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00:01:48.920Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today I'm speaking to farmer, activist, and organizer Severin von Scharner-Fleming.
00:02:05.620The direct relationship to an ecosystem in place seems to me like a very profound pathway for personal accountability.
00:02:15.300based in down east maine severin runs a smithereen farm a mofka certified organic
00:02:24.000wild blueberry seaweed and orchard operation which hosts summer camps camping and educational
00:02:30.200workshops she is a founder and board member of agrarian trust and current director of the
00:02:36.140greenhorns a 13 year old grassroots organization whose mission is to recruit promote and support
00:02:43.080the incoming generation of farmers in America. Well, Severin, thank you so much for joining me
00:02:53.440today. It's so lovely to speak with you, dear friend, and I'm really excited to get into these
00:02:58.380wonderful topics with you. It's a pleasure. Well, in preparing for this interview, I learned that
00:03:06.580around the world, churches own millions of acres of land, much of which could be tended to. Now
00:03:13.720globally, it's estimated that the Catholic Church owns almost 200 million acres of land, making it
00:03:20.100one of the largest non-government landowners in the world. And simultaneously, many advocates for
00:03:26.120land redistribution point out that in the 20th century, formerly enslaved people and their
00:03:31.960descendants owned 15 million acres of land in the United States, but the vast majority lost title
00:03:38.100due to discriminatory practices at the United States Department of Agriculture. And of course,
00:03:43.820in the United States, most of this land is owned by settlers. I'm not the first person to think
00:03:49.600about these glaring inequalities, but I wanted to bring this up for us to really sit in and explore
00:03:56.520this area of farmland transfer a little further. I think we can agree that imposing colonial
00:04:01.900narratives of ownership upon the land is not the solution, but history has complicated our
00:04:07.960solutions. So I wonder if you could speak to how farmland transfers can not only return lands to
00:04:14.220those who are committed to tending it, but can also work to acknowledge land theft throughout
00:04:18.960this country's formation wow well played
00:04:24.580yeah there's a very succinct hashtag it's called land back that is about return about land return
00:04:37.560and the request for land return as articulated by in that case indigenous activists and organizers
00:04:44.760who have studied their history and who are engaged in the practice of returning themselves
00:04:52.780to the land as well as having the land returned to their care and stewardship.
00:04:58.160And the return of our relationship with land obviously has political and economic and social
00:05:09.540and ecological implications. And those different spheres of relationality and the rebuilding of
00:05:18.980relationality obviously are what's at stake for humanity as a whole. You could say that land
00:05:26.040return and returning to land and remembering that we need to return to a more land-based
00:05:34.280livelihood and live inside of accountability with ecological systems is the great project
00:05:41.900of the coming century. And, you know, my work has been with young farmers for 13 years as an
00:05:49.120organizer and trying to help young people get into agriculture, especially agroecological,
00:05:57.080restorative, agroforestry, permaculture, organic farming, vegetables, and pasture poultry and
00:06:03.360pork and chickens and orchards and local food systems. And that's all part and parcel of that
00:06:10.420meta project, which is returning to an ecologically sensible, sensitive relationship
00:06:19.100with our local landscape, with the commons to which we belong, with the watershed and the
00:06:27.140food shed being really discoverable in the sense of the colonial project by people in ships
00:06:34.160traveling through the ocean powered by the wind and arriving in the places where that wind took
00:06:40.840them and naming the harbors and the points and the capes and the land forms new england and
00:06:48.440cape discovery and in that discovery and in that settlement pattern really identifying
00:06:56.680the places on the landscape where they could capture value for their funders back home and
00:07:04.320or the portals through which more settlers would funnel and claim land and the justification that
00:07:11.300was given in that story obviously was of a terra nullis the catholic church sanctioned at that time
00:07:17.640the claiming of indigenous lands because those peoples who belonged to that land and to whom
00:07:23.800that land belonged were considered, well, they were not Christian. They were indigenous. They
00:07:31.120had their own animist and highly diverse spiritual practices. So that sanctioning by the Catholic
00:07:39.160Church makes your question particularly poignant because through that process, through the colonial
00:07:46.160process, the Catholic Church itself came to own a tremendous amount of land, as you say. And not
00:07:51.700only the Catholic church, you know, many churches, most all churches have some land, even if it's
00:07:57.940just a parking lot. And because of the tax law in the United States, churches can hold land
00:08:04.540without paying taxes. So they're in some ways really well positioned to hold land for a long
00:08:11.500time. And, and some of them hold land for very good purposes. There's wonderful examples of
00:08:17.940partnerships between young uh well we made a little film actually about some wonderful
00:08:23.780food activist food access activists helping doing food pantries and food kitchens and food justice
00:08:31.840work who are farming um on land owned by the catholic sisters uh the the monist the monastic
00:08:40.520land. But yes, it's a wonderful tangle of topics as soon as we are entering this conversation of
00:08:49.720decommodifying land and reconstituting our human relationships to harmonize with the needs of the
00:08:58.240land, the will of the land, and meeting the wants that we have more locally and in a way that's
00:09:05.440respectful and accountable. So let's do it. It's a century-long project.
