Ep. 5 - All Revolution Is Based On Land with Leah Penniman
What the soil can teach us in the fight for climate justice.
Solving the climate crisis isn’t about reinventing the wheel or the latest tech scheme — it can be as simple as growing food and building community.
Host Shilpi Chhotray chats with Leah Penniman, farmer, educator, and co-founder of Soul Fire Farm, about the intersection of land, food justice, and racial equity. Leah shares how Afro-Indigenous farming practices offer solutions to the climate crisis— but also serve as a tool for personal and community healing.
From the legacy of Black farmers in the U.S. to the ongoing exploitation of agricultural workers, this conversation reveals how land is not only the foundation of sustenance but the basis of revolution, independence, and justice.
Key Topics
Farming as a spiritual and ecological practice that reconnects humans to the earth.
Pitfalls of Industrial agriculture, from soil degradation, pesticide contamination, and contributions to the climate crisis
Afro-Indigenous farming practices that sequester carbon, restore soil, and increase resilience to extreme weather.
Land justice and reparations: Historical land theft, racialized wealth disparities, and efforts to build Black land commons.
The Trump Administration's impact on Black Farmers and the agri-food industry.
How modern food systems continue to exploit the most vulnerable, including undocumented farmworkers and incarcerated individuals, whose labor produces the food we eat
Resources to Explore
Farming While Black by Lean Penniman
Black Earth Wisdom by Leah Penniman
AP investigation “Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands”
Credits
Presented by Counterstream Media and The Nation
Powered by Wildseeds Fund
Host: Shilpi Chhotray
Executive Producer: Mindy Ramaker
Engineer: Dennis Maxwell
Project Manager: Marianella Núñez
Additional Research: Sarah Morgan
Leah Penniman
Leah Penniman is a Black Kreyol farmer, author, mother, and food justice activist who has been tending the soil and organizing for an anti-racist food system for 25 years. She currently serves as founding Co-ED of Farm Operations at Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, a Black & Brown led project that works toward food and land justice. Her books are Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land (2018) and Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists (2023). Find out more about Leah’s work at www.soulfirefarm.org and follow her @soulfirefarm on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
-
Ep. 5 – “All Revolution Is Based on Land” with Leah Penniman
Shilpi Chhotray [00:00:04] This is A People's Climate, powered by Wildseeds Fund, from Counterstream Media and The Nation. I'm your host, Shilpi Chhotray.
CLIP [00:00:13] Worldwide, its estimated crop yields could decline up to 30 percent by the year 2050, as the planet warms and climate change fuels more severe drought and flooding.
CLIP [00:00:25] Small farms have been hit hard, with scores of them going out of business as big ag gets bigger. For African Americans, it's even more dire. In the last 100 years, they've lost almost 90 percent of their acreage.
CLIP [00:00:39] Look, we have farmers. I love farmers. I want 80 percent, 85 percent of the farmers, and I love them. And I'm never going to do anything to hurt our farmers.
CLIP [00:00:49] Workers' Union says a worker has died due to injuries caused in immigration.
CLIP [00:00:52] The U.S. Department of Agriculture is cutting two programs worth roughly a billion dollars. One of them provided roughly $660 million for schools to buy food from local farms.
CLIP [00:01:06] The President can't have it both ways. You can't say you love farmers, and then the next minute you're sending them messages saying how you're not going to help us.
Shilpi Chhotray [00:01:19] Hey everyone, it's Shilpi. Today you're in for a real treat. I'm joined by the remarkable Leah Penniman, farmer, educator, and the co-founder of Soul Fire Farm. Leah has dedicated her life's work to food sovereignty, land justice, and the reclamation of ancestral agricultural traditions. Through Soul Fire Farms, she has helped train and inspire thousands of new growers, while also leading a movement to end food apartheid and reconnect communities of color with the land. Leah is also the author of Farming While Black, a groundbreaking book that has personally reshaped how I approach farming and climate solutions. Her vision bridges the fight for racial justice with the urgent need to restore our relationship with the earth, a theme we return to again and again on A People's Climate. I'm so excited to share this conversation with you. Leah, welcome to A People's Climate. I've been really looking forward to this conversation, and it's wonderful to be here with you today. Thank you so much for having me. It's a true honor. I want to start with the heart of your work, which is farming. At Soul Fire Farm, you don't just grow food. You're weaving together regenerative practices with Black and Indigenous wisdom. How do you see farming as a means of healing?
