>> their respective books on big data and the attica prison uprising. and booktv visits pueblo, colorado, to visit the city's literary sites. that's just a few of the programs you'll see on booktv this weekend. for a complete television schedule, booktv.org. booktv, 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors. television for serious readers. now we kick off the weekend with miriam horn's talk on conservation in america. >> good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the rare book room. my name is kaylen.

it's my pleasure to have miriam horn joining us this evening, the author of two previous books including the bestseller earth to peopler. she works at the environmental defense fund. miriam previously worked for the u.s. forest service and spent 15 years writing numerous newspaper articles and for magazines including "the new york times," "u.s. news & world report," smith soap january and "vanity fair." -- smithsonian. tonight we're celebrating "rancher, farmer, fisherman," it's about conservation heroes of the heartland. joining miriam in conversation, we're glad to have ian frazier, best selling author. but first, to tell us a little bit about her book, please welcome miriam horn. [applause] >> thank you, kaylen, and thank

you, eddie sutton, for welcoming us to this incredible room at the strand and for keeping the strand such a vital part of our lives. thank you, ian frazier, for joining me here. i have been a group by of ian's -- groupie of ian's for 25 years since i first read "great plains." if you haven't read it, you should pick it up on your way out. i wanted to do a couple things before we start the conversation. one is just to explain a little bit about why i chose the geography i chose for the book, and the other is to do a little reading. so let me start with the geography. the book unfolds as a trip down the mississippi river, and the mississippi river, it's the third largest river in the world. it's the -- it's only outsized

by the amazon and the congo. we who live in flyover country, i think, overlook its significance. it's the center of the american story in almost every imaginable way. it carries a million tons of silt and clay in it every day, or it did before we reengineered it. it's called the big muddy for a reason, and that mud built the american continent,al of land -- all of the land from missouri to louisiana. it built the rich heartland soils that our food supply depends on, its own delta that and those wetlands that are just about half of the marshland in the united states and an absolutely critical ecosystem. it's been absolutely critical to american history, the geography of the watershed matches perfectly with the louisiana purchase which thomas jefferson foresaw would determine the -- [inaudible] of the republic. mark twain called it the body of

the nation. ian frazier said in one of his essays in "hog's wild" which is also a wonderful collection, he says the mississippi is us and vice versa. this is where lewis and clark took their famous journeys and huck finn and jim theirs. it's where many of the most significant battles of the civil war were fought and lost. it's where most of our natural wealth still resides. it's in the mountains, our oil supplies, our copper and mineral supplies from those great plains come our meat and our grains and our legumes, our beans. and from its estuaries and the gulf of mexico beyond, its delta, come most of our seafood. so it remains totally central, still, to our food supply. and lastly, it's really critical to our politics. in addition to mapping on the louisiana purchase, it also maps

perfectly onto red state america. so figuring out who we are as a country often happens in that territory. if you read the titles essay in ian frazier's book, you will discover that it also maps almost perfectly on the population of -- [inaudible] hogs in america. i actually have two hog cameos in my third chapter. in both cases they are either trying or succeeding at eating people. [laughter] so the book unfolds in five long chapters, basically i begin in the headwaters of the missouri which is the furthest northernmost reach of the mississippi with a cowboy named dusty, a former rodeo champion who has been instrumental in saving hundreds of thousands of acres of both private ranches and public wildlands. and he raises his cattle alongside grizzlies and wolves. i then write about a kansas

farmer, a large scale farmer from kansas. i go out onto the mississippi river with the ceo of a barge company that navigates all of the inland waterways that provide this tremendous connectivity to both within the country and with the continent and the rest of the world. i go into the louisiana wetlands with sandy wen who is a vietnamese refugee who is the advocate for the shrimping community and end in the gulf of mexico with a red snapper fisherman named wayne werner who has been instrumental in bringing back red snapper populations which were virtually wiped out, to bring them back to this tremendous abundance. so the chapter i want to read from is chapter two which is about the kansas farmer x be there's a couple reasons i want to do that. one is because it's my favorite chapter, and the second is because the kansas farmer is

actually here. he and his wife flew out yesterday for their very first visit to new york city to be here for this event. justin was my most challenging subject. [laughter] he was a very reluctant starlet. he said no to me four or five times before he finally said yes. but he then opened up his life and his world to me in this really amazing way. so justin farms on almost 5,000 acres that his mother's family -- who were swedish immigrants -- they homesteaded right after the civil war. and for generations they farmed the way people have farmed for 10,000 years. they went out with i plows, and they broke the sod, and they turned the soil over, and they created those incredibly beautiful black, fragrant, straight, long furrows that we all associate with the heartland, the most beautiful, iconic scene of the heartland. you know it from grant woods.