00:09:15.440Yeah. Well, thank you for starting us off in that way. And you've described agrarian trust
00:09:23.780as a means to, quote, emancipate the land from commodity structure. And I know many of our
00:09:30.160listeners will really have an interest in this conversation as so much thought swirls around the
00:09:35.280notion of ownership when it comes to land, that land needs to go back to its original stewards,
00:09:41.300that land ownership is actually central to obtaining some means of sovereignty in the
00:09:45.800immediate, and of course that land cannot and should not ever be owned by an individual.
00:09:52.280So I'm wondering if you can share with us how the agrarian trust plays with the notion of land
00:09:57.580ownership and how beyond the legality of it, land trusts are steps towards loving and caring for
00:10:04.080land through communal ownership? So in very practical terms, what we're talking about is
00:10:12.680sovereignty and self-determination of communities and the people who are actually with their bodies
00:10:20.880working in some form of food production, subsistence, gardening, foraging, wild harvesting,
00:10:29.060protecting gathering firewood and providing for human needs through interaction with an ecosystem
00:10:36.560and it just bears mentioning over and over as we get into these abstractions and I'm going to tell
00:10:41.800you about our community land trust model and tax structures and everything is yes more of us need
00:10:48.260to be doing it ourselves and especially in this moment when there's a lot of unemployment as there
00:10:55.980was in the last economic fall down time. I think a big, big message that I want to foreground in
00:11:03.940this conversation is this movement, this land movement, this farm movement, this wild harvest
00:11:10.280movement, this tending, this habitat restoration, this ecosystems amelioration, this butterfly
00:11:18.060supporting movement needs human bodies. And we are really excited for new people who have maybe
00:11:24.940not been part of this before to join and we welcome you please come it won't happen without
00:11:33.700our work without our physical work so the agrarian trust was founded after I think about 10 years of
00:11:43.080work in young farmer organizing and young farmer organizing to connect young farmers with each
00:11:49.940other with policy advocacy to try and get more funding for professional training, for low interest
00:11:56.520loans from the government, for activating the educational networks so that when farmers could
00:12:03.340get really good access to apprenticeship training and classroom training and meet each other and
00:12:10.180navigate their way into the profession. And it's all very positive and Greenhorns and
00:12:16.580National Young Farmers Coalition continue to exist as those portals. But what we ran into
00:12:22.020over and over within the life story of all of our community members, all the young farmers that we
00:12:27.520met, was a central problematic structural issue, which is access to land is incredibly challenging,
00:12:37.220even in a country as big as ours and where so much of the land is what you could say
00:12:43.120underutilized or potentially available. Like if you just look at it as you're driving by,
00:12:49.940there's a lot of land here compared to Europe or Asia. And so despite that kind of appearance of
00:12:57.600there being plenty of opportunity and plenty of space and all these beautiful small towns with
00:13:01.940main streets that have vacant storefronts and despite all this appetite and hunger and demand
00:13:09.100for locally produced food and for CSAs and local eggs and everything that that project of actually
00:13:15.940getting onto land turns out to be quite a project and it boils down to relationships it boils down
00:13:23.380to transactions it boils down to lease agreements purchase agreements loans and debt and negotiation
00:13:32.220with neighbors and it boils down to money. And so five years ago, Agrarian Trust began as a kind
00:13:40.340of multi-stakeholder swirled community discussion that was hosted by Piscinas Ranch and was
00:13:46.340facilitated lovingly. And essentially what we did was sit around and co-create what we thought would
00:13:53.680make for the best habitat, legally, culturally, socially, habitat in terms of a land agreement
00:14:01.580for the kind of young farmer enterprises and organic enterprises that we see happening.
00:14:07.780And so Agrarian Trust basically based itself on the community land trust movement and envisioned
00:14:15.160a form of landholding, commons-based, that learns from the rules of commons management
00:14:24.420that were articulated by Eleanor Ostrom, who was a scholar of the commons and an economist
00:14:38.900She studied the highly coordinated Balinese rice gardens and their irrigation.
