What if one of our most fundamental assumptions about land is wrong?

For centuries, land in the United States has been tied to wealth, power, race, and who gets to belong. But for farmer, food justice activist, and author Leah Penniman, the very idea that land is something we can own demands a deeper examination.

In this episode, Leah and I explore the systems and histories embedded in our relationship with the earth, from food apartheid and Black land dispossession to the Afro-Indigenous traditions that offer a radically different understanding of ownership, responsibility, and belonging.

But beneath this conversation is an even bigger question: What changes when we stop asking what belongs to us and begin asking what we belong to?

• Why Leah believes the history of Black Americans and the land is far more complex than the story we've been taught
• What we fail to understand when we treat land primarily as property and an economic asset
• Why Leah uses the term “food apartheid” and what it reveals about power within our food system
• The connection between Black land ownership, independence, and systems designed to maintain economic control
• What Afro-Indigenous farming traditions might teach us at a moment of escalating climate calamity
• The relationship between spirituality, justice, and how we understand our responsibility to the earth
• Why Leah's newest book, Children of the Land, takes her work into the realm of parenting and the next generation
• What responsibility we have to plant seeds for a future we may never see

00:00 | The Land Is Not Ours to Own 01:13 | Finding Belonging in the Natural World 05:23 | Reclaiming the Land After Generations of Trauma 08:40 | We Belong to the Land 13:36 | Food Apartheid: Who Built the System? 20:46 | The Audacity to Farm 23:18 | Carrying Seeds Into an Unknown Future 31:41 | When the Earth Is a Relative, Not a Thing 46:47 | The Seeds We Plant for People We'll Never Meet

Leah Penniman is a Black Kreyol farmer, mother, activist, author, scientist, earth-lover, and African Traditional Priest who has been tending the soil and organizing for a racially just food system for 30 years.

She is the Co-Founder and Farm Director of Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, an Afro-Indigenous training farm dedicated to food and land sovereignty. Soul Fire Farm facilitates farmer training for Black and Brown people, a no-cost farm food distribution program for communities surviving food apartheid, and domestic and international organizing toward equity in the food system.

Leah is the author of Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land and Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists. Her forthcoming book, Children of the Land: Kincentric Parenting at Soul Fire Farm, explores village-based care, kinship, and raising the next generation in relationship with land and community.

Soul Fire Farm https://www.soulfirefarm.org/

Farming While Black https://www.farmingwhileblack.org/

Black Earth Wisdom https://www.blackearthwisdom.org/

Resources Howard Thurman, “The Sound of the Genuine” 1980 Commencement Speech at Spelman College https://youtu.be/QRKCfbV8eBU?si=JuKTn8av6hYiWIOm

Continue the Conversation

The thinking continues beyond the mic. Explore essays, reflections, and extended conversations on Substack:

https://substack.com/@robbinjorgensen

Connect with Robbin Jorgensen:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/robbinjorgensen/

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