Cover artwork by Ale Silva
Summary
Food security, climate adaptation, and vibrant biodiversity all in one place — welcome to the ancient and diverse technologies of Sea Gardening.
These widespread (but often overlooked) monumental rock features are proof positive of thriving Indigenous maricultural systems all around the Pacific Rim, since time immemorial.
These spaces are not only simply stunningly beautiful spots to hang out, they're also a powerful symbol of ecocultural restoration; of Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and internationalism; of relationship building; and of the kind of future that is possible as we adapt to a changing climate and rising sea levels. We hope you find them as inspiring as we do.
Join us as we visit a sea garden, learn about how they work, and meet a few of the people bringing them back to life.
Ongoing support for this podcast comes from listeners just like you. To keep this show going, join our community at patreon.com/futureecologies
Our supporters get access to early episode releases, a community discord server, discounted merch, and exclusive bonus content.
Show Notes and Credits
This episode was produced by Mendel Skulski, with help from Adam Huggins and Eden Zinchik
With the voices of Hannah Morris, Carl Olsen, Erin Slade, Nicole Smith, Marco Hatch, Erich Kelch, and Nicole Norris.
And music by Jonathan Kawchuk, Daniel Lapp, Thumbug, Adi Gortler, Gamelan Bike Bike, and our theme by Sunfish Moon Light
Special thanks to Skye Augustine, Erich Kelch, Courtney Greiner, Miranda Post, Jenifer Iredale, and to everyone out there bringing sea gardens to life.
This episode includes audio recorded by Slanesh, prozaciswack, smokingsound, ralph.whitehead, and Garuda1982, accessed through the Freesound Project, and protected by Creative Commons attribution licenses.
The sounds and squirts of a lively sea garden, video by Skye Augustine
Tending to the Fulford Harbour wall under a winter (midnight) low tide, photo by Bryant DeRoy
The Fulford Harbour wall is over 800 meters long! Photo by Ally Stocks.
A work day at Russell Island in 2015, photo by Iain Robert Reid
The Russell Island Sea Garden (untended control side), photo by Ally Stocks
Ala̱g̱a̱mił Nicole Norris turning over a clam garden. The rock wall is visible in the the background.
Good food at the WSANEC Science and Culture Camp, photo by Hugo Wong
Citations
Cox, K.D., Davies, H.L., Millard-Martin, B. et al. Ancestral and contemporary intertidal mariculture practices support marine biodiversity in the northeast Pacific. Commun Earth Environ 5, 351 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01515-3
Cruz Coto, O., Thurber, A., Reid, S., & Hatch, M. (2023). Indigenous Sea Gardens within the Pacific Northwest generate partial trophic niche and dietary fatty acid shifts in littleneck clams ( leukoma staminea ). Ecology and Society, 28(2). https://doi.org/10.5751/es-14008-280208
Groesbeck, A. S., Rowell, K., Lepofsky, D., & Salomon, A. K. (2014). Ancient clam gardens increased shellfish production: Adaptive strategies from the past can inform Food Security Today. PLoS ONE, 9(3). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0091235
Harris, L. A., Garza, C., Hatch, M., Parrish, J., Posselt, J., Alvarez Rosario, J. P., Davidson, E., Eckert, G., Wilson Grimes, K., Garcia, J. E., Haacker, R., Horner‐Devine, M. C., Johnson, A., Lemus, J., Prakash, A., Thompson, L., Vitousek, P., Martin Bras, M. P., & Reyes, K. (2021). Equitable Exchange: A framework for diversity and inclusion in the Geosciences. AGU Advances, 2(2). https://doi.org/10.1029/2020av000359
Hatch, M., Parrish, J., Heppell, S., Augustine, S., Campbell, L., Divine, L., Donatuto, J., Groesbeck, A., & Smith, N. (2023). Boundary Spanners: A critical role for enduring collaborations between indigenous communities and mainstream scientists. Ecology and Society, 28(1). https://doi.org/10.5751/es-13887-280141
Holmes, K., Lepofsky, D., Smith, N. F., Crowell, T. D., & Salomon, A. K. (2022). Ancestral Sea Gardens supported human settlements for at least 3,800 years on the Northwest Coast of North America. Frontiers in Earth Science, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2022.988111
Jackley, J., Gardner, L., Djunaedi, A. F., & Salomon, A. K. (2016). Ancient clam gardens, traditional management portfolios, and the resilience of coupled human-ocean systems. Ecology and Society, 21(4). https://doi.org/10.5751/es-08747-210420
Keith Holmes, Kieran Cox, Amy R Cline, Marco BA Hatch, Morgan J Black, Anne K Salomon, Dana Lepofsky, Nicole F Smith, Sarah Dudas (2020) Ancient ecology: the Quadra Island clam gardens. Fisheries, 45(3).
Lepofsky D, Smith NF, Cardinal N, et al. Ancient Shellfish Mariculture on the Northwest Coast of North America. American Antiquity. 2015;80(2):236-259. doi:10.7183/0002-7316.80.2.236
Lepofsky, D., Toniello, G., Earnshaw, J. et al. Ancient Anthropogenic Clam Gardens of the Northwest Coast Expand Clam Habitat. Ecosystems 24, 248–260 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-020-00515-6
Neudorf, C. M., Smith, N., Lepofsky, D., Toniello, G., & Lian, O. B. (2017). Between a rock and a soft place: Using optical ages to date ancient clam gardens on the Pacific Northwest. PLOS ONE, 12(2). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0171775
Reeder-Myers, L., Braje, T.J., Hofman, C.A. et al. Indigenous oyster fisheries persisted for millennia and should inform future management. Nat Commun 13, 2383 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-29818-z
Toniello, G., Lepofsky, D., Lertzman-Lepofsky, G., Salomon, A.K, Rowell, K. (2019 11,500 y of human–clam relationships provide long-term context for intertidal management in the Salish Sea, British Columbia, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 116 (44) 22106-22114, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1905921116
Wickham, S., Augustine, S., Forney, A., Mathews, D., Shackelford, N., Walkus, J., & Trant, A. (2022). Incorporating place-based values into ecological restoration. Ecology and Society, 27(3). https://doi.org/10.5751/es-13370-270332
You can subscribe to and download Future Ecologies wherever you find podcasts - please share, rate, and review us. We’re also on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and iNaturalist.
If you like what we do, and you want to help keep it ad-free, please consider supporting us on Patreon. Pay-what-you-can (as little as $1/month) to get access to bonus monthly mini-episodes, stickers, patches, a community Discord chat server, and more.
