- Hi, I'm Kirk Swenson here at Ideas Fest in Asheville, North Carolina.

In this next program, we talk about some of the nuances of land conservation, who benefits, who has access, and how can we approach conservation in a way that's equitable for all involved.

- [Announcer] Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

- I've been writing for "National Geographic" for a long time, it's supposedly the bible of exploration but today we're gonna climb some mountains of the mind, probably one of the thorniest and steepest mountains that this country has faced.

And I've got two fantastic climbing partners with me today that I'd like to introduce you to.

The first is Natalie Baszile, who is the author of "Queen Sugar", who many of you I hope have read and have maybe seen on the Oprah Winfrey Network.

[audience applauding] Wonderful story about a single mom from LA who inherits a sugar cane farm in south Louisiana, and unbelievably tries to make a go of it, in the most wonderful way.

Her most recent book, however, is called "We Are Each Other's Harvest" and it's a series of essays and interviews celebrating both the success and the struggle of Black farm families across the nation, including several from right here in North Carolina.

So please welcome Natalie Baszile.

[audience applauding] Now my next climbing partner probably needs no introduction in these parts, he's literally a towering figure in Appalachian conservation circles.

Sorry, Jay, it's a tall joke.

He's the author of "Stand Up That Mountain", which chronicles his and his small group of friends and neighbors years-long fight to stop what would've been one of the largest open pit gravel mines in western North Carolina, would've torn down an entire mountain within a mile or two of one of the most spectacular sections of the Appalachian Trail.

He served as trustee and secretary of the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy, acquiring state, federal and private funds to conserve and protect 90,000 acres from development and keeping in its natural state.

Please welcome Jay Leutze.

[audience applauding] Now, first I want to give you an idea of just how high a mountain as we have to climb today.

Just last year, 2023, the Chatham Group, which is a big think tank in Europe, said that one of the number one issues in the world today is the increasing land crunch where conflicting issues between farming, conservation, saving prestigious areas as climate refuge or carbon sinks, is becoming one of the most controversial issues that we face.

And dealing with that land crunch is gonna affect us all and our children for the foreseeable future.

So that's where we're gonna try to get to today on our mountain.

And since it's Juneteenth, Natalie, I'd like to talk to you first, and you know, this was the day when the US Army went into Galveston, told Texas they had lost, the slaves were free, six months before that William Tecumseh Sherman made a promise, not a promise, made an order.

- Yes.

- That the freed slaves would get, the freedman would get, 40 acres and a mule.

He even threw in a steamboat in there to transport between the plantations.

It would've been literally the largest land redistribution program in this nation, probably since we took all this land from the Cherokees and the other Native Americans.

The Black farmers didn't get it.

Tell us what happened.

- Right.

So you're right.

In the wake of Sherman's March to the Sea, he issued Special Field Order 15, setting aside that 400,000 acres of land along the south seacoast from Georgia all the way down to Florida.

And in the wake of that commitment, in the wake of that field order, Lincoln was assassinated and his predecessor clawed back all of that land from the freed people of color who had really looked at that as really the first opportunity for them to realize their own independence.

And it really, when people talk about Special Field Order 15 and the promise that the country made to the formerly enslaved people, this was really a crossroads.

This was really a turning point when this country could have done the right thing and really set those freed African Americans on a path to independence and sovereignty and really land ownership.

And it was a promise that was broken.

And it lives on as a moment when you look at what's happened with African Americans in farming and land ownership and wealth creation since then.

And it really was a huge missed opportunity.

- Unbelievable.

One of the things that, of course got very controversial with the 1619 Project a few years ago was this idea of how important that their labor was.

- Right.

- And I think many people don't quite understand just how much wealth that free labor generated, not just for southern plantation owners, northern bankers, northern ship owners, English textile mill owners, French investors, even African kings who sold many of their captives to the European slavers.

I mean, this was an enormous amount of wealth generated on the backs of these people.

And this was what they didn't get, it was just a small attempt at reparations that was never received.

- Exactly, exactly.

And it was, when you look back at that moment in history and you realize that, like you said, this was an opportunity to make a change that would've lasted for generations and could have impacted the way African Americans were allowed to participate in this great democratic experiment and the ramifications of that and the ripple effects of that continue to this day.

And that's one of the things that I was thinking about in "We Are Each Other's Harvest" when you look at what's happened to Black farmers in this country, from emancipation to the present and continues to this day.

- We're gonna talk about that in just a second.

Jay, let's talk a little bit about the conservation element.

The federal government now owns millions of acres of wilderness, parks, national forests, conservation groups like yours, Southern Highlands Conservancy, Nature Conservancy own millions more.

We've got tech billionaires and Ted Turner and the founders of Patagonia and North Face buying up huge fiefdoms in Patagonia or in parts of the west for their own little wildlife kingdoms.

What could be wrong with that?

