My half-Mohawk grandfather said, “You cannot speak of trees without speaking of their home. Nor bears or fish without their dinner table in the water.” It was filled with metaphoric references that suggested a whole at work.
It always made me look askance at environmentalists and well-intended people working on a single subject. I listened to policy bodies and activist groups because of my work as an urban planner and a Lecturer in urban planning and business. They formed efforts around Rivers, …or Forests, …or Wildlife, and I was most annoyed by this dissecting for fundraising, activism, and planning purposes. Like they did with a frog in the biology lab.
My master’s thesis in Urban planning (1985) was about the Preservation of Agriculture in Santa Clara Valley. I originally used the Uvas-Llagas Watershed, within the larger Pajaro River Watershed, as the boundaries of my study. I was asked by faculty, to reduce the scale to make things more measurable, “in human terms.” Say, city limit boundaries. I was resistant but lost the battle. I wanted to graduate and teach there. So, this mental battle of how to frame and shape what we see and consider is a very long time in the making in my life.
As a consultant in my early career to businesses and a Senior Lecturer eventually in urban planning, I was part of a new, short-lived, program that brought these two streams together. The Dean of the Business School kept a joint degree alive for 4 years until he retired. If you wanted a master's in business, you took courses in urban planning and vice versa. Apple was one of the first companies I convinced to put their engineers, seeking business degrees, into studying both lanes via this program.
I continued to hear people say ‘watershed’, ‘air shed,’ ‘food shed,’ and other examples of fragmenting life, unable to see it was a system at work. Plus, it was a human-centered view: our water, our air, our food. So, I renamed it to align with the images my Grandfather impressed on me. It was before my life partner, Dave, died; who was a forester for Crown Zellerbach, managing all the nurseries and a couple of CZ forests. He loved the change of terms. He laughingly commented, “I was too close to see it." At that time, I was selling my 40-acre tree farm on a mountain ridge outside Battle Ground, WA, and was very worried about how people would treat it. It was daily on my mind. One day, I made it up the term Lifeshed, 25 or more years ago. But I rebelled against people for 40 years before I coined the precise idea and then the word Lifeshed.
What is mislabeled in the world that denies a system and ecology at work? What might invite the mind to reconceive it?