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Nature has its unique ways of speaking with us, but we fail to slow down and listen to what she has to say. By treating her as a living relative instead of a resource, we can finally get access to powerful and transformative earth wisdom. Corinna Bellizzi is joined by Leah Penniman, a Black Kreyol farmer, activist, and African Traditional Priest who has been tending the soil and organizing for a racially just food system for three decades. Together, they discuss how humanity can bring back Earth’s ownership to Earth itself by paying attention to what nature has to say, rather than exerting human supremacy centered on commodification and exploitation. Leah also talks about practical solutions to food apartheid, why climate justice is forever connected with racial justice, and Soul Fire Farm’s mission to teach the next generation to reconnect with the land’s ancestral roots.
About Leah Penniman
Leah Penniman is a Black Kreyol farmer, mother, activist, author, scientist, earth-lover, and African Traditional Priest who has been tending the soil and organizing for a racially just food system for 30 years. She serves as Co-Founder and Farm Director at Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, an Afro-Indigenous training farm dedicated to food and land sovereignty.
Leah’s books, Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land (2018), Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists (2023), and Children of the Land: A Soul Fire Farm Parenting Guide (2027) are love songs for the land and her people.
Leah holds an MA in Science Education and a BA in Environmental Science and International Development from Clark University, and served as a high school biology and environmental science teacher for 17 years. Leah began farming in 1996 and trained at Many Hands Organic Farm, Farm School Mass, and internationally with farmers in Ghana, Haiti, and Mexico. Leah is a West African Traditional Priest (Ifá, Vodun), practitioner of the Dharma (Nipponzan Myohoji Grafton Sangha & Order of Interbeing), and member of Jewish Voice for Peace. The work of Leah and Soul Fire Farm has been recognized by the Soros Racial Justice Fellowship, Fulbright, Heinz Prize, Pritzker Environmental Genius Award, Grist 50, and James Beard Leadership Award, among others.
Leah and the Soul Fire Farm team facilitate powerful food sovereignty programs – including farmer training for Black & Brown people, a no-cost farm food distribution program for communities surviving food apartheid, and domestic and international organizing toward equity in the food system. Leah’s joy-practices include running, African dance, mountain hiking, and folk singing.
Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-penniman-6839025a/
Guest Website: https://soulfirefarm.org
Guest Social:
https://www.facebook.com/soulfirefarm
https://www.instagram.com/soulfirefarm
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz3Bs3G0GkDR83JSxF4C5Eg
https://www.instagram.com/leahpenniman
https://www.facebook.com/leah.penniman
Additional Resources Mentioned:
BIONEERS KEYNOTE: Leah Penniman – Free the People! Free the Land!
BOOK: Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists by Leah Penniman
BOOK: Farming While Black by Leah Penniman
Show Notes:
- 02:20 – Gathering Different Voices For Farming While Black
- 05:20 – Immersing Into The Spirit Of Nature
- 18:19 – Returning Earth’s Ownership To Earth Itself
- 28:53 – Most Notable Voices In Farming While Black
- 44:20 – Difference Between Food Apartheid And Food Desert
- 51:38 – Why Climate Justice Requires Deferring To Nature
- 55:55 – Why You Should Get A Plant Friend
- 59:13 – Get In Touch With Leah
- 01:00:43 – Discussion Wrap-up And Closing Words
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Listening To Earth Wisdom With Leah Penniman
Welcome regenerators. Each week, we explore the intersection of sustainability, justice and regenerative thinking through conversations with leaders that are working to build a healthier future for people and for the planet. I have the honor of hosting another of Bioneers’ keynote speakers, someone who I have followed for some time, Leah Penniman. I first learned of her work when I interviewed Paul Hawken on the show back in 2021 to promote his book Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation.
I’ve been following her ever since. She was featured in an essay that she wrote specifically about the farm that she works with Soul Fire Farm. Now, Leah Penniman is a Black Kreyol farmer, mother, soil nerd and food justice activist. In 2010, she did co-found Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, with a mission to end racism in the food system and reclaim ancestral connection to land. She’s been farming since 1996 trained with farmers in Ghana, Haiti, and Mexico, and spent seventeen years teaching high school Biology and Environmental Science.
If we are to survive together as a species, we need to pay attention to the indigenous call for kin-centricity.
There’s a quote from George Washington Carver that opens her new book, Black Earth Wisdom. “I loved to think of nature as unlimited broadcasting stations through which God speaks to us every day, every hour.” That idea of nature as a living relative, not a resource, is at the heart of everything that she does. With that, join me in welcoming Leah to the show. Thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you very much for having me on your show.
Gathering Different Voices For Farming While Black
The first book that you wrote Farming While Black became something of a movement. It’s a text for land-based liberation work. This new book Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists is an anthology of dialogues with leaders from Alice Walker to Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, and Queen Quet all circling on that one idea. What made you want to step back from writing in your own voice instead of gathering other voices for this book?
I’m so glad you asked that question. Farming While Black was the book I needed to read when I was getting into farming as a young teen of color interested in the land. I would go to conferences and see mostly White men presenting, White men authors and wondered if I had a place in the movement. Tony Morris, a beloved ancestor, said, “If there’s a book you need to read that hasn’t been written, go and write it.”