when i was working on this book, i went back to -- [inaudible] and was really struck at how he described, she really sees an orderly farm as indicative of an orderly soul, that it's the dissolute families in her novels, their farms are also dissolute. everything is rag ared, and the families -- ragged, and the families that are upright and morally sound and industrious have these beautiful geometries. he was like a mod -- she was like a modern artist. so that's to how justin's family farmed for generations. and willa -- [inaudible] pioneers about a swedish family very much like justin's. she talks about the brown earth yielding to the plow with a blissful sigh. i'm paraphrasing a little. well, that was written in 1913, and we all know what happened 20 years later in the '30s when we had, after prolonged drought,

some steady winds started blowing, and ten million acres of the richest soils in the world picked up and blew away. we lost half, half a foot, up to two feet of topsoil. it blew sometimes across kansas in a cloud 10,000 feet high and 200 miles wide, and we lost what is, essentially, a nonrenewable resource. that soil had taken the mississippi river millions of years to build, and here it was up and blown away because it turns out that when you break the sod and you turn those prayer bely soils over -- prairie soils over, they become highly vulnerable to erosion, wind and water erosion. they collapse. all the beautiful space in those soils that allow air and water to penetrate collapse into a hard pan, and the soil can't take water anymore which as drought and heat get worse and worse and worse in the great plains, it becomes an increase

ingly horrible problem. the worst damage was done was the damage to the life in the soil. soil is the most diverse ecosystem on the planet. it's got more biodiversity than a tropical rain forest, than the ocean, and it's all microbes. there are uncounted species, undoubtedly thousands, maybe tens of thousands of species, trillions of organisms in every teaspoon, and they are the foundations of life on earth. they make photosynthesis possible, they are critical to every plant that justin grows. so justin has totally revised the way his family farms along with many farmers like him across the great plains. they have retired their plows. they now farm in a way -- justin has not plowed in more than 15 years. he also has introduced enormous and ever-increasing diversity into his thousands of acres.

so he keeps adding in new rotations of crops, and he also a ads in cover -- adds in cover crops. he plants mixes of crops, and those help protect and renourish the soil. he is the furthest thing from a small, organic local farmer, but his soils are rebounding in a really remarkable way. the levels of carbon and organic matter in his oils and the -- soils is and the level of life in his soils are beginning to approach the native prairie, and that's a really important achievement given how critical big farmers in the heartland are for all of our future. so i want to read just a little bit -- i spent many, many hours tromping around justin's fields with him. you walk on this beautiful mat of stalks and residues from previous crops, and listening to justin talk about why he farms the way he farms. so i want to read just a little bit of justin's chapter, if i

can imagine all of these things here. -- can imagine all of these thing -- manage all of these things here. justin's fields now look nothing like his grandfather's tidy purr row ares. though his acres of wheat and alfalfa are still marked off like vast checkerboards, light and dark, dark and light, they're messy. the knee-high stubble standing like bart simpson's hair with a thick. tangled mat of straw or leaves covering the ground. where his predecessors set out to tame nature, justin strives to emulate the native prairie are. we have hard, sometimes violent, dangerous thunderstorms in the spring with heavy rainfall, heavy winds, and then we get dry, hot and windy and then very cold with blizzards. the prairie can weather all that, it is steady, resilient across long periods of time. our farms on the prairie have to

learn to do the same, to be resilient to these dramatic, harsh forests. farming like the prairie requires, he says, learning how to come alongside that biology, to partner with it. it also requires resisting the temptation to think we can until it. we can control it. a living system is complex, always changing and adapting. that's part of its mystery. and that mystery, the need to deal with lots of uncontrolled things, is where my faith plays into myself as a farmer. science is part of it, technology is part of it, but humility is part of it as well. farming in concert with the prairie requires constant close almost pa turn attention. just -- paternal attention. justin knows the land intimately through his own senses and hands. in an essay she wrote for an online writing class, lindsay describes watching justin

studying, seeing things i can't see, turning the wheat over in his hands, examining every square inch with the eye of a scientist and the touch of a far. his nail scraped -- scrapes away at something. justin is as often striding across the field as he is cocooned in a tractor, open ago soybean pod to see if it's ready for harvest, stopping to dig with a small shovel he carries everywhere or crouching to sink his big hands into the black, fragrant soil. he's often joined by his i don't think employee -- his young employee, garrett kennedy, who reminds justin of himself, fresh out of college. though garrett is so skinny, the shovel barely notices him when he jumps on. [laughter] sometimes andrew, justin and lindsay's son, comes along too with his own pint-sized shovel

diligently digging alongside his dad. it would be hard to say who is more excited by the discoveries, especially the fat earthworms whose excavations inspire in justin a thrill and autofervent as to verge on comical. oh, this is wonderful. this shiny material is their poop. very rich for more be plants. they burrow down five feet or more, eating all the time, filling their bellies with nutrients that they carry from deep in the soil up to the root zone and carrying other thing back down. in deep drought they go deeper still, tie themselves in a not and go -- in a knot and go dormant. earthworm activity is my best measure of biological activity. what a gift this is. so justin, thank you for sharing your life with me. [applause]

