Leah Penniman Transcript

Omkari Williams 0:20

Hello, and welcome to Stepping Into Truth, the podcast where we have conversations on social justice and how we all get free. I'm your host Omkari Williams and I'm very pleased that you're here with me today. My guest today, Leah Penniman is founding Co-Executive Director and Farm Director of Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, an Afro-Indigenous farm that works toward food justice and land justice. Her books Farming While Black and Black Earth Wisdom are love songs for the land and her people. And in a first for Stepping Into Truth this is actually Leah's second time being on the show. I asked Leah to return because the work that she does is so important in both empowering Black people to reconnect with the land, and in expanding the understanding of all people about how systemic racism impacts all of us, and our connection to the earth. And it is my great pleasure to have Leah back on the podcast. Hi, Leah, I am so happy to be talking with you again.

Leah Penniman 1:25

Thank you very much for having me back.

Omkari Williams 1:28

So you have written this beautiful new book, Black Earth Wisdom. And it's a series of conversations that you had with Black people working in various areas of expertise about their connection to mama Earth, and what we all need to be thinking about in terms of our relationship to her. And I have to tell you, the book was so rich, I was actually having a hard time deciding what I wanted to talk to you about. And then I read this sentence, and I'm quoting you and you said this, you said, "I believe we protect what we love, and that we can only love what we know intimately". And I read that, and it stopped me in my tracks. And I knew that that was it. This book really is a conversation about love for the Earth and the different ways that it manifests for each of the people you speak with. And for all of the ways that it can manifest for us, too. So let's start there. What made you write this love letter to Earth, and to all of us about mama Earth?

Leah Penniman 2:32

Hmm, thank you for that. So, Black Earth Wisdom was a rehydration of a childhood covenant that I had with the Earth. So when we say we protect what we love, and we love what we know intimately, when my siblings and I were growing up in a small town in central Massachusetts, we were among the only Brown children in that whole school district. The racialized bullying was cruel, to say the least. And so we found our solace in nature. We quite literally hugged the trees exhaling our CO2 into their bodies and imagining that we were inhaling oxygen in this cycle of reciprocity. We invented a religion called Mother Nature, later found out that was more of a remembering than invention. But we had our shrines, you know, decorated with blue jay feathers and paper, birch, and bits of moss, where we paid homage to this, this real mother for us, this protector, this place of solace and refuge and became politicized quite young, when we realized that the Earth was in proverbial trouble; there was global warming and, and species destruction.

Leah Penniman 3:45

So we made a club, the Junior Ecologist Kids Club and went on pollution patrol. We were cleaning up and planting and interrupting logging in the forest as six and seven year olds. And as I got older, there was a way that the real world kind of pressed in. The pragmatism of how do you really make change? Seeing the impracticality, in some ways, of the the hard line that we held around the Earth that it was never okay, right to destroy, to kill. And something is lost in our pragmatism that young people have a moral clarity about. And during the pandemic, when there was a little bit of more time to hear the birds and see the sky. I heard the voices of the Earth again. And they were calling me back home to that childhood covenant to that moral clarity to that, you know, this is actually about love. This is actually about relationship not just about quantifying the value of ecosystem services and figuring out the political solutions, and this that and the third, this is about a relationship of reciprocity and kinship with the earth. And I got very curious who else felt that way which was a part of the impetus for Black Earth Wisdom.

Omkari Williams 5:03

Wow, I have to say I got chills listening to you. Because I think you tapped into something that a lot of us have experienced which, and it may not have been relative to the Earth, but there's something in our childhoods where we just there's this purity. And before that gets sort of knocked out of us by the experiences of life, just connecting to that shows us that we are actually powerful. And even if we forget it, we can come back and reclaim that awareness. And that ability to affect change, even a small change in our own circumstances, and our own particular corner of the world. And so that's really, really beautiful. Thank you for reconnecting us to that.