I certainly did not start the Black Farming Movement regenerative ag that has been going for a long time in the African-American community and beyond. It was a way of cleaning a place for the rising generation. Those who are returning to the land. What I was realizing as far Farming While Black was catalyzing conversations around the nation is the deeper why was still needed. The deeper why is beyond farming and beyond just food justice. It has to do with reimagining and reclaiming our relationship to the earth herself.
The Earth mother, as a deity, as a living relative, and as the source of all. It felt appropriate to bring together the collective of brilliant Black environments of voices across the movement that have not received their due and to emphasize that this isn’t only just farming. This is about birds, soil, atmosphere and oceans. If we’re going to survive together as a species, we need to pay attention to the indigenous call for kin centricity.
Some of the voices you featured might be better known in some spheres and not known at all and others. I felt myself along the way getting introduced to people I’d never heard of and then reconnecting with people like Adrienne Maree Brown who wrote a book on Emergent Strategy that has become fundamental in a lot of my work. It guides a lot of what I do being in this sustainability education field, earning my PhD and working on the build of regenerative businesses.
Immersing Into The Spirit Of Nature
I appreciated being able to revisit them through this lens while learning from so many others. It felt in a way almost like what I do with this show. It was to turn some of what I do into a book, but you did it so beautifully. I want to talk about the central theme and about how you bring George Washington Carver forward. That idea and that connection too in a way. The Theology of nature which is something I don’t think we talked enough about. We pigeonhole people as either religious or spiritual. I don’t think we tend to think about the greater perspective there. What made you put this at the center?
That question makes my heart flutter. I love Dr. George Washington Carver. For folks who don’t know. Dr. Carver, among other talents, was a Scientist and Agronomist at Tuskegee Institute in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He’s arguably the Godfather of the modern regenerative movement. Two generations before the Rodel Institute was even founded. He was getting poor farmers to cover crop compost, do rotational grazing, implement poly cultures and crop rotation. He believed that caring for the soil was the foundation of human survival.
When his friend Glenn Clark interviewed him for a sweet little biography and asked him, “Where did you get all of these ideas?” This is a man who had thousands of patents. He was so far ahead of his time. Albert Einstein himself called him one of the greatest minds of the generation. He said, “I get my ideas by going into the forest before dawn and asking God to speak to me through the trees and the birds.” This is where that quote that you open with comes in when he said that nature is God’s unlimited broadcasting system.
Here was a person who believed in the divinity of nature, the transcendent power of nature to inspire our best ideas and saw us as humble servants to the soil that’s scientists in the truest form. Also, a theologian and a devotee of the divine in the earth. That speaks to me so deeply because I’m what they call a double pique. A preacher’s kid. I have two parents who are ministers. One is a prime minister and one is an ordained divine unit universalist. I myself took a path of becoming ordained in African indigenous religion, which does worship nature, the ancestors, and the spirits of the earth. For me, my inspiration for all of my work as a scientist and as a farmer comes from the sense of our sacred duty to be in collaboration with the living planet.
I love that. It does come back to this whole idea of nature as a relative, not a resource. It’s something to be collaborated with and not extracted from and changing our entire headset about that. Where does that framing come from you personally? Does it connect to you in a different way?
I was first introduced to the frame explicitly when I was a young adult living in Ghana. I apprentice myself to the Queen Mothers. It’s better translated as Moniay as community mother. These are women who take care of orphans. They protect the sacred groves, mediate conflicts, ensure smooth governance in the community, officiate rites of passage and so on. I spent a lot of time with the Queen Mothers doing agricultural projects and textile projects. They like to ask me questions about life in the United States. A place that they saw on TV, but never visited.
One more thing they asked me. My name in their language Amidade. They said, “Amidade, is it true that in the United States, farmers will plant seeds and they won’t pray or sing or do poor libations or even say thank you to the earth? Expect the seed to grow and produce a harvest.” When I admitted that’s by and large true. They said, “That’s why you’re all sick. You’re all sick because you treat the earth as a commodity and not as a living relative.” Mic drop moment.
We get sick because we treat the earth as a commodity and not as a living relative.
Personally, it’s become so important. In my 30 years as a farmer, I make sure that in a very tangible way that we’re integrating that ethos of concentric relationship. I’m quoting Enrique Salmon and other indigenous thinkers when I say concentric. What that means in a very practical sense is we had a marshy area. We wanted to dig into a pond. We asked permission. We use an African indigenous divination system to ask permission.
The land said no for nine years, so we did not touch the pond. It was only in the 10th year that we got permission. We make offerings before we harvest. We bring our instruments and songs regularly into the fields to give thanks and celebrate with the land. There’s this interplay of the spiritual and the material woven into our life at Soul Fire Farm.
How did the land say no to you?
Without getting into the mechanics of the divination system because every culture will have its own way kidding with spirit. In Yoruba religion and Yoruba cosmology, there are a number of divination systems that use trees. There’s a kola nu, which is from the Cola acuminata tree. It’s called Obiata, which is divided into four parts. You can throw those four parts and depending if they land face up or face down. There’s interpretations. There’s also the Iken, which comes from a palm tree. That’s sixteen nuts. Depending how you manipulate them, we’ll get a geofencing number that has a bunch of poems and stories associated with it that give you their answers. Someone who’s trained clergy in the religion will know how to perform a divination and then give an answer to a question like that.
