Nate spent his childhood working with his dad in the garden. Together, they explored soil science and learned from master gardeners, laughing and sweating together with their hands in the dirt. During college, Nate pursued a degree in Biology and Health Sciences while simultaneously losing his dad to ALS. As a way to connect with his dad spiritually, Nate has continued to build on their shared garden knowledge and spend time with the plants they both cared for. Today, Nate loves maintaining his community garden and cultivating the orchard his father started. In his spare time, you can also find him perfecting his compost recipe and jamming with the musical collective Dafunkus.
Nate got involved in the Permagardens Foundation because it was the perfect melding between his passions for food justice and global health. As a registered nurse and massage therapist, Nate has always felt that some of the greatest healing comes from food. While he always felt a strong calling towards this work, nurtured by his background in environmental education and the Quaker religious tradition, he experienced a profound deepening of its importance through reading books like “Braiding Sweetgrass” and “Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice”.
Nate sees the principles of permagardens as a tool to empower people worldwide to be able to feed their children. He dreams of a world transformed by the power of Indigenous wisdom and decolonization by learning from the lessons of plants.