Description
Social Forestry: Tending the Land as People of Place is a must-have for anyone who wants a reciprocating relationship with their communities, themselves, and most importantly their awe-inspiring forests and landscapes.
Social Forestry connects villages and communities to their land and adjoining bodies of water. Concepts include forest management, protection, and regeneration of deforested lands with the objective of improving the rural, environmental, and social development. Through ecological assessment, carbon sequestration, and generating wildcrafts, people re-establish their wonder in the woods.
Author Tomi Hazel Vaarde, collaborator of Siskiyou Permaculture, uses poetry, photographs, drawings, and data to outline philosophies and concepts of Social Forestry. By weaving culturally sensitive stories, myths, and lessons from a range of customs and traditions including North American Indigenous communities and Vaarde’s own Quaker upbringing, Vaarde explores how holistic land and community management approaches can facilitate resolution of some of our most dire local and global crises. The writer’s work is critical to overcoming eco-grief while instilling necessary changes to the West Coast landscape for fire mitigation and restoration of complex forest systems for generations to come.
Many Indigenous peoples have learned regenerative management by living for generations in and with a sense of place, but few examples of whole-system planning and participation are evident in modern society. Climate adaptation, human survival, and the maintenance of biodiversity that supports life on Earth require radical, back-to-the-roots grounding and intentional dedication. Social Forestry helps readers remember the ways of the wild while implementing local food production, collaboration with conservation efforts, forest management, and stabilization of headwaters to build resilience for the long term. To live in harmony with our surroundings, we need to re-skill, always remembering those who came before us and acting in ways that honor traditional wisdom of people and place.
Endorsements
“Social Forestry by Tomi Hazel Vaarde is a book of hope. Hazel shows how our relationship with the Earth and her forests does not have to be an extractive one leading to destruction. Through cooperating together we can regenerate our forests and rewild ourselves and the land, growing hope as ecosystems recover while empires crumble.” —Vandana Shiva, PhD, author of Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture: Sustainable Solutions for Hunger, Poverty, and Climate Change
“Step into this manzanita-burning charcoal dirigible for the wildest ride you can imagine through Gaelic seasonal rhythms, Quaker ethics, medieval guild practice, permaculture insights, and deep-rooted tree goddess wisdom. Tomi Hazel will teach you how to manage towering bonfires, abundant gardens, forest gifts, feral decorating, land assessment, and communal love dynamics with a healthy serving of improv poetry and insight from days long ago. A true archetypal elder, Tomi Hazel validates your internal clock and doses out the medicine for your soul, your land, and your people. Do not miss your chance to experience this inimitable voice, guiding us toward a renewable, regenerative future.” —Jessica Carew Kraft, author of Why We Need to Be Wild
“Hazel is one of the few elders in the rewilding community. Their visionary approach to integrating humans back into the land has inspired thousands of people and given us hope for a transition to a vibrant, regenerative future. This book is the priceless culmination of their experiences, knowledge, stories, and passion gained and given throughout their lifetime. It will provide inspiration, insight, and direction for decades to come, right when we’ll need it most.” —Peter Michael Bauer, host of the Rewilding Podcast
“It is clear that Hazel has developed a deep understanding—a knowledge, wisdom, and power —of how humans can be an integral part of the solution as we seek to bring about habitat restoration. Hazel stands in the new ‘front line’ in the battle to engage people with place, and Social Forestry will, I am sure, become a key text in the emerging literature on the theme. If we are to heal our relationship with our forests and woodlands, we would do well to dive deep into the writing of Hazel Vaarde.” —Alexander Langlands BA MA PhD PGCert FHEA FSA, Senior Lecturer – Uwch Ddarlithydd, History/Heritage – Hanes/Treftadaeth
“Inside this luminous guide, you will find practical placemaking advice, ancient lore, and a humor that shimmers. Receive these generous offerings—a lifetime of wisdom from an elder, a teacher of permaculture, and radical changemaker like no other—and you will be transformed. Together we listen to the earth, we understand where we belong, and we find our way home again.” —Helena Norberg-Hodge, Director of Local Futures and author of Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh
“Embracing past and present with a timeless eye on the future, the author weaves their life story into the story of chosen place, the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon, walking with wisdom between the settler and Indigenous worlds that have shaped it. . . . Grounded in the material realities of land, people, and community to an uncommon degree, the author points ceaselessly toward the spirit in all things. For scholars of change, the bibliography alone is worth the price of admission. To find such a guide and visionary elder in the way of holistic thinking is a gift beyond measure.” —Peter Bane, author of The Permaculture Handbook: Garden Farming for Town and Country and Executive Director of Permaculture Institute of North America
“With Social Forestry: Tending the Land as People of Place, Tomi Hazel Vaarde takes us into what may seem to most of us to be an alternative universe, a world in which humans live as an integral part of a healthy ecosystem. It can serve well as a handbook for living in and with a forest, but it’s much, much more. It offers, for most of us, the rarest of chances to step out of our doomed industrial culture for a few hours and learn what it would be like to live as a species that could thrive on into the indefinite future without degrading the ecosphere to the point of collapse.” —Stan Cox, author of The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic
“With Social Forestry, Tomi Hazel Vaarde gifts us with poetic musings and hands-on ideas for healing our relationships with the places we live through actions that help us better understand and restore our many imperiled landscapes. Vaarde shows us how Social Forestry is both a theory and a praxis anchored to the intentional work of ‘culture-tending’ that addresses our ecological grief by seeking local spaces to reignite our imaginations and act together in meaningful ways.” —Diana Negrín, Wixarika Research Center and UC Berkeley Geography Department
“Tomi Hazel Vaarde’s new book is brilliant! And full of surprises. In these times of fear and isolation, their poetic trailblazing integrates deep ecology, the ethics of First-Nation cultures, small-is-beautiful bioregionalism, and ‘mythic memory’ to advocate the repair of the planet, forests, while rewilding our own damaged psyches.” —Chellis Glendinning, PhD, author of My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization
