Regenerating Earth: Farmers Working with Nature to Feed Our Future

There’s no denying it: we treat our planet like dirt. Humanity’s impact has become a geologic force changing the climate and threatening oceans, glaciers, and the lands that feed us. 

Living in rural Indiana, author Kelsey Timmerman witnesses first-hand the damage modern industrial agriculture has done to our land and our communities. He’s afraid to let his kids swim in the nearby pond filled with farm runoff. There are times, after manure from giant chicken factories has been spread on the surrounding fields, that it’s hard to breathe. The industrialization of agriculture has disconnected farmers from the fields, neighbors from neighbors, and communities of eaters from the harsh realities of how their food is produced.  

Timmerman recognizes that farming – the occupation of his family heritage — is the source of these and other problems. But he also suspects it doesn’t have to be that way. In Regenerating Earth, Timmerman travels across the United States and around the world to meet farmers and activists who employ practices and philosophies that acknowledge the human role in complicated agricultural systems. Over and over again he finds farmers who see agriculture as not the problem but the solution, one that builds soil, promotes ecological diversity, provides people with meaningful lives and livelihoods, and sequesters carbon—maybe even enough to combat climate change.

Timmerman takes readers along on his global adventure – standing barefoot in a traditional Hawaiian kalo patch, into the Amazon, and down forgotten rivers. He protects a herd of cattle from lions alongside the Maasai warriors of Kenya, sees firsthand how chocolate could save the rainforest in Brazil, and meets American farmers who’ve rejected the agrochemical industry for an approach inspired by that of ancient and Indigenous peoples.  

By weaving the local with the global, Timmerman shows readers how the way they live, their eating habits and relationship with nature connect to issues of environmental and social justice. And how this newfound awareness can add meaning and purpose to our lives. 

Our hunger, and the agriculture required to satiate it, can be a gift that connects us to chloroplasts, lions, mycorrhizal fungi, and our fellow humans around the block and the world, if we accept our responsibility to play an active part in a regenerative future.