Brace yourselves for some rough audio! Something about our cellphone connection caused some problems with Akiva’s voice. Our producer got it into a tolerable condition and our editor pulled together a great transcription (below).
Akiva Silver is the owner of Twisted Tree Farm, a 20-acre homestead and nursery dedicated to growing healthy trees, food, and family in Spencer, New York. He is also the author of Trees of Power: Ten Essential Arboreal Allies. In this episode, Akiva tells us about his journey to growing trees, his perspectives on nature and ecological history, and his approach to humanity’s relationship with its environment. Akiva also generously shares information about his growing practices, his property, and his business. Find out more about Akiva’s farm and writing on his website.
Links
Timestamps
0:00 – intro
1:12 – humans as part of the ecosystem, conversations with nature
7:01 – when Akiva started farming, evolving relationship with nature, wilderness survival
12:51 – places of great disturbance and wildlife, people creating diversity and abundance by accident
14:41 – Akiva’s property
16:23 – Akiva’s business
22:36 – Akiva’s book: manifesto and field guide, writing and articles
24:54 – American chestnut tree, keeping things in balance
28:48 – state of the New World prior to European settlement, abundance and prosperity in North America
36:42 – the chestnut story around the world, adaptation and evolution, enormous diversity in nature
41:19 – people as gardeners of the globe, what being caretakers and stewards really means
44:59 – the phenomenal complexity of nature, making adjustments
47:40 – faith, humility, curiosity
48:45 – fighting cynicism and bitterness
51:02 – putting your work where your mouth is, sphere of influence
54:17 – conclusion
Long-form text version
Geoff Graham: Welcome to the Yeoman podcast. I’m your host, Geoff Graham. On Yeoman, I’ll speak with people who build and grow things, people who create art, and people who think about community, meaning, and purpose. My guest today is Akiva Silver. Akiva is the owner of Twisted Tree Farm in Spencer, New York, and the author of Trees of Power: 10 Essential Arboreal Allies. You can purchase Trees of Power and his other books, as well as seeds, scions, shrubs, and bare root trees, at twisted-tree.net. On his site, you will find a great many articles and videos where Akiva has generously and patiently shared his deep growing experience. He’s also appeared on plenty of podcasts. I don’t believe he’s on Twitter, though you can find him on Instagram at @ttfarm279. And, of course, you can find him here today on Yeoman.
Akiva, welcome. Thank you for joining me.
Akiva Silver: Alright, thanks for having me.
Geoff Graham: If I may, I’d like to start our conversation with the following quote from the first chapter of Trees of Power and then ask you to elaborate a bit. You write:
The highest level of appreciation comes through participation. I hope this book inspires you to gather and plant the trees here—by which you mean the specific trees you describe in the later chapters—the trees here are some of the most enjoyable beings on Earth to work with. If you watch for them, they will overwhelm you. Sometimes it will seem like they are merely offering you thousands of pounds of food and seed for free, but they have their own interests at heart. By taking from them, you will be helping them. You will be partners.
Nice. I like that.
Akiva Silver: Yeah, who wrote that? That was great. I love that.
Geoff Graham: I love the notion that you present, particularly in the first half of the book before you get into the specific trees—of reminding us to see humans as part of our ecosystem, and the nature around us as things that we exist with, rather than apart from. Can you tell me how that’s, um, when you first began thinking that way?
Akiva Silver: I’m not sure when, but I think some of these things we just realize slowly. I’ve come to the understanding that we’re in a conversation with nature. Whether you’re working with a tiny backyard, a patio, a big farm, a wilderness area, or whether you own property or not, we’re always in this conversation. There’s an action and there’s a response.
If you’re mowing the grass every week and not doing anything else, it might seem like there’s no conversation, but that’s actually a pretty significant conversation that’s taking place—and with a pretty loud response. That’s why I think participation can create a really deep conversation when you’re noticing it and doing things. It’s not just about enforcing your will, like saying, “I want to put an orchard here,” or “I want to have a garden here.” It’s more about starting to do stuff and then seeing how it feels—seeing how the land responds, what kind of results you’re getting.