[all laughing] - I don't know if that's a softball or the ultimate hardball.

Well, there are a couple of things happening simultaneously.

Number one, the story that you just recounted is a story about entitlement.

Title to land is a European concept that doesn't exist in a lot of other places.

We draw lines on maps and we confer title to what's within those boundaries.

The King of England used to confer title and king's grants to large tracts in the new world.

And guess what, the people who still hold power in this country are the descendants of that entitlement, that landed-ness.

And so not surprisingly, new wealth when it's created, one of the things that people who come into new or vast or massive wealth want to do is accumulate vast title because it has power in perpetuity, it lasts for generations.

Now, in the twisted way our society works, it only conferred those benefits to males.

So if you were an Appalachian family whose ancestors had the favor of the crown before the revolution and you had vast land holdings, say between Morganton and Spruce Pine, tens of thousands of acres, and you had 12 children, but seven of them were males, those were the ones who then subdivided that land.

So on the one hand, the conservation part of acquiring vast tracts of land has value because in conservation, size really matters.

We know partly because of the climate crisis that we're in, people are moving, species are moving and to be effective at conservation, you need to address large land areas so that species can migrate, say in response to a changing climate, in response to other things as well.

So I cheer when Ted Turner buys vast acreages in Montana on the open market, land that is for sale and reintroduces bison, there can be a conservation benefit conferred because the alternative is subdividing that land into ranchettes and fragmenting it with roads and features that make it hard for species to respond to a moment like climate change.

But it does remind us of the other movements that have controlled vast acreages, which partly is the conservation movements' past when people in Washington DC saw landscapes and said that would make a great park without paying heed to the fact that there were already people there.

And the federal government has the power under the Constitution and the 10th Amendment to use eminent domain when there's a public benefit conferred, decided by the taste makers of the day and the lawmakers of the day and that's how we got some of the vast acreage, including Great Smoky Mountains National Park, protected.

But protected at the expense of people that were already there that had to be removed.

- Well, and also when billionaires buy vast tracts, they don't invite the public in, in general.

- That is almost always the case.

- Yeah.

- That is the case, as is the case with people who buy three acres of land who don't really invite people to be on their land either.

The billionaire mindset is, "Well now I'm gonna draw a line around this, and this is mine".

I loved hearing Ron Rash talk this morning in his poem about the barbed wire fence on the ridge near the cemetery and the flowers would blow across the property line.

Just this appreciation of these lines that we are imposing on landscape where turtles don't pay heed to it, butterflies don't, salamanders don't, bears don't, but we have this obsession with line drawing and that is yours and don't come across on mine, that's so deeply embedded in our species, but it's not a very natural, it doesn't comport with natural law.

- Yeah, yeah, Robert Frost got really famous building stone walls, right?

- Yeah.

- Writing about it.

Natalie, many of the people and farmers that you profile in this wonderful book, you describe very well that farming is an economic activity, that it has to be profitable or else it doesn't happen.

But in every case there is a spiritual, almost, it's hard for me to describe, there's a spiritual connection that these farmers, some who've been on the land forever, some are just getting on it now and experiencing it.

That they have to this land and it's remarkable.

Can you expound on that a little bit and tell me how it impacts their lives?

- Sure.

So when I was working on "We are Each Other's Harvest", I really wanted to explore this idea of people of color returning to the land or in some cases, like you say, they have been here, they're third, fourth, fifth generation farmers.

And I had the great pleasure of meeting a lot of farmers here in North Carolina.

And no matter how much land they were working, to a person, they all expressed, like you're saying, a real, almost spiritual connection to the land.

And they derive such pleasure out of just the simplest thing, getting up in the morning, smelling the soil, watching plants grow.

And that's what really, I think, in almost every case, connects all of these farmers.

And it is the reason why they get up every morning.

It is the almost poetic appreciation for watching something grow and being that connected to the soil.

And it's really a beautiful thing.

I'm thinking of a couple of farmers.

There was one in South Carolina, Blueford, South Carolina.

I talked to a young guy, his name was O'Neal Blueford.

And he farms in Nesmith, South Carolina with his three brothers and his dad.

And just the way he talked about getting on his tractor every morning and looking behind him and seeing the plants come up and the way he talks about babying the soil, it really makes you appreciate what these farmers do and just the commitment that they feel about preserving and being stewards of the land.

It's really a remarkable and very inspirational thing.

- It is.

Jay, the founding fathers of the conservation movement, John Muir, Audubon, they wrote about a similar type of connection, both to wildlife and the land.

They wrote some nasty things about African Americans as well, and a lot of the early parts of the conservation movement were white, wealthy, exclusive, I would say, rather than inclusive.

What do you think the conservation community is doing, has done to sort of address that wrong that has been perpetrated?

- So we had a great forum in Asheville about 10 years ago to talk about what was happening in conservation and was conservation consistent with our values in communities.

