This innovative community-focused project creates a living lab fibre garden to produce local textiles in a vibrant outdoor research site on campus. The garden will support interactive sustainable textile and creative arts projects while also serving as a public community space that addresses climate resilience and decolonization. We interviewed the project team to learn more about their work.
Interviewees:
- Germaine Koh, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, Arts
- Simone Levy, Urban Design Planner, Campus & Community Planning
- Renée Lussier, Landscape Architect, Campus & Community Planning
Q: How will the Fibre Garden serve as a functional site for "honorable harvesting" and pre-colonial ecological knowledge rather than a decorative green space?
This green space is not being approached as separate from life, nor as a site to be consumed (whether commercially or for touristic purposes). Rather, we would like for it to be integrated into real life, where everyday functions such as harvesting for food and fibres for clothing, community gathering, and having restorative time, take place in a sustainable and integrated way. We are hoping the site can be a place for hands-on learning about some of the traditional ecological principles that make for sustainable land practices, and some of this will be in conversation with local Indigenous folks, involving culturally important native plants that were used in pre-colonial times, such as stinging nettle, dogbane, milkweed, and fireweed. In this way we hope the garden can strengthen the presence of Musqueam values and Indigenous practices on campus. The land around here was always managed by the First Peoples to include sustainable agriculture, which includes principles that we will communicate about on site, such as honorable harvesting. As laid out by Anishinaabe/European writer Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, the Honorable Harvest is based in principles of being in reciprocal relation with the environment, asking the plants their permission—and taking “only that which is given” by the plants themselves, never taking the first or last, taking only what you need and never more than half, and using the materials respectfully, without waste, sharing and giving thanks.
Q: Can you describe how the community-scaled flax processing machinery will advance local sustainable textile production?
Alongside the native plants we will also be growing fibre flax, the plant that produces linen, which is central to an interdisciplinary research project that is looking at the possibilities for sustainable regional seed-to-cloth-to-user linen industry that is based in small-scale production. Across North America, it is individual producers who are rebuilding linen-making practices, after that industry was wiped out a century ago by the rise of environmentally and socially damaging industrial cotton, and then synthetic fibres. This small-scale production, unfolding in households, collectives, and backyard gardens, also feeds a real human yearning for community connection and the satisfaction of growing and hand-making things yourself. Yet there are certain steps in the flax-to-linen process that are more laborious, time-consuming, or less pleasant, including “breaking” and “scutching” the flax straw (crushing and removing the woody parts of the stalk), as well as “retting” it (a controlled digestion of pectins and lignin that releases the bast fibre). We are hoping to look at whether introducing machinery that is compatible with small-scale production—for example, portable, not too noisy, easy to operate by diverse users, buildable from readily available parts—would make linen production more accessible, without removing the process from the localized community in which the rest of the production is happening. We will also look at whether offering a locally centralized location for the retting process would remove another barrier, to making local linen production “human-kind,” as our community partner Sharon Kallis from EartHand Gleaners Society says.
Q: How do you plan to use this garden as a "living lab" to explore sustainable alternatives to fast fashion?
We hope that the Fibre Garden can be a place to produce hyper-local textiles, exemplifying the possibilities for clothing and textiles that are sustainable because of their local production and their use of sustainable agricultural principles. For example, we should be growing enough flax to make enough cloth to make a few pieces of clothing. We will process this on site, using machinery to be designed by a Mechanical Engineering graduate student, then provide the fibres to local artisans to produce creative linen designs, which we can showcase in UBC’s annual Slow Fashion Season, an initiative that is also led by members of our team. The slow and local character of this kind of production is key to its sustainability; local organic production should reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the transport of materials, as well as fewer resources, while being more durable than fast fashion—but our research will include life-cycle assessment of a system reoriented to the local such as this—which is very different than the prevalent one today in which, for example, a T-shirt made of water- and chemical-intensive industrial cotton that travels halfway around the world and back before being consumed (and some 30% to 40% of garments are never even sold), and quickly discarded to be sent back to an overseas landfill.
Researchers, artisans and Indigenous producers will also look at the other fibre-producing plants on site, focused on native species such as nettle, dogbane, milkweed, possibly fireweed—all plants that have been traditionally used for textiles. We would like to be able to reinforce and support the resurgence in the traditional practices of this area, which were of course the original model for sustainable clothing. A number of Indigenous artists will be working with materials from/on site.
Q: How will students from diverse disciplines be involved in the design, cultivation, and programming of this site?
Some student involvement will come in response to the open calls we will issue twice a year (look out for those @fibregardenUBC on Instagram), including to students, staff, researchers, and community, for proposals to engage with the space, the agriculture plots, and/or the FLEET Mobile Studio (https://fleetstudios.org) that we are bringing to site. These proposals can range from short term or intermittent events or seasonal uses of the garden, to longer-term projects. We expect that some student-led skill-building workshops will take place on site, organized by students involved in Slow Fashion Season, or student clubs such as Roots on the Roof, with one of their leaders currently in a Work Learn position tending and helping to plan the garden.
SEEDS Sustainability Program will help connect us to student applied learning projects. Several professors are also planning to integrate experiential learning in the garden into their curricula—for example, with Visual Art students building public furniture and helping to cultivate and process plants for fibres, Industrial Ecology classes doing life cycle assessment of flax grown on site, and a Mechanical Engineering student working on flax machinery.
Q: How will the garden’s design and collaborative framework be made replicable for other community-based green space initiatives?
The kinds of sustainable practices we would like to cultivate on site are not only ecological but also social ones. We hope this space can serve as an example of a productive green space that is managed within community, where knowledge and resources are shared beyond typical disciplinary silos and hierarchies. This democratization of knowledge and the opportunity to experiment and learn, includes traditional ways of knowing in addition to academic ones. Our community partners, including collectives and farmers, bring very valuable bodies of knowledge. We hope it will be a place that encourages UBC’s priority of learning everywhere on campus and beyond. The plans for machinery we develop will be distributed under creative commons principles, to encourage their spread. The plants that are being used in the garden will also be monitored and considered for inclusion into the planting palettes of future campus open spaces where opportunities for harvesting and increased biodiversity are being explored.