How or when do we talk about the books that move us? Perhaps at a dinner party. With a bookstore clerk or librarian. Maybe on Twitter or Facebook. Raving to a friend.

For those of us hoping for yet another form of book talk—and, connected to that, 

—additional solace can be found in the form of the new app 

. Inspired by informal salons in Spanish cafés and bars where people gather to exchange ideas and discuss political and artistic nuances, Tertulia condenses recommendations across forms of media and social media in a single space, offering a comprehensive window into book conversations happening around the world.

When first signing up for the app, users are prompted to select three or more genres of books that interest them (I chose Literature & Fiction, Mystery, and New Non-Fiction). Next, they indicate what kind of chatter they hope to hear synthesized in the personalized “book café” (I picked authors, book critics, and journalists). This allows them to include authors, critics, journalists, and even those they follow on Twitter. Based on my selections and data, the app opened on 

by Amy Tan, with recommendations from the likes of musical artist Dua Lipa and author Madeline Miller.

From there, users can browse the Tertulia virtual bookstore’s “shelves,” with selections curated by trusted voices across the literary and media worlds—synthesizing, for example, reviews from notable critics, Twitter chatter from authors and media figures, and even podcast mentions of books within the confines of the app. For Celeste Ng’s 

 review, a tweet from writer Dolen Perkins-Valdez, and even an Instagram post from actress Reese Witherspoon.

Tertulia allows users to purchase books directly from the app, build out personal lists, and scroll through trending stories. It can be difficult to cut through the noise of the hundreds of thousands of books that are published every year, and while community-oriented platforms like Goodreads (which since 2013 has been owned by Amazon) and the Bookly app already exist, Tertulia serves as an alternative, even more helpful and personalized tool for readers attempting to sift through it all. It’s also a way to steer away from the book-buying grip of Amazon.

So if “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” as Joan Didion once said, then perhaps Tertulia aids us in tackling the next part of that equation. Maybe we tell each other about stories so that they, too, might live as we have. In this new app comes a way for us to draw closer to the books that bind us, inspire us, or even destroy us. For all those emotions that books and words might elicit, here arrives an app that aims to help us in sharing more widely in them.

This New App Gives Readers a Place to Convene and Connect

Born beneath the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, a microscopic fungus is spurring a new culinary movement. Fy, short for “Fusarium of Yellowstone,” has sprouted into the limelight as a sustainable alternative for conscientious diners, and has begun to germinate in menus and stores across the United States.

, a Chicago-based company producing and distributing Fy-based products, came out of a partnership between scientists, explorers and “optimists” seeking to cultivate a sustainable food source out of fy. Today, it ships out a medley of fungi-based foods—with Fy breakfast patties and a maple-flavored alternative, as well as two flavors of dairy-free cream cheese. Fast-growing and more sustainably produced than a majority of other products on the market, Fy presents a new option for vegetarian-forward and ethically-minded consumers. Highly versatile, too, it’s capable of forming a substitute meat product as easily as a protein-packed powder or liquid.

, Fy uses less water, land, and energy than animal-based proteins. To help explain how Fy came to be, the company brought on YouTube star Hank Green, whose science brain has garnered immense internet fame, to create 

 reminiscent of his “Crash Course” and “SciShow” productions.

As explained by Green, the fungus was discovered during a NASA-backed study at Yellowstone National Park in which scientists were investigating what forms of life could thrive under extreme conditions. “Sooner or later,” Green says, “someone decided to lick it.” Nowadays, for commercial purposes, Fy grows in trays, fermenting starches and sugars from plants into protein—a process that can be easily replicated in sprawling cities and other environments not conducive to traditional agricultural efforts. (New York City’s 

 is another player at the forefront of the urban mushroom-propagation space.) Fy has even made its way into orbit, with Nature’s Fynd launching its protein bioreactor (the device that produces Fy) into space earlier this year in collaboration with NASA.