Future Ecologies is recorded and produced on the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the WSÁNEĆ, Penelakut, Hwlitsum, and Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and other Hul'qumi'num speaking peoples, otherwise known as Galiano Island, British columbia, as well as the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓əm) Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil-Waututh (Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh) Nations - otherwise known as Vancouver, British Columbia.
Transcription
Introduction Voiceover 00:02
You are listening to Season Six of Future Ecologies.
Adam Huggins 00:07
Hey everyone, welcome back. No cold open this time, because on today's show sea garden, we're diving right in to a story about food security, ecosystem restoration and climate adaptation.
Mendel Skulski 00:21
It's a story going back 1000s of years into the past, and fingers crossed, 1000s of years into the future. What does all that look like? Well...
Hannah Morris 00:35
You'll just have to wait and see.
Erich Kelch 00:37
Cool. And we'll get up to speed. [Boat accelerates]
Introduction Voiceover 00:55
Broadcasting from the unceded, shared and asserted territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh, this is Future Ecologies – exploring the shape of our world through ecology, design, and sound.
Hannah Morris 01:11
Uhh where are we? We're at the beach, and we're at one of the historic, what is now called a sea garden, previously known as a clam garden wall. And before it even had a name, I imagine that we would be at a grocery store. We were at my ancestors grocery store, our dinner table.
Hannah Morris 02:00
ÍY SȻÁĆEL [SENĆOŦEN greeting] Good day, everyone. My English name is Hannah, and my W̱ILṈEW̱ SNÁ is W̱EM,LEŚELWET, and I'm from here in the W̱SÁNEĆ territory in Saanich. [SENĆOŦEN] I'm grateful to be here with you today.
Mendel Skulski 02:14
I'm grateful to be here with you.
Hannah Morris 02:15
HÍSW̱KE
Mendel Skulski 02:15
This place is so... alive, it's hard to believe!
Hannah Morris 02:20
Isn't it?
Mendel Skulski 02:23
Picture this... low tide on a sunny day, a gently sloping beach, bright, not with sand, but with coarse bits of broken shell. All around you, buried clams are saying hello as they squirt jets of water into the air. The red rock crabs duck and dart all over the abundant green seaweed. And just there, behind you on a boulder, a sea cucumber the size of a shoe, waiting patiently for the tide to return.
Hannah Morris 02:57
I feel extremely privileged this is a work day. This is what I get to do for work, come and check out the beach
Mendel Skulski 03:03
Including the most prominent feature of this beach, a rock wall stretching across the entire width of the low tide line.
Hannah Morris 03:13
All rocks have been placed there gently, specifically and with a good heart and mind when it happened.
Mendel Skulski 03:25
How long have those rocks been there?
Hannah Morris 03:27
Allegedly 3500 years to 4000. I don't know. I put some rocks on there about a year ago. So there's some new ones, some old ones. Oh, Carl's got a fork!
Mendel Skulski 03:54
What are you doing right now, Carl?
Carl Olsen 03:56
Just digging to see what clams I'll come up with here. I think right here is mostly butters and stuff.
Mendel Skulski 04:04
Hold on... is that... is that a barnacle?
Carl Olsen 04:10
That's an old, old barnacle. Big one, eh?
Mendel Skulski 04:12
That's a big one!
Carl Olsen 04:16
My English. Name is Carl Olsen. I'm from the W̱SÁNEĆ community, Tsartlip. I carry my grandfather's Indian name. It's ZȺWIZUT.
Carl Olsen 04:29
Go to along the rock wall there and start digging. You'll see. The clams are... they're healthier. And that's what this wall provides, too, a healthier environment, and you get much meatier clams, they're bigger, they're healthier.
Mendel Skulski 04:49
Tell me what we're looking at.
Hannah Morris 04:50
What are we looking at? We're looking at rocks all piled up in wall form. And not only are there rocks in there, there are different species.
Nicole Smith 04:59
There is so much life in these places. They're alive.
Mendel Skulski 05:07
I feel like I would be remiss in letting this day go by without having you, our resident marine ecologist, give me a lightning round of all the species you might find in the sea garden.
Erin Slade 05:19
Oh, boy, okay. Well, I mean, there's so many. And if you start getting into tube worms and shore crabs, I'm not going to be able to tell you what species they are. You'll see our superstars, the butter and little neck clams. Those tend to be the most targeted, harvestable native species. You'll see red rock crabs, burrowing under the rocks, moving around under the green seaweed, sea stars, sea cucumbers, limpets,
Nicole Smith 05:50
whelks,
Erin Slade 05:51
many different types of sea snails,
Nicole Smith 05:52
all sorts of barnacles, of course,
Erin Slade 05:55
a lot of hermit crabs,
Nicole Smith 05:56
sometimes little gunnels.
Erin Slade 05:58
Urchins! urchins is another one. We don't see a ton of them, but they do exist on the wall.
Nicole Smith 06:02
Lots of creatures, more than I've just mentioned.
Marco Hatch 06:05
Yeah, thinking about low tide, the water receding out, and you can see the top of the rock wall. That rock wall emerges, the waves coming offshore, being broken by that rock wall. And you have a kind of a smooth, clear water inside the clam garden as the water is receding. And then the little clams start spurting out — pshc psch pshc — shooting up little spurts of water, up and down. And then, as the water recedes and the rocks fully emerge, you can go down and crawl around the rocks and see red sea cucumber, red rock crab, chitins, large snails and limpets.
Erin Slade 06:41
And something that we don't see very often, but we know exists — that people actually sometimes create traps for — is Giant Pacific Octopus.
Erich Kelch 06:51
What else can be there? Chitins, mussels, yeah, the whole works... feast.
Mendel Skulski 06:57
A feast on the beach.
Erich Kelch 06:58
Feast on the beach, yeah yeah yeah.
Marco Hatch 07:02
You have this really complex ecosystem that emerges all within this rock wall system and seaweeds and all these other traditional foods, and all of this three dimensional structure, these rocks that are piled up with little hidey holes in them for other traditional foods to live in. And so it's this really unique system where, you know, as an intertidal ecologist, we'll go to soft sediment — sand, gravel, mud beaches — and look for clams and do our research there, or we'll go to rocky intertidal, and that's where we study things like limpets and snails and things like that. But here you've got both of those things together.
Mendel Skulski 07:36
So before I forget, could you introduce yourself?
Erin Slade 07:39
Sure, yeah. I'm Erin Slade, and I'm a marine ecologist working with the Sea Garden Restoration Project at Parks Canada. We've been working on this project and with these wonderful communities and sea gardens for just over four years.
Nicole Smith 07:52
Hello. My name is Nicole Smith, and I am an archeologist, fortunate to work along the coast for over 20 years.
