Farmers and Climate Change

An evening with author Margiana Petersen-Rockney in conversation with journalist Anna Sale

What happens when the climate is changing faster than the stories we tell about ourselves?

Farmers and ranchers are experiencing climate change directly. Drought, wildfire, extreme heat, shifting seasons, water scarcity ~ these are not abstract predictions but realities shaping land, livelihoods, families, and futures. Yet the politics of climate change can make responding to them extraordinarily complicated.

In Farmers and Climate Change: Agricultural Adaptation in an Age of Rural Polarization, Margiana Petersen-Rockney takes us beyond the divide between those who “believe” in climate change and those who don't. Drawing on seven years of research in Northern California, she explores how farmers actually adapt ~ and the social, political, economic, and deeply personal forces shaping their choices.

Because changing how we farm can mean changing a relationship to land. To family. To neighbors. To identity. To generations of knowledge about what it means to be a farmer.

Petersen-Rockney joins award-winning journalist Anna Sale, host of Slate's Death, Sex & Money and People Trying, for a conversation about what happens when climate science meets lived experience, and what becomes possible when we listen to the complicated realities beneath polarization.

The evening will begin with a short introduction from anthropologist Cari Borja, whose work sits at the intersection of food, agriculture and education ~ placing the conversation within a larger question: How do we ask people to change without first understanding what we are asking them to risk?

Perhaps meaningful climate action begins not only with changing practices ~ but with understanding people, the places they belong to, and what change is asking of them.

Margiana Petersen-Rockney is a political ecologist who studies climate change and rural livelihoods. Margiana grew up farming and worked in food justice non-profits before receiving her PhD from University of California, Berkeley where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in the Environmental Science, Policy and Management Department. She’s now an Assistant Professor of Environmental studies in the Franke College of Forestry and Conservation at the University of Montana.

Anna Sale is a journalist who hosts the award-winning interview podcast Death, Sex & Money from Slate and the new multimedia interview series People Trying, featuring people who work close to land, water, and nature as we're all adapting to change. She’s also been a contributor to This American Life, Fresh Air, The New York Times, and The Atlantic, and the author of Let’s Talk About Hard Things. She splits time between Berkeley and Cody, Wyoming.