Ancestor Work: Liz Carlisle on Healing Grounds, Living Roots & Girl Drumming

This is somewhat of a momentous occasion. Liz Carlisle wrote a book called Healing Grounds a few years ago, and a listener brought it to my attention. Just as it was for Liz, it’s been really significant for me. Initially setting out to test regenerative agriculture’s claims on carbon and climate restoration, a bigger picture opened up. And a line from the last page has stayed with me since – ‘this is ancestor work’. Longer term listeners will have heard me recall it a bit on this podcast. It even came up in the recent chat with Nicole Masters at Grounded Festival, such is its synergy with where so many others seem to be finding themselves. And it's our starting point here. 

Liz also has a new book out, a compilation with dozens of amazing stories and contributors, co-edited with Aubrey Streit Krug of The Land Institute. It’s called Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods (global release here). While Healing Grounds is also coming out in paperback, with a new foreword. 

These are works so full of everything we need and could benefit from more right now. Successes, joys and wisdom, transcending impasses, traumas and would-be divides.

And it’s all somewhat presciently evidenced in the songs Liz wrote and performed as a young touring musician, some of which she kindly shares with us here. That was before that life led her to this one, via a job with farmer and new Senator at the time, Jon Tester. 

Her work now also includes being an Associate Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at UC Santa Barbara, where she teaches courses on food and farming to a growing, ready and bold student cohort of thousands. 

Here Liz shares her Dust Bowl lineage, the pain of disconnection from farming, and the way each layer of understanding gets deeper than tools or inputs. Regeneration, she argues, is tied to Indigenous stewardship and to food traditions carried through diaspora, and it only works at the scale of the climate crisis if it is equitable for people as well as healthy for soil. That takes us into the hard, practical questions: land ownership, short leases, monocultures, and the policy machinery that keeps farmers locked into systems that are brittle under climate change and biodiversity loss. 

We also talk about what’s possible and happening right now, in that context. We talk land trusts, commons-based models, cultural access agreements, and Indigenous land return, plus why perennials matter so much for climate resilience and soil carbon stability. Living Roots brings the concept to life through stories of serviceberries, agroforestry, prairie strips in the Midwest, and the remembering of perennial grains that reframes “innovation” as cultural memory. 

Chapter markers & transcript.

Recorded 17 June 2026. 

Music: Feels Like Home, The Water Is Wide, and Montana, all by Liz Carlisle.

Transcript

Opening Song & Intro

Liz 0:00

My name's Michael and I'm thirteen had my birthday Saturday. Mom brought the cake, Dad brought extra iciness, I just stole away. Switching houses every week. Nowhere left that I can think but this hollow in the trees and built it with my own two hands. One place in the world that I can stand and just be. And I realized, well, maybe we're not really talking about the same thing. Like, what is the deep form of regenerative agriculture that really will help us solve the climate crisis, help us meet the challenges that we have. And praying for our souls.

Meet Liz Carlisle And Her Work

AJ 1:35

G'day there, Anthony James here for The RegenNarration with the stories that are changing the story, enabling the regeneration of life on our home planet. That was Liz Carlisle with the tune too from earlier times in her life. This is somewhat of a momentous occasion. Liz wrote a book called Healing Grounds a few years ago, and the listener, Hi Roni Gomez, brought it to my attention. Just as it was for Liz, it's been really significant for me. And the line from the last page has stayed with me since. This is Ancestor Work. Longer-term listeners will have heard me recall it a bit on this podcast. It even came up in the recent chat with Nicole Masters at Grounded Festival. Such is its synergy with where so many others seem to be finding themselves. Healing Grounds ended up accompanying us around the Americas, and Liz and I almost met up at the outset of that journey. Alas, untimely illness prevented it, but now we're back home and in receipt of the news that she has a new book out. A compilation with dozens of amazing stories and contributors. Co-edited with Aubrey Streit Krug of the Land Institute. It's called Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods. And Healing Grounds is also coming out in paperback with a new forward. These are works so full of everything we need and could benefit from more right now. Successes, joys and wisdom, transcending impasses, traumas, and would-be divides. And it's all somewhat presently evidenced in the songs Liz wrote and performed as a young touring musician before that life led her to this one, via a job with farmer and new senator at the time, Jon Tester. Her work now also includes being an associate professor in the Environmental Studies program at UC Santa Barbara, where she teaches courses on food and farming to a growing, ready, and bold student cohort of thousands. And finally, we get to talk about it all. We're live, Liz. How are you?

Liz 3:42

Oh, so happy to be here, AJ. Thanks again for the invitation.

AJ 3:45

I'm so happy to be here too. It's great to finally speak. You are the most highly anticipated guest on this podcast. I think it's safe to say, just by pure dent of the amount of time it's taken for us to get to this in a couple of years. But it's allowed the fermentation process, no, in in the works and in our exchanges, and it is wonderful to be here. I wonder

Finding Home Between Mountains And Ocean

AJ 4:07

if we might start with where you are. Can you bring us into where you are, how it feels? And also, I guess, in lieu of not being at home, how home feels for you.

Liz 4:17

Yeah, well, that's interesting. I I am originally from Missoula, Montana. I come from the Rocky Mountains and I'm sort of back in my home region. I'm not all the way to Missoula yet, but I'm with some family in Idaho in this same kind of Rocky Mountain landscape that's so familiar to me. Um, and I was hiking with my partner and his cousin um about a week ago and was just struck by these wildflowers that I have such a deep memory of because I grew up with at this time of year the lupe and bloom and the airleaf balsam root, and they were all there to greet me. So um I do feel at home in a certain kind of way. But now in my job, I teach in the environmental studies program at UC Santa Barbara in Southern California along the coast. And so I'm also coming to find a home place um with the ocean. Uh, you know, I grew up with the mountain sort of being the place where I found awe and inspiration. And now I live also with mountains, but but with the ocean, the Pacific Ocean, you know, as this great being that reminds you that you're part of something much, much larger.

AJ 5:23

Oh, yeah. And so we're on the Indian Ocean here on the west side of Australia, but exactly the feeling it gives you. But I'm so curious then, I mean, as a saltwater person myself, how have you come to relate? Do you feel like a coastal person now?

Liz 5:38

Oh my gosh, that is such an interesting question, AJ. And you know, it's interesting. Working in this field in regenerative agriculture, I think as a young person, when I first started into this in my 20s, a lot of the stories that I really connected with were about people who'd been in the same place their entire lives or had returned to the same place. And that their land stewardship and their care and this sort of genius and everything they learned from land came from this deep commitment to a particular place. And I thought, oh, great, let me try to do that. That hasn't been my journey. Um, and it isn't my lineage either. I come from an immigrant lineage, you know, I'm not indigenous to the North American continent. My grandmother lost our family farm in the Dust Bowl. So it was really powerful for me actually in graduate school. I was fortunate to study with a woman named Kim Talbert, who's become very famous. She's a professor in Canada now, a great professor of Indigenous studies. But she introduced me to this concept of being routed rather than rooted because she she comes from a people who um had great migratory patterns in their connections to land, and that resonated with her. And so I think that's been a part of my journey of finding home is knowing, you know, that ultimately everything on this earth is connected. And some of us find our home and make our contributions in a single place. And there's so much that's really, really beautiful about that. And then especially in the world today, many, many of us are in diaspora and on some kind of journey of travel. Um, but there can be really deep connection in that too. Um, and it was really the chance for deep connection with people who care about the earth that brought me to UC Santa Barbara. And now I have this opportunity to, you know, find connection with the ocean. So I'm a beginner, you know, I'm still learning that my students who take marine biology will show me when I'm on the beach. Guess what this species is, you know? And so there's there's a humility in it too, is you know, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about, you know, um the plantain plant and and how it, as not a native plant to the North American continent, nonetheless found a way in that ecosystem to contribute. And so that's my journey is you know, to try to be a humble contributing member where I am, even as a person who is is not certainly not indigenous and in the place where I spend most of my time, yeah, I've only been there since 2019.