>> didn't you have an earthworm that was, like ors four feet -- four feet long? >> one of my friends has a photo -- i haven't town one -- >> that's incredible. >> these guys carry pictures of their worms to show each other. [laughter] >> i thought it was also cool that you grew wheat in, like, downtown cleveland? [laughter] pretty amazing. yeah, that's a great chapter. and no-till farming is so inspiring as a concept, just to read about it. having read a lot about, you know, the dust storms of the '30s and seeing the pictures of them and talked to people who are in them, it's just amazing to think that that's something that could be, that you could actually do something about. but, so i was just -- as i read

your book, what impressed me was how down to, like, the square foot it got in terms of geography and in terms of the places where the people were. and it sort of reminded me, you know, that here sometimes in new york, well, when my book about the great plains came out, i had people say to me, oh, i liked your book about iowa. and i said, well, it's not actually iowa. [laughter] and i'm from ohio, and, of course, the standard thing that people in new york say, ohio, yes. here we call that iowa. [laughter] did you find, i mean, and this leads to kind of another strange thought, but it made me think that democrats may not be very good at geography in general, you know?

that republicans are better at geography. there is this is just -- this is just an instinct that i have. because i feel like you're talking about these are red states, all the places that you go, and yet you have such -- everybody seems to have this incredible knowledge of the place where they are. did you start with a place and look for people in the place, or did you start with the people and become interested in the place where the people were? that is, how did you get together with justin and with the people? >> i started with the people. i had -- i spent a lot of my own childhood on a farm in california with some farmers who are really extraordinary stewards, take a very, very long view of the land, and then in my 20s i worked for the forest service in colorado. and in both cases i had really gotten exposed to how deeply people who live and work on the land know it, how much they understand it and love it in a

way that, i mean, i was out of the bay area and thought i knew everything, and i realized that i knew nothing at all when i got to colorado about a forest and how you had to take care of a forest. and then i've been at environmental defense fund for 1 years, and environmental defense fund is sort of unusual in seeking out partners like justin in working with industrial scale farmers and commercial fishermen and working with corporate ceos of barge companies in trying to move some of these really big levers in the world to make change. so i had been hearing stories for years from my colleagues about people like justin, people who were doing this really tremendous work that was going completely overlooked by most of us and certainly by most of the people in the environmental community. so i tarted canvassing -- i started canvassing everyone i knew for good subjects and slowly began to converge on this idea of using the mississippi as the narrative spine for the book

and sort of loved when i started looking at maps and realizing that it was the louisiana purchase and it was huck finn and lewis and clark's journeys and it was red america and it was where all of our natural resources are with a few exceptions. it just -- the geography really began to speak to me. and so hen, you know, it -- so then it kind of fell into place. montana i had to look a little extra hard because the first cowboy i found was on the wrong side of the continental divide -- >> how far over? >> over by where you used to live. over by the swan. jim stone. >> oh. >> but the water -- >> but you mention him in the piece. >> i do, yeah. because the cowboy i write about, dusty, is part of this huge partnership that spans the divide, that spans ten million acres. so i had to start with them and ask them for a rancher who would flow down to justin's farm and blow down into the mississippi. but other than that the

geography just sort of fell nicely into place. >> i mean, the people are distributed. you have far rest, and hen you have the merit -- and then you have the merit enterprise. the barge owner is, i mean, they're like -- part of their operation is all the way up in the illinois river. i mean, they're almost up to chicago. >> right. and be they go up the tennessee river, they go all the way -- the mississippi watershed goes from the rocky mountains to the appalachians, and the tributaries that feed it, it does look like this enormous funnel. the tributaries go all the way -- well, as you point out, you actually can go through the great lakes and come down the mississippi. but there's actually a connected waterway all the way there. so you look at those tributaries, yeah, they work all the way up the illinois river. they carry coal -- they mostly carry oil and gas and chemicals, what are called red flag cargoes. i went out with them -- i spent

