Episode Details

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:

www.judithdschwartz.com

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.