Healing Gardens

What is traditional ecolological knowledge and wisdom?

This is a hard question for me to answer, let me start by breaking down the question itself. What exactly is tradition? A tradition is something that is passed down from one generation to another, often orally. It is interesting to note that this is much stronger among communities that share a common spiritual teaching. I just heard something intersting on the radio, which is that our hunter gatherer ancestors were more sucessful if living in a community that shared some type of spiritual tradition. This connection doesn't have to spiritual of course, it could as simple as a way of eating or cooking.

The next question would be what is ecological knowledge and wisdom? Ecology is the interaction between all organisms in an enviroment and how they relate to each other. Knowledge is a knowing of a set of facts that pertain to the same subject, whereas wisdom is knowledge that is developed through experience and almost represents a transcending of knowledge in my opinion.

So traditional knowledge and wisdom would be a deep and thorough understanding of the relationships between organisms in an enviroment, passed down from generation to generation. This is something that can be seen still existing in some pockets of the world, mostly native peoples, but is relatively missing in mainstream society. It is mainly because of the corporization of farms and food that we no longer need this type of knowledge to survive and thus our traditions tend to be of a different kind.

If this knowledge and wisdom still existed than gardening would most likely be done in a different way. It would not just be about the plants but everything in the garden, including non-living matter such as dirt and rocks. This knowledge and wisdom does not necessarily die out because it is intuitivly alive in all of us.