As we do things, you can tell fairly soon how it feels. If it’s just flowing and happening almost effortlessly, and things are just kind of moving really easily, that’s a good sign. On the other hand, sometimes you start doing stuff and it just feels impossible—this thing breaks, that thing breaks, and it just doesn’t feel right. But when it feels right, that’s where the conversation is really happening. It’s when you’re noticing how your actions feel in the moment.
When your actions feel really good in the moment, the response that comes later is usually pretty profound. Maybe that response is noticed a year later, or two years later, or 10 years later, but it’s significant. For example, let’s say I’m planting a bunch of seedlings in a field, and as I’m going, it doesn’t feel good—the weather is bad, there’s a lot of clay and rocks, and I just feel like I’m shoving these trees into the ground, hoping they’ll work but not really knowing. Then there are other times when the soil isn’t too wet, isn’t too dry, and the roots just slip right in. You step back from what you just did, and it feels right. Those plantings often work out a lot better.
So, I think there’s this whole conversation taking place in which we’re being told if we’re in the flow of things, if we’re reflecting. It’s like when I’m having a conversation with a person—you can tell if it’s going well or if it’s hitting walls. When you hit walls, you have to redirect, reassess, and rethink things. That’s how I feel when working with nature. I’m constantly starting something, and if it doesn’t feel good, I just abandon it. Why force an issue? It’s like if you’re talking to someone and they’re clearly not listening—what’s the point of trying to keep telling them something? It’s better to say, “Let’s talk about something else,” or “I’ll go talk to a different person,” or “I’ll go be by myself now.”
I think that’s what it has to be like if you’re working in the garden too. It’s got to feel good, it’s got to feel right, and it’s got to be smooth.
Geoff Graham: How long ago did you begin farming?
Akiva Silver: I’ve been working on the property I’m on for 15 years—I got it in 2009. I was doing some stuff for a couple of years before that at a place I was renting. But most of my background is actually more about foraging, wilderness survival, and primitive skills. That’s also a tremendous conversation to have—just trying to find and gather your own food and materials from the wild.
Geoff Graham: I’ve listened to you share about that in other conversations and podcasts, and you write about it a good bit in your book. If I have it right, that was your path to beginning to grow trees. You started to appreciate, through observation, how much wildlife and nature were present around human settlements, and how positively we could impact what happens in nature. Is that how you began farming?
Akiva Silver: Yeah, absolutely. When I first got interested in nature, I grew up with a typical American middle-class childhood—not really immersed in nature at all, not paying much attention to the plants and animals around me. When I first started getting really interested, I had the philosophy that’s more or less mainstream in our society—that nature is good and pure, and people are bad and dirty, just making a mess of things. If you want to see nature, you need to get as far away from people as you can because anything we do just contaminates it.
There’s this whole concept of “leave no trace” camping, like “leave only footprints, take only pictures” kind of ideas. I just assumed that was the way to be—to move through the Earth making as little impact as possible, not leaving any evidence that I was there. But the more time I spent in nature—and you can spend a lot of time in nature and not really get much out of it—but I was really engaged because I was trying to learn.
Geoff Graham: And what age were you at this point? How old were you?
Akiva Silver: 21. I’m 45 now.
Geoff Graham: Got it.
Akiva Silver: Yeah, I just read some books and got very excited about the idea of wilderness survival. I wasn’t just interested in wilderness survival; I wanted to go full-on primitive—like Stone Age technology only. I didn’t want to survive with a knife or anything like that. I wanted to be able to make all the tools, just hunt and forage, and do it in this pure, purist mentality.
That approach had some drawbacks, but it was also really good because when you start trying to do things—like if you’re trying to harvest food and you don’t have anything except your hands—you end up really having to tune in. For instance, making stone tools doesn’t mean you just pick up any rock and break it open. You have to really understand the different types of rocks and how they break. And if you’re trying to catch a wild animal like a rabbit or a chipmunk, you have to understand what they eat, what they do—and I didn’t know any of that stuff.