Leah Penniman 5:55

And thank you for receiving it, it felt like a tender, vulnerable, precious thing to put that out in the world. You know, Farming, While Black, my first book in 2018, is quite practical. I mean, I love this book. It's like how to plant your carrots and the whole noble agrarian history of Black farmers and the story of Soul Fire, you know, but it really satisfies the left brain that wants to know how to do things. So it is a how to, and Black Earth Wisdom. Is this deeper why. Why compost? Why care? Why feed the community? Why stand up for the rights of nature? And it taps into something at the soul forest level, which, of course, is a much more vulnerable thing to put in the world than a planting chart. So I'm glad, though, that it's resonating, at least in some small way.

Omkari Williams 6:46

Oh, absolutely. And you talk about the why. But there's also the sort of the why not? Because the why reminds us that we are part of nature, we are not separate from nature, except in our thinking. And so the why not for me is why not treat ourselves and the Earth with the same reverence? Why not look at the world as if we are actually part of it rather than apart from it? And that's something that in the conversations you have kept coming up for me over and over again, were all the different ways in which we are part of the world if we allow ourselves to reconnect with that awareness. And there is this thread throughout in the book of the disconnect between Black people in the United States in specific and the Earth. That disconnect isn't an accident. That disconnect happened very intentionally. Would you speak about that?

Leah Penniman 7:53

Hmm. So the disconnect between Black people and nature has been a systematic project of white supremacy. At the end of the Civil War, 1865, the Union army is going around knocking on doors and telling people this is the end of chattel slavery. There was a gathering of freedmen in Falls Church, Virginia, who wrote a letter to the bureau working on Reconstruction saying what their needs were. And they said, what we need, our homes and the ground beneath them that we may plant fruit trees concerning which we can say to our children, these are yours. So this deep connection to land, this yearning for land has been a steady drumbeat in the history of Black people. Mama Savi Horne, who's a lawyer with Land Loss Prevention Project, I interviewed her for Black Earth Wisdom. She says, some of the freedmen would step away from the plantation to try to eke out a living elsewhere and realize they could not survive without a particular grove of trees back on the plantation. So they would return to share crop and be reunited with those tree kin.

Leah Penniman 9:05

And our people against odds, you know, against the sharecropping, the tenant farming, the convict leasing using the loophole in the 13th Amendment managed to still purchase almost 16 million acres of land by 1910. Almost all of which is gone. And it's gone, not because people wanted to leave but because the Klan and the White Citizens Council and other white supremacist quite literally burned folks off their property. Shot at them, lynched people, 4000 names we know, many more we don't know, and created a refugee crisis also known as the Great Migration when 6 million Black people went North to try to flee the flames and the gunshots, right. The USDA, the US Department of Agriculture was also complicit in denying financing and support to Black Farmers while granting it to white farmers leading to foreclosures. And so there's been this, this litany, both in the farming world and also in the wild spaces world.You know the National Parks, they were created on stolen Indigenous land and they've excluded Black and brown people for much of their history because of Jim Crow segregation.

Leah Penniman 10:10

In fact, the national parks were created as a eugenics projects. I was really, really shocked, I shouldn't have been but I was shocked to learn this in the research, that Madison Grant who was instrumental in creating Everglades, Olympic, Glacier, Denali National Parks did so as a way to strengthen the Nordic race, and wrote about it in his 1916 book, The Passing of a Great Race which Adolf Hitler referred to as his bible. Right? So a lot of these leaders were part of eugenics society, John Muir, or James Audubon, racist slave owners, and had this vision of conservation as creating these pristine natural places as playgrounds and exercising grounds for white people. But what is very important to dispel, it's not that the relationship between Black people and nature is broken. In fact, 70% of people of color participate in wilderness recreational activities. But yet only 2% of national parks visitors are Black, right? When you survey Black people, Black people are more concerned about the environment, specifically climate change than white people. So it's not so much that that flame that care has died within us, but the access to wild spaces, the access to leadership, and the environmental movement is not there because of this legacy of white supremacy.

