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How Land Heals with Judith Schwartz
281 Plays7 days ago
Our guest today - Judith Schwartz - has spent her career showing us that the natural world is more resilient than we think, and that we have more power to restore it than we have been led to believe.
Judith is a journalist and author whose books, Cows Save the Planet, Water in Plain Sight, and The Reindeer Chronicles, have taken readers from the degraded hillsides of China's Loess Plateau to the Arctic tundra of Norway.
In this conversation, Judith shares stories from around the world of people healing land, rebuilding community, and rediscovering a sense of meaning in the process. It was lovely to sit with Judith and remember that restoration is closer than we think.
In this episode, we dive into:
- Why the climate crisis is, at its root, a people problem and what that means for how we respond to it
- The Loess Plateau in China: how an area the size of the Netherlands was brought back from ecological collapse, lifting 2 million people out of poverty
- Common Land and the "four returns" model, and what a business designed to serve the land actually looks like
- The Sami reindeer herders of Norway, and what their ancient practice reveals about the intelligence hidden in animal and land relationships
- Why photosynthesis, not money, may be the truest measure of wealth
- The rights of nature movement and the stop ecocide movement as legal pathways toward a different relationship with the living world
- What it means to slow down as a communicator, and why listening has become more central to Judith's work than publishing
More about Judith (check out her substack!):
Judith D. Schwartz is an author and speaker who looks at our environmental crises, including climate change, through the lens of nature. Not nature as a “thing”, but how natural systems “work”, creating the conditions for life to thrive. Her books include The Reindeer Chronicles, Water In Plain Sight, and Cows Save the Planet. Home base is a gentle mountain slope in southwest Vermont.
Find more of Judith at the links below:
https://judithdschwartz.substack.com/
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.
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Transcript
The Magical Transformation of Land and Consciousness
00:00:02
Speaker
The state of our landscapes is a reflection of our consciousness. Over the course of 14 years, what looked like a moonscape looked like a lush, beautiful, fertile area with lots of trees. It's like magic.
00:00:21
Speaker
And then you see pictures of children attending school, and they look healthy, and their teeth look good, and people talking about how they're making a living now with the vegetables they grow, with the apples they harvest.
00:00:40
Speaker
And it's quite extraordinary. It's something like two million people were lifted out of poverty. And it continues.
Why Are Farms Declining?
00:00:50
Speaker
In Season 2 of Agrarian Futures, we're starting with a simple question.
00:00:55
Speaker
How did we get here? Farms are disappearing. Land is getting harder to access. Rural economies are hollowing out. But there are people building better ways forward.
00:01:05
Speaker
Join us as we investigate what's broken in our food system and what it looks like to build something better.
Judith Schwartz on Land, Climate, and Economy
00:01:15
Speaker
Today on Agrarian Futures, we're joined by Judith Schwartz, an author and journalist whose work has fundamentally reshaped how many people think about land, climate, and the economy, and has had a huge influence on on my own thinking. Judith is the author of The Reindeer Chronicles,
00:01:32
Speaker
Cows Save the Planet and Water in Plain Sight. And her reporting takes us to some of the most far-flown places across the world and shows us what becomes possible when we change how we relate to land.
00:01:44
Speaker
Thank you so much for being here with us. My pleasure. When I think of climate change, I think about all the awful news that's like bombarded at us every day that presents this kind of end of world scenario in which, you know, the the earth is going to heat up and, you know, we're going to lose our land, lose our water. and And there's fundamentally nothing that we can do about it.
00:02:06
Speaker
I found that your book did an incredible job at presenting the situation, articulating like a holistic vision of the big picture while giving us concrete examples of people doing things on the ground and kind of presenting and a nuanced perspective on the complexities and also hopes of dealing with climate change. To get us started, could you share a little bit about what prompted you to write this book?
The Overlooked Role of Soil in Climate Change
00:02:33
Speaker
As you mentioned, I wrote a book called Cow's Day the Planet, which is a book about soil, kind of a soil's eye view of the world. Then a book about water, Water in Plain Sight, Hope for a Thirsty World. And then this one, The Reindeer Chronicles that you've mentioned.
