Food Forests for Chattanooga’s Future

Dreams and Visions

Imagine for a moment the following possible future for our city: Every neighborhood has thriving hubs of urban agriculture, sourcing organic materials and “waste” products back into the growing of healthy and economically accessible food. Where once there were vacant lots or barren weedy fields of grass, mature forest gardens now thrive providing fruit, vegetables, flowers, fibers, wood, and other materials to neighbors; people walk from their homes—surrounded by flowers and home garden plots, perhaps with chickens scratching about here and there—and gather in their neighborhood food forest, enjoying picnics, playing music, incorporating green spaces into everyday life. Children play freely and safely in rich ecosystems filled with edible foods and an abundance of living things, even within dense urban neighborhoods. City dwellers are connected to food producers in the rural hinterland, where farmers raise livestock in sylvopasture and regeneratively managed fields; flows of energy and resources move between city and countryside; trails and rails connect valley and mountain and ridge, and homes and businesses and organizations harvest sunlight and harness the wind, surrounded with garden plots and pollinator meadows, trees providing shade and beauty and food.

The Food Forest Coalition of Chattanooga is working to realize here and now aspects of just such a vision, starting with the building of community-supported forest gardens on a small scale, gradually moving towards larger and more diverse installations and programs. For now, our area of work is primarily within the southern tier of Chattanooga neighborhoods, roughly those running south of I-24 to the Georgia state line (and potentially into neighboring Rossville as well). While long-term we would love to expand to other parts of the city and indeed metro region, for now we are focusing on this portion of the city in order to concentrate our energies and develop a coherent network of installations and participating communities and organizations.

Key Goals of the Food Forest Coalition of Chattanooga

1. Direct local food production and distribution: perhaps the most central goal of any food forest is to provide food–particularly fruit but also certain types of vegetables (and potentially the full range of garden vegetables), as well as nuts, mushrooms, and herbs for culinary and medicinal purposes; cut flowers also figure into this equation, with a robust food forest potentially providing sustainable populations of wild or semi-wild blooms for community gathering. While no single food forest is going to solve problems of food availability single-handedly, it can indeed provide healthy and tasty produce to populations who might not otherwise have any such access at all, and it can begin to address these problems in its additional roles as anchor sites for other activities and projects. Unlike a traditional community garden, a food forest can be browsed by anyone, and will support high levels of use; it can further encourage people to expand their horizons in terms of fresh and locally available food, whether through accessible farmers’ markets or through urban foraging for semi-wild fruits and other edible plants (which will be further supported by deliberate pedagogy, on which see below). 

2. Recreational and socially oriented green space: the southern tier of Chattanooga is severely lacking in accessible green spaces, to say nothing of high-quality and ecologically and socially rich green spaces. Only a handful of public parks are located in these neighborhoods (and in adjacent Rossville), and those that do exist remain relatively meager in terms of facilities. Each food forest would be a de facto public park, providing different sorts of appropriate recreational and meeting and gathering spaces, and giving area residents a very different park experience than the standard model of closely clipped grass fields with a few trees and landscaping. As dynamic places, the food forests would offer new experiences and sights to neighbors as they matured and grew and changed, providing beautification for neighborhoods to boot, especially when repurposing otherwise vacant lots

3. Community formation and equity building: these are some of the most diverse neighborhoods in our region, with a wide variability in terms of income gradient, languages spoken at home, and socio-cultural backgrounds. Bringing different distinct communities together in a democratic and open way, over the shared issue of access to and use of the land itself, is a potentially powerful way of mitigating social stresses and bridging divides–but also building real equity and access, giving power and resource allocation to the people who actually inhabit these neighborhoods and who will themselves care for and enjoy the fruits of the land. One of our central goals will be to ensure that the land used for our urban agriculture and ecological restoration sites will remain in long-term trust to the communities who use these places, and so help to avoid potential dynamics of displacement in the future. 

4. Ecological services: while there are many vacant lots and riverine corridor across these neighborhoods, it is worth noting that mere lack of use does not automatically equal robust ecological dynamics or resulting ecological services such as support of pollinators, rebuilding of soil, filtration of water and air, or support of other forms of urban wildlife and biodiversity. As is true virtually everywhere on the planet in the twenty-first century, aggressive invasive species are a constant presence and threat, and will frequently overwhelm unmanaged natural spaces, preventing the formation of subsequent ecological assemblies absent human intervention. Our food forests will act as anchors and refugium for ecological restoration, both active and passive, providing robust and diverse ecological services simultaneous to and convergent with the food, social, and other benefits provided for humans. 