And there was a young woman there who blew my mind.

She said, "How do I get involved in conservation?"

And I said, "Well, internships are really a good way into conservation".

And she said, "Internships are for people who already have money, I can't afford to do an internship".

And everything I had learned about conservation to that point led me to believe, conservation is behind the eight ball, we're falling behind, we're scrappy, we're nonprofits, we don't have money in the bank, we use other people's money to knit together conservation land, and however we can do that work, we have to do it.

Well that left out people who couldn't afford to work for less and it left out people that could not afford to have internships.

And right at that moment, the National Land Trust Alliance was placing a value and was projecting out from this national organization that these concepts that were new to a lot of us in conservation, in equity, and not just access to land, but who does the work of conservation.

And we realized, great, we woke up, it was a little bit late, we woke up to the fact that this movement had become a sort of calcified province of white privilege.

And we realized that we could not break that down without having people from disadvantaged communities doing the work.

But people do not like giving up their jobs to make way, to make room for other people, even when they're relatively low paying jobs as they are in the nonprofit sector, people hang on to that.

So we have, in the conservation community and I see a lot of land trust partners and friends out here, we have had a reckoning that the world of Muir and our forebears were onto something about protecting the natural world, but it had a limit.

It ran into a wall where human frailty, that we all suffer from and it's a national disease, it's a national problem, and it's not enough to try to be neutral in our hiring.

We have to be anti-racist in our hiring.

We have to break down centuries of thinking that has some in the billionaire class, for example, thinking they can wall off the world's issues and the world's problems by using lines and using title.

So I'm excited to be alive at the time where we are starting to break down these walls.

We have a long way to go, obviously, but we have to create these partnerships.

We have to create this workflow that includes more people who we have inadvertently often, but as part of our national sickness that we have not included everybody.

- Okay.

Let's talk about a little bit how that affects agriculture, because you have a wonderful chapter in your book called, "Black to the Land", which I love because I used to write for the old "Mother Earth News", which was published right here in Hendersonville, Earth Day 1970, '72, something like that, the Shuttleworths.

Which was the original back-to-the-land magazine and all the Boomers and '60s hippies built their yurts and learned how to drill wells.

And it was one of the most cataloged and archived publications, second only to "National Geographic", oddly enough, because it was so full of wonderful information.

You talk about Booker T Washington's newsletters in almost the same manner, full of practical advice, wonderful instructions for Black farmers.

It and many of these farmers that you talk about are new to coming back to land.

- Yes.

- Is there a Black to the land, growing Black to the land movement in the United States?

What's fueling it?

How are they doing?

- There actually is.

And when I first heard about this, these are young people in their twenties and thirties and forties who they call themselves the Returning Generation.

They might not necessarily have grown up in agriculture as farmers, but they understand the value of being connected to the soil, having access to fresh food for their communities.

And so an example of this are the two young women who were on the cover of the book, Leah and Naima Penniman, who are the founders of Soul Fire Farm up in upstate New York.

And there is this movement underway where young people of color are returning to the land and they are bringing with them a spirit of activism.

And they are, in many cases, employing practices, farming practices that go all the way back to the beginning, right, and so they're a lot of organic farmers, they're farming with indigenous practices that they are educating themselves about and they are really tapping into this long history in the African American community of, like you said, they're referring to Booker T Washington and all of his experiments.

They are looking at Booker T Whatley who was the founder of the CSA movement.

- Yeah.

- A Black man.

And they are drawing on these kind of mentors and ancestors that have been part of African American history but those stories have been lost.

And it's very exciting to see the work that they're doing now in their communities, often on smaller to mid-size farms, but they are really leading the charge and it's very exciting.

- Well, and one of the other cool things here is that many of them are women.

And you talk about how women ownership in farms and women management of farms has grown 26, 27% since the last two agricultural surveys.

- Yes.

- So women are moving back into farms and apparently having some success.

- Yes.

- 'Cause the average, still, the average farmer is white and 65 and ready to retire.

- Right, right.

And this is what a lot of these farmers are recognizing is how do they get access to land, for example, how do they get the mentorship?

How do they get the information?

But again, these young people are bringing their educations and their ambitions and their experience back to agriculture and really reframing the narrative about what that even means to be connected to the land.

- Yeah, that's fantastic.

So Jay, you've helped a lot of, and in the conservation trust movement have moved a lot of land from private hands into federal hands.

And I wanted to tell a little story about a guy I met out in Oregon who was a Vietnam helicopter pilot, military, who had the honor of taking Jimmy Carter to see the damage done by Mount St Helens volcano in the '70s.

And during that helicopter ride, President Carter looked at the land below him and said, "Oh my God, this is devastating.

I've never seen anything like this".

And the pilot said, "Mr. President, this is the Stanislaus National Forest.

We haven't got to the blast zone yet."