AJ 8:07

Oh, Liz, it's so good hearing you talk about that because this is what I've grappled with too. Like even getting into all this work and finding myself still called to go to the people with those roots to share their stories. And I've wondered, but am I just like not learning? Am I not getting the message? You know, or is this or is this indeed my role? And it's just it's just a different role. So this segue is oh, I have to ask, are you surfing yet?

Liz 8:38

Not yet. I am getting in the water. Um there we go.

AJ 8:41

There's a start. It's not the warmest water as I remember either, so that's a fair enough.

Liz 8:46

Oh, my friend did give me a wetsuit, so that's how you're in the game.

AJ 8:51

So

Ancestor Work And Deep Regeneration

AJ 8:52

anyone who's been listening to this podcast knows there's only one place this conversation was ever gonna start, and that is at the end of your previous book. We're gonna obviously talk about the new one, Living Roots, but your previous book, also coming out again this year with a new forward, Healing Grounds, ends in such a powerful way that the refrain ancestor work has almost become mantra in my life and and has r recurred throughout the podcast in that couple of years since we initially hoped to have talked. And it's on the very last page of the book. I just looked over it again last night, just to is my memory right. It was the the very last thing you had in that book, and it was as much because of the journey it seemed that you took through that book that that ended up being the closing stanza. I imagine as deeply as it hit me in reading it, for you to put that as your last word, it must have hit you in real time, as it were, similarly.

Liz 10:04

Yeah, yeah. I I closed um really with some words from Stephanie Morningstar, um, who leads the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust in the northeastern part of the United States. And um, the work of that organization is not only to find land for black farmers and other farmers of color who've been disconnected from land by virtue of slavery and other oppressive systems, um, but also to do so in partnership with Native communities and to form, you know, these really deep agreements where Native communities access their homelands for things that are important to them, whether that's, you know, ceremony, reburial of ancestors, harvest, and also farmers of color, you know, who are themselves carrying these ancestral lineages, but in diaspora have an opportunity to grow food, feed their communities, um, you know, build land-based businesses. So, as you might imagine, you know, the woman who's leading this work has a lot of insight. And I had some beautiful conversations with her. And I think that kind of encapsulated, as you said, what I learned over the course of the book. So I sort of started that book project, Healing Grounds, wondering about can we use regenerative agriculture to solve the climate crisis? Because some of my friends in the research world were like, yes, this is such a powerful climate solution. And others were like, eh, a few, you know, emissions reductions on the margins, but not a lot here. And I realized, well, maybe we're not really talking about the same thing. Like, what is the deep form of regenerative agriculture that really will help us solve the climate crisis, help us meet the challenges that we have environmentally at the scale of those challenges? And I kind of started with like, you know, counting carbon atoms and such and reading those papers and sort of came to the insight that, you know, regenerative agriculture, as it's termed now, is rooted in these indigenous practices from around the world. And that in my own place where I live in North America, there are indigenous North Americans who are carrying these on, as well as these people in diaspora from Africa and Asia and other parts of the Americas who also carry those legacies. And not only are these like ancient things from thousands of years ago about, you know, buffalo grazing and agroforestry in Africa and polycultures, um, you know, the three sisters in Mesoamerica, it's also this is part of liberation struggles. Like these ways of relating to land have been part of liberation struggles for these communities in the past couple hundred years, as they've been on the front lines of the industrial agriculture that's been so extractive, not only from the earth, but also from their bodies and their communities. So, you know, after sort of realizing that, as like, oh, this has a lot to do with sort of repairing colonialism if we want to engage in regeneration. Uh, and then Stephanie Morningstar kind of lands um, you know, this journey with this beautiful quote about how earth care and addressing the climate crisis ultimately comes back to this kind of ancestor work and understanding, you know, that the extraction wasn't just of carbon. There's a whole web of extraction from the past 500 years. Certainly, we could maybe go deeper than that, that needs to be repaired, um, certainly in the ways that we relate to land, but also in the ways that we relate as people. And so there's a kind of reconnection to land, but also with an understanding that it has to be equitable and that people have to be able to benefit from the fruits of their labor.

Dust Bowl Lessons And Family Repair

AJ 13:34

You mentioned before your grandmother, and you've written how you remember her telling stories of the dust bowl growing up as a kid. And I'm wondering for you, since that moment of finishing Healing Grounds, has ancestor work for you taken on new tones and deliberation?

Liz 13:54

Yeah, I think it's really interesting how I think many of us probably have a moment that we remember in childhood or early adulthood. Maybe for some of us it takes longer where we're all on our own journeys. But when you kind of have this insight about like, this is who I am, and this is how I'm placed in the world, and this is where I come from. And I remember that very clearly as a young adult, realizing I come from this family that used to have a farm and used to have agriculture, and now we don't. And there's something about that disconnection that I need to understand and that I need to be part of repairing. And then over the course of my life, there's like these extra layers to the story. So at the beginning, what I understood was machinery, right? Like the plows that were used prior to the Dust Bowl, moldboard plows, they were just tearing up the land too heavy. And then I understood, you know, the chemicals that were used, especially in the aftermath of World War II, that was part of what completely changed the Iowa, you know, that my mother grew up with when she still had some connection to farming, even if it wasn't my family farm. And so in my first book, in Leno Underground, I was sort of grappling with those things and the organic movement that was trying to reject an industrial chemical model of agriculture and instead move to a sort of more biological way of doing things and more community-based. And I think in working on healing grounds, I kind of added another layer to okay, what went wrong in the dust bowl, what went wrong for my family. It wasn't just that the plow was too heavy. It was like, what were we doing in western Nebraska? And why were we not in dialogue with the people whose homelands those were, who did know what kind of land that was and how to steward it and how to sort of bring forth an abundance of food and other life-giving things in a sustainable way.

AJ 16:16

I'm so curious as to whether you feel any particular connection to any ancestors of yours with some disposition you have in this way.

Liz 16:28

I do feel a really strong connection to my grandmother. Um and it's interesting, you know, sort of like sometimes when we say ancestor, we think like long, long, long ago. She was alive until I was 30. So she's an ancestor now. Um, when I was a kid, she was just my grandma, and you know, I was playing with her. But uh I think I will spend my whole life sort of fully registering a lot of the really important lessons that my grandmother taught me, mostly in the way that she lived her life. Um, I think a lot of this she actually understood in many ways, in the ways that she sort of became a naturalist uh in her life, you know, as a way to reconnect with land. And my mother's been talking with me even this week about how she feels like her mother, my grandmother taught her about awe and how um, you know, my grandpa didn't have really any money coming out of the dust pool, and my mom didn't have a lot of money growing up. And there was a sense of like you have everything you need if you can go and be in the natural world and be in awe. And so that does feel like um a lesson that's come down to me. And then also, you know, the insights around no one is free if everyone's not free, or the kind of connection between equity and sustainability. What my grandmother ended up doing with her life is she became an educator, and she and my grandfather worked really hard on the project of educational integration, of sort of creating curriculum and sort of the first integrated schools in their community in Waterloo, Iowa, of working to make that project a go in a very idealistic way that only sort of white people engaged in civil rights in the mid-century might do. You know, like we can look back and be like, ooh, residential segregation, poverty, like there's probably some things that are going to get in the way of this. Um, but I think she had this insight that there was an equity dimension of repair as well as this kind of like connection with the natural world. And and she did a lot of that connection with the natural world with her students, um, who, you know, came from these diverse backgrounds and many maybe hadn't had in fact been dispossessed of those land connections through the history of slavery. And she did see in some way that it was also part of her responsibility as she was weaving reconnection for herself to also make sure that those who had in in much more profound ways been robbed of a connection to land had an opportunity to reconnect too.

Drums Songs And Rural Storytelling

AJ 18:52

Absolutely fascinating. Growing up in Montana, then in this context, it wasn't these things yet that really sparked for you though, huh? It seems it seems music for one, and that might have come from your dad and athletics too. Did I read?