Green isn’t the only celebrity betting big on Fy. Eric Ripert, a 

 guest judge and the chef and co-owner of the three-Michelin-star Midtown Manhattan restaurant Le Bernardin (and the guest of Ep. 80 of our 

 podcast, out November 9), serves as a culinary advisor to Nature’s Fynd. Through Ripert, Fy has found its place in the finest of dining rooms, appearing in several items on his restaurant’s menu. The vegetarian tasting menu, for example, features a warm potato-olive-Fy parfait, crafted with dairy-free cream cheese derived from the fungus. The same cream cheese appeared in a cheesecake at the restaurant—a Fy-filled squash blossom accompanied by a blackberry sorbet.

With fine dining already in the mix and a trip to space in its rear-view-mirror, a “high-Fy” diet future could very well be on the horizon.

A Microscopic Fungus From Yellowstone’s Hot Springs Is Spurring a New Culinary Movement

When Ji Hye Kim first moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, she didn’t find much that resembled the homemade Korean cooking she’d grown up with. In 2016, in an effort to fill this gap, she opened 

, where her aim is to fuse traditional Korean recipes—like those her mother would cook—with the distinct produce of Michigan and the Midwest. But Kim, who was named 

, didn’t always see a culinary career in her future.

Raised for 13 years in Seoul before emigrating to New Jersey, Kim landed in Ann Arbor as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan studying political science and economics. Graduating shortly after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, she took a job at a hospital to renew her visa in a struggling job market. After working for a few years later, marriage brought her back to Michigan and Kim found a job in the specialty foods department at Zingerman's Delicatessen, where she fell in love with the work that went into preparing each item. She was struck by the level of detail and care that went into each batch of balsamic vinegar, each block of cheese, each brew of coffee. It was then that she began dreaming about opening her own restaurant, a place where she could not only supply homemade Korean dishes, but also bring that same attentiveness and knowledge to, say, a bottle of soy sauce.

Here, Kim describes how she celebrates Chuseok, the mid-autumn festival being celebrated this weekend in South Korea; shares her favorite dish; and delves into her approach to blending Korean tradition with modern-day Michigan ingredients.

“When I started getting into cooking, I thought about what I could do to expand Korean food in Ann Arbor. I started wondering, what does homemade Korean cooking look like here? It’s not like I can bring in fresh produce from Korea, and I can’t imagine practical Korean housewives, grandmothers, and mothers paying extra money to make their meals as Korean as possible when they can go to a farmer’s market and get in-season, better quality, and cheaper produce. All those thoughts went into the building of my restaurant, and they continue to evolve as we learn more. To some people, it might not look like familiar Korean food. But to me, it’s deeply Korean, while remaining true to my new home.

When I first came to the United States, I went from celebrating large festivals with my extended family to it just being me, my mom, and my brother. We still celebrated Chuseok, but in a smaller way. There was no hoopla coming from our neighbors, or our friends, or our school. It became a lonely holiday, but we made the best of it. The traditional feast involves way too many different kinds of food for one person to execute, so my mom went with a more basic version: taro and beef soup, premade rice cakes from a Korean grocery store, 

Before the pandemic, I would host special dinners, like a six-course all-you-can-eat buffet, with huge platters of Chuseok food. But now, my family is in New Jersey and I’m in Michigan, so I celebrate by putting a Chuseok special on the menu [at Miss Kim].

The spirit of Chuseok is a celebration of harvest. Michigan has one of the most amazing farming communities, brimming with so many colors of produce. This year, Chuseok falls on the first week of September, and that’s the best time for Michigan produce—there’s so much good stuff. Tomato doesn’t always get featured in Chuseok recipes, but I love buying green tomatoes and slicing it and using that for 

 [a pan-fried fritter] instead of zucchini, which is more typical. I love buying local mushrooms and using that in 

[thinly sliced, marinated, and grilled beef]—I used to just assume that all Koreans knew it. But when I started studying regional foods, I learned that this dish is specific to Seoul. And if Korea has well-developed regional cooking, then why not regional cooking in Michigan? If I am celebrating this holiday, which is deeply agricultural and rooted in the abundance of harvest, it wouldn’t make any sense if I didn’t use what’s been harvested by Michigan farmers.

The idea is that Korean food—or any food—is more than just a list of ingredients. You have to understand the spirit and the philosophy behind it. Chuseok is an agricultural holiday: It’s a celebration of harvest. So I try to honor that within my tiny community, and my friends, and the restaurant.”

