Partial Introduction:

Wild Blueberries are ripening. Or, Earth is ripening Wild Blueberries. For Us. And Birds and Bears.

Wild Blueberries ripen, or Earth ripens Wild Blueberries, in a special place and time. They ripen on a hill sloping southward towards the Gulf of Maine, where Quail hides her eggs among the woody stems and Goldenrod waves tall and bright yellow in contrast to the soft white yeast covering each and every dark berry-gift. When someone collects them with their fingertips and drops them into their mouth, they become a part of the landscape and the landscape becomes part of them. N. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa novelist, essayist, and poet calls this reciprocal appropriation, where “man invests himself in the landscape, and at the same time incorporates the landscape into his own most fundamental experience” (McLuhan, 1994, 391). Eating local and foraged foods is a communion with the land that fosters intimate knowledge, reciprocity, and sense of place. Practices of foraging, hunting, tending, and partaking of food directly from the land cultivate a culture of reverence for Earth/landscape translates to community stewardship. Community stewardship indicates a positive level of wellbeing and wholeness within a community group, this wholeness results from a balance within all elements of health. A model of wellbeing for health and culture cannot exist without relevant connection to the Land, that relevant connection with Land- transmitted through an interconnected web of the foods eaten, the work necessary to survive, and the objects and stories associated with the people who inhabit a specific place.

As Earth has begun to show signs of disease from human effects on ecosystems, humans too have begun to show disease. Rather than the traditional health issues of bacterial infections, or lack of nutritious food, many people in the United States are experiencing chronic inflammatory and autoimmune disorders such as obesity and diabetes. Contemporary health and wellness culture is “focused on adhering to different diets and exercise programs” and it has been “found that these are not sustainable changes” (Buettner & Skemp, 2016). The desire for a healthful life model led to a National Geographic Expedition researching the secrets of longevity and the “discovery” of 5 regions (Loma Linda, CA, USA; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece; Okinawa, Japan) around the world were residents consistently live to 100 years of age and beyond with relatively low incidents of illness or mobility issues. Dan Buettner and his colleagues dubbed these regions Blue Zones® and created an evidence-based framework of 9 commonalities ( Power 9) that facilitate wellbeing and longevity. The Power 9 (figure 1) "are evidence-based common denominators among the world’s centenarians that are believed to slow this aging process” (Buettner & Skemp, 2016). These commonalities are all aspects of intangible cultural heritage and are relevant to the time and place of the 5 designated regions despite the varied landscape of each. Though Blue Zones® takes into account the diet, lifestyle, and movement of residents, the framework neglects to register the interconnectedness of intangible cultural heritage with landscape and sense of place. “ The relationship between the natural environment and tangible and intangible culture impacts the way practitioners and community scholars and others view cultural rights and responsibilities” (Macdougall, 2019), therefore, its impossible to fully understand how these regions create healthful communities without recognizing and honoring their connection with their sense of place, especially when recognizing that scientific evidence related to diet is still vastly short of conclusive.