00:02:52
Speaker
So each of those books I wrote to fill in what I felt was missing in our conversations, particularly our conversations about climate.
00:03:04
Speaker
For Cow Save the Planet, what I felt was missing was the soil. Because as I learned, the state of our soil has so much to do with climate. I mean, soil is where the earth meets the air.
00:03:21
Speaker
Soil is also the biggest reservoir of carbon on earth. I mean, earth literally, like land, because the ocean clearly holds a lot more carbon. But much more carbon, like more than twice as much carbon is in the soil compared to in all the trees and all the living matter above the ground.
00:03:44
Speaker
And then there is the understanding that so much of the carbon in the atmosphere did come from the soil. because of add agricultural practices. So that was the beginning. That was the launching point for that book.
00:04:01
Speaker
And I'll skip over water in plain sight for now, but it can be said that I felt that water was missing from the climate conversation. But with the Reindeer Chronicles, I had seen so many examples of incredible land transformation.
00:04:21
Speaker
And I just felt it was so important to get these stories out. But also that the understanding that our climate is regulated by natural processes, by all of the functioning of our ecosystems, that's what regulates our climate.
00:04:45
Speaker
And that that we know that we can restore even large, extensive, damaged ecosystems, then that means that we can restore some of that climate-regulating capacity, which I feel is such a hugely empowering bit of knowledge because that's something that we can all get involved in.
00:05:19
Speaker
in one way or another, and really to broaden it out, that the lives of so many people who are living in degraded landscapes, which is so much of the world,
00:05:33
Speaker
Just life is so hard and often meaningless. People struggle with meaning to find work and just to get by. If we shifted our attention to restoring ecosystem function, then that would provide so much meaningful work for people and to feel that what they do matters.
00:05:57
Speaker
And I think that that creates such an opportunity that at this moment, we collectively are blind to. Absolutely. And I like how your book kind of spans everything from really large scale public private partnership projects to like very concrete, small things that pretty much anyone could do.
00:06:19
Speaker
You start the book off with one of the most ambitious projects, the Loos Plateau in China. Can you talk a little bit about why you chose that as a good kind of jumping off point for your book and what it can tell us maybe about kind of the potential for land restoration?
Eco-Restoration: The Loos Plateau Success Story
00:06:35
Speaker
Yeah. So for one thing, when I learned about this particular project in which an area the size of the Netherlands was was restored to ecological function. It was brought back to life. The land was re-greened and the water cycle restored and all of these really important things. I kept thinking, oh my gosh, I wish more people knew about that. So one of my intentions was
00:07:08
Speaker
to bring this story out because few people knew of it and everybody who knew of it really was inspired by it. And also because this story was documented by a filmmaker named John D. Liu.
00:07:26
Speaker
And John has been such a teacher to me over the years, and I wanted to tell his story because he didn't initially think that he would be a chronicler of eco-restoration, but indeed that is what he became. So the Los Plateau is a large area in China that had been the nation's breadbasket. That was the center of farming, and it, in fact, was where farming began in that part of the world, right around the same time
00:08:05
Speaker
as Farming began in the Fertile Crescent. So thousands of years went by and the practices were not so kind to the earth and the land degraded.
00:08:21
Speaker
And in John's films, you see just how bad it is. You see like this like barren hill, hillside, with maybe one little like bunch of grass popping up and a goat eating that grass down to the ground. So the animals are in poor shape.
00:08:43
Speaker
People were in dire poverty. Millions of people were in poverty, living in caves. Grandparents foregoing food so that their grandchildren would have something to eat. I mean, it was really, really horrific.
00:09:01
Speaker
And then on a national level, for one thing, the government was subsidizing all these people. Not that that was enough, but trying to keep everybody alive. And then also, all of that very friable, mineral-rich soil had turned to dust and was going into the Yellow River and causing huge problems. So the government decided, basically, after consulting with
00:09:31
Speaker
ecologists and geologists and economists and hydrologists and every expert you can imagine determined that they could either continue to dredge the river and continue to help out people in poverty, or they could restore the entire watershed, which would resolve the problems that had been plaguing the region.
