Roots through the City: Urban Foraging and Ecological Literacy

Abstract

Situating the practice of urban foraging within theoretical contexts of experiential learning necessitates a consideration of environmental discourses concerned with the challenges of placing ourselves into a concept of nature that is inclusive of the more-than-human beings we share the world with. The practice of gathering plants as food stuffs engages us politically as well as philosophically within these debates and requires a post-humanist appreciation of how to conduct research that acknowledges the messiness of the lifeworld. The experience of this through the lens of urban foraging remains tantalisingly beyond our ability to theorise and reduce it to absolutes. The ‘walk and talk’ interview method is deployed to comment first on the practices of urban foragers as an in-situ event replete with embodied and emotional entanglements, and secondly to be able to approach the concept of ecological literacy as a developmental faculty derived from the practice. Urban foraging simultaneously gives a means to develop greater awareness of the more-than -human through a material and physical experience of plant cycles and plant agency that also contributes to a growing awareness of food systems existing beyond a consumerist agenda. Consequently, levels of eco-literacy are enhanced through shared bodies and materials whilst engaged on a foraging walk in the city. The research asks that several large bodies of theory and empirical research - environmentalism, educational discourse and post-humanist geographies engage more fully in conversations aimed at uncovering how it is we can live and learn with more- than-human beings who partake as equal subjects in our research endeavors.