00:14:45.160rituals she was studying the way that humans in relationship care for and administrate land
00:14:53.080and ecosystems held in common and basically what it means is that there's an accountability
00:15:00.040structure that isn't just one person one deed and a set of rights in fact it's the rights that are
00:15:08.360associated with the land that we hold are are highly constrained you're you don't have the
00:15:13.880right anymore once land comes into the agrarian trust to degrade and destroy it. You don't have
00:15:19.660the right to export and mine from the land. You don't have the right to develop that land for0.51
00:15:26.380commercial purposes. You have the right to produce food for the local community, and you have
00:15:31.740support from that local commons of humans who are involved, the governance committee, but also the
00:15:39.600larger encircling community of humans who are interested in the restoration of that land,
00:15:47.820in the diversification and intensification of life of that land. And so this all sounds very
00:15:55.220philosophical. When it boils out on paper, what it means is we're a land trust and we have now
00:16:01.86010 incorporated local land commons with two more coming. And we have accepted land gifts.
00:16:10.800We have fundraised for land purchases. We have negotiated bargain sales. And essentially the
00:16:19.340land and the land communities who approach us come in and participate in the land commoning process
00:16:26.760as facilitated by the agrarian trust legal team and advisory team to hold this land available
00:16:37.380and make it available and keep it available for community supported agriculture and community
00:16:43.020supporting agriculture. And of course, I refer you to the agrarian trust website to learn in more
00:16:49.740detail how you might participate as a farmer, as a donor of land, as a landholder, as a land
00:16:56.380neighbor as a someone who knows and is in relationship with landowners because as we
00:17:02.060I'm sure can all appreciate each farm land unit each bounded parcel has its own kind of history
00:17:13.580and destiny and karma and complexity and so as we're working to heal and reconnect with the
00:17:23.360logic of the larger landscape and think more like the butterflies who skittle along in the sunshine
00:17:30.320on the south-facing wall and think more like the water that pours through from the mountain to the
00:17:36.460sea and you know remember the legacies and the structures and the architecture and the vernacular
00:17:43.180and the identity that's associated with our settlement of this land in the kind of U.S.
00:17:50.080history terms but that there's the kind of an unfurling that's inferred by this practice and
00:17:58.200it also comes with this certain kind of magnetism certain magical possibilities and
00:18:04.440I guess the only thing I can say is having observed the kind of raw data of all of these
00:18:10.960parcels and people and the trying and the effort and kindness to make this land available for the
00:18:18.560kind of farming that it it can be that there's a will force that shows up and it's been a slow
00:18:27.240process getting agrarian trust started but then it's been a really a quick accelerating process
00:18:32.720as each of these land commons starts to fulfill its mission and the relationships crystallize and0.96
00:18:40.140the kind of gossiping fairies participate in some way. I'm just, I struggled to articulate,0.99
00:18:48.800but I, I want to encourage everyone to know that the conspiracy for land liberation
00:18:57.240brings with it some very special power. I love that you said that. And I feel that
00:19:07.200as well. Now I'd like to explicitly talk about the commons with you and its importance and
00:19:15.220I think the language around the commons can immediately turn people off as it's so often
00:19:20.540associated with the tragedy of the commons but lately I've been really inspired by what can
00:19:26.180become of our collective commitment to the commons as a means to stave off expanding global land
00:19:31.620privatization, wherein governments are putting more and more land and natural resources into
00:19:37.180the hands of developers. So I wonder if he might discuss a bit about why the revitalization of the
00:19:43.120commons is actually a very powerful framework for us to draw inspiration from. Yes, the tragedy of
00:19:51.420the commons is an article that was written by Hardin, and he later corrected or clarified that
00:20:01.220He was talking about the tragedy of an unmanaged commons and that the confidence we need in order to manage the commons we share, the atmosphere, the forests, the watershed, the rain, the sea, the commons we share are bounded by invisible and a multitude of boundaries.
