Interview with Dan Imhoff,
Author of Farming With The Wild
With Scott Vlaun, editor of Seeds of Change eNewsletters

After reading Farming with the Wild, I had the great fortune to meet Daniel Imhoff at the 2005 Ecological Farming Conference where he led an all-day workshop and tour promoting the synthesis of sustainable farming practices and conservation of biodiversity. As these goals are essential to the mission of Seeds of Change, I asked Dan if he would talk to us about his vision for the future and what it means for us as gardeners, farmers, and citizens. I caught up with Dan a few months later in Taos, New Mexico for this interview.

Scott Vlaun: How does "farming with the wild" relate to gardening? Why is it important for gardeners to create and maintain wildlife habitat around their yard or garden?

Dan Imhoff: It comes down to beauty and place. Let me give you an example from own life. We started looking at the landscape around our beautiful homestead in the Anderson Valley which is a semi-coastal valley in Northern California. After we had completed our plan, I asked a local landscaper to install some raised beds around the house and set up a reliable irrigation system. I even went so far as to say: "go ahead and pick the plants." I gave him general directions but left a lot of latitude to make decisions about what to plant. A year later I was really upset, not necessarily at the landscaper, but more at myself. We live in a mixed redwood, fir, and oak woodland, as well as an oak savannah grassland area which has wet winters and dry summers. But the plants they chose for around the house had nothing to do with where we were. I felt like the garden came from somewhere else and I didn't want to feel like I was somewhere else. I don't mind an appropriate amount of lawn, it's functional, offers fire protection, and good for kids and adults to play on. I'm a badminton fanatic. However, when you think about your house you don't have to be a gardener, although that's one of the coolest things to be in the world. I think one of the neatest things to do is to find a landscaping solution that's appropriate for where you are, so you don't think: Wow! I'm in Brazil or Australia right now, or somewhere else. Eventually I took out almost every single plant and went back and started over with a palette of native California grasses and medium story shrubs like California Lilacs, Coffeeberry, Redbud, and Toyon, things that you find in the succession between shrubland and the forest. They're thriving, and they don't require a lot of maintenance. Grasses like California fescue and Deer grass can be used to create different textures. They flower at different times. Some people might find them colorless and bland, but I find them fantastic. They attract a huge number of insects and birds and a lot of things that are beneficial to the garden. We do have a little dry stacked stone wall that holds our little lawn and it's rimmed with cascading rosemary and a bed of Spanish lavender that fronts a small wall. What's amazing about the rosemary is that on sunny winter days the wall is literally buzzing with feral honeybees and bumblebees. That transfers directly to the plum and almond trees nearby and all the other plants in the garden. That's not necessarily a wild concept. Rosemary doesn't really belong there, but it is perennial, and essential for the kitchen.

SV: So for the gardener it doesn't necessarily translate to "wild", but it does translate to creating the same kind of diversity that would be found in the wild.

DI: I think it really depends on what you mean by gardener. What you can do as a gardener is look at the wildness that you support as part of what you do. You might have amazing vireos and hummingbirds and all kinds of butterflies and moths visiting your garden. That's part of what you're doing. You're participating. There's permeability. There's flow. Louis the Fifteenth's garden, that's almost like Hell in a way. It's nature tortured exclusively for human use with so little wildness in it. A garden without any wildness to me is a scary thing.

SV: You talk about Frank Morton's place in your book. (Frank Morton is an independent plant breeder and seed grower for Seeds of Change.) It's not like his garden is full of natives, or plants that would have been growing there, but he creates the kind of ecosystem in his garden that you would find in a natural ecosystem, so it builds the same kind of resilient system with lots of things going on in it.

DI: Leopold wrote that the distinctions between tame and wild are really in our minds. How we break down the barriers between tame and wild—by what we bring and what we let in—helps to define who we are.

SV: In a lot of ways, there's nothing "natural" left.

DI: Absolutely, most of the world is now a restoration project waiting to happen.

SV: So we're recreating the genius of nature; much like Permaculture; developing systems that emulate nature's resilience.