[audience groaning] He was looking at all the clear cuts that had gone on in the national forest during the era of the timber wars.

So my question to you is, is the federal government really the best steward of our wilderness heritage?

[all laughing] Because I mean, I've been an environmental journalist for, gosh, 35 years now, and there hasn't been a two year period where I haven't written about the fight over ANMAR or logging issues in the national forest, the BLM with their overgrazing of their lands, they've got some issues.

- They do have some issues.

And I would, I guess my response is that we are our federal government.

The federal government is as ineffective as we let it be or as effective as we require it to be.

As participants in our society, I don't like this sense that we are removed, "The government does this and we are victims of it".

Now, that's often the case because the government has resources, but that it gets from us.

They get their resources from we the people.

I get asked the question all the time, because we do buy a lot of land that we convey out to Pisgah National Forest.

And there's a question in the forest plan revision that comes up every 10 years.

It usually takes them 17 years to finish a 10-year plan.

But the question is, "Well, what if they make bad decisions?

What if they have bad things in their forest plan revision?

Shouldn't you have held onto the land?"

Nobody, no land-holding entity is going to be perfect.

The thing I like about federal and state and county ownership of land is that there is some layer of accountability at some point to us if we participate.

There are meetings that are called by the Forest Service that are attended by three people.

And so the call to action, I think, is to all of us to be active participants in our society.

It's exhausting.

It is exhausting.

There's so many decisions that seem outside of our range and you feel like you're beating your head against the wall.

But I'm not in favor of sitting back taking pot shots at state and federal agencies unless you're an active participant in trying to make sure that their decision-making is sound.

- Well what about these conservation groups that now control it and not the federal government?

Are they doing the right thing?

Are they protecting these, do they have the resources to protect these?

- They're often under resourced and the reason that my land trust, Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy or my friends at Conserving Carolina, one of the reasons that we convey land out to a federal agency is they have staff and expertise in land stewardship.

We do too, but on a much smaller scale.

And we are engaged in the Titanic battle for the future of life on earth here in a cradle of botanical diversity in the Southern Appalachians.

And we feel an incredible sense of urgency that the choice in Pisgah National Forest, second most visited national forest in the country, the first is in Colorado and it's only number one because of ski slope visitation, so otherwise, Pisgah National Forest is the most popular, most visited national forest in the country, the public only owns 56% of it.

So we are hustling to try to close in gaps so that Pisgah National Forest can function as an ecologic whole.

We are hampered because we can only buy land from willing sellers and only the land that the federal agency wants to hold.

So we have to go to the forest supervisor and say, "Is this a tract that you're interested in owning?

Is it in your strategic plan?"

It's well within the proclamation boundary of Pisgah National Forest, but if the forest doesn't want to own and manage it, it's very difficult for us to own and manage it because we are not a federal government and we can't just tweak the tax rates to raise more revenue to fund ourselves.

So we are members of our communities and Pisgah National Forest probably has four or five land trusts buying land within that forest boundary to make it work better.

But resources are a big problem.

- Okay.

- At all levels.

- Natalie, I wanted to read a little section from this book 'cause we were talking earlier about Black access to land and how they're struggling to get land.

And I just want to remind folks, this is from the Paul Thompson essay?

I'm sorry.

Pete Daniel, I'm sorry.

- Oh yes.

Oh yeah.

- "USDA, the Last Plantation".

"Even as the FHA denied loans or used other tactics to ruin Black farmers, it supported loans that would transform rural land into golf courses, shooting ranges and tourist attractions solely for the use of whites.

Even as Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and the federal government, at least in theory, advocated civil rights, USDA leadership mouthed support for equal rights while turning on African Americans with a vengeance.

By the turn of the 21st century, there were about" 18, oh, well there were, sorry, there were a million Black farmers in the beginning of the 20th century.

"By the end there were about 18,000 Black farmers left.

This was not an accident, but rather result of the USDA operating system that threatened not only Black farmers, but small white farmers and women, Native Americans and Hispanics."

So there was a landmark lawsuit brought by Black farmers against the USDA, Pigford versus Glickman, that was settled in '99.

Was it enough?

- What's your, I'm sorry.

- Was it enough?

- No.

- Was the settlement a billion dollar or something?

Was it enough?

- No.

So to expound on it.

So Pete Daniels is a historian and he has written a lot about the cause of Black land loss and he really focused on the USDA and what's so complicated and infuriating about this is here is a federal agency, the USDA, whose whole mission historically has been to help the American farmer.

And when it came to Black farmers and Latinx farmers, indigenous farmers, but primarily Black farmers, this same agency systematically deployed strategies to disenfranchise Black farmers.

So he quotes this statistic saying that in 1920 there were roughly a million Black farmers who owned or farmed almost 14 million acres of farmland in this country.

In 2017, that number had declined to, I think it was 45,000, which is basically the size of a public university.