00:20:24.600so there's this belonging that happens on many many scales and in the same way we were talking
00:20:32.520about the kind of architecture of and vernacular and cultural identity of settlement that you know
00:20:40.700started in the point of of the harbor and where the boat arrived and then you know filed its way
00:20:48.300up rivers and got set it up dams and made railroads and you know and articulated a logic pattern
00:20:53.820across the landscape that was about you know extraction and financialization of natural
00:21:00.240resource economies and then connectivity and trade and that that logic pattern that now lives
00:21:06.700as our kind of built world lays over another another logic pattern that we can tune into and
00:21:14.560that's that logic pattern you know is the commons and they can be made more transparent
00:21:23.080when they are culturally understood as that so you know in the U.S. right now the public lands
00:21:32.760are and you know public and the public forests national forests are described as public and as
00:21:41.380a commons but in practice the right to log and the right to graze are essentially
00:21:51.980leased off for very low price to private contractors or private entity or companies
00:22:01.140or ranchers or logging companies. And then the practices that happen on that land are,
00:22:10.000you know, not terribly well managed and not very careful. And so again, even in the place where we
00:22:20.680would want to refer to a kind of having a confidence in our commons in terms of you know
00:22:25.840our reverence for public lands as a nation and scenic beauty and the national parks and
00:22:31.460well if you kind of scratch under the surface what you discover is that mining and mineral rights
00:22:38.040sales and exploitation of publicly owned lands especially under this current administration
00:22:45.860um is going on in a scale that it's like buffalo bill out there uh in terms of the eco side
00:22:55.460but if we're talking about the commons and we're talking about referring to the commons and
00:23:02.900discovering the kind of logic of the commons to which we belong it's i think it's helpful because
00:23:11.920it reminds us of the accountability that obviously is lost in an economy like our contemporary
00:23:20.520economy, but which is inherent in any sustainable or regenerative or, you know, frankly, just plain
00:23:29.740old resilient way of living in the future. And so you can really easily just start with your
00:23:36.860naked body wearing a mask and what it eats and what it drinks from and where, you know,
00:23:43.160where, what it, where, when it goes pee, where that pee goes. And, you know, just from the very0.57
00:23:48.280basic human scale, where is my river? What watershed am I a part of? Who, what, who are
00:23:54.940the farmers that are feeding me? What is the land that is feeding me? Where's the water that irrigates
00:23:59.420that land coming from? And what's the forest that's, that's holding that water on the landscape.
00:24:05.280And those ways of relating to our home place help us to identify the places of intervention and the, you know, to be really tuned in, as we say in our Earth Life film, we say, tune in, tune into your home place and learn kind of the history and the destiny of that home place as a way to orient your own re-engagement with that commons.
00:28:20.940the National Resource Conservation Service,
00:28:23.020gives grants to put hedgerows and redo native plantings.
00:28:27.060And they give grants for mitigating runoff from dairy barns.
00:28:30.920And they give grants for fencing and they give grants for greenhouses.
00:28:34.180And they're very focused on habitat for sage hens and prairie birds and migrating birds and everybody.
00:28:44.200But they're also very focused on private property and ranch owners and farm owners.
00:28:50.120But there are actually so many places on the landscape that provide opportunity for restoration, opportunity for local food production,
00:28:59.520and opportunity for resilient society that are not family farms as they are kind of traditionally
00:29:07.160understood by many of our institutions and much of the kind of cultural identity of land care
00:29:13.300in like, you know, rural discussion and discourse. And so that kind of civic
00:29:22.500reclaiming of places like schools like churches like cemeteries like libraries like sides of the
00:29:32.160road and the emergence of kind of new places of production within especially along the urban edge
00:29:40.960could come about through other means than you know purchase and community finance and
00:29:47.420you know all this stuff that we're talking about with generational succession and purchase and a
00:29:54.360lot of the momentum that's possible for making habitat for young farmers and making habitat for
00:30:02.280community gardens and making habitat for pollinators uh can can happen in a negotiated way
00:30:11.260with institutions that are not quote unquote, the family farm. And, uh, it's a whole other
00:30:19.640conversation, but I think that it's very important in whenever we're talking about one kind of
00:30:25.740project or organization or approach like agrarian trust, which I'm happy to talk about for years
00:30:31.420that I want to make sure that I'm not excluding what I see as, you know, 15 other totally viable
00:30:38.120pathways to achieving land care in the situational context that present themselves
00:30:44.180variously in this highly diverse landscape. And that, you know, especially, you know,
00:30:52.160what I'm observing with the flight of families who can from cities during COVID and the
00:31:01.460kind of resettling of those humans in city proximate country communities is one version
00:31:10.780of resettlement and there's ownership problems that come along with that because then city you
00:31:19.180know raytheon employees are much better able than uh young orchardists to afford ownership of that
00:31:28.220land, obviously. And anybody who's buying a second home sanctuary is definitely going to be able to
00:31:33.480outbid anybody who's trying to farm. But if those communities understood that they're in an area so