Leah Penniman [00:02:33] Oh, my goodness. There's much to say about farming as a tool for healing. So when I was living in Ghana, West Africa, in my early 20s, I apprenticed myself to the Queen Mothers, who are the maternal custodians of rural society in the Krobo area of West Africa. And they said to me one day, you know, Leah, is it true that farmers in the United States will put a seed in the ground and they won't pray or dance or sing or even say thank you to the sacred earth and then expect the seed to grow? When I admitted that that was usually true, they said, well, that's why you're all sick. You're all sick because you treat the earth as a commodity and not as a relative. So that conversation has shaped my worldview ever since, because Afro-Indigenous farming is centered on the deification of nature.
Shilpi Chhotray [00:03:22] So what is deification of nature? Could you unpack that for us?
Leah Penniman [00:03:26] Soil is God. Trees are God. Mountains are God, the lake is God, we as humans are bound up with each other. We are bound up with the earth. And so we have all of these forms of agriculture that come out of the continent that are super sustainable relationally and ecologically. So things like polycultures, planting a bunch of stuff together, you know, raised beds, African dark earth compost, mutual aid societies. And this is so different than a system of agriculture under racial capitalism that's rooted in plunder. Accumulation, exploitation. And when we talk about healing, so much of that, both the personal healing, the community healing, but also the environmental healing. It has to do with returning to a frame of connecting to nature, one another, and the earth through kin-centric belonging.
Shilpi Chhotray [00:04:20] I just got chills. And I know we just jumped right into this piece of it, but I really wanted our listeners to understand your experience as a black farmer is so much rooted in this healing and your roots in this ancestral wisdom. You know, I've heard you mention in the past that the south end of Albany is classified as a food desert, but you prefer to use the term food apartheid. Can you explain why you prefer this term?
Leah Penniman [00:04:49] Absolutely. Well, first shout out Karen Washington of Rise and Root Farm, who is a mentor of mine and the one who coined the term food apartheid, because she feels that it's more honest. You know, a food desert is something natural and there is nothing natural about a system of segregation that relegates certain people to food opulence and others to the type of scarcity that leads to diabetes, heart disease, all manner of diet-related illnesses. The south end of Albany, you know, it had no grocery stores. It didn't have a farmer's market. There were no community garden plots available when we lived there. There was just a McDonald's and a liquor store. Unfortunately, that's the reality for millions and millions of Americans. It was a very personal struggle for us to try to get fresh food for our children, and so it was our neighbors who actually encouraged Jonah and I to start Soulfire Farm. They said, when are you going to start a farm for the people? When are you gonna bring vegetables and fruits and eggs? This neighborhood, and when we first came out to Grafton, New York, where Soulfire Farm is, this land was vacant. We purchased it from a timber company that had destroyed the ecology, destroyed the soil. There was no infrastructure at all, like no driveway, no septic, no electric, no water well. So it was really from the ground up with our hands, you know, slowly over time built a team, became a community farm, built really at this point a whole campus, a whole infrastructure. We have 2,000 people who come here every year now, but it didn't start that way. It started as a really tiny... Family farm etched out of a mountainside back in 2010.
Shilpi Chhotray [00:06:27] That is so incredible. What a power couple. That's really awesome to hear. So shifting gears a little bit. I do want to talk about the pitfalls of industrial agriculture, which is often touted as the solution to feeding the world, even still, even with all the knowledge at hand. Of course, we know it comes with serious environmental and social costs. I would love for you to help us flip this narrative and explain how it's actually leading to food insecurity, soil degradation, and exacerbating the climate crisis.
Leah Penniman [00:07:02] It was 2012 when Hurricane Sandy hit the Eastern Seaboard, which was the worst tropical storm on record to reach upstate New York.
CLIP [00:07:13] Hurricane Sandy crashing onshore, winds now at 90 miles per hour, and this storm is so big, so vast, 60 million Americans... Will feel its power.
CLIP [00:07:25] Devastation, debris, even death in many areas along the East Coast.
