Foraging Weeds: Healing Earth, Presence and Polycrisis

We live in a world that rewards speed. Many of us rush to understand problems, rush to implement some solutions, and then rush to face the next crisis (and often burn out). But there is a kind of wisdom that only comes slowly — the kind that requires us to sit with a place long enough to truly see it.

I recently had the honor of attending a session led by Amy Anderson, an urban forager based in Boulder, the unceded lands of the Arapaho, Ute, and Cheyenne peoples. What she offered was not just practical knowledge about which parts of plants we can eat in Colorado at specific times of the year. It was an invitation into a different way of relating to the living world around us.

In this article, I explore:

1. How ethical foraging depends on building genuine relationship with local ecosystems — and why that relationship is central to what I have come to call "Reindigenizing"

2. Five scientific reasons why foraging and eating wild plants and weeds is inseparable from addressing the ecological crisis

3. Why eating foraged plants is not a lifestyle choice but a meaningful act of paradigm shift in the face of polycrisis

4. Why the ecological presence that foraging requires will, for most of us, depend on our capacity to tend to our layers of trauma and the stresses of modern life

5. Why BIPOC individuals and communities are invited into a deeper reclamation — of knowledge, of land relationship, and of what was always ours

Amy taught us that to harvest wisely from local plants, shrubs, or trees, we must begin to notice things we have collectively stopped seeing. We can notice when flowers, leaves or seeds first arrive for different plants each spring, and whether they are arriving earlier than last year due to climate crisis: many plants in Colorado are arriving 2–4 weeks earlier in 2026.

We should notice which birds or animals depend on the same leaves or fruits we are harvesting, and we should learn to leave enough for them.

One thing she shared has stayed with me: when you harvest from native plants (as opposed to weeds), no one should know you have been there. It reminded me immediately of the Zen teaching — “Leave no trace”.

She also made an important distinction: native plants have evolved over thousands of years in relationship with the local ecosystem — they are, in the truest sense, home. Weeds are plants that outcompete natives and disrupt the relationships that local insects, birds, and soil organisms depend on. As a result, we must harvest weeds as much as possible.

Needless to say, the most authentic and sacred version of ecological literacy is best learnt from Indigenous or animist elders not driven by modernity. These elders can show us the way to becoming a keystone species.

Reindigenizing: How can people of color belong to the land?

At the heart of foraging is something deeper than nutrition or environmental action. It is the slow, patient building of a relationship with the place where we live. And that relationship, I would argue, is one of the most radical and necessary things a change agent in these times of polycrisis can cultivate right now. This belonging to our local ecosystems is what, following the lead of Indigenous elders and scholars, I have been describing as an important aspect of Reindigenizing. Reindigenizing includes a return to ways of knowing and being that treat the land not as a resource to be extracted but as our living community.

But who gets to build a relationship with the land?

Indigenous peoples across the world were forcibly separated from — lands they were inextricable, sacred parts of. I feel that we are being asked to protect and revitalize the ecological wisdom of living Indigenous cultures while remembering and reclaiming the indigeneity of those who do not currently identify as Indigenous, however distant that connection may feel.

Black, Brown, and other communities of the global majority carry broken relationships with land — not only as a legacy of colonization but as an ongoing reality. Enslaved Africans were forced to work land that was never theirs under law. Black farmers in the United States lost an estimated 90% of their farmland — nearly twelve million acres — between 1910 and 1997, through a combination of legal discrimination, violence, and USDA policies that systematically denied them loans and assistance. Latinx and other farmworker communities are among the most exposed to the pesticides we produce, the least able to access the food they grow, and among the first to face displacement when land values rise. These are living wounds that shape who feels safe on the land, who has access to urban or rural green space, and whose relationship with local ecosystems has been most violently disrupted. The path of reindigenizing, in its fullest sense, will reckon with all of these histories simultaneously.

Why foraging is a paradigm shifting solution?

Reason 1: The Food System and the Climate

It is tempting to think of climate crisis and our industrial food system as separate issues to be tackled one at a time. They are not. They are different expressions of the same underlying logic — one that treats living systems as inputs to an economic machine. Different parts of the one broken system.

