@dynamic My grandpa liked to plant Hazel trees, because his favorite nut was the hazel nut. Maybe if he were so inclined, he could have written a similar treatise on the benefits of Hazel. ;-)

@lwriemen

Somewhere (possibly resilience.org?) I recently saw an argument that hazelnut is a good choice because it is wind-pollinated and so doesn't rely on pollination by commercial honeybees.

Personally, I'd like to see more embrace of interdependence with wild pollinators, but it does make sense to include wind pollination in the mix so that we have fallbacks.

(I also do not know how chestnut is pollinated.)

@dynamic @lwriemen
Chestnut is insect pollinated as well as wind pollinated I believe, I hear chestnut honey is delicious. I think it's really the appeal of the sheer quantity of food that individual chestnut trees can produce over a lifetime that gives them cred. Its easy for people used to monoculture to imagine as an alternative food source, even if it wouldn't be quite the panacea in practice.

@blowdart_the_police @dynamic @lwriemen is primarily wind pollinated, which works totally OK in all of the contacts that it evolved in.

@blowdart_the_police @dynamic @lwriemen the nice thing is it hazelnut fit well underneath chestnut trees you can do both

@dynamic @lwriemen so there are thousands and thousands of things that have to happen but in order for them to happen some of them have to happen. That’s not monoculture and that’s not a silver bullet. It’s making a decision to do a thing and see it through so that other things can happen.

@dynamic @lwriemen our culture seems to have a problem with the understanding of the difference between things and sets of things. Diversity in poly culture are a set of individual things that have to happen, without regard to multi scalarity, everything can get flattened this way.

@dynamic @lwriemen

Me: let’s get homes weatherized all over the world

The inevitable response: you can’t just build a home out of insulation and window caulking

@BuildSoil @lwriemen

What I was trying to say was that I hoped someone with a different expert perspective would weigh in. I don't qualify as a real expert here, although I can't speak for Lee.

@dynamic @lwriemen I’m just curious about what requires weighing. 1 million chestnut trees isn’t very much but it would feed half 1 million people all of their grain needs for 1000 years.

And 1 million corn plants only fills up 30 acres and only feeds a small fraction of the same number of people. And yet it’s a far worse monoculture that Hass to be tilled every year damaging the soil and it can’t grow in reasonable numbers in residential areas.

@dynamic @lwriemen I just wanna be clear that I’m not looking for a panacea or a silver bullet. I don’t believe in them. And as soon as you stop looking for one now there’s all these options that we can begin so let’s get 1 million Chestnut planted and we can work on all sorts of other things.

You know it only takes a few minutes to plant these trees and then hand them out but it does take some human coordination and getting people to the project of planting and distributing trees focuses them and they can work on other things they can work on other plants they can work on policy they can work on activism. They can share chores they can help each other, but really it’s only asking for a couple hours commitment tops it’s just something to do to begin

@dynamic @lwriemen also, I just got here from Twitter. I actually don’t know if the tone I’m using is too much or not. Just so you know, I’m getting a PhD in this stuff and I’ve been teaching and lecturing and planting for the last three years now. Forgive me if I’m just rolling over you it’s both a beautiful action people can take and not that big of a deal.

@dynamic @lwriemen if you’re really curious about this topic and I can tell you that it is an endless well of detail, I love this paper on Corsican, Chestnut systems and maybe you will too https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol16/iss2/art5/

@BuildSoil @lwriemen

The part about building a home out of insulation and window caulking was a bit abrasive, sure, but not in a uniquely Twitter way, I'd say.

And I can totally understand some prickliness if you come back to a thread after some time away and see people apparently poking holes in it.

@dynamic @lwriemen well apologies for any Snark, but what I’m getting at is that this is about the procedures of constructing a complex system. We have to work through successional processes and that means we need to make one decision of the time they need to be decisions that open up the doors for complexity.

@dynamic @lwriemen I’m not prickly, I’m relentless. I have made a vow to get several million chestnut planted and that’s going to require explaining in detail how it works.

@BuildSoil @lwriemen

For my part, I got excited about mob grazing during a symposium hosted by some Land Institute people at an Ecological Society of America meeting many years ago, and then a somewhat smaller number of years later did a postdoc where I worked on modeling grassfed beef productivity, and while I still feel optimistic about rotational grazing, I also now know that a lot of people are overselling it.

@BuildSoil @lwriemen

So I'm a bit wary of what at first sound like no brainer food systems solutions.

@dynamic @lwriemen it’s a good idea not to apply things to the wrong scale.

@dynamic @lwriemen but yeah, through 30 years now of study and practice and then three years of arguing my case in the halls of Twitter, I feel very comfortable defending and showing how the math adds up. But in order to get there, we have to understand the fitness of approaches to particular skills of time and space. Niches are only appropriate at certain levels of the panarchy.

I don’t tend to go for mob, grazing, though planned grazing can be a bit more adaptive because it’s paying attention to the larger and smaller scales

@BuildSoil @lwriemen

Whatever paths one chooses toward building a better world, the next step on my path is toward bed and sleep.

@dynamic @lwriemen see you get it. Tend the basics the rest will work

@dynamic Not an expert. Reading @BuildSoil thread, sounds well reasoned and studied to me.

@lwriemen @dynamic all I’m doing is picking one chore on the giant communal chore wheel I wanna just knock this off so that we can get the other tasks.