Carlisle Introduction and Chapter One

  Regenerative Agriculture is a very common buzzword in the "eco-conscious" areas of the internet. This is often pitched as a way to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and return it to the Earth. However, Liz Carlisle calls for caution with this. By treating regenerative agriculture as a “new” modern invention, we are being colonizers as well as ignorant. 

The carbon farming hype is confronted at the very beginning. The innovations being used by current white, midwestern farmers are rooted in Asian-American, Indigenous, and Black agricultural traditions. The word “healing” within the title isn’t about fixing just the Nitrogen cycle; it is about healing the rift between people and the land they live upon. We are unable to fix the problem without looking at the extractive logic that causes it to break in the first place. This logic is tied to slavery and settler colonialism.

Previously, the North American prairies were one of the most effective carbon-sequestering machines on the planet. It was carefully managed through indigenous practices, which included the stewardship of buffalo and the use of fire. The indigenous model was reciprocal, while the colonial model is extractive.

The nice thing about this perspective is the idea that Regenerative Agriculture is not a technical fix. This narrow focus of how many tons of Carbon dioxide we can sink into an acre of land is just another form of extraction. We are still using the Earth as a tool rather than a companion.

Real healing occurs when we realize that the people who are most harmed by our current food systems are minorities. These minorities are the ones who hold the solutions to our problems. This first section of the book can serve as a deprogramming for those who feel we can just buy our way out of climate change with some organic labels. We need to acknowledge the grounds they were to begin with and whose labor was used in order to exhaust them.