I love that. I just figured people reading who are less familiar, might be like, “How does the land say no?” It could be that there’s an underground aquifer that isn’t as full as it needs to be or something to that effect. You don’t know what the reasons are behind that story. Trusting in nature and listening to nature is something that’s important.
We’re used to this human supremacy way of being where people just do what they want to do. The opposite of that is ecological humility, which I talked about Black Earth Wisdom, my book that came out in 2023. Ecological humility is understanding that we’re late on the scene. The pine trees were here before us. The hawks, the eagles, and the water. We take a seat and we listen. We defer to their wisdom as our elder siblings on this planet.
How do you think shifting our language from talking about nature as a resource to talking about it as a relative can change our behavior even in the most capitalist of us?
Even my degree is in environmental science. Some of my elders will say even the idea of an environment inherently creates distinction between people and nature. It relegates all these beings to a setting like the environment in which life happens. The word resource implies the extractive conversion value of nature. Even the word nature. Humans and nature are very Cartesian. It’s this division.
We’re separate.
Dualism. Indigenous cultures around the world will challenge that with more concentric language. These are siblings or their uncles or their deities. They have personalities. That can be criticized in Western Sciences anthropomorphism, but the danger with non-anthropomorphism is that you have non-personhood. You have non-rights. Corporations have rights of people, but trees and rivers don’t have rights of people except in a few exceptions around the world. I do think interrogating the language that we use can help us to start to decolonize the mind frame of this dualism, the separation between humans and all of our siblings who are not humans.
This reminds me of two things. One of Robin Wall Kimmerer works in Braiding Sweetgrass. It’s talking about the three sisters and the interchange between three types of plants to support and sustain not only one another, but the people that benefit from the fruits that they bear or vegetable, squash, or grains and things along these lines. It also causes me to think about what you’ve done and so far as creating cooperative systems. Moving from thinking of the earth or the land as something you can own to something that is stewarded. I wonder if you could talk about that.
It’s challenging in Western Society, because the concept of property ownership is so fundamental to the sense of what is the right to be a human. The right to life, liberty and property. I’m just reading a newer book that just came out about indigenous history since Wounded Knee. The real intentional project of trying to get native people to give up their communal land holdings and to divide up into these three simple individually owned structures as a way of in “civilizing and westernizing” indigenous people and the violence of that. Ultimately, how it led to so much land loss.
One of the ways that we’ve tried to counter that is by studying our Afro-indigenous and other indigenous land systems. For example, in Ghana, West Africa. Where I studied, they have what’s called the Huza system, which is a communal land holding of kin and non-kin who work together to manage farms, sacred groves and water sources. There are systems like that all around the world that buck the notion of the naturalness of one individual or one family holding all the rights to a personal land.
In the West, in the way that this is catching on, is with something called the Land Trust or the Community Land Trusts. For folks who don’t know, shout out to Shirley Sherrod and the late Charles Sherrod, who were the first to create a Community Land Trust in the United States in the late ‘60s. Their African-American farmers in Georgia. They managed to put thousands of acres of land into trust to be preserved and to be held by the community.
Building off of that legal model, what we’ve done at Soul Fire is that the land is held in common by a cooperative and the buildings can be owned by individuals or families who build them or who purchased them and they can hold equity in those buildings. The land itself is protected as a Commons. It’s not perfect. We’re still trying to fit indigenous ideas into, frankly, White man’s law. It’s as close as we can get within the legal constraints of the way that property ownership works. We’re very happy to say that there are several families that collectively hold and steward this land. Which makes it much less likely to ever be sold or developed for a non-regenerative purpose.
Returning Earth’s Ownership To Earth Itself
That’s beautiful. It does also borrow ideas from how land is managed in some other countries. For instance, in Greenland. One of the things that makes Greenland so much more affordable to, let’s say, buy a home in, is for that very reason. You basically can own the structure on the land but not the land. The land remains the nation’s property and then that has rules by which they manage it. I have also heard and this happened at Bioneers in 2026.
I encountered some people who are working on returning Earth’s ownership to Earth itself. I’m still learning about that and how far along we are. Where is this possible versus where is it not possible? At the same time, we confront this country’s challenges where the administration is returning public lands to people like Elon Musk to try and grow data centers for some reason. I see the head shake. I’m in the same space.
Nature preserves that are turning into logging expeditions. We’re in a very different space than we were even a few years ago. If we can see that that’s possible, we can also see that the reverse is possible. That’s one of the things that gives me hope. I learned about some Catholic nuns that returned swaths of land in the Midwest to the indigenous peoples and we see more of that gaining seam at the same time. There’s always hope.
I didn’t write about this in the book because it predated this action. We’ve been in collaboration with the Mohican Nation for some years. Soul Fire Farm is on Mohican territory. The Stockbridge–Munsee band of the Mohican Nation has their reservation and headquarters in Boulder, Wisconsin after their own forced trail of tears. Our collaboration has taken many forms over the years but most recently, we were very excited to be part of a coalition that returns 258 acres of land right here in Grafton, New York to the nation.
We commemorated that land returned with a prayer pilgrimage in October of 2025. Where we walked for several days to sacred sites all along the Hudson River praying an interfaith prayer and using our footsteps, our sweat and our labor as prayer. It was beautiful. We culminated in arriving at the 250-acre parcel, which has a house on it. Gathered in the house and ceremonially passed over the deed and the maps. It had prayers there with some members of the nation, some youth, and some storytellers and singers. It’s a very small drop in the bucket of the repair that is needed, but it felt very meaningful to be able to hand over that acreage. Which has some very important sacred sites on it to the nation.
