Embodying an Ecological Framework

The below interview is part of Ecologies of Entanglement, a collaborative series between Are.na Editorial and Dark Properties.

When I look at a forest, I see something wild and organic, alive and unplanned. When Casey Tang looks at forest, he sees inputs and outputs and cycles of feedback. He sees a system at work, in which interdependent components operate in parallel to create a whole. This is because Casey understands forests more deeply than I do — he has an extensive mental library of plants and their properties, and knows how they work together to shape their environment. He knows all this because he’s lived in a forest, studied permaculture, and has planted several edible forest gardens, including two in Queens, New York. He also knows this because he understands more than most about systems sciences, an interest furthered along by his knowledge of software and computation. 

In 2014, while simultaneously working as a software engineer and designing a forest inside Socrates Sculpture Park, Casey started seeing overlaps between emerging software methodologies and ecological design. “It became second nature to observe and analyze most things within a systems framework and to see interconnections,” he tells me in his interview. To deepen his understanding of systems sciences, Casey studied at the MIT Media Lab’s Art, Culture & Technology program. After graduating, he worked on Mozilla Rally, a first-party data platform that allowed people to donate their data in order for researchers to better understand how large tech companies like Facebook and Google track users and influence their behavior. If working with forest ecosystems season after season had given Casey an almost embodied understanding of systems thinking, then at MIT and Mozilla he deepened and applied that knowledge to the internet, data, and technological systems of ever more complexity.  

I first met Casey in 2021 at a Channel Walkthrough event for Are.na, where he shared channels on complexity and Indigenous cybernetics, fully blowing everyone away. These days Casey is studying category theory, which he describes as the next evolution in systems sciences, and in July he had an exhibition on show at Artists Alliance Inc in New York. He’s an example of my favorite kind of artist and thinker — one whose wide-ranging interests and disparate references are connected through his work, and who finds rich and fertile ground in the overlaps and in betweens.

Meg Miller: The first question to all our interviewees in this series is, what have you been growing lately? Could be anything. 

Casey Tang: I’ve been studying category theory with a researcher from the Oxford Quantum Group. That feels like growth. Category theory extends my understanding of networks and systems but works differently from previous frameworks. It feels like scaffolding for thinking compositionality, facilitating the growth of new pathways for sensing and thinking across scales. But it’s new ground for me — if you asked me about growing stuff a couple of years ago, I would tell you I was growing a forest [laughs].

Meg: Ok, I’m definitely interested in that. But first, I wanted to ask you about how you self-describe: as an artist, an agroforestry designer, and a product designer. How do these disciplines interconnect through you? 

Casey: Well, it must have been 2014. I was growing a forest garden in Socrates Sculpture Park, and at the same time, I was working at Artstor, an academic discovery and cataloging platform for images and records. It was a time when the software industry was overwhelmingly adopting iterative methodologies. Google launched in 1996, and Facebook in 2004. The Manifesto for Agile Software Development came out in the early 2000s and was steadily growing in adoption. In 2010, there was a rise in startup ecosystems and incubators. The internet was growing in interconnectivity and competitiveness — leading to an increase in complexity and contingency. There was a need for a new method to help organizations navigate and grow within this environment.

I remember standing in Socrates — I was shifting around these mountains of compost (generously provided by Bigreuse), spreading them 88 feet across, preparing for sheet mulching and cover cropping — when I realized that software methodologies were getting closer to ecological design. Before iterative processes like agile and lean, the software industry primarily followed the “waterfall method.” This method meant making decisions based on prior observations and working on individual parts in isolation within a team before passing it on to the next team until deployment. This linear approach was named “waterfall” due to its sequential phases from beginning to end. In ecological design, you focus on the interdependent parts in situ, operating in parallel, creating cyclical feedback at the local and macro levels to create a whole or an observable different state. The crucial difference between iterative software methodologies and past models is operating and constantly incorporating environmental feedback.

I started looking into the connection, which led me back to biophysicist Donella Meadows and architectural theorist Christopher Alexander, both of whom I read in my agroforestry course. In 2006, I lived in a mountain pine forest in Massachusetts to take an intensive forest garden design course with Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier. They had just written the temperate forest gardening tome, Edible Forest Garden. Afterward, I worked for the NYC park’s department in ecological restoration. While re-reading Christopher Alexander in a technology context, I learned his book A Pattern Language introduced the idea of pattern libraries adopted by the software industry. Another book of his, Notes on the Synthesis of Form encourages developers to approach creating systems by composing modular parts together through small incremental steps based on human use and feedback from the environment. It sounded like iterative software methods, but I was surprised to learn that the book was published in 1964. For most of his career, Christopher Alexander was based out of Berkley, California, which places him near Silicon Valley. He arguably influenced more developers and professionals creating the digital world than architects creating the physical one.

