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| Ramps in early spring. UWExtension |
In April, my friend Laura brought me some ramps—not just parts, but the entire plant, broad, smooth leaves, small, shallot-size bulbs, roots and all. I know she wouldn’t go out in the local forest preserves and dig them up, foraging or poaching, depending upon your perspective. So where did she get them? Her CSA has begun growing them. Because they were intact, neither of us ate them, but planted them in our respective gardens, watered them in well, and are hoping for the best. I did remember to mark where I’d put them, luckily, because the leaves soon faded away and disappeared, as happens with many species of spring ephemerals.
I’ve never eaten ramps that I know of, though I hear they’re delicious. I know where they grow, at several undisclosed locations, but they are on forest preserve land, and a strict no-poaching policy is in place. As such I would not go harvesting against the rules, partly because, as a volunteer steward, I have engaged to follow them. Foraging is a subject about which passions run high, and sometimes it seems one can’t take a nuanced view. Yet the topic has many complexities—there are cultural, situational, horticultural, and ecological factors to consider, at a minimum.
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s new book “The Serviceberry” is an inspiring meditation on gift economies, and the possibilities for creating forms of sustainable, non-capitalist social organization in modern society. She talks about how nature provides, and the mutualism between birds and other animals and the serviceberry bushes packed with tempting, sweet berries. Animals and bushes help each other flourish. This makes sense, as far as it goes, and she says something crucial when discussing the role of humans. She calls for “the Honorable Harvest”—the idea of taking no more than you need, and taking only 50% or less of what’s there, to always leave some for others. She says, “we are called on to harvest honorably, with restraint, respect, reverence and reciprocity.” She also speaks of foraging and finding less than expected, sometimes. Should one even harvest in this case, or instead take steps to help improve conditions for the particular species of plant? Kimmerer does say to give back, however you can, whether directly helping tend the land, or indirectly, through other means such as donations to causes.
Foraging, to work well, relies on the cultural existence of a responsibly-managed commons, an area of land in which a defined group of people both harvests foodstuffs from it and works to ensure the land community’s continued thriving into the future. This involves rules and ethical guidelines such as understanding what and when to harvest, not harvesting too much, of knowing how to manage different species of plants, and contributing to the work of both tending the areas where the plants grow. As Kimmerer says, harvesting responsibly is a given, in a way that helps species regenerate and even increase, so that there is food for humans and habitat for all the other living beings. But equally important is the balance humans provide: the care for food-producing areas, full of “wild” plants, that might be called forest gardens. Such a situation is discussed in “Medicine Wheel for the Planet.” Native ecologist Jennifer Grenz describes how indigenous food-growing systems and forest gardens have included, “thinning trees to allow for the required light, using fire to “sweeten” the land…propagating plants through cuttings, and fertilizing soils with fish bones.” All ways of managing land responsibly for continued land health and food and habitat benefits for all species.
By contrast, in modern day America, there is still an unfortunate myth that the vast, open lands that the Europeans beheld when they first arrived, full of abundant game and verdant as all get out, were just somehow naturally that way. By and large, they failed to understand the long centuries of land management that produced these landscapes. They also failed to understand the ways in which native peoples had all the food plants they needed, both in the managed “wilderness” and in their vegetable gardens. The invasive newcomers set about importing their own, familiar foodplants and domesticated animals, and proceeded to attempt to remake the landscape based on cultural and ecological misunderstandings. These actions, coupled with capitalism and Christian colonialism, helped produce the ecological polycrisis we are living through today.
It is difficult for many people enmeshed in modern, American society to understand what an actual commons, embodying sustainable, regenerative land management, would look like. The prevailing sad, tired old paradigm of endless growth encourages unthinking consumerist blindness. That there will somehow, magically, always be more—profits, resources, room to expand—is an unfortunate delusion that infects our whole society. (It is also striking, as so many have pointed out, that while our capitalist system somehow posits endless resources and endless growth, the business model requires creating scarcity in order to generate profits.) Consequently, any resource held in common will always become degraded. Someone or some entity will always take advantage of what ever isn't owned and controlled privately.
These conditions and beliefs mean that that many people have never experienced or participated in cooperative, sustained management of a resource. As a result, people often set out to forage with a consumerist mindset completely opposite to the one required by responsible land citizenship. It could be a sort of supermarket-only-it’s-free attitude: the plants are there for the taking, without thought of consequences or for what has been required for the plants to be there in the first place. And without thought for other species that might rely on these plants, or that other humans will be out foraging too. What haul did you score today?