00:09:57
Speaker
Can you share a little bit about how that restoration went and how it looks like today? Yeah. So what they did was the government hired the local villagers to do much of the restoration. They did plantings.
00:10:14
Speaker
They worked on the ground so that it was terraced, so that when it rained, that held the water or at least slowed the water so you didn't keep losing the topsoil. And they also encouraged the people in the villages to pen their animals because they were just letting the animals free range, just like that goat I mentioned, and find whatever wrasse there was.
00:10:47
Speaker
and that was destroying the land. So they kept the animals away. if They fenced them off so that they weren't continuing the process of degrading the landscape.
00:11:02
Speaker
So that's what they did. And it started, i believe, or at least John's documentation started in 1995. The project may have started a year or two earlier.
00:11:16
Speaker
and Over the course of even 14 years, what looked like a moonscape looked like a lush, beautiful, fertile area with lots of trees. And there are some really stunning little film clips that John did where you can actually see in eight seconds the time lapse going from 1995 2009, and it just completely transformed. It's like magic.
00:11:51
Speaker
And then you see pictures of people who had been in terrible poverty, and who are dressed nicely, and they are no longer living in caves but have real houses.
00:12:07
Speaker
You see pictures of children attending school, and they look healthy, and their teeth look good, and people talking about how they're making a living now with the vegetables they grow, with the apples they harvest, and It's quite extraordinary. It's something like two million people were lifted out of poverty through that.
00:12:34
Speaker
And it continues. Wow. What I love also about that chapter is obviously the role of John DiLeo and him as as a thinker. And I think he talks about, I think you have a quote from him that says, land kind of reflects the state of our consciousness.
00:12:50
Speaker
Yes. The state of our landscapes is a reflection of our consciousness. And thank you for highlighting that because it's a really powerful quote that really prompts one to think. And it goes two ways.
00:13:08
Speaker
That if our consciousness is full of greed and you know selfishness and not caring about nature and other beings, well, that's going to be reflected in the landscape.
00:13:23
Speaker
And then if you're living in a an extremely degraded landscape, can you escape all the negativity? Can you transcend it?
00:13:35
Speaker
Yet, if you're in a beautiful place, it's easy to inhabit that positive state of being. And I think perhaps maybe it's also somewhat reflective. Like I think we view the economy as this thing that is outside of us that we have no, that is just this unquestioned structure. But in fact, like how we choose to do things, which is our is our economy, it is our society, has consequences on the world around us. And
00:14:06
Speaker
you know, what does a degraded landscape say about us as a society and us as an economy? And I think, yeah, his quote was a good reminder of that for me as well.
00:14:17
Speaker
One more example that you talk about in the book and that I think is also very relevant to this conversation is the reindeer in Norway. Could you share a little bit about that case study and what that says about the interplay with economics?
Norway's Reindeer Culling: Ecosystem Dynamics
00:14:32
Speaker
Yeah, so several years ago, i was in Norway, and everybody was really captivated by a particular law case that was going through the courts.
00:14:48
Speaker
And that was that the Norwegian government had decided or it declared that there were too many reindeer, that the fragile tundra ecosystem in the far north was suffering because of too many animals.
00:15:08
Speaker
And so therefore, the reindeer herders were told, to cull their herds. And there was a 23-year-old reindeer herder who said, no, that if I cut the number of animals, that won't be a viable business for me. I can't make a living.
00:15:32
Speaker
You're saying then that it is not possible for a young person, for my generation, to take part in this way of life that has been central to us for hundreds and hundreds of years.
00:15:53
Speaker
And it kept going to higher and higher courts, and he kept winning. Unfortunately, it went to the Supreme Court of Norway,
00:16:05
Speaker
and right in front of the parliament, and he lost. And that was really, really sad for the Sami people who are doing their best to hold on to their traditions.
00:16:21
Speaker
And what i found is that the Norwegian government was exactly wrong. That rather than the reindeer harming the landscape, the reindeer were actually maintaining that very ice-bound, cold landscape.
