This weekend, I drove south to the Black Hills for the annual South Dakota Festival of the Book. We are enjoying an indulgently beautiful fall, the weather somehow luxuriously warm and cool at the same time. All the moisture we’ve had this summer means the colors aren’t as brilliant as in drier years, but no one seems to mind. Rolling through the open prairie toward the mountains, windows down, the greens and golds flowing past me, I was full of gratitude for this beautiful place I get to call home.
I’ve been a presenter at the festival for the last few years, and am consistently impressed by the breadth and depth of talented writers who arrive to take part in the event. They come from all over the country, representing every genre of book available, and I always leave feeling I’ve learned something unexpected and very useful.
This year, there were a number of authors with books about our modern understanding of agriculture and land use, two topics I never tire of hearing or talking about. One in particular held special interest: “From the Ground Up: The Women Revolutionizing Regenerative Agriculture” by Stephanie Anderson. People keep recommending her book to me, not realizing she was born and raised on a ranch just a few miles from me and that I know her work well.
Her talk was brilliant, as was the discussion during the Q&A that followed. The audience was largely made up of people like me who are concerned our food systems are in deep trouble. We appreciated Stephanie’s thoughtful research and the work being done by the subjects of her book. As we left the conference room, the discussion continued in the hall, small groups gathering to share ideas that Stephanie’s talk had inspired. It was beautiful to behold.
Later, I attended another talk about agriculture that couldn’t have been more different. Whereas Stephanie’s talk welcomed her audience into a more expansive understanding of what is possible, the second author led with, “My ideas make a lot of people mad.” I turned out to be one of them. The Q&A following his presentation was contentious and resulted in heart rates and voices rising (mine included).
Here’s the thing, though: After his talk, the second author also hung around, actively listening to the people who had disagreed most strongly with him, and that was equally beautiful to behold. I found my frustrations with some of his statements transforming. Publicly disagreeing with people on the internet has become commonplace, but taking part in a real-life conversation about fundamental and deeply-held values that are divergent — and everyone doing so with measured dignity — was inspiring and affirming.
I use the word affirming even though I’m pretty sure no one’s positions changed. If anything, while I came to better understand the aforementioned author’s perspective, actively contrasting my beliefs and values with his made me more confident in what I believe and why I believe it. Unexpectedly, however, that felt like a liberation. That author’s upbringing, education, research and chance encounters have led him to certain conclusions. Mine have led to different ones. Our work in the world is not the same.
Janine Benyus, the creator of the term “biomimicry,” and a thinker I greatly admire, writes: “The question is how do we stay awake to the living world? How do we make the act of asking nature’s advice a normal part of every day inventing?”
I was thinking of that as I drove home. The landscape of the prairie in autumn is very different than the landscape of spring because the land is doing a very different job, aided by the weather, the angle of the sun and a thousand other things. One is not wrong and the other right. Each, literally, has its season. Perhaps we humans need to make more room for the idea that contradiction and opposition are our birthrights — the key to our resilience and the longevity of our species. Wholeness is not achieved through uniformity, but by embracing the inherently rich soil of paradox. And it is completely OK if you don’t agree.