So, it created a need for very deep observation—really paying attention to details and trying to understand how to read tracks, what bird language is, and what’s happening in the woods, where to find different types of plants. You spend a lot of time constantly being curious, asking questions, and trying to figure things out. I’m the kind of person who tends to go deep with things if I get interested in them seriously, and I became really obsessed. I was spending every possible minute in the thickets, in the woods.
If I had to be somewhere, like at a family gathering or something, I would always wander off at some point and go find some thicket or patch of weeds—anything. I would crawl around in there and observe everything I could. I wanted to know about the soil underneath the plants, why they were growing there—I just wanted to know everything. The more I observed, the more I started to understand that wildlife is actually way more abundant near places of great disturbance. It’s almost like the more disturbance there’s been, the more animals, birds, and plant diversity there are.
Now, there are certain kinds of plants that only grow in undisturbed areas, but as far as being able to find food, see animals, and hear birds, it wasn’t in the deep mountains at all. It was always in places like the junkyard behind Walmart, along highways, and so on. Once I started to observe that, it just became more and more apparent—it’s like once you see something, you start seeing more of it.
So then, that led me to realize, “Oh, people aren’t necessarily bad for nature. They can actually create more diversity and abundance—and they’re doing it mostly unintentionally, by accident.” Once I realized that, I thought, “What if we did it on purpose? What if we created these disturbances intentionally?” I couldn’t stop after that. The whole concept of enhancing an ecosystem to the point where there are more birds, more animals, more types of flowers, fruits, and herbs was so exciting to me. So, I’ve just been building ponds and planting trees ever since.
Geoff Graham: How long before this did you get your property? As I recall, you were growing things on the side and working in landscaping, is that right?
Akiva Silver: Yeah, I was doing that and a lot of wilderness education programs with kids for years. That was throughout my 20s. I got my property when I turned 30, I think—yeah, that makes sense. I can’t remember all these details exactly, but yeah.
Geoff Graham: When I first learned of your work, I think you had five acres, but I believe you started smaller than that. And now you have much more land, is that right?
Akiva Silver: No, I bought 20 acres—it’s the only property I’ve ever owned. It was 20 acres when I got it, and I’ve been here the whole time.
Geoff Graham: Has the area you’ve been farming grown?
Akiva Silver: Yeah, the 20 acres have been a long project, and it’s starting to feel filled in. There’s still quite a bit I’d like to do, but it’s getting more and more settled. I use more and more of it every year.
Geoff Graham: Can you share a bit about the growth of your business—how you started selling trees, and where you are now?
Akiva Silver: Sure. I started before I moved here, when I was still renting. I would collect seeds and dig up seedlings, put them in pots, and then sell them on Craigslist—which was what people used back then to sell things. It was just a little bit of side money. Then we bought our property and moved here, and I was still selling stuff like that—on Craigslist or through plant walks I would give.
Once I was here, I realized I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to drive somewhere else to work, and whenever I did, all I could think about was what I wanted to work on at home. So, I started daydreaming about how I could actually make money at home. I remember talking to my friend Sean Dembroski, who owns Edible Acres and is a really good old friend of mine. I asked him, “How can I make money at home?” and he looked at me and said, “Plant propagation.” I knew he was right, and I started putting everything I could into the nursery—moving plants, building a website, and advertising in every way I could think of to get the word out that I had trees. I just started growing as many as I could.
Once I really decided I wanted to do it, it took probably two or three years before it became my full-time job.
Geoff Graham: Can you give us a sense of the scale of the business now? Like, the number of customers you have, the number of trees you’re selling—those kinds of things.
