Food Talks – Manaaki Whenua

On March 18th Food Talks hosted Severine Von Tscharner Fleming and Wendy McWilliam to share their experience, knowledge and thoughts about how we can hold a relationship with our whenua that invites wellbeing at an ecosystem level, and what change that might invite into our lives.

Wendy McWilliam is a landscape ecologist, landscape architect and environmental planner who specializes in the planning, design and management of green infrastructure in urban and rural landscapes. Green infrastructure in food landscapes are the vegetative and hydrological components of these systems, that may or may not play a role in food production, but also provide other  important services to farmers and communities, like water cleansing or support for pollinators. At the moment, my focus is on rural agricultural systems, both vineyards and animal production systems (e.g. dairy or sheep); however, I also get involved in researching community gardens. In terms of the latter my colleagues and I recently published a paper on the role of community gardens in post-earthquake recovery.