5. Agricultural, ecological, and cultural/historical education: the pedagogical potential of the initiative would be threefold: first, our overall coordinating organization would work to reach local households, particularly those of lower-income residents, who were interested in gardening, permaculture, home-scale food forests, food preservation, and the like, and do hands-on teaching and facilitate peer-to-peer instruction that would help small-scale producers increase yields, households to conserve energy and better store and utilize food, how to safely and effectively forage urban wild plants for food and medical uses, and so on. A crucial part of this plan would involve perambulatory teaching, using a diversity of instructors and especially drawing upon local gardeners and producers. Ecological teaching would be related, with a stress on cultivating individual household and neighborhood public spaces in ecologically sensitive ways conducive to restoring habitat in a manner congruent with human needs and capabilities. Such pedagogy would also involve instruction in existing and historical ecological systems and their plant and animal assemblies native to our region. Finally, both our teaching and our instillation signage would be integrated into a historical awareness of agriculture and ecology in our area. All of the above forms of pedagogy would also be realized in part through interpretive signage and rotating temporary exhibits based in our core food forest installations.  

6. Community nursery stock and seed library: home-scale agriculture is already practiced by many people in our communities here in and around Chattanooga, in particular in the neighborhoods intended for food forest installation. This project will aim to not only bring together home-scale producers and share expertise, seed stock, and resources, but to also directly provide perennial plants in the form of seedlings and graft stock for planting. Perennial fruit bearing plants are generally fairly expensive when purchased from nurseries, which can be a real impediment for lower income residents; plus not everyone in our neighborhoods has easy access to motorized vehicles, nor is the knowledge necessary for grafting especially widespread. 

7. Environmental remediation and climate benefits: a century of heavy industry left many Chattanooga soils and waters polluted in deep and persistent ways, and while pollution is not as severe as it was a couple of decades ago, many pollutants persist, some of an industrial nature, others of the quotidian sort found in any city lot, such as lead derived from paint. Food forests can not only provide a way to grow healthy food with minimal or no effect from such pollutants, they can be designed in such a way to actively remediate and heal polluted soils and waterways, and to prevent future routes of pollution through control of runoff, reduction of pesticides/herbicides, and the routing of landfill-destined materials into compost and other uses. In terms of confronting anthropogenic climate change the benefits are somewhat more abstract: certainly the gardens themselves will act as sequestration sites for carbon, though given their size this direct benefit is probably pretty minimal, likewise the cessation of things like fossil fuel powered grass cutting have small climate benefits, while localized food production can help to reduce methane-producing food waste and vehicular transport. More significantly, the formation of local green spaces that act as in-neighborhood destinations and anchors can encourage reduced vehicle use and more localized forms of production, education, recreation, and the like, building-blocks in developing infrastructure far less dependent on fossil fuel use. Bringing residents into closer contact with living ecosystems from which they directly and tangibly benefit in the form of fresh food and enjoyable green spaces is also vital in encouraging individual and community investment in other solutions, in highlighting the value that healthy food and ecological systems have for all of us. 

Geographical and Cultural Contexts

This South Chattanooga network of food forests will cross a diverse landscape that encompasses several distinct human and natural ecologies and embraces a truly wide range of communities, from the relatively affluent to some of the most economically disadvantaged in our metropolitan area. Our western anchor will be on the slopes of Lookout Mountain, the eastern anchor in the shadow of Missionary Ridge, with sites located on mountain slopes and in the limestone valley bottoms between the ridges.

Historically this landscape would have featured a mosaic of ecosystems of varying degrees of human presence and intervention; remnants of historic ecosystems remain scattered around the metro area, and will provide reference points for our food forest development, as will the long history of human occupation and agriculture, from the Woodland Period to the present. The human history of this landscape is even more diverse, and has encompassed various indigenous peoples as well as in more recent years people from all over the earth, each bringing new species of food-bearing plants to our region, many of which we can incorporate into our food forest installations. One of the goals of our community food forest initiative is to incorporate that rich human history and present, drawing upon the agricultural traditions represented by the residents of these neighborhoods as well as reflecting indigenous practices that were once a part of the landscape. 

These are also landscapes with troubled troubled human histories: most immediately for our purposes, the land carries the traces of heavy industry and its pollution, with various substances remaining present in the soil and the water long after the culprits closed down and shipped away. One of the advantages of the food forest model is the fact that perennial agriculture is on the whole better suited for soil remediation, and carries much less risk to human health, than a lot of annual vegetable production models; where in many of the available pieces of land raised beds or extensive soil remediation would be necessary, a food forest can work with higher levels of contamination without passing them on to human consumers.

These neighborhoods are also marked by the long legacies of racism, various forms of violence and social disorder, and other legacies that have shaped our city and with which we must continue to grapple. Crucially, our goal is for this project to incorporate all of the residents of these neighborhoods so as to strengthen the communities around them. Direct community participation and decision making is crucial to realizing such a vision, with the support and guidance in particular of existing community structures such as churches, libraries, locally owned businesses, neighborhood groups and associations, and the like being especially important.