Healing Grounds: Liz Carlisle On The Deep Roots Of Regenerative Farming
Regenerative farming has hit the mainstream, as manufacturers, retailers and investors look for ways to mitigate climate change through a better food system. At the most basic level, regenerative agriculture intends to mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon in the soil. But with recent events highlighting the need to address racial injustices and redefine the roles of workers in the food system, there is so much more to consider with regenerative farming. Healing Grounds by Liz Carlisle is an excellent place to start this conversation.
Liz Carlisle is an Assistant Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at UC Santa Barbara, where she teaches courses on food and farming. She has written three books about regenerative farming and agroecology: Lentil Underground (2015), Grain by Grain (2019, with co-author Bob Quinn), and most recently, Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming (2022).
Errol Schweizer: What motivated you to write Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice and The Deep Roots Of Regenerative Farming?
Liz Carlisle: Food and agriculture is responsible for a quarter to a third of greenhouse gas emissions. And yet you can imagine a world in which it's actually a climate solution. And so I've always been drawn to farmers who are trying to make this shift. How do we take agriculture, which on this continent is so clearly a climate problem and shift it to a climate solution? But something that really struck me when regenerative agriculture started to get a lot of attention in the mainstream a few years ago is the response from the research community, from my colleagues in academic institutions and nonprofits that work on this and even a lot of the farmers engaged in it. On the one hand, you had some people who were so excited about regenerative agriculture as a climate solution. But then, on the other hand, I started seeing a lot of people in the research community saying, wait, hang on a minute here. This sounds like a lot of marketing hype, it might just be smoke and mirrors. So I was really puzzled and really curious. Why is there this big gap between some people who think regenerative agriculture is a really important part of the climate solution and other people who feel like this is something that the big food companies are using to greenwash their products? So what got me started researching this book is this question, is regenerative agriculture really a powerful climate solution?
ES: Why the focus on regenerative as opposed to organic?
LC: I have done a lot of work in the organic community and I would consider myself a part of the organic community. My first book, Lentil Underground, came out of just beautiful, life-changing conversations with folks in my home state of Montana who were part of starting the organic movement in that part of the world and for whom organic was the way they saved their farms and their rural communities. And so I think that story about the organic movement is really important. I learned a lot in those conversations about the role of agricultural chemicals and the businesses that manufacture them in shaping the way agriculture developed over the past 50 to 75 years. But I'd been left with these questions, was that really the beginning of extractive agriculture? Did it really start in the mid-20th century? And in researching this book, I found deeper origins of extractive agriculture in this country.
ES: And so when you're considering extractive practices in the U.S. food system, what is the significance of land and land stewardship?
LC: The observation that a lot of the organic farmers were making was that the dominant industrial agriculture system in the U.S. is extractive. It's extracting from the land, it's extracting from rural communities, it’s extracting from rural economies. And so I think people have started rallying around this word regenerative because that clearly describes the action that people want to take to reverse this logic of extraction and instead start giving back to the land, start giving back to community and, from a food sovereignty perspective, starting to reclaim land and community and the ability for communities to feed themselves.
And what I realized in researching this book, is that the extraction of soil carbon that folks in regenerative agriculture are so worried about and trying to reverse was part and parcel of a much larger set of extractive processes. And the name for that, the clearest name I know, is colonization. And so the starting point for understanding what's wrong with agriculture, is when European colonists came to the North American continent, proceeded with a genocide of indigenous peoples, a genocide of indigenous food systems. And this very extractive idea about how agriculture would be designed, that its purpose was to extract resources from land, to extract from community, to extract from people who are already here in order to generate wealth for the European elites at that time.
But that logic, if you're really serious about regenerative agriculture, that's what you've got to address because it has repeated itself over and over in the experience of African people who were brought over and enslaved in agriculture and immigrants who were brought to work in conditions that were not much better than slavery. And then ultimately even European-American family farmers who experienced this extractive process. And I think there's a recognition that ultimately, even though there are certain communities that are on the frontlines of these processes of extraction, ultimately they're screwing us all. And climate change is a very clear example of how extraction is ultimately going to disrupt all of our ability to have a secure livelihood and a good life on this planet.