Liz 19:08

Yes, I I suppose as kids we we explore a lot of things. Um and yeah, my dad was a guitar teacher, and I was really lucky. He he taught me guitar. And my grandfather actually, um, on my mother's side, the one married to the grandma I've been talking about, was a jazz trombonist and a band director in in this integrated school. So it was actually at that time, it was a big deal for jazz to be the music curriculum, you know, when it used to be sort of Western classical music and things like that. Um, so there was a lot of music in my family, and and I think just in general, uh music, but also storytelling was something that really spoke to me. And so my way of exploring all of these themes that we're talking about was really around stories. And in my early adulthood, stories set to music and songwriting and country music, but also just listening to the insights that people carry and the stories that they tell about their own life, and then also about sort of the meaning and purpose that drives them as ways to kind of get inside, like what has gone wrong with rural America, and what wisdom do people carry about how we might set it right?

AJ 20:13

Oh, so right. I want to come back to that, but I want to do want to go go back to the roots of your music. Is it true that you were a marching band drum leader?

Liz 20:24

Yes, this is true.

AJ 20:27

And in that you have it in common with one Karen Carpenter, who was also a fine singer.

Liz 20:35

I would recommend it to especially young women. I would highly recommend playing the drums in high school. It's a great way to like embody your power and a sort of different kind of identity than often gets mapped on. So that was great. My first email address was drummer girl Liz, and I played drum set in the jazz band and and snare drum in the marching band, and and it was amazing. Yeah.

AJ 20:57

My first email address was Little Drummer Boy.

Liz 21:00

I guess we were we had the same idea there.

AJ 21:04

But uh Karen said the same thing, no. I think she started playing another instrument, saw the drums, and we're like, heck no, I'm playing the drums. And the guy could just step aside. And then you went on to play music seriously and beautifully. And that must have been, I mean, for all the the story connection that you're talking about, to find yourself with an audience in that way for these passions must have been really special at the time.

Liz 21:32

Yeah, yeah, it really was. I mean, I was really interested. I was drawn to country music because of these stories about rural ways of life and a lot of stuff about land connection and also just very direct kind of emotional genre. And I want to sort of write about um, you know, what it could look like to rekindle it in again, my sort of idealistic mind, this like agrarian connection. Uh, but what was beautiful about those years too is it. It brought me to all of these different rural communities around the United States. I toured a lot my last two years of college and full-time two years after college. And as a result, I saw a ton of little towns that I never would have been to otherwise and really did have the chance to listen in a lot of ways to stories people would directly tell, but also just to be in these places and to feel what was going on. And it was remarkable the degree to which the challenges that rural people were facing all over the United States had some major common themes around the way our agricultural economy is structured and the policies driving that. Like it just struck me, wow, all these different, beautifully specific dreams about growing food in a way that's consistent with the needs of this place and the people of this place, but they're running up against the same obstacle. So that was a really powerful thing to learn and sort of drove everything that I did after that.

Leaving Music For Policy Work

AJ 22:59

Yeah. It drove you indeed to leave that life behind. Sounds like a huge decision.

Liz 23:06

Yeah, it was a big shift. Um, so there was an organic farmer from my home state of Montana who ran for the United States Senate, and it was really a long shot. He was up against a three-term incumbent who had a lot of support from agribusiness, but he won. He pulled it out by just a few thousand votes. And he was talking about how converting to organic really saved his family farm, how we needed to move away from an extractive economy, the state which had mining and fossil fuel-driven agriculture and some pretty difficult forms of forestry, uh, to a more regenerative economy and organic farming and renewable energy. And it was just incredibly inspiring. And to me, it spoke to the needs and the dreams of so many of the people that I'd engaged with while I was touring. Um, so he got elected, and then shortly thereafter, I applied for a job in that office and became the legislative correspondent for agriculture and natural resources, which meant all day long I was answering emails and dialogue with Montanans who were involved in agriculture in some way, and really came to appreciate, you know, that this individual senator came out of this extraordinary people-powered movement to convert to organic and regenerative agriculture that I had never known about, you know, growing up in this western Montana city that's more kind of recreation, tourism, university town. But out here, you know, in the sticks in central Montana, where those of us in western Montana didn't necessarily think there was anything intellectual going on, people were organizing with each other to figure out, okay, if we're going to get off chemicals, what crops are we going to plant? What rotations are we going to use to actually sort of naturally fertilize the land? And really a remarkable sort of grassroots transition that I learned about, that I became incredibly inspired by.

AJ 24:54

Yeah, right on. And you must have as well to make that pivot in your life too. But but you can see the threads. And indeed, one really prominent thread from around, I guess, just before you took that job and perhaps some of your touring was what you studied at college.

Liz 25:08

Yeah.

AJ 25:09

Ethnomusicology and folklore and mythology and so forth. Yeah. I guess what led you there, and then what how did that inform what you were, how you were able to engage and what you were seeing?

Liz 25:20

Yeah. I mean, I think a deep curiosity about the world, a desire to be around other people who are driven by curiosity and not money. You know, as you might imagine, you could also like major in economics at Harvard and you might find a different crowd. I'm sure there's some lovely people who did that, but I knew no one chose folklore and mythology because they wanted to get rich. So you were sort of in a protected space for people who really were there for inquiry, really just wanted to deepen their understanding of the world. And that's what I was there for. I had this deep love of storytelling. And, you know, part of what I did, I think, is sort of build my craft as a storyteller and read a lot of great stories and hear a lot of great stories from all of these musical traditions around the world. But then the other thing I learned in that major was how to actually see the stories that circulate around us all the time, that sometimes are so kind of baked into our common sense that we even can't notice them. And so that was a really powerful thing to be able to see, oh, like this is a story that we're all telling each other that's actually limiting us. And so if we can actually surface it and say, hey, look at the story, we're telling it. This is the origin point of it, but it can be otherwise. And we can actually imagine a different story or a different set of possibilities. That was a really valuable thing that I took from that major and then was able to add to my own story craft is like, oh, this isn't just a beautiful art. There's actually a purpose to it. Is like, what are the stories that need to be surfaced as a kind of counter to some of the dominant stories that are limiting our social imagination? Um, so that was an incredible thing about that major. And then, you know, my sort of focus in that major, we all sort of chose a individual focus. And I was really focused on rural American music and sort of what it told us about people's connection to land. And so that sort of led in into the music career and a deeper engagement with people from rural communities beyond, you know, what I was familiar with in Montana to kind of extend and have a sense of like what context did my own upbringing exist in, my own family sort of Dust Bowl story.

Folklore Tools For Seeing Hidden Stories

AJ 27:37

Oh, can we just push a little further into that? What did what did looking through the music lens of rural America show you then?

Liz 27:47

You know, now that I'm sort of situated the way I am, um, with a lot of incredible colleagues in environmental justice, I'm now aware of a phrase that I didn't know at the time. Um, that's called an asset-based perspective. Um it means that when you're in a community, instead of writing about, oh, these are all the disadvantages of this community, they're in poverty, oh, poor them, um, that you actually look at like what cultural resources do these people carry? Like what forms of wealth are here, even if it's not monetary wealth. And I think that looking at rural America through the lens of music, looking at the world through the lens of music, um, was a kind of asset-based perspective, is sort of understanding people first from their stories and their dreams and the perspective that they bring to the world. And I think that was obviously like incredibly important in going around, you know, uh talking to people, writing books, trying to understand what was going on with farming and some really difficult realities. And instead of sort of being like, you use chemicals, you're bad, or like you're uninformed, you have no knowledge, sort of starting from a standpoint of, oh, interesting. Like there's these narratives about the dreams that people have, something's going wrong along the way to achieving them. What are the kind of structural elements that people are up against? And can I talk to them and hear their perspective and actually learn a lot from people who are like on the front lines of these challenges in their everyday lives?

AJ 29:22

Fascinating. Should make mention that the senator you met you were talking about before was John Tester. And a lot of people here are certainly in the scene, will perhaps already know it, even, but uh but be familiar with the name. And I'm fascinated too by what you've just outlined because it's so much of what I hear about the good stuff that happens when people manage to get out of those structures or transcend them in some way, is that it's done by connecting at these levels, really it almost sounds trite to say, but unifying levels. And I it's it's funny because it was only yesterday when I was looking back over your website and and you got your four books lined up there, and a little caption of each underneath, and and under uh Lental Underground was a little caption from a review that said, in an increasingly polarized era, and this was 10 years ago, yeah. An optimistic case for a renewed commitment to the little things that bring us together. Little big things, maybe even, but it's something that you found even then and having common then with so much of the good stuff, is that in one form or another, it's just not getting hung up on the on what you see at face value.

