Event to feature storytelling and the show and tell of natural tools and crafts

By Meg Wade for Ashland.news

Tomi Hazel Vaarde, author of “Social Forestry: Tending the Land as People of Place,” will speak next week at the Northwest Nature Shop at 154 Oak St., Ashland, from 7 to 8 p.m. Wednesday, April 23.

Vaarde (who in their book describes their preferred pronouns as “Friend/They/She”), is a member of Siskiyou Permaculture, which hosts annual courses on social forestry and optical surveying in addition to a regular winter storytelling gathering and classes on permaculture.

At the Nature Shop, Vaarde says she will introduce the concept of social forestry, and then talk about “becoming ‘People of Place’ by identifying the drainage basin that we live in, and coming to know it well,” in part through the practice of “watershed pilgrimages.” Such pilgrimages involve walking the watershed boundary, such as the one around Ashland Creek, which Vaarde says she has done “10 or 12 times” over the last 50 years.

While Vaarde says they hope to largely take audience questions, there will also be storytelling, and a bit of “show and tell” with tools and crafts from the forest, such as baskets, a pocket transit used for optical surveying — a combined compass and clinometer that Vaarde described as a “compass on steroids” — and a broad knife used for coppicing work.

Copies of “Social Forestry” will be available for sale at the event. The book, published by Synergetic Press, features a foreword by well-known author and permaculture teacher Starhawk, and draws on Vaarde’s many experiences and experiments in both permaculture and forestry, which she has taught to both children and adults. Locally this includes many years of practicing and teaching in Ashland and at Wolf Gulch in Little Applegate Canyon.

While there’s plenty of practical information in its more than 450 pages, from a review of the basic physiology of trees to considerations on felling them, to diagrams of kilns and field looms, the book’s primary focus is on the cultural and social. As Vaarde writes: “Social Forestry is participatory, interactive, and observant. We do it together.”

The book both opens and ends with chapters attending to culture — “This call is to do culture-tending” says Vaarde in the introduction — and feature stories both local and global, with many that pull from Vaarde’s upbringing as a Hicksite Quaker; reflections on Indigenous Ecological Knowledge (IEK), Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and the role of modern science; and notes on the importance of social practices that make space for many kinds of diversity, including gender and neurodiversity.

Throughout all of these Vaarde expands the sense of the social realm to include other beings and the land itself: “As we join up and mushroom into mutual aid pods, looking at the work, and considering the immensity, we dig in. The headwaters call us. The trees sing to us. We can reciprocate. Talk back.”

This emphasis on learning to work with others and “talk back” to the trees means that “Social Forestry” relies as much on Vaarde’s skill as a poet and storyteller as it does their technical knowledge of how to manage a prescribed burn or process acorns. Story and wordplay are the primary tools here, not charts or precise instructions.

This is permaculture told slant, one might say, and for those who enjoy the book’s poetic sensibilities, Vaarde is about to release a new chapbook of poems. “The Shifting Forest Chapbook,” edited by Karen Taylor of Siskiyou Permaculture, will be forthcoming in July of this year.

A regional tour is planned both to highlight the new chapbook and continue promoting “Social Forestry.” Events throughout July will take place in Portland and Seattle, on the Olympic Peninsula, and other locations around the Northwest. Details can be obtained through Siskiyou Permaculture’s newsletter.

More about Vaarde and their work can be learned on their website at wildtendingwithhazel.com, and in previous coverage from Ashland.news: ashland.news/ashland-creatives-exploring-new-and-old-ways-to-live-with-nature/

Siskiyou Permaculture will run its next Optical Surveying course later this year, from October 16: siskiyoupermaculture.org/optical-surveying/

Information on next week’s event is available on the Northwest Nature Shop website: northwestnatureshop.com/event/social-forestry-presentation-by-tomi-hazel-wednesday-april-23rd-7-pm

Ashland resident and freelance journalist Meg Wade’s byline has appeared in Mother Earth News and other publications. Email Ashland.news at news@ashland.news.