Every other post in this series has described something from the past.

The Inca terraces, the West African parklands, the rice paddies of Southeast Asia, the burning practices of Aboriginal Australians — these are histories. The systems still exist in remnant or restored form, but they belong to a story about what was.

This post is different. The people described here are alive. The practices described here are happening now. The knowledge described here was never interrupted.

Some communities around the world continued to live in close, active relationship with their landscapes throughout the same centuries that other civilizations were building cities, developing writing, domesticating the atom, and landing on the moon. Not because they were left behind. Because the way they lived worked. Because the relationship they maintained with the land was, by the measures that matter most — sustained productivity, nutritional diversity, ecological health — as sophisticated as...