Back to the Garden

Jose and Rich are organic farmers committed to sustainability . . . and they don't believe in climate change. This episode explores how that dissonance might be possible, the power of language, and whether or not the term "climate change" will help save the planet.

Transcript for Reclaiming, story 8: Back to the Garden

Smeek: This is State of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project. Each episode we take a common human experience like teaching or breathing or joking, and bring stories that deepen our understanding of that experience. My name is Shameika Wilson, otherwise known as Sek Meek, and in the next few episodes.

Souls. We're looking at the theme of reclaiming. This series will feature stories about reclaiming neighborhoods, music venues, childhood obsessions, sports teams, languages, and ways of seeing ourselves. It's about holding the tension between what we were and who we've become. It's about returning to our origins, but this time with a more nuanced perspective.

Today's story is about reclaiming collective understanding, a lost skill in our society. So often we use different ways of explaining things, even when we want the same thing, like the whole pecan or pecan potato, potato debate. At the end of the day, we're still talking about nuts and starches. So much of the division in our world today comes down to an unwillingness to really consider the perspective.

We don't understand. Or agree with today's episode by Anna McNulty is a story about reclaiming curiosity and exploring a relationship. She almost wrote off because of a disagreement. Here's Anna with that story.

Anna McNulty: On my first day at Josie and Richard's farm, we weeded below the cherimoya trees. We were out in the field getting to know each other, and I asked them, “have you had to change the way you farm because of climate change?” 

Rich said something like, “climate change? Ugh. We don't believe in that garbage. The climate is always changing. It's just a way for the government to control us.” 

I was absolutely speechless. Josie and Rich are some of the most sustainable people I know. They run an organic farm in New Zealand at the very top of the North Island. They have solar panels for all their energy needs, a compost toilet, a native bush restoration project, and organic produce every which way. They built their own home out of tires they found in a nearby junkyard to turn a waste product into something beautiful. They make everything they use: wine, beer, soap, lotion–you name it. 

How can Josie and Rich dedicate their lives to sustainability but deny climate change? I decided to find out.

This is the story about the wondrous lives of two people who run an organic farm, live in a house made of tires, and read each other's minds. And it's also a story about why they don't believe in climate change. In the end, I think it tells us something about the power of language, and how the solution to saving the planet may not have much to do with the phrase climate change at all. 

To understand how we got here, we need to first go back in time to learn how Josie and Rich started the farm. That story begins in the middle of the ocean. Josie and Rich lived in a boat for five years traveling around the Pacific Ocean. Everything was going great until one day Josie noticed that the boat was filling with water.

Josie: I looked out the back and I said to Rich, “oh, what's all that water? Why isn't that water draining out of the boat?” So he said, “I think you better put a May Day Call out.” Like we've been living on a boat for over five years and had never had to do anything like this.  

Anna McNulty: Water was coming in so fast that Rich barely had time to make the call before he was washed overboard,

Rich: And I'd gone up into the cabin to grab some life jackets, and I got caught in there. The wave that broke in pushed me back out and I got sucked back out with it over the back of the boat. And we both were sort of treading water, watching the boat going underwater.

Josie: I had a wet suit on, but Rich–he was in a T-shirt. It was really cold, so he was getting hypothermia. 

Anna McNulty: Josie knew if they weren't rescued soon, Rich would die.

Josie: And I was just holding onto him on the surfboard, and I knew he was dying right there. And then we actually started talking in our mind to each other. We didn't even talk out loud. It was very cosmic.

Anna McNulty: But just when Rich was ready to let go, they saw a boat headed toward them. 

Josie: We managed to survive two and a half hours out in the water.

Anna McNulty: That brush with death changed the perspective forever.

Rich: It puts your life into perspective pretty smartly about what's real, you know. And it sets the course.

Josie: It had hit us pretty hard, you know, we needed to be grounded again.

Rich: That was a slingshot to us growing food for other people.

