Track and Food 79: UC Santa Barbara Professor Of Environmental Studies Liz Carlisle On Her New Book Healing Grounds And The Deep Roots Of Regenerative Farming

Some episodes are just super fun to dig into. This one was no exception. I first heard about Professor Liz Carlisle’s book, Healing Grounds - Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming back in March while reading a small interview she’d given for Civil Eats. This piqued my curiosity to learn more about what she’d written and how her books’ narrative fell within the scope of the regenerative farming movement.

I had widened my eyes to this cause and way of farming after reading and interviewing author and renowned BBC journalist Dan Saladino‘s book Eating to Extinction. With Liz’s book, I felt a sense of comparability between the two and, after chatting with her and Dan personally, understood that both had genuine heart centred as the focus to their stories. For each, it wasn’t just fixing the way we did things in just technical terms, but that we had to understand the community and relationships with the people involved as our means to grasping the brevity of our problems.

Healing Grounds tells the stories of Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian American farmers who are reviving their ancestors’ methods of growing food—techniques long suppressed by the industrial food system. These farmers are restoring native prairies, nurturing beneficial fungi, and enriching soil health. While feeding their communities and revitalizing cultural ties to land, they are steadily stitching ecosystems back together and repairing the natural carbon cycle. This, Carlisle shows, is the true regenerative agriculture – not merely a set of technical tricks for storing CO2 in the ground, but a holistic approach that values diversity in both plants and people. For our conversation, we dug deep into each chapter, how every one unfolded, what she learned along the way and how she came to adopt the double entendre of Healing Grounds as the title of her book. Liz gives a detailed and nuanced interview, one I absolutely enjoyed throughout. This is definitely one of my favourites and I’m confident a listen you’ll surely enjoy.


Liz Carlisle is an Assistant Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at UC Santa Barbara, where she teaches courses on food and farming. Born and raised in Montana, she got hooked on agriculture while working as an aide to organic farmer and U.S. Senator Jon Tester, which led to a decade of research and writing collaborations with farmers in her home state. She has written three books about regenerative farming and agroecology: Lentil Underground (2015), Grain by Grain (2019, with co-author Bob Quinn), and most recently, Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming (2022). She is also a frequent contributor to both academic journals and popular media outlets, focusing on food and farm policy, incentivizing soil health practices, and supporting new entry farmers. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography, from UC Berkeley, and a B.A. in Folklore and Mythology, from Harvard University. Prior to her career as a writer and academic, she spent several years touring rural America as a country singer.