Climate Injustice Series Spotlight Feature: Professor Steffanie Scott
Edited by: Eurus Pan
We have the opportunity to speak with Professor Steffanie Scott, a leading international scholar on topics related to food system change, for the second topic of our Climate Injustice Series, where we will be exploring food insecurity through the academic, research, and community efforts in Waterloo. In this article, Professor Steffanie Scott shares her personal and academic journey and reflection on the topic of the food system.
As a person of British settler ancestry born in Canada, my recent journey to explore land connections and “Indigenous and ancestral ways of knowing and being” has taken me in many directions. Kahontakwas (Diane) Longboat encourages settler-descended peoples and guests in these lands we call Canada to learn their ancestors’ ways of knowing the land. I’ve found myself drawn to learning about herbal medicine growing and making, plant wisdom, and animal tracking. I’ve taken the Moonschool program at the Guelph Outdoor School, in which we told stories from our ancestry around a campfire, learned to make cordage from wood nettle stems, wandered blindfolded through a forest to enhance our use of non-visual senses, and have a daily practice of a ‘sit spot’ outside. Charles Eisenstein’s description of interbeing and “the story of separation” of people from each other and the land resonates with me. Anishinaabe scholar Andrew Judge, in his Gathering Hearts and Minds to Restore the Land Network, reminded us of the importance of having a seven-generation vision of land restoration, a vision that links to seasonal practices associated with each moon cycle — from the sugarbush moon to the strawberry moon and so on. I am receiving all these teachings and exploring applications in my land-based practices, academic research, and teaching. And I am seeking to express gratitude for every bite of food as a step toward rekindling my connection to the land.
Many of us have heard of “nature deficit disorder” and the increasing evidence of health benefits for people with regular contact with nature. Terms such as “forest bathing” have come into the English lexicon. But the importance of nature connection, or our connection to the land base, goes much deeper. “How can we know who we are if we don’t know where we live?” asks Inuit elder and author Aalasi Joamie (Ziegler et al. 2009). “Indigenous ways of knowing to emphasize land-based pedagogies and recognize how the land is interconnected with all aspects of life” (Ljubicic 2021). I have been on a personal and intellectual journey to experience and explore land connections.
Eco-philosopher and naturalist Aldo Leopold (1970, p. 261) wrote, "it is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land.” Indeed, Mohawk elder Kahantakwas Dianne Longboat explains that we must learn to fall in love with the land to defend it. As noted by Jon Young (who inspired the founding of many land-based learning programs and outdoor schools), Otto Scharmer (co-founder of the Presencing Institute), and many others, western culture has become profoundly disconnected–from the land, from each other, and ourselves. This begs the question: how do we learn to fall in love with the land? And what about cultural appropriation, reconciliation, or decolonization?
It is essential to acknowledge all people descended from land-based cultures, or they would not have survived. All people have been connected through ancient, land-based relationships such as fire-making, hunting, weaving, plant medicines, and more. When Christianity was spread through Europe, and beyond, land-based relationships were condemned, causing significant trauma still barely acknowledged in Western culture. So Europeans became disconnected from their land-based lifeways and spirituality. They later enacted that same severance from lifeways and violence on the lands and peoples they met when they colonized and settled in the Americas and elsewhere. The rise of science and industrialization further reinforced this separation. Much healing is needed among all peoples to recover from the traumas of separation from the land and land-based lifeways.
Land connection is about being in a relationship with the land. This goes deeper than a ‘touristic’ experience of recreation that is common with hiking or camping, for example. It goes deeper than the transactional and instrumental approach common among many gardeners, which typically involves manipulating plant matter to yield vegetables or a desired aesthetic. It goes deeper than a checklist of birds that a birder has come across. And it goes beyond being a master naturalist who can ID every plant in an area.
Among many other practices, the land connection can involve daily rites of passage, storytelling, honouring the land, expressing reciprocity and gratitude, feeling awe and reverence, acknowledging beauty and complexity, asking permission before foraging, and a multi-sensory awareness of what birds and other animals are communicating and experiencing through their sounds, tracks and sign. In other words, land connection entails “ways of knowing and being” in relationship with the land. It is a heart-level connection with “all our relations.”