Akiva Silver: Yeah, sure. I don’t keep very precise records, but I think we generally move about 10,000 seedlings a year. This spring, I sent out maybe 600 orders to different people, and then there are always people who stop by and just come and get stuff. The business definitely provides more than an adequate income. It gives me some flexibility and creativity. I don’t feel like I have to work too hard or kill myself trying to make ends meet. I’m not one of those people who runs a farm and is busy and stressed out all the time.
As far as the work of growing things to sell, dealing with customers, and packaging plants, it probably amounts to about 15 hours a week. So, anywhere between 10 to 20 hours a week, I’d say.
Geoff Graham: Do you have support? Or seasonally, do you get help?
Akiva Silver: Yeah, I used to have a lot more help. At one point, I had five people working for me. Now, I just have one guy who comes for half a day a week. But it’s kind of up to me how big or small I want the business to be. I’ve found a happy medium where it’s not stressful, and it’s big enough. I like the size it’s at now because it’s easy to add new things or take away others as I feel like it.
For example, last year, I grew a lot of black locusts and sold them, but this year, I didn’t even feel like starting any. I’m doing more with berries and aquatic plants now. It’s just kind of fun—I grow what I feel like, and there are people out there who want plants.
Geoff Graham: It seems to me like you always sell out of pretty much everything. Is that right?
Akiva Silver: I think so. Sometimes there will be things left over. Like this year, we finished our shipping season about a week ago, and once I sent out the last order, I looked around and saw what was left that I’d rather not grow for another year in the nursery. There was a pile of about a thousand chestnut seedlings, and I realized I hadn’t sold them. But then, that same day, a guy contacted me and bought all of them, so that worked out well. Sometimes I have extras, but usually, I can sell everything out because the internet is very big, and I’m very small.
It might sound like a lot—10,000 seedlings—but when you think about the size of the country and how people from all over are ordering our plants, it’s not that much. I’m in New York State, and I get orders from people in Ohio, Florida, Washington, Vermont—just people all over who are gardening and Googling stuff. They find what they want, whether it’s an apple tree or something else.
Geoff Graham: So, when did you start writing about it? The book, I have to say, is beautiful. For people listening or watching, I don’t know that I’ve read another book quite like it. It’s half manifesto—maybe the first half—and then the second half is kind of a field guide to 10 of your favorite “trees of power,” your magnetic trees. It’s a deep dive into helping people understand each of these trees, how to grow them, specific things about them. But the first half is very much a manifesto. When did you start writing?
Akiva Silver: I don’t know. I think I’ve always written, just for fun. I’ve always had writing as kind of a hobby. Before I wrote the book, I used to write a lot of articles, which actually helped build the business in a lot of ways. I would write articles and, you know, I’d just get excited about something and couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I had to write it down. I’d write about American plums, for example, and why they’re such a cool tree, and then I would take that article and share it with every listserv I could find. I’d just tell people, “Hey, here’s another article I put out,” and it was free, with no ads or anything.
Geoff Graham: Sounds like you built credibility through that.
Akiva Silver: Yeah, in a way. I wasn’t doing it for selfish reasons—I just genuinely wanted to talk about how cool American plums were. But then people would say, “I want to grow that,” and I’d say, “Oh, okay, cool, I have a bunch of seedlings.” So, it was a good way to help get the word out. I would submit those articles to newsletters, like native plant societies and stuff like that.
Geoff Graham: The first tree of power that you begin talking about in the book is the chestnut tree. You spend a great deal of time on that—both a tragic and a hopeful story with regard to the American chestnut. Would I be right in sensing that you have a soft spot in your heart for the chestnut?
Akiva Silver: Yeah, I’d say it’s more like—at least at the time I wrote the book—it wasn’t so much a soft spot as an obsession. I just could not stop thinking about chestnuts for several years. Once I realized what these trees are and what they do, I just—I just can’t even believe how phenomenal they are. There needs to be more of them, you know? We lost so many, and it’s not hard now to bring them back. It’s like these trees belong in our landscape, and our landscape is really missing something without them.