00:16:45
Speaker
This goes back to a theme that I've been writing about for a long time. which is our lack of understanding of animal land dynamics. And that when you really look at how animals interact with our landscape, we see that there are ways that they are healing the landscape if they are managed appropriately.
00:17:09
Speaker
Here's how it works. The reindeer are nibbling leaves of shrubs and trees, and that does two things. One, it keeps the growth of those plants, of that vegetation, keeps it under control.
00:17:28
Speaker
Because what many people don't know is that as the far north warms faster than the rest of the globe, that what they're seeing is a kind of shrubification of the landscape. That these plants couldn't really get going and growing in the past to the extent that they are now.
00:17:52
Speaker
And why this is important is that the leaves of shrubs and trees absorbs heat. It has a lower albedo, whereas the heathlands under them reflect more heat and keep the ground cooler.
00:18:10
Speaker
That's one key aspect. So they're keeping the plants down so that they don't overwhelm the landscape and so that it's still appropriate for the reindeer and so that reindeer can get at the lichen.
00:18:25
Speaker
in the ground that they feed on And in the wintertime, the reindeer are in large, large groups. So you see them sweeping across the landscape in great numbers.
00:18:42
Speaker
And what that does is it crushes the snow. They're trampling and they're pressing down on the snow. And that doesn't sound very good because we all like fluffy snow, like the snow that I actually have outside at the moment here in Vermont.
00:19:00
Speaker
But that blanket of snow acts as an insulator, whereas when the reindeer are pressing down the snow, then The ground is in greater contact with the cold air, so it keeps it in this state of permafrost. It's keeping the ground frosty, the permafrost frosty. So that is important.
00:19:28
Speaker
And research has been done that found that having grazing animals appropriate to the Arctic On the landscape, it can keep the temperature down by something like 15 degrees centigrade.
00:19:47
Speaker
So it sounds kind of random, but it's actually significant. Yeah, reading about the reindeers and the way you you talk about their impact on the landscape was fascinating. I'd read ah quite a bit about like holistic management and that in the West, but hearing about like that in the Arctic environment is just incredible.
00:20:08
Speaker
Shifting the the conversation you know back out to the key themes that underlie all of these stories that you tell, these like hopeful stories of... land regeneration, often with the impact of animals and humans, of course, as well.
00:20:22
Speaker
But thinking about the constraints also that we have in our current system, how would you think about how us as a society, we can restructure things in a way that would allow for more of these projects to happen? Because I mean, I think a lot of the examples that you show, either in the case of China, required a lot of public funding, or it requires people to sacrifice financial stability to do it despite the odds, or to find a way to do this work not remunerated in a in a financial sense. At a society or even country level, like how should we be thinking about this? And how can we create the right structures that would enable more of this work to happen?
Rethinking Wealth and New Economics
00:21:08
Speaker
Well, I think you said it when you said, how might we be thinking? Because it really quite simply involves a shift in our thinking.
00:21:20
Speaker
So thinking about what is wealth, understanding that our economy functions within nature, as opposed to thinking that nature is a subset of our economy and therefore nature should be in service to the economy?
00:21:41
Speaker
Gosh, that is such a big question. How do I even begin? It actually does go back to when I started this entire journey, when I wrote the book, Cows Saved the Planet, which is really a book about soil. But because no one was talking about soil back in 2012, the book came out in 2013, I knew that I couldn't have a title something like Soil is really important. You should care about it.
00:22:09
Speaker
So what happened was I was writing a lot about new economics. New economics is the understanding that the economy should serve people and the planet instead of the other way around.
00:22:23
Speaker
And there's a really rich kind of intellectual bank of knowledge and thinking in new economics that I found working.
00:22:34
Speaker
really, really compelling. So i started to ask questions like, why does nature and the functions of nature have a value of zero in our economy?
00:22:53
Speaker
That was one question. Is the GDP the best measure of prosperity? That was another question. And then the overall question of what is wealth?