CLIP [00:07:29] Sandy is likely to go down as one of the costliest storms in U.S. History. The initial estimates of the losses are anywhere from $20 to $50 billion.
Leah Penniman [00:07:40] We had an unbelievable amount of water, and when we went outside with headlamps in the night, we saw that a river had formed through the woods, where there was no river before. And it was washing away, threatening to wash away the entire farm. And in the morning, we started hearing the radio reports about all of these farms that had lost all their topsoil, all the industrial farms that have lost all of their harvest. And we went out and as the water subsided, we were shocked to see that we had almost no losses at all. The reason we had almost no losses at all was because we had been doing Afro-Indigenous farming, which means we had raised beds. We had 10% organic matter. We had mulch. We had everything covered. We had perennials integrated into our field. Everything the way our ancestors had done. And that allows water to percolate slowly rather than rush off. Climate change is not theoretical. This is happening to us. We're in unprecedented heat, unprecedented pests. This is a factor every day for us on the farm. We're having to take hourly heat breaks and put ice on people. I mean, it's a real, real, real issue. It is fascinating to know that these Indigenous wisdoms, that sequester carbon also actually help us mitigate the impacts of climate fallout, such as flooding, such as drought. So as you alluded to, industrial agriculture is a train wreck for the planet and the planet's people. If you count the entire food system, including production, land use, transport, retail, and waste, we're talking about one third of the climate puzzle being attributed to the food system. So that's huge. That's on par with transportation. That's on par with energy. So our job as farmers is to put the carbon back in the soil. It's to put life back into the soil for every 1% increase of organic matter in our soil. We're capturing 8.5 metric tons of atmospheric CO2 per acre. So on our farm alone, that's tens of thousands of pounds. And if we scale that up, we're going to be able to solve, again, almost a third of the climate puzzle. When you look at industrial ag, pesticide exposure. When you look at the amount of soil degradation and what that means for future generations, when you look the way that workers are treated with an industrial ag system, it's very clear that the profit-motivated system is not one that takes people or the planet into consideration.
Shilpi Chhotray [00:10:12] They're only worried about their bottom line. At Soul Fire Farm, you're using no-till farming. That counters this issue by promoting the carbon sequestration that you're talking about. I think it's maybe even explaining what tilling is and then what the no-tilling piece looks like.
Leah Penniman [00:10:30] Tillage is a system where you use mechanization in order to turn the soil over and pulverize the soil. And the reason that farmers do that is because they want to reduce the competition of weeds when planting their seeds and also to loosen up the soil so that the roots have plenty of room to grow. And so tilling is the fast and easy way to do it. And it's the way that's been used in Western agriculture for generations. A lot of folks don't know that the beginning of anthropogenic climate change was actually when settler colonizers took their plows to the Great Plains in the 1800s. They destroyed 50% of the soil organic matter releasing it as CO2 into the atmosphere. That's the first bumps you start to see on the anthropogenic-climate graphs was actually tillage. No-till systems are indigenous systems by and large around the world. No-till systems have tended to use brush cutting, fire, and heavy mulches. And at Soul Fire Farm, the way we do our no-till is that when we're finished with a crop area for the season, we'll plant a whole bunch of cover crop. So we plant cover crops, and those are plants that you grow not to eat, but just to feed the soil. And they decompose and make a nice mulch layer that you can plant right into because the smothering also inhibits weed growth. And that's what the forest does, right? When you think of the forest, it doesn't... Periodically just tear itself all up and pulverize, right? It continues to add layers on top of organic matter. So we're mimicking the forest. We're doing biomimicry in our no-till systems.
Shilpi Chhotray [00:12:04] That's pretty incredible. You know, so many of the solutions to the climate crisis already exist. They just need to be rediscovered, not reinvented. Okay, just to shift gears here for a second, because I really need to answer my four and a half year old on this. The other day I stopped by a grocery store because my son really wanted watermelon. And when I opened it at home, he's like, mama, this doesn't have seeds. What's going on here?
