The Fight for Rural America: Confronting Big Ag And Building a Model for Protecting The Land And Its People
Presented in partnership with The Progressive.
Join Sonja Trom Eayrs and Curt Meine as they discuss their respective research and work examining the contemporary realities of rural America, the damaging effects of Big Ag on rural land and its people, and how Iowa farmer, conservationist, and “radical center” policymaker Paul Johnson championed efforts to revitalize the nation’s rural landscapes and communities.
Dodge County, Incorporated is an engrossing legal drama that recounts the Eayrs family’s three rounds of litigation against public officials in Dodge County, Minnesota, in efforts to prevent a factory farm from going up across the road from the Eayrs’ intergenerational family farm. With the factual rigor of an attorney and the passion of a farmer’s daughter, Sonja Trom Eayrs weaves together her family’s struggles with the larger realities of corporate livestock production in the United States: the pollution, the waste, the metamorphosis of thriving, verdant countrysides into bleak commercial zones.
We Can Do Better brings together the writings of Iowa farmer, conservationist, and policymaker Paul Johnson (1941-2021). As a state legislator, state and national agency leader, and champion of private lands conservation, Johnson was a prominent figure in the sustainable agriculture movement for more than three decades. Agriculture, he held, “involves more than food and fiber and fuel. It’s the care of all life.” In his public and private life, he pursued that vision through pragmatic steps to bring farming and conservation together.
In conversation with Norman Stockwell.
Curt Meine
Curt Meine is a conservation biologist, environmental historian, and writer based in Sauk County, Wisconsin. He serves as Senior Fellow with the Aldo Leopold Foundation (Baraboo, WI) and the Center for Humans and Nature (Libertyville, IL); as Research Associate with the International Crane Foundation (Baraboo, WI); and as Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For more than three decades he has worked with a wide array of organizations at the intersection of conservation, agriculture, water, climate change, environmental justice, and community resilience. Meine has authored and edited several books, including the award-winning biography Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (1988/2010) and The Driftless Reader (2017). He served as on-screen guide in the Emmy Award-winning documentary film Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for Our Time (2011). In his home
landscape, he is a founding member of the Sauk Prairie Conservation Alliance.
Sonja Trom Eayrs
Sonja Trom Eayrs is a farmer’s daughter, rural advocate, and attorney. She is involved in several rural advocacy organizations, including the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, Farm Action, Land Stewardship Project, and Dodge County Concerned Citizens. Trom Eayrs also serves as the business manager for the Trom family farm in Dodge County, Minnesota.
Norman Stockwell
Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive. Previously, for over 20 years, he served as WORT Community Radio’s Operations Coordinator in Madison, Wisconsin. He also coordinated the IraqJournal website in 2002-2003. In 2011, he regularly reported on protests in Madison for Iran’s PressTV and other outlets. His reports and interviews have appeared on Free Speech Radio News, DemocracyNow!, and AirAmerica, and in print in Z Magazine, the Capital Times, AlterNet, Toward Freedom, the Tico Times, the Feminist Connection, and elsewhere. He is co-editor of the book Rebel Reporting: John Ross Speaks to Independent Journalists.