Book Review: Healing Grounds

Climate, Justice and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming

By lori stern

Iwas excited to read the book Healing Grounds after listening to a live webinar with author Liz Carlisle. Dr. Carlisle had demonstrated her support for farmers stewarding the land through her previous book Lentil Underground (2015). And this book similarly tells the stories of farmers, but this time with a focus on those that are relying on deep cultural traditions of healing the planet and the potential for addressing climate change.

I initially picked up this book to hear the voices of Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian farmers who are reviving ancestral methods of agriculture. Healing Grounds is organized with four chapters that highlight research and agricultural practices from each of these communities. Learning about these methods and how they have been incorporated into current regenerative farming systems to address climate change created a fuller picture of how much we borrow as an organic and regenerative movement from BIPOC farmers that have stewarded the land well before us.

Chapter one highlights Latrice Tatsey and her research on the buffalo’s role in creating an immense ecologically productive landscape. Tatsey is a member of the Blackfeet Nation. Her research has found that buffalo grazed pasture has more diversity in plant species and the plants are much larger than in pastures grazed by cattle. Tatsey observed, “When you have healthier plant species, they are taking more CO2 out of the atmosphere and bringing it back into the soil profile. Which potentially means buffalo could help us respond to climate change.” Between Tatsey’s research findings and the unfolding story of re-establishing a wild buffalo herd to the Northern Plains, Carlisle recounts U.S. policies that resulted in genocide and the 1887 Dawes Act that parceled land into reservations and individual tribal members. This approach allowed the U.S. government to seize land they deemed as ‘extra.’

With carbon rich soils under prairie grassland tilled up and released by colonial agricultural practices and the buffalo gone, Carlisle details the plight of prairies today, recalling the dust bowl and overuse of chemical fertilizers that pollute waterways. Through the story of a ‘multi-national’ effort by the Blackfoot Confederacy’s Iinnii Initiative to restore a wild buffalo herd, Carlisle links the beneficial and reciprocal relationships that result for not only buffalo, but other prairie wildlife and people as well. Chapter one’s theme of reciprocity through grazing and no-till methods practiced by other Indigenous tribes in lowlands and river valleys sets the tone for the rest of the book.

In chapter three, “Hidden Hotspots of Biodiversity,” Carlisle tells stories of multiple researchers in Mexico and Central America who asked farmers about weed and pest problems only to hear farmers say they had none. Instead, these “farmers described the intricate ecological interactions that kept insect populations in check” and utilized wild plants, viewed by researchers as weed. Chapter three’s lessons were about balance, diversity, and the intricacy of ecosystems that include nature and cultivation.

Each chapter contains rich descriptions of traditions and approaches to problems created by our “modern agricultural system.” However also woven through these narratives are stories of resilience in the face of loss of original land connection and the potential that these traditions could be lost as well. The exploration of cultural traditions around food and farming provides enough detail for farmers who are interested in implementing some of these methods to find out more. Not only are these the stories of community members, but they are rich with research findings about the benefits of these ancestral approaches that relied on diversity and interconnections.

Dr. Carlisle sandwiches these narratives and histories from Indigenous. Black, Latinx and Asian farmers and researchers between chapters that put this agricultural knowledge system in context. What begins the book as a simple question, “Can soil really save us?”, evolves into an exploration of how we got to a food system that is both fragile and extractive. Carlisle makes the case that current agricultural policy and practices support vast monocultures and false control of soil fertility through chemicals that kill beneficial microbes and insects.

As with many quests, when you begin with the end in mind, Healing Grounds takes Carlisle and the reader from a question of soil carbon to questions of values and morals. In her closing chapter she identifies that 40 percent of the U.S. population is made up of the communities highlighted in this book. People referred to as BIPOC or Black, Indigenous, Latino and Asian Americans, make up more than 60 percent of the agricultural laborers, yet they own only 2 percent of agricultural land. Carlisle, and those whose stories she shares, make the argument that the U.S. agricultural system and the climate would be better served to listen to the farming wisdom of these communities. However, through Carlisle’s researching this book, she came to learn that: “The extraction of carbon from soils was just one integral piece of a much larger process of extraction, a process that included the theft of Indigenous lands, the forced enslavement of millions of Africans, and the extortion of immigrant labor. To repair the soil, we needed to repair it all.”

Lori Stern is the Executive Director of Marbleseed. You can read her letter from the Executive Director on page 3.