Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Margiana Petersen-Rockney remembers a time when climate change wasn’t the politically polarized issue it is today. Growing up on her family’s farm in southeastern Massachusetts, she learned the ins and outs of farm management and the social dynamics of her rural community. Now an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Montana, Petersen-Rockney blended her roots with her academic work to create her new book Farmers and Climate Change: Agricultural Adaptation in an Age of Rural Polarization. Her background as a farmer helped her build trust with 150 farmers she interviewed in the course of her research, yielding in-depth, honest interviews about what many saw as a sensitive topic.
Enjoy our conversation on what mainstream discourse gets wrong about climate change, how farmers are adapting to the on-the-ground impacts, and hopeful prospects for change.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Daily Yonder: Can you talk a bit about your upbringing, your background, and where you got the idea for this book?
Margiana Petersen-Rockney: I’m actually home on my family’s farm right now. I was a farmer from the time I was a little kid – I was a part of 4-H and homeschooled until college. And I was really a business partner to my mom in the farm operation. My mom has been a farmer longer than I’ve been alive, primarily of dairy goats. The farm I grew up on is very self-sufficient: all the labor and management decisions are made by members of the family.
Going back to the 90s when I was a kid, people were very rarely talking about climate change, and if they were, it was like, “Maybe this is happening? We don’t really know.” Back when I was a kid, it didn’t feel so political. Then I saw it shift to become this litmus test for political identity. And at the same time, I’ve seen the farmers that I grew up with – my mom and one of my brothers who are still farming full time – have to grapple with the impacts of climate change, and the politics of not really being able to talk about it with other people in the farming community.
So when I went to grad school, I was very interested in finding out how universal my experiences were. I wanted to know how farmers are navigating both the material impacts of climate change, but also the social, cultural and political dynamics around climate change that in some ways are even harder to navigate.
DY: You write in the book that many farmers have “legitimate reasons to resent what many view as a government that no longer values rural life.” Do you see the devaluation of rural life as related to the politicization of climate change within your lifetime?
MPR: I think it’s related. There are many factors coming together to create the perfect storm for climate change to actively be made into such a political flashpoint. Climate change has been framed badly by academics, politically progressive politicians, and environmental organizations as something that requires individual sacrifice. We’re told, “you need to not drive as much, you need to not eat so much meat, you need to make these changes, you need to give these things up.” And when that is the message to people who already feel like they’ve given a lot up and their prosperity is less than their parents or grandparents, that doesn’t feel good.
We also see this layer of blame coming out of these liberally coded institutions that climate change is caused in part by farmers. And of course, that is true. But there’s not often a recognition that farming is very diverse. There are some forms of farming that are very detrimental to the environment, but there are also a lot that can actually help sequester carbon, help build working landscapes that help us adapt to climate change in the future. And even for the farmers who might be operating in ways that emit more greenhouse gases, there’s very little recognition that many of them don’t have a choice, that they would maybe like to do things differently but they’re being squeezed so tightly by these concentrated markets that sell them the inputs they need to farm and put them in debt.
We see a lot of proposed solutions look to rural communities to take land and resources to build green energy projects and do carbon capture. If you already feel like stuff has been taken from you and you’ve been blamed, and then are asked to fix the problem, that creates an opportunity for that polarization to be amplified. It creates a window for political actors to come in and say, “you’re being blamed, you’re being told to give stuff up, and I’m going to tell you, you’re a hero, you’re the backbone of the country, and you are being trampled by the elites.” So climate change is a really good issue for authoritarians to pit the people against elites.
DY: Can you talk about how this polarization shows up in farming communities?
MPR: We are now at this moment where political polarization is so intense that in places that have a proposed identity, if you are an outlier, you can easily be excluded from those community support systems. It’s really hard to survive in a rural community if you are ostracized. And climate change and adaptation is now so politicized that it can mean that people are cut out of these communal systems that are so important for their day-to-day survival.
We talk a lot about the physical risk of climate change, but actually there’s this whole other set of risks that wasn’t really represented in academia. A lot of people I grew up with in my rural community envision themselves as self-sufficient but are really reliant on each other. Those kinds of interreliant community networks are what has provided resistance to corporate control and concentrating wealth outside of rural communities.
We also have a highly socialized agricultural safety net in this country: low-interest loans, grant programs, disaster relief funding. The decisions about who gets funded are made through the farm service agency at the county level by a committee of farmers – your peers. So if you’re seen as the ‘weirdo’ who’s doing weird climate stuff, you may not get approved for your low-interest loan, or you may not get disaster relief funding after a wildfire. There are very powerful farmer-led organizations that do a lot of lobbying at the state and national level and provide legal support and services to farmers. Farmers often told me about times they stepped out of line and then were not helped by those organizations. So there are real consequences at the policy level, at the organization level, and at the individual level in the community.