Liz 30:40

So I am interested in in writing about this topic of regenerative agriculture, and there are sort of technical experts that I interviewed. I am really interested in understanding sort of biogeochemistry. Um, but but each of these books is really a parable. And I think that the nature of the parable becomes more apparent to me over time as I look back. And so interesting, I appreciated the wisdom of that reviewer when I was going back and looking at the reviews um and redoing my website in advance of this new book. Um, and I was like, wow, yes, I think that person captured the essence of this parable. And, you know, I was 27 when I went and did the research for Lennel Underground. It was a phenomenally impactful experience. The farmer at the center of that story has been a great mentor in my life. And he, you know, studied himself um stories and religious studies when he was in college. And so he was he was definitely operating on that level himself. And so, you know, it's a story about the organic movement in Montana and how all these acres that used to be monoculture wheat are now wheat and legumes in rotation, and a bunch of them are organic and just this incredible landscape shift. But it's also about the fact that really different people came together to make that happen. And so, in the early days of this conversion to organic and to pulse crops in the 80s, there are these meetings, these farm improvement clubs. And the farmers who come together in these clubs to solve these practical challenges about, you know, what variety of lentil or what cover crop variety. You've got one guy who's like an NRA member who's like out on his ranch and is four-wheeler. You've got an ex-hippie who like protested the Vietnam War and is a fan of Rachel Carson. You've got like a deeply, deeply devout Christian family who came to organic out of health concerns. And so that's sort of a story of like all these people who have these very different origin points come together around this is the kind of farming we want to do. This is the way we want to manage our common land, you know, that we all share, this region that we live in. And this is the kind of economy, the kind of community economy that we want to build together. And I think the parable of it for me was that it wouldn't have been possible if people hadn't had the courage to come together across differences, really try to understand each other at some deep level, and then without ever collapsing that difference or agreeing on everything, working together on a common project that was the shared prosperity that then sort of drove a very important part of each of their lives.

What Blocks Change In Farming

AJ 33:27

There's so much that's happened like that. And so even just in our conversation, you could get the impression that Montana is now absolutely rocking and not going through its worst drought in 50 plus years, as I was repeatedly told when we were there last year. And let alone the Colorado River on the cusp of Powerpool and Deadpool. Yeah. So what is getting in the way when we have shown as a species, I suppose, that we're capable of this and can love this way of being, and that the fruits can be enormous. Including when we're doing it, you know, digging back into the roots of healing grounds with other cultures and so forth. What's getting in the way, Liz?

Liz 34:15

Yeah. I mean, I think at the root, unequal distribution of power, and as a result, very unequal distribution of wealth. Um, I think if you were to ask people, and I guess this was part of what happened for me as a musician and a folklore major and stuff, is I I did get to talk to a lot of people about like what world do you want?

AJ 34:34

Yeah.

Liz 34:35

And if if it was a majority vote, we would have a different world. You know, I really do think that people want the kind of world that you're describing of land care and community care, and that those are the things that we prioritize. The problem is that it's not really a majority vote. You know, it's it's we have um very small group of people who hold a lot of wealth who have really disproportionate power over these decisions about how land is managed because they own it and because they have disproportionate influences of over the policies that govern it as well. And I think all over the world, that's what people are grappling with. Um I know the details in the United States better, how these things influenced our farm bill, which is our major piece of national legislation that essentially like deeply, deeply subsidizes monocultural corn and soy in particular, other commodity crops as well, like wheat and cotton, and makes it so hard for farmers to step off of that farming model into diversified regenerative farming. Because in many of the most productive farming regions in the US-Midwest, people's guaranteed income isn't necessarily coming from the crops they sell. It's coming from their extremely lucrative crop insurance. And the perverse thing is that with climate change, on the one hand, you know, you and I would say, oh my God, like this is a clear signal that we need to shift to a more resilient cropping system. Look at all the corn getting flooded, you know, like, hey, isn't everybody getting this memo? That's not the memo people are getting. The memo people are getting is this is even riskier than it ever has been. I need this very lucrative crop insurance that's tied to my 10-year average production history, my yields. I can't possibly afford to shift away from corn because if I stay with corn, the government will make me whole every year. If I move to, you know, as a friend of mine, Wendy Johnson, has done regenerative grazing, multi-species, plus perennial grains, plus an orchard, like, yes, that is more ecologically resilient, but cold turkey, you're stepping away from this income guarantee. Um, so we we have these structures baked in that are perverse in terms of like what resilience looks like. Um, and then of course, you know, the point that I found out in Healing Grounds, which is, well, most people who want to be engaged in land stewardship don't own land. And so we're sort of at the mercy of the very small number of people who do. And then a lot of farmers are renting it, and that creates a difficult situation because, you know, in California where I live now, you have a lot of people farming strawberries or um leafy greens on these one, two, three-year leases. That's a very common type of commercial farming in California. Well, the land is really expensive to rent, and it's based on sort of commodity strawberry returns, commodity lettuce returns. Well, you know, ecologically, it does not make sense to grow strawberries year after year after year. You're gonna get some nasty bugs in the soil, like, you know, verticillium, uh, because you're not rotating. Well, a lot of those farmers know like it'd be great to have a brassica in there, some broccoli, some mustard, but you don't get paid as much for broccoli and mustard. And the rent is based on what you get paid for strawberry. So this is, I think, the kind of nitty-gritty that we have to engage with of how the structural situation is impeding the kind of ecological management that many of the people who are directly on the ground actually understand very well. They just don't have the economic support and flexibility to do what they know they need to do.

AJ 38:20

So, Liz, it's like it's such a picture when you can see it like that, that does seem foreboding. It's it's a lock. Like if the if the mechanisms of changing, the political mechanisms of changing that system are not set up to allow more widespread, you know, democratic input, and then the structures of the that you would change are such a lock, the ownership such. But of course, things do change, and things are changing.

Liz 38:53

Yeah.

Land Trusts Commons And Land Back

AJ 38:54

So let's dig into some of the mechanisms. This is gonna lead obviously to Living Roots, but uh it does come back to me in what impacted me so much at the time with Healing Grounds, with some of the stuff that Stephanie Morningstar was working on, but also so many others, right? With sort of trust setups and so forth.

Liz 39:12

Yeah.

AJ 39:12

And confronting. I mean, I re similarly, you know, I remember talking in it was just coming up time after time after time that the f I'll pull out an Australianism here, you probably haven't heard of this, hey, a furfee. You know what a furfy is? No, no, okay. A furfee is is something that's completely ridiculous. Okay, yet somehow persists in our culture. And so the furfe of owning nature, yeah, as if when you come down to it, as if you can own life itself, planet, water, land, it doesn't make sense, except of course in the system we've set it up from a certain cultural view, but this leads us to the lock, right? But some of the work that you're covering is indeed getting to that root of how do you actually address the furphy of owning nature because if you don't for us quote unquote to compete in that terrain, you can't. The game is stacked.

Liz 40:19

Yeah.

AJ 40:20

So you have to you almost have to change the the conditions under it.

Liz 40:25

Yeah.

AJ 40:26

And indeed, if you're getting to that level, which we ultimately probably have to, that's what I was gonna mention that I was even in a on a panel in a at a film launch once, and I trotted this out because I'd been hearing it on the podcast and everything was just pointing to it. Got to get to the root of the issue type thing. Ultimately, you know, at some stage, sure, we're gonna have to unravel a bit today. But and I I I threw it out there and there was this murmur of of yes across the audience. I'm like, it was another case list where I thought, people actually know this, yes, but it seems so untenable to go at. Yet there are these stories that you have covered that are going at it, are finding a way to get to the conditions upon which the injustices and inequalities and an apparent lock exists, huh?

