I NODDED ALONG with everything in the holistic permaculture course until day four, when things went off the rails. My family and I were at a farm in Bolivia, volunteering and learning about land design, groundwater recharging, alternative energy technologies, and returning fertility to the earth. Day four’s topic was community-building, which sounded innocuous enough.
Our host and instructor was a man from New Zealand who has farmed two acres in a remote Bolivian valley for nearly a decade. He talked about the importance of local decision-making, how focusing on global problems over which we have little influence can leave us feeling disempowered. Human-induced climate change, he added, is another story the oligarchs at the top are telling to stoke our fears and get us to surrender our freedoms. That and the pandemic.
Our host’s views are extreme. But he is among a growing group of back-to-the-land conservatives who don’t fit my categories. He disbelieves mainstream climate science, yet he is installing solar ovens, composting toilets, and bioconstructed buildings on his property. He scoffs at “wokeism,” which he sees as another form of top-down control, yet he deeply respects the local Indigenous community and attends the Quechua-only neighborhood meetings with surrounding farmers.
Like many on the fringe Right in the United States these days, our host embodies a disorienting set of stances: an abiding suspicion of government overreach; resistance to corporations, banks, pharmaceutical companies, and anything smacking of global elitism; and a sense that almost all our problems could be solved by returning to a more local and grounded way of life.
I struggled to keep my jaw hinged during the rest of the course, which only got more strange. We thought about cutting our two-week visit short, but in the end I’m glad we stuck it out. Our stay allowed me to practice two postures that are key to healing our polarized society: curiosity and cooperation.
Our host is an intelligent and well-read man. Though I’m tempted to write him off as another climate denier who wants to protect his privileged way of life, I am also curious about how he arrived at his views. Hearing his story has helped me reflect on how I also arrived at certain political and ideological stances by way of life circumstances, the people I associate with, and the ideas I’ve been exposed to. I’m learning not to let my own views keep me from interacting with another human being whose narratives about the world are so different from my own.
At the end of the day, I can cooperate with my host’s permaculture project because I believe we desire the same things: clean air, clean water, healthy soil, and a neighborly, abundant society for our children. He may be telling a different story about what’s happening in the world on a large scale, but here, on the ground, we can work together to corral turkeys, move a chicken tractor, and improve degraded land. We may not be solving climate change, but we are developing something more basic: mutual respect.
Liuan Huska is a freelance journalist and the author of Hurting Yet Whole: Reconciling Body and Spirit in Chronic Pain and Illness.
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