There are other concerns. The idea of the wild, honorable harvest is wonderful, but the reality is very different, at least here in Northern Illinois. In public lands surrounded by urban sprawl, as in the Chicago region, foraging leads to problems due to human population pressure. There aren’t enough natural areas to support the 5.5 million people in Cook County, Illinois, even if they all foraged responsibly and lands were managed for food gathering. This is quite similar to the problem of too many deer in a limited area (which I’ve written about previously). Deer overpopulation leads to over browsing; consequently, many valuable species of plants disappear, and other animals have a harder time getting a living. We often have to cage young trees, shrubs and other plants in order for them to survive. It’s the same with people. If everyone could come and forage on forest preserve lands, taking what they wanted, certain species such as ramps and golden seal would simply disappear. You can talk honorable harvest all you want, talk about taking 50% or even 20% of what’s available, and have genuinely good intentions, but it’s unfortunately a question of numbers and plant regeneration. Each person taking a portion of what’s left, means that even if the last person leaves the last few berries, after a while, the species will begin to decline. Thus, the Cook County Forest Preserves might be thought to have an invisible cage around them.
And what about the balancing side of the equation, which is that the foragers would have a genuine understanding of the characteristics of the plants and fungi they are gathering, and are also doing what is necessary for the desirable plants to increase and thrive?
A Swedish acquaintance of mine once described how in his country, everyone goes out and harvests chanterelles. Yet, there are always more. Why is this? Because they harvest using a particular type of basket, and as they put the chanterelles' fruiting bodies in the baskets, they are also scattering the spores through the openings in the weave, so that there are actually more morels growing where people harvest and along the trail than deeper in the woods. This shows a human accommodation to the needs of the morel, so that both species may prosper. It is a form of mutualism, very different from setting out to collect as many morels as possible in your local American forest preserve and throwing them in your plastic bag to take home, as I’ve seen done. In that case, how are you giving back? How are you thinking of the needs of other species? How are you ensuring a woodland full of morels to harvest in coming years?
In addition, many foragers, perhaps particularly urban and suburban ones, might have a sort of romantic notion of “living off the land,” of somehow getting back to nature. This might be the case with a young couple I met recently, while I was out clearing a patch of woodland of invasive garlic mustard. They were meandering around, looking at the ground, discussing, plastic sacks in tow. It was ramps season, and I had a thought that perhaps that was what they might be looking for, particularly since they were lingering in a patch of invasive lily-of-the-valley that hadn’t started to bloom yet. The leaves look extremely similar to ramps (I’ve seen forest preserve volunteers confused). But the lilies are poisonous. What might have happened had I not walked over and said hello?
The usual conversation ensued—"Hi, there, I’m with the forest preserves, nice day, isn’t it?” I asked if they were aware of the rules around foraging in the Preserves. No not really. I explained, and gave a quick botany lesson, before showing them the garlic mustard and explaining why I was doing what might look a lot like foraging. “So, if you really want to forage, take this garlic mustard! Smell the leaves—it’s an herb and you can make pesto with it, or add it to soup and its quite nutritious. We can use the help controlling it.” They took a couple of stems, smelled them, and said they’d try it, and we parted cordially.
But I keep pondering. How can a culture of responsible foraging actually come into being? My thought is that if you are a forager, you really should give back in actual reparative ways and perhaps find ways to forage that don’t negatively impact the limited public land and rare plant species we have. The ethical forager wouldn’t seek wild plants on protected land or on land they don’t actually understand and help tend. The ethical forager would find non-rare, possibly aggressive and invasive species to forage, such as garlic mustard. They might create places to forage, such as their own yard, or develop a foraging garden similar to the forest gardens touted by permaculturalists or actively tended by native peoples. In this light, perhaps those ramps in my backyard will take hold, grow and multiply. They’d be a great addition to my own small foraging garden.
Relevant Post about Deer Overpopulation:
How Do White-Tailed Deer Change Ecosystems, Anyway?
Resources:
Ramps, Allium tricoccum, by Susan Mahr (University Of Wisconsin-Madison Extension)
"The Serviceberry," by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Simon & Schuster; 2024)
“Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A Journey toward Personal and Ecological Healing,” by Dr. Jennifer Grenz (U. of Minnesota Press; 2024)
How to Plant and Grow Ramps, by Kristine Lofgren (Gardener's Path)
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