Most readers know that America’s long history of racial discrimination has severely limited land ownership by people of color. In Healing Grounds, Liz Carlisle shows how farming practices among four oppressed groups – Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian Americans – have historically maintained and improved the land these people have been able to occupy, and how they continue to do so.
Their methods suggest a path to regenerative farming that could arrest climate change, if combined with major reduction in the use of fossil fuels.
Most surprising is Carlisle’s chapter on restoring the buffalo. In this, as in the other chapters, she builds her case by introducing the reader to individual experts. Here, Latrice Tatsey, a graduate student and member of the Blackfeet Nation, is stretched on the ground with her head in a foot-deep hole she has dug to begin her research into soil quality in buffalo grazing land. Next Carlisle interweaves conversation, references to other experts, and the story of an ambitious plan to bring back free-ranging buffalo herds. The result would be a healthier prairie, with a wider variety of plants and healthier soil that would sequester more carbon. No plowing, no land left uncovered between planting seasons, no monoculture. It’s very engaging reading.
Each chapter follows the same pattern. Some history of the discriminatory practices endured by each group leads into discussion of healthy farming methods used by each, and a suggestion of how each could lead to climate friendly regenerative farming.
In each case, the odds against widespread adaptation of these methods seem long. Nonetheless the author leaves us with lots of good reading about the intersection between agriculture, racism, and climate change, and with hope that those long odds can be overcome.
Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy in the Leaflet, Volume 10, Issue 2, February 2023.