Rediscovering the relationship between movement, nature, food, memory, and quality of life
By Neil O. Campbell
Governance Ecosystem Designer and Founder, Living Ecosystem Design
While working recently, a memory came back to me. It was not a memory of a major event, a vacation, or some carefully planned childhood experience. It was something much simpler. I remembered walking to school with my sister Donna in eastern Westmoreland, Jamaica. I could almost smell the journey again. Along the country roads were trees, plants, flowers, and the vegetation growing naturally around people's homes and yards. Depending upon the season, fruit could be found along the way. The environment had a smell, a temperature, a texture, and a rhythm. You experienced where you were because there was very little separating you from it. At the time, none of this seemed extraordinary. We were children walking to school. There were no conversations about biophilic design, green infrastructure, walkability, food systems, environmental psychology, or urban forestry. We were not trying to reconnect with nature. We had never disconnected from it. During fruit season, there were days when we ate so much fruit that by the time we got home, there was barely enough room in our stomachs for dinner. A piece of fruit did not always begin as something packaged, transported, refrigerated, displayed beneath fluorescent lights, purchased, carried home, and finally consumed. Sometimes you simply reached for it. Looking back now, what appeared to be an ordinary childhood experience feels extraordinarily rich.
What Did We Leave Behind?
My life today in the Atlanta region offers an interesting contrast. Like millions of people living in metropolitan regions, much of my daily movement occurs inside an automobile. I travel from the suburbs into the city and from the city back to the suburbs. The windows are usually closed. Depending upon the season, the air conditioning or heat is running. Traffic surrounds me. Vehicle exhaust, uncomfortable temperatures, congestion, noise, and the practical requirements of getting from one responsibility to another shape much of the journey. We escape one controlled environment to enter another.
Home.
Car.
Office.
Car.
Home.
Then we repeat the cycle the next day. Modern metropolitan life has given us extraordinary conveniences, opportunities, technologies, infrastructure, and economic possibilities. The answer is certainly not to romanticize the past or pretend that earlier ways of living were free from hardship. But advancement should not prevent us from asking an important question:
What valuable human experiences did we unintentionally leave behind as our environments modernized?
We have become very good at moving between places while experiencing increasingly little of the places between them. That distinction matters. Transportation traditionally asks how efficiently we can move someone from Point A to Point B.
Living Ecosystem Design asks another question:
What should the journey itself give us?
From a City in the Forest to a Forest We Can Experience
In my previous Living Ecosystem Design article, I asked:
If Atlanta is a City in the Forest, where are the trails through the forest?
The premise was straightforward. If Atlanta's tree canopy is one of the region's defining environmental assets, perhaps the forest should not merely surround us. Perhaps people should be able to move through it as part of a connected regional experience. But that leads naturally to another question. If we create more opportunities to walk through the forest, what should we experience while we are there?
What if portions of Atlanta's trails, parks, greenways, neighborhoods, and other appropriate public landscapes included edible vegetation?
What if some trees provided shade and food?
What if a child walking along a trail encountered a pawpaw tree and learned what a pawpaw actually tastes like?
What if another person encountered native persimmons, berries, muscadines, nuts, herbs, or other regionally appropriate edible plants?
What if, in selected locations, Georgia's famous peach became more than an image on a license plate, road sign, or marketing campaign?
We are the Peach State.
Shouldn't people who live within the built environment occasionally have the opportunity to experience a Georgia peach as part of the Georgia landscape?
The question is not whether every street should become an orchard or every public park should become an agricultural operation. The larger question is whether some of our green infrastructure could also become edible infrastructure.
Perhaps We Are Not Discovering Anything
One of the principles I continue to explore through Living Ecosystem Design is the distinction between discovering and rediscovering. Many ideas presented as innovations are actually modern adaptations of relationships human beings once understood quite naturally.
Growing food near where people live is not new.
Walking to destinations is not new.
Sharing excess food with neighbors is not new.
Using trees for shade is not new.
Knowing when fruits are in season is not new.
Children learning about plants by encountering them is not new.
Communities caring collectively for shared resources is not new.
Perhaps the innovation is not the invention of these experiences. Perhaps the innovation is learning how to reintroduce them intelligently into contemporary metropolitan life. Atlanta already provides evidence that such thinking is possible.
The Urban Food Forest at Browns Mill is a City-owned and managed public edible landscape. The 7.1-acre site was developed as a new model for a City park and includes fruits, nuts, vegetables, herbs, and mushrooms intended for public consumption. Its history is equally important. The City records that former owners Ruby and Willie Morgan were remembered by neighbors for leaving excess produce along their fence for others to take and enjoy. City of Atlanta: Urban Food Forest at Browns Mill
Think about what that represents. The physical landscape changed, but a community value embedded in that landscape was not entirely lost. It was carried forward. That is stewardship.
The Atlanta BeltLine provides another interesting foundation. As of June 2026, Trees Atlanta reported that the BeltLine Arboretum extended nearly 17 miles and contained more than 10,000 planted trees along with hundreds of thousands of native shrubs, plants, and grasses. Among its specialized botanical collections is a pawpaw collection. Trees Atlanta: Atlanta BeltLine Arboretum
These examples suggest that Atlanta may not need to invent an entirely new relationship between public landscapes and edible plants. Pieces of that relationship already exist. The opportunity may be to ask how those pieces could become part of a larger ecosystem.
Native, Adapted, and Culturally Meaningful
The Georgia peach introduces another useful lesson. Peaches are not native to North America, even though generations of cultivation have made them deeply associated with Georgia's agricultural and cultural identity. The University of Georgia notes both their nonnative origin and Georgia's long history of successful peach production.