Marco Hatch 08:00
[Xws7ámeshqen greeting] tse ne-sná7 Marko Hatch. My name is Marco Hatch. I'm a member of the Samish Indian Nation and Associate Professor of Environmental Science at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
Erich Kelch 08:12
My name is Eric Kelch, born in lək̓ʷəŋən territory, here on the West Coast, and work now for Parks Canada on the Sea Gardens Project.
Mendel Skulski 08:19
So just make sure we have it covered, what is a clam garden? How does it work?
Marco Hatch 08:24
Clam gardens are magical intertidal spaces where ancestors moved large rocks to the low tide line to flatten a beach. Just like you could terrace a hill to grow more grapes, you can terrace a beach to grow more clams. And so these rocks at the low tide line, sediment then fills in between them. And so it takes a steep beach and it flattens it out. What that does is it increases the space in what we call the Goldilocks zone. So butter clams and other clams live in a really narrow zone of the intertidal. If they live too high, they dry out and die. If they live too low, they get eaten by sea stars. So there's a really narrow window they like to live in, and these terraces are built in exactly that tidal level. You've got a rocky ecosystem that was built intentionally by people moving rocks, and then all that sediment that fills in that winds up being prime habitat and conditions for clams to grow. Through the Clam Garden Network, we've been able to measure and quantify things like two to four times the biomass of clams in a clam garden compared to a non clam garden area, and growth rates about 50% or greater.
Erin Slade 09:30
So sometimes they're actually built up in spaces that didn't previously have a sandy beach, and by creating a barrier between two rocky outcrops, you create the space for sand to start to fill in and creating basically a new beach where there didn't used to be. So they can be kind of on steep bouldering slopes. They can be between rocky outcrops on beaches that already exist, such as the one that we're at today on Russell Island, or something like the Fulford harbor sea garden is a big, long wall along a large, already kind of sandy gravel beach.
Mendel Skulski 10:05
And then beyond the rocks, what are we seeing?
Hannah Morris 10:07
I see the bull kelp.
Mendel Skulski 10:10
So this is a proper little kelp forest as well.
Hannah Morris 10:12
You bet
Mendel Skulski 10:13
Wow.
Marco Hatch 10:17
Clam gardens are only exposed a few days of the year at low tide. In the US, a lot of Clam Gardens will be expected to be around a negative two foot tide. In Canada, you're generally a meter or less.
Erin Slade 10:32
One of the major challenges with... Well, I don't know if it's necessarily a challenge, it's really just a nature of this type of work. And part of what makes it beautiful and special, but also limiting and fleeting is that we can only really access these places for a few days every month, in the summer and then in the middle of the night when the tides are low enough in the winter,
Marco Hatch 10:50
with our most extreme tides during the winter and summer solstice. But those extreme tides in the winter happen at night. But yeah, being an intertidal ecologist, when you open your calendar for the year, you put in low tides, and then you plan everything around that. These areas can be extraordinarily vibrant, can have high densities of clams, and also defy what we think is possible — having these clams at a higher tide line, if you could move the height of those clams up by 20 centimeters. Now they're probably exposed more hours of the day, and then more days a year, right? So if you're thinking about that as your grocery store, we've just, you know, opened it more days with longer hours, which is huge in the winter time, and other times when it might be marginal to go out and harvest.
Mendel Skulski 11:38
Why did the name change from clam garden to sea garden?
Hannah Morris 11:42
Because there aren't just clams that live here.
Erin Slade 11:44
One of the reasons that we call these spaces Sea Gardens is at the guidance of the nations. These rock walls are multi faceted and multi functional, and they don't just support clams. They support many other species.
Mendel Skulski 12:00
Is there just one type of sea garden?
Nicole Smith 12:03
No, there are many, many different kinds of sea gardens, and there are around the world.
Hannah Morris 12:09
It's global too. It's not just here on the West Coast, not just on Vancouver Island. It's everywhere.
Nicole Smith 12:15
There are going to be variations on the sea garden technologies that may target particular species, or may be beneficial to many.
Adam Huggins 12:24
On the bays and fjords of Patagonia, Corrales De Pesca have been maintained by Indigenous Chilean and mestizo people to harvest and store the abundance of the sea, including fish, eggs, shellfish and seaweed
Mendel Skulski 12:40
Along the humid coastlines of the Taiwanese Penghu archipelago, monumental stone fish weirs known as Shi Hu sprawl like enormous petrified jellyfish made of basalt limestone and coral.
Adam Huggins 12:54
For over 6000 years, the Gunditjmara people have used volcanic stones to create pools and channels to capture kuyang or short-finned eels as they migrate to sea and back through the complex wetlands of southeastern Australia.
Mendel Skulski 13:12
And here, up and down the west coast of North America, there are fish traps, octopus houses And, of course, clam gardens. All around the Pacific Ocean, many forms of indigenous mariculture have been practiced since time immemorial.
Erich Kelch 13:29
I think fundamentally, it's modifying a beach in a way that provides more food than would have been there on its own. So this idea that if you take an active part in restoring or attending a beach, then you could provide lots of food.Depending on culture, depending on like what the beach offered you, what is naturally there, you know, I think people were smart and they they really are emblematic of deep listening and deep paying attention and deep connection to a place. Dependent on what that site was, was what you would kind of modify it to be, and different beaches are going to need different things.
Nicole Norris 14:08
It's so much more than just a collection of rocks that creates biomass or biodiversity. It's so much more than that. It's a revival of a portion of our language, a revival of the kinship ties between our nations, because long ago, we were nomadic. You know, we have all these overlapping shared spaces, and the Gulf Islands is definitely one of them. [Xeláltxw greeting] My English name is Nicole Norris, and my traditional name is Ala̱g̱a̱mił. I am a very treasured member from the Halalt First Nation coming from the Hul'q'umi'num homelands here on Vancouver Island. I'm a descendant of Stutson, and there's grand stories of Stutson being in these places. Stutson, in our greater creation story, is one of the first four that fell from the sky. It was him and his three brothers.
Mendel Skulski 15:16
Long since Stutson fell from the sky, Nicole recalled the very first time that she visited a sea garden wall, walking under a moonlit low tide with her friend and colleague.
Nicole Norris 15:30
And we got to a certain part in the wall, and I pulled off my my boots and my socks, and I began to nestle my feet into the sand, into the ground. And I turned and I looked at him. It was such a profound moment for myself. I turned and I looked at him, and I said, I'm standing in Stutson's footprints. And I leaned over, and I grabbed a rock off the wall, and I put my hand on top of it, and I said, I'm holding a rock that Stutson held. I'm holding his hand.