Leah Penniman [00:12:31] Such a good question. I love that your four year old wants to know why there are no seeds in watermelon. So it's kind of wild. So it usually actually the results of plant breeding, which is an important technology. Plant breeding is how we have all of... Almost all of the crops that we have. And one of the wild things that modern plant breeders have done is actually convince plants through breeding not to make babies by selecting for seedless fruits. So we always encourage wherever possible to use heirloom or community-based hybrid. And those plants will always have seeds because these are what makes it viable at the ecosystem level.
Shilpi Chhotray [00:13:16] I'd like to talk about pesticides. I read recently that at least one pesticide was found in about 94% of water samples and in more than 90% of fish samples that were taken from streams across the country. I mean, that's pretty frightening.
Leah Penniman [00:13:32] It's beyond devastating to me, the ways that our so-called modern Western society is poisoning the very planet we depend upon. And there's a wonderful member of our board of directors, Tagen Engel, who made the very good point that our regulations are so backward that you have to get a certification and pay money to grow food organically, but you are free to poison the waterways and the atmosphere wantonly with no certification, no inspection and no review. But I think we have to look at this not just from an individual consumer perspective, like, how do I keep myself safe? But what is the world we live in where we allow glycosate to just be in our waterways? What is this world we in where mother's milk is not free from contamination because of what we've allowed into the atmosphere and really take this to a policy level nationally and internationally to get rid of these poisons in our food system.
Shilpi Chhotray [00:14:26] That's such a stark reality. And for me, it raises the question how Soul Fire engages at the policy level to help drive those systemic changes.
Leah Penniman [00:14:37] So Soul Fire Farm is a member of a few national and regional coalitions where we work together with other farmers on policies. Our biggest policy win, which has now been undone, was to get a provision from the Justice for Black Farmers Act around farmer debt relief actually passed by Congress and debt relief starting to go to some of these socially disadvantaged farmers. The payments have now been completely halted under the Trump administration and they have defunded all U.S. Department of Agriculture programs for disadvantaged farmers, including Black, Latinx, women and veteran farmers. And so this has been a devastating blow and we're not giving up, but we do know that in this current time, a lot of our focus is on protecting our community members from attack so that we will be there to exist and resist when hopefully this particular season of repression is past us.
Shilpi Chhotray [00:15:35] The Trump administration's ongoing immigration policy does highlight an inconvenient truth about the U.S. Agri-food industry. Without undocumented immigrants, the system would not function.
CLIP [00:15:47] Since taking office, my administration has launched the most sweeping border and immigration crackdown in American history.
CLIP [00:15:56] Ventura County fields were among the many locations targeted by immigration agents in early June raids that rattled California.
CLIP [00:16:06] More than 360 people were arrested and one field worker died in the chaos.
CLIP [00:16:10] The chilling effects of those raids are hitting hard, a state that is the top producer of agricultural products in the country. More than one-third of all vegetables and two-thirds of fruits and nuts in the United States are grown right here.
CLIP [00:16:24] Despite earlier promises that farm workers would not be targeted, the reality for many today is a choice. Do they go to work to do their job and risk arrest or do they stay home and then perhaps risk not being able to pay their bills?
Shilpi Chhotray [00:16:38] Can you speak to the impact of these immigration policies and ICE raids on the workers who feed us and how the system of exploitation intersects with injustice in agriculture? I live in California, Oakland, but there are ICE raids constantly just in local farms an hour or two inland.
Leah Penniman [00:16:57] Yeah, there's a friend of mine who works at an ag university out in the Midwest who every year will ask his students, these are agriculture students. And the question is, how much would you need to be paid to work in the town's meat packing plant? And starts at $10 an hour, 15, 20 goes up. And even when he gets up to $200 an hour there are zero students in this agriculture university who'd be willing to take that job. Because they know how disgusting and dangerous and life-threatening and backbreaking that work is. And further, these are predominantly white students. They believe that this is work for folks from across the border. I think we need to pause and really ask ourselves what kind of system have we created where the U.S. Contributes to economic and political conditions across the border that would drive indigenous people to leave the lands they know, the families they love, to risk their lives, to come here, to do backbreaking labor that our own ag students would not do for $200 an hour. That's the system we've created. And it is not fundamentally a new system. Like the U.S. Food system is built on stolen land and exploited labor in its very DNA. The reliance on the undocumented workforce is just a continuation of that very DNA and we've been, grief isn't even the right word. It's like shock, dismay. I mean, 57 year old Jaime Alanis Garcia just died falling off a roof.
