Today’s photographs are views of fall’s bright yellows. The woods and meadows are not just full of color but also teeming with plants that are edible, mushrooms at this time of year first and foremost (I offered their photographs already last week.)

I was taught about edible plants in a podcast on foraging, the search for food in the wild, or your back yard, or the town commons, take your pick. A young Black woman from Ohio, Alexis Nikole Nelson, provided in equal measure food for thought and references to food for our stomachs.

Beyond introducing (real) food stuff, teaching about biology and botany and creating amazing recipes, she reminds the listener of how Black people had a relationship to foraging during slavery, and how their traditions and knowledge were cut off with the hardships and legal or customary exclusion from nature following emancipation. Proprietary rights of White landowners were harshly enforced, once they had no gain from people’s survival, a survival that depended on supplementing the meager scraps of food they received on plantations.

Nelson has by now over 3 million followers on TikTok, and I must say that I got drawn into her videos, getting used to the intensely lively quality that many of them display – after a while it becomes infectious, or less noticeable, can’t say. The content is what convinced me, so much to learn in ways that obviously appeal to a HUGE number of people who are now equipped to bring food to the table even when funds are short. She is a gifted teacher beyond her culinary skills and adventurous spirit.

Here is a link to her site, where you can choose among so many interesting offerings (you don’t have to sign up, just click on any of the videos.) She talks about food as a way to connect to people, a way to show love and and way to express creativity – available for free to all if you know where to look in our eco-system. This is a key point for learning how to forage in a society where 50 million people are food insecure – not knowing where their next meal is coming from.

Black populations were, of course, not just prevented from accessing naturally occurring food sources that grew on private or local lands. There is now a public conservation about how access to nature in general is inherently more difficult for Blacks than for Whites.

If you are tempted to join the chorus that protests: “Public trailheads are open to everyone. Campsites are not segregated. Rivers belong to all!” I urge you to familiarize yourself – as I had to do, since I was clueless about the severity of the issues – with what is happening in real life.

The range of obstacles is vast.(Ref.) – It starts with the experience that you are singled out as someone unusual on the hiking path (borne out by statistics that show how enormously underrepresented Blacks are in outdoor recreational activities,) and beyond that hypervisibility often made to feel the you don’t belong. It continues with being told directly or indirectly not to trespass on traditionally White activities like fly fishing, or entering a space that was meant as an escape for people from “crowded urban centers,” often a euphemism for poverty, crime and POCs. Most frighteningly the range includes attacks on your property and physical safety, from slashing tires and tents, to actual attempts at lynching. If you don’t believe me, read up in such publications as the Sierra Club Magazine, not known for hyped-up commentary. Or the local Washington State news. Or stories about Black birders in Central Park….

The history of public park systems – culturally segregated even after legal segregation ended – and current day prejudices against non-Whites interact. POCs are three times more likely to live in places where they have no immediate access to nature, and lacking the funds or time to travel far. That is not a coincidence, given the historic structural issues around racism in the National Park movement, claims Myron Floyd, dean of the College of Natural Resources.

“The underlying rationale for creating parks was this idea of U.S. nationalism, to promote the American identity, and the American identity was primarily white, male and young. …..It was really trying to distinguish the American identity from the European identity: being a separate, more mature nation in the mid-19th century.”

John Muir, who is credited with the creation of the National Park System and the conservation movement, was recently called out for his long history of racism by the Sierra Club. For Muir, who co-founded the organization in 1892, Indigenous people “seemed to have no right place in the landscape” despite the fact that they had lived there for thousands of years. He also believed that Indigenous peoples’ villages and their ways of life should be destroyed in order to have “unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.” 

Other important figures in the conservation movement, like Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, held racist beliefs and believed that parks were created for Americans of only Northern European descent.

Some months ago the American Trails organization published a list of new organizations that hope to increase participation in outdoor activities by all those traditionally excluded. It did so in the context of a historical perspective on racisms in the outdoors, a short read that I highly recommend.

One of my favorite essays this year describes how another question of access to nature plays out in our own back yard. Strongly recommended reading. It is about the urban rural divide in Yamhill County and how a proposed hiking path was torpedoed by the extreme Right. It was a locally supported trail project that all of a sudden became a hot button in the “culture wars,”now dominating election campaigns for local office, dividing a community, enhancing bigotry and extremism. Spoiler alert – the 12 mile trail project got successfully killed by conservative forces that did not want urban “trash” to blight their landscape. Its remaining proponents are receiving death threats.

Here is an upbeat musical offering to fall – with leaves rustling and colors shimmering, before ending in a pensive mood that goes with today’s discussion of continued inequities.