You said repair and I want to bring this up because as I read your book, I got thinking about a word that kept coming up. That word was reparative. The reparative nature of what you’re doing because it’s not simply regenerative agriculture. It’s more than that. Even some of the language that we use around that space is very much human centric. As you mentioned before, many of the leaders in that space are older White men. We see that repeatedly. I want to connect back to this from your work. You write that human supremacy over nature and White supremacy share the same route. Can you talk about that connection?
Human supremacy and White supremacy share a similar route because both of them are connected to non-kin thinking. As soon as we named nature as non-family or non-person, it allows a particular ravaging to be justified. This is not a hyperbole or supposition. There was a project in Europe to de-animate the world in order to allow capitalism to flourish. The witch hunts were part of that and the annihilation of paganism was part of that project.
We cannot see the Earth as kin if we are going to blast open mountains and dig out minerals. It doesn’t work. In a similar way, the project of being able to commit genocide against indigenous people, to capture Black people from our homelands and forces into the bowels of slave-ships and the whips and chains. All of that was possible because of the internal contortion that had to happen to name Black people, indigenous people, other people of color as other than us or different from. By us, I’m speaking of Europeans. Other than White, other than human.
Primitive and all the language that’s used.
That becomes this similar route. I would argue that the environmental movement should not be separate from racial justice movement. When we reweave the we, the kinship, the family, the personhood of all of our kin, then we will treat each other in the way that we have been designed to treat each other. Which is with respect, honor, fairness, and equity. All of this is very possible for us and is in fact, some of the DNA of our communities that we have contorted in the name of greed in accumulation.
It’s still a real challenge for most capitalist leaning White people to admit that and to just sit with the truth that we as a culture of people that came to the space that is known as North America saw it as purely something to be extracted and the tragedy of it. I reflect on this often. The displacement of people and of animals. The destruction of forests. The disregard for what was there and how it existed and what was beautiful about it. It’s like, “We got to tear this down to build.” Now, we’re doing that with the data center. It’s the things that frustrate me every day.
One would have to have their head in the sand to not see it. I know the shame is strong but we can’t heal what we won’t face. I recommend the book The heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David that just recently came out. It’s an outstanding indigenous history. It talks about these very themes but we’re talking. It’s by David Treuer.
By confronting them, we can push back against some of these other massive land grabs that are happening, too.
This is not different. I don’t want to demonetize this moment of acute fascism that we’re in. Also, it’s a matter of degree. It’s fundamentally not different. If you look, honestly, at the history of European imperialism and the assault. There are even words for the level of cruelty, ravaging and dehumanization of the imperial colonization of the world. It’s raking up the resources. Blasting a part of the planet. Ravaging the forest, enslaving the people and cutting off limbs. It’s a brutal history that continues on into the present.
It’s not different. It’s a degree and it’s a scale.
It’s a different tools. Until we’re willing to look at the fundamental DNA of that, we’re not going to be able to frankly survive as a species. To survive as a species, we’re going to have to figure out how to get along with every other being on this planet and to be in balance. That’s going to mean changing some of the ways we think, we act and some of the comforts that we were used to. Being comfortable with huge houses that have AC on demand all the time and everything. We eat chicken when we feel like it and beef if we feel like it. We might have to adapt. Be in balance.
We might have to be a little uncomfortable and be willing to sit and discomfort. I’ve also heard that there’s not a huge separation between patriarchy or the patriarchal systems that we have and White supremacy and colonialism. All these ideas get intermingled. When you’re critical of patriarchal leadership and this idea of supremacy, whether it be human supremacy or White supremacy, it’s the same story. It’s all part and parcel of the same thing.
Silvia Federici writes about that well. Folks aren’t familiar with her work about those connections between patriarchy, the ravaging of the earth, the witch hunts and the hunting down of the herbalists. Brilliant with color. Not an easy read but she’s worth reading.
Most Notable Voices In Farming While Black
I’ll have to build a reading list from this to share, so thank you. Now, you have several voices featured in the book. I’d like to speak about a few of them. Alice Walker is one example. What did that conversation bring out? Perhaps, what from it might have surprised you?
Alice Walker is so fierce. It was in 2022 when I interviewed her. I’m remembering that what stands out is her belief that we should worship a God who also reveres us. Mother Nature is the only God that she has found who meets that criteria. That was something powerful in the conversation. She’s like, “These Gods that aren’t from our people that get imposed on us, they don’t love us.” The Earth does. The Earth brings forth water, forth cabbages, scarlet tanagers, wind and clouds.
These absolutely undeniable acts of beauty, generosity and love. That’s worth revering. That stood out. Something that also stood out is her humility. I remember asking her about the legacy that she wanted to leave. What would she want people to remember and she was like, “That’s not even a question. That’s irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. We come and we go from dust to dust.” That struck me in her conviction that it wasn’t about her or being remembered in any way.