And when you look at what has contributed to Black land loss, right, 14 million acres down to almost, I think it's maybe 3 million acres today, the USDA is the primary cause of that.

And what they have done historically, and it's what this lawsuit was about, Pigford versus Glickman, and then during the Obama administration there was Pigford versus Vilsack, these were lawsuits that were brought by Black farmers, class action lawsuits pointing to these generations of discrimination where the USDA, on the federal level, but then also on the local level, were deploying all of these strategies from denying Black farmers' loans, not even processing the paperwork and it was this domino effect.

And then the same USDA was going in and foreclosing on these Black farmers' land, clawing it back and then selling it to white farmers.

And this is the number one reason why Black people have lost land in the last hundred years, roughly.

These lawsuits were not enough.

Pigford versus Glickman, I think the average settlement was $50,000, right.

When you have farmers who were in debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Pigford versus Glickman, I mean Pigford versus Vilsack, the same thing.

And this is not something that has just happened in the past, this continues to happen today.

The USDA has gotten better.

Vilsack, Tom Vilsack is still the Secretary of Agriculture under President Biden.

And he and his agency actually just completed a study in February of this year in Washington DC, they had this equity summit and I was actually there.

And the agency has acknowledged these wrongs and they are really trying to do better.

They had this two year long study that they did that they just revealed the findings in February of this year.

So the agency is trying to change, they are looking at some of their practices that have historically discriminated against people of color.

But it's hard because a lot of farmers in the meantime, they've lost their land, they've passed away.

And it's really an example of an agency that has done so much damage that is now trying to correct the wrongs of the past.

But a lot of farmers are still skeptical.

- I'm sure.

- Understandably.

- Well, and these were programs that were put in during the Roosevelt era in the '30s to save.

- To save the American farmers.

- Save the American farmers from going bankrupt.

FHA loans, ASCS Service, crop stabilization, crop payments, crop insurance.

- Yes.

- I mean, billions upon billions of dollars, of course which now go to like the 1% of the giant farmers and not much to the smaller farmers.

- Well, exactly.

- And people growing different crops, not corn and soy and all the.

- Right.

And then you even look at something that happened as recently as when President Biden first came into office.

He had the Justice for Black Farmers Act and Steven Miller, who was part of the previous administration.

Well, the Justice for Black Farmers Act was an act that was again, trying to give debt relief to Black farmers, acknowledging this hundred year history of discrimination.

And then you have someone like Steven Miller who comes in, gathers together with a bunch of white farmers and then claims reverse discrimination.

- He's from Texas, that's right.

- Right.

And so again, this is an ongoing struggle to try to acknowledge the history, acknowledge the rights and the wrongs and these obstacles are still being put in place, so it's an ongoing struggle.

- So one of the things I remember reading recently was that farmers, as an occupation, have the highest rates of suicide.

- [Natalie] Yes.

- Of any other occupation.

- That's true.

- And I feel like a lot of that is because when they get in these economic strifes, small farmers, they lose this land.

- Right.

- That has been in their family, these are white farmers, that have been in their family for generations.

- [Natalie] For generations.

Yes.

- And it's such a blow to their identity and their pride that they take their own lives.

- Yes.

- We heard a statistic last night at Mayor Bottoms' seminar that young Black men now have the highest rates of suicide or higher, equal to white.

I feel like, well, tell me, is the land both in conservation or exposure to wilderness, exposure to farms, there seems to be a spiritual cure, a healing process that goes along with that.

You talk a little bit about that in some of your books.

Tell me what farmland, how can it heal the rifts that we've seen in land ownership in this country?

- Well, I think of one of the farmers who I interviewed for the book.

He is a former vet and he farms, he's a cattle farmer in Red Springs, North Carolina, Marvin Frank is his name.

And when I met Marvin, I was so inspired by his story because his life operated at exactly that intersection.

He had been a special forces vet, had served his time, had had many deployments to Afghanistan, and really was suffering from PTSD and really was on the brink of taking his own life when his father encouraged him to meet with this older Black guy who was a cattle farmer.

And Marvin tells the story in the book of going out to this cattle farm and for the first time, feeling a sense of peace.

It was quiet, he was out in the countryside.

And from that day forward, Marvin really decided that he would be a cattle farmer because, not because he had aspirations to be a farmer initially, but because farming, being connected to the soil, quieted his mind and gave him an opportunity and a sense of purpose.

And Marvin, I'm proud to say, his whole cattle operation has grown.

It's called Briarwood Cattle Farm, Briarwood Farm, if you ever want to look him up.

And he has like a processing facility now.

He's a real success story.

But again, this was a guy who had served his country, was suffering from PTSD and really found a sense of peace and ease through farming.

And so it's just an example of what this connection to land can really do to heal people.

- Sure.

Jay, we've had, I mean, I've seen several studies that show how there's this similar healing property of being in wilderness, being in wild places, being immersed in nature.