Omkari Williams 11:33

It's interesting that you say that, because I think that people don't understand the impact of white supremacy on all of these sort of subtler, more underlying aspects of life in the United States right now. For instance, Black people are about 13% of the US population. But 94.4%, of agricultural land is owned by white people.

Leah Penniman 12:05

Right.

Omkari Williams 12:06

And there's just no way to make sense of that. Other than that there has been as you, as you outlined, intentional suppression of Black people having access to the same programs that support white farmers, that support white landowners. And when we look at that, and then we look at something like National Parks, which are supposed to be the spaces for everyone, and we look at how they've really been kept for white people from the beginning with intentionality, it makes really good sense that we then see a white woman calling the police on a Black birdwatcher in Central Park.

And it's so I mean, I personally find it so frustrating. And as I was reading your book, I actually found myself calming down from that frustration because of the amazing people that you're interviewing and the people that they're working with in the work that they're doing. And I know that you yourself, have spent a lot of time learning from Black and indigenous people around the world, as have the people that you interviewed in this book, in their various specific areas of interest. Why do you feel it's so important that we learn directly from these people when possible, as opposed to learning from the internet?

Leah Penniman 13:39

Oh, I love that why learn from people and not from the internet? Well, I'll give you a spiritual answer to this because it's something I've I've personally struggled with a bit. You know, I'm raised in Western society. You know, I went to college, I love the written word. And when I started studying in West African indigenous religious tradition, where I'm now a member of clergy in both Vodoun and Orisha Yoruba religion, there is a very clear directive that we learn mouth to ear, teacher to student. It's not written down in books, some teachers won't even let you write things down. There's no recordings for later. It comes directly from teacher to student. And I was fighting against that. I was like, can't you just write this down for me? Let me record this. My brain doesn't work like this with this memorizing and it's so inefficient, right? But among other reasons for this, there is an Ashe there is a soul force energy and activational spirit that comes in the relationship between the teacher and the student that is dead on the page.

Leah Penniman 14:52

And these are practices done in community. These are practices that defy the western concept of individual, of independence, of all by myself, which of course is an illusion. You know, all of us even the most hardy, rugged individualists are completely reliant on other people and other beings for every single breath that we take. And traditional African religions, and communities by extension, recognize this interdependence and this is why teaching happens in this way. So I've been won over I have to say ,I've been won over to relational teaching. But I think also I want to, I guess suggest that we are not separate from nature. We Black people, all people right are also part of nature. And one of the greatest things that I learned in the research for Black Earth Wisdom is the importance of relearning how how to read the earth.

Leah Penniman 15:48

So a quick story, I was speaking with Audrey Peterman, she's a Jamaican American elder. Among the first Black people to visit almost all the national parks. She's a National Park advocate, but the first time that she went out to the Midwest and saw the the wide black sky unencumbered by light pollution and dotted with sparkling stars, she had this realization that there was a time when almost everyone could read the sky, right? Night or day, they could tell the weather, the time of year, directionality, even the stories of their people in the patterns of constellations. And in a similar way, Leni Sorensen culinary historian worked on High on the Hog said, you know, there was a time when every farmer knew that you put his corn seed in the ground when the oak leaves with the size of the squirrels ears. And so we can think of the sky, the oak leaves, as well as the tree rings, the ice cores, the birdsong, as Earth's languages. And we can think of Earth as a primary source.

There's a children's game of telephone where one person is the primary source, they whisper to the next person who gets a little distorted whispers to the next person is a little more distortion and on and on until at the end, you have a funny scrambled message. Now, this is what we're doing though in adult society, where so few people can read the Earth, the primary source, the languages of Earth, including the Black people who are the color of soil. No one is hearing that and so we're playing this dangerous game of telephone, where the scrambled messages at the end are just wrong. And that's how we are making societal decisions based on this this misinformation. So Audrey Peterman and many of the other contributors to Black Earth Wisdom argue that the most important thing that we need to do is to become literate, again, all of us to become literate in the languages of the earth, and to be much closer to the primary source.

