The Big Picture

Southern Chattanooga severely lacks accessible green spaces, with even fewer high-quality 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 have limited facilities.

Food forests can be de facto public parks, providing different recreational, meeting, and gathering spaces. This gives residents a different park experience than the standard model of closely clipped grass fields with a few trees and landscaping.

As dynamic places, food forests offer new experiences and sights to neighbors as they mature, re-imagining under-utilized spaces as solutions to expressed community needs and desires.

Perhaps the most central goal of any food forest is to provide perennial food– fruit, vegetables, nuts, mushrooms, edible flowers, and herbs for culinary and medicinal purposes. While no single food forest will solve systemic food access, it can provide healthy and sovereign produce to underresourced food-insecure communities. Food forests begin to address systemic problems as anchor sites for other activities and initiatives. Food forests can be designed to encourage communities to expand diversity within their food nutrient sources through markets or urban foraging.

The under-resourced neighborhoods of Chattanooga are some of the most diverse 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 over the shared issue of access to and use of the land is a potentially powerful way of mitigating social stresses and bridging divides. Community food forests act as a starting point, building equity and access, giving power and resource allocation to the people who inhabit these neighborhoods and who will tend and enjoy the fruits of the land.

A central goal is to assist communities in ensuring land used for urban agriculture and ecological restoration remains in the long-term trust of the communities who use these spaces. This is integral in avoiding potential displacement and gentrification in the future.

While there are many vacant lots and riverine corridors throughout southern Chattanooga 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 in the twenty-first century, aggressive species are a constant presence, frequently overwhelming unmanaged natural spaces, preventing the formation of subsequent ecological assemblies absent human intervention. Food forests 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 human benefits.

• Individual/Household

  • Our overall coordinating organization builds relationships to connect with local households, particularly those of lower-income residents interested in gardening, permaculture, home-scale food forests, and food preservation. Through, hands-on teaching and facilitating peer-to-peer instruction that would help small-scale producers increase yields, households conserve energy and better store and utilize food, how to safely and effectively forage urban wild plants for food and medical uses, etc.

• Public Spaces

  • In Public spaces, with preambulatory teaching from diverse instructors, drawing upon local gardeners and producers, we focus on cultivating individual household and neighborhood public spaces in ecologically sensitive ways conducive to restoring habitat congruent with human needs and capabilities. Communal learning includes historical ecological systems and their plant and animal assemblies native to our region.

• Regional Context

  • We would integrate a historical awareness of agriculture and ecology in our region through communal earning and site signage

A century of heavy industry left many Chattanooga soils and waters polluted in deep and persistent ways. While mild improvement has occurred in recent decades, many pollutants persist, some industrial, others found in many city lots, such as lead derived from paint.

Food forests provide a way to grow healthy food with minimal or no effect from such pollutants. They can be designed to remediate and heal polluted soils and waterways and prevent future routes of pollution through control of runoff, reduction of pesticides/herbicides, and routing landfill-destined materials into compost and other uses.

In confronting anthropogenic climate change, the benefits are somewhat more abstract: the gardens sequester carbon, though given their urban lot size, this direct benefit is minimal. Likewise, the cessation of things like fossil fuel-powered grass cutting has small climate benefits on a micro scale, 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.

Home-scale agriculture is already practiced by many people in Chattanooga communities, in particular in southern neighborhoods. This project will bring together home-scale producers and share expertise, seed stock, and resources, directly providing perennial plants.

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 widespread.