For example, if you start looking at nut trees in general—walnuts or beech nuts or oaks, or any of the wild nut trees, pines even, you know—any kind of pine makes a nut, right? You start looking at these trees, they actually don’t make a crop every year. Most of them will be like every two or three years, and some are even worse. You know, some beech trees will make a crop every seven years, ten years. Pines, it’s like every three or four, you’ll get a good crop. Black walnuts, it’s every couple of years.
And you think about that, and it’s like, okay, big deal, whatever. But if you are an animal that depends on a high-protein source dropping from trees, if you’re depending on nuts, and you have years where there’s nothing—where the acorns just didn’t drop at all because there were none—then wildlife populations go through these boom-and-bust cycles. And nowadays, if you read about wildlife, it’s considered normal for squirrels to go through boom-and-bust cycles with their population. Absolute peaks and crashes are regular and considered normal, but I don’t think that used to be the case.
So, chestnuts are unique in that they bear nuts pretty much every single year. This chestnut grower I work with, Brian, he’s been growing chestnuts for almost 50 years now, and he’s had a crop every single year. There was only one year he had a very small crop, but pretty much every other year he’s had a really substantial crop. And so if you have trees like that in the landscape, then the walnuts can fluctuate, the oaks can fluctuate, but the chestnuts were like a cornerstone that kind of kept the whole system from getting too far out of balance. So, you didn’t have to have gigantic numbers of animals starving to death because there’s no food.
This is one way that I think chestnuts were very important in our landscape—just keeping the whole thing in check from swinging too far high and low. You know what I mean?
Geoff Graham: So you and I are on the subject of chestnuts and the abundance of them. In the book, you spend at least a couple of pages talking about Charles Mann’s book 1491, which is a book I highly recommend to people. It’s about the state of the New World prior to European arrival. The book is kind of in two parts, as I recall—there’s a lot on South America and a lot on North America, two very different civilizations there. But the picture of North America Mann paints in 1491, as I recall, is one of enormous abundance and probably as populous as Europe*. Healthy, certainly there are skirmishes, but largely pretty peaceful. And I wonder, at least on the East Coast or in the eastern parts of the states, how much the chestnut had to do with that. As you described the abundance around them, I think that probably it was critical there.
[* Note from Geoff: A friend prompted me to fact checked Mann’s population claims, and plenty of anthropologists—indeed the overwhelming majority of anthropologists—contest this claim.]
Akiva Silver: Yeah, um, so for example, to give you an example, I looked at the first forestry survey for my county in Tioga County, New York State, and they said 50% of the trees in this county were chestnut. So it was a very dominant tree, and I would imagine those were massive groves that sustained people and sustained wildlife populations and had a lot to do with just, you know, providing a real solid source of basically bread for people and animals that was there every single year. And I think that it must have had a lot to do with creating stable societies and systems and ecosystems.
Geoff Graham: This was new to me in Mann’s book—the idea that North America was as populous, if not more populous, than Europe at the same time, with a comparable size landmass.
Akiva Silver: Yeah, he talks about how the Pilgrims come over on the Mayflower and land at Plymouth Rock—it’s like the story we know. But the beginning of that story is, for a couple of decades before that, they kept sending ships over, and the ships had nowhere to go. They would get to the East Coast, and it was filled with towns of the native people. It wasn’t like, “Oh, we’ll just settle here and start this New World.” No, this New World was filled to the brim with civilization, and there was nowhere for them to go. So they would get their boat there, do some trading, and then they’d go back to Europe—they couldn’t stay there, there was nowhere to go. And then one day, they came back in 1620 when the Mayflower lands, and they get there, and—I don’t know if that’s the right year—but they get there, and all these villages are empty. And they’re like, “Oh, well, we can settle here now because all these people are gone.” You know, they had all died from disease. But, uh, yeah, it was very populated.
Geoff Graham: Yeah, it’s interesting to think about what early Europeans experienced when they encountered the New World. What they really experienced was a post-apocalyptic world. I mean, 95% of the population had died within the span of one generation.