Omkari Williams 17:43

Wow, that makes me think of, I grew up in Manhattan so I grew up in a place with enormous light pollution. And occasionally you would see a star. But I was fortunate in that I got to go out into places where it was dark at night. And whenever I would go out in those places, I would always whisper to myself, that the stars have come to visit, because that's how it felt right. It felt like, oh, the stars have come to visit me. And this is so magical. There's so much that we're missing, not just in the education, but in the nourishment of our souls, when we don't have those connections, because that feeling that I feel and to this day, anytime I'm in a place where it's dark enough at night, that you can really see the sky is so powerful, it puts me in right size relationship to things. You know what I mean?

Leah Penniman 18:42

Yes.

Omkari Williams 18:43

And that is so important. If we were in right size relationship to things, I think it would be really different in the world. What do you think?

Leah Penniman 18:52

I love that you put it this way, because another big theme that came out of the book was also about scale. And so the way you're talking now about right size relationship, I think about it in a spatial dimension, right? We're really tiny. The universe is really big, when we zoom out, you know, and sort of the classic example is, astronauts seeing the Earth from a distance for the first time and going, Oh, wow. All the things that we love and live and die and fight for are happening in that happening in that tiny blue speck. Like, let's pay attention to what's really important.

And one of the other ways that we got thinking about scale in this book was temporally, capitalism will have us thinking in quarterly returns, is real quick how we measure success. And it's one of the reasons we very much struggle to pass any long sighted legislation or figure out global cooperation is because everyone's on quarterly returns for their stockholders. And maybe they're thinking about the next election cycle, but rarely, rarely is anyone thinking generationally. And so for a long time, you know, one of the refrains of Soul Fire has been you know, they want us measuring quarterly returns, we're measuring in generational returns.

And then I met a geologist, Lauret Savoy, Dr. Lauret Savoy, who studies not generational term returns, right, but these like galactic returns and so that it just blew my mind to start to think about if we were to think about our legacy in terms of the layers of rock that would be examined millions of years from now, what, what would that be right? And so Dr. Drew Lanham, an ornithologist, said, well, if aliens or you know future intelligent beings come and drill down, they're gonna see this layer that human beings left behind as I'll quote, "plastic and death".

Omkari Williams 20:43

Okay, wow.

Leah Penniman 20:46

But here's a counter, a counter example. So I'm gonna tell you a little, I like to tell stories. So Tiffany LaShae, Black soil scientist comes to our farm, Soul Fire Farm last year to run a soil workshop. And she comes with this auger in her hand. So for folks who aren't soil nerds like me, an auger is a tool that you use to take out cylindrical cores of soil, pretty deep down so that you can read the history of the soil. So she's digging and digging, few hours pulls out these long many feet of core. And this brilliant woman, you know, it starts 2000 years ago, she said, Okay, this is when the forests were burned by Indigenous people here in order to, you know, increase blueberry habitat and deer habitat. Here's the 1800s, this was the sheep craze, when there was a million sheep in New York, and this is their manure, this is a black line of their manure, I'm just seeing mind you just smudges of color. So she's reading this whole history. And then she gets to current time. And she says this top foot, this top foot of black, rich, sweet smelling humus, that's what you all created. Because when we got to this land in 2006, you couldn't put a shovel in it, it was a hard pan clay. Totally eroded, degraded, abused mountain soil. And we built up using Afro-Indigenous practices, a foot of soil, which is, by the way, many hundreds of times the rate of the natural soil growth that would happen without intervention. And she said this, this line will be in the geological record that you were here, and that you left this place better than you found it.

Omkari Williams 22:21

I love that.

Leah Penniman 22:23

I was like, what I never thought I never in my life had thought, what mark are we leaving in the geological record? And how would that change? How would that change the way that we think about what we're here for and what it is that we want to do? So now that's my goal. I'm like, anywhere that I'm involved. I want the geological records to show, we gave more than we took like, let's go there.