00:31:40.880close to a city where the land is so valuable for food production, then there would be an option
00:31:47.060for those municipalities to give tax benefit to those who produce food and to make more punitive
00:31:56.300um in a tax way the kind of anti-social behaviors that can sometimes happen or anti
00:32:04.320anti-nature behaviors or you know it's not just going to be tenure I think it's also
00:32:10.520got to be a larger cultural project to demand of our human community that we hold ourselves
00:32:19.240accountable to the region that we're a part of and that if we're in a river bottom and we're
00:32:25.360growing, we have a beautiful land for growing vegetables, that we will share that land with
00:32:31.040those who want to grow vegetables. And that this kind of bounded and discreet entitlement
00:32:39.060that constitutes kind of normal land ownership behavior has just got to be renegotiated because
00:32:46.740the movement of people and the disruption of our weather systems are going to force
00:32:55.260our hand and the initiative and the kind of visionary hopefulness of people who are
00:33:02.620willing to start and experiment with food production strategies in all the nooks and
00:33:09.220crannies of productive potential on the landscape really need and deserve to be welcomed and
00:33:16.820cherished. So I think it's not just about farm families and supporting farm families with
00:33:22.060succession, although that is a major, major project for this country to undertake. And
00:33:27.580the statistics are very clear on this. 70% of American farmland is owned by people
00:33:33.540over the age of 65. Many people who live in the cities now are actually connected
00:33:40.420through generational inheritance to rural lands and farmlands, which are leased on their behalf,
00:33:46.940often to larger scale operators many of whom are leasing a lot of land and producing you know the
00:33:56.720commodity food systems uh that have become the norm as a result of u.s farm policy soybeans and
00:34:05.480corn and wheat and animal feed hay that are um giving us the american diet we have today and
00:34:16.700So there are many people who are making decisions in this next, you know, 10, 15 years that will really define what happens to the American food system as they take on this land that they newly own or as this land that is newly for sale becomes either financialized or bundled as an investment or consolidated and concentrated in ever larger holdings.
00:34:43.360and you know very concretely we as a movement of people involved in organic farming
00:34:51.480we know where all the organic farms are and we know who owns them it's all on it's all listed
00:34:59.520in the directory and ensuring that those existing organic farms that are currently the
00:35:07.840kind of wellspring of regional food systems and that are the trainers for new farmers and that
00:35:17.600are the places where we meet as a community for our picnic and our CSA pickup. These farms,
00:35:26.380many of them, according to some surveys by some states, more than 60% of these existing current
00:35:34.540farming today organic farms don't have adequate succession planning and that those current
00:35:41.900farmers need help with their exit strategy and they need help with passing that land forward
00:35:48.480to the next either generation within their own family or generation of next farmers who aren't
00:35:54.820in the same blood family but for whom farming that land is a life's mission so just to say
00:36:03.740there are many points of access to participating in a helpful manner when it comes to making sure
00:36:10.080that this farmland that we already have as organic stays inorganic and agrarian trust has got
00:36:16.260tremendous amounts of resources and readings and strategies and approaches that are about
00:36:21.160succession planning and the kind of transactional strategies for land succession but beyond just
00:36:30.980kind of the land ownership and the pathway forward for these, you know, farm units that we have
00:36:35.840today, there's a whole other kind of renegotiation of tenure and access that isn't to do with
00:36:43.580ownership. And I think that that's a place of very live exploration. And if we have to buy it,
00:36:51.280and if we have to operate under the terms and the valuation of contemporary capitalism, we can't do
00:36:58.380So land gifting in terms of ownership, land gifting into the agrarian trust, these are things that we are tremendously pleased to see occurring.
00:37:09.620But in order to actually succeed at doubling the territory that's growing organic food or tripling the territory that's growing organic food or times 10, increasing the regenerative practices that we know are necessary for restoring our carbon cycle and healing the landscape, the pathways have got to increase and expand.
00:37:52.200And I wish there were 15 scholars that I knew who were studying it because I think emergent practices in that kind of land space are the hope for humanity.
00:38:03.360because the places that we have where we can eat still and where we can grow food and where we can
00:38:09.500heal land and we can restore productivity to these landscapes these are these places really
00:38:15.640need care and and as the planet earth is suffering so much desertification and extreme
00:38:24.020weather and flooding and you know farmland degradation reversing those trends on the on
00:38:30.920the big acres is one major project, but expanding out from the places of existing strength and
00:38:39.120investing deeply and profoundly in those places that can be actively healed is really
00:38:47.120the work that is, that's the Lord's work. That's the work of, that's the work we need to be doing.
00:38:53.840That is really exciting. And I loved hearing some of these details around this work. And I, yeah, I can attest that there's no or that there's undoubtedly a tremendous amount of excitement coming from young people when it comes to getting back to the land, farming their own food and seeking and starting acts of restoration.