Liz 41:13

Yes. Yeah, you're right. I mean, there are a bunch of amazing projects with these kinds of land trust systems, or Stephanie Morningstar also works a lot with um cultural access agreements, which in the word access is even kind of a rejection of the whole idea of ownership as the only way for communities to do land back or to restore stewardship. Um and but there is a tremendous amount in the United States of Indigenous communities reclaiming homelands for exactly this kind of management of commons of whole landscapes. We've had several such projects succeed in California in recent years. Um there's a lot of exciting stuff happening in Montana, you know, the sort of restoration of buffalo herds and that involved land sovereignty as well. And lots of cool things happening at like state and municipal policy levels, too, um, that are making possible some of these kinds of trusts or commons landowning. There was a really exciting proposal actually in the United States Senate and Congress in 2021 for an equitable land access service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture that would buy land from retiring farmers and make it available affordably to especially black farmers, to farmers who had been excluded from land ownership. So you're right. There are there are projects afoot. Um, and I think what's important is I don't think anything is too small. I think sometimes uh in certain spaces, certainly in academia, sometimes we get into this kind of like looking at pie charts or being like, oh, you know, that's great that you have a five-acre regenerative farm, but it means nothing in the context of like, you know, an entire ecosystem. I completely reject that way of looking at change because when I look at big historical changes that I admire, I see that those small pockets where we can live out the kind of future that we dream of are actually essential. Um, sociologists call them prefigurative spaces. Uh and I think that's where we're at right now in um regenerative agriculture in a sort of global movement of regeneration in general, is that due to the incredible struggle of many, many people, we're so fortunate in this time to have access to these kinds of prefigurative spaces where we can experience what this kind of land care feels like in a particular place at some scale. And I think that's really important to our collective ability to imagine okay, it can be like this. It's totally, you know, ecologically possible, agronomically possible, and totally within our capacity as human beings. And I think that is part of what continues to. Motivate us to do the policy work, the structural work, to make those things not alternatives, but in fact the thing that we incentivize. So I I think all of those beautiful places that you've experienced, that I've experienced are are really gifts, are an important part of the change that is that is happening.

AJ 44:21

So it seems by extension is that part of the opportunity for us is to indeed go to those places.

Liz 44:29

Yes.

AJ 44:29

To feel them, to dot dot dot everything you just said.

Liz 44:33

Yeah.

AJ 44:34

To make it real.

Liz 44:35

Yes.

AJ 44:36

And take our cues from that.

Liz 44:38

Part of that, that last chapter of Healing Grounds. Um, I spoke with three amazing people that work in this kind of land trust space. And one of them, in addition to Stephanie Morningstar, Neil Thapar, um, he spoke about, and he's an attorney, he's like super technical, very, very structural. Um, but he spoke about, you know, he comes from the South Asian lineage. He was, you know, has lived his life in the United States, but has had the opportunity to go back and has experienced a little bit of this kind of commons relationship to land through family and community in South Asia. And he talks about, you know, in the interviews that he did with me, how important that was uh to his ability to imagine these kinds of structures in the United States and do this technical work as an attorney and this really fierce, like kind of advocacy attorney work, um, you know, ultimately is powered by his experience of commons management in South Asia.

AJ 45:37

Fascinating. Oh, I have to bring up, I mean, again, speaking of the roots of these things, you talked about Shirley and Charles Sherrod as well. Yes, yeah. Unforgettable. And and indeed, the model that they set up that informs what's happening now 50, 60 years later.

Liz 45:56

Yeah. So, you know, community land trust, I don't know how common that terminology is in Australia. It's coming on too. Okay, okay, yeah. Well, here in the United States, it's it's mostly thought of in the context of affordable housing, of urban community land trust projects that make housing affordable, because um, you know, the the housing is sort of taken off of the open market and the ability for it to go up and up and up and up in value, and it's held in this community land trust as a community asset. Um, what I really didn't know until I started doing some of the research for this book, actually, the first community land trust wasn't urban. It was rural. It was a farm. Um, and it was started by the Sherids who were, you know, envisioning this amazing new communities land trust with a bunch of black farmers in the South. Um, and that is the root of that legal model. And so it's been interesting, I think, for a lot of farmers of color to learn that and realize that their dreams of applying the community land trust model to agricultural land are rooted in the very origin of where that model came from and just this incredible dream that these civil rights leaders had of like a piece of civil rights work to be economic opportunities through agriculture and connection to land.

Why Perennial Foods Matter

AJ 47:13

So, how does this lead to living roots? Living roots, the promise of perennial foods. What brings you to that and how did it come together?

Liz 47:23

Yeah, um, I mean, I think another of the central insights of Healing Grounds for me was in the talking to climate scientists and people who study the connection between soil health and climate, people just kept telling me, like, oh, it's all about roots. Don't you know? Like the carbon coming out of roots is five times more likely to actually be stabilized underground in minerals than carbon that we add above ground. So if you want to have an agricultural system that really rebalances our climate system, it's got to be deeply rooted, right? You need roots in the ground all year round. And then, of course, as I was learning about the 500-year history of extraction on this continent, I was like, oh, how are we supposed to be deeply rooted if people are getting uprooted all the time, right? And so that is where the kind of land trust wisdom comes back in is that to have an agriculture that meets climate change and meets that challenge, we really need to allow both plants and people to be deeply rooted. So a lot of these ancestral systems that people told me about in that project involve deeply rooted perennials, you know, um, African agroforestry systems and Afro-indigenous forestry systems that have moved around the world with the African diaspora, or, you know, the regenerative grazing that is based on indigenous folks' relationship with buffalo. So Living Roots is a project all about perennial foods, um, foods that come from perennial plants, fruit trees, nut trees, berries, animals raised on perennial pastures, um, some newly developed perennial grains, also some ancient perennial grains, like Jacob Birch writes about gamillerae peoples, you know, long-standing perennial grains that they're redeveloping. And what all these foods have in common is these really robust root systems that perennials make the choice to invest a huge share of their energy that they harvest from the sun in this community of organisms underground. And that's what gets them through year after year. That's why they live for so long and get through the winter and the drought and the floods. And so I'm inspired by this on a practical level that, you know, perennial foods they reduce the emissions associated with our food system. They're more resilient to climate change, they build soil health, they clean up air and water pollution, reduce our reliance on fertilizer and pesticides and plowing. Um, but this is a book of personal essays. And one of the things people really speak about is the teaching of perennial foods about how to get through hard times by coming together in community and investing in shared prosperity. And so, in that sense, there's a real resonance with what I learned in the project of Healing Grounds. And this is kind of going to the plants themselves through these farmers and researchers and chefs who have deep relationships with them. Sort of what are these plants teaching us? You know, what can perennial foodways offer us, both practically in this time, but also as, you know, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about plants as kind of the elder siblings of humanity. Um, and so there's kind of that register as well.

AJ 50:27

When you say it so beautifully and featured in the book so beautifully through all these stories, I'm again struck when I think of how hard farmers are doing it and how much we're flirting with dust bowls again.

Liz 50:41

Yeah.

AJ 50:42

Uh I mean, 400 marine dead zones was just one of the things written in the book, let alone the land itself, just related to the water.

Liz 50:52

Yeah.

AJ 50:52

And and of course, everything we've talked about with all those marginalized folk over the ages. But as a farmer or a rancher, that you're in that basket now too. Like commonly, it's a marginalized up against it with the structures we've talked about type of situation. And I would say, I mean, just with the rising inequality and so forth, more and more of us, even in urban areas, are in the same basket too. And when you when you talk about perennials living roots in that way, I almost laugh because it's almost it's almost so obvious. But given we're so vulnerable in so many ways right now, and given that we're doing things so tough in so many ways right now, that it could be so much more secure and easy. It could be so much more secure and you don't have to do it every year. You don't have to rip stuff out and put stuff back in every year and then force it to grow and you know, with all the inputs and stop other stuff, force other stuff to not grow, and then oh, the the paddock's bare and it's blowing away because we've got a storm off off the flood. So it's we don't have to do that. So it's almost seems so obvious in the end of like, oh my god, yes, of course. And I have heard like we have got ranches here on you know, half a million acres. That that is that has been their goal over the last 20, some some of them, 20, 30 years, whatever, some more recent taking it on because they've seen that. Surely again, it's a very and obviously for all the people in your book, it's almost got to be an easy selling, though, Liz. Hey, look over here.