The benefits of experiencing land connection are myriad and can include “transformational resilience” in the form of psycho-social-spiritual wellness; physical wellness; overcoming of trauma; overcoming of racism and other systemic oppressions; disaster management; climate mitigation, and adaptation.
I grew up on Vancouver Island (on Coast Salish territory, in a family of British settler background). Our family was lower middle class, but we enjoyed richness in many other ways: fresh garden produce, salmon, and sometimes deer and moose. Potluck dinners with my extended family, appreciating and celebrating each other and good food. So much to cherish.
We had ready access to beaches, lakes, rivers, forests, mountains, and a mother who would drag my sister and me out to appreciate them even when we didn’t feel very appreciative.
I recall my shock when moving to Ontario (in 2003) and learning that people had to pay a fee to access ‘conservation areas. No wonder more people are overweight in Ontario, I thought. What’s more, there are Tim Horton’s tempting people with doughnuts on almost every street corner! Our environment, for physical activity, nature connection, mental health, and food consumption, shapes so much of who we are.
Sharon Blackie observes that “When we find our home in a distinct landscape … and connect there with our stories, it is from that strong place of belonging that we can begin the unravelling of the Wasteland [that is modern life]” (p.62).
One way I have cultivated a place of belonging is through gardening and foraging wild food & medicine.
We always had a vegetable garden when I was growing up in Victoria. My mother’s family from the midlands of England were farmers, and we had little money, so it was natural for her to grow food.
We had chickens in a fenced-in pen in the backyard for a while. We would toss compost (fruit & veg scraps) out the kitchen window into the chicken run, and they would delight in gobbling it up. We would sometimes let them out to run around in the backyard. My first ‘job’ was selling surplus eggs to friends & neighbours. Some of the eggs were so big that the egg carton wouldn’t close, especially the eggs from our favourite hen, Toddle.
When I later lived on campus at UBC as a doctoral student in the late 90s, I had the opportunity to have a small garden plot of my own in the community garden. I recall a friend visiting one day, and I showed her our little plot, pulled a fresh radish out of the ground, washed it under the tap, and offered it to her. “Oh, sorry… I don’t feel comfortable eating things that aren’t from the grocery store,” she explained. I was shocked at the level of disconnect that some people feel, and I realized how different my upbringing and garden experience were from many others.
When I moved to Waterloo and had a house with a backyard, I again took to establishing a garden. I excitedly learned about what could be grown in this climate. I went to nurseries and seedling sales and marvelled at the range of seeds available at Ontario Seed Company in uptown and Seedy Saturday (seed exchange) events — buzzing with gardeners excited for a new planting season.
In the early years of my garden, I counted up 70 varieties of edible & medicinal plants growing in my garden one year! My ambitiousness has mellowed a bit in the years since then.
I explored permaculture and planted berry bushes; my most successful crops in recent years have actually been my perennial fruit plants: crab apples, rhubarb, raspberries, currants, and grapes. I eventually discovered that my garden already had a red currant bush & a well-established elderberry ‘tree’ (bigger than a bush!) that the neighbours didn’t like since the ripe berries would stain their car and driveway as the branches hung over the fence. That was before I learned what one could do with elderberries. In the years since that discovery, I have been filling my freezer with jars of elderberry syrup. And did you know that “elderberry has a potent direct antiviral effect against the flu virus”?
Coming to Ontario, I also learned about serviceberries or Saskatoon berries. And isn’t it great that the municipality plants these right on the boulevard in many neighbourhoods? My favourite way to do it on the Canada Day holiday is picking these berries around campus or in my ‘hood. Do you know where the serviceberry bushes on campus are?
Another gardening inspiration stemmed from reading Tending the Earth: A Gardener’s Manifesto by Toronto-based author Lorraine Johnston. A book review explains that Lorraine Johnston’s “interests are mainly in how growing plants (for food, for environmental benefits) nurtures the good in ourselves and the world. She views gardening as a deep and meaningful conversation with the planet.”
Inspired by this book and other experiences, I took workshop after workshop at Little City Farm in Kitchener (which is sadly now closed). Karin Kliewer hosted workshops there on starting seedlings, on organic growing, on starting sprouts, on foraging wild foods, on dehydrating and lacto-fermenting.
Another of my connections to land, food, and community over the past 13 years has taken root through being a member of a Community Supported Agriculture farm (CSA) just west of Waterloo called Fertile Ground CSA.