DY: You talked to 150 farmers in the course of your research. Can you talk about what it was like to interview farmers in this climate of polarization?
MPR: I don’t think people would have even talked to me if I hadn’t grown up on a farm. The fact that I could start those conversations by saying I grew up on a farm allowed a sense of trust that I am genuinely curious about people’s experiences, even if maybe I don’t agree with the conclusions they’ve come to from those experiences.
I was surprised by how often I’d be talking to somebody who – based on the bumper stickers on their cars – very clearly had an external politics that aligned with climate denial, and deep into the conversation, as I’m asking questions about drought and wildfire – not actually using the word climate change – they would say something like, ‘look, I know the climate is changing.’ Sometimes they’d say, ‘I don’t know how much humans are contributing to it, but people are experiencing change.’ People would say, ‘I know the climate is changing, but don’t tell my neighbors.’ Some of the people who are doing more visible adaptation practices talked about being called ‘weirdos’ and ‘hippies’ and not being welcome at local events or supported by local farmer-led organizations.
DY: Can you talk more about what you mean by adapting and what that might look like?
MPR: Climate change is happening, and it’s going to keep happening, and so we need to figure out how to adapt. Over the last century, our agricultural policy and economic structures have pushed farming towards these simplifying pathways, towards what we might call industrial agriculture. You can adapt by simplifying, but it just narrows future options. The outcomes of simplification: farmers are locked into these cycles of debt, we don’t have very much genetic diversity, and we have very concentrated markets. Covid showed us how fragile that simplified system is: people were going hungry, grocery stores were empty, food insecurity was rising. And yet farmers were having to dump milk down the drain, leave vegetables to rot in the field, and couldn’t process the animals.
There’s another way that agriculture can develop and adapt, which is to diversify the biology on the ground, to diversify markets, types of knowledge, and who’s involved in agriculture. And that just leads to more options in the future. Farmers are adapting, whether or not they believe in climate change. Maybe instead of trying to convince farmers that anthropogenic climate change is real – because that belief is where politicization has really been able to expand – what if we just skip belief and say, “We all believe different things, but let’s focus on actions. What are we going to do to help make the farm better able to survive the next drought or the next wildfire?” I think that farmers are really interested in that. If we don’t get stuck on trying to change people’s beliefs – because our beliefs are so ingrained in our identities and our social groups – there’s a lot more action that can be taken.
DY: Your book includes perspectives of authors from different backgrounds. Can you talk about why that diversity of perspective was important for your research?
MPR: Especially when people don’t live in rural communities, it’s easy to paint with a broad brush and say “all rural people think this or that,” or say rural populations are only white.
When you actually meet people and talk to them, you find that not only are rural communities really diverse, but they’re also always changing.
If you google a U.S. farmer, it’s a picture of a 65-year-old white guy in a cornfield. The people who aren’t that – the people on the margins who haven’t been benefiting from the policy that has pushed agriculture in this simplified direction – are really able to do things differently. They’re not burdened by past practices. They’re not benefiting as much from inclusion in the USDA or Farm Bureau networks already, so they have less to lose by doing things differently.
Farmers who have been excluded from these systems have had to be really creative. There are farmers who maybe normally wouldn’t come together, but in these moments of change have some shared interest. In the book, I talk about white and Hmong farmers coming together, or farmers and tribal communities working together on salmon restoration. There are these kinds of alliances forming in moments of change. People are excited to innovate and try new things and to not only shift the practices of farming, but also the identity of being a farmer. Understanding that gives us pathways forward toward what a lot of people – no matter what they believe – want: a clean and functioning environment.
DY: In the last chapter, you look to the future. Where did your research lead you in terms of policy changes?
MPR: There’s a lot of opportunity to shift from politics of less to politics of more. In rural communities I’ve worked in, people feel they’re looked down on by people in urban areas. We place a blanket blame on farmers or on rural communities without recognizing the ways that we’re all actually very dependent on the resources in those places. We need to move past blaming the people who are doing that labor and shift towards a politics of more.
How can these disruptions create new possibilities? How can we frame farmers as climate heroes – as people who can use these amazing practices to manage landscapes that we all benefit from? How can we shift policy to better support those long-term adaptation strategies that keep farmers and their families – not distant corporations – on the land using practices that promote biodiversity and help us adapt to unknown conditions in the future? If we can then shift our agricultural safety net to support those kinds of adaptation practices, rather than where the vast majority of taxpayer dollars have gone historically, we can support rural communities, increase their prosperity, protect the land itself, and its ecosystems, and ultimately benefit the climate.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
Subscribe
The post Q&A: What Do Farmers Have to Say About Climate Change? appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
