Good question, and sorry for not being more thorough. Here’s what I think, I’d be grateful for any discussion/different perspectives though.
A nut forest could just be a load of nut trees with everything else suppressed. The diversity that’s crucial to the health of the ecosystem can be entirely missing.
It differs from a wild forest in that the organisms who inhabit it are dominated by one species, humans. The will of everything else is put under the will of that species. In a wild forest, everyone’s will is in competition and cooperation, no-one has the final say on anything. The wild forest is the expression of the will of countless self-willed (wild) beings. The nut forest exists only to serve the will of one, who might not even live there.
As a whole, the wild forest adapts itself to changes in its environment, and fits in with whatever is happening in the universe it’s a part of. The nut forest doesn’t do this, and its dogged determination to continue producing nuts for the humans who dominate it give it a distinct disadvantage when changes happen, making it less resilient and less likely to survive the changes that will inevitably happen. It’s like the difference between a diverse, healthy gut flora and the devastated one you see after a course of antibiotics.
Zone 5 is to me a crucial aspect of permaculture. Zones are purely in the imagination of the human doing the work. They’re just a way of making categories out of infinite complexity, so that our limited intellect can believe it “understands” what’s going on, and how to proceed in a way that will produce food for us while we learn more about our world.
Zone 5 refers to the only real “zone”. The rest of them (1 to 4) are derivations, simplifications of zone 5. If we ignore it, as most “permies” do, then we can’t really learn anything about the source of the other zones, and end up in a self-referencing circle of illogical deductions and notions based on our own preconceptions or what we would like stuff to be, not on reality.
Without zone 5, permaculture is like a science project with no references, I think it’s so important because with it, permaculture can be a beginning for people to learn how to live within reality, as opposed to the fantasy world we presently occupy. It can provide the grammar and logic out of which we can become wiser. Without zone 5 it’s as worthless as all the other new-age, self-obsessed diversions from the truth of how things work here on earth, which we must understand if we want to survive.
Zone 5 is just another word for wildness.
something like that…
Andy