About this episode

Judith Schwartz discusses the resilience of the natural world and the power of communities to restore land and meaning in their lives.

Our guest today - Judith Schwartz [https://www.judithdschwartz.com/] - 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 [https://www.judithdschwartz.com/], 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…

People in this episode

Host: Agrarian Futures

Guest: Judith Schwartz

Topics covered

• land restoration
• climate crisis
• community rebuilding
• rights of nature
• ecological resilience
• sustainable practices

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Cows Save the Planet, Water in Plain Sight, The Reindeer Chronicles

Places: Loess Plateau, Norway, China, Netherlands

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