An Ann Arbor Restaurant Fuses Korean Tradition with Modern-Day Michigan Ingredients

What does it mean to revisit a photograph? When a camera shutters, it locks a moment in time, forever trapping the image it renders. That well-trod notion, however universally understood, becomes unsteady in 

, the latest book by the Minneapolis-based photographer 

, whose work has long documented lonely souls and fractured dreams in spaces across the United States. In 

, Soth revisits five of his previous books, including in its pages new notes, annotations, text excerpts, and even photographs—melding his works into a distinct and retrospective road trip across his accomplished career.

A sense of bleakness pervades parts of this project, echoing the pain and shattered hope in some of Soth’s earlier images. His annotations remind us of time gone by—in the years since publication, subjects have died, places or names have been forgotten, certain photos have become favored over others. In one image from 

 (2004), a thickly-muscled man named Lenny sits shirtless with his dog. A note on his table reads, “My dream is to live as long as I possibly can! I like to live to be 100 yrs old and look as I do now!!” Soth’s scrawled note reveals Lenny died in 2011, at age 54.

 turns images, once captured and immortalized, into something fluid and contemporary. There’s an unstable temporality to the book, existing both now and then, imposing an alternation that is at times painful and sudden. All throughout, his photos capture visions of the Mississippi, Niagara Falls, hermits, and more. These are visceral, bleak, lonely, and haunting pictures. In revisiting 

 (2006), for example, Soth admits that he could never quite portray love as clearly as the distance between partners. Flipping through the book’s pages can be a melancholy affair.

His new work takes us inside past journeys, with readers becoming companions in retrospect. As a reader and viewer, it’s as if you're sitting there with Soth over a beer, listening as he remarks and remembers these wayward memories. All the same, the new pages are snapshots, too, flies trapped in their own printed amber. Revisiting may update the past, but it serves only to freeze each moment in a new time. What this leaves us with is a sense of Soth’s immense depths of experience—that though we can view his book as something complete and enclosed, there are countless sights left still unseen.

Fans of Soth and newcomers to his work alike can find something deeply moving in this dense volume. The title of the book stems from Walt Whitman’s 

. Like Whitman, Soth’s distinctive vision captures something new and timeless. As one flips through the volume’s pages—entranced by not only Soth’s images, but by his annotations, too—it is hard to think of Soth and his work as anything but poetry.

A New Book Captures the Magnificent Breadth and Melancholic Beauty of Alec Soth’s Photography

Scott Serrano and Allyson Levy know all too well that the distinction between a simply beautiful garden and an “important” one comes from its most fragile or unusual plants. “It’s the Noah’s Ark function,” Serrano says. “You try to find rare plants that are disappearing and protect them.”

The married couple are New York State transplants, artists spliced into the Hudson Valley region who have fostered countless plants over the past two-plus decades. But what began as a small backyard garden has since blossomed into a sprawling 21-acre estate—one that houses a variety of species as sure to entice a plant nerd seeking rare vegetation as a city dweller eager for a weekend escape.

 hosts more than just plants: Serrano and Levy open up the grounds to guests each weekend, and have been since 2007. For those who live too far away to visit in a single day, a repurposed barn on the edge of the gardens allows for overnight stays, and Kingston, New York, with its new 

The roots of the arboretum date back to 1999, when the couple moved from San Francisco to Stone Ridge, in New York’s Ulster County, where they first began tinkering in the dirt. The early days were steeped in trial and error: “Like, ‘Oh goodness, we killed 

 again. Let’s try mounting up the soil, or putting it in the sun, or protecting it more,’” Levy says. “Now that it’s been close to twenty-three years, it’s grown easier.” By 2001, their gardening efforts had turned serious. Their grounds are now home to a vast collection of flowers, shrubs, trees, and more—from hydrangeas to magnolias, from Florida anise to monkey puzzle trees. “Part of our work is to help preserve the diversity of life on earth,” Serrano says.