At this point, I knew systems thinking, systems sciences, and cybernetics connected my interests and work. If you dig far enough into any system framework, be it biotic or abiotic, you end up at MIT. The institute originated many of these disciplines, so I went there to study. Ecology, design, technology, and even the art I'm interested in all link back to systems sciences and the evolution of computation.

Meg: And forest design was always in the background, as something that you did personally?

Casey: I practiced forest gardening until I went to the institute in 2018. In 2006, after returning from the pine forest in Massachusetts, I designed and planted a forest garden on my lawn. I created one in Socrates. I designed and helped implement a large garden on a barge for an artist. I did a rudimentary design and a species matrix for a garden in Palestine. My most robust forest garden is in Woodside, Queens, a neighborhood covered in concrete with few street trees. I started the garden there in 2015, and it has over 100 species, including saffron, edible hostas from Japan, edible daylilies, and a purple fragrant spring tree from China. The early spring leaves and shoots taste like delicious garlic greens. The perennial kale and tastier dandelion varieties are from Europe, and several key namul or wild greens are from Korea. They are the most delicious of the edible perennial greens.  My parents are now looking after the garden. They harvest from it and give away fruits and vegetables to their friends. They love pawpaw and Violette de Bordeaux fig. The pawpaw trees produce 80 lbs of fruit annually, and the figs are the best-tasting variety you can grow in zone 7b. If you ever want an edible plant not in your country, befriend immigrant aunties and grannies.

Meg: That sounds amazing. Could you take me through how forest gardens work exactly? 

Casey: Forest gardens are agriculture systems modeled after communities in different phases of ecological succession to generate resources from the environment. The porous system comprises flora, fauna, and human culture in dynamic equilibrium. Each component has characteristics and behaviors and serves multiple functions. Connected, they form a network where they constantly negotiate with each other and the embedded biosphere. As a designer, you are trying to capture environmental inputs –– sun, shade, wind, water, nutrients, and microbes in the soil –– to circulate through your network. You optimize relationships that capture, store, and circulate energy as it degrades through your system — stabilizing into a forest garden, on average, in five years. The forest, an emergent property, is a recursive function. It has downward causation or generates feedback to the layers below. All of this transforms across different timescales — a day, months or seasons, and years or succession.

I've seen a lot of forest gardens, but there are few good ones, especially in the Northeast. One that stands out is Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates’s site in Massachusetts. Jonathan has left to start his farm. I started the garden at Socrates and later in Woodside to centralize edible perennial plants worldwide and experiment with forest garden design aesthetics. I also wanted to experiment with the commons through the resources generated from a forest garden. For forest gardens to thrive in our world, we need tasty, edible perennial plants, which we have yet to be breeding for as a Western Industrial society. 

Modern industrial agricultural practices have historically focused on breeding annual plants, which exhaust their energy and die in one season. But with perennial plants, it's the opposite — they take their time and slowly get rooted. They come up annually and are more resilient. This will make edible perennials critical with the climate crises. I knew that to evolve these systems and make temperate forest gardening functional in our society, beyond a gesture, I had to collect specimens and start plant breeding. Unfortunately, the existing plants are not that tasty or substantial. It takes work — like pawpaws, it took a guy 20 years to make a tasty one. These things don't just happen. The Eastern Agricultural Complex is an example of domesticated crops rewilding and becoming useless to humans. People are now actively trying to re-domesticate them for perennial agriculture. 

Forest gardening methodologies emphasize functionality, and the results can resemble a farm, particularly in smaller spaces. I began integrating other ecological gardening approaches into my design to combine functionality with aesthetics. I included the “New Perennial” movement, popularized by Piet Oudolf and developed in the 1980s, taking off in the ’90s, as well as “Shizen Fūkeishik,” or “natural landscape gardens.” Despite all three methods mimicking nature, they differ in approach and yield distinct results.

Meg: And these techniques themselves are not new, right? Indigenous communities have been planting food and medicinal herbs in forests in sustainable and regenerative ways for centuries. 