24 hours on a tow boat with eight men pushing four football fields of oil barges up the mississippi river, and it is mind blowing, the traffic on that river. it is basically bumper to bumper traffic or coal barges and grain barges and rock barges and fuel barges and everything you can imagine. i mean, you really see that there is still an industrial heart and an agricultural heart in this country that, you know, is still really enormously important. but so, yeah, it was really the people. and then, i mean, i sort of had an embarrassment of riches. there were dozens of other stories that i could have told that would have been nearly as good. and so i then had the latitude to kind of find this nice journey in the -- >> well, and in every one it's also kind of a cliffhanger, you know? like you don't know are they going to be able in the story about the cowboy, will that work? he has all these different people who are so, you know,

that he can get all these different people to work together is really amazing. his patience. really all the people you talk about are so patient and able to deal with people yelling at them from both sides. >> well, and open. i mean the, you know, the thing that really struck me -- and you're absolutely right. montana is a great example of a place where people hate each other's guts. [laughter] that's where the spotted owl fight took place, probably the nastiest natural resource fight ever in the united states. you've got the bundy trial starting this week, you've got, you know, the ranchers hate the hippies, hate the hikers, hate the hunters, hate the outfitters, hate the loggers, they all hate the federal bureaucrats. but somehow they all came together. i mean, there were exceptions. there are people who never, who never joined -- >> and there are friendships

that end forever, which is tragic, in a way -- >> his best man hasn't ever spoken to him again because they saw him. first, he fought a bunch of oil and gas leases that were going to go in and change one of the largest contiguous intact landscape when lewis and clark went up there. so dustin came back from the rodeo and got involved in that fight, and that was what caused the rift with his best man because they were sort of seeing visions of the back and dancing in front of their eyes, of course, people in the bakken wish the bakken had never happened. but they saw what they thought was going to be huge fortunes to be made. and dusty knew that -- dusty and only of the other -- some of the other guys i knew once you destroy this stuff, you can't turn it back, you can't get it back. and he says that.

i mean, justin's son walked around for months imitating dusty saying there's more shingles than grass, it's too late partner. [laughter] so it's, you know, they had a sense. but, yeah, it has been -- and that's been one of the inspiring things about the book, is to actually see there are places where people still can bridge these vast political divides. >> right. and it's like we're so used to stasis, you know, and things not getting done. but these are local situations where things do get done. >> absolutely. >> i mean, i was just -- i found it hair-raising, the descriptions of the barges going down the mississippi where you've now got either an enormous flood which is just hellaciously difficult to keep control of a barge, or you've got, you know, 9 feet, 10 inches of water and a 9-foot draft on your barge. so, i mean, how they manage to deal with this incredibly

varied, difficult waterway, and i was out there. i did a piece about invasive carp, and i was out there a while ago and read -- the infrastructure of the mississippi is just falling apart. >> yeah. >> it is just not being maintained. >> yeah. >> and that comes new also in your book. how this guy manages to keep pushing those barges through when he's either got, you know, flood or drought. >> yeah. no, they have nerves of steel. and i went back -- i used this book as an excuse to read all the great american literature. i read some more mark twain and, of course, he described what it means to be a river boat pilot on that river. he spends weeks learning, going up the river learning every bend and every sandbar, and he gets to the top and he's really cocky, and the guy says, you know, it's a completely different river going down, and it'll be completely different tomorrow because the sand will have shifted. so it's the level of acute

alertness that these guys have to maintain, they've got, you know, lives onboard, they've got these dangerous fuels, you know, dangerous cargo, and the weather, i mean, as justin well knows, the weather's getting more and more extreme all the time. so they are swinging, they will have one month the army corps will be blasting levees to try ore lease the blood, and the next month they'll be dredging the bottom to try to deal with the drought. i mean, it's swinging like crazy. that's another thing they all have in common that was a great advantage of focusing on this geography is they are really on the front lines of a lot of the changes that are happening in terms of prolonged drought, in terms of rains that come much more intensely, that are much more concentrated in terms of pests that are moving across where they didn't use to exist. >> i thought it was really cool that you describe this guy, he's telling how to go around, like, a bend and this really tough

part, and you just have to let it drift, and you just have to hold your breath and let it drift before you kick the motor in, you know, the steam engine in again. and you found an exact parallel in twain where he said just letting it drift was the hardest thing in the world. >> it's terrifying. >> you think of twain, he was a steam boat captain for a while and made his brand but, in fact, he really did learn the river -- >> i mean, he was navigating much smaller vessels. it was like shooting rapids in an aircraft carrier. these things are so huge, you can't believe it. the captain walked me to the front of the barges, and it took us ten minutes to walk from the wheelhouse to the front of the barge. so vast. and it wasn't anything like the biggest thing out on the water. so these things are so huge, and they're navigating them through these narrows with the water whipping them around. and, i mean, it also is sort of