The grounds are teeming with life—verdant greens and flowers of all shapes, colors, and sizes dotting the earth. The smells are sure to be just as varied, with sweet scents floating off a range of rose breeds or a musky odor emanating from the soil. All of these and more dance and mingle in the Hudson Valley’s crisp breeze.

For rarer breeds, the couple not only grows them, but helps them propagate, selling some select plants to visitors. “If nurseries get things that are too zany, too out of left field, and they don’t get purchased, then they go out of business,” Serrano says. “So nurseries have to maintain a certain conservatism; they tend to get plants people already know. But there are literally tens of thousands of plants that are just as, if not more, beautiful that people are just not exposed to.” (Sharing their knowledge further, Serrano and Levy also recently published the book 

Cold-Hardy Fruits and Nuts: 50 Easy-to-Grow Plants for the Organic Home Garden or Landscape

The arboretum and gardens are home to six endangered species. For Serrano and Levy, the hope is that the property can serve as a space for the discovery and appreciation of nature for a long time to come, well beyond their time as its caretakers. “The goal is to leave our land to Ulster County as 

 arboretum,” Levy says. “And hopefully, we'll have more than twenty-one acres when we're in mushroom bags in the ground.”

From Their 21-Acre New York Estate, a Botanist Couple Propagates Plants and Gardening Know-How

Holger Schulze runs the Sound Studies Lab at the University of Copenhagen, where scholars and artists gather to explore sonic and sensory experiences. There, researchers trace the aural rhythms of our lives and of the societies we inhabit—both historically and in the present. Mixing field research and critical analysis, the lab tackles projects ranging from the birth of rave culture in the late Soviet Union to how the dramatic effects of climate change manifest in sound.

Schulze, a professor of musicology and the lab’s “principal investigator,” has spent decades trying to understand sonic experiences. Founded in 2011 at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in Germany, the Sound Studies Lab began with a project on functional sounds and sound design. It has since traveled across projects and universities, landing in Copenhagen in 2014. The lab now houses three full-time researchers and collaborates with sound scholars and artists across Europe and the United States.

We recently spoke to Schulze about what sounds can teach us, how they can effect change, and why our sonic experiences shifted amid a world of Zoom calls and pandemic-altered noise.

I was always interested in understanding how listening works, not just on an audiological level or physiological, acoustic level, but on an aesthetic level. When I studied in the ’90s, there wasn’t much scholarship about sound to be found. So I tried to create spaces through theater studies, literature studies, and media studies. When the early 2000s came, I realized there was a growing trend of people coalescing under the term of “sound studies.” It was now possible to speak about sound in a way that promoted a cultural study. It was an ongoing interest of mine that only became possible because academia moved in that direction.

What does the study of sound entail? What can we learn from it?

The joy in studying sound is that our topics are everywhere. I go out of the door, and there’s a topic. I’m talking to you and, of course, there’s the topic of Zoom sound. You’re sitting in one space, you have one “room space” in your voice, and I have another “room space” in mine. They are not conflictual, but if people are walking nearby, suddenly the outside world intrudes.

For me, the joy is that through sound, we can analyze the world. There is a long history of approaching the world through vision and through documents, but sound is still a young approach. My researchers try to understand the world historically, contemporarily, and also interpersonally—how people interact, and how political, social, or personal change comes about through sound.

Sound is like a door into the vast array of corporeal, sensory experiences. Once you're there, the step into smell, tactility, kinesthetics, or other areas is not so far away. The reason for that is the body. We don’t just listen from the ears, but from the whole body.

To many people, the idea that sounds can 

something is surprising. But if you look back into history and at present times, there are many moments when simply the activity of sound makes change. In the case of the Soviet Union, there were times when sounds suddenly presented a new freedom or a new radical lifestyle. Or, in the case of contemporary climate change protests, people are present through their sound—through the screaming, dancing, and cries. You cannot ignore this.

Action through sound is sometimes related to words and meaning, but more often has a role in itself. Sound does something to us. It can be unsettling, joyful, or freeing. So that is a range we deal with. It’s difficult to explain briefly, because you have to actually listen to it and experience it. But it has this moment of performance. So you do something with sound, and suddenly it happens. Suddenly, it signifies something. People change through that. That is perhaps the most concise way I can explain it.