Anna McNulty: Back on land, they made a commitment to take care of the earth by growing food for other people. So Josie and Rich bought a parcel of land and turned it into an organic farm. They grow every vegetable you can think of and lots of fruit. Their cash crop is cherimoya, a large green fruit with a white custard like inside. It tastes like a blend of pineapple and banana. Rich and Josie started growing cherimoya when they found out that their neighbors had stopped growing it.

Rich: We've always moved in the opposite direction of the flow for some reason. And I said, wow, people are getting out of them. That means there's gotta be a shortage sooner or later. Yeah, we were right and we grew the cherimoya from seed and grafted them ourselves.

Anna McNulty: Cherimoya is not the only thing they grew from the ground up. Josie and Rich believe in walking their environmental talk; their house made out of 700 tires they found in a landfill is just one of countless examples that prove this point.

Rich: Building a house outta tires, that's a really good way of turning a negative into a positive. You've gotta walk your talk. So many people should do it. 

Anna McNulty: But as we continued talking, I kept going back to that moment on my first day on the farm when Rich told me he didn't believe in climate change.

Rich: Climate change, I think, is an Al Gore fantasy.

Anna McNulty: I grew up in a place where everyone believes in climate change. Not kidding. Rich was the first person in my life who looked me dead in the eye and told me they didn't believe in climate change.

I asked Rich if he remembers our conversation from my first day on the farm, and if he could say more about why he doesn't believe in climate change.

Rich: If we were in a climate crisis, everyone would have to stop flying around in private jets and really start backing your organic grower 'cause they sequester more carbon than any other grower.

There's nothing positive going on here except trying to make money out of people and restrict them. It's more about stop polluting the planet. It's not climate change, it's pollution and no one's addressing it. Pollution, it's been going off for years and years, not recycling and, and not touching the earth as lightly as they could.

Anna McNulty: As he was speaking. I really focused on listening instead of inserting my own opinion.

Rich: For me, we all move through cycles, but we haven't got any warmer. It all depends where you start to track it from, you know, and now we've got CO2 going up, but it's been a lot higher in our past and we need CO2. We're carbon-based life forms. And we’re stardust and 20 billion year old carbon. And we've gotta get back to the garden. That's Joni Mitchell (laughs)

{Joni Mitchell’s song Woodstock plays, “And we are stardust . . . 20 billion year old carbon, and we’ve got to get back to the garden . . . .”}

Anna McNulty: That's Joni Mitchell's song, Woodstock. Joni Mitchell is an environmentalist. Her song, Big Yellow Taxi, became the anthem of the environmental movement in the 1970s. With lyrics like, “hey, farmer, farmer. Put away the DDT now.” Today, Big Yellow Taxi is ranked in various places, including The Guardian as the number one song about the climate crisis.

So it's really interesting–even maybe oxymoronic–that Joni Mitchell, a climate activist, would be quoted by Rich in his argument against climate change. But here's the thing. Even though Joni is a climate activist and Josie and Rich are climate deniers, they all want the same thing: to get back to the garden.

Anna McNulty: Are you scared for the future, or do you feel like everything's fine?

Rich: When we hear about the World Economic Forum having a little get together and Davos and they're all flying in there with a thousand private planes, they're gonna, and try and tell people like you and I, how it's gonna be that, well, it's not gonna happen.

Josie: We just see this land getting wasted on and poisoned. And yeah, I'm concerned about that. Yeah. 

Anna McNulty: I began to wonder if climate change solutions are leaving the small grower behind, and if their perspectives are missing from these bigger conversations.

Rich: Getting towards our retirement age now, we've started planting native trees. So that's our plan going forward, is to bring the native bush back. And I'm still very hopeful that things will change.

Anna McNulty: That's good to hear as a young person–that there could be a future out there. 

I come from such a different world far away from the actual realities of growing food, but I was beginning to understand Josie and Rich's arguments.

They don't believe in climate change, but they are definitely treating the earth better than most people I know who do believe in it.

Rich: It's made our resolve even stronger.

Dr. Brianne Suldovsky: It is really tempting to combine being pro-environment with being concerned about climate change, right? I think that's something that a lot of people do.

