Combining inventories for ethical action: lessons from using ‘community ethnobotany’ for food forest design

Abstract Food forests present one of the many initiatives which seek to address the unsustainability of the industrial food system, but are often critiqued for paying insufficient attention to socio-economic inequalities. Aware of this risk, the authors and the team of regenerative citizen farm the Biesterhof , located in the Netherlands, engaged in participatory action research (PAR) in effort to include the neighboring community in the design of its future food forest. This paper presents the insights from this process, which built conceptually on ethnobotanical and community economies scholarships towards what we call ‘community ethnobotany’. Participant observation and interviews with the farmers, as well as members of the neighboring communities from various demographic backgrounds revealed different ways of relating to nature and particular plant species. A co-designing workshop kickstarted participants’ emotional investment in the food forest and created a sense of co-ownership between community members and the farmers. The process has provided the farmers with concrete ideas for the food forest design which includes a diverse pool of possible plant and tree species. At the same time, it elucidated physical and financial barriers experienced by some community members that hamper their access to the food forest. This article concludes with a reflection on the conceptual and practical utility of community ethnobotany as a PAR methodology.