ES: A lot of the dialog around regenerative agriculture rightfully puts soil in the center of the conversation. But what I like about your work is that you look towards the socio-economic relations, i.e., who works the soil. Why did you take that direction?
LC: I think my experience of talking to people who really do have an intimate relationship with soil and land and plants is that I think most of those folks understand that they themselves are deeply intertwined with the natural world, that the natural world is full of all of these embedded histories. When you walk the land, if you're a farmer and you have a farm, when you're walking that land, you see all kinds of signs of the presence of your parents and your grandparents, and maybe generations before that or maybe another family that stewarded that land. You can't speak of healing land without that being a profoundly social project as well.
But I think there are also people who are a few steps removed, who like the idea that simply repairing soil health through some simple practices that don't require a reckoning with political economy might be a way of dealing with climate change without actually having to really face structural racism. That's why I think it's important to be really explicit and say, if you want to bring back indigenous plants, then indigenous human land stewards are very important. And that's what the regenerative grazing conversation is all about: it has to do with indigenous sovereignty for indigenous people. You can't just speak of buffalo as some kind of theoretical model that we're going to use to inform cattle grazing without acknowledging that buffalo are a relative for indigenous plains people. And it's the relationship of the people and the buffalo and the way in which indigenous people were setting fires that actually amplified what the buffalo grazing was doing to the prairie.
And I don't think I had previously recognized what a deep history agroforestry practices had on the African continent. And there's a lot of really incredible research demonstrating the ways in which those agroforestry practices and those deep relationship with trees and forests have been translated throughout the Black diaspora all over the Americas. Those agroforestry traditions and that relationship with the woods and that relationship with plants more broadly was key to Black resistance and Black liberation movements all the way from enslaved people planting dooryard gardens for their own subsistence and to sustain cultural traditions, through Harriet Tubman using her knowledge of plants that grew in the woods to help sustain people along the Underground Railroad. All the way up through the reconstruction period: George Washington Carver working at Tuskegee and doing research on compost and understanding that the woods provided this model of how to build up biological fertility that could be useful specifically to Black sharecroppers, for whom buying new commercial fertilizers meant being more deeply in debt to white elites, which was exactly the opposite of Black liberation. And then all the way up through Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm and the Civil Rights Movement, and then ultimately Black liberation work today and projects like Soul Fire Farm.
This is an incredible thread of ancestral practices of relating to plants and trees in particular that have provided an ally in the face of all this extraction and exploitation. I spoke at length with Olivia Watkins, who stewards a piece of forested land in the triangle area of North Carolina, Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill. She's in a community called Holly Springs, and her family's had this land for 130 years. An ancestor of hers was one of the first Black landowners in the area and bought it in 1890. It was a sanctuary space for her family at a time when Black people experienced so much violence and discrimination. And over the years, her family managed to hang on to that land in the face of just about every strategy you could imagine to dispossess Black people of their land. Raleigh Durham ended up urbanizing in recent years. And so this land that has been for so long a sanctuary for Black people is also now a sanctuary for wildlife, for species of trees that you don't find in the area anymore and for soil carbon. And so when Olivia talks about agroforestry and forest conservation, she's talking about conservation, always in this double sense of conserving Black owned land, which has been threatened, and conserving all this wildlife and these forested areas that sequester carbon, which is also threatened. And that allyship really struck me and that connection between liberation work and regeneration work.
It's time for us to get on the right side of history for an obvious set of moral and ethical reasons, and also because if we don't understand the root causes of the processes that are leading to our disconnection from land, we're not going to be successful in our movements to shift them. And so, if we take a cowardly approach to regenerative agriculture because we don't want to face race, we don't want to deal with indignity, not only is that the wrong choice, but it means we're going to fail. If we don't address the root causes of the problem, we're not going to solve it. And so I think this book, for me, it's a first step of just trying to listen to another set of perspectives other than my own. When I sit with them and reflect on them, I think they ultimately really deepened my understanding of the world around me such that I can better position myself to be effective in that world.