Liz 52:31

Right. It kind of comes back to everybody's context, you know, and and what's interesting is not only do people tell stories about different plants and different landscapes with different cultural traditions associated with them, they also tell different stories about how they've figured out how to do this and do it in the context of all of our modern challenges, whether it is about indigenous land reclamation or sort of finding value-added markets that will support a transition that's happening in the middle of a sort of commodity food landscape, or, you know, all these various ways of kind of, yeah, creating these spaces where you can say, hey, look at how much ecological sense this makes. Let's also make it make economic sense.

AJ 53:13

Right. Yeah.

Health Politics And Better Narratives

AJ 53:14

And how much sense it makes on a health level. Which does bring to mind Maha too, you know. I did just note that there was an electoral, a notable electoral win. Was it was it Iowa? Ah. Where a Maha-backed rep actually beat the Trump-backed rep.

Liz 53:30

Yes, yes.

AJ 53:31

Candidate. Yeah, yeah. So it is fascinating. Speaking of the possibility of unifying concerns, you know, we all care about health. And you know, plenty of people have talked about health as the real wealth over the eons, but yeah, potentially there is a moment here if we can again get under all the um political, politicized, perhaps better said, flashpoints. And those levels.

Liz 53:56

I mean, I think that's also why I really believe in the power of storytelling, you know, for for good or not good. Is that right? We have these kind of raw struggles. And I think we're trying to understand them. We're trying to make meaning of our lives and understand our struggles in some context that helps us understand what to do about them. And so I think um it's been interesting for me to watch the sort of rise of Maha Make America Healthy again from you know, my early days going to organic conferences that were politically diverse in, you know, the early 2010s. I feel like I've seen some of the ingredients of this cake being baked, um, but it didn't have to be baked in this way. And so there's kind of a there's a grievance frame of a certain kind that has been offered to a group of people who have real struggles. And what we need to offer instead is a different frame that's not a grievance frame, that is a unifying frame that connects the struggles of those people to the struggles of other people in a way that allows us to move forward in a productive way, um, rather than kind of at each other's throats or um, you know, propping up sort of false boogeyman as the reason for the problems. And it's interesting because I feel like I probably even know individuals who now identify with Maha, who I might have met, you know, 10 years ago, who had a different idea about who their community was, who they were in community with, and who they were going to work together with. So I think aspects of that frame have been really damaging, but I think it also just challenges the rest of us to sort of tell better stories that can help us solve our problems rather than just use them as these kind of grievances to stir up conflict and maybe win some elections.

AJ 55:45

Yeah, right. I wonder as as that way proves unfruitful.

Liz 55:49

Yeah.

AJ 55:50

Yeah, well, it's it's sort of what you said before too, like you're either gonna double down on the wrong way or come to an insight that that we can actually do it together. And uh I I agree with you and I do love the stories that I too hear time and time again of across the political and other aisles type of connections.

Serviceberries Agroforestry And Prairie Strips

AJ 56:09

So I'm curious then, speaking of stories, Liz, what I mean, it's gonna be like choosing favorite children I know, but what stories stand out to you in Living Roots or even just in the moment?

Liz 56:19

Yeah. Well, uh Rosalind Le Pierre's essay about service berries is is really special to me because she she comes from Blackfeet Nation. She's an ethnobotanist, she's also a historian and religious scholar. She teaches at the University of Illinois. Um, but she sort of helped me see a new dimension of the landscape that I grew up in through the lens of this essay about service berries and how her mother, when her mother was a child, she would go out and pick gallons of service berries with her whole family, and they'd fill up all of these 50-pound cotton flour sacks, and then they would dry these barriers on the on the roof of Rosalind's grandmother's house, and they'd have enough for the whole year. Um, they'd they'd make these um like hot soups and they'd also um dry it in flour and add it to other things. And I think this story was really remarkable to me, just in the depth of the relationship with this plant as a food, but then also like all these other uses, like inner bark being used for medicine and these longer branches being used for sacred pipes, and then even like these tiny twigs being used to pierce the ears of babies. And so I just found myself in awe of like that depth of relationship with a plant and with a place, and and then just the like joy and abundance of it that really, really sort of sings in in Rosalind's storytelling.

AJ 57:38

Oh, it sure does. And even just the recasting of it, it wasn't just the buffalo as well in those. But that's coming back too, as you said, some extraordinary stories continent-wide on that level. There are so many stories. I certainly was struck, and you know, because I admit to not having read Leah Pennerman's book, but I've just sort of glanced at parts of it. So many books. But obviously, yeah, have become increasingly familiar with her work, and that she said the and you know, she's not the only one who uses this word, like miracle, watching these techniques, in her case, restoring an African-American heritage on land that they've managed to get hold of and work at Soulfire Farm.

Liz 58:18

Yeah.

AJ 58:18

So the miracle at Soulfire Farm that evolved from an experience of her going to Haiti after the earthquake and learning from their methods of bringing back the forest that had been stripped colonially.

Liz 58:30

Yeah.

AJ 58:31

And that that's continued on too. And it brought to mind a number of things, including, wow, that's what aid can look like. Yeah. Ostensibly, we're going to help them recover from an earthquake, right? But it comes back and it sets up a miracle recovery on home soil.

Liz 58:45

Yeah.

AJ 58:46

That's aid.

Liz 58:47

Yeah.

AJ 58:47

And that indeed, yes, it would be classified as a miracle by Leah.

Liz 58:52

Yeah.

AJ 58:52

And you know it can appear so, but that's the nature of that's the nature of it. If we can get back to the roots, so to speak.

Liz 59:00

Yeah. I mean, she writes beautifully about this four and a half acre agroforest at Soulfire Farm and the roots in these Haitian methods and Afro-Indigenous methods of agroforestry. And she also tells this great story that I didn't know about Harriet Tubman and her apple orchard planted at her House of Freedom in Auburn, New York. And that Harriet Tubman, you know, who we all know from her underground railroad work, had as a girl, she had been forced to plant apple trees by her enslavers, but never got to enjoy the fruit. And so she had this dream of like, one day, I'm going to plant apple trees that my community can freely enjoy. And she did it. And I think that part of Leah's essays really calls attention to the way that perennials have so often been this act of tremendous intergenerational faith and hope and courage. And so, you know, as you were speaking about the challenges of our times, I think those kinds of stories are really helpful to understand that even if we're in the midst of a challenge that we can't sort of rationally imagine our way out of, um, we can certainly look to stories like that as an example of like, we can still plant a tree, we can plant seeds, we can, in metaphorical and literal ways, for future generations, we can believe that they will exist and that there's something we have to offer them. Um, so yeah, just beautiful, beautiful essay. It's the lead essay, Leah Penneman's essay in this book. And I cannot adequately represent the joy that I felt when we got the email from her saying that she would, in fact, contribute a piece to this book because she's amazing. We got to do a couple of live events with her this spring as part of the book release. And if you ever have a chance to read, watch, be with her in person, she's really an extraordinary teacher. And farmer.

AJ 1:00:48

Yeah.

Liz 1:00:48

She's out there with her hands on the land.

AJ 1:00:51

Exactly. And it all stemmed from giving too. It wasn't I'm a victim and I need you to give me stuff. Right. It was gifting that then enabled the power.

Liz 1:01:01

Yeah.

AJ 1:01:02

So much in it. And I'm also moved then, Liz, by how many stories were through the Midwest. I mean, you talked about all the, you know, the game being stacked to soy and corn, and the Midwest is sort of the epitome of it in some way. And yet there are so many of these stories coming up there too.