one of the central themes in the book, is learning -- i mean, justin in the passage i read, justin talks about it, you can't control it. you have to accept that there's a lot of it, first of all, that we can't understand. i mean, the microbiology, you know, it will be hundreds or thousands of years before we actually understand everything that's living in the soil and what it's doing, how these ecologies are working. but, so there's a lot of yielding up to natural forces. so with the mississippi river, it's yielding up to those forces to navigate it, but it's also in the wetlands realizing that the only way they're going to save these wetlands, the louisiana wetlands which are vanishing into the sea, 2,000 square miles have vanished into the sea, that the only way to do it to use the power of the river, to release the river in a controlled way, but to release the river and let this force that is greater than any human engine ever could be carry that mud into those wetlands.

so there is a kind of letting go that's happened with a lot of them. >> yeah. and, i mean, the corps of engineers kind of comes a across as something in a cartoon or something. [laughter] >> yeah. >> they do this and, oh, no! >> that's a great description. >> so they have -- so now they're kind of saying, gee, maybe we shouldn't have done some of these things, and let's just let it kind of go its way. the vietnamese who you talk about have been there 40 years. you still think -- >> right. like it was just yesterday. >> got here yesterday, but, of course, they've had a whole generation there. and a lot of the, every story really that you tell, you talk about the ancestry of the people and how they got there. and it's always a difficult story. and the story of sandy wen? >> wen, yeah. >> how she got there in her father's fishing boat which he sank in order to be allowed on shore -- >> right. >> so to give of the host country no choice.

the tough lives that those people have had and to see that this particular, i mean, it's kind of funny that in that chapter you think, oh, okay, great. we'll just let the river fill in all that silt, and they go, wait a minute, that silts up our shrimp -- >> right. >> those must have been amazing people. you also describe the cuisine which is just a total new thing in the book, all the different things -- >> well, my daughter told me i should just do a presentation, the greatest meals i had in every place that i went, and i think i am. when i'm in new orleans, i think i am going to do that. truly one of the greatest meals was when i was with the vietnamese shrimpers. we flew out in a sea plane, and everywhere you go food is so central to the culture. and so we fly out there, and they invite us to lunch. and they're all, the vietnamese shrimpers are always a padding around in their little pajamas and slippers, but they pull

until a net of shrimp, they take it into the kitchen on the boat and they boil them up, and they have brought with them -- which they do do as a matter of course -- they brought those rice crates that you soften in hot water and those delicious base sills and mints and various -- baa sills and various herbs and they brought rice noodles and hot sauce, and we make these fresh shrimp wraps on the boat that i will never forget for the rest of my life. and i had many fabulous meals with sandy. but i had great meals all the way along, including at justin's -- [laughter] >> you ended the book or the last part takes place mostly in the gulf with wayne, the fisherman? and your description of the gulf, i guess people are sort of aware what the gulf looks like from having watched the horrible deepwater horizon coverage. but talk a little bit about what the gulf looks like.

i hadn't realized it's just an industrial floor, basically -- >> it is really, it was completely shocking to me. i mean, it's very wild. i got terribly seasick out there. it is a truly, it's truly rugged waters, and we went out about 90 miles to go fishing, but everywhere you look there are these oil rigs that are the biggest thing you've ever seen in your life. i mean, they -- it's like you're on, in a space colony. these things are, they look like those things in the return of the jedi, those imperial walkers in return of the jedi except a hundred times bigger than those x they're completely strung with lights. so you look off into the water, you don't ever really see stars. you see these sort of industrial constellations extending as far as the eye can see. and you actually fish be at the rigs. the red snapper really like rigs. they are, basically, like reefs for them. so we would go out, and wayne

would be looking for the fish. we were out fishing with his nephew, and he would be looking for the fish, and invariably he would find them gathering around the rig. so we would have this pristine experience fishing in the shadow of a -- >> and they're catching hundreds of thousands of pounds of snapper. >> they're pulling them in on -- it's all hook and line, but they put multiple hooks, so when they pull them up, it looks like a christmas tree with these beautiful, shiny red ornaments on either side. yeah, it is an amazing landscape which i was not at all prepared for. >> well, one of the great pleasures of the book is the american landscape, and you go from, you know, montana all the way out into the gulf. it's something that you don't see all that much anymore, where someone will take an entire thing and try and describe it. it's much more now what people try and do is describe just one thing, you know?