Anna McNulty: That's Dr. Brianne Suldovsky, an associate professor at Portland State University.

Dr. Brianne Suldovsky: And in some ways, that connection exists for people. But it doesn't always.

Anna McNulty: She studies the public's understanding of climate change.

Dr. Brianne Suldovsky: One of the important things to remember when thinking about this connection between beliefs about climate change and beliefs about the environment or behavior toward the environment generally, is that climate beliefs aren't really about understanding science. It's about political views and it's about culture. And it's about in group, out group, and a whole bunch of other things.

Anna McNulty: Growing up, Dr. Suldovsky, an expert on public understanding of climate change, didn't believe in climate change herself!

Dr. Brianne Suldovsky: I'm from a very small conservative, fairly religious town in Idaho, and I grew up, not with an animosity towards science, but just with caution towards science. I was raised to believe that the earth is 6,000 years old, and that scientists planted fossils to confuse Christians about the age of the earth. And so anytime climate change was brought up–which by the way was not often–it was kind of presented not a conspiracy, but like a political ploy to kind of give the government more control than it should have.

Anna McNulty: What Dr. Suldovsky is describing sounds a lot like Josie and Rich.

Dr. Brianne Suldovsky: I didn't change my mind by learning more science, believe it or not. For me, what changed my mind was actually learning about philosophy of all things. I was in an English class my senior year of high school, and we had to read a book called Sophie's World. It's basically a book about a little girl named Sophie who meets all of these different philosophers. It was the very first time I actually questioned my assumptions about what it means to know something and how we know and what counts as knowing. And then I ended up going to college and took introductory science classes and it was the philosophy coupled with talking with actual scientists that ended up unraveling my skepticism toward climate change.

Anna McNulty: My entry point into believing in climate change was not science either. My elementary school had Earth Day assemblies, and I really loved animals as a kid. I mean all kids do, but I like really, really, really did–to the point that my grandma told my mom it would be bad parenting if she didn't get a dog for our family.

And one year at an Earth Day assembly, they showed us photos of polar bears. Looking at these polar bears on melting ice caps made me realize that the actions we take have enormous consequences. The world was melting before me, things were dying. And my entry point was a story about the fate of an animal and a powerful image.

Like Dr. Suldovsky, growing up I absorbed what was around me to help inform my thoughts on climate change. It's just that the information we were surrounded by was radically different. I was rocking a reduced reuse recycle shirt at age six, and I was motivated to take care of the environment because of climate change.

That's why I was so puzzled by Josie and Rich's anti-climate change opinions. They say they don't believe in climate change, but every action they take is sustainable. Can a movement claim you even when you reject it or deny its existence? This made me think of one of my favorite singers, Dolly Parton.

Dolly Parton wrote 9 to 5, a feminist anthem, a song embraced by the working women's movement. But Dolly refuses to classify herself as a feminist, and has continually separated herself from the women's movement. WNYC's Dolly Parton's America, hosted by Jad Abumrad, and produced by Shima Oliaee confronts this phenomenon of Dolly's pro-woman songs and simultaneous aversion to the word “feminism.” Jad says,

Jad Abumrad: Clearly the lenses we have to see each other . . . the words that we use to describe each other–they're just not good enough.

Shima Oliaee: And maybe Dolly moves in that space where those words fail.

Anna McNulty: The same space that Josie and Rich seem to occupy.

Josie and Rich aren't motivated to make an environmental difference by believing in climate change. For them, climate change doesn't matter. And while this example of cognitive dissonance felt novel and somewhat profound to me, it's something Dr. Suldovsky has a long history with.

Dr. Brianne Suldovsky: It is entirely possible for someone to say, I'm not sure about this whole climate change thing, but I do love clean air and clean water, and I hear about plants and animals in the ecosystem.

Josie: I don't know what the answer is to make people stop abusing our earth.

Anna McNulty: Josie and Rich have a lot in common with people in the climate movement, as does Dolly with people in the feminist movement. I mean, she's close friends with Jane Fonda after all. They have all these things in common, even though they use different language, and none of them would ever admit it.