That distinction matters because an edible landscape should not simply be a collection of whatever fruits people recognize most easily. A more thoughtful approach would consider native, regionally adapted, and culturally meaningful edible landscapes. Georgia already offers tremendous possibilities.
The native American persimmon grows across Georgia. UGA Extension also identifies native or regionally suitable edible plants such as pawpaw, elderberry, blueberry, blackberry, red mulberry, muscadine, and others that can be considered according to site conditions and maintenance requirements.
The objective should not be novelty.
It should be ecological and cultural fit.
The landscape should tell us something about where we are.
References: UGA Extension, Home Garden Peaches | UGA Extension, Avoiding Early Bloomers
What If the Walk Home Helped Us Recover From the Day?
There is another dimension to this idea that interests me. What if our transportation and recreational landscapes were designed not simply to move us, but to help us decompress?
Imagine finishing a demanding day. Instead of immediately entering another enclosed environment, you begin walking. There are trees overhead. The temperature beneath the canopy is different. There are birds. Plants have scents. People pass one another. The environment changes throughout the seasons. And at certain times of the year, something growing along that journey is ready to be eaten.
You pick it.
You taste it.
For a moment, you are not merely traveling home. You are experiencing where you live. Perhaps we should not call this therapy in the clinical sense. But could the built environment contribute more intentionally to our daily restoration?
Could the journey home become part of our recovery from the day?
Could walking become not simply exercise or transportation, but a transition between the different demands of our lives?
Our infrastructure already influences stress, behavior, health, social interaction, and the amount of time we spend outside. The question is whether we are designing those effects intentionally.
Community Value Is Also Value
There is an economic development lesson here as well. We frequently measure community progress through property values, construction activity, investment, tax revenue, new businesses, household income, and other important indicators.
But communities contain another form of value that is more difficult to place on a spreadsheet. There is value in knowing your neighbors. There is value in children being able to walk somewhere safely.
There is value in mature trees.
There is value in local traditions.
There is value in being able to recognize the seasons.
There is value in a grandmother showing a child which fruit is ripe.
There is value in a neighbor having more than enough and leaving something for someone else.
There is value in memories attached to place.
If development raises the financial value of a community while systematically erasing the experiences that made the community meaningful, our measurement of progress may be incomplete. That does not mean communities should remain frozen in time. It means development should begin with another question:
What is already valuable here?
Then:
What should be preserved, what should be restored, what should be adapted, and what can be improved beyond what existed before?
This is an important distinction between preservation and stewardship. Preservation can sometimes imply holding something exactly as it was. Stewardship recognizes that environments must evolve, but asks us to accept responsibility for what we carry forward.
Stewardship Means the Trees Cannot Simply Be Planted and Forgotten
Of course, an edible public landscape is not as simple as placing fruit trees beside a trail. Trees must be appropriate for their locations.
Soils matter.
Water matters.
Pollination matters.
Utilities matter.
Visibility and accessibility matter.
Fruit falling onto walking surfaces matters.
Wildlife matters.
Harvesting matters.
Pruning matters.
Pests and diseases matter.
Public education matters.
Long-term maintenance matters.
UGA Extension notes that growing peaches and other fruit trees successfully in Georgia requires appropriate site and cultivar selection together with continuing care. Native species may reduce some maintenance challenges, but every landscape intervention still requires thoughtful management.
This is precisely why community stewardship should accompany community enjoyment. Public agencies, nonprofits, horticultural experts, community organizations, residents, schools, businesses, and volunteers can each have roles appropriate to their capabilities.
The exact operating model would need to respond to location, species, community capacity, public health requirements, environmental conditions, and available resources. But complexity should not automatically become an argument against imagination. Good design acknowledges complexity and organizes it.
Reference: UGA Extension, Home Garden Peaches
Designing Memories
When I think about walking through Westmoreland with Donna, what stays with me is not an infrastructure project.
It is a feeling.
The smells.
The trees.
The fruit.
The road.
The freedom of simply walking through the environment. And perhaps that is an important test of our built environment. We spend enormous amounts of time discussing what cities should build. Perhaps we should spend more time thinking about what people should experience after we build them.
A trail is not merely pavement.
A tree is not merely canopy.
A park is not merely acreage.
A transportation system is not merely movement.
A community is not merely real estate.
Each becomes part of the environment through which human beings construct their lives and eventually their memories. Atlanta has already embraced the identity of a City in the Forest. The next stage of that identity could ask us to experience the forest more fully.
Walk through it.
Learn from it.
Care for it.
Rest within it.
And, in the appropriate places and seasons, perhaps even eat from it.
Not because doing so would return Atlanta to some imagined past. But because progress should allow us to carry forward the best things human beings have already learned about living well. Perhaps the real question is not how many fruit trees we can plant.
Perhaps it is this:
What kind of memories are we designing for the next generation?
If a child growing up somewhere in the Atlanta region fifty years from now can remember walking with a sibling beneath trees, recognizing the changing seasons, smelling the landscape, reaching for ripe fruit, and feeling connected to the place they call home, perhaps we will have created something more valuable than another amenity. Perhaps we will have rediscovered a way of living. And then built upon it.
About the Author
Neil O. Campbell is the Governance Ecosystem Designer and Founder of Living Ecosystem Design (LED), an independent research and thought leadership platform that aligns physical design, governance, infrastructure, capital systems, and human systems to help cultivate resilient, thriving communities. This article reflects the continuing development of the Living Ecosystem Design framework and its application to contemporary challenges in urban governance, the built environment, economic development, and community development.
Disclaimer: The views and perspectives expressed in this article are those of the author and Living Ecosystem Design and do not represent the views, policies, or positions of the author's employer.
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