Our global food system — from farm to fork — is responsible for somewhere between 20 to 33% of all the climate-heating (greenhouse) gases the world produces each year. That includes the emissions from making synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, from the soil being plowed, animal agriculture, from the trucks and ships moving food around the planet, and from the food that rots in landfills.

The process used to manufacture synthetic fertilizers — developed a century ago and largely unchanged — consumes about 1–2% of the world's entire energy supply. It also releases nitrous oxide, a gas roughly 275 times more powerful at warming the planet than carbon dioxide. Only about half of the fertilizer applied to fields is actually absorbed by crops. The rest of fertilizer runs off into rivers and oceans, starving coastal waters of oxygen and creating vast dead zones — more than 700 of them worldwide — where almost nothing can live.

Here is something that matters deeply for those of us watching the manifestation of climate emergency (including the recent news of slowing down of the Atlantic Ocean's circulation system) with alarm: that agricultural runoff alters the freshwater content and chemistry of the ocean. The atmosphere where greenhouse gases are accumulating, the food system and the disrupted ocean system are not separate problems. They are deeply entangled.

Please see here if you want to see more technical facts and numbers related to these five buckets without the narrative presented below.

Reason 2: What We Have Done to the Soil

Beneath our feet lies one of the most complex and under-appreciated ecosystems on Earth. Healthy soil is alive — threaded with fungal networks that move carbon and nutrients between plants, teeming with bacteria, worms, and insects that recycle the building blocks of life. These networks store more carbon than all the world's forests and the atmosphere combined.

Industrial farming has been quietly destroying soil for decades. Repeated plowing breaks apart the soil's structure and exposes stored carbon to the air, where it becomes carbon dioxide. Chemical treatments kill these fungal networks. Growing the same crop year after year removes the biological diversity that allows soil to sustain itself, making it progressively dependent on synthetic inputs just to stay productive.

What fills the spaces between the crops — what we routinely call weeds — turns out to be the soil's own repair crew. Many of these plants are what ecologists call pioneer species: the first responders after disturbance. Dandelions break through compacted earth with deep taproots, opening channels for water and air. Clover pulls nitrogen from the atmosphere and deposits it into the soil. Stinging nettles draw up minerals from deep below the surface. These plants can heal land we have damaged. Our response has been to spray them with herbicides/pesticides.

Reason 3: The Hidden Cost of Pesticides

Each year, humanity applies roughly four billion kilograms of pesticides to the land. The global industry generating those chemicals is worth around $84 billion annually.

Glyphosate — the world's most widely used herbicide, has been classified by the World Health Organization's cancer research agency as a probable human carcinogen. People with high exposure show significantly elevated rates of certain cancers, particularly non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Dozens of other common pesticides interfere with our hormonal systems at extraordinarily small concentrations — disrupting everything from reproduction to thyroid function to children's neurological development. Researchers in Europe have estimated that the health costs of these hormone-disrupting chemicals run to over €160 billion per year on that continent alone.

Then there are the bees. A class of insecticides called neonicotinoids, now found in the pollen and nectar of wildflowers growing near treated fields, have been shown to cut the reproductive success of wild bees by up to half. Insect populations in some well-studied regions have fallen by 75% over the past three decades. This is not a distant ecological statistic. Insects are the foundation of most food webs and the primary pollinators of both wild plants and our crops.

Reason 4: The Plants We Ignore Are More Nutritious Than the Ones We Grow

Here is something that tends to surprise people: the food we have worked so hard to produce has been getting less nutritious over time.

Studies comparing vegetables grown today with those grown in the 1950s show consistent declines in protein, calcium, iron, and vitamins. The reason is not a mystery — we bred crops for yield, appearance, and shelf life, not nutrition. The more calories we squeeze from an acre, the more diluted the nutrients per calorie tend to become.

