well thank you everybody for being here
making this event possible I’m here
today to talk to you how we conserve
wild places in this country in other
words what is the conservation paradigm
that we have I’m going to suggest that
it has some unintended consequences that
in fact we are alienating people from
nature and perhaps equally as
importantly that we may be impacting our
health and how we perform conservation
and that means that we may be making
nutritional issues a problem for us by
keeping things protected under a glass
dome but I’ve got to set the stage
because we can’t leap into these topics
without understanding the way that we
live and how it affects the way we view
conservation now is a time when 80% of
the United States lives in urban and
suburban areas when you combine the fact
that 90 percent of our time is spent
indoors on average it’s clear that our
views of nature how we should interact
with them and how we should protect them
are not informed from a place of direct
experience when we spend now as children
over seven hours a day on a screen and
30% of kids get less than 15 minutes of
outdoor time a day it’s very clear that
we no longer have direct connection to
the outdoors informing how we should
interact with it and obviously this is
going to create confusion around how we
view humans in nature a recent paper by
vining and colleagues actually asked
people do you consider Homo sapiens to
be part of nature and overwhelmingly
people said yes but when they were asked
to describe a natural place most of
those respondents stated it was where
humans and their effects were not
present and that’s an obvious tremendous
contradiction are we or are we not part
of nature and
really illustrates that we are not
having meaningful interactions our
current conservation paradigm in this
country could be described as a
hands-off approach any place that we
want to protect the stated goal is to
prevent humans from collecting from
taking and from gathering what we do
though is we actually prevent a
meaningful interaction between humans
and other wild beings now just being in
natural places has a lot of value
because these are low stress or
inspiring environments but we are not
being nourished in a way that causes us
to cherish those places to want to
champion their protection what we tend
to do is to put a figurative glass dome
over the remaining wild spaces while
industrial exploitation takes the rest
of the world from us Sokka and Gaston
describe a really interesting excuse me
a really interesting effect of the loss
of contact with nature and what they
show is that when we lose contact with
wilderness with open spaces with green
spaces that we become apathetic toward
conservation because we’re being
alienated from those spaces once we lose
interest those places become transformed
and we lose them to urban sprawl and now
the ability to contact nature disappears
and it becomes a progressive spiral of a
loss of first-hand experience with
nature to further call attention to how
we often view humans as separate from
nature when we see images of two animals
feeding themselves we consider the
nonhuman animal to be performing their
normal behavior but the human is causing
impact and clearly these two animals are
actually both eating they’re
biologically appropriate
wild food we have spent so much time
indoors that we don’t learn traditional
ecological methods of collection methods
that support both the collector and the
collective and this is essentially
called reciprocal conservation where
both parties benefit I’ve been involved
in many conversations where it’s
asserted that we should protect wild
spaces of any size by consuming
agricultural plants in other words leave
the wild plants alone of course when we
look at these images do remember that
these spaces used to be forests prairies
and marshes and interacting with them
just further disconnects us from the
wild but a really important assumption
that’s being made is that these crop
foods and wild foods are nutritionally
comparable and a number of studies now
show us that that’s not the case let me
provide you with just a few examples
picture here is Rosa rugosa the beach
rose and this is a species that’s native
to Asia that is now naturalized here in
North America and occurs over a lot of
the condom the red fleshy tissue of the
hip was analyzed for its vitamin C
content remember vitamin C is a
water-soluble vitamin that is an
antioxidant it protects us from cancer
reduces the risk of stroke and bolsters
immune system function the hip was found
to be nearly 55 times higher in vitamin
C than what our television commercials
tell us is a good source the cultivated
orange and that wasn’t a typo I meant 55
times higher so this plan has massive
health effects that we could benefit
from if we interacted with it another
example this is wooly violet vial of
Surya and this is a species that’s
native to eastern North America and it’s
early spring leaves were analyzed for
their pro vitamin A
content and this group of carotenoids
are important they bolster our immune
function they act as antioxidants they
reduced the risk of certain forms of
cancer and this species was 60 times
higher than the iceberg lettuce that’s
frequent in our salads another example
the groundnut this is a native vine that
is a legume and it produces an edible
tuber
now this tuber this underground storage
organ was tested for its mineral content
