening, garden design, and Permaculture intensives all tend to unintentionally omit. We had the best teacher one could hope for - Nature itself. The Urban Ecoliteracy workshop is about practical ecological design in urban, developed landscapes and Permaculture principles are seamlessly integrated.

Even though someone might not own land, it does not negate a need to develop a relationship with the place you live in and to learn to grow roots into that place. Part of what plagues Americans is that national spirit of restlessness and the outwardly directed drive that works hand-in-glove with colonization and the legacy of Manifest Destiny to create the socially dysfunctional and environmentally compromised places most of us live today.

Being firmly rooted in a sense of place is the only saving grace to the ungroundedness, rampant social disconnection, ecological alienation, and anomie that haunts the psyches of people today. A person can't be grounded (literally) if he or she is not willing to become vested; if one is not vested, that person is only a tourist pretending to be a citizen. To become vested, one has to be willing to cultivate relationships with one’s surroundings and neighborhood, which includes the human and nonhuman elements in toto.