CLIP [00:18:39] A farm worker who suffered serious injuries following an ICE raid at a Ventura County farm has died. That's according to his family. Jaime Alanis is the first person known to die during a Trump immigration raid.
Leah Penniman [00:18:55] 300 people were taken from his farm that day. This is a parent, this is a sibling. Like these are human beings who are growing our food, who deserve the most honor, the most dignity, the most love and are being harassed and attacked and it's unconscionable, absolutely unconscionable. And you know, 78% of the people working the land in the United States are Latinx, even though being a farm owner is the whitest profession in the Unites States. And agricultural workers, even if they are documented, do not have the same labor protections as other workers. They don't have overtime, they don't the right to a day off, they don't have fair wages, they don't have collective bargaining and then you have on top of it, this violent kidnapping. So I always encourage everyone, like join your local ICE watch, try to help your neighbors who need to stay in, you know, bring them money, bring the food. We need to resist, we need to band together. We cannot let our community members be attacked in this way.
Shilpi Chhotray [00:19:59] In Farming While Black, you point out that 100 years ago, black Americans owned around 14% of farms in the United States. But today that number is just 1%. And you know, 14% isn't that high, but that is quite a decline. This dramatic shift is not coincidental, as you write. The current food system was built on the labor of 12.5 million skilled African farmers whose forced labor on stolen land became the foundation of this nation's wealth. So this history has undoubtedly shaped the relationship, I would think many black farmers have with land today.
Leah Penniman [00:20:36] Chris Bolden-Newsom, who is a farmer in Philadelphia and seed keeper. He put it really well when he said the land was the scene of the crime. And by the scene the crime, I would say the chattel slavery, the sharecropping, the tenant farming, the white mobs burning down people's houses for being too upbeat, right, all of that. But I would add she was never the criminal. The land was never that criminal. So this oppression happened on the land and many of our ancestors, my grandparents and great-grandparents included. Got it tangled up in terms of the land being the source of their oppression. And so there were many, few generations of exile, including self-imposed exile. And I think that the piece that we are starting to heal now is the recognition that we belong to the earth and that they can't take away the thousands of year legacy of noble and dignified land-based tradition that we do have predating chattel slavery. So that is one piece, but the reality is, as you mentioned. 98% of the agricultural land value, 95% of acreage is white-owned, which is more concentrated than most of history. And there's a history of that, right? The genocidal displacement, laws in most states that actually precluded black and brown people from owning land. And then you have the issue where black farmers have less access to capital and credit. All of these structural factors that have nothing to do with the will of the black community. And so how do we address this?
Shilpi Chhotray [00:22:07] You're naming such deep structural barriers here, land theft, racist laws, systemic denial of credit. And yet we also know there are powerful movements pushing back. What's actually happening on the ground?
Leah Penniman [00:22:20] So we have made great gains with the debt relief, which I mentioned that the administration has put on pause. I also want to applaud the work of the National Black Food and Justice Alliance and the Northeast Farmers of Color Alliance in terms of building a black land commons. And then to uplift the work of our ecosystem of farmer training orgs that are trying to make sure that there is this culturally relevant space for people to learn the skills so that we can feed our community. So it's happening. It's happening! For this land, thank you, for this land.
Shilpi Chhotray [00:22:54] We're seeing it, we just need to scale it. You write about how Europeans did not know tropical and subtropical agriculture, so they kidnapped experts to build the sugar cotton and tobacco plantations of the Caribbean and the U.S. South. When we talk about the basis of wealth of this nation, how do we connect that for people that don't understand the role of forced labor?
Leah Penniman [00:23:18] Now Judith Carney writes about this so beautifully in Black Rice, just about the history of the transatlantic slave trade and how black folks from the west coast of Africa were not kidnapped just for the physical labor that colonizers had hoped they could provide. They were kidnapped specifically from the regions with agricultural expertise. So take for example, the rice farmers of Senegambia. They were kidnapped to create the rice economy of the Carolinas. You know, these crops, cotton and sugar, these did not grow in England. They did not grown in Spain. And so they had to find people with this expertise to actually run the agricultural system. And estimates are between, you know, four. Billion to $7 trillion if you count for inflation of what was contributed in terms of unpaid wages to the agricultural economy of the United States by our ancestors. And so you can't say, when we know that 80% of wealth is inherited, when we that the wealth gap between black and white is ever widening, you can say that a baby born today. Is on equal footing, right?