00:39:16.200however i do wonder what is the lifespan of this excitement or when is its journey when does it get
00:39:25.440stuck or when do people get stuck in this journey and is this excitement translating into more
00:39:30.480farmers on the land and what about the very troubles that arise when we seek to live off
00:39:36.660the land quote unquote what does living off the land mean under a system that has made it nearly
00:39:41.900impossible to subsist solely from the land. And I guess, you know, what are the nuts and bolts
00:39:47.560of living a sustainable life? Oh, golly. Yeah, well, when healthcare is so expensive and
00:39:59.780liability is such a concern and water tables are dropping and urbanization continues to push land
00:40:09.140values and taxes up, then an economy that has been defined by cheap food policy is, in fact,
00:40:18.940a very challenging economy to run a small farm business in. And that's obvious to everybody
00:40:24.480who's farming. And I think it's at least somewhat obvious to the organic consumer
00:40:29.960that they would need to pay more for farming that is sane and sensible and kind-hearted.
00:40:37.020there in many store in many of the kind of life stories of the people who are getting into
00:40:44.000agriculture what you'll discover is um compromises and accommodations to the
00:40:50.560larger macroeconomic world and that often means an off-farm job uh
00:40:57.920you know and it often means working with you know within a very strong social group
00:41:05.760of either a family, you know, part family partnership or cooperative or kind of multi-human
00:41:11.660unit of collaboration in order to share living costs and share health insurance and, you know,
00:41:19.660just confront the world in good cheer because it is so challenging. And, you know, the rent's too
00:41:27.340damn high overall. The value of natural resources is too low. The value of property is too high.
00:41:34.980And this is a macroeconomic context that, you know, was invented for a purpose and has been sustained by special interests who are not at all committed to restoration.
00:41:48.440I just think it's healthy to acknowledge that, you know, farming is romantic, but it pretty quickly becomes obvious that that romance comes at a cost.
00:41:58.260And when you have livestock, you have dead stock. Things go wrong and the stakes are high. But your question was, how do we sustain these humans who are entering this work?
00:42:12.080I feel like the answer to that is that these humans who are entering this work need to be bonded in with a large kinship network of supporters and allies and need to be operating, you know, not to be trite, but, you know, in community.
00:42:29.340And that the reconstituting of our community accountability and community embeddedness is actually a huge cofactor in the success of all these farms, that every farm is in itself a social matrix and lives at the center of a massive kind of crystal pattern of humans who care and are connected and are engaged.
00:42:57.980And that that can provide a really powerful scaffold for the next farm that starts and for the next related food business and for the next initiative to confront the salmon farm that proposes to pump water from the aquifer and to put forward a kindergarten and put forward a emergency food drive and to respond to the crisis when it comes.
00:43:25.140And so to recognize that the farm as a unit and the farm or farm family or farmers who are participating are actually, they're kind of like holding a certain role and they're providing the food and they're doing the feeder role.
00:43:41.200But they are the commons unto themselves. They are part of a bounded social entity that exists and is connected through nutrition and through spirit to that land.
00:43:55.660And the more of those spongy, diverse, mutualistic, accountable to each other, informationally dense pockets of humans, connected humans we have, the better able we are to sense and respond to the crisis of our time.
00:44:18.740so i guess if you're a listener and you don't feel like you're part of a farm
00:44:22.780kind of posse i would say become become part of a farm posse or deepen your part you know what part
00:44:31.200you play because there's the there's something very very yeah i don't know again here i am
00:44:38.860without words again something very powerful about belonging to such a group
00:44:44.100yeah i feel like um community makes the impossible possible and to have that type of support
00:44:57.520emotionally physically and in so many ways um uplifts the spirit but also
00:45:04.520creates a type of network that allows individuals to not be individuals and that's so important
00:48:41.920gathering wildflower seed and planting and improving with mulch and cardboard and food
00:48:52.300scraps the little rented place that's nearby us and either transplanting with a shovel from
00:48:58.880a wild place or coming in from a nursery with native plants making um making those acts of
00:49:06.000restoration um nomadic yeah there's a lot of moving a lot of humans moving and you know and
00:49:20.900i think acknowledging to ourselves how this moving has been historically an experience
00:49:31.400And an expression of human desperation and a driver of ecological destruction, you know, that obviously trade and settlement and migration, voluntary in the case of settlers or involuntary in the case of some settlers.
00:49:52.640and those who were made homeless by the Scottish clearances or the Irish potato famine or religious
00:50:00.060persecution that's connected to land and power. You know, it's not just those of African descent
00:50:09.960who had no choice but run away from a world order that was exclusive and violent. And the way that1.00
00:50:20.740we run and the energy that we carry as diasporas or as nomads or as vagrants or as ungrounded
00:50:30.980young people very much informs the way that we treat and are able to treat the land.