Liz 1:01:18

Yeah, I think something that we wanted to come through this book is really this diversity of contexts and the way that people have found to take a step forward, even in contexts where you'd think, like, oh my God, like how could you possibly move towards regeneration? So Wendy Johnson, who I mentioned earlier, she grew up on a family farm in Iowa during the 1980s farm crisis. Super tough time, you know. Her family was on food assistance as farmers when she was growing up. And so, not unsurprisingly, like she headed out, you know, as a young adult, had a career in fashion in in LA, but felt this pull back to the land when her grandmother died. And she was worried, you know, that her parents couldn't manage it by themselves. And so she went back to Iowa, you know, to try to farm organically. She faced all these challenges with flooding of her organic crops. And that's what motivated her. She didn't give up. She said, I think this land needs perennial systems. And so her essay is full of like the kind of messiness of it because she's so direct. She's such a farmer, she's so honest. But there's also this palpable hope of this woman just in the middle of like the belly of the beast, possibly globally, you know, of commodity agriculture, planting her chestnuts and her perennial grain and her regenerative grazing system with this perennial pasture, and setting up, you know, direct marketing and uh feeding her neighbors, like really doing asking this land to do the work that it was meant to do to take care of land and community, and then raising her daughter in this place and in this way. Um, so you know, incredibly inspiring story from Wendy. There's also a great story that Lisa Schulte-More writes, also in Iowa. She's a professor at Iowa State and a MacArthur genius. Um, and her team's working on something called prairie strips, where farmers take just 10% of their land, and these can be very intensive corn soy monocultures managed with chemicals, but 10% of the land goes back to this native prairie. And they've shown that, you know, you do this, you get two times as many birds, three times as many pollinators, 70% less nitrogen running off into the watershed. And farmers really appreciate it often too, because they're losing less topsoil. And these are beautiful places. She talks about how one of her collaborators had like a family wedding because this land is beautiful now. It's like alive with wildflowers. So another example of um people being able to take a step, even when it seems like they're so constrained.

Indigenous Perennial Grains Remembered

AJ 1:03:50

Yeah, right. And you mentioned the Australian connection too, before, obviously, with Jacob Birch. How did that come about?

Liz 1:03:58

Yeah. So I should say I had this wonderful co-editor on this project, Living Roots, um, Aubrey Strait Krug. She works at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, where they're really involved in breeding perennial grain. Um, but Aubrey's work as the director of the Perennial Cultures Lab is really to understand the whole wider context and the web of relationships within which the sort of technical and scientific work at the Land Institute exists. So she's very interested in people around the world who have relationships to perennials. Um, and and Jacob has this incredible story about, hey, you know, Gamiller people have this long-standing relationship with these uh grasses that we've long harvested for grain, and we're trying to revitalize these. So Aubrey was a fan from afar. And I think she'd had maybe a conversation or two with Jacob. Um, and she mentioned this when we started the book project and was like, wouldn't this be the most amazing way to lead off the perennial grain section? Because in the United States, it's always thought of as this novel thing that scientists do in the lab. Try to make a perennial grain, you know? And wouldn't it be amazing if we actually started with this story about indigenous perennial grains in Australia being revitalized? And it just totally reframes the entire section as opposed to like, oh, this is this like whiz-bang thing that we're all trying to do. It's like, no, this is a remembering of something that folks have cultural memory of. Um, and and Jacob tells beautifully the story of his own kind of awakening to this being his life's work and his life path.

AJ 1:05:35

Oh, sure does. I mean, again, that the kernel of insight comes from somewhere else. And yeah, ironically, in a way, in this case from Europe, but the cultures that we do, we celebrate, these cultures of Italy. Right. Where we st you still see them on covers of tourist magazines.

Liz 1:05:52

Right.

AJ 1:05:52

And he was there and he got the insight. It wasn't just their local food situation, it was the culture that had endured for centuries that that gave him. The inside, oh yeah, my culture, my place, and uh and that he can map it back. This is fascinating to me on multiple levels. But speaking of ancestor work, he maps it back to a dream he had, and not being the sort of fella who who looks for meaning in dreams necessarily, but had this extraordinary moment where an ancestor came to him in a dream. Yeah. Clear as crystal, but not with a clear message as such. But he can he can map back what shifted for him out of that presence, yes, to that presence, not necessarily word spoken or a message delivered or whatever.

Liz 1:06:39

Right.

AJ 1:06:39

But he can map it back to that. So

Coming Full Circle On Ancestor Work

AJ 1:06:42

it makes me wonder, Liz, after this too, is it still the same answer? Is this what it's all about? Is it still and is it still ancestor work?

Liz 1:06:50

Yes, that's a that's a beautiful um coming full circle. And and you had me thinking about how, you know, ancestor work, I think Jacob represents it very beautifully, isn't a game of Simon says, you know, maybe if we're new to that term, we do imagine, like, oh, I'm gonna have a dream and literally an ancestor is just gonna tell me exactly what to do, you know. Whereas I I think Jacob is is giving us a much more honest version, is that instead, you know, like our ancestors, our ancestors are kind of tough, you know, like they're not interested in just giving us all the answers. They want us to find out on our own. And so, in a sense, you know, this dream that Jacob had was an ancestor setting him on a path, but he, you know, an ancestor opening a door that he had to walk through. Um, and so I guess it's it's a wonderful gift to read Jacob's essay and to know that uh maybe our experience of connecting with an ancestor or lineage uh will seem a little opaque at the beginning. But we we can we can know that that that's like that's a journey for us to try to understand um the meaning of something that is clearly significant. But I think oftentimes in all these stories, the precise significance of it wasn't necessarily clear to folks at the beginning, but it sort of set them out on a journey.

AJ 1:08:07

Well, yours too. No, you said it before with lental underground, even in ways you didn't you wrote a book and you still didn't really know until you had it reflected back to you later on.

Liz 1:08:20

Humbly knowing that, you know, I'm sharing with you what I understand now. And um, you know, if I'm so lucky, uh my understanding will deepen as I continue to be in dialogue with people.

AJ 1:08:29

And to think that there's a power in that, you know, that the power that we talked about before of reconnecting with land and each other and in these ways and and in this way, there's so much power that again, it's not the money and it's not the surface stuff that can appear insurmountable. But if we're tapping the stuff that even outlasts that, yeah, then there's yeah, I I hear that too. So perhaps I've just led into um into what you think about what I'm about to put to you, but you guys did say in your book that you feel like people are up for this now.

People Are Ready For Regeneration

AJ 1:09:01

Yeah. I didn't take that lightly. What are you seeing?

Liz 1:09:05

Yeah, well, it's an amazing experience to edit a collection of 30 stories from an extraordinarily diverse group of people, some of whom are in their 20s, some of whom are in the sort of later seasons of their life, and you know, all of this extraordinary diversity and and who are very powerful people and very courageous people, you know. Like what I would say of all 30 of these essayists that contribute to living roots, they did not take just the easiest path in their life. Like they had a sense of purpose and have pursued it through lots of challenges to realize this kind of connection to perennial plants and as a result, a kind of intergenerational stewardship of land. And so I think Aubrey and I came out of that as we were writing our introductory essay with this sense of like, wow, this collection of 30 stories is actually just scratching the surface. Because every single one of these people comes out of a community doing this work. Um and then when we went on the book tour, you know, this past spring, we got to meet these communities. We were in the places where these contributors live and work, and wow, you know, and you're just struck by like what an incredible global web of people engaged in regeneration in all of these powerful and courageous ways. Um, for all these different reasons. But I think a lot of it does have to do with people seeing these ecological crises and also people like drawn to reconnecting with parts of themselves and yeah, their own lineages and their own cultural traditions and all the beauty that can come of engaging with regeneration and and sort of meaning and purpose and really health and well-being in our own lives. So I do think people are are up for this work of regeneration.

AJ 1:10:58

Yeah, I I'm taking stock of that. I was just shaping cheers to what you were saying in the in the mug I'm holding, which you might be able to read is from Guatemala, which was a home for me 20 years ago, and I managed to revisit it as part of our journey into the Americas. And and indeed the Mayan ancestry is present there through some of his stories in your book too, including going through to the Midwest with uh Reginaldo, which some people would be familiar with. And if you're not, you need to read the book, but just nodding the head to that aspect of the story as well, and just you know, again, other parts of the world, as you say, and other cultures, but all all mapping on and in diasporic ways, again, as you as you say, Liz.

Teaching Lineage Land And Bold Futures

AJ 1:11:39

So before we sign off, I'm curious too, like you're teaching now. So as this knowledge comes to hand and you're teaching undergrads to young folk, yeah. So I I'm picturing people who've come in and probably don't know what they're up for. Is that fair to say? It's like, well, I used to experience this too, but but with post grads, they come into a sustainability thing or whatever and they get systems thinking. So what is this sustainability? But I imagine young people from a culture that this isn't dominant in. I'm imagining it's like that. It's like, whoa, this is what we're going at. How are they going at it? How do you how do you go at it with them? And how are they coming at it?

