Cultures + Generations + Hearts + Connected
Environmental Conservation
Antinanco’s Mission is to serve our greater relationship with Nature and to accept its ability to flourish as the highest wealth attainable. We strive to preserve and follow Earth-based traditions that honor this relationship, and offer valuable lessons. These lessons hold the solutions we need to help heal Earth today and tomorrow. Among them are how we can rebuild the connections to Land and to traditional practices around protecting the diverse fertility of Earth, and how to grow, gather and preserve foods in respectful and harmonious ways as to not take away from the overall balance of all relations.
Food Forest Restoration Project
We focus on restoration of Food Forest systems that represent a fundamental segment of the Northeastern woods. The Northeastern forests are some of the most productive forests in the world, and are the principal source of many medicinal and food-producing plant species. There is growing and widespread concern that many of the species are being depleted and becoming rare and endangered due to increasing risk from over-development, overharvesting, destruction of the habitat and degraded soil conditions.
The Food Forest Restoration Project started in 2018, initially focusing on restoring the American Chestnut tree, and gradually expanding to other food and medicine producing trees, shrubs and plants.
We invite the public to participate in our Planting, Stewardship and Restoration Programs, and offer free native trees and shrubs for planting at home, to open a connection that has been lost. Our First Peoples were Keepers of the Forests everyday of their lives, and we believe that by engaging as many people as we can in planting and caring for our plant relatives, we can restore this friendship. As part of the events, we offer hands on trainings, helping all involved to get more equipped to become better stewards of Mother Earth.
American Chestnut Tree Revival
The American Chestnut Tree (Castanea Dentata) is native to the North American forest ecosystem and is on the brink of extinction. In the first half of the 20th century, 1 out of 4 trees across the 180 million acre range of eastern forests were killed by an accidentally introduced pathogen: the Chestnut blight (Cryphonectria parasitica). The loss to date of the American Chestnut is cited as one of the worst ecological disasters in the United States.