Eiffel Over

Tag: harvest

  • Imagining the wood from the trees

    This week, I’ve been writing about observation as the starting point for regenerative design.

    Today, I’ve been working with colleagues at Hazel Hill Wood to envision a year-long process of investigating what timber is currently—or could be—available for harvesting from the wood to use in our buildings. In a sense, we are learning to tell the wood from the trees.

    Through this process, I foresee the following levels of timber availability:

    • Ready – Timber that has already been felled, sawn, and seasoned—ready to be used immediately.
    • Ready for processing/seasoning – Timber that has been felled but still needs additional preparation, such as seasoning.
    • Ready for felling – Mature trees that are best harvested now to make the most of their timber potential.
    • Needs tending to – Timber that could become valuable in the future but requires care now—such as thinning or pruning lower branches—to ensure a high-quality crop later.
    • Needs time – Young trees that aren’t yet ready for harvesting but can be planned for as part of a long-term strategy.
    • Needs imagining – The trees that don’t yet exist. With thoughtful, long-term planning, we can envision trees growing in the future—trees that may one day be harvested, perhaps not by us, but by future generations.

    It’s this final phase that I find particularly magical: imagining the wood from the trees. It’s about seeing what’s missing and planting the seeds—both literal and metaphorical—that could flourish decades from now.

    All of this thinking reminds me that the role of the regenerative designer is imagine a thriving future and take steps towards creating that future. It begins with observation and imagination.

  • Stone circles on the beach

    Hundreds of years ago, the inhabitants of the Île de Ré, just off France’s Atlantic coast, developed an ingenious way to catch fish. At low tide, they built large stone circles, say 20 metres or more in diameter, and formed by a rock wall about 50cm high. At high tide these stone circles are completely submerged. But as the tide falls, water remains trapped in them, and so do the fish swimming in that water. At low tide the water eventually drains out of the walls, leaving the fish lying on the beach, for the local fishers to just pick up.

    These stone circles, or ‘écluses’ in French, were very effective in providing a local food supply. So much so that during the Napoleonic Wars, recruiting officers for the army tried to destroy the walls in an attempt to starve the local population and force them into joining the army. Later, the owners of commercial fishing fleets sought to have them shut down as they proved a risk to their own market domination.

    Through a regenerative lens, in this example we see:

    • A local population connected to a local source of supply. 
    • A low-tech method for harvest that the community itself can build and adapt.
    • The resilience that local supply can provide (and therefore why the army and larger commercial operations sought to remove it).
    • A scale of operation that is necessarily limited – they can only harvest fish that swim over the beach; there’s literally plenty more fish in the sea. This is in contrast to the super trawlers that can take far more than their fair share.

    Community, ecology, supply and resilience. These are the sorts of stacked, multiple benefits that we are seeking to create through regenerative design.

    Today, groups of volunteers are protecting and rebuilding the walls. Perhaps for posterity. And, or, perhaps they see a time in the future when harvesting in this way may return stacked, multiple benefits to their community and ecosystem.

  • Seeking abundance in the Cambridge Fens

    Seeking abundance in the Cambridge Fens

    An abundance mindset is a key tool for the regenerative engineer. It gives three things.

    The first is the ability to see the richness of the situations we are in. The wealth that we have which may go unnoticed. The unused materials that could be worked with. The richness of the harvest.

    The second is the possibility of seeing the potential of a place. What could this place be. What could happen here if we unlock the latent capacity of community and ecosystem to make something better.

    And the third is the ability to see the missing richness of a place. Where a system may be in a desertified state, what it could like where it returned to its previous flourishing state.

    It is this third kind of abundance that I see in the project to return 9000 acres of the Fens in East Anglia to nature. Where this was once a habitat deep in peat and rich in diverse species, draining of the land and intensive farming have left the fens in a decertified state in which 2cm of peat is eroded ever year. Near my cousin’s house the land is four metres lower than it was before draining started in the Victorian period. Soon there will be none left.

    But purchase of large swathes of land by the Wildlife Trusts is enabling the return of wetter forms of farming in this land. This alternative approach aims to restore the peatland habitat, increase biodiversity and create a shift to alternative crops that can thrive in these wetter environments.

    This abundant vision creates the potential for humans and the rest of the living world to thrive together.