00:50:40.280And so it's not just about carrying your own cup and not using plastic and, you know, having
00:50:45.580accountability with your food scraps as a as a person between homes and between lives and
00:50:53.980especially in this pandemic time of so much kind of suspended and limbo-y
00:51:00.700those limbo i i really commiserate with the limbo we youth and not knowing where they're
00:51:09.120going to land where they could join in productively and helpfully but step one seems to be acknowledging
00:51:18.520to oneself that being on the road and eating junk food from the fast food and etc is just inherently
00:51:27.420more destructive and that is that's a historical truth as well so one thing i've been noticing in
00:51:38.920My own migration down from Maine to visit all the kind of partner organizations, the Maine Grangers and Maine Preservation and all these partner groups that we're going to work with on our summer camps next year.
00:51:52.940and just friends all the friends to see on the way is that all these farm organisms all these
00:52:02.000farm projects have had a major influx of new humans like college roommates and sisters-in-law
00:52:09.020and you know humans humans joining because there's so many humans kind of cast adrift by
00:52:16.340the shutdowns. And it's hard. It's hard. The good news is there's lots of jobs.
00:52:24.960There's lots of jobs in agriculture. And so those who hadn't maybe thought of themselves as doing
00:52:31.260that might newly consider that. And of course, what I would hope is that in this next phase
00:52:37.100of recovery and state investment in regaining our prosperity as a country, that there would be
00:52:48.560money made available through the state for work, restoration work, in much the same way as during
00:52:56.800the Great Depression, which was both an ecological and an economic crisis, that the planting of
00:53:03.160trees and the restoration of roadways and camps and national park infrastructures and water and
00:53:11.920well they were very focused on dams during the wpa time but it gives me a lot of hope to see that
00:53:18.360there are many conversations about restoration and public works and even public funding going
00:53:27.560to towns to be assigned for historic preservation of civic buildings and churches and i think that
00:53:34.560those pathways for economies that are based on restoration are incredibly valuable to focus on
00:53:41.720in this time shade trees in the city needed infiltration of runoff in the in the drains
00:53:51.200and in the gutters in our towns needed so much intervention in the physical matrix of our kind
00:54:01.260of built environment. And the logic of that work is highly accessible to us. And it doesn't take
00:54:08.900that long of a training to get ready to be in a position to help. So I'm hoping that that's
00:54:17.220something that we start seeing more of, I feel that that must be what is going to happen next.
00:54:24.500I love that vision. Yeah. There's so much, so much work that is needed. And I hope that
00:54:33.020restoration in the right way is funded. And, um, and I think it will be, and I think we need to be
00:54:41.960also very careful when we see the word restoration because like so many of these other words have
00:54:53.080been co-opted by the big green machine and I've learned that the hard way in restoration
00:55:00.420and I think there are people that are doing it with a lot of integrity and so for those of us
00:55:08.660who are looking for those types of jobs and life callings we just need to be discerning when we're
00:55:15.620looking into it but knowing that it is needed and we need to stand up for the earth to do it with
00:55:22.640intention and integrity and a type of community involvement that's deep and meaningful and
00:55:33.440in the greater we edition of greenhorns you write in the introduction quote we who do not
00:55:41.240participate directly in violence that is committed in systemic ways to keep us comfortable and who
00:55:47.400therefore do not acknowledge or associate with the violence i refute such weeing i suggest we
00:55:54.840replace it with we the implicated we the complicit we the orphans of oppressive biocide we the
00:56:02.520granddaughters of extraction we neighbors and creatures nearby the supply chain we the most
00:56:09.020certainly impacted by the chemistry in our watersheds and therefore an immutable alliance
00:56:14.600with one another end quote and the terminology granddaughters of extraction is so powerful and
00:56:24.960resonant as this next generation or the generation after us will also be children of extraction and
00:56:32.240will experience pain regardless of proximity. As a granddaughter of extraction, what has
00:56:39.320been your practice in making reparations to the land while also acknowledging your own
00:56:43.900limitations? How can acknowledging our complicity lead us into an immutable alliance?
00:56:57.600it's a process I mean I think you know where I am in the world is Passamaquoddy homeland and
00:57:09.520I got swept up in a kind of fascination with an obsession with algae wild seaweed
00:57:20.300and participating in an intimacy with the marine world and the intertidal world.
00:57:27.900And so there I am up there with a feral apple orchards growing out of the old stone walls
00:57:34.020that's now reforested from clear cuts and historic logging that was supporting the shipbuilding era.
00:57:42.820And so very literally, you know, we have our library in an Odd Fellows Hall that was built in 1890 and that was built by the prosperity of shipbuilding and logging and cutting down the beautiful pine trees for masts, quite literally for the King of England.
00:58:02.500And then paper making and lath and plaster and rock for lime and plaster and cement.