Shilpi Chhotray [00:24:39] I think the stat is like a white baby has 16 times more wealth on the day it's born than a black baby. Malcolm X said in 1963, I think he was in Detroit, revolution is based on land.
Leah Penniman [00:24:55] Well, this quote that Malcolm X shared in his message to the grassroots, land is the basis of revolution, is actually the quote on the back of Soul Fire Farm's t-shirts.
Shilpi Chhotray [00:25:05] Oh my gosh.
Leah Penniman [00:25:05] It is a very near and dear.
Shilpi Chhotray [00:25:07] Wait, I need one.
Leah Penniman [00:25:08] To us is very near and dear to us. And [00:25:12]land is the basis of everything. Land is what feeds us. It's where we build our homes. It's we bury our dead and have our family reunions. It's the security we pass on to our children. It's our relationship with safety and the earth with water and air. It is everything. [13.1s]
CLIP [00:25:27] [00:25:27]Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is a basis of freedom, justice and equality. The white man knows what a revolution is. He knows that the black revolution is worldwide, in scope and in nature. [17.8s]
Shilpi Chhotray [00:25:47] I wanna talk about Angola Prison in Louisiana, which spans 18,000 acres, roughly the size of Manhattan, which is hard to believe. It was built on a former plantation. This land is used for prison labor, many of whom are black, working under slave-like conditions. It's pretty draconian. A January, 2024 Associated Press investigation revealed that goods tied to prison labor were the majority of the black prisoners. Are embedded in this supply chain of major food brands like Frosted Flakes and Coca-Cola. So these goods are on the shelves of virtually every supermarket in the country, including Kroger, Target, Aldi and Whole Foods. And so the prison workers who are the backbone of the supply chain are paid pennies, if anything. And I think it's important to ask you how you see the role of prison labor, particularly involving black prisoners. In today's agricultural systems.
Leah Penniman [00:26:48] When slavery officially ended in 1865, it didn't really end because there was a loophole in the 13th Amendment that allowed people who were convicted of a crime to be forced into servitude, to be force into slavery.
CLIP [00:27:05] The 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.
CLIP [00:27:13] The labor system that took shape in the late 19th century developed coercive means to ensure that cotton remained king. It was called convict leasing. Get arrested on a minor charge or a trumped up charge. You could find yourself locked up and then hired out to a corporation bidding on inmate labor. The pipeline from prisons to profits in this country has deep roots.
Leah Penniman [00:27:41] The prisons filled with black people after the Civil War, who were then leased out to the plantations, to the railroads, to the mines, and the mortality rate was abysmally high. At one point, Alabama's state budget was almost 80% from leasing black prisoners to private individuals and companies. It's a business. It was a business and that has not ended. And so we have this system where even to this day, and a lot of people think it officially ended in 1928, so we're all good to go. But we're seeing through this AP investigation that there are actually hundreds of millions of dollars of farm products being sold to the public made with free labor, or at best, two to 40 cents an hour labor. And that absolutely has to stop. I hope we can agree. The moral conscience of our nation is stable enough to agree that slavery is a bad thing. We cannot have a slave system. And this goes for whether it's agricultural work or firefighting work, a lot of the firefighting which is very linked to climate change has been also prison labor. So people are being considered, our community members are being consider disposable and cogs in this machine of capitalism. And we've absolutely got to take a stand against that.
Shilpi Chhotray [00:28:53] Thank you so much for breaking that down and we'll link the AP study in the show notes as well. So we've talked a lot about the systems that need to be changed. And there are so many flaws in the current way we're doing things. What would a truly just food system look like?
