Episode #69 of the Ground Shots Podcast was recorded in southern Oregon this past August among old Juniper trees tucked just below a special Tableland mesa, with Nikki Hill of Walking Roots, and Sigh Moon assisting in the conversation.
Nikki Hill and Sigh-Moon Elsner where we did the podcast recording.
Nikki Hill can be found chasing wildflowers throughout the western US. She is not sure when her adoration of plants began, but they share a kindred spirit. Nikki earned a bachelors degree in environmental science and botany which led her to the field of habitat restoration nearly 16 years ago. Disillusioned by methodology that focused on eradication, she struck off on her own. She spent six years growing food and medicine, first as an urban farmer and then as a nomadic rural farmer, and co-founded Daggawalla, a seed and herb company. Since 2014, she has been exploring her feral roots as a wildtender, planting gardens outside agricultural boundaries. Her hope is to foster habitat resilience by sowing a living seed bank for the future, in a spirit of collaboration with the non-human world. Her website can be found at www.walkingroots.net.
Sigh Moon (aka Simon Elsner) is a rad fae queer aspiring wildtender and lover of land based devotional practices. Obsessed with plants and nature spirits, sleeping outside, and general ‘camping’, they dwell all over the west side of turtle island. They dive in and out of many diverse demographical cultures. Shapeshifting and gourmet squatting extraordinaire. They are a highly sensitive person living in the hick ‘wilds’ of the devastated food and medicine heaven gardens of so called ‘southern Oregon'. They are single, and like to cuddle. Energetic Sensual erotic blueprint. Gay, AMAB non-binary adorable freak. Awesome land tending.
In this episode of the podcast,
I do a bigger update and intro than normal, because it’s been a few months since I’ve put out an episode! Skip past 20 minutes in if you don’t want to hear Ground Shots updates.
We talk about:
What is a tableland or mesa?
Nikki’s intention in doing survey work at Thacker Pass, a place in Nevada slated to become a large lithium mine
Questioning the sustainability of lithium
Seeing wild gardens and patterns on the landscape that reflect historical relationships of indigenous peoples and places
How deserts have been hard for European ancestored folks to conceptualize and how this makes it easy for us to consider it a wasteland to be inverted to perpetuate modern culture
Considering certain lands sacrifice zones comes from the idea that we are separate from land and that we can actually have an effect
the effects of private land ownership on the water table and water flows on land
seeing through a lens of botanical archaeology
how archaeology is often focused on ‘settled’ life evidence not nomadic life evidence
how do we start to re-see why plants are on the landscape in relationship to human historical tending of those plants?
the misinformed idea that hunter-gatherers (gatherer-hunters) were not sophisticated in their tending
what is the point in caring about anthropogenic landscapes?
Nikki’s plant survey process at Thacker Pass in Nevada and some of the plants she found like Yampah, Biscuitroots, Mariposa Lilies and more.
Links:
Nikki’s Website: Walking Roots
Counterpunch article by Nikki: “Botany as Archaeology, to Stop a Lithium Mine’
Nikki’s instagram page: walking.roots
Sigh Moon’s Instagram page: tenderwildeyes
Sigh Moon’s Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrmu0A77ja3o8DZ32ttOsIA/videosSave
‘The Ecology of Eden: An Inquiry into the Dream of Paradise and a New Vision of Our Role in Nature’ book by Evan Eisenberg, a book I read in college on critical ecology that feels relevant to this episode
“The Void, The Grid & The Sign: Traversing The Great Basin” by William Fox, all about concepts of void and land value in the Great Basin Desert, a fascinating book
“1491” and “1493” by Charles Mann, alternative histories to North and South America mentioning anthropogenic landscapes including ‘terra preta’ in the Amazon, mentioned on the podcast
Save Oak Flat and the Apache Stronghold Campaign
Angela Moles Ground Shots Podcast interview mentioned on the podcast: Episode #57: Gabe Crawford interviews Angela Moles P.h.D. on the rapid evolutionary responses of plants due to climate change, challenging scientific dogma
Past episodes of the podcast featuring Nikki Hill:
Episode #31: Wild Tending series / Nikki Hill and Gabe Crawford on the basics of wild-tending
