By: Emily Foubert

It is with great excitement that Agraria is changing the name of its education umbrella, The Nature School to The Land School. 

Beginning as the nature school was a dream come true for me, which was the inception of ongoing, continuous land-based programs for our young ones and families. As Agraria has grown, so too has the breadth of educational topics, skills, and traditions that we uplift, learn, and propagate in our communities. Not only are we a haven for ecological and cultural nature connection, but we are now also becoming a center that teaches adults traditional and farming ways of life through our burgeoning skillshare offerings and Regenerative Farmer Fellowship. 

So, why then make the change from the word “nature” to “land?” When I muse on the word nature, I associate it with this following list of accompanying meanings: outside of us; as something we go/travel to, not live in presently; a place we enjoy and recreate in, as a fun, one-off event; an objective scientific term. In contrast, the word land brings with it feelings of home; family; internal/within us; lineage; ancestors; belonging; living with and tending to presently; the reciprocal relationship between earth and humans; a subjective cultural term. 

And so it is the subjective, not objective, connection-filled meaning that we foster at Agraria. Digging, seeding, walking, tending, homesteading, tracking, building — these are all action words for living with the earth, not just learning about the earth. To me nature elicits looking, observing, and a more academic learning approach. Yet, land invokes living, tending, and a more kinesthetic way of being. We at Agraria are seeking to remember our culture of deep ecology and earth connection. 

At the same time as we have been implementing this name change, I have been reading a fabulous book that I recommend for anyone who loves meditating on land and language. Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane is a bank of tasty words of British and Irish origins that describe specific aspects of landscape, water, wind, weather, and farming. For someone like me who feels the disappearance of the traditional, land-based ways of her Welsh, Cornish, and Shetlandic ancestors heavily, this book is a feast for a soul starved of ancestral ecological knowledge. 

As I read, I tear up from relief that someone of my heritage still knows the language of the old ways. When we live with the earth, spending more time outside than inside each day — digging, listening, gathering, tending to the land — it follows that we have a rich language to describe our daily lives. So many terms have been lost, terms that speak to the intimacy between humans and earth, as evidenced in MacFarlane’s book. This loss of intimate land language starkly highlights our disconnect. The revival of these terms, in turn, can be a measure of our reconnection and a description of our actions, a re-remembering of our intimate connection with the land.

A few wonderful words/phrases from Macfarlane’s book: 

Milkbottle ice slide made by children in winter conditions (Nottinghamshire dialect) 

Lan sacred area or enclosure (Cornwall) 

Boreen small seldom-used road usually with grass growing up the middle (Hiberno-English) 

Prickingings footprints of a rabbit (Northamptonshire) 

Dowly of a day: dull, gloomy, misty (Lancashire) 

Gob period of stormy weather in spring (Caithness)

Hazeling of a morning: warm and dry following a dew, and therefore a good morning to sow. 

One term from MacFarlane’s book that has already caught on with Agraria’s naturalists and educators is to smoog:  “the work of children to gather, crack, stack, and whack bits of fallen timber in woods.” As we build out the nature play area on our land, we smoog with the children, gathering sticks for fires and clearing understory for ease of movement through the bracken and to use in our shelters.

The Land School is a community-based project that yearns to connect families within our daily lives, drawing us out from behind our televisions and into gardens, forests, and streams together. Nuclear families are the zeitgeist of our times, yet The Land School can broaden our notion of a family unit. Nuclear families are the kernel of a parental unit and their direct children. Typically, the notion of a nuclear family is associated with private land, consumerism, and the dependency on society for food, clothes, and shelter, and separate financial responsibilities from the community at large. This dependency on a consumerist society, of being society-reliant instead of self- or community-reliant on lifeways skills (cooking, building, growing food), creates a collective psyche of disconnect with the earth, and subsequently lower life satisfaction. Tori DeAngelis collects a few studies that point to this broader societal depression in her essay published in American Psychological Association, Consumerism and its discontents.  

I invite you for a moment to close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Three, actually. And ask yourself, “what are my fondest childhood memories?” Take a moment to swim in those memories. What made them so wonderful? Were you outside? Were you with others; if so, who? I would bet that your memories, like mine, are outside, with people and land in close intimacy, such as eating together, sleeping under the stars, cooking over a fire, building, growing. This. This is our route to happiness. More time together, outside. Richer lives and language will come of it. If empirical evidence is helpful for you, I invite you to read this meta-study linking nature connection and happiness. 

Let this year be the beginning of many where we revitalize our deep sense of place. We hope you will join us for children’s camps, after-school/homeschool/family programs, seasonal celebrations, and Wednesday evening gatherings for all ages- Land Walks (1st Wed of the month), Skill Shares (2nd), Volunteer Hours (3rd), and Bird Language Meditations (4th). In the summer we will also be hosting Open Garden hours, Family Camp-Out, and multi-day August Skillshare Gathering. During these events, we will remember and make anew the words of belonging to the lands of Ohio. Here’s to many successful years of reconnection at the Land School! 

*Foubert is the Youth Education Manager at Agraria.