I frankly also think that you reflect some of that in filling out the forms online about who to interview. I’m very open. I would love to interview any of the farmers that you collaborate with and tell their stories and what’s different. The things that they’re doing, but you are asking even the people who want to talk to you in this format to think bigger about the conversations or hosting about what they’re putting forward. You essentially shared it’s not about one person. We are doing this in concert together and that’s important to reflect back on, especially as we are thought to be encouraged in this society to be like the latter climbers. Everybody’s got to be on top of their pyramid, so to speak.
The longer I’m in this work, the more sure I am that it’s collective. To go back to European cosmology. Again, something that I love about the creation story is that it’s this whole team effort. I’m also a student of Torah and the Christian Bible. I have deep respect for those traditions as well. In the beginning, there’s a singular omnipotent, omni powerful entity that makes it all happen. In the yearbook creation story and indigenous creation stories, in general, there’s this whole team. It’s like, Ogun makes the iron chain that helps the deities go from the sky world to the Earth world. You have Obatala molding the humans out of clay and Oshun getting the waters going.
It’s this whole collaborative effort. I noticed that it was Soul Fire Farm. Honestly, if we want this work to continue, we have to constantly be cultivating new leadership, distributing our resources, making sure that folks are in on decision-making. It’s about this collective team effort. That’s what makes the work possible to continue on. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if my name is on it. What matters is the people are getting fed. The gardens are built. The land is shared. That’s ultimately what matters. If I can contribute to that, so be it. If I’m not needed, that’s also fine, too.
Now, another individual you connect with during this book is Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, who works at the intersection of ocean policy and climate. I’m particularly passionate about ocean health. I perhaps know a little more about it than a lot of people because I had an intense religious belief as a child that I would one day be a marine biologist. Which didn’t end up coming to a fruition but I remain deeply entrenched and do some personal research there. I’m a scuba diver and also worked in the fish industry until I could no longer take it. You learn a lot and you learn about what’s changing.
I have so many questions for you about that. I’m reading Richard Powers newest book, which is about the ocean. You would love it. I loved Dr. Ayana. We all have a huge French crush on her at Soul Fire Farm. She’s just a very cool lady and brilliant. One of the things that struck me as someone who’s a land lover myself and a student of soil and trees was learning from her. That the oceans produce most of our oxygen. Those little phytoplankton and those powerhouses are in trouble. They’re declining because the oceans are warming and acidifying. The ocean is the lungs of the planet and folks aren’t paying attention. That was something that stood out from our conversation and felt important for everybody to deeply understand.
Few people truly understand what happens when there’s an intense algae bloom and why does it evacuate all of the oxygen from the area and all these fish. What does it mean when you have all these different species of whales having essentially miscarriages in an earlier stage in their gestation? What does this mean about the environment of our oceans? The acidity questions are big.
Absolutely. Maybe you can talk about the ocean. Tell us something. We should know.
Monterey Bay has some interesting research that’s happening right here. Also, the Packard family who has supported the Monterey Bay Aquarium all these years has some Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. They’re sending down rovers on the deep sea floor pretty constantly. They’re taking samples and reviewing what is happening in our oceans in one of the most rich in life oceans in the world in the Mariana Trench and everywhere else. What they’ve clearly stated is that there are several species of our aquatic life like mollusks, that in their larva stage, are not able to build the shells anymore. They’re starting to degrade.
With the rising CO2 in our atmosphere, the ocean is absorbing more of it. The movement of the wave is what absorbs most of that CO2 into the ocean. Therefore, that is increasing the acidity of the ocean. As our CO2 levels rise in air, they also rise in the ocean. Some of that can be used and trapped in shells and integrated into plant life that are growing there to go ahead and create the oxygen that we breathe because of all those algae species.
There’s this tipping point. We’re getting closer to this tipping point where the acidity becomes too much for the ocean to handle. At that point, our seas can become too acidic to support the life that’s in them and that becomes a life killer on this planet. That’s the scariest thing that I’ve learned about the story that is at play for us. There’s a lot of research happening about what we can do about it. Can we solidify the CO2 that’s in our atmosphere to sink it in some way? One of the best ways is to plant more trees and grow more food in a regenerative way.
That’s one of the most effective ways that we found. The speed with which acidification is happening is also something that we’re up against. The thing that I think makes me the most fearful is that when we are investing so much infrastructure and data centers that are going to utilize more energy and utilize more water. We’re going to push that tipping point forward more quickly because we don’t know the impacts that we will have with the creation of all these centers if we push forward in the next ten years building as many as it looks like there are projects for.
That’s what scares me. That’s the thing that might wake me up in the middle of the night some days. Frankly, the beauty of what we’ve been able to do already just in the Santa Barbara area with the restoration of aquatic life there and with how much life is returning to the Santa Barbara Channel Islands, it gives me hope that we can do something more globally.
Maybe so. I remember learning about ocean acidification as an undergrad. For folks that don’t know, it’s carbon dioxide mixed with water and carbonic acid. You get acid essentially in the ocean lowering the Ph and dissolving the shells of mollusks. It’s scary, but I’m hoping that we turn about as a species and recognize the we’re not going to Mars. This side is great. It is just perfect. It’s the Goldilocks planet. There’s none like it as far as we know and certainly, we can’t get there if there is. It would certainly be much easier to work together to keep the oceans healthy even to try to figure out an escape plan.