Marco Hatch 16:11
Seeing these massive, monumental rock features that ancestors had built and tended for 1000s of years changed my view and understanding of intertidal ecology. When I was a undergrad, our fisheries professor would say that there's no way that Indigenous people in the Northwest impacted salmon populations. There wasn't enough people, and there's so many salmon, there's no way that people could have impacted that. And that was just what people accepted, you know, 20+ years ago. And then you start to learn about things like stone fish traps and fish weirs, and the technologies existing to harvest every salmon that came up a stream. If you put a weir up, it's blocking the stream, and people are making a decision about which fish get to pass and which ones don't. Even in big rivers like the Columbia all of those fish are going up to spawn in small tributaries, right? Like the technology existed to harvest every single fish that came up the river. That didn't happen, right? These environmental abundances that were seen didn't happen by accident. People had intention in their management. In the terrestrial realm, I think that that's been accepted a bit earlier, particularly around burning, tending of camas meadows, Garry oak. In the marine environment, it's been a bit harder. And one thing I think is really beautiful about revitalizing clam gardens and sea gardens is they're very visual, tangible features. These are monumental rock features, sometimes a kilometer long, that people have built and maintained for 1000s of years in a space that our ancestors have been removed from and our contributions have been ignored. It ties back into what is natural? How do these ecosystems get to where they are? Clam gardens give us that really visual like, hit you in the face, you can't deny that these 1000s of pounds of rocks for a kilometer long, stacked up, were done by accident.
Marco Hatch 18:10
Operating both in traditional knowledge or traditional ecological knowledge or indigenous knowledge, or whatever term you want to use for traditional knowledge systems, and mainstream or Western science has historically had a lot of tension and difficulties. There's a few models that we practice that can help provide ways forward, and one metaphor that's often used is the idea of braiding. So, braiding traditional ecological knowledge and mainstream science together. And in the braiding metaphor, each strand maintains its identity and isn't compromised or compared or held above or below the other strand. But by combining those knowledge systems, we can create something stronger than the sum of its parts.
Nicole Norris 18:56
Traditional science and Western science is the same. It's just different language that translates it. Indigenous knowledge is based on generational observation. All of those teachings come from observing the water, observing the wind, how it interacts with the land, the water, the trees. But also observing our relatives of the ocean, our relatives of the woods and our relatives of the sky. They provide us with teachings of ways of being. And so the clam doesn't feed just us. It feeds aquatic loved ones. It feeds the woodland animals that come onto the beach and harvest. It also feeds certain birds or relatives of the sky. And so that clam feeds the fish, it feeds the crabs, it feeds the octopus, it feeds the eagles, the seagulls, the oyster pickers. What we recognize is that it's all interconnected, and how valuable that one single clam is.
Mendel Skulski 20:06
So a big question is, how old is this technology of sea gardening, and how do we know?
Nicole Smith 20:14
Well, from the archeological work that we've been doing on the coast, it would seem that these sea gardens or clam gardens are at least 4000 years or so. Now, of course, in archeological terms, dates are always a little bit fuzzy. It's tricky because these rock walls, they're made of rock. It's inorganic, and radiocarbon dating needs organic carbon to establish a date. If you can imagine that these walls, sometimes they build up over time. Sometimes the foundation of them are built in a moment. People will get the rock from different places. Sometimes they'll get it from land and they'll bring it to the beach. Other times, they'll get the rock from the beach themselves, and when they get it from the beach, the rocks can be covered with barnacles. Now, the barnacles tend to like to live on the top, but if you can imagine, sometimes those first rocks will go into the wall, and if they get turned upside down, and those barnacles then go on to the underside of the rock, they can get trapped in the muck or the mud — and in the right conditions, preserve. So what we found is that we could look for those barnacle scars on the bottom of the rock.
Erich Kelch 21:32
And so they can date those scars!
Nicole Smith 21:34
In a regular beach setting, they will only last on the surface of a rock for one to two years, we learned from the barnacle biologists. Because beaches are actually really clean places, and when a barnacle dies, there's all sorts of organisms that are going to come to scrape that basal plate off. Things like bulldozing limpets will come along and clean the surface of the rock so that then it's available for new barnacle larva to settle. So when we find a preserved barnacle scar, that's exciting, and we know that we have a very tight time range.
Adam Huggins 22:10
And besides preserved barnacle scars, archeologists have other evidence that these clam gardens go back for millennia.
Erich Kelch 22:19
They noticed that the rock walls change where their location was based on tidal height. Where the rocks were placed were at a different place on the beach depending on where the ocean was.
Marco Hatch 22:31
So there's two competing factors. There's isostatic rebound and sea level rise.
Nicole Smith 22:35
Parts of the coast where the glaciers were really thick and really heavy, you know, really depressed, the land down. Some of us might remember water beds. If you sit in the middle of a water bed, you go down in the middle and the sides go up. Well, that was similar here on the coast, like around Kitimat and extending down. But then other parts of the coast, like Haida Gwaii, didn't have as much, and they were on those edges, so they popped up.
Marco Hatch 23:00
Isostatic rebound was explained to me by my marine geology professor as every Thanksgiving his uncle Eli, would come over, who was a rather massive fellow, and would sit and watch football on the couch. And then when he got up, the couch would slowly come back to level. Isostatic rebound is effectively that for when we had a mile of ice over this area, that ice is melted and the land is slowly coming back up.
Nicole Smith 23:25
And so where it was weighted down starts to come up. Where it was up starts to go down.
Marco Hatch 23:32
Compared with sea level rise, which is the whole bathtub is getting higher.
Nicole Smith 23:36
What effectively happens is you have these changes in sea level positions. But it's really different, depending on where you are in the coast. You know, some places it's falling, and other places it's rising.
Marco Hatch 23:48
And so we see more ancient clam gardens that are now well above the clam zone, and newer ones are built at the current tide height. In other communities, we see walls that are meters below sea level today. And so these technologies have been used for 1000s and 1000s of years to adapt to local sea level change.
Erin Slade 24:07
You know, in the Southern Gulf Islands, sea levels have been rising for over 11,000 years. When we talk about the relevance of this type of work moving forward, you know, these are spaces that have been adapting to sea level rise for 1000s of years.
Nicole Smith 24:21
So I think that's important for everyone to know, and archeologists to know that, depending on where you are, they might be really subtle. And we don't want to say that "Oh, there are none in this area." They just might not be in view. I mean, there are past shorelines that are now way underwater, and there are past shorelines that are way high inland and now covered in forest canopy. So far, our survey has really been limited to the present intertidal zone, so it's possible there are older features that we haven't seen, because we haven't been looking in the right places
Adam Huggins 25:01
There may be hidden gardens below the waves or behind the trees. And so we can't say for sure how old this technology really is.