Josie and Rich, maybe even without trying, offered advice on how to bridge the divide in the climate debate.

Rich: To touch the earth lightly, try and leave as little footprints as possible and make it a better place.

Josie: It just takes people to be in harmony with each other. Yeah, not judge each other.

Rich: You've gotta have discernment, and to have that you've gotta know what's resonating for you. You know, what's your truth? Because everyone can make their own realities as well. You know, we live a separate reality, but we're all here on the same planet. Every one of us is very important.

Anna McNulty: Like Josie and Rich, I had a personal passion that motivated me to care about the planet, but for four years, I judged them.

I held this conviction that I was right without considering any alternative narratives. It embarrasses me to think that I might have disregarded them because we use different language.

Dr. Brianne Suldovsky: Words like “climate change” function to divide us, and that's sad, right? It's just kind of a shame. We get so caught up in that, that we forget that we are all human beings living on the same planet who actually have a lot in common and a lot of shared value.

Anna McNulty: In full honesty, if I met Josie and Rich anywhere else besides their own home where I was living and working, I might not have given them the time of day. Once I learned they didn't believe in climate change, I might never have heard their perspective and realized that we actually agree on the important things when it comes to the future of the planet.

Dr. Brianne Suldovsky: Here is a great example of people who are doing all the quote unquote right things, but it's just they just don't accept climate science. 

Anna McNulty: But maybe believing in climate change could be beside the point. 

Dr. Brianne Suldovsky: I wish I could tell you, like if we just say this phrase, everything will be magically fixed. But in my mind, the most promising way forward is to stop using the phrase climate change. Just stop using it. To be clear, this is just if you're dealing with someone who's skeptical of climate change or you know, doesn't accept it. If you're talking to people who are already alarmed and they already accept climate science, it's totally fine to talk about climate change and that topic and use that phrase. 

And that's a controversial piece of advice. and I've gotten quite a bit of pushback from climate scientists themselves, because they feel like not using it feels disingenuous. And I absolutely understand that. But I think from a social scientific perspective, I think we have to ask ourselves, do we want to be right or do we want to address climate change?

Anna McNulty: Approaching the topic without judgment, recognizing everyone's importance, accepting that we can live different realities and hold different perspectives and still all work in our own ways to protect the planet. Maybe that's not only okay, but necessary. 

My conversations with Josie and Rich didn't stop there. So much of the climate movement has focused on the individual. And there's nothing wrong with composting or recycling or learning to live more sustainably. But Josie and Rich are right, as long as the people with the most money and power aren't prioritizing sustainable practices and changing systems to reduce harm, our individual efforts will only get us so far. The change needs to come not just from individuals, but from systems designed to make sustainability a priority for all of us. 

I still don't agree with Josie and Rich about climate change, but I'm grateful for the ways they've expanded my vision of what's possible and shown me the importance of connecting with others across differences.

I'm a better kinder person because I met Josie and Rich, more adventurous and bold, and more open to the world and all of its possibility. They've given me some hope that maybe it's not too late to get back to the garden.

Show Closing:

Smeek: This is State of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project. This episode was produced by Anna McNulty and me, Shameeka Wilson, with support from Laura Joyce Davis. 

For their generous financial support, we’d like to thank the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, the program in writing and rhetoric, the office of the Vice President for the Arts, and Bruce Braden. 

Anna McNulty: Thank you to my mom, Lanie McNulty, and my sister, Sophie McNulty, because they gave me enumerable edits throughout this process, and the story would not be the story without them.

Smeek: You can learn about the Stanford Storytelling Project and our podcast workshops, live events, and courses@storytelling.stanford.edu.

For State of the Human and the Stanford Storytelling Project. I'm Shameeka Wilson, Y'all. Thanks for listening.

“Back to the Garden” tells the story of an organic farming couple, Jose and Rich, who are committed to sustaining the environment . . . and who don't believe in climate change. This episode explores how that dissonance might be possible, the power of language, and whether or not the term "climate change" will help save the planet.

Produced by Anna McNulty, Shameeka Wilson, and Laura Joyce Davis.