The piece I understand less well is as the ocean becomes more acidic. It also pushes it warmer. I don’t understand the physics behind that but I’ve heard scientists remark on this a few times and haven’t had the time to dive into that research. If you’re talking about global warming as an issue, that’s also connected to the warming issue as a separate layer. It just is. Now, as far as Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s work. What did she teach you about a part of this work that you hadn’t spent much time in?
Since we’re so focused on land and soil and using the soil and the plant roots as a carbon sink. It was helpful for her to remind us that most of the planet is water. There needs to be more of a conversation between those working on regenerative Ag and even these agricultural projects in the ocean. Folks like GreenWave on the East Coast that are doing these kelp and seaweed projects that both produce fertilizer for the land, but also are capturing pollutants and carbon in this vegetative form and then the oyster projects. It got me thinking about the ways that land and sea can collaborate. If folks want to source their soil amendments from these regenerative ocean projects and vice versa, then it helps us work together to restore both land and ocean.
I’ve even seen oyster shells used and making a special type of neoprene that can be used for scuba diving. It’s not oil-based as a petroleum product. There’s some interesting ways to use the waste from oyster farming as well. There’s so many interesting projects. Frankly, there are also a great carbon sink because the shells become that storage. Queen Quet speaks for the Gullah/Geechee Nation. What did her relationship to land and water teach you?
Queen Quet and Gullah/Geechee Nation, their history as folks may know is that there were many enslaved people in the Carolinas. Mostly who came from the Mende, Senegambia people who were rice experts in Africa. Some of the first transplanters, rice farmers, are West African. They were kidnapped for their expertise and help to build the multibillion-dollar rice industry in the Carolinas. Many of them escaped and formed Maroon communities.
The Great Dismal Swamp is the most famous, but there are many other Maroon communities which have persisted in being able to hold on to some of their African indigenous language and technology. Gullah-Geechee are among them. There’s been films and books. Look up the Gullah-Geechee if you’re not familiar. Something that I love so much about her work is that she combines cultural preservation. When we’re talking about spirit and science, this cultural preservation, language preservation alongside ecological restoration work. She does some work with oyster shells and receding the oyster beds off the coast. Working against the incredible forces of tourist development and land grabbing to try to hold on to these lands that they keep in preservation as a people.
Now, as we know the story of rice, it’s like so many of these seeds were braided into the hair of individuals that were taken against their will as slaves from Africa. Is this story directly connected to that as well?
As far as we know. This is a story that is passed down through oral history and was first recorded amongst maroon communities on Turtle Island. As the story goes, African women who were facing kidnapping and enslavement both before and on the slave ships, would braid seeds into their hair as insurance for wherever they may be going, they wanted to be able to plant those seeds to nourish themselves and their families.
We hear many stories of the African rice, but there of course other crops that were hidden and taken from West Africa like sorghum, millet, different kinds of basils and cola and melons seeds that have made it and have integrated into Black and Indigenous culture. For example, in Haiti, where my maternal ancestors are from. There’s African crops such as Black-eyed pea that are used in the local cuisine and then indigenous crops like the joumou pumpkin that are used in the local cuisine. There was clearly this interplay and sharing of seeds and cuisine amongst Black and Indigenous people there.
Difference Between Food Apartheid And Food Desert
As we continue to learn as time goes on, typically the oral histories are proven out to be facts. I tend to rely on oral history as much as I would the science ones. Now, I want to talk for a moment about food apartheid and land reclamation. You use the term food apartheid rather than food desert and there’s an intention there. Why does this distinction matter?
I credit Karen Washington for coining the term food apartheid. She’s a mentor of mine that I’ve known since I was a young person. Also, as our board president at Soul fire Farm. She’s the founder of Black Urban Growers or BUGs and Rise and Root Farm. The reason she coined this term is because the government has been using the term food desert to refer to a census tract, a neighborhood zip code that is high poverty and does not have access to fresh food from grocery stores or farmers markets. A desert implies a natural ecosystem.
If humans can create a system, they can dismantle a system.
There’s nothing natural about some people having whole foods and fancy farmers markets and other people just having Kentucky Fried Chicken and a package store. There’s nothing natural. That’s a human created system. In fact, if you overlay maps of housing segregation, redliningmaps, essentially with the maps of neighborhoods with low access to fresh food. They are almost perfectly aligned.
Those housing segregates are human created. The government created segregation that said, “Within this line Black and Brown people must live and outside of this line mortgages will be given.” We still live with the legacy of that housing discrimination now. Food apartheid is more honest and honestly, it’s more hopeful because if humans can create a system, they can dismantle a system. Deserts are going to be on this planet. Apartheid does not need to be on the planet.
I appreciate that. I know that Soul Fire Farm runs farmer training programs to help address this for Black and Brown people. What does reclaiming that connection to land look like?
Soul Fire Farm is a team of about twenty folks taking care of 80 acres of ancestrally Mohican land and working to uproot racism and seed sovereignty in the food system. What it looks like for us as far as our training programs is, we have about 1,000 to 1,500 folks come to our programs in person each year and another few tens of thousands who join our online programs. The most popular one is a week-long course in regenerative agriculture. It runs Sunday through Friday. You spend half the day doing hands-on learning with our livestock, our orchards, bees, mushrooms, vegetables and herbs.