and it had 23 times the calcium content
of the potato that we find in our
supermarkets in fact it was higher in
every mineral tested over potato sweet
potato and taro now why is this the case
well there’s a few factors involved one
of which is that we know higher yield
crop varieties concentrate less minerals
in their tissue this is called the
dilution effect and we also know that
there are real genetic differences
between crop varieties and between
agricultural plants and wild plants in
other words no matter how much we
fertilize our fields cultivated species
on average are not going to equal the
nutrition of wild plants one more
example and it centers on stress we
think of stress as a bad thing but when
it comes to plants and their nutrition
it’s actually a good thing when plants
are stressed by say a pathogen or an
insect herbivore they up regulate
protective compounds called
phytochemicals that turn out to be
really beneficial when we ingest them
when we tend plants and protect them
from stress they simply don’t up
regulate these compounds and we eat less
of them in our diet another theme here
is fruit size we know cultivated species
we like to make larger but when there
are beneficial pigments that function as
antioxidants and the skins the bigger
the fruit gets
the less skin there is per unit mass so
we consume less of those pigments in our
diet in one study
Bilby including bill berries and
blueberries the the anthocyanins this is
a kind of pigment found in the skins was
tested and it was found to be eight
times higher in one wild species
compared with a popular blueberry
cultivar the issue here is that the wild
species protect us from cancer to a
greater degree now we have erected a lot
of pervasive mythology on our ascent to
contemporary humanity and you may think
that this discussion of nutrition really
isn’t important because our agricultural
and our industrial diets give us all
that we need but the reality is they
don’t and we have a number of ways that
we can demonstrate this one way is that
we can look at hunter-gatherers people
who consume an entirely wild diet and
look at what happens to them when they
become acculturated in other words they
begin to eat the foods of Industry
invariably people who had high
resilience to cancer cardiovascular
disease stroke diabetes obesity
depression periodontal disease and so on
all began to experience these chronic
diseases at really high frequencies the
reality is is our modern diets do not
supply the same level of nutrition now
recovering this nutrition means that we
need to eat wild plants we need to
interact with them and one of the ways
we always have eating them and we often
don’t realize that plants as sedentary
organisms have a number of strategies to
protect them from herbivore
for example the ostrich fern on your far
left
it has a synchronous maturation what
that means is the leaves don’t all
emerge at the same time so if an
herbivore which could be a human comes
through the population we don’t get to
eat all of the leaves
at once the spring Beauty the spring
appearing species has a very fragile
connection to its underground storage
organ if a deer a human or any herbivore
comes along and gathers that shoe it
disconnects from that root leaving it
behind and that storage organ can regrow
the plant and on the far right the
mission bells this species has
dispersible propagules all that means is
when we dig for the bulbs for food we
litter these little bulblets all through
the soil all of which are capable of
growing a new plant
as you can see plants have a number of
strategies to protect them from humans
and any other animal from eating them
but it’s not just the adaptations plants
have it’s what humans have learned over
a very long period of interacting with
them so that we can sustain and even
increase the populations of plants that
we collect this is evening primrose this
is a species that grows and recently
disturbed habitats if we leave it alone
the hands-off conservation approach that
site will grow in with competing
vegetation overtop it and shade the
plants out however if we go in and we
dig for some of the edible tap roots we
passively weed the area and remove
competitor plans we also prepare that
soil to be a perfect growth medium for
the seeds if we time our collection in
the fall when those seeds are mature
they drop into these prepared beds
reciprocal conservation benefits us with
nutrient-dense food and benefits the
plants by maintaining the site as an
appropriate place for this species to
grow our conservation paradigm takes a
really simple view and it asserts that
humans cannot be part of the ecological
fabric of space without causing harm
it states that we protect wild places
large and small by preventing humans
from interacting with them the problem
is is this prevents meaningful
interaction that develops a deep
connection such that we cherish places
and want to be champions of their
protection I mean it’s true that the
simultaneous use and conservation of
resources is more difficult than leaving
them alone we have to learn much more
deeply about the organisms that we share
this world with that’s okay because
reciprocal conservation ultimately
develops that deep connection and it
upholds these very practical reasons for
the conservation of life and it
nourishes us far more deeply than
walking down the aisles of a supermarket
thanks so much for listening [Applause]