Even that first Thanksgiving story with Squanto—what would that have been like? It would truly be the worst conceivable apocalypse. Meanwhile, you show up and think, “Oh, we found this new place,”
Akiva Silver: You’re just talking to the survivors of something incredibly tragic that had just happened.
I don’t think we really understand what it was like to walk into a place that had just lost almost everybody. If somebody showed up in New York City now, they’d have one experience, but if they showed up after almost everyone had died, they’d have a totally different take on what that civilization was.
Geoff Graham: Right. They also walked into this enormous abundance—this Eden of massive forests and great production—without fully appreciating that these had been cultivated over many generations to be the way they were. There was just so much abundance in that place relative to what they were used to. It was the first time I really started to think about what civilization meant, and how limited a view we had on all the different ways people have achieved prosperity. There was certainly great, widely shared prosperity in North America in 1491, especially relative to Europe.
Akiva Silver: Yeah, but it wasn’t recognized because it was so foreign. And all those systems were collapsing when Europeans arrived because diseases like the flu and smallpox traveled faster than the Europeans did. By the time the Europeans arrived somewhere, the disease had already played out in a lot of cases.
Geoff Graham: Right, they advanced with feral pigs—pigs carried the diseases. The diseases spread outward as the pigs went feral, right?
Akiva Silver: I was imagining it more like this: a group of people trades with a ship that just arrived in New England, and now they have influenza. They bring it back to their town, then someone from their town travels to a town further west and spreads it there. Then someone from that town travels to another place and spreads it further. I think people just carried it around. But I guess it doesn’t really matter now. It’s just one of those remarkable stories from the history of this Earth that never seems to run short of amazing, horrifying, and awesome tales.
Geoff Graham: Yeah, I hadn’t thought about it, but the chestnut’s experience is somewhat parallel to that.
Akiva Silver: The story of the chestnut is a really old and good one. If you think about chestnuts, there are chestnuts native to America, Japan, and Europe. Did these trees just spring up out of nowhere, with a new species popping up in America and another in Japan, totally separate? No, I’m sure they had a common ancestor, like the original kind of chestnut tree. This happened so long ago that it was back when all the continents were connected, in the days of Pangaea.
That’s hold old chestnuts are. Chestnuts were around when the continents were still connected, and then, over time, as the continents split apart and mountain ranges formed, the American chestnut ended up living in places like Maine, Georgia, and other regions. It adapted to its environment—whether it got really cold or had to deal with certain diseases and insects. The chestnut just kept adjusting, growing, and evolving. For example, it had to coexist with white pines that grow 250 feet tall, so it had to learn different things.
Meanwhile, another group of chestnuts was living in Southern China, dealing with a whole different set of circumstances. Each species figured out its own way to survive in its specific environment. Now, we’re in this period of globalization, and chestnuts are facing new challenges. All those different species that evolved in different places now have a chance to come back together and share what they’ve learned. It sounds a bit strange, but it’s true.
Geoff Graham: I love how you described that in the Chestnut chapter. It’s such a wonderful story. We’ve obsessed over helping the American chestnut remain solely an American chestnut while also making it blight-resistant.
Akiva Silver: We want to reunite the American chestnut with its long-lost cousins! It’s like saying, “You need to talk to your ancient siblings in Japan because they know how to deal with Chestnut blight, and you clearly don’t.” So, bring them back together. They can have a conversation, have sex, and make new trees that can do what the American ones can do and what the Asian ones can do. You can create these phenomenal trees that are well-adjusted to this world because they’ve learned so much over this incredibly long period of time in all these different places.
It’s almost unfair not to allow them to do that and instead insist on just growing the American ones. It’s so shortsighted. You’re calling it an American chestnut, but look at the history of where these trees come from—they were here before North America even looked like this. So, who are we to say, “This is this species, and that’s that species”? That’s how I feel about it. These trees can get along with each other, but people are the ones who want to keep them apart. And there are actually people who want to keep them apart and don’t want the different genetics to mix. I think it kind of sucks for them. I think it’s unfortunate because there’s a lot of plant diversity in this world, and if we don’t start using it, we’re really missing out. Why not take advantage of this incredible diversity we have on this planet?