00:58:12.300And the spaces that we inhabit are so informed by the extractive project that was what drove this, not only the economy, but also human identity.
00:58:29.880And so the kind of, you could say that the culture of the sea and the normative expressions that are inherited by even locally owned, even culturally appropriate and embedded, even familially acculturated fishing families, it's taking too much fish.
00:58:52.100And so the traditions that we are, you know, involuntarily a part of are damaging.
00:59:03.200And so it's, you know, when I come back to this landscape, why we went to Maine was to be in, why I was magnetized by this place, which is Passamaquoddy homeland, where we can range freely over, you know, thousands of acres because there's so few humans there.
00:59:23.440And there's so much self-willed wildland to interact with is that in the practice of relating to these self-willed landscapes is an opportunity to kind of re-acculturate oneself.
00:59:42.320And I don't think that can happen easily.
00:59:46.860I think, you know, my own virtue is not very high because I spent a lot of time flying around the United States and driving around the United States, starting farmers coalitions and attending conferences.
01:00:02.560But that the direct relationship to an ecosystem in place seems to me like a very profound pathway for personal accountability and for tuning into what is happening, what all is happening, all the creatures and the timing, the wind that's blowing the seaweed up on the shore, the shorebirds who are migrating in and eating all the arthropods.
01:00:32.560the time that is available to harvest the wet seaweed from the beach for the
01:00:41.360this kind of synchrony of the world and the larger,
01:00:45.260wider world has been an extraordinary experience.
01:00:54.040And obviously that's a very great privilege that I was through family
01:00:59.660support able to buy land in this place now one thing i can say is that land in that place is
01:01:08.900very very affordable and buildings in places like down east maine and northern northern you know
01:01:16.760northern most new england um is very very affordable and there are many places like that
01:01:24.060where for relatively little money you can get buildings you can get land you can get forest you
01:01:32.300can be um you can be out on the margin and uh it's the margin is a wonderful place to be
01:01:43.240in this question the margin feels like it's giving us so many of the of the signals and uh
01:01:53.380We are at the end of a peninsula where every day during the changing of the tides, we have a phenomena called reversing falls, and it's a major tidal event.
01:02:06.620It's about 16 acres of whitewater when it's at full peak, and it's this churning and surging and reversal.
01:02:17.200It's this vortex that, of course, is hugely generative of oxygenation and, you know, the chaos that makes the seals come and hunt and the birds come along and the eagles swoop down.
01:02:36.280the confusion is rich also it seems like that's i don't know the problem is once you get into
01:02:47.220these highly poetic landscapes everything turns into metaphor and it all becomes highly amusing
01:02:53.160and when you're weeding your strawberry patch and harvesting your apples up and down and
01:02:58.900going out and gathering the shiitakes every day and fishing and fermenting the fish and
01:03:06.600tending the oysters. And, you know, you have plenty of time to be very romantic and consider
01:03:14.440the poetic implication of everything. And, you know, and then you fall to bed exhausted. So
01:03:20.560what to say about that? Just that that's a different from the kind of anxiety that I think
01:03:28.900has been an experience of my early youth and an experience of being a college educated person
01:03:37.720raised in the city and the experience of seeking purpose and that you know my own personal activism
01:03:48.060and inquiry and you know slightly frenetic over exertion in the world has been informed I think
01:03:57.000by that anxiety of being a daughter of extraction and I only hope that after a few more years of
01:04:06.700building oxen sheds and cooking eggs in the kitchen everything and getting our you know our
01:04:14.640situation dialed in so that we can feed a lot of people and live well and do good work maybe after
01:04:25.900a few more years, maybe a couple more decades of frenetic activity, I will be calm enough
01:04:32.420to leave in grace. But I think, uh, you know, it makes sense to be anxious. It makes sense to be
01:04:41.300afraid. It makes sense to worry and, and, and hoard and claw our way. And, you know, that's,
01:04:49.600That reflects our experience genetically and epigenetically as, as, as, as human creatures.
01:04:56.900So having compassion for others who might arrive into your scene and who are in some
01:05:04.100way unbalanced or upset, you know, is the challenge.
01:05:10.500And if you have the capacity to make a scene and make a home and make a sanctuary and be
01:05:16.480settled in a way that's compassionate and kind, then do it. You know, take responsibility for
01:05:23.620your, for your capacity. If you have the capacity to lead and administrate and coordinate and farm
01:05:28.940and plant and host, do it. We need you. Thank you for listening to another episode of For the Wild
01:05:42.260podcast. The music you heard today was by Handmade Moments. For the Wild is created
01:05:47.800by Ayanna Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Melanie Younger.