The Consensus on the land here is that the inaugural Social Forestry Winter Camp at Full Bloom was a success!  (To be transparent: that’s not an official consensus, but I haven’t seen much in the way of sour faces or complaints either from the winter campers or the Full Bloom residents).   Yesterday was their “open camp” and they gave a tour or the their community and some of the forest tending they have down.  Very impressive.  What was a dense thicket of fir and cedar is now a spacious forest with a lot more breathing room and a lot less fuel for potential forest fires.

To know that this was all done within the context of a group singing songs about the land, having daily check-ins, and generally imbedding themselves in the forest ecosystem fills me with reverence as I move through the “treated” forest.

Winter camp was also successful in doing a small controlled understory  burn of an Oak woodlawn.   Periodic, if not annual, burning was an essential practice of the Native Americans who lived in this bioregion to maintain the fertility of the Oak Forests (a.k.a Acorn Food Forest).  Modern controlled burning has to be done in a different way as the amount of understory fuel has built up through years of fire suppression, clear cuts, and general lack of integral forest management.

To me, the biggest success of the whole Winter Camp experience was that a group of individuals spent 5 weeks living in the forest, relating to it, tending to it and each other and now have a wealth of learning and experience to further themselves and all of us towards a truly regenerative relationship with forest.

“But I’ll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected with everything.“
Alan Watts