How has the pandemic shaped the study of sound?

We were all surprised by how many sound projects suddenly popped up. Many people found that their city, or their village, or their countryside sounded different. Commuting died down, and the way people were doing things changed. You had time to go on a walk at 10 a.m. and listen at a time you might otherwise be at your desk.

Of course, there are also the Zoom call logics—all these dynamics of how we enter a conversation, how we negotiate who is going to speak, how the room sound enters the moment of conversation, how we suddenly look into personal spaces. On a phone call, we wouldn’t do that. So there’s an aspect of intimacy, of privacy, that came into the world.

How would you describe the mission of the Sound Studies Lab?

To understand and interpret the world through sound. To support these sound practices and actions. To transform the world through sound. We want to make clear that sounds are not merely passive, aesthetic objects. They are part of our world, and they change things.

A Lab in Copenhagen Looks at How Sound Explains the World

Steeped in centuries of rich cultural and agricultural practices, Japanese tea can be difficult to fully grasp, with its subtle hints of flavor and complex aroma. Brewed for well-versed drinkers and first-sip novices alike, Zach Mangan’s 

Stories of Japanese Tea: The Regions, The Growers, and The Craft

 (Princeton Architectural Press)  provides the ideal guide.

In the late 2000s, Mangan embarked on his own tea journey, turning from a life as a musician to one of a tea expert after a chance encounter with 

 while on tour in Paris. That first fateful bag later sparked a month-long trip to Japan, where the idea for 

, Mangan’s tea distribution company with offices in Brooklyn and Fukuoka, began to germinate. Here, Mangan returns to the roots of his craft and writes an account of his discoveries. The book, which documents how Mangan first fell in love with tea, acts also as a curated compass, containing recipes and food pairings, interviews with experts and craftsmen, and of course, step-by-step guides on how to assess, purchase, and brew the perfect cup of tea.

In the book, Mangan catalogs the diversity of Japanese teas, charting a course from the wide-ranging styles of 

. He writes carefully and lovingly about each genre of tea, easing out its distinctive qualities and logging the specific processes that precede each harvest. His words, though soaked in expertise, are easy to understand and accessible even to the least refined palate.

The book does not begin and end with Mangan’s journey alone. Its pages also briefly trace the echoes of tea history, touching on major developments that thrust the drink from an ancient footnote to a headline that spanned generations. Today, tea has become prolific both in and out of Japan. And with new technologies, Mangan notes, teamakers can create a quality product that stays fresh for longer.

Despite the rich history, though, it’s easy for descriptions of tea to fall flat. Often, people default to “earthy,” Mangan says. But tea, as with coffee or wine, takes time and study to understand. There is indeed a “terroir” to it. And while an undeveloped vocabulary doesn’t diminish one’s ability to enjoy it, Mangan leaves us with ways to broaden our language around it. So slow down, take a sip, and embrace your “flavor memory.” Do you pick up hints of leafy greens or nuts? Aromas of flowers in bloom? According to Mangan, there are no wrong answers.

A Handbook for Navigating the Nuances of Japanese Tea

Consider the flower. What image blossoms to mind? What emotion does it elicit? For centuries, flowers have persisted as muses, motifs, and even mediums for artists seeking to capture and express some aspect of the human condition. In 

Flora Photographica: The Flower in Contemporary Photography

 (Thames & Hudson), out August 30, editors William Ewing and Danaé Panchaud compose a selection of vibrant modern floral works. The end result is a book stocked to the brim with images that dance into bloom—but there’s more than beauty beneath the surface.

To the editors and visual artists whose work populates the book, the flower is at once political, symbolic, emotional, and expressive. As an example, the editors point to the publication’s very first image: a woman raising a small arrangement of flowers. Taken amid political protests in Belarus in 2020, the photo represents a simple gesture on its own, but one bold enough, in context, to warrant arrest. The book features essays by Ewing and Panchaud, as well as nine chapters—loose categories that bind together the hundreds of photographs that fill them. From “Roots” to “Imposters” to “Fugue,” the editors channel thematic concepts that resonate across the distinct petals on page. Those categories arose organically, the editors say, after laying out the 200-or-so photos that remained after trimming down from the thousands they happened upon during their research.