The Obama administration made a huge push for the National Park Service to try to get more people of color on the trails, get more people out there.

Are you seeing more hikers on the Appalachian Trail of color?

Are you seeing more urban kids putting down their cell phones and experiencing that joy?

- I like to think we're on the cusp of a revolution of all kids, not just kids of color, but all kids.

And I feel this in my own family, of people putting the phone down and walking into the woods because we are feeling a collective sickness.

And it was interesting to see the Surgeon General yesterday talk about warning labels on telephones.

We are walking around with an experiment in our pockets, and it is, the experiment is being conducted on us and on our brains.

And we know, you can take blood pressure measurements, you can see what happens to people in nature, all people.

But we have to also be careful and acknowledge, and I know this from a young woman that we hired on our staff, a Black woman from western North Carolina.

And she said, "It takes me a long time to get up the nerve to go outside", partly because she has to wonder what it is gonna feel like to be a Black person on trails where there are few Black people.

Is she gonna feel safe?

Is she gonna feel welcome?

And those of us that have dedicated our lives to conservation, the idea that some people might not feel welcome in the places that we protect, lets us know that we have a crisis on our hands.

And that has to be reckoned with.

I wanted to tell one quick story about trauma and healing.

I work with a guy, for a few years, named Garett Reppenhagen, who was a special forces sniper in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And on Capitol Hill you can have no better storyteller than Garett Reppenhagen because Garett tells stories about what wilderness means to him and what land protection means to him, what natural places mean to him.

And I was with him in a meeting in a senator's office from Montana who wasn't completely sold on the idea of more public land.

And Garett told the story of being in Iraq and the way he would settle himself before holding his rifle steady, he hoped, when he was on a mission, he would go through this dream state of fishing back home in Colorado and he would say to himself, "I wanna survive this mission so I can go fishing one more time in that place".

And then he would follow with, "But it's hard to get to that place because people are building ranchettes along the road and it's harder and harder to get to that trout stream because this federal program that buys access to public places is constantly underfunded."

So by that time, the member of Congress who's heard it all, is just stricken by this realization that the work we do in conservation can have benefits like that.

And that these experiences that people have across the board are powerful and they make us human.

They make us, we like to think in our better selves, they make us Americans.

And this is what people who are fighting for America value about America, the very place, the very soil, the very water that flows and so that leads to a very high calling.

- Okay.

Thank you.

We're almost to the peak of our mountain of the mind.

I've got one more question for each of you, and then we're gonna have questions from the audience.

Let's assume that by some miracle of AI, Russian deep fakes and Chinese misinformation, I become president of the United States.

[all laughing] - You have my vote.

- Yeah, really.

- Jay, I nominate you to be my Secretary of the Interior, you now have control over the entire federal domain.

What the first three things you're gonna do to make it access to this, our purple mountain's majesty more equitable, more fair, more just?

- Okay, I will not lie, I've thought about this before.

[all laughing] What would happen if I were Secretary of the Interior?

First of all, I would thank my predecessor, Deb Holland, who is the first Native American Secretary of the Interior.

So the Interior Secretary, if you look at other countries, Interior Secretary usually means the person, or ministry of the interior in a lot of countries, means the person that gets to give away the goodies, you get to give away the coal, you get to make money off the oil, you get to build a fiefdom around resources and exploiting them.

In our country, as Secretary of Interior you're charged with that and you're also charged with our natural areas, the federal agencies that manage land.

So one of the projects that I'm working on right now needs federal money.

And if I were Interior Secretary, I would direct the money immediately into this project.

It's a very interesting project.

It is here in Asheville and it is Deaverview Mountain, some old timers call it Spivey Mountain.

Ron Rash talked about his father's family being from the Leicester community, Spivey and Deaverview overlooks Leicester.

It is the poorest part of Asheville.

And we are in the process now of buying 343 acres and turning it into a park.

In order for us to be able to do this, we have a philanthropist that stepped in and the land was listed on the market, some of you probably tried to buy it, and we had a philanthropist step in, buy it quickly, and then agree to hold it at a low interest rate while we raise money to buy it.

We need federal funding that will come through the Land and Water Conservation Fund in a new program called ORLP, Outdoor Recreation Leadership Program.

It is a program designed to create more parks in underserved communities and it is a Biden initiative, it was funded at $192 million.

The problem is that it's a federal bureaucracy to wade through this.

And a lot of communities of color have said, "We don't have the resources to apply for your very complicated federal grant.

We haven't developed these systems."

And so I would cut out some of the red tape in the ORLP program and Deaverview Mountain would be open to that community.

- Awesome.

- Including Johnston Elementary School at the base of it, which is on 95% free lunch.

And they are looking up at this mountain and they thought it was gonna be covered with mansions and now it's gonna be their park.

- Awesome.