DI: That's the whole key. In addition to acknowledging, in a deep way, our ecological conscience and how we make room in our land for what else ought to be here. The more we let in, the bigger people we are. I think gardeners actually have it easy in that they have the most to gain from wildness, working with natives and understanding a lot more about them. Gardeners are often times not dependent upon their efforts for their survival. So how can they embrace the beauty of it? That's what keeps coming back to me. How can some place be so beautiful right where it is, not trying to look like it came from somewhere far away? I actually had the opportunity to hang out with the gardeners from Versailles. They told me right out, they are suffering amazing problems because they have been hammering that land for so long. They have come up with some incredible techniques to make their gardens productive, but the gardener looked me right in the eye and told me that if Louis the Fifteenth had genetic engineering at that time that they would have used it in a heartbeat. They've poured arsenic, heavy metals, and all kinds of chemicals on their plants for over a century. In the pursuit of their idea of beauty they've created a toxic nightmare. I don't think you really have to work that hard. Some of the best gardeners show us that. Sometimes you feel like you're raising gophers or you're feeding the birds, but I think over time those things balance out. Not that I think it's a sin to kill a mole or gopher. There are healthy populations of moles and gophers where I live and they have plenty of area they can take over. But I understand the thought process of bringing in a cat or a terrier or a trapper. It's all part of the whole thing. I also appreciate those hard core people who say 'hands off, I'm not even going to go there.'

SV: So after five years of working on and talking about Farming With The Wild and looking at farming all over the country and thinking about the global situation, what's your outlook for the future of food production and maintaining some semblance of our wild diversity?

DI: I think it's a real mixed bag. In some ways there are just amazing things being done. In many ways what I hear all over the world is that this is an issue that everyone is facing. It doesn't matter if you're in Malaga, or in Texas, New Mexico, California or Oregon—land prices are escalating and biodiversity is in peril. A lot of it has to do with water availability, invasive species, and development. People are realizing that they've got to come together to make really interesting, creative solutions. There can be tax incentives, NRCS (National Resources Conservation Service) cost-share programs, or other joint efforts. What is needed is human capital and by that I mean a critical mass of experiential, financial, and technological support as well as the knowledge and vision to make these things happen. It's also a race against time. We're living amidst this major industrial assault that they call agriculture and forestry, and economies are growing, and many people make us want to think that it's all inevitable. That this extinction crisis is inevitable, that the Endangered Species Act is a pain in the ass and it needs to be reformed or just taken away altogether. It's one of the most profound legislations ever passed by human kind. We're living in desperate times. It's time for everybody to dig in deep. I see some people digging in really deep and I see the other side digging in pretty deep as well. But nature is talking to us all the time—with very subtle directions.

SV: Do you think that it's just a matter of paying attention?

DI: I wish it were that easy.

SV: Bill Mollison talks about Permaculture—thoughtful, careful observation is the first thing.

DI: And to do that I think we might need a yoga revolution. I'd like to see a lot more farmers doing yoga. I'd definitely like to see a lot more businessmen and politicians practicing yoga because it requires your feet being on the ground. Even if your only benefit is to concentrate on your breath and experience your feet being grounded. That's where it all starts. Then you open yourself up to all these other elements that are life changing. We are talking about change—big change—whether it comes from something big and bad where we have to change out of necessity... On my worst days that's what I think is going to happen. We'll have to hit the bottom.

SV: What would the bottom look like?

DI: The bottom will look totally ugly. It could look as bad as all we have left are cockroaches, grass, cows, pine trees—those extremely resilient species that we have managed to cultivate to our benefit.

SV: Anything that's not a direct benefit will just get wiped out?

DI: Not necessarily. The system will always support opportunistic species we might not necessarily value: mosquitoes, blackbirds, kudzu, aggressive carp, and so on.

SV: Are you hopeful at the end of the day?

DI: Depends on the day. I love my land, the land that I'm fortunate to take care of. I think there is an unprecedented land grab going on right now. I feel that everywhere. A lot of land being bought on speculation. I still believe that our agricultural and rural lands are our hope. I do think that there is an extreme urgency. An important question is whether the gathering wisdom is able to keep pace with perhaps what we do best—grow and destroy in the process of creating human environments. Although I think there's a lot of wisdom out there.

SV: What can a person on the street do to be part of the change?

DI: They can make their thinking a lot wilder. Your values have to somehow match your life. That's not an easy thing to say and I know that I'm not a person to be put up on a pedestal, but I think it comes down to our values and changing the way that we look at the world and then answering some big questions.

SV: Which is?

DI: Why are we here... what's our ultimate purpose... and what are we leaving behind? Those are questions I always come back to. It doesn't even matter if we're talking about packaging...

SV: Besides paper or plastic? (Imhoff's latest book, available from the Sierra Club, is entitled "Paper or Plastic: Searching for Solutions to an Overpackaged World.")