00:23:08
Speaker
because the amount of money floating around somewhere abstractly is growing hugely, mostly going to billionaires, you know, to the top 0.001%.
00:23:24
Speaker
And yet that's not making us more prosperous or enhancing human wellbeing, certainly not making us happier.
00:23:36
Speaker
So I just want to note that I looked through the episodes in your podcast and I saw that you interviewed someone from Slow Money, New York.
00:23:46
Speaker
It was a slow money gathering at Shelburne Farms in Vermont that completely shook up my thinking and brought my attention to soil and how soil actually gives us a pathway to understanding wealth.
00:24:04
Speaker
So I can tell you that little story if that's okay. Yeah. You ready for a little slow money? Okay. So I had written an article on slow money because it was a really compelling model for how to revive communities and nature as well as business.
00:24:26
Speaker
And I went to this gathering. And this is when I was really in the thick of writing about economics. So I went to a talk and there was this guy who was talking about soil.
00:24:41
Speaker
And I was thinking, come on, i know soil as a metaphor for community wealth or soil, you know, as like thinking about what grows and what fertile futures we may have.
00:24:56
Speaker
But let's get back to the real important stuff. Let's get back to the juicy stuff about economics. But actually, this guy was not using soil as a metaphor. He was talking about soil.
00:25:08
Speaker
And one thing that he said completely, completely knocked me over the head, and that was that over time, more carbon has gone into the atmosphere from the soil, from how we treat it how we fallow our farmlands, how we overgraze, how we undergraze, how we leave our soil in poor condition.
00:25:38
Speaker
And so that led me on the path of exploring how you bring carbon back into the soil. And back then, the people who were talking about it were those in the realm of holistic management, which is using livestock as a vehicle for restoring landscapes and healing the soil.
00:26:01
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it really comes down to kind of mindset and intention and our lens onto the world in a way, rather than any technological fix of of any type.
00:26:14
Speaker
Right. I don't see anything being turned around through a a technological fix. Not at all. Because in writing this book about soil, because I had been writing about economics, I approached this through an economic lens, that that was kind of hovering over me.
00:26:36
Speaker
and Throughout, I was kind of exploring the notion of photosynthesis, which feeds into the soil, and the soil feeds into photosynthesis. and Photosynthesis can be seen as the source of wealth because it's what grows.
00:26:57
Speaker
It's what adds complexity. It's what feeds us. So... That's kind of important. And when...
00:27:07
Speaker
I was grappling with how do we shift the direction that we go in and kind of put out this bumper sticker version of where we might go. And that is oxidize less, photosynthesize more.
00:27:27
Speaker
So when I say oxidize, that means burning. That means like burning up our forests, burning up ancient photosynthesis by burning fossil fuels, by farming in a way that releases more carbon that oxidizes and goes into the atmosphere. So oxidation is the burning of matter, of ultimately living or once living matter.
00:28:02
Speaker
So oxidize less, photosynthesize more. And i think that we could describe our current economic system as an oxidizing economy, that we're using it up.
00:28:24
Speaker
We're using up our wealth rather than building wealth And with a shift of intention, we could be building wealth.
00:28:37
Speaker
So let's do it. Yeah. Yeah. When I wrote this book, I kind of thought that all we needed was to understand that.
00:28:48
Speaker
But in order to make this shift, there are many levers. And one of them is actually... a legal lever that I've been following.
Legal Frameworks for Nature Protection
00:29:01
Speaker
Actually, there are two legal measures. One is Stop Ecocide and one is the Rights of Nature movement. The Stop Ecocide movement is bringing into our international legal understanding the notion of ecocide, the destruction of nature as a violation, as a criminal violation.
00:29:31
Speaker
And that movement is getting a lot of traction, particularly in Europe, less so in the United States. And then the rights of nature, the giving of rights to rivers,
00:29:46
Speaker
to particular landscapes, to living beings like herring. There's movement to establish the rights of herring in New England, and that is being driven by the Mashpee Wapanag tribe, the people of the first light, the people that we refer to in our Thanksgiving celebrations, the people that were with the pilgrims.