[audience applauding] - And I wouldn't even get to the third one, I would pass it to Natalie.

- All right.

Natalie, you are my new Secretary of Agriculture.

- Oh!

- You are in charge of the largest federal agency in the country.

So large in fact, you don't even know how many employees you have.

- Wow.

- 'Cause they've been asked and they can't give you a number.

[all laughing] So what would you do to make access to our amber waves of grain more fair, equitable and just?

- Yeah.

Well, I think first of all, I think I would, we have to change the way we think about agriculture and farming and having careers that are connected to land, I think, in this country.

And I'm from San Francisco, so, ground zero for tech and all that and I really do feel that in so many ways, as innovative as technology can be, it also removes us from our connection to something as simple as having our hands in the soil and even the definition of success.

So I think first I would really work to help not just communities of color, but all of us really shift what we understand the definition of success, right?

Because so often anything having to do with working with the land, that's not quite as glamorous as working in tech or working in finance.

So I think first of all, we have to broaden how we think about our engagement with the land.

Second, I think I would really put a lot of resources into educating young people so that they understand where our food comes from, right?

Because I think the pandemic showed us all how dependent we are on these systems and structures that we don't really have any access over.

I know it was terrifying for me to walk into Trader Joe's and see the shelves that were empty and to realize, holy cow, if we run outta food, I'm as vulnerable as the next person.

And so I think we all need to, but especially young people need to understand that carrots don't come out of a can, they don't come from a plastic bag in the supermarket, that we really have that connection to the soil.

And then I also think that I would make a lot of these programs more, I would increase the access and I would also make it easier to access the information because if you don't know where to go, right?

If you don't have access to the information, it makes it that much harder to even get started, even if you have the desire.

- Yeah.

- So those are probably the first things I would do.

- Wonderful.

And I think maybe having an FFA, Future Farmers of America, in every inner city school, I think that would be cool.

Why are they only in rural schools?

- Right.

- You can be Assistant Secretary with that great idea.

- There you go.

You're nominated, you're hired.

- Alright, that's it for us.

We'd love to take questions from the audience.

Please stand at one of the few microphones and direct your questions to Jay and Natalie.

- Hi Jay.

Hi Natalie.

Thank you so much for sharing today.

I have many questions, but my partner told me to keep it to just one or two.

So I wanted to ask, what are your thoughts on regenerative agriculture?

Natalie, you mentioned Soul Fire Farm, I love that place, I love what they're doing.

And if you have any thoughts on the Farm Bill, which is hopefully providing safe working conditions for farm workers, clean water, soil, air, food and growth education in schools and natural resource conservation.

- Well, that's a big question.

What do I think of regenerative agriculture?

Well, I think it's great, right?

I think that what I'm encouraged by is to see the way more and more people are aware of regenerative agriculture and those practices, right?

And it's interesting to me because now we have this label, regenerative agriculture, which really just points back to the way people were farming a hundred years ago, right?

It has this brand new sexy label, and I'm not disparaging that, but really what is the most encouraging thing to me is it's looking back at some of the practices when we talk about carbon sequestration, when we talk about the benefits of cover crops and all of these practices that our forefathers used in the past and that was the main way that we preserved the soil, kept it clean, right?

So I'm encouraged, and I'm most encouraged because this idea is spreading.

You have more people in more communities talking about these practices that are really the future.

So that's first.

In terms of the Farm Bill, I'm encouraged, I'm hopeful.

I think that there is, again, more awareness now about all of the practices that we need to deploy to, like you're saying, from protection for farm workers to access to information for young farmers.

All of this is very encouraging to me.

And I think that this is really the future of agriculture.

Small scale agriculture, I think is on the rise, that's encouraging.

And I also wanted to say that even in terms of looking at partnerships between land conservancies and private individuals and private sources, that actually is encouraging to me, too.

So I think the future is bright, I think we have a lot of challenges with climate change and all of this, but I think land conservancy is really the way to go.

- The revolution is on.

- Yes.

- Google Community Farm, Alexander, North Carolina, and there's a great regenerative agricultural project happening there.

And we use, it's an incubator farm so that young people who can't afford access to land can work there, create a farm plan there so that in the future they can afford to get into debt by borrowing money and get their own land.

[all laughing] - Yes sir.

- Agriculture is a huge thing here in North Carolina.

We're, I think, we're second in the nation, if I remember correctly in commodities, agricultural commodities produced.

I was doing some quick research while you were talking.

There's 46,000 farms in North Carolina, only 1500 of which are Black owned.

Listening to you talk about this issue, are there organizations and nonprofits here in North Carolina or maybe in the southeast, that individuals in this room can support that their effort and their goal is to support and prop up these Black-owned farms?

- That's a great question.

On a national level, I don't know that there is one organization.

I know that people are now beginning to kind of form networks, right, that address this question.