Half the day I sit down courses and workshops that go over the history of Black and Brown folks farming, soil science, marketing, and business planning. Everything about farming. It’s a crash course. It’s very intense. Folks can follow up with our online additional specialized courses once they’ve graduated from that. Our alumni go on to do such cool stuff. We had our alumni reunion. I got to hear about folks’ projects. Keisha Cameron is doing fiber farming down outside of Atlanta, Georgia.
There’s the Shelterwood Collective in the Pacific Northwest. West is doing regenerative forestry. In England, there are the lands in our names Land Trust Project that’s helping get land to Black farmers and so many others. For us, it looks like training, equipping, inspiring and supporting that next generation and then watching as they apply what they’ve learned in their local context. It’s like psyllium spread this seed, and then have these unique locally adopted projects pop up that then in turn feed and educate their community.
I love that. It is essentially like seeding the future. It makes sense that this restorative work would start at Soul File Farm, too. Is there a particular story from the farm that shows what’s possible when people get that connection back like if you have one to highlight.
There’s many stories, but what comes to mind is a story of one of our youth. This person is giving me permission to say his name because he’s part of the Stars. Deidre Carter came to the farm as a young person. The only messages that young people have gotten about farming pertained to slavery, so there’s a lot of skepticism and real understandable concern. Deidre did not want to get out of the van at all was. He was like, “I will be eaten by the bear or something terrible is going to happen.” When everybody else got out of the van, he did not want to be left alone to die, as he thought.
He got out and it was a very muddy spring day. The youth did not want to get their sneakers dirty. Half joking, I was like, “What do you think of barefoot?” They decided to go barefoot. We toured around the farm and they didn’t hear a word of the tour because they were so busy squealing at the delight and horror of things like mud, worms, frogs, snakes and pesters. They were having a whole time. When we finished the tour, we sat down in the circle.
Deidre said, “The strangest thing happened. When I was walking around. It’s going to sound crazy, but it was like my grandma’s spirit came through my feet and up to my heart. She’s since passed away, but she reminded me of when I was little. We would garden together. She would put a worm in my hand. He said, “’Miss, I didn’t think it had anything to do with this place but I’m remembering that I do have something to do with this place. I do have something to do with growing food and the land.” He got a little teary.
These other youths also start talking about their grandmas and memories of grandmas. I could just see for these young Black men who’ve been told that the only future that they have is incarceration or early death to be able to have a moment of connection with their ancestors, with the land, food, worms and frogs. The opening up of possibility, even if they don’t go into farming. Deidre happens to go into environmental science, which is cool. Even so, the reminder that we belong and it’s possible for us to have agency in our lives and to matter. It is such an important gift of what the Earth hands to us when we take time to connect.
Why Climate Justice Requires Deferring To Nature
I can picture everything of the story you just told from the perspective of a lot of city kids who might not get out there into the muck of it such as the woods and the reality of animal husbandry and everything else happening in a single place. There’s this dissociation that can happen. Reconnecting to nature almost takes a cathartic moment like that. That’s beautiful. In this last section of the interview, I want to talk about differing nature a bit. The book argues that climate justice work requires us to defer to nature as our teacher. What does that posture require of us?
The posture of deferring to nature requires listening. I don’t just mean this in a spiritual sense. We listen when we send rovers to the ocean floor and pay attention to the results. We listen when we take ice cores and pay attention to the trends or when we read the tree rings and notice the stress on the forests. Dr. Drew Lanham who I interviewed for the book, who’s an ornithologist. When we notice that the bird songs are fewer and less diverse than they have been in the past. It’s the posture of listening and then hearing and responding accordingly to what the Earth is telling us.
It is possible for us to have agency in our lives and to matter. It is such an important gift from the earth when we take time to connect.
On our farms and to be very practical, we were growing a lot more vegetables before the pandemic. It was very clear based on the pest pressure and the quality that a particular field did not want to be in vegetables. We did not add more chemicals to the soil. We don’t do that anyway. We said, “Clearly, this is not a match. We turned that into an orchard that is a silver pasture orchard where there are ruminants and chickens fertilizing and grazing in the rows and then apple trees in between and it’s flourishing. We noticed and we changed. We might have a notion like, “We wanted to have 200 CSA shares.” That means these many acres. The Earth doesn’t want to do that, so we’re going to shift. That’s what it means.
That adaptation as a life skill that we seemingly sometimes forget then just figure we can shove some chemicals and make it change. Is there something specifically that the land has taught you that no person could have?
Almost everything. Even at the Bioneers keynote, I was struggling. It was like seven minutes. What on Earth does one say at these times in seven minutes that isn’t just a bunch of hollow sound bites? I don’t want to be vacuous and dishonest. I went to the forest. I was like Dr. Carver. I went to the forest before dawn to do my mindfulness practice, make offerings, and pray and the Earth was like, “What else would you possibly talk about other than concentricity that is the relationship between all beings, the interdependence, the inter being of all beings?” I was like, “Alright. Word.”
Did that contribute to the butterfly?
Absolutely. To give a little bit of context for folks who haven’t seen the keynote. For a long time, Soul Fire has been using this social justice concept of the butterfly, which talks about the four main strategies for social change, which exists on the wings. There’s reform which works within the system. Resist which is pushing up against the system. Build which is creating alternative structures and heal which refers to the cultural elements that help us withstand the moment that we’re in. We’ve never talked about the body of the butterfly. What is the glue that holds it altogether and the commonality? Which I would argue is concentricity or interdependence. That’s what the Bioneers keynote talked about.