making this event possible I’m here
today to talk to you how we conserve
wild places in this country in other
words what is the conservation paradigm
that we have I’m going to suggest that
it has some unintended consequences that
in fact we are alienating people from
nature and perhaps equally as
importantly that we may be impacting our
health and how we perform conservation
and that means that we may be making
nutritional issues a problem for us by
keeping things protected under a glass
dome but I’ve got to set the stage
because we can’t leap into these topics
without understanding the way that we
live and how it affects the way we view
conservation now is a time when 80% of
the United States lives in urban and
suburban areas when you combine the fact
that 90 percent of our time is spent
indoors on average it’s clear that our
views of nature how we should interact
with them and how we should protect them
are not informed from a place of direct
experience when we spend now as children
over seven hours a day on a screen and
30% of kids get less than 15 minutes of
outdoor time a day it’s very clear that
we no longer have direct connection to
the outdoors informing how we should
interact with it and obviously this is
going to create confusion around how we
view humans in nature a recent paper by
vining and colleagues actually asked
people do you consider Homo sapiens to
be part of nature and overwhelmingly
people said yes but when they were asked
to describe a natural place most of
those respondents stated it was where
humans and their effects were not
present and that’s an obvious tremendous
contradiction are we or are we not part
of nature and
really illustrates that we are not
having meaningful interactions our
current conservation paradigm in this
country could be described as a
hands-off approach any place that we
want to protect the stated goal is to
prevent humans from collecting from
taking and from gathering what we do
though is we actually prevent a
meaningful interaction between humans
and other wild beings now just being in
natural places has a lot of value
because these are low stress or
inspiring environments but we are not
being nourished in a way that causes us
to cherish those places to want to
champion their protection what we tend
to do is to put a figurative glass dome
over the remaining wild spaces while
industrial exploitation takes the rest
of the world from us Sokka and Gaston
describe a really interesting excuse me
a really interesting effect of the loss
of contact with nature and what they
show is that when we lose contact with
wilderness with open spaces with green
spaces that we become apathetic toward
conservation because we’re being
alienated from those spaces once we lose
interest those places become transformed
and we lose them to urban sprawl and now
the ability to contact nature disappears
and it becomes a progressive spiral of a
loss of first-hand experience with
nature to further call attention to how
we often view humans as separate from
nature when we see images of two animals
feeding themselves we consider the
nonhuman animal to be performing their
normal behavior but the human is causing
impact and clearly these two animals are
actually both eating they’re
biologically appropriate
wild food we have spent so much time
indoors that we don’t learn traditional
ecological methods of collection methods
that support both the collector and the
collective and this is essentially
called reciprocal conservation where
both parties benefit I’ve been involved
in many conversations where it’s
asserted that we should protect wild
spaces of any size by consuming
agricultural plants in other words leave
the wild plants alone of course when we
look at these images do remember that
these spaces used to be forests prairies
and marshes and interacting with them
just further disconnects us from the
wild but a really important assumption
that’s being made is that these crop
foods and wild foods are nutritionally
comparable and a number of studies now
show us that that’s not the case let me
provide you with just a few examples
picture here is Rosa rugosa the beach
rose and this is a species that’s native
to Asia that is now naturalized here in
North America and occurs over a lot of
the condom the red fleshy tissue of the
hip was analyzed for its vitamin C
content remember vitamin C is a
water-soluble vitamin that is an
antioxidant it protects us from cancer
reduces the risk of stroke and bolsters
immune system function the hip was found
to be nearly 55 times higher in vitamin
C than what our television commercials
tell us is a good source the cultivated
orange and that wasn’t a typo I meant 55
times higher so this plan has massive
health effects that we could benefit
from if we interacted with it another
example this is wooly violet vial of
Surya and this is a species that’s
native to eastern North America and it’s
early spring leaves were analyzed for
their pro vitamin A
content and this group of carotenoids
are important they bolster our immune
function they act as antioxidants they
reduced the risk of certain forms of
cancer and this species was 60 times
higher than the iceberg lettuce that’s
frequent in our salads another example
the groundnut this is a native vine that
is a legume and it produces an edible
tuber
now this tuber this underground storage
organ was tested for its mineral content
and it had 23 times the calcium content
