Temperate Agroforestry: How Forest Garden Systems Combined with People-Based Ethics Can Transform Culture

How can transforming monocultures to diverse polycultures address and solve the intersecting issues of our food system? This literature review offers community resources, practical examples, and academic research to support the shift away from monocultures, and the broader social contexts that encourage them, and towards food systems as part of cultures that prioritize people, water, and the land. Forest garden systems are presented as a temperate agroforestry-based food system design which make use of multiple perennial plants to meet human needs for food, medicine, fuel, and more while regenerating the environment in which they grow. There is a lack of peer-reviewed research in temperate forest garden systems, but it is gaining momentum alongside an increasing application in non-academic contexts. Combined with cultural principles that prioritize people, the land, and water over profits, forest garden systems are proposed as a pathway for meeting local community’s needs and environmental regeneration.