Meanwhile, the plants growing freely at the edges of our gardens and along our paths contain nutritional profiles that would be remarkable if they appeared on a supplement label. Lamb's quarters — a common garden weed Amy highlighted — contains more calcium than milk, more iron than many other sources, and more vitamin C than oranges. Stinging nettles carry two to five times the iron of spinach, along with a suite of anti-inflammatory compounds. Dandelion greens have more beta-carotene than carrots and more calcium than kale, plus inulin — a prebiotic fiber that feeds the beneficial bacteria in our gut. Purslane, that flat succulent weed of disturbed ground, is the richest plant source of omega-3 fatty acids known to science.

These plants grow for free, in your neighbourhood, already adapted to your local climate and soil. They need no fertilizer, no pesticide, no refrigerated truck, no packaging.

They are, in a very real sense, the food system we had before we decided to build a different one. This is the food system I encountered when I spent time with Bhil and Lepcha tribes in India in the recent years.

Reason 5: A Disrupted Circle

For most of human history, the nutrients in food completed a cycle. They came from the soil, passed through plants and animals, nourished people, and eventually — through composting, waste, and death — returned to the soil. The circle closed.

Industrial food systems broke that circle. Nutrients now travel in one direction: extracted from soil in one part of the world, embedded in food, shipped globally, consumed, and then flushed into waterways as waste. The soil loses what it gave, and it never comes back. The waterways receive what they cannot absorb.

We pay for this broken system twice: once at the grocery store, and again in the healthcare costs of diet-related disease, and in the environmental costs of degraded rivers, depleted soils, and a destabilized atmosphere. Estimates of the true external cost of industrial food — when you price the health impacts, the soil loss, the water pollution, the emissions — run to over a trillion dollars annually in the United States alone.

We have constructed a system in which we work more hours to earn money to buy food that is less nutritious than what is growing, unbidden and free, in the ground beneath our feet.

A Response to Polycrisis, Not a Lifestyle Choice

The concept of polycrisis asks us to resist the temptation of solving one problem at a time. Our crises — ecological breakdown, fascism, public health, inequality, cultural disconnection — are not separate. They share roots. Which means responses that address only one thread at a time will always be insufficient.

Learning to eat wild plants and weeds is not the only or most important solution, but it is something more interesting: a convergence point. A single shift in practice and perception that pulls on multiple threads at once. It is a surprisingly powerful act of moral resistance against the very systems driving our planetary crisis.

It can reduce demand for synthetic fertilizers and the emissions they produce. It can create a personal incentive to keep local ecosystems intact and diverse rather than manicured or sprayed. It can replace nutritionally depleted industrial food with something genuinely nourishing. It can make part of our food supply free and accessible regardless of income. It can support the soil biology that stores carbon. And perhaps most importantly, it can rebuild something that industrial civilization has systematically dismantled: a felt relationship between people and the living places they inhabit.

A culture that outsources its nutrition to a globalized commodity system while poisoning its local ecological substrate is likely structurally incapable of that response — regardless of the quality of its climate models.

Systems thinkers have argued that the highest leverage points in a complex system are not technologies or policies but paradigm shifts — changes in the goals, values, and worldviews from which systems arise. A culture that sees weeds as food, sees local ecosystems as pantries, and sees itself as embedded in rather than separate from ecological systems is a culture capable of responding to polycrisis.

A Zen connection: Ecological Presence Requires Inner Ground

There is a quiet prerequisite to everything described in this piece that rarely appears in environmental writing: we cannot truly notice the natural world if we are not, at least some of the time, truly present within ourselves.

To observe whether a flower is arriving earlier this spring than last. To notice which bird depends on the berry we are about to harvest. To sit still long enough to hear what an ecosystem is telling us. None of this is possible when our minds are running the familiar loops of worry, guilt, self-criticism, unfinished conversations, or the ambient dread that comes with living in a time of cascading crises. Deep ecological attention is not simply a matter of putting the phone away. It asks something more of us.

What it asks, I believe, is some degree of inner settledness — and that settledness, for most of us, requires tending to the layers of trauma we carry, often without fully knowing it. These layers are not unusual. They are the ordinary inheritance of being human in this world: childhood experiences that left marks, systemic injustices absorbed into the body over years, losses that were never fully grieved, and — increasingly — climate dread.

