5.12 Sowing the Seeds of Change
I came back from a two week road trip west across the roads less travelled in our prairie provinces with my Mom and gathered up a stack of notebooks, manuscripts and books to share with you in this episode. It's a bit of a wild ride!
I talk buffalo, the cost of profit-poor ranching, the encroachment of foreign & industrial ownership of farmland, railway from history to current needs, and a true tale documenting the Canadian way of letting the rich skip out on their profit-losses and leave us tax-payers with the bill.
All brought together by a moment of despair darkening the face of a man I'd just met, that called up from my heart the light of hope for change within our lifetimes. The now is showing it's fragility - the next is knocking.
This episode runs long, but it's a rich one!
referencing:
Betty Carpick June 2022: Being Ancestors on season one, episode 9 of Something Different This Way Comes
Old Man on His Back Ranch, Plains Bison and native prairie c/o Nature Conservancy of Canada
National Farmer's Union report on Farm ownership, Farmer demographics & why both are concerning
Young Agrarians of Canada
Old Man On His Back: Portrait of a Prairie Landscape by Sharon Butala & Courtney Milne (Harper Collins 2002)
Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography by Chester Brown (Drawn and Quarterly 1999)
Shoes Were For Sunday: the unforgettable tale of making do with nothing on Glasgow's streets by Molly Weir (Penguin Books, 1970)
Hunting a Paradigm, An Economist's Quest: The autobiography of a would-be reformer by Alex N. McLeod (1997)
Singing Back the Buffalo, directed by Tasha Hubbard, broadcast on the Nature of Things March 2025
How-Tos: organize meaty community-building conversation spaces:
Learning For Sustainability resource library