and find one thing. like, you know, the history of, you know, some one particular thing. and it's something, i found in "the great plains," it's easier to talk about the country if you go north and south than if you go east and west. >> that's interesting. >> east and west, you get new york and l.a., and it's kind of a tired plot. [laughter] but if you go north and south, it's quite interesting. >> yeah. >> more interesting. anyway, we want to have questions, and we've got about 15 minutes or so, or less, i don't know. for questions. [inaudible] >> why are, why are these -- [inaudible] [laughter] >> when are you directing that question to, rick? maybe i'll ask you that question. why are they red? wow. >> we talked about the global warming -- [inaudible]

you accept the reality -- [inaudible] so how come there's -- >> well, i think it's actually more complicated than that, and i'll invoke justin again as another example. justin and i ended up talking about climate a lot and, you know, it's still not an easy conversation to have in kansas. the politics, the politics are interesting because, like, if you go to louisiana, if you listen to louisiana's leadership when they're in washington, d.c. like david vitter, climate change doesn't exist. if you follow them home to louisiana, they're totally accepting the u.n.'s science on sea level rise, and when they're developing a master plan for the louisiana coast, they're relying on that science. they're calculating sea level rise and intensifying hurricanes as part of the plan. so the politics, i think, get more authentic and interesting if you leave the or the of media bubble -- the sort of media bubble and the political bubble in washington and if you go have these conversations closer to

the ground. so justin took me up to k state where he went to school to meet his professors, and -- well, first we walked by, they have all these, he showed me all these labs where you had to do all these tests. like he had to be able to tell pig weed from some other weed, and they were doing all these experiments making different shapes of wheat heads. one of the labs looked like a desert, it was all cactuses and sand, and justin said, oh, maybe that's my farm in 20 years. there's the climate change lab. but when we went to talk to his professors, they all were completely clear that climate change is happening, but they also were clear that that's not a useful way to talk to their state legislators. so they talk to their state legislators about extreme weather and about the aquifer that's being depleted. and the same conversation is happening increasingly among farmers. if you look at the ag press, and justin shared some really

interesting articles from, you know, increasingly in the mainstream ag press people have moved from -- so the first step is extreme weather's happening, and we have to figure out ways to be more resilient to that weather. so we have to do things like no-tilling that keep water in the soil and that protect our soils. the next step is, okay, this maybe seems to be a trend. you know, maybe this is happening a lot. but we're not, we're going to leave aside, this is merit lane, the ceo of the barge company, i don't see any purpose of getting in the fight about what's causing it, but let's deal with it. let's deal with the fact that the climate is getting more extreme, and let's make more efficient vessels, let's do everything -- let's keep pollution out of the atmosphere be, do everything we can. and then the next step is to say, okay, well, as -- and i hope, justin, it's okay that i will quote you saying this. as justin says, okay, well, if the problem is that there's too much carbon dioxide and nitrous ox side going into the

atmosphere, i have things i can do on my farm that offers solutions to that. i have ways of farming that can prevent nitrogen from being lost from my fertilizer into the atmosphere. so it's, you know, if you -- there's a woman that i quote in the dusty chapter who says if you listen to people and you give them a chance to not be defensive about their lives and their choices, you can actually really get somewhere. and what i loved about doing this book was having these conversations. i mean, you know, justin's heard me say this before, i felt like i could ask justin anything. i could ask him, you know, i pushed hard on him on insecticides which are these insecticides that people are really concerned are having detrimental effects on pollinators along with a lot of other things. but there's evidence that they are one of the contributors. not only did justin engage in that conversation for hours and

hours and hours with me, but he went and he read, and he's the only person i know who has read the whole 380-page epa report that they did on the particular chemical that he had been using, and he modified the way that he farms. i mean, there's a level of openness in the people that i met, and it wasn't just that i found, you know, the five enlightened guys in the heartland. i mean, i -- you know, justin is part of huge networks of thousands of farmers, many of them who are young like him and have come out of land grant colleges like he has and who are very high-tech and very sophisticated in the science who are challenging themselves constantly and inviting other people to challenge them including new york environmentalists. i mean, i had to pass a test. justin took me to the no-till plants conference, and -- [laughter] none of them had ever even met a new yorker before, and they're all like -- [laughter] who is this interloper that justin has brought in, and i had