Nicole Norris 25:10
No amount of archeology and carbon dating is going to be able to prove it, unfortunately. They can say that, yeah, we've been here for a really long time, and they can investigate some of the shells and the spaces and theorize how we used to cook.
Mendel Skulski 25:26
Because these rocks have probably been on the wall longer than just their latest millennia old barnacle scars.
Nicole Smith 25:35
Oh, totally, that's definitely true, and that's one thing that we think that they're dismantling and rebuilding as sea level is rising.
Carl Olsen 25:43
We're the salt water people. We traveled by canoe and we camped here. We had a food base when we're heading down to visit our relatives in Lummi, and we'd camp in the San Juan Islands, do the same thing. We never really had to carry food with us because the food base was feeding us on our way. That's the way it should be. You know, when you have like, 4 million people in Canada that are food insecure, and we have beaches that we could maintain and keep healthy. You know, having this is food security, and we gotta bring it back.
Hannah Morris 26:30
Yes, we live on an island. There's beach everywhere. Unfortunately, there aren't clam gardens everywhere the way that there used to be, but there is beach everywhere we live on Vancouver Island. And with that, I find it easier to explain to community what's outside of our back door, and what would be there without colonization.
Erich Kelch 26:52
It's constantly shocking to me that we have this intertidal resource that's so bountiful, that's so healthy for us, that's so like, you know, free in a way, with rising food prices, and we don't take care of it. We don't take care of it properly. You know, there's closure maps everywhere, and you can't harvest and why aren't we treating this like a resource that we could all benefit from? To have, like a food that can be that can be processed, that can be dried, that can be traded, that is always going to be productive if you take care of it. You know, the teaching that if you take care of these places, they will take care of you, I think, speaks volumes.
Marco Hatch 27:28
We've seen some communities reactivate clam gardening after experiencing food scarcity and shortages through COVID 19. And so for a lot of remote communities external food is barged in, and if that barge doesn't show up that's a real concern. Those communities have taken conscious effort to revitalize traditional food systems and clam gardens being a part of that, of ensuring that there's that resilience within the community in case external food doesn't show up. That they have the knowledge, the technologies, the gatherers, the processors within their community, that they know where to go and how to get to work.
Mendel Skulski 28:11
Unfortunately, the question of where to go is sometimes complicated by a second question...
Adam Huggins 28:18
Are the clams even safe to eat?
Marco Hatch 28:21
I think it's important when you're managing closures for seafood safety or human health concerns to think about how are people actually consuming those. Knowing how things are prepared, what parts are discarded, changes an individual's exposure level. So butter clams is a large clam that in this area people dried and traded. And depending on the community, there are different ways of processing the clam. A lot of communities will take the black tip off the siphon. So the siphon is where the clam brings water in and ejects water. Butter clams have a black tip of that siphon. A lot of communities cut that off and discard it, citing that that's where the toxins are stored.
Mendel Skulski 29:01
So-called Red Tide is caused by population booms of a naturally occurring microorganism, a dinoflagellate called Alexandrium,
Adam Huggins 29:11
which produces saxitoxin, a potentially lethal neurotoxin.
Marco Hatch 29:16
It's existed forever, but in recent years, both the frequency, how often we get these red tide blooms, and the duration and the window of opportunity have all increased, and so it's happening more often and with stronger red tides now compared to 500 years ago. But we were curious, looking at a butter clam, can we measure the amount of toxin in each body part? And we found that both the siphon tip and the siphon disproportionately held more saxitoxin. Now, this isn't to say, you know, if there's a red tide closure, go out there and chop the neck off a clam, siphon off a clam, and you're safe. But it does show that those parts of the body have a higher concentration of Saxitoxin compared to other areas. And so that's where we're trying to operate, of not testing traditional ecological knowledge, but trying to see, is there ways we can quantify it as it relates to how we open and close clams. And certain communities have actually been able to do that, where, working with government agencies, when they go into test butter clams, they'll test the whole clam, and they'll test the clam without the siphon. And so there'll be certain times of the year where clams are deemed safe to eat if you discard the siphon. And that's an example of incorporating that traditional ecological knowledge into the way that we measure and manage traditional food as it relates to seafood safety.
Adam Huggins 30:43
So you might be wondering, when the clams aren't safe to eat, is it still worthwhile to work in the garden?
Nicole Norris 30:51
Even though we're not digging clams and having a clam bake on the beach, there's so much more that comes from it.
Nicole Smith 30:58
These are places that need to be cared for on an ongoing basis. You need to tend the beaches. You need to care for the rock wall, and, as shared, these are places that you care for like you might a family member.
Nicole Norris 31:11
It's not rocket science. This is simply how it's done — to really humanize our aquatic loved ones. When I talk about that point of view from a clam, I talk about noise pollution, I talk about our loved ones in the in the woods, in the sky, right?
Nicole Smith 31:29
And so it's this wonderful way of seeing people in relationship with the environment around them as equals, as opposed to being separate from.
Mendel Skulski 31:43
So you mentioned the nuancing of clam gardens to sea gardens to open up this more general space for different creatures. I'm curious about the garden part of the name.
Nicole Smith 31:53
I think the really important part of garden is that it's really speaking to tending and caring for places. One of the dominant narratives was that First Nations, communities up and down this coast are hunter gatherer populations. And in the textbooks, you would see how they would be described as living in very bountiful environments where the resources essentially swim to them, instead of understanding the agency and the care and the engineering that has gone into shaping these landscapes.
Erich Kelch 32:31
We used to think people mean they're degrading the environment, and so we need to take people out of the environment to protect it. That's what we... that's what the Western kind of world used to think about conservation, and now we're learning — hopefully, we're learning... at least, I'm learning — that places need people, and these ecosystems weren't created by accident, and people were involved in making them bountiful. And so by people being here and tending a sea garden in all sorts of ways. It actually increases the biodiversity of a place. Like, what a concept. And so people being here is what they need to thrive. And we see places where it's not thriving, it's kind of dead. There's a lot of empty shells. There's not many clams because it hasn't been dug up.
Adam Huggins 33:20
When we come back, a lesson in gardening... after the break.