Liz 1:12:21

Yeah, I mean, this is really one of the gifts of my life to get to work with young people. I just um finished my 11th year of teaching. Um, I counted actually for an essay that I'm writing for a performance review, and I've worked with over 2,000 students over the last 11 years. Um and that's one of the huge roots, I think, of me confidently saying, I think people are up for this because um, in general, my students are quite a bit bolder than I am in what they imagine for their world and their future. And I can't remember the last time I had a class without a pretty significant wait list. Um they are pushing me in these directions, including like healing grounds in many ways, came out of students' interest. Um, the students that I work with at UC Santa Barbara, many of them are non-white students. Many of them are from um families that immigrated from Mexico, Central America. And as they pursue a degree in environmental studies, many of them are very interested in understanding their own lineage with land care and earth care and, you know, the ways in which they may be a first-generation college student, but they are they are not a first-generation earthworker. Um, they are standing on the shoulders of giants. So um, also a number of Asian American students who come from lineages and and hard things like Japanese American internment. Um, and that was a piece of what I also was interested in representing Healing Grounds is, you know, all those stories. So I I'm really excited about what young people imagine for the future of this planet. I I interact with a lot of young folks who are willing to imagine very, very different ways of being with each other and with the land. And I think um I'm in a season of my life now where one of my major responsibilities is just to support them and walk with them and offer whatever I can in support of these beautiful visions that they have that will, I think, challenge some of us who are older and you know, are familiar with certain ways that things are. Um, I'm always grateful for students who uh are ready to kind of push some boundaries.

AJ 1:14:38

100%. Yep. No, and I feel the same about the podcast, and I guess you do about the books too, hi. That that's what you're you're presenting yourself to be changed. And uh and again, I've just felt never has there been a greater gift, and and there's something in that, obviously, as opposed to uh defending our

A Practical Invitation To Join In

AJ 1:14:54

our points. It's more of an explicit um call to action too, hey, this book.

Liz 1:14:58

Yeah, yeah. We we can transition to a more perennial regenerative food system. And, you know, we've talked about all these different ways um across the course of our conversation. People will participate in different ways, whether in a community garden or through land trusts or trying to develop uh community-supported agriculture, organic marketplaces that allow people to experiment at a certain scale. So many different ways for us to make room for these life ways to flourish. Um, but now is our time to sort of jump in in whatever way we can, wherever we are. And um, what I can guarantee you is that while that will be a contribution to future generations and the place where you are, the benefits that will flow back to you by virtue of being able to touch a much deeper sense of time will be many orders of magnitude more. And I think it's a great thing to do to ground ourselves in a time that is so challenging in so many ways, just to touch into that deeper time scale. And perennials really do help us do that, especially when we cultivate them with our friends and neighbors.

AJ 1:16:09

That's almost precisely what I was wondering, actually. Liz, that last bit in the context of things, you know, that we could, you know, we could talk about another hour worth of of that, but I think you've just nailed it. Um thank you. And of course, yeah, whether it's telling the stories too, huh? Or indeed, or indeed, playing the tunes.

Songs As Maps Across Time

AJ 1:16:28

And and you've been kind enough to send me a few songs that I can patch into this. And I just want to have the conversation first, but I got my options. And as I'd been listening to your music again, as I did back when I thought we were gonna meet, but uh I was doing it again here, and and even my wife was calling it, wow, that's a nice one. And that was Feels Like Home, by the way. Um so when you did come back with the ones that we'd sort of I mean, they are amazing tracks, The Water is Wide, Feels Like Home, Cheeky Montana song. Um Upstream. So I'll I'll patch one or one or more of these things in, but for you, why did you send these ones? Because I left it to you. I didn't preempt. Why did you send these ones through?

Liz 1:17:13

That's interesting. I guess it it kind of comes back we were talking earlier, how you kind of the meaning of a parable lands with you many years later. And uh at least at this moment in my life, I can look back on these songs that I wrote over 20 years ago, I think in every single case. And um, it's like an earlier version of myself that was prescient in some way is speaking to me. Um and and I can I can understand what she's saying, you know? It's like ah yes, that that is an insight that somehow I had someone offered to me at that age that is worth coming back to. Um, and there is, I was also thinking about sort of land and water and upstream, of course, is is all using this kind of water metaphor about sort of navigating life, you know, and it's not all smooth sailing. And Montana is is sort of place-based, even though it's also, as you said, like a super funny song. And then the water is wide, you know, that's a traditional song, and it it speaks to like a like a lot of folk songs, there's a particular story of longing in it, but it is also there's something bigger that's evoked by it of kind of longing. And um, I guess it is about diaspora in many ways and the kind of like terror that we feel um being um a long ways away from a place that is home, but then also sometimes there's something we need to do in that place where we are, and there's something to just feeling that longing and that tug, and not necessarily trying to do anything to solve it, but knowing that that is a wonderful thing upwelling in us is that sense of connection to place and places that we've loved and that we care about. But love grows on and waxes call and takes away.

AJ 1:19:32

And neither we just need it is uncanny that in a sense you might have just written the map given conversation. And it does I do marvel at that as you are, and it does speak, I think, at least in part, to the deliberate conscious and maybe subconscious act. That you don't just let another day pass, you write a song that counts. And so you're you tr you're tapping something that counts. And same with same with books, I think. And this is still the value of a book or even an album, let alone a song, you know, in this in this era of just streaming hits or whatever, um, or putting on shuffle. That whatever engages us and you know, back to the land, just get to the heart of a good life.

Liz 1:21:02

Yeah.

AJ 1:21:03

And be surprised. Be surprised constantly, hey? And know that your being isn't uh this isolated thing you are, you are connected through the roots to everything that ever was and every other color of skin ultimately, and yeah, et cetera, et cetera.

Liz 1:21:17

And I think, you know, maybe that experience for me of coming back to those songs also highlights that that knowing is really a process of remembering and that it is so circular. Um, you know, as a Western academic, I might think of it being more cumulative. Um, but this is a reminder that it's much more of a circle and it's much more of a remembering. And so many of these really wise traditions of land care and regeneration have embedded in the practice of land care these rituals of remembering and um stories and other ways that people make sure to remember and kind of come back instead of imagining this kind of like linear development, right? The word that we so often use to talk about agriculture in a Western context, um, that instead it's this kind of moving in a circle of the things that remind you of, yeah, the essential truth of your being.

AJ 1:22:10

Well said. And funny, Liz, because as the sun sets behind you, you have been haloed. So there's you've been kindly trying to avert it, but you couldn't help it. You're still haloed. Seemed fitting. Thanks a lot, Liz. It's been just brilliant. Worth the wait, you might say.

Liz 1:22:30

Well, thank you so much um for your patience and for what's become, yeah, this connection over many, many months.

AJ 1:22:38

Many months and now many books. Thank you very much.

Liz 1:22:41

Thank you, AJ. What I miss about Montana. No, honey.

Closing Thanks And Listener Support

AJ 1:22:51

That was Liz Carlisle, aka drummer girl Liz. Her new book, co-edited with Aubrey Streit Krug, is Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods, out now through Island Press and New South Books here in Oz. Healing Grounds and Liz's other books are also accessible via her website, and more of her music is elsewhere online if you're like me and keen to hear more. If you like what you hear here, I hope you'll consider becoming a paid subscriber on Patreon or Substack. This episode was only possible with your support. So thanks very much to Becky Trilsbach and Sarah Keo for joining on Patreon, and Stacy Kerchio and Dominique Hess for joining on Substack, in addition to all your support over the years. And thanks to all four of you for coming to the Subscriber Solstice online gathering last weekend with the legend Fred Provenza. The music you're hearing now is Montana, and prior to that, the water is wide, and at the top, feels like home. All by Liz Carlisle. My name's Anthony James. Thanks for listening.

Liz 1:24:14

No, I didn't finish the place where we are. It's down in the tree. Always love me.