to pass a test at the lunch table. they all, like are, wheeled on me and said, so what do you think of gmos? [laughter] and i'm not going to tell you what my answer was, but i passed the test. [laughter] >> oh, yeah. >> i wanted to ask justin a couple questions. first of all, i'm worried now that you're not plowing the deep furrows, has that affected your family life at all? [laughter] [inaudible] of.-- [laughter] did you pick up anything from miriam that actually changed your way of looking at things? >> [inaudible] >> good questions. the first answer about my family life is, actually, we spend a

lot less time -- my dad's generation, when my dad was pardon farming, a lot of the success or failure, i would say you had to make good choices, but you also had to work really hard and spend a lot of hours working the land and spending time in the field. and your success in some regard, i think, was based upon how hard you could work. and today it's much more -- i don't spend all those hours tilling the land that we did when i was young. and so we're much more efficient with our time, and we spend much more -- i like to spend a lot more time at home with my kids. that's really important to me. that's part of how we think about a farm, is how we appreciate our lifestyle and working with our family and several generations together and teaching the kids about -- [inaudible] and the land, things that extend

well beyond our lifetime. so, yeah, that's changed kind of what we've spent our time doing, and the success in my generation is not so much -- we still have to work hard and be timely with the things we do on the farm, but it's much more based on knowledge and your amount of knowledge per acre, if you will, or spending time thinking and studying, reevaluating, challenging other peers that want to be challenged in how to improve our system. and so that kind of almost leads into your second question about how it was to handle miriam. the first day miriam came, actually, we were right in the thick of wheat harvest which is a very intense time. we work as many hours as we can when the wheat, when the environmental conditions, the weather and the humidity allow us to be harvesting the wheat fields, because at any moment, one of the large thunderstorms can come across the plains and have hail, marble or baseball

sized, and we can lose our entire profit in about five minutes. so when the crop is ready, we work good and hard as many hours as we can. that's when miriam came. [laughter] she flew into wichita, south central kansas, and i gave her directions -- [inaudible] we're kind of at the end of a -- [inaudible] and this is going to be interesting. if she can find it. and she did. she just -- she brought her little note pad and her pen, and her voice recorder which was really intimidating at first -- [laughter] and she started asking questions and learning. it was very intellectually challenging to me. i was tired that time of year anyways, but i was tired to a whole new level that year because -- [inaudible] that i had to do at the same time. my experience has been that i was very optimistic to have participated in this. farmers tend to, we tend to be introverts and not be -- it's

difficult for us to open our entire world up to many people because it's somewhat of -- [inaudible] because the land, in my opinion, reflects a lot of our personal be severals. and so -- selves. and so it was a big choice for us to open ourselves up in this way. but my experience has been that miriam was to honoring of that and wanted to truly understand the complex decisions that we made and how we navigated those decisions, and that was pretty apparentfrom the start. so as time -- apparent from the start. so as time went on, that level of trust increased. and i have learned a lot from miriam and appreciate the things i have learned and the hard questions that she asked me. the healthy conversation has improved my farm by having her there, which i have told you that. that's true. >> very nice.

>> i'm curious about your thoughts on -- [inaudible] mainstream -- [inaudible] i don't have much trust for ranchers and farmers and fishermen. and your thoughts on that and what might bridge that divide -- [inaudible] >> yeah. no, that's a terrific question. so the question was what about the activists that aren't prepared to trust an industrial-scale farmer or to find conservationists in the heartland. and i think that, i mean, it is a hard question, you know? there are people whose view of environmental defense fund is that we are too ready to partner with companies like walmart who we do partner with.

we have an office in bentonville. there are real tensions, there have been tensions within the environmental community. i think that it's fair to say that there has been an evolution at least in the bigger groups that you would have heard of, that there is a convergence around a kind of pragueing matism -- pragmatism, a recognition that it's now or never and that if you hold out for, you know, the perfect, not only if you hold out for the perfect you may not get anywhere, but also the idea of the perfect is itself flawed. you know, you really see this in food production, that there's a sort of an idea that if justin were just a better guy, he just would get rid of every pesticide on his farm or, you know, and he certainly wouldn't use gmos. and when you actually start to look at the choices that justin's making, every choice that you make comes with trade-offs. and so the really honorable way to farm is to be candid about

that and to really consider what the choices are. so that if you forgo pesticide, then you end up losing an swire crop, you've with -- an entire crop, you have therefore lost all the water you put into it, all the diesel you put in your tractor, the land that you've used. so that you constantly are having to weigh and balance these choices. and i think, i think that the environmental community more and more is, i mean, in part because of the urgency of climate change and the you urgency of the challenges that we're facing in everything from invasive species, you know, all of the things that are coming along with climate change and the loss of wildlands and the loss of important private habitat, the endangered species issues. i think there is a growing convergence around the middle