DI: Yeah... paper or plastic? That allows you to get to some of the deeper questions.

SV: Before we get on to the deeper questions, what is the right answer to the "paper or plastic" question? Or, do you have to read the book?

DI: Well, you have to determine what kind of paper, what kind of plastic, and what you intend to do with either one. It's an absurd question, really.

SV: When I go to the grocery store, and I've got my groceries on the counter, and they pop the question, what should I say? What's the ecological choice?

DI: "I've got my own bag, thank you." One of my first jobs as a copywriter was to explain the benefits of reusable cotton bags. I still have those bags after fifteen years. The correct answer lies in creating a system that supports a world of health and beauty. The test with everything is "Does my choice support a world of health and beauty?" Plastic bags litter the landscape, they get hung up in the trees. If you went up to Canada, where they are completely annihilating the Boreal forests for paper, it would probably just make you sick. How do you bring those solutions close to home? You can't bring everything close to home so you have to do as much as you can nearby. Then you make your peace with your decisions. But the paper or plastic thing, I know I'm going to get asked about fifty-million times.

SV: I think that's a good answer: "Neither, I've got my bag."

DI: Exactly, "I've got my own system for it." Carry a water bottle, carry a mug. You should see what the numbers say about a ceramic cup. I don't have them off the top of my head but if a café uses a cup for a year, one time every other hour, rather than a paper cup with a sleeve and a lid—the savings are something like 100 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions, 800 gallons of water effluent emissions, 100 pounds of solid waste and savings to that café of hundreds of dollars. That's just one cup used every other hour throughout the year.

SV: What about the energy to keep washing the cup?

DI: Savings kick in after 70 uses and a ceramic cup lasts up to 3000 times. And we use upwards of 100 million cups a day. 75% are paper and the rest are fossil fuel based... and that's just for coffee. Just between Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks it's about 50 million. It's staggering.

SV: Wow! So carry a cup.

DI: Yeah, a huge amount of resources are wasted on disposability. It would also be nice if we had proper accounting that was respectful of what it really takes to make something like a paper or styrofoam cup. They are starting to do that on the other end, at the point of sale. In San Francisco there is an initiative to charge $.17 for a paper or plastic bag in the store to cover waste disposal costs.

SV: This is what we don't seem to want to look at: the costs of our decisions down the road.

DI: To tell you the truth, the impacts of producing it are a hundred times more on the front end in the forests and oil fields and factories, but if all we can start to do is deal with the back end, then let's start there.

SV: But there's got to be an ecological answer to paper or plastic? I always thought "paper," so I can compost it when it wears out, or start my fire with it. I have a guttural reaction against plastic.

DI: Well you might find it argued that plastic is more efficient. It could take less energy and materials to produce, for instance.

SV: But it's not going to break down in the environment in the same way.

DI: Neither will that paper bag actually. Paper is the biggest component in most of our landfills.

SV: And it won't break down?

DI: Not necessarily. The landfill environment is anaerobic in many cases. In many a landfill you can still dig out a 20 year-old Big Mac, half eaten in its wrapper or a legible newspaper. What we're creating is stratified, almost petrified waste sealed in there so that nothing can get out. So I use a plastic bag sometimes too. It's almost 50/50, a no-win situation. Every time you just cut that off, it becomes a non-issue. "I've got my own bag." One of the biggest bad actors right now is PVC. It has to be done away with now.

SV: Like vinyl siding?

DI: Yes, vinyl siding and blister packs, those impenetrable plastic planks they now use to package electronics and printer cartridges so you can't steal them. How do we create a system to make that go away? Our first step will probably be material substitution, like PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate) which is a potential hormone disruptor, but better than Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC), which is a known carcinogen.

SV: So you go out to an organic farm and there's PVC pipe hoop houses and PVC pipe irrigation all over the place. It seems so incongruous.

DI: I've got them all over my orchard actually. You know, the manufacturers aren't being held accountable, their own designers are not asking the right questions, and we're not demanding a real alternative to the easy, modular, lego-like irrigation infrastructure that we've got all over the ground everywhere. PVC is one of the most heinous materials that we have in this world.

SV: So we need to be asking a lot of questions as consumers. Like "Where did this come from, and where will it go?"

DI: Yes, and how can I make the best choices that I possibly can, and create systems to promote a healthy and beautiful world? Within your own power, you can be part of that.

To read our review of Farming with the Wild, click here.