We shouldn’t be limited by the boundaries we’ve drawn on maps, deciding where something belongs. Everything has been moving around the planet for much longer than we’ve been here.
Geoff Graham: You talk about people as caretakers—like we’re the gardeners of the globe. Actually, there’s a great quote in the forward to this book Trees of Power by Samuel Thayer. He writes:
“We are not aboard a doomed ship bobbing in a frigid sea. We are on Earth, exactly where we are supposed to be, surrounded by all that we need, in a garden that needs tending.”
He continues:
“Trees are the answer to so many of our ills and the ladder to so many of our dreams. They are the arms and hands of the Earth, reaching up to the heavens on our behalf, grasping the slippery currency of sunlight, and rendering it through their wondrous alchemy into the stuff of life—our life and theirs.”
I thought that was beautiful. It spoke to me as a reminder—or maybe it’s new to some people—that our purpose isn’t to make the world a completely natural place, but to be stewards of it. To care for it, help it grow, and develop in a great way. It’s such an optimistic message, much like your thoughts on chestnut trees—a positive message about the important role we can play as stewards.
Akiva Silver: People frame themselves in different ways—some say we’re a cancer on the Earth, while others believe we’re meant to be caretakers. There’s a range of views on this. I wonder if the whole idea of being a caretaker might be a bit egotistical, thinking, “Oh, I know the answers; I’ll take care of you.” I like the idea of participation and conversation more. We’re here with everything else, trying to figure it out together. Participating and interacting in a conscious way—paying attention to what’s being said back to us—is important.
If you’re in a conversation where you’re just talking and talking and not even listening when the other person speaks, it’s not really a conversation. But if you’re doing something and you’re curious about the response, you’re in a good place. I’m not sure if that’s stewardship or caretaking, but it does mean you care about what’s happening. You’re taking care, but you’re not like a babysitter raising children when working with nature. You might be raising baby plants, but you’re doing it as part of a whole system. Nature is phenomenally complex, and there’s so much we don’t know—much more than what we do know. If we’re not constantly reaching back into curiosity, we’re going to make crazy blunders. We’re going to make blunders anyway, but at least if we’re curious, we can keep making adjustments and corrections.
And, you know, moving more in the way that things move. The more I observe, the more I want to be like what I’m seeing. When I’m watching clouds move or seeing the way water flows, I want to be more like that. It’s about really listening and trying to fit in with everything. You don’t want to be the weird guy at the party who doesn’t fit in; you want to fit in and get along with everyone, have a good time. That’s how it is in the garden too—you want to fit in too! You don’t want to be the lord of everything, thinking, “I’m taking care of everyone here; I know what’s best because I read good books on permaculture and know what to do here” It’s more like you want to be a guy at the party who’s having fun, engaging in wonderful conversations that are stimulating and eye-opening.
And there’s no conclusions—if you start paying attention to the Earth, you’ll see it’s not a place of conclusions. Every story doesn’t have an ending. The story of the chestnut didn’t end. These stories just keep going. Even after things die and disappear, there’s always this ripple effect that continues into the next story, and there’s really no break between them. So, yeah, I don’t know—it’s a great place to experience life.
Geoff Graham: I love that. You talk about being curious and not egotistical in your approach. It seems like a first step toward curiosity is humility, trying to approach everything with it.
Akiva Silver: Yeah, I think curiosity comes alive from faith and trusting that the powers that make all this happen know what’s going on. If I’m in a place of faith, where I think the universe knows what it’s doing when it spins these planets or God knows what he’s doing when people go through things, it helps you not freak out about things like, “Oh, this is really bad—look at all this garlic mustard or Japanese knotweed or this infestation of beetles. It’s just the worst thing ever!” Instead, you might think, “Well, it’s here for a reason. I don’t know what it is, but it’s here.” I think that’s how curiosity comes to me—by being in a state where I don’t think things are happening by accident or just because life sucks and bad things happen. I believe everything happens on purpose.