Among the 135 contemporary photographers featured in the book are David LaChapelle, Valérie Belin, Viviane Sassen, Martin Schoeller, and The Slowdown’s co-founder 

. “Compiling the photographs was a very joyful process,” Panchaud says. “And it’s not necessarily because flowers tend to be colorful and nice and innocuous, but more because it was an unexpected topic for many of the photographers we were looking at. We had a lot of surprises. Of course, there are a few who are very well known—maybe twenty or thirty of them—but the rest are a mix of absolute chance encounters.”

Despite the book’s neatly organized chapters, the editors note that flowers resist static interpretation, even within a single species. The chrysanthemum, for instance, a symbol of fertility in China, represents death in Europe, according to Ewing. “What’s interesting is not so much that there is a language of flowers,” he says. “It’s that the idea falls apart when you really look at it. People want to believe that there is a language of flowers. They want to be able to buy a manual and be told exactly what the chrysanthemum means, exactly what the peony means, exactly what the rhododendron means.”

The matter becomes even more complicated as the way we view flowers evolves in the contemporary era. For Ewing and Panchaud, new trends surfaced as they put together the collection: a shift from black and white to vibrant colors, a growing anxiety over the climate crisis, a keener eye for societal issues and ills. Still, there are some traditions that have carved out a resilient foothold; despite some shifting meaning throughout history, red roses have long been gifted as symbols of romance and love.

Undisputable is that floral traditions are deeply rooted in culture. “Flowers represent something extremely profound in our species’s history,” Ewing says. “The fact that you can watch a flower live and die—sometimes within the very same day—speaks to the heart of people. This is an analogy for our own lives, a reminder of the transience of life.”

A Photographic Compendium Highlights the Unspoken Power of Flowers

Writer Hannah Lewis says she practically fell in love with Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki when she first read the 2007 book 

, which he co-authored with ecologist Elgene O. Box. The book introduced the Miyawaki method, a reforestation technique that involves planting native trees close together in vacant lots and backyards to restore biodiversity in urban areas and towns. According to advocates, these tiny forests, even with footprints as small as six parking-lot spaces, can grow up to 10 times faster and generate 100 times more biodiversity than forests planted using conventional methods. The concept resonated with Lewis’s own efforts to raise awareness about sustainable ecosystems—including her work as editor of the 

Compendium of Scientific and Practical Findings Supporting Eco-Restoration to Address Global Warming

, a bi-annual, open-access compilation of scientific studies, industry and government reports, and journalistic investigations that outlines the benefits of repairing degraded or destroyed natural ecosystems as part of society’s response to the climate crisis. Reading Miyawaki and Box’s book led her to 

 in 2020, and a just-released book of her own: 

Mini-Forest Revolution: Using the Miyawaki Method to Rapidly Rewild the World

In the book, Lewis chronicles her own investigation of mini-forests, which span locations from a small coastal village in Brittany, France, to sprawling metropolises all over the planet. (Lewis lived in France while she was writing 

, and has recently returned to the U.S.) She explains not only the science behind Miyawaki’s genius, but also the trials of her own mini-forest project, which she planted in Roscoff, France. Like Miyawaki, she doesn’t shy away from digging her hands into the soil. And like the benefits of a mini-forest—from establishing wildlife corridors and habitats for pollinators, to bolstering soil health and sequestering carbon—the seeds Lewis’s story leaves behind are varied and quick to sprout, resulting in a book that is part personal narrative, part mini-forest ledger, part how-to manual, and part call to action.

Lewis also highlights how various mini-forests, informed by the Miyawaki method, are germinating rapidly across the globe. She writes of school children in France who slosh through mud, eager to submerge saplings into the ground, and tiny-forest advocate Shubhendu Sharma, who has planted a forest in his backyard in India. In Beirut, she spotlights traumatized survivors of an ammonium nitrate explosion, who have turned an abandoned park into a budding mini-forest, burying there the names of those lost in the blast.

We recently spoke with Lewis about the surging popularity of the Miyawaki method. Here, she talks about how mini-forests have the potential to help heal the planet as well as the people who plant them.

