The story of U.S. agriculture is a story that agroecologist Liz Carlisle thought she knew.
That story begins after World War II, when a rapid increase in technology led agriculture to shift away from family farms toward powerful corporations. But, as the author of Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Agriculture told me during our Rare Reads conversation, the story is more complicated than that.
“What I learned in researching this book is that it was all an extension of a process that had started hundreds of years earlier, shifting US agriculture away from a mutual benefit between people and land to this more extractive paradigm,” said Carlisle. It was a powerful moment of reckoning for Carlisle, whose own family lost a generational farm during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
“There was a certain story that worked for me for a while,” she said of her understanding of our nation’s “agrarian myth.” Now, she understands that the complexity can give her a richer sense of what she’s doing and what it means to be part of her family’s agricultural legacy.
If “regenerative agriculture” has begun to sound like a buzzword, Healing Grounds helps restore its depth. The book centers on four protagonists – all young, female, and BIPOC – who have reconnected with their personal roots to restore ancestral knowledge to the land and promote soil health. As shown through their stories, regenerative practices are far from being a new concept.
“Whether you’re talking about agroforestry or cover cropping or minimum tillage systems, these are all things that you find precedents for in Africa, in Latin America, in East Asia that go back thousands of years,” she explained. As she put it, “these knowledges have been co-opted or we’ve forgotten where they came from.”
For Carlisle, the best way to bring these practices into focus is to center people at the heart of regenerative practices.
“It’s important to remember that, with all of our dreams of a regenerative agriculture that helps repair our planet and helps us respond to climate change, it’s not the kind of thing that you set it and forget it,” she said. “People remain an integrated part of any one of those practices or systems in perpetuity.”
Healing Grounds is a powerful lesson in how letting go of incomplete stories is not a loss. It is how we make room for a truer, more beautiful one in which land, culture, and community heal together.
Watch the entire conversation here.