Eden Zinchik 33:38
Hi. You haven't heard from me before, but I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Eden, and I joined the team at Future Ecologies earlier this year. I've been working behind the scenes, but I'm here to remind you that this podcast is supported by you, our listeners. We are ad free, independent and crowdfunded. There are so many reasons you might want to support this podcast. Maybe you believe in the power of independent media — answerable only to you, our audience. Maybe you care deeply about the kind of stories that we're telling, and you recognize that it takes a lot of time and effort to tell them. Or maybe you just want access to new episodes before anyone else, exclusive bonus content, and our community Discord server, plus stickers, embroidered patches or a cozy hat. No matter the reason, we rely on your support. So if you feel fed by what you've been hearing, you can return the favor, and keep us going and growing. Help us produce the show for as little as $1 each month, or any amount that you choose, at futureecologies.net/join — that's futureecologies.net/join Okay, back to the show.
Mendel Skulski 34:57
Where we left off, Erich was reminding us that these spaces need to be nurtured — for their own sake, and so that they can nurture us in return.
Carl Olsen 35:08
What happens when a clam garden bed is not really maintained, and it hasn't been for years and years, the build up of the amount of clams in this bed gets so great that they just start dying off. And that's what you're seeing.
Marco Hatch 35:26
Traditional teachings around if you don't tend to beach, it dies. If you don't dig a certain way, and you don't put your sediment down a certain way, you don't harvest a certain way, it'll harm the beach.
Nicole Norris 35:40
If you're hand tilling the beach, you want to turn over the substrate so that it aerates, so that water can filter through, and all of the years of silt can wash away.
Marco Hatch 35:54
In an anoxic or hypoxic, no to low oxygen areas of the sediment, aerobic respiration doesn't happen — respiration using oxygen like we do. So you have anaerobic respiration, which is typically done by sulfate reducing bacteria, which produce hydrogen sulfide as a byproduct, which is both toxic to juvenile clams and gives that rotten egg smell. And so if we don't tend to beach, you get a lot of fine grain sediment, which tends to be organic, which tends to reduce oxygen, which sets up those conditions for hydrogen sulfide. So by tilling it, we're physically turning the sediment over. Or the way that we dig clams and leave the sediment out, gives that opportunity for the fine grain sediments to wash away.
Carl Olsen 36:37
It's like cultivating a garden. You cultivate it here too. You turn it over so it keeps the ground loose, and you know, at low tide, the air gets into it. These rock walls kind of break down just because of the waves from the boat or the movement of the tide. You got to keep maintaining them. We clean off the seaweed here. One of the elders explained that some of the seaweed best to get it taken off, because it's like having a piece of plastic over.
Hannah Morris 37:11
When we're doing restoration work, that seaweed gets scraped off and brought up to the bushes back here for a little bit of fertilization, as well as to help keep the clams breathing. They, like us, need oxygen to breathe.
Nicole Norris 37:26
We use potato rakes to hand till the substrate. That process needs to be so mindful, because that's somebody's home. My Uncle George Harris always talks about getting your mind right. So when you're there for a helpful purpose, your intention is to help. We're helping the ancestors finish their work, because they're not here to do it anymore, and so you got to be careful. La'lum'uthut is what they call that — be really careful.
Hannah Morris 37:44
There are some people I've come down seeing walking along the wall, where it's... you just don't know. You don't know what you don't know. So sharing the you know, we stay off the wall. We treat it with respect. We treat the beach how we would want to be treated.
Nicole Norris 38:17
Culturally, there are certain times in the year that we're not supposed to walk on the beach, and maybe to share that information, so that people are more mindful when they go into these places. At the time when the herring spawn, you know, when the waters are just a little bit warmer, when the clams spawn, or the sea urchin and the oysters, when they're doing their thing. You know, that's the time when you stay off the beach.
Carl Olsen 38:41
My grandparents always used to say, watch the birds when you go down, like seagulls or crows, we'll bring the clam up and drop it on the rocks to break it open and eat it. If they're doing that, they said, the clams are good to eat. And they say, watch the birds. If they stop eating the clams, then you stop eating the clams, they'll tell you, everything is connected. There's a connection to everything, because everything has a life, and when you use it to feed yourself, you give thanks for it to the Creator. If you take care of everything, it's going to take care of you.
Mendel Skulski 39:27
If you're looking for a mnemonic, just remember WATCH.
Erich Kelch 39:32
We All Take Care of the Harvest. Yes, yes. I love that acronym as well. You know, how are we being there and taking care of it? And that's, that's what these places need. You know they need people. Makes them happy.
Mendel Skulski 39:46
Could you tell me a little bit about the balance between tending and harvesting and the sort of the practice of gardening in these spaces? What does that look like for communities through time?
Nicole Smith 39:56
It's not like you build a wall and leave it. That might be what some of us do in our yards, or in our cities or towns. These are places that need to be cared for on an ongoing basis.
Marco Hatch 40:07
And what I really appreciate about it is it's not looking for a short term solution, meaning we went out and restored the beach, and next year we expect 10 times more clams. It's a long term investment. People are doing it, not because they might see direct benefit, but that their children and grandchildren will be re-engaged out there, will be part of the ecosystem, will be on the beach harvesting healthy, abundant clams. If we think about clam gardens that we've dated that are 3+ thousand years old, that's 3000 years of continuous tending with a small pause recently. That's a big commitment. That's a different commitment than I'm going to go out and remove invasive plants for a couple weekends a year or I'm going to go out and plant some native trees. That is a long term, multi-generational commitment that has to be weighed and taken seriously. You know, start with one, invest our time, build those relationships, improve that beach and see what comes.
Erin Slade 41:09
You know, this work takes a lot of hands and a lot of hours, and so we have a pretty enormous volunteer list at this point. So we have lots of extra hands, but this is work that's led by the Nations, and it's important that people from community are here leading that work. And so it's just a matter of getting enough people, being organized enough in advance, and people having enough space and time spread across the few days that we have to actually do the work, because these low tides are fleeting.
Adam Huggins 41:35
The work that Erin is referring to are beach days, but not the kind that you or I might have grown up with. These beach days are all-ages community gardening and teaching events, organized under the auspices of the Sea Gardens Project.
Mendel Skulski 41:51
What is the Sea Gardens Project?
Erich Kelch 41:52
The Sea Gardens Project is a collaborative effort between Parks Canada and guided by W̱SÁNEĆ and Cowichan nations to restore the beaches of which we're standing at one right now, to provide food for Indigenous peoples into the future forever, to restore the sea gardens provide food and then to make sure that they're tended as they once were for millennia into the future by First Nations.
Carl Olsen 42:17
We're between Sidney and Salt Spring Island, on a little island called Russell Island.