That is marvelous and was very inspirational. I appreciated it.
Thank you.
Why You Should Get A Plant Friend
I have this one last question for you and then I’ll let you have the floor for closing. For someone who has never ever farmed before. Not even in their yard and who might feel far from parts of this discussion, but also be curious. Where would you tell them to start that listening?
Someone who’s curious about connecting to the Earth, whether that’s through farming or otherwise and wants to know where to start. I would suggest this practice of adopting a plant friend or a sit spot. What that means is finding a place in nature. It could be the base of a tree. It could be a dandelion growing up in the crack of a sidewalk or a community garden. Go there to that place as often as possible. Ideally every day, but at least two times a week to the very same spot and stay for five minutes, completely still in quiet and open your senses.
You will notice leaves unfurl. Pollinators visit. The flourishing of moss and then the decline of moss. The way the rain hits one side of the tree or the other. I promise you that it will open your heart in ways that you can’t anticipate. It’s about the relationship. In the West African indigenous, the Yoruba religion, we talk about the practice of giving something, saying something and listening. If you want to adopt that, you can bring a little pinch of tobacco or cornmeal or some dried flowers. You put it down as a gift because when you want to make friends. What do you do? You go to someone’s house, you bring a drink or food. You give a gift. You say something like, “Good morning. This is me, Leah. It’s wonderful to be with you,” and then be quiet and listen.
I have a few plant friends but there’s my favorite, which I call her my friend Maple. She’s a maple tree that struggles amidst a redwood forest on the bridge of this paved over bridge. Somebody has taken the trouble to cable her so that she doesn’t fall down. Which is interesting because it’s not like on any person’s property.
After every big storm, I’ll go to visit her and just say, “How’s my friend Maple doing?” It is a place where I practice that moment, that listening. I practice gratitude there. For me, that particular spot has a specific smell and a feeling of home in some ways. I’ll rest for a moment after a hike and spend a little bit of time right there. You can find a bit of beauty, even in a cement jungle by making friends with a tree or something to that effect. Thank you.
The Earth is everywhere.
Get In Touch With Leah
Thank you so much, Leah for joining me and for working to gather the chorus of voices that makes up this book. It’s incredible. I feel the need to go back through it again, frankly. I have enjoyed this conversation and following your work for the last several years. I know that people can find out more about you and the book through the links I’ll share but is there anywhere in particular you’d like to invite them to visit?
Please just visit us at SoulFireFarm.org. We’d love to have you come for a volunteer day or join in on one of our projects.
That’s beautiful. I’m honored to play a small role in sharing this work. I want to go ahead and quickly offer a few thoughts as we close. Is there anything else that you’d like to share?
I’ll just end with one of my favorite quotes from Yrsa Daley-Ward, she said, “I was raised pulling food out of the earth. I know where joy comes from and how to make it.”
I love that. Thank you.
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Discussion Wrap-up And Closing Words
For all of you, this is the reason that I host this show to share the important work of people who have dedicated their lives to transforming broken systems to help us build a better future together. Repair some of what the so-called modern way of living has supposedly fixed for us while still making noise, while creating more separation and more division when we should be coming together. I love the work that Leah is doing to help us listen to nature or our bodies or souls and sitting with discomfort from time to time asking a question about, is this okay to build here? Should I plant here? Should I do something differently and when we do hear the answer to listen to it.
The Earth has been speaking to us this whole time, our entire existence every day, every hour in a 1,000 broadcasting stations. Maybe the work we have to do now is simply to slow down, turn the dial back and remember how to listen. Before we end, I have one more reminder for her to lift up our cause partner Prescott College. 2026 marks their 60th anniversary and they can continue training future leaders to think systemically, act ethically, and lead regenerative change across communities and ecosystems. It’s where I’m finishing my own PhD in Sustainability Education.
We know higher ed is under threat and strained, so I’ve committed a monthly gift of $60 in honor of that anniversary. This is an addition to my tuition. It’s no small feat. If it’s within your means, I hope you’ll consider joining me and supporting the institution. You can visit CareMoreBeBetter.com/Support. Thank you, readers, now and always for being a part of this pod and this community because together, we can do so much more. We can care more. We can be better and we can find our way back to the broadcasting stations of Mother Earth. Thank you.
Important Links
- Leah Penniman on LinkedIn
- Leah Penniman on Instagram
- Leah Penniman on Facebook
- Soul Fire Farm
- Soul Fire Farm on Facebook
- Soul Fire Farm on Instagram
- Soul Fire Farm on YouTube
- BIONEERS KEYNOTE: Leah Penniman – Free the People! Free the Land!
- Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists
- Farming While Black
- Regeneration: Ending The Climate Crisis In One Generation with Paul Hawken, 5 Time Best-selling Author and Environmentalist – Previous Episode
- Alice Walker
- Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on LinkedIn
- Queen Quet on LinkedIn
- Emergent Strategy
- Braiding Sweetgrass
- Shirley Sherrod on LinkedIn
- The heartbeat of Wounded Knee
- GreenWave
- Karen Washington
- Black Urban Growers
- Rise and Root Farm
- Keisha Cameron on LinkedIn
- Shelterwood Collective
- Prescott College
- Support – Care More Be Better