There is a way through this, though it is not a shortcut. In my experience, both as a climate scientist and as a Zen Buddhist leader of grief-rage ceremonies, it begins with learning to belong to our own hurt and angry parts — to turn toward our pain rather than away from it, to let it be witnessed, and in that witnessing, to slowly release its grip on our attention. When we can do that — when we can be with what is most tender and difficult in ourselves without fleeing — we find that we can be with the world in the same way. We become capable of sitting with a dying ecosystem not just intellectually but fully, the way we might sit with someone we love who is suffering. That is a different quality of presence altogether.

This is not individual work alone. As I have written elsewhere, trauma heals most fully in community — in spaces where vulnerability is welcomed, where grief can move through a group, where no one has to carry their pain in silence. The climate movement urgently needs these spaces, not as an add-on to the "real work," but as the relational soil from which genuine collective action grows.

None of this means that a climate advocate must be fully healed before they are allowed to pay attention to a dandelion. It means something simpler and more human: that the practice of slowing down to notice the living world around us, and the practice of tending to our inner lives, are not separate practices. They nourish each other. Every moment of genuine presence in a living ecosystem is also a moment of returning to ourselves. And every time we learn to stay with something difficult inside us, we become a little more capable of staying — really staying — with the world outside.

BIPOC reclamation

For BIPOC readers, I humbly offer the fact that foraging in public or urban green spaces carries real risks that fall unevenly. Racial profiling, over-policing, and the criminalization of simply being on land are not hypothetical. They are present realities that any honest conversation about reclaiming ecological relationship must acknowledge and design around.

And yet — and this is important — the relationship between BIPOC communities and wild, living food has never truly been severed. It has been suppressed, criminalized, displaced, and grieved. But it persists. In grandmothers who know which leaves to pick. In diaspora kitchens where bitter greens from the old country are still cooked without a recipe. In the Bhil and Lepcha elders I have sat with in India, who never stopped knowing the land as a living relative. In African American foodways that carry plant knowledge born in the South — knowledge that was itself a form of survival and resistance. In Latinx communities where quelites — wild greens gathered from fields and roadsides — have been eaten continuously for thousands of years, through colonization, through migration, through everything.

This knowledge did not disappear. It went quiet. And it can be called back. Here are some ways to do that with both joy and safety:

Start on land that is yours or trusted. A backyard, a container on a balcony, a community garden plot — these are spaces where you can grow and harvest lamb's quarters, purslane, and nettles without navigating the risks of public space. Weeds do not need to be invited. They will come.

Forage in community, with community. There is both safety and joy in going out together — with neighbors, friends, a congregation, a mutual aid group. Reclamation does not have to be solitary. In many ways, it should not be.

Seek out and support BIPOC-led foraging and food sovereignty spaces. Organizations like Soul Fire Farm — rooted in Black and Indigenous food sovereignty — and urban foraging collectives led by and for communities of color are doing this work already. Joining them, learning from them, and contributing resources to them is part of the reclamation.

Go back to your own ancestral food knowledge. If your lineage is African, South Asian, Latin American, Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern — your ancestors knew wild food deeply. Talk to elders. The knowledge lives in seeds, in recipes, in bodies. It is waiting to be called forward.

Know your legal ground. In many U.S. cities and national forests, foraging small amounts for personal use is legal. Knowing this, carrying it with you, and sharing that knowledge within your community is itself a form of power.

The systems that told us land was not for us, that wild food was not food, that our presence in green spaces was suspicious — these systems were lying. They were lying to protect an economic arrangement that needed us separated from the land and dependent on what they were selling.

The dandelion growing through a sidewalk crack does not know about those systems. It is simply doing what life does — finding a way through, offering what it has, asking nothing in return.

That is, perhaps, the deepest teaching in this whole piece. Not that foraging is a political act, though it can be. But that the land has been waiting for us. That it never stopped.

Foraging weeds can be political and climate advocacy, too. Perhaps some of the most important kind.

(This piece draws on research from the United Nations’ IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the Endocrine Society, and peer-reviewed studies published in Environmental Health Perspectives, Science, and the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, among others.)