Casey: Yeah, ecological gardening and its general techniques are not new. These systems have had different manifestations across the world, including Loke ea fishpond in Haiwaii, Milpa in Mexico, Chagga home gardens in Tanzania, Taungya in Myanmar, Satoyama in Japan, which covered most of the island at one point, and forest gardens in the West. Early Europeans who came to the Americas didn’t recognize Indigenous agriculture because they looked like forests and were considered untouched pristine nature. Today, the scientific community holds similar views. In the Amazon, for example, there are all these useful medicinal plants near villages and settlements—they didn’t just appear; humans intentionally cultivated them. However, scientists are divided on whether the Amazon was heavily altered by humans or primarily growing on its own.

Meg: So you were tying these agroforestry ideas back to systems thinking, to Christopher Alexander and to Norman Wiener and cybernetics, and that’s what brought you to MIT? When you were studying at MIT, did you feel like you had a deeper, or a different, understanding of these concepts coming from an agroforestry background and thinking about sustainability and regeneration in that way?

Casey: Forest garden design gave me a practical and rudimentary conceptual understanding of ecological relationality and systems thinking. The design process requires you to build tacit knowledge of plants, their characteristics, and behavior within interdependent communities, also known as polycultures, guilds, and drifts. Once you embody this knowledge, you more readily and efficiently place each plant into a community based on an ecological niche that minimizes competition and amplifies mutually beneficial relationships while slowly shaping the burgeoning ecosystem. I began to embody this ecological framework over the many seasons of designing and planting ecological gardens, eventually shaping my general thought process. It became second nature to observe and analyze most things within a systems framework and to see interconnections. I could not articulate most of what we had been discussing before MIT.

My research at MIT focused on the history of technoscientific systems science and thinking — its evolution from cybernetics to complexity science and how evolving systems frameworks and models influenced cultural production, design, governance, technology, and concepts of order. It expanded my systems understanding to see — in a very embodied way — that all things and beings are just expressions of decisions, relationships, and forces aggregated over time. I can now layer different disciplines and systems frameworks to bring phenomena into varying levels of fidelity, context, and direction. 

Meg: You have a channel on Are.na called “Indigenous Cybernetics” that’s really popular. What is meant by this term, “Indigenous cybernetics?”

Casey: Cybernetics, coined and formalized by Norbert Wiener in 1948, is a feedback loop or circular causality within a closed system. This simple notion was radical at a time when science was dominated by physics, turning Wiener into a celebrity. Cybernetics would eventually disappear, diffusing into other disciplines across the formal and social sciences during the post-war period. The 20th-century science of information and relationality would replace atomized reductionist science. However, even within this radicality lay dormant a dichotomy of self and other, internal and external, us and them. These closed systems actively kept the environment and “the other” out. Second-order cybernetics try to rectify this by placing the observer or scientist into this circuit with the other, their subject. Still missing was a notion of a predicate.

Many concepts underlying systems thinking have existed in Indigenous culture in a very developed, functional, and integrated way. “Indigenous cybernetics” points to this relationship and how Indigenous peoples use and create it today. Indigenous cultures have similar concepts of relationality and often contain a predicate value, e.g., environment and community. In science, experiments are usually done isolated and not in situ. Context is frequently a missing value in many systems sciences and thinking. 

Ecological restoration and design rely on, incorporate, and acknowledge indigenous people, practices, and technology. But, I noticed this is different in the formal sciences and systems thinking, even though there are similar systems concepts. I started the channel to learn about indigenous knowledge and practices in relation to system thinking and the possibility of their influence on scientists' theorizing systems. I also wanted to learn about the emergent technologies based on and coming from indigenous communities and cultures. I was interested in other techno-imaginaries that manifested in form. 

We, or those who depend on information technology for survival, live in a technoscientific naturalism. In a culture that does not trust dreams, a framework or discipline or phenomenon isn’t really “real” unless it can be formalized in math and, by extension, computed. Missing from this type of knowledge production is an embodied knowing, at an individual and societal level. Focusing so much on a particular knowledge production can create a misalignment between knowing and action. We can measure climate change and know its adverse effects but not change our behaviors or sensing differently to make any difference that makes a difference.

The next interview from Ecologies of Entanglement will be published on Sunday, September 29. Subscribe to Dark Properties and Are.na Editorial to make sure you don’t miss it.