Clam Gardens Across Generations and Places Support Social–Ecological Resilience to Global Change

Abstract

The construction of intertidal rock-walled terraces, colloquially known as clam gardens, was one of a suite of ancient mariculture techniques practiced by Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast of North America. Clam gardens were built and tended across significantly more than 1,000 kilometers of coastline and over at least four millennia. Throughout this time and space, a suite of environmental and social variables, such as changing climate, sea level, human population demographics, and tenure systems, would have influenced the reciprocal relationship between clam gardens and generations of people learning from and adapting to these slowly changing conditions and punctuated disturbances. Based on our understanding of clam gardens from coastal British Columbia, Canada, we explore how social and environmental variables and their differences through time and space may have shaped multi-generational practices surrounding the building, maintenance, use, and recent reconnection to and reclamation of ancestral clam gardens. Ultimately, clam gardens are exemplars of how looking to the past can guide the future of resilient, equitable, and sovereign food systems amid changing ocean and socio-political conditions.

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