00:30:16
Speaker
So the reason that i do think the ecocide movement, stop ecocide movement, can make a difference because it calls upon people driving businesses to consider that if they, so it's a deterrent, that if they destroy a landscape, a watershed by the mining or whatever work that they're doing,
00:30:45
Speaker
that they could be liable under ecocide law. So that's why I think that's worth mentioning. So these two legal movements can prompt a shift in our understanding and therefore our intentions.
00:31:01
Speaker
I love the definition of true wealth as photosynthesis. I think it's on the one hand, like very simple and obvious, but on the other hand, very radical.
00:31:12
Speaker
And I think decenters humans from the center of everything, we develop GDP and these economic metrics that are really just about like how much we monetize, how much we bring into the monetary economy, how much we buy and sell.
00:31:27
Speaker
often kind of taking resources that were there to start with and just bringing them into the economy. And, you know, we've taken to the point where like there's basically none of those resources left and we've forgotten what else there is. And to kind of, I don't know reframe it as, i mean, something that's so much bigger than us, like photosynthesis, we're just a small piece of that and a small beneficiary of that among many others is,
00:31:53
Speaker
is a very interesting framing I actually hadn't hadn't heard before. Yeah. And it also reflects what John Liu said is the core principles of restoring ecosystems, that you want to manage your landscape in a way that you have increasing biodiversity levels increasing biomass and increasing soil organic matter.
00:32:26
Speaker
And if you think about it, I mean, we can go back to the Los Plateaux, that what we see is going from a state of impoverishment with very limited photosynthesis to to via photosynthesis and the resulting increase in biomass, biodiversity, and soil organic matter, a state of thriving.
00:32:56
Speaker
So it's it's really, it's something so easily thriving. forgotten, but so core, so elemental.
00:33:06
Speaker
And we know at any time we see it, when we see a degraded landscape, can wealth come from there or a thriving, beautiful, productive landscape?
00:33:19
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. To finish us off, I have one more question. And that's kind of around your role as as a communicator, as a storyteller. You mentioned how Maybe at one point you thought like it was really about getting the information out there of the different possibilities and that the different things people are doing and and the evidence on the benefits of animal impact.
Judith Schwartz: From Information to Mentorship
00:33:43
Speaker
I'm curious, how do you think of your role now? And how do you think of your role having, you know, been writing about a lot of these topics for a long time since your first book and probably even before that?
00:33:54
Speaker
Yeah, that's an ongoing question for me. But definitely a shift happened when in the course of writing the book, The Reindeer Chronicles, it occurred to me, what should have been obvious, that all these environmental challenges are really due to people problems.
00:34:20
Speaker
That it's not the lack of information per se, but how people interact with the land, how people interact with each other so that a business that tries to do something positive falls apart and the land degrades and all just all the stuff, greed, fear, fear of change,
00:34:45
Speaker
a feeling of this is the way it's always been done, or I don't want to do something different because my neighbors will look askance at me.
00:34:56
Speaker
So I've slowed down. I felt a real rush to get information out, but a real slowing down and listening and hearing where people are and hearing where people are open to possibilities and And now, as I'm older than many people in the field, dealing with various aspects of regeneration and restoration, being available to them as they have questions about how they might do this work.
00:35:34
Speaker
Being available is a very big part of where I see my role. And I continue to write and to apply this, the understanding that I've been privileged to learn through all the people that I've been able to spend time with and write about to local questions about how do we appropriately do solar energy and at what cost, things like that.
00:36:10
Speaker
That's a ah great place to end. Thank you so much for coming on this interview with me. And for any of the listeners, I definitely urge you to check out any of her books.
00:36:21
Speaker
The latest one is obviously The Reindeer Chronicles, which is incredible. But the other books are are great as well. Water in Plain Sight and Cal Save the Planet. So thank you so much and look forward to continuing to read your work.
00:36:37
Speaker
Excellent. It's been great to be with you.
00:36:41
Speaker
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexander Miller, who also wrote our theme song. If you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe, and leave us a comment on your podcast app of choice.
00:36:51
Speaker
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