that is not about -- it never feels quite like compromise to me. it's not like you're giving up half of what you believe in, it's that you're digging deeper, you know? you're listening to a more complicated story. i mean, some of the people i met over where ian useed to live on the west side of the continental divide in montana who, i mean, one woman had had her tires slashed about ten times because she was, like, this hippie who'd moved in from seattle, and she was doing political cartoons in the newspaper that were, like, pictures of clear cuts and -- she was really going after the loggers. and then she started working with a logger and trying to find common ground with him, and she realized that both of them, their -- both of them felt like the best day they could find was a day in the woods. and they start walking in the woods, and she said the longer that this group of people who thought they had nothing in common, the larger they genuinely talked and listened, the more consensus emerged. it wasn't like, okay, i'll give

this up if you give this that up. it wasn't this parceling out the pain. it was actually realizing if you pull in a richer story, if you pull in more parameters, you can arrive at something that actually works better all the way around. >> we have time for just one more question. >> so when you describe it that way or i listen to justin, you make me feel -- [inaudible] [laughter] but then i think of when you tarted in beginning -- started in the beginning talking about your rancher and his best friend. and be when you are faced with such enormous profits like fracking brought to north dakota, now we see all of these terrible environmental effects and earthquakes and such. but it just seems at to -- at some point the way our system is set up, there's so much money to be made that, you know, you're

going to have these -- you're going to come to some point -- [inaudible] >> so patty is, has asked about places where the stakes get so high that you can't actually fine common ground. find common ground. i certainly am not a utopian. i know there will be places where there just are collisions that are impossible to overcome. on the other hand, i think that louisiana is a really interesting example. i mean, there is no place on the planet really where you have more powerful interests cheek by jowl than you do in louisiana. that's another mind-blowing thing about that landscape, is you realize you have the biggest oil companies in the world, america's biggest fisheries, you have new orleans and millions of people, the biggest port complex in the hemisphere, you have massive -- it is the big boys, they're all sitting there together at those tables, and they manage to figure out a coastal restoration plan that

they got total consensus from everyone from exxonmobil to the audubon society and from the entire louisiana state legislature. and, again, it's these, it's pushing harder to figure out, okay, so if we can restore wetlands and, you know, garrett graves, who's the freshman republican congressman from louisiana, and he used to -- he tells a story that i repeat in the book about disappearing wetlands and most of the coast of louisiana is privately owned, almost all owned by oil and gas companies. he said the environmentalists were like go take the land away from them and fix that wetland. the wetlands are critical storm protection for not only for the city of new orleans and all those people, but also for that oil and gas infrastructure. it's the biggest oil and gas infrastructure in the country. most of our oil and gas proves those those ports and pipelines. and so, but instead he said, you know, we could go to an oil

company and say, look, if you help us restore this wetland, not only are you going to hold onto your bottom rights because if the land disappears on top, you also lose the mineral rights underneath. so you're going keep your mineral rights, have shelter from storm, we're going to get all these nutrients that are coming down the mississippi river that are choking out life in thousands of miles, and so really harming louisiana fisheries. but if you replant wetlands, it takes up those newt represent thes, so the nutrients become miracle grow for the wetlands, and they're now good instead of a bad thing in the gulf of mexico. if you can come up, sometimes it's actually, it is sort of mind-blowing that you can come up with these solutions that help everybody. they protect, they protect all the people, they protect the oil and gas rests, they protect -- interests, they protect the fishing interests, the navigation interests. and, you know, you can't do it everywhere, but it's actually remarkable that in a place where the stakes are that high, that

you did get that kind of unanimity. so you can be hopeful. >> a really lovely note to end on. [laughter] thank you all so much for joining us tonight. miriam is going to stick around and sign book, so if you've already purchased a copy, we'll form a queue on this side of the roomful we also have a couple copies of ian's book you're interested in purchasing those, and thank you for sharing this evening with us. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

>> you're watching booktv on c-span2, television for serious readers. here's a look at what's on prime time tonight. we kick off the evening at 7:30 p.m. eastern with a couple of this year's national book award finalists. first, heather ann thompson discusses the attica prison uprising of 1971. that's followed by kathy o'neill on how data algorithms impact society. and on this week's "after words" at 10 p.m. eastern, john dickerson, host of cbs' "face the nation" recalls memorable presidential campaign moments. we wrap up booktv in prime time at 11 with some programs on the current presidential candidates. first up, dick morris discusses his book, "armageddon: how trump can beat hillary," followed at midnight with david cay johnston's critical talk about the making of donald trump. that all happens tonight on c-span2's booktv.