Marta grew up with a love of trees and wild places, and a fascination with the dark fecundity and mysterious denizens of peat bogs and muddy tide flats. She has been sowing seeds, talking to snails, and digging in dirt for as long as she can remember. Many years ago she left a PhD track in Spanish Literature to pursue a career in professional cooking, where she mastered the art of transforming parsley into a fine dust and cooking the entire head of a pig. With the beauty of haute cuisine also came a sobering look into the underbelly of our industrial food system. Frustrated by the damage and disconnect she witnessed there, Marta began a deep dive into wild food foraging, permaculture, ancestral skills, and eco depth psychology. She attended Alderleaf Wilderness College’s year-long naturalist training and completed her Permaculuture Design Certificate there, taught by Dave Boehnlein.

Marta loves permaculture for its systems thinking and its experimental, connective, and intersectional approach. She is excited to be in conversation with the desert and to keep asking how we as humans can be in balance and right relationship with the rest of the world.