Geoff Graham: You were, how do I put it, gentle—very gentle—in your critiques in this book of ways of thinking about things, but I would still say you’re a bit critical of pessimism and cynicism.
Akiva Silver: Yeah, that’s what we fight against our whole life—trying not to let those cynical forces take over our minds. The older you get and the more life you go through, the stronger they seem to come, trying to get you. You have to watch out for it. It’s like that Tom Petty song: “People come, people go, some grow young, some grow cold.” That’s the real danger—to not let bitterness and cynicism take over, because it will sneak up on you. It’s insidious, always trying to get you. You can see it when you look at old people’s faces—you can tell who it happened to and who it didn’t. Their faces get permanently stuck in these positions, and it’s like, “Ah, I don’t want that.” Then you see someone else who’s old, and you can see there’s love in their face and eyes. That’s the real work, the real battle—not letting the darkness take over your mind, because it wants to; it’s hungry.
Geoff Graham: I love that your book is a constant reminder of that all the way through. I feel like there’s—you don’t ever use the word anti-humanism in the book, or a phrase my friend Steve Mouzon uses, “Gizmo Green,” referring to people trying to come up with hyper-technological solutions to problems. But I feel like in some chapters, some of the sections in the book, it’s as if you’re grabbing the cynic or the pessimistic cynic by the shoulders and shaking them, saying, “Hey, wake up! There’s a lot to be optimistic about, and you can do it right now—you can go do good things!”
Actually, some parts of it are stoic. Do you consider yourself a kind of stoic philosopher? Because there’s a lot in here that reminded me of stoic writings.
Akiva Silver: I have to confess that I’m ignorant—I’ve heard of stoicism, but I don’t actually know what it means, so sorry.
Geoff Graham: Well, there’s one quote—I think it was Marcus Aurelius, but I’m paraphrasing—he more or less says, “Don’t waste your time debating what it means to be a good man. Go be one.” I love that. In your section on the environmentalists, where you’re giving them a challenge, you say the best way to create change is to create alternative options that are so much more appealing than the status quo. Then you flow from that into a discussion of what is your sphere of influence and to focus on the things that are within your control. It’s a really great section.
Akiva Silver: Well, I think it’s very easy to complain about things, and there’s a lot to complain about. But it’s much harder and takes more energy to make something and to be brave enough to show it to other people. You look at the whole world, and it’s overwhelming—oceans, the rainforest in Indonesia, the orangutans, climate change—it’s just so many things, and it’s extremely overwhelming. But I like the idea of focusing on your sphere of influence. If you’re just overwhelmed and talking about how bad everything is, you’re just making it worse. But if you’re focused on your sphere of influence—where do I actually have an impact, how can I help—then you’re busy, you’ve got things to do.
Your sphere of influence might just be in your home, with your two kids, or whatever your situation is. If you recognize where you can be effective, then you’re busy, and you don’t have time to complain about other things. It’s nice to recognize what your sphere of influence is, and then you’re doing something great. And like I said, there’s no conclusion—you’re not going to save the world, but you’re probably going to make it a little better for one person or a hundred people or for this little patch of ground or for those birds that live in the neighborhood or for some bats that you just built a bat house for. It’s a great thing to not feel like we’re just victims of this harsh world—because we are, and we’re not. There’s a lot to do.
Geoff Graham: Absolutely. this is probably a perfect place to wrap up. I’d love to come up and visit. Could I come visit the farm?
Akiva Silver: Sure, people come here all the time
Geoff Graham: Yeah, it looks like it on the website. The website for Twisted Tree Farm is again twisted-tree.net. My guest has been Akiva Silver: a great optimist and a man who plants trees. Akiva, thank you so much for joining us on Yeoman.
Akiva Silver: Sure, thank you so much for letting me speak and listening.
Yeoman 