Omkari Williams 22:46

You have completely shifted now how I think about things because I already was thinking, I'm thinking long term, I'm thinking, you know, what do I want 50 years from now for people to say forget 50 years from now. Now I'm thinking okay, way 1000s of years from now. And I will affirm that a foot of rich topsoil is amazing. In the timeframe that you are describing, especially because I know that part of the country really well. I used to live not far from you. And it is rock. I mean, it is it is a battle, what you all have created at Soul Fire Farm is remarkable. But it also speaks to what's possible for all of us.

Leah Penniman 23:33

Exactly.

Omkari Williams 23:34

And that's amazing. It's not, I mean, yes, you all have done an incredible thing. But it's not beyond the scope of what other people can do in their various ways where they are.

Leah Penniman 23:48

Exactly. It's not about exceptionalism.

Omkari Williams 23:50

No.

Leah Penniman 23:50

We're just doing what our ancestors did. We're doing what Dr. Carver taught us, right? We're doing what the Ovambo people taught us. So it's absolutely within a very realistic reach of, of anyone who wants to turn towards the Earth.

Omkari Williams 24:04

And I like how you phrase that, "turn towards the Earth". Because I think that part of the thing right now is most of us don't spend much time out in nature. I mean, a lot of us live in cities, where nature is not necessarily that accessible. But even those of us who live in suburbs, or somewhat more rural areas, we spend a lot of our time indoors, we spend a lot of our time, even when we're outside, we're on devices. And I'm wondering how you're sort of combating that tendency as you expand the mission of Soul Fire part of which is to bring Black youth, Brown youth from urban environments into the natural environment to build that relationship with the Earth for them.

Leah Penniman 24:57

Absolutely. So nature deficit disorder, is a real thing. You know, there was a really shocking study not too long ago that followed 900,000 people. And it revealed that children who grew up with the lowest access to green space had a 55% higher risk of developing a psychiatric disorder. And three quarters of communities of color in the contiguous United States live in nature deprived areas. That's three times the rate of white communities, living in nature to private areas. So it's, it's very serious, to not have access, and then even when there is access to not know how to engage. And it's interesting that you, you can tell I like to tell stories, I'm gonna tell a story because you mentioned devices outside and it made me think of this really powerful anecdote from Dr. George Washington Carver. And then we'll sort of come back to what we're doing at Soul Fire.

Leah Penniman 25:47

But Dr. George Washington Carver who's the patron saint of organic agriculture, he was at Tuskegee University in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and advocated for cover crops, and mulching, and crop rotation, and all manner of soil care that really laid the groundwork for the modern organic movement. He was considered one of the 10 greatest scientists of all time by Albert Einstein for his innovations. So something remarkable about Dr. Carver when he was asked, where do you get these ideas for all of these 1000s of inventions and novel methods. And he said, it's very simple. Every morning, I go out in the pre-dawn hours, to the forest. And that's where I listened to the voice of God through nature. He said, I love to think of nature as unlimited broadcasting stations through which God speaks to us every day, every hour. So he got his instructions from, you know, not a handheld device. But from this, this radio, like God's radio as it speaks through peanuts, and flowers and trees, you know, and in a similar way, the forest itself has its own internet.

Leah Penniman 27:03

It has a an internet of fungal mycelium where it's passing messages, trees are talking to each other. They're sharing sugars and minerals and warning signs, you know, so there's a part of me that is tickled at the idea of sort of like tapping into this quote, unquote, device of, of nature's conversation. But all that to say, when, when we're at Soul Fire Farm, the good news is that it's relatively simple to start to rebuild the relationship with the Earth.

We found almost universally, young people to elders, when we have an opportunity to connect to the land in a way that is safe, that we choose, and that honors our dignity and is culturally relevant, the Earth just does the work of composting that trauma into hope. Of welcoming her children's footsteps and laughter back home. You know, it's like only one bouquet of flower picking in or making one burrito from things you harvested or feeding a couple of goats. And we see that remembering of home, we've only been away a couple generations, you know, compared to many, many 1000s of years of human history. So we didn't forget each other. It's like an old friend you haven't seen in a long time. And after a few niceties you sink back in and get pick up where you where you left off.

