Akira Miyawaki

It's hard.

You know? It's not Miyawaki forest.

Yeah.

Many people think-

Thank God

... yeah, it's not Miyawaki forest.

Yeah, Miyawaki needs to just-

Most of the real estate-

The power of planting a native tree, for example, is remarkable.

We've just had been working with groups of students here to plant a series of Miyawaki forests, these small, tiny little forests that And people are doing it in their neighborhoods, their backyards, cities are organizing Milwaukee forest plantings, tiny forest, forest, pocket forests, many forests, lots of different words for essentially the same idea, taking little bits of space and the city and creating, you know, permeability and biodiversity and.

doing all these wonderful things, changing the temperature, little plants, little plantings like that, relatively little, it could be the space of a couple of parking spaces.

This is what, you know, we've done some films about, there's examples from the Netherlands where they've taken a handful of car parking spaces and converted them into little forests.

Super, super important, and one of my biggest failure and success as well, yeah.

When, uh, if you go to our food forest experiment, we are experimenting several protocols, and we started with a Miyawaki-inspired food forest.

Um, there's a lot of good things in it, yeah, uh, because Miyawaki is the-

So more syntropic style

You can create a beautiful patch that m-that makes you happy within two years, very fast.

There are other criteria, the resilience, the fruit production.

Fruit production in a Miyawaki-inspired, uh, forest is very bad.

I can give you the example of the mango that we planted with a kid.

Basically, it's a mixture of the part I'm very interested in, how do we work with ecosystems to help with everything that ecosystems can help with to make good use of these ecological services, for instance, like helping with mitigating flood potential in a city, stormwater management, like you mentioned, creating cooling areas to counteract the heat island effect in cities, as ecological sanctuary, sanctuaries for native biodiversity, you know, so that the city can be contributing to mitigating the extinction event, to contributing to the restoration of local, greater local ecosystems.

We can grow Miyawaki forests inside of cities and create these little sanctuaries that are mature forest biodiversity.

So climax forest biodiversity pockets where we can preserve endangered species that don't have anywhere else to be preserved.

And because there are not cows walking through the city so often, We have these special opportunities to create special nature conservation zones.

We get to see more, you know, more life.

That's awesome.

If you were to take, let's say in Southwest Texas, because it's got a particular capacity for native plants to thrive, what would a park look like in a city that is done the conventional way versus a park that would be done in the Miyawaki style or the complex forest system that you're talking about? When a person walked through it, what would they see that was different? Or maybe not see.

Right.

So bear with the incredible sounds of nature.

So Miyawaki forests were developed by Akira Miyawaki, who was a Japanese botanist and plant ecologist.

And he was born in 1928.

And he He experienced incredible hardship throughout his life.

Definitely.

We're actually working with some folks in New Orleans, shout out Dirty Nola Landscaping, um, to put Miyawaki forests in people's lots and yards as a way to make super dense biodiverse plantings in the city.

And I think, yeah, we try and, you know, like we were saying a little bit earlier, you know, we're not in the context that Akira Miyawaki was developing this methodology.

We are taking his process as like the inspiration for a type of approach to to either restoration or land stewardship or so on and so forth.