Erich Kelch 42:25
These gardens that we're looking at here haven't been tended for maybe, maybe 100 years or so. They were not tended until this project kind of restarted about eight years ago. And so what we don't really know is, what is the effort required to restore a sea garden that hasn't been tended? That's kind of a new question, I guess. And so by having two sides of the beach, we have a side here that we actively manage and actively tend and restore, and then we have a side here to our right that we don't do anything with. And so we're curious, you know, what is the difference? And it's tricky, because we never want to be in a place where we're having to prove Indigenous science. Indigenous science is is knowledge on its own. And we don't want to be testing that or trying to prove that.
Nicole Norris 43:11
It's just something that we know, but we have to prove it all the time.
Erich Kelch 43:15
There's like, maybe another way to speak to a different kind of language, I guess, like, we can use other methods to share that story also.
Nicole Norris 43:24
The pathway that has been created between the Hul'q'umi'num, the SENĆOŦEN, and Parks Canada has really become a worldwide demonstration of a better way of being together, about marrying indigenous knowledge with Western science.
Erin Slade 43:45
My title is a restoration officer. I lead a lot of the ecological monitoring that we do, and so as we conduct this restoration work that's guided by community, we're also monitoring how that work is impacting the ecosystems, and particularly the bivalve — the clam species. The clam communities and all of the seaweeds and invertebrates along the walls, we monitor how those are changing over time. We've also, over the years, been trying to monitor how the geomorphology, how the topography of the beach, is changing over time, because we do expect to see that the beach will slowly shift in slope over time.
Hannah Morris 44:22
From this rock this way, I believe it's what's being restored with Parks. And from down that way, down that side of the beach is not being restored.
Mendel Skulski 44:32
So this is like the dividing line between the restoration project and the and the control.
Nicole Norris 44:37
We have to be able to prove to Western science that our methods also work. We know that they work because that clam garden is 4000 years old, and that is the way it's always been done. Without scientific research and the data and the hypothesis behind it — you know, the language that translates that — how are we to get somebody who isn't so culturally, emotionally and generationally tied to that space? How are we to get them to see it as important, or to see the reasons why we need to do certain things? Like, have more restoration days, or put more money into the program so that we can even get there. That data is going to support the underlying reasons as to why we want to do that, which is, it's a food source. We need to cultivate it, and we need to nourish it. And here's the reasons why.
Hannah Morris 44:37
Yeah.
Erin Slade 44:37
The design of the project was put together with community members and people were okay with starting things off as an experiment. And part of that is because, you know, we do live, currently still live in a society where a lot of the most respected knowledge that is used by government to guide decision making comes from the scientific community. And so in order to speak that language, doing an experiment supports us being able to kind of provide that type of knowledge, to provide evidence towards this work being important and impactful and effective.
Erin Slade 46:23
But... it's challenging because, you know, people come here and spend a lot of time observing and working in these spaces, and care a lot about them, and having to only work on one half of the beach, only tend one half of the beach, that doesn't sit well with people.
Nicole Norris 46:40
You know, it's like having a hamper full of dirty laundry and you only wash half of it. We have a cultural obligation to take care of these spaces, because it's what takes care of us. That's really what it comes down to.
Erin Slade 46:56
The timelines for seeing the impacts ecologically are not short, and they're also not entirely clear. But we know, you know, like the life cycle of clams, it takes a while to start seeing the response in the clams, and then to start seeing that in the juvenile population.
Erich Kelch 47:15
I didn't know this until just this past year, but clams have these kind of, what are they called, like sporadic seeding events, where they seed in large numbers, and those happen every like three or five or seven year marks.
Erin Slade 47:30
And what we expect to see is kind of with the settlement of juveniles coming from a stronger adult population, we start to see a new crop of adults, and that can take many years.
Nicole Norris 47:32
We are seeing a comeback of some of the biomass, which is fantastic. We're seeing other aquatic plants starting to grow, vegetation starting to grow there, which is fantastic. But I said to them just last summer, I'm done with this test. Okay, I want the whole beach. And I was getting pretty forthright. They were like, Oh well, the test, this, that. And I pushed back. And I said, Listen, I want the whole beach. I want to turn over the whole beach. I want to measure it. I want to section it off. I want to start seeding. We only have this many years left. And I said, you know, stop pussyfooting around. We need to get this work done. And I said to my colleagues at Parks Canada, I feel like I'm wasting my time. This is lip service. Either we're going to do it or we're not. Some of these spaces we've been working at for a decade. We've been turning them over for a decade. So the site beside us, that's the controlled site, is going to take the same amount of effort when we should have been doing the whole thing all along.
Erin Slade 48:52
Well, I think that's, you know, it's one of the challenges in working in ecology is, you know, like having the humility to recognize that you can't... these systems are not entirely unknowable, but they are not entirely knowable. This isn't like a lab experiment. When you work with ecology, you're working with complex ecosystems that interact with each other. And you can never have, well, not never, but in most circumstances, you're not going to be able to control all of the factors in order to be able to sort of distill things down into one particular mechanism or function or species. It bleeds into the Indigenous way of knowing that we respect that these spaces cannot be entirely known, but what we can do is spend time in them and build relationships with them and find ways to care for them that follow what we do know. And in doing so, having less rigidity and more adaptability is just generally the way things are done.
Nicole Norris 49:51
The other thing that this has demonstrated is this is an act of reconciliation on behalf of a federal agency. Parks Canada and their humble friendship making with the Hul'q'umi'num' and the SENĆOŦEN is really an act of reconciliation. Our original relationship was with the land. It wasn't with government. And they have provided us an opportunity to regain access, and even though some of these places are more than likely deemed as a heritage site, they've allowed us to operate them as active management sites — recognizing that this is going to revive a food source and create food security and food sovereignty for nations along the coast, and this really falls in line with the right to self determination.
Mendel Skulski 50:53
And beyond the interface between the Hul'q'umi'num', the SENĆOŦEN and Parks Canada, sea gardens are now truly a place of international relations.
Nicole Norris 51:06
One of the greater things about some of this work is we've gone through a process with our sister nations about knowledge repatriation.
Marco Hatch 51:19
The Pacific Sea Garden Collective is this really amazing network of Indigenous people and allies that work closely with them from all around the Pacific, from Washington State, coastal BC, southeast Alaska, Hawaii, Guam and Palau that get together every year or two and share our ancestral technologies and restoration work that we're doing, and through this network, we're learning from each other, but also understanding that we're experiencing a lot of the same struggles and issues. As a clam gardener going to Hawaii in 2020 and seeing the fish pond restoration, it really opened our eyes to what could be possible.
Erin Slade 52:02
More recently, lots of nations have started their own initiatives to restore and rebuild, or build new clam gardens or sea gardens up and down the coast.
