43. Wild Medicinal Plants and Hemp Farming with Daphne Valentine

07/04/18 • 111 min

Good Life Revival: Permaculture, Rewilding, Homesteading

Do you communicate with the plants on your local landscape? Because they are always trying their hardest to reach you, whether or not you’re able to hear them.

My guest for this installment of the Good Life Revival Podcast — no. 43 — is Daphne Valentine, a professional forager, farmer and pickle-maker from Murphreesboro, Tennessee. When it comes to communicating with plants, Daphne speaks with authority, drawing from a deep reservoir of lifelong experiences.

“Plants have a frequency. If you’re in tune with it, if you’re listening, you’ll hear it. [...] Medicine plants give off a pretty strong frequency, and we hear that as foragers.”

Aside from her pursuits as a forager, she and her husband grow medicinal hemp on their farm through Tennessee’s Hemp Research Pilot Program, which she says is a very profound experience.

“Having grown hemp from seed to big bushy plants that are speaking, very loudly, I understand the connection. I understand the language that it is speaking.”

Each of Daphne’s primary interests are united, I think, by a core passion for the physical and emotional healing power of medicine plants, and of food as medicine itself. I hope this conversation encourages you to venture out on to the land to cultivate intimate relationships with all of the plant allies that you find there.

Do you communicate with the plants on your local landscape? Because they are always trying their hardest to reach you, whether or not you’re able to hear them.

“Plants have a frequency. If you’re in tune with it, if you’re listening, you’ll hear it. [...] Medicine plants give off a pretty strong frequency, and we hear that as foragers.”

Aside from her pursuits as a forager, she and her husband grow medicinal hemp on their farm through Tennessee’s Hemp Research Pilot Program, which she says is a very profound experience.

“Having grown hemp from seed to big bushy plants that are speaking, very loudly, I understand the connection. I understand the language that it is speaking.”

Previous Episode

42. Domestication and the Suffocating Void of Modern Civilization with Kevin Tucker of Black & Green Review

What do we find when we take a hard look at our collective suffering in the modern civilized world?

Is existence itself a state of suffering, as the Buddhists would have you believe – or is it possible that there is a fundamental disconnect between how we live and what our animal bodies and minds require?

“We are each still born a nomadic hunter-gatherer. If we were born into a hunter-gatherer culture we would turn out just the same as anyone else there. There’s nothing innately changed about us — it’s entirely social.”

My guest on this episode of The Good Life Revival Podcast is Kevin Tucker, the anarcho-primitivist thinker and writer responsible for the Black & Green Network, which connects green anarchists around the world in order to build momentum for the rejection and dismantling of civilization.

“Green anarchism is explicitly against civilization... Either the Earth is alive and worth fighting for, or it isn’t.”

Kevin is the author of Gathered Remains: Essays on Wildness, Domestication, Community, and Resistance, published through his own Black & Green Press in early 2018.

(I’ve chosen Gathered Remains as my pick for the month of June in our ongoing book club series – you can learn more about that here.)

Over the course of our two-hour conversation, we dig deep into the topic of green anarchism, its relationship to rewilding and the hunter-gatherer lifeway, what it means to be “domesticated”, and the impending cultural collapse that many of us believe is already under way.

I must admit that this is a sharp break from my usual M.O of presenting you with uplifting, motivational stories to inspire you to take action. As much as I prefer to spend most of my time in that head space, where I personally am able to be most productive, it is incredibly important that we keep in mind why we all desire to see a cultural shift towards a way of life that’s better aligned with the needs of the Earth – because our civilization could not possibly be any more dysfunctional and maladaptive, and it is not long for this world.

“These are the death throes [of civilization] and they are ugly — these are very ugly times and they’re going to continue to get worse.”

Make no mistake, this ship is sinking, and if we have any hope of constructing a lifeboat in time, it will require us to confront this stuff head-on. I hope you can muster up the courage to join me in doing the hard work of taking a hard look at the myriad existential crises at hand.

Next Episode

44. Invasive Species, Restoration and Ecological Literacy with Tao Orion of Resilience Permaculture

What can so-called “invasive species” teach us about the health and vitality of our ecosystems?

Is it possible that these oft-maligned invaders are actually serving functional roles on the land? And if we determine that they need to be managed, how exactly should we go about it?

When you read Beyond the War on Invasive Species by Tao Orion, today’s guest on episode 44 of the Good Life Revival Podcast, you’ll discover that the conventional “restoration” narrative is pretty cut-and-dry: invasive species are a Problem that require complete and total eradication, primarily through the use of chemical herbicides such as glyphosate, 2,4-D and imazapyr.

How effective is this management plan? Not very. What sorts of consequences does it have for the health of the land, and all those who inhabit it? We do not know, but like many other myopic decisions that we humans are making in this era, it's safe to assume that the full effects may not even fully manifest for decades, or centuries, or millennia to come.

By contrast, Tao, along with a growing number of skeptical ecologists and naturalists (myself included), would argue that the proliferation of non-native species is merely one symptom of a problem that runs much deeper than plant populations in flux, down to the core of our civilization and how we organize our lives.

“We need to be willing to take responsibility for the ecological changes that our lifestyle brings.”

When we allow ourselves to ask “why?” all the way down to the root of the problem, we are forced to confront the uncomfortable truth that our very way of life in the modern era is the reason for undesirable species thriving where robust and resilient native communities once flourished.

“I honestly think people feel guilty about the ways that land is being managed. There’s a deep sense of unease about the way our society has come into being — about our colonialist history.”

Tune in to hear Tao and I discuss the complex nature of invasive species and the field of restoration ecology; what invasive species can tell us when we read the landscapes around us; and how we can promote ecological literacy in a culture that only seems capable of investing in short-term treatments to minor symptoms of systemic problems.

I have chosen Beyond the War on Invasive Species as my pick for the book club in the month of July. Order a copy directly from Tao and she will even sign it before sending it off. Support good people doing good work!

Today’s episode also features several new pieces of music by yours truly. Stick around to the end where I share a new song of mine — 8 years in the making! — called “No Inside, No Out.”

Want to hear all of the original music from the podcast, in full? That’s just one of the perks for pledging your support for the Good Life Revival at any level on Patreon, the crowdfunding platform that makes it possible for me to do this work.

You can also gain early access to interviews like this one with Tao, which was published on Patreon a full week ahead of its release on the main feed.

To learn more and pledge your support today, visit patreon.com/goodliferevival.