My name is Nico Bacigalupo Zappia. I was born and raised in the legacy of my mother; a permaculture teacher, herbalist, and master gardener in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At the age of sixteen, I received my permaculture design certification from Occidental Arts and Ecology Center in northern California. At eighteen, I left to study Natural Resources Conservation in the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia. Two years into my degree, I transferred to the University of Minnesota, where I received my Bachelor of Science in Environmental Science from the College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences. While my background is in permaculture design and ethnobotany, my research focuses on integrated agroecological systems. I am now pursuing a triple master’s at the University of Copenhagen, Technical University of Dresden, and Czech University of Life Sciences in Global Forestry, Tropical Forestry, and Agroforestry, respectively.

I collaborate and consult with restaurants and purveyors in the Twin Cities to develop and fortify integrated and ecologically sound food systems and partner with chefs and farmers to facilitate the incorporation of permaculture design principles and perenniality into foodways here in the Midwest.

My writing engages with the transmutative processes of internal and external ecology and explores the destructive and constructive alchemical forces at play within dynamic systems. Ecology as both a physical science and a lens through which we can view our mental, emotional, and relational ecosystems gifts us the grace to interrogate the function and sustainability of our internal and external landscapes. My work explores identity, family, relationship, and methodologies of repair through an ecological lens that enlists stories of trauma, grief, joy, folklore, and myth as paths to creation and as ways in which we can build new systems to relate to each other, to our earth, and to ourselves.