Down to Earth: The Planet to Plate Podcast

Latashia Redhouse is director of the American Indian Foods program at the Intertribal Agriculture Council, where she supports food producers across the country to get their food to consumers in the US and beyond—while encouraging traditional and regenerative agriculture practices.

William deBuys is a prolific author of books documenting people's relationship to the earth—which is too often destructive. In his new book, The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss, he writes of an expedition to Nepal that he made with a group of doctors and other medical professionals, led by American Zen Buddhist Roshi Joan Halifax, and reflects on what it means to care for an ailing earth as doctors care for patients. 

James Rebanks is the author of the newly-released book Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey, which recently won the 2021 Wainwright prize for UK Nature writing, and best-seller The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape. His books explore the experience of being a farmer from a millennia-old farming tradition that was almost lost to "improvement." Wonderfully written and highly readable, these accounts of his life in the Lake District of Cumbria, England, give us a lived sense of the promise of industrialism, the genuine short-term gains, the nuances of what went wrong and why...and the reality that there are no clear heroes and villains, but rather it's a truly complex system that has to be managed for land and human health if we want to survive.

Sandra Postel has devoted her life to studying the world's freshwater systems, and they're not looking so great right now. Through a combination of over-allocation, over-engineering, over-use, and climate change, we'll be in trouble if we don't address the problem soon—in fact, we're in trouble now. But the solutions are there, and already in place on a small scale, and they involve working with nature rather than against it to restore the natural flows and stay in balance.  

Many of us were taught that microbes—and bacteria in particular—were dangerous pathogens, and the safest thing human beings could do was create a sterile, bacteria-free environment. But in fact microbes are absolutely essential to human health, the health of the soil, and to pretty much all life on earth. Dr. Emeran Mayer is a gastroenterologist, executive director of the G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience, and the director of the UCLA Microbiome Center. And he’s author of the new book, The Gut-Immune Connection. We talk about how the human microbiome functions, how it's stressed by the standard American diet (SAD) and lifestyle—and the deep interconnections between the human gut and the destruction of the soil microbiome by intensive chemical agriculture. And yes, there are good solutions—if we have the knowledge and will to make them happen.

Reese Baker has been designing permaculture landscapes for many years, and with his family has turned his home on a quarter-acre lot in Santa Fe, NM into a teeming oasis of life, complete with wetlands, a pond, trees, and food and flower gardens—not to mention bats, pollinators, fungi, soil life, and other friendly creatures. His vision for Santa Fe is to make it a pilot city for large scale water conservation, capturing each drop of rain to grow gardens and trees, and lessening the pressure on municipal water systems while increasing local food production. 

Gordon Tooley and his wife Margaret Yancey started Tooley's Trees in Truchas, New Mexico, in the early 1990s. They grow and sell rare and heirloom trees that are well adapted to the semi-arid climate of the region. But just as important as the business is the history of these fruit trees and the genetic preservation of varieties that have very specific characteristics and uses--and the way of life that cultivates a deep relationship with the wildlife, soil, water, and even air in their particular place. We talk about what it means to choose a slower pace of life that favors close observation and low-tech tools over instant gratification. This interview is part the Good Earth series, a project supported by the New Mexico Department of Agriculture Healthy Soils Initiative and led by photographer Esha Chiocchio. It features a set of eight videos on soil stewards in New Mexico. Please check out the short videos here.