Reintroducing the Chestnut tree to our landscapes today can guarantee food sovereignty for hundreds of years in a way that reduces reliance on capitalism and does not assume stable climate scenarios.
Libby Green • Spring 2022
The short of it: Why focus on chestnuts?
Chestnuts are accessible, long-lived trees which build soil, produce calorie-dense nuts annually, grow with room underneath for other plants, and sequester carbon – a perfect tree for community resilience in futures of precarity.
We envision a world where we collectively move away from a scarcity-based food system that continually harms workers, consumers, and the environment while lining the pockets of a few, and towards one which generates livelihood, equity, leisure, and abundance. We believe that chestnuts can be one tool amongst many to accomplish this. The American chestnut, nearly forgotten to history due to the blight, can make a comeback that disrupts the mainstream food system.
We envision a world where there are chestnut trees in every town and city, with autonomous collectives that gather and distribute the nuts each year. We envision a world where chestnuts are integrated into agroecological orchards and animal pastures, providing diversified income for small farmers or more sustainable feed for livestock. We envision a world where chestnuts grow in rural yards across the country, providing feed and habitat for wildlife and family alike. This is a world where, in years of personal or collective scarcity or calamity, people know that there is an abundance of healthy food growing around them. This is a world where activists and community groups can find the energy and freedom to organize while being fed from abundant regenerative trees. This is a world where we don’t have to rely on destructive systems of agriculture but instead can rely on our local ecosystems and community members. This is a world that is resilient in the face of climate change by strengthening networks of mutual aid and community care, in part by organizing coalitions of perennial food tree stewards. As Andrea Ferich said, “Let’s propagate the bread and roses of the forest and reorganize our labour around it.”
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