So I know that there's an organization called BUGS, Black Urban Growers, and that is a whole network of, and they meet every year they have a conference, I can't remember where it's gonna be this year.

But that is an example of people coming together to share information, access, they're doing that kind of networking.

Unfortunately, I don't know of, off the top of my head, of an organization here in North Carolina that you could contribute to.

I'd have to ask around, but I think I know that there's some, maybe you know of some?

- There's one, North Carolina Land Trust that focuses on Black agriculture and there's a bill pending in the North Carolina legislature right now that helps reunify title.

This has been one of the big problems in the Black farming community is that if you have for years title that is subdivided among heirs, it's very hard to reconstruct who all the people are that would have to sign off on a sale of land.

- Yeah.

- And so people take advantage of that and come in and get this title out from these broken family relations that are multiple generations on.

So there is a Black Heirs Bill pending in the North Carolina legislature.

It has been for the last three or four years, it sometimes takes a long time, but I'm hopeful that that legislation will pass and it will expedite reunifying title.

Some people do wanna sell their land and that is their right.

That is okay.

White people sell their land, too.

So there's not an idea here that, well let's keep these Black people in farming by doing this.

It's to give them the opportunity to have sovereignty over their title the way everybody else has had sovereignty over their title for a long time.

- Great.

Let's go over here.

- Hi, thank you very much for being here.

Just wanted to say it's Latina, not Latinx.

- [Natalie] Thank you.

Thank you.

- Wanted to remind everyone that on April 18th, 2023, NC House Bill 822 was put forward in the legislature, which is to prohibit involuntary servitude.

So just last year was the last slavery law in North Carolina to prohibit involuntary servitude that served to support the 13th Amendment.

So I think that that must be mentioned and said, and a good reminder.

No one voted against or for it.

It was brought by Representative Allen Buansi, Representative Terry Brown and Representative Charles Smith.

So equity is removing barriers and diversity is protecting the rights of people of all demographics through representation.

How are local indigenous communities being collaborated with to lead conservation efforts nationwide?

And how is the conservation community preventing "Pretend-ians", Euro-diaspora Indian enthusiast clubs from usurping federally recognized tribes?

And if you wanna get involved in local community farming, the South Side Community Farm is being threatened with being removed and putting a playground on it.

So write to the public housing person in the city, so you can let her know how messed up that is.

Thank you.

- [Joel] All right, thank you.

- I would mention, thank you for those remarks, that the Eastern band of the Cherokee Indian is very organized society and conservation is critical to that tribe.

They are managing fisheries on their lands here in western North Carolina and the land trusts are working to build bridges and I would say that Conserving Carolina has been particularly successful, along with Mainspring, a land trust out of Franklin, in creating bridges between the Eastern band and the land trust community.

And sometimes it's around a resource as seemingly commonplace as the grass that grows that helps weave the baskets that are really important in a local indigenous culture.

And so I would commend some of our land trusts partners for looking for ways to create these new relationships.

There's a lot of exciting work ahead.

- Alright, we've got time for maybe one more question and then we'll be around if anyone else wants to grab us to ask other ones.

Thank you.

- I appreciate it.

One of the things I've really enjoyed about visiting Asheville is how friendly and interesting the Uber drivers have been.

And just on my way here this morning, my Uber driver was a former wine importer from Europe and he was telling me that the younger generation of vineyards are using older methods of growing that grow deeper roots and for dry agriculture rather than drip irrigation.

And so it, that certainly does seem more sustainable.

In my mind, I have gotten the association between modern farming and technological innovation in terms of higher yields and more efficiency.

And so it seems like there might be some tension between that and the older methods of farming.

But I'm wondering if that is true.

Is there that tension?

- Well, I think if I'm understanding your question, you're talking about the tension between smaller agricultural farming and mono crop farming.

Is that what you're referring to?

- [Audience Member] Yeah, I think that's one of the aspects, yes.

- Yeah.

Well, and I think when you look at smaller farms, this will be another thing I'd do as Secretary of Agriculture.

Part of the challenge is making sure that small farmers have not just access to land so that they can grow their crop, but they have to have a place to sell it.

And so I think that maybe that would be a way of addressing that tension about production if there were more outlets.

I mean, I think you all are lucky, you're in North Carolina where there seems to be a thriving farmer's market community and there are outlets for farmers.

That's not necessarily the case across the board.

And I think that that's one of the things that we need to address is making sure that farmers actually have the pipelines to produce, to sell their products.

It's harder for me to speak on mono crop farming, that's kind of a different area, but I can't answer that question, I wish I could, I'm sorry.

- There is lots of conflict.

I'll just put it there.

- Yeah.

- Between the two.

Alright, that's our panel.

Thank you.

We've reached the top.

- We hope you enjoyed this program.

I'm Kirk Swenson and thank you for joining us for this year's Asheville Ideas Fest.

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