Omkari Williams 28:24

I really love that. Composting trauma into hope. That is such a beautiful image. And it's so vivid, and I can feel that in my body. When you said those words, there was this exhale that I felt happen of, Oh, yeah. this can this can be repaired. And this can be repaired in connection with the Earth internet, rather than the internet that we've created. Right?

Leah Penniman 28:58

Right.

Omkari Williams 28:59

That's just such a beautiful opportunity that we can take advantage of it's like, yeah, go out into the world of nature. And let nature compost some of the trauma into hope. I'm going to carry that one with me. Thank you so much for that.

Leah Penniman 29:19

Thank you.

Omkari Williams 29:21

So that actually leads me to another thing that I wanted to talk with you about because something that really stuck with me in the book, one of the conversations one of the sections is the one on environmental racism. And you touched on it when you talked about how few Black people live with nature as an accessible opportunity for them. Would you talk about environmental racism and not only the impact on Black people, but the impact on our society as a whole?

Leah Penniman 29:55

Absolutely. So I'll put forth the main premise of the environmental justice movement is that all people have the right to equally share environmental burdens, and also equitably share environmental benefits. And so we've talked about some of those environmental benefits such as access to green space. But environmental benefits also include access to healthy, nutritious, culturally appropriate food. Clean water that's free of lead. Clean air that doesn't burden our lungs with asthma. And then ideally, there'd be no environmental harms or burdens, but we do have them and so when we talk about equitably sharing those we're talking about the siting of hazardous waste landfills and where the chemical factories are, and where the lead pipes are, and the the disposal sites for nuclear waste, and so on.

Leah Penniman 30:53

And study after study starting in the 1980s have shown that we live in an apartheid country when it comes to who is benefiting from the Earth and who is being harmed, you know. The Olin Corporation dumped 4000 tons of DDT into the waters of Triana, Alabama, the 1970s on Black residents, and it was decades before they were forced to remediate and compensate those residents who suffered dramatic health impacts. Community members, Black community members were burdened with the Whispering Pines Landfill in Houston, Texas and the Warren County hazardous waste landfill in North Carolina. And they, to their credit, they got together and formed the first national People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991. And wrote these beautiful founding principles of environmental justice which, among other principles, included the affirmation of the sacredness of Mother Earth. Decrying discriminatory public policy, uplifting Native treaty rights, and on, and many of these principles have made their way into federal law. They've influenced the way the Environmental Protection Agency works and also changed the conversation in the broader environmental movement, to help folks understand that, that people are part of nature.

Leah Penniman 32:10

It's not that we need to focus on this fortress conservation mentality where the only work of environmentalist is to kind of fence off these untouched wild spaces and keep the people out. But the lungs of our children are also part of nature, right? The bodies of our elders are also part of nature. And so how do we keep them healthy and free from pollution and integrated into all of the beautiful benefits that the Earth has to offer? And it's now very difficult, because of the leadership of our elders, it is actually very difficult for the white environmental movement to ignore environmental justice, environmental racism issues. So we've we've made some progress. But just in 2021, you know, there was another nationwide study that showed that despite the progress, the environmental burdens of heat exposure, of air pollution, of the rising coastal floodwaters, and other harms are still disproportionately on the shoulders of Black or Brown people. So we have a ways to go, both within the nation and globally, where, you know, the folks who are on the front lines in terms of climate impacts are often the nation's the communities who didn't cause the problem in the first place, and are disproportionately Black and Brown.

Omkari Williams 33:36

So that said, What gives you hope?

