Reparations Tithe

Your purchases and donations support our ability to care for plants, restore our watershed, and share the wealth. Trees give away a quarter to half of the energy they produce. They alchemize sunlight into sugar and share it through their roots with their children and the millions of small soil critters that give water, nutrients, and protection to the trees. All of this starts with the gifts of the sun, light and warmth, none of which we’re able to return. The sun gives freely, and the trees move that gift along. So must we, because the gift must always move for justice and kindness to flourish. Anaerobic conditions and concentration of wealth might be two different names for a smilar phenomenon.

Silver Run Forest Farm grows in the ground, rooted in the past and soil legacy, so we hold ourselves accountable to making our relationships, with our history and our present, as right as possible. As two white middle-class men, we’ve inherited the wounding advantages of violence and waste. Many people who lived and worked with these plants have been killed, displaced,still being colonized, still resisting, still propagating. Their knowledge often isn’t honored with compensation or recognition, instead blended into melting pots like permaculture. The gifts of sunlight, soil, and the cultures that cared for them have been stolen and hoarded.

Now we sell and share these plants after receiving the gifts of knowledge, the lives of these plants, and access to land to grow them. We want the healing accountability of reparations to transform the conditions that allow violence and waste to spread. We want to keep the gift moving by imitating the photosynthetic generosity of the trees. We give away an abundance of plants and we redistribute 10% of what we gain from purchases and donations to people and projects that heal culture, nurture land, and resist and remediate the invasive species of white supremacy and colonization, led by those most violently targeted by these oppressive forces and who are leading the beautiful resistance.

In all our work, we want to imitate a culture of trees: abundant, diverse, renewing, mutual, slow, rooted, cyclical, nurturing, and deeply connected underground! We share our work and wealth because they have been shared with us, because that’s what our trees do, because the circle of gifts must always move to redistribute abundance so that all creatures have enough and are free.

Thank you for helping us make that happen!