What initially drew you to the Miyawaki method?

I came across a project in Nantes, France, that was doing the Miyawaki method. That was the first time I heard about it. They were planting a small, dense native forest in response to the expansion of a road near their house, so that it would block the sound and filter out some of the pollution. I called them and asked for more information. The concept seemed ecologically sound: They were thinking about the species composition that would be growing there if the area hadn’t been cleared for agricultural development.

It was a completely different approach than what you normally see, where people plant a tree here, a tree there. And it seemed doable, because they weren’t trying to take on several hundred acres—they were just taking on two hundred square meters near their house. If two people can do something like that with the help of friends and their community, I thought, then that’s something that can ripple out. Little groups of people could do something of that size everywhere.

How do the environmental benefits of the Miyawaki method differ from other reforestation techniques?

There are lots of different goals when we plant anything. The aim may be decorative, to produce a product or a crop, to create shade, to stop erosion, or even to capture carbon. But Miyawaki’s goal was to regenerate 

. When you have many plants growing together, as his method proposes, the organisms are mutually reinforcing.

By creating a forest, you create a microclimate inside of it that is cooler, and more humid. That creates a more mild environment for everything growing there. It blocks wind, extreme temperatures, and sunlight to the interior, and all the plants benefit from that and grow well. It also creates a habitat that animals that live in forests need. So you’re creating a snowball effect by bringing all the species that would normally grow together into the same spot.

The Miyawaki method is extremely effective. For instance, a few years ago, researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and citizen scientists began 

 in a very small forest created using the Miyawaki method. The community had planted a couple dozen species of plants, but within a few years, they counted hundreds of plant and animal species. Mini-forests are like magnets. They create homes for animals that didn’t have homes before.

The other upshot of having plants growing in a community together is that you stimulate the soil, and get its 

—a microscopic network of fungus intertwined with the tree roots—going. When it rains, this underground sponge-like structure can absorb more water, which is handy not only in floods, but also in droughts. It’s a stockpile of nutrients that can continue to support the plants growing there.

The more productive the ecosystem is, the more carbon drawdown, photosynthesis, oxygen production, and all the other things we like about trees, result. They’re fortified in an ecosystem, versus being planted on their own and having to fend for themselves.

Why do you think the Miyawaki method is surging in popularity right now?

Part of it has to do with the fact that there was this 2016 

Ted Talk by eco-entrepreneur Shubhendu Sharma

, which simply disseminated the idea broadly. The timing of it was really good. It was right around the signing of the Paris Agreement, and people everywhere were becoming aware of how urgent the climate crisis was. We’re seeing the decline of nature so intensively, and that is accessible and really helps take care of the planet.

Some of the mini-forests you wrote about in your book, such as those planted in Beirut and the 

, were created as spaces for healing, both in an ecological sense and for the local communities. How did healing emerge as a theme of the so-called mini-forest revolution?

One thing Miyawaki emphasizes is that people are part of nature. That’s easy to forget in the middle of a city, when the things we depend on have corners and sharp edges and plug into the wall.

Miyawaki wanted to restore the earth’s ecosystems, and the reason he wanted to do that was for 

. We’re happier and healthier when we’re connected to nature, which is where we come from and what we still depend on today.

Where do you think the Miyawaki method fits into the global effort to find solutions amidst the climate crisis?

We hear a lot about technological solutions and reducing consumption, but the Miyawaki method is an approach that connects people to nature, and that works. You can engage your whole community in learning about what biome they live in. It’s a way to learn about the species that normally live in the same area as you, and to take care of them and to create a space for them again.

Once the planting starts, you don’t need any machines; you just need people. They can be small children or older folks, because the plants are not heavy. It’s a great way to establish a direct connection between a local ecosystem and local people. They’re the ones who plant it, and they’re the ones who are going to watch it grow.

Hannah Lewis on the Burgeoning “Mini-Forest Revolution”

Julian is a writer and reporter from Berkeley, California. His writing spans multiple genres, most recently covering local news in North Carolina. His work has also appeared in NBC News, HuffPost, and Columbia University’s longform magazine, 

Julian Shen-Berro

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