Nicole Smith 52:12
Many of us share this hope and goal that there will be communities who are digging in their clamming beaches and restoring their clam garden walls, or building new clam garden walls. I mean, we're seeing that already, and it really is connecting people with tradition. It is addressing issues of food security, issues of climate change. You know, I just, I feel really hopeful for what sea gardens can offer and help us with as we go forward.
Nicole Norris 52:46
Swinomish came to spend a lot of time with us, and they built the first modern day sea garden. The Swinomish are my immediate relatives, and I'm so exceptionally proud of them. What really opened my eyes was the amount of permits that they needed, the amount of other entities that needed to say yes.
Hannah Morris 53:08
They built their own wall about a year ago and had to jump through many, many hoops due to the government and whatever else they had to go through to put rocks on their own land. And it was a week of being Indigenous together, not just Coast Salish people, they're all indigenous people just by being together in an Indigenous collaborative with no, I don't know, what would you say... maybe hidden agenda that the federal government had when they came to Indigenous lands sparked enough inspiration and drive for everyone to get back onto their own lands to take care of it in the way that they know how — whatever that looks like. Whether that be lunch on the beach and just spending time or getting your hands dirty in the water, moving rock. I really, really try my best anytime I come out here, not only to just bring myself, but to bring someone from my community, in a younger generation, to show them that it's okay and it's probably the right thing to do to reconcile and work together with Parks Canada and the federal government in order to restore our practices and work together as one to take care of the land that we're all here on now. Whether we like it or not, it's this is our reality... and it's a good one, it could be a good one if we make it.
Mendel Skulski 54:57
Marco shared a story from a time he was visiting Bella Bella, Heiltsuk territory, where there are clam gardens that have been continuously tended until much more recently than the site at Russell Island. He and his local guides were traveling by boat.
Marco Hatch 55:13
And it was getting later in the day, and the tide was up pretty high, and off to our right, I saw a small, little rock wall on this bedrock feature. So just hard bedrock, and a little rock wall, and then white, broken shell hash behind it. So I was like, "hey, just drop me off here." I grabbed all my survey equipment, and it's not high tide, but it's above low tide, so clam gardens are well underwater. And the butter clam zone, now the tides above the butter clam zone, so I wouldn't expect to see butter clams there. And I was looking around just broken, dead shells everywhere, butter clams and some horse clams, and all these different species. I was like, wow, this is really amazing. And I reached down and just filled, just both my hands scoop up a big chunk of the sediment, which is all just white, chalky, broken shell, and it was full of butter clams. I've never seen that many butter clams. Normally, a butter clam is, A) lower on the beach, but also lower in the sediment, where you'd have to dig down a good six centimeters or 10 centimeters before you get to the butter clams. Here it was a layer of clams, and below that layer was another layer of clams, and below that layer was another layer of clams, and it was just chockablock full of clams. And so here, just this highest density to this day, of clams I've ever seen in this little feature that's too high based on the textbooks for clams to live in. Now they're not just living there, but they're thriving in this immense density. And so I was just blown away. I was doing all my measurements just with my head, like, literally in the sand, like, freaking out about all these clams. And I start to think, "oh, man, I wonder... I wonder if they're gonna come back and get me." They were out of sight around the corner. I couldn't hear the boat or anything, so I'm looking around the corner, and I see off in the distance, like, well, there's a stone fish trap over there. And I'm stuck on this bedrock outcropping, and I walk to the other side, and I see an abalone shell. And you can look down in the water, and it's a steep cliff of bedrock in crystal clear water, with fish and kelp and abalone habitat all around in the same area as well, and you can look up and see the fruits and berries that the uplands been managed as well. And it was that point that kind of hit me, that I've spent a lot of my time with my head in the sand just looking at clams within clam gardens. But if you move your head up and look around, you start to see that this is one very important piece, but one piece of the puzzle, one piece of the traditional food system of mountain top to sea floor bottom.
Carl Olsen 57:46
Our ancestors had this figured out, and I am thankful for my ancestors. And that's why I got to be passing it on to my grandkids and to my kids, so that they know the history of this place. They know the stories of this place. They know why we maintain these clam garden beds, and why these rock walls were built and were known as clam gardens. The more that you talk about it with anyone, the more people will understand first nations and how they survived. And I think it's really important.
Nicole Norris 58:38
And really what it is, is it's about trying to prepare a table for our great, greats that are yet to come.
Carl Olsen 58:46
I have a little great, great grand neice that's been out here already, learning about what's in the water there. And it sticks with them. You know, even at that age, you know, they'll learn more as they grow older, but they need to be here.
Nicole Norris 59:06
One of the things that I say when we have new visitors is, if you listen carefully on those paths, you can still hear the songs of the people that were there before us. That Stutson's words still vibrate among those leaves, and eventually my words will vibrate there for my descendants.
Mendel Skulski 59:45
As sea levels rise, our window to rediscover many long since tended gardens is closing. So at low tide, keep your eyes peeled,
Adam Huggins 59:56
and if you spot one, or if your community would like some guidance on how to revive or build a new one, get in touch with the Clam Garden Network at clamgarden.com
Mendel Skulski 1:00:07
To learn more about the many other types of sea gardens in the Pacific Sea Garden Collective, visit seagardens.net
Mendel Skulski 1:00:15
Future Ecologies is an independent production.
Adam Huggins 1:00:18
You can find us and all of our episodes at futureecologies.net
Mendel Skulski 1:00:23
Or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what we do, you can help us to do it, by supporting the show with any amount at futureecologies.net/join
Adam Huggins 1:00:36
and if money is tight, you can still do us a big favor by rating the show and leaving a comment wherever you're listening,
Mendel Skulski 1:00:43
and of course, share it with everyone you know.
Adam Huggins 1:00:46
Goes without saying.
Mendel Skulski 1:00:48
This episode was produced by me, Mendel Skulski, with help from Adam Huggins and Eden Zinchik,
Adam Huggins 1:00:55
Featuring the voices of Hannah Morris, Carl Olsen, Erin Slade, Nicole Smith, Marco Hatch, Erich Kelch and Nicole Norris,
Mendel Skulski 1:01:06
with music by Jonathan Kawchuk, Daniel Lapp, Thumbug, Adi Gortler, Gamelan Bike Bike, and Sunfish Moon Light
Adam Huggins 1:01:18
And of course, cover art by Alé Silva.
Mendel Skulski 1:01:22
Special thanks to Sky Augustine, Erich Kelch Courtney Greiner, Miranda Post, Jenifer Iredale and to everyone out there bringing Sea Gardens to life.
Mendel Skulski 1:01:35
Okay, that's it for this one. See you at the beach.