Leah Penniman 33:42

What gives me hope? Well, there are two things that give me hope. One is our ancestors. I often talk about our ancestral grandmothers who had the audacious courage to braid seeds of black rice, okra, molokhia, sorghum, millet into their hair before being forced into the bowels of trans-Atlantic slave ships. So they were in a pretty bad situation of their friends and family getting kidnapped and taken and there were no report backs from across that bubbling ocean. And yet they took seeds, and seeds are the embodiment of hope. Seeds assume a future of planting, of reaping, of sharing, of passing down. So if they could have hope in that circumstance, we really have no excuse. Right? So that is the first thing that gives me hope.

Leah Penniman 34:32

The second is, honestly very practical. You know, to be real. I have no idea if society is going to figure this out. Are we going to get to the promised land? Are we even going to get to the mountaintop? I do not know? So I imagine the counter scenario. If I were to abandon hope and adopt a posture of despair and cynicism. How would I behave? What would I do? Well, I would probably engage in some hedonistic self satisfaction. I'd try to guzzle up as much fossil fuel as I could, while we still have it, I wouldn't bother with the labor of feeding my neighbors. Why do organic agriculture, it's much harder, you know, so I'll stop composting, maybe I wouldn't even farm, figure out how much money I could make as quick as I could, right and on and on. And so if you take that to its logical conclusion, if we all adopt a posture of despair and cynicism, and it doesn't matter, and why care, in the immediate near term, we will cause harm to one another to ourselves and to the earth. And if we hold on to hope, if for no other reason than that, it's highly practical, then we will do good in the moment for other people, for other beings for ourselves, we will make the current day brighter. And perhaps this accumulation of right action will result in getting to the proverbial Promised Land, but we don't know. But in the meantime, we're investing in the relationships, relationships of care with those around us.

Omkari Williams 36:08

I just love that. That's perfect. And that's the perfect place for me to ask you for three things that people listening to this conversation can do to move us towards the mountaintop, to move us towards that promised land.

Leah Penniman 36:30

So, three actions we can take to move towards the mountaintop, I'll start big scale, and then move to the personal. So one is I think it's very, very important that we center the voices and leadership of the people most impacted by environmental injustice. So Black and Brown farmers, environmental leaders, ecological thinkers. And so Soul Fire Farm has a reparations map in collaboration with the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust, it's on our website, and you can find Black and Brown lead land projects near you and give them a hand. That's one very practical way of supporting, I think. Also on the societal scale, anytime there's an opportunity to advocate for policies that support Black farmers, such as the Justice for Black Farmers Act, that support farm workers, such as the Fairness for Farmworkers Act, anything that supports rights of nature, land back for Indigenous people, reparations for Black people, we need to be sending those letters, calling, be in the streets to support that type of change. And then to sort of zoom in, so the more personal you know, I mentioned earlier in the conversation that Audrey Peterman among others has have encouraged us to become literate again, in the languages of the earth. So we have a chance to get to know our neighbors, not just the people neighbors, but the amphibians, and the trees and the flowers and the mosses. Get to know their names, spend some quiet time listening, sing them a song of gratitude. And in rekindling that relationship with the Earth, we are almost guaranteed to fall in love. And when we fall in love, we are almost guaranteed to defend and protect.

Omkari Williams 38:19

There's really nothing more I can say. This is just so perfect and so beautiful, and gives me so much hope. Thank you, Leah, so much for this conversation for your beautiful books, and just for the work that you're doing in the world because it's really needed.

Leah Penniman 38:40

Well, thank you. This has been delightful, and I so appreciate your willingness to receive the gift of Black Earth Wisdom and to share this conversation with our communities.

Omkari Williams 38:50

Thank you.

A recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns us in very stark terms about what we have to do, and the time in which we have left to do it to divert disaster or further disaster. But beyond simply thinking about averting climate disaster, I think that we need to follow Leah's lead and get into right relationship with the land, the oceans, and the air. As Leah says, we protect what we love. So let's find or rediscover our love for this home that we all share. Thank you so much for listening. I will be back with another episode of Stepping Into Truth very soon. Until then, remember that change starts with story, so keep sharing yours.