Leah Penniman [00:29:16] You know, Fannie Lou Hamer in Blessed Memory, beloved ancestor, she said, if there are 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned up in your larder, no one can push you around or tell you what to say or do. If we can feed ourselves, we can really free ourselves. So what does it look like to have relocalized food systems where the majority of the food that we grow is grown relationally, is grown regeneratively, is grown with our heritage and cultural practices. Where the government is actually paying farmers and land workers for our care for the public trust. So if you're taking care of soil and water and pollinators and sequestering carbon, there should be a stipend for that to support that and to actually have land reform where land is being given back in a thoughtful and peaceful way, of course, but land being given to the tribes. And so it's a matter of catching up to where our ancestors have been and then being able to feed. The community without destroying the planet.
Shilpi Chhotray [00:30:17] I'm on board. I will support this vision fully and wholly. I think the other piece of this is reparations. What do you say to people who are reluctant to directly confront the issue of reparations and the return of land to black and indigenous communities?
Leah Penniman [00:30:34] I mean, reparations, sometimes folks can think of it as a scary word, but at its root, it's about repair. We need to challenge the scarcity mindset that says if one group gets something, the other group automatically loses. There's more than enough land for everyone. There's enough food for everyone, there's enough money for everyone and we can have the courage to ask how much is enough. Nobody ultimately is going to win unless we all win. And so re-adopting that indigenous frame of mind is going to allow us to soften and recognize that your thriving is my thriving. Your safety is my safety. You having a home and land means that my home and land is more secure, right? Because we all have enough. We're not seeing each other as an enemy, as a combatant, we're being able to engage with one another as equals.
Shilpi Chhotray [00:31:25] What we're trying to do here is just balance it out a little bit more. You know, we can't continue sustaining a culture in a world where so few have so much and then there's just global masses who are doing everything they can to try to stay afloat. Here's my last question for you, Leah. What do you want the soil to teach others?
Leah Penniman [00:31:53] So when I think of what I want the soil to teach others, I think about time scale and what it is to zoom out. There's a wonderful black soil scientist who comes and helps us out at Soul Fire Farm. Her name is Tiffany Laschet. And she was doing a soil analysis a couple of years ago of taking soil cores, which is basically like inserting this metal cylinder deep into the soil and then pulling out a sample that has layers in it. So this was a meter long or more sample. And she was able to see, oh, here's a few thousand years ago when Mohican folks were burning this landscape in order to manage for berries and deer. And you can see the residue of the ash. And here's the 1800s when there was a sheep craze in upstate New York and there was like a million sheep. This is what that looks like. So it was super cool, right? And then she gets to the very top, sort of end of the core. And there is about a foot of black. And she said, this is what you all built in the past 15 years. You built this top soil. And she's said, a million years from now. If someone were to take a sample of rock, they would see that you were here and that you actually left a mark of beneficial contribution to the place you were in the form of a small black line. That was such a backdrop moment for me because up until that point, I was thinking, you know, capitalism thinks in these quarterly returns and indigenous people, we think in seven generation returns. But what is it to think in a geological time scale? To aim to have the record of our humanity not be plastic and death in the geological record, but a thin black line of humates that we contributed to the earth. So that's what I want the soil to teach us, how to zoom out and really think about the big picture of what is the legacy that we're leaving behind.
Shilpi Chhotray [00:33:56] Thank you, Leah. I've learned so much from you on this episode and I'm so excited to continue learning from you and all the incredible work you and Soulfire Farm are doing. So thank you so much for joining me today.
Leah Penniman [00:34:10] Thank you for having me. This has been really, really special. I appreciate your thoughtful questions and just all that you do in your journalism to advance these essential conversations. I really appreciate you.
Shilpi Chhotray [00:34:26] Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Leah offered us so much wisdom and I'm deeply grateful for her teachings of farming, rooting us in healing, dignity and our relationship with the earth. A special shout out for the t-shirt she sent me stamped with Malcolm X's words, all revolution is based on land. I wear it with pride as both a gift and a reminder of what's at stake and of the future Leah is helping to build. If you like today's episode, share it, rate it and drop us a line at hello@apeoplesclimate.org. Thank you to Wildseeds Fund for making this podcast possible. This episode of A People's Climate is executive produced by Mindy Ramaker with engineering and sound design by Dennis Maxwell, theme music by Khafre Jay and additional research by Sarah Morgan. Recorded at Studio 132 in Oakland, California. From Counterstream Media and The Nation, I'm your host, Shilpi Chhotray. Until next time.