of the potato that we find in our
supermarkets in fact it was higher in
every mineral tested over potato sweet
potato and taro now why is this the case
well there’s a few factors involved one
of which is that we know higher yield
crop varieties concentrate less minerals
in their tissue this is called the
dilution effect and we also know that
there are real genetic differences
between crop varieties and between
agricultural plants and wild plants in
other words no matter how much we
fertilize our fields cultivated species
on average are not going to equal the
nutrition of wild plants one more
example and it centers on stress we
think of stress as a bad thing but when
it comes to plants and their nutrition
it’s actually a good thing when plants
are stressed by say a pathogen or an
insect herbivore they up regulate
protective compounds called
phytochemicals that turn out to be
really beneficial when we ingest them
when we tend plants and protect them
from stress they simply don’t up
regulate these compounds and we eat less
of them in our diet another theme here
is fruit size we know cultivated species
we like to make larger but when there
are beneficial pigments that function as
antioxidants and the skins the bigger
the fruit gets
the less skin there is per unit mass so
we consume less of those pigments in our
diet in one study
Bilby including bill berries and
blueberries the the anthocyanins this is
a kind of pigment found in the skins was
tested and it was found to be eight
times higher in one wild species
compared with a popular blueberry
cultivar the issue here is that the wild
species protect us from cancer to a
greater degree now we have erected a lot
of pervasive mythology on our ascent to
contemporary humanity and you may think
that this discussion of nutrition really
isn’t important because our agricultural
and our industrial diets give us all
that we need but the reality is they
don’t and we have a number of ways that
we can demonstrate this one way is that
we can look at hunter-gatherers people
who consume an entirely wild diet and
look at what happens to them when they
become acculturated in other words they
begin to eat the foods of Industry
invariably people who had high
resilience to cancer cardiovascular
disease stroke diabetes obesity
depression periodontal disease and so on
all began to experience these chronic
diseases at really high frequencies the
reality is is our modern diets do not
supply the same level of nutrition now
recovering this nutrition means that we
need to eat wild plants we need to
interact with them and one of the ways
we always have eating them and we often
don’t realize that plants as sedentary
organisms have a number of strategies to
protect them from herbivore
for example the ostrich fern on your far
left
it has a synchronous maturation what
that means is the leaves don’t all
emerge at the same time so if an
herbivore which could be a human comes
through the population we don’t get to
eat all of the leaves
at once the spring Beauty the spring
appearing species has a very fragile
connection to its underground storage
organ if a deer a human or any herbivore
comes along and gathers that shoe it
disconnects from that root leaving it
behind and that storage organ can regrow
the plant and on the far right the
mission bells this species has
dispersible propagules all that means is
when we dig for the bulbs for food we
litter these little bulblets all through
the soil all of which are capable of
growing a new plant
as you can see plants have a number of
strategies to protect them from humans
and any other animal from eating them
but it’s not just the adaptations plants
have it’s what humans have learned over
a very long period of interacting with
them so that we can sustain and even
increase the populations of plants that
we collect this is evening primrose this
is a species that grows and recently
disturbed habitats if we leave it alone
the hands-off conservation approach that
site will grow in with competing
vegetation overtop it and shade the
plants out however if we go in and we
dig for some of the edible tap roots we
passively weed the area and remove
competitor plans we also prepare that
soil to be a perfect growth medium for
the seeds if we time our collection in
the fall when those seeds are mature
they drop into these prepared beds
reciprocal conservation benefits us with
nutrient-dense food and benefits the
plants by maintaining the site as an
appropriate place for this species to
grow our conservation paradigm takes a
really simple view and it asserts that
humans cannot be part of the ecological
fabric of space without causing harm
it states that we protect wild places
large and small by preventing humans
from interacting with them the problem
is is this prevents meaningful
interaction that develops a deep
connection such that we cherish places
and want to be champions of their
protection I mean it’s true that the
simultaneous use and conservation of
resources is more difficult than leaving
them alone we have to learn much more
deeply about the organisms that we share
this world with that’s okay because
reciprocal conservation ultimately
develops that deep connection and it
upholds these very practical reasons for
the conservation of life and it
nourishes us far more deeply than
walking down the aisles of a supermarket
thanks so much for listening [Applause]
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