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EcoRadio KC
EcoRadio KC is a magazine show, including live segments, prerecorded stories, and interviews. The weekly explores our interdependence with the rest of the world, showing the connections between the ways we choose to live and the health of the whole community of life.
On this episode of EcoRadioKC, we hear from the great storyteller, Wes Jackson. Wes is the pragmatic visionary who created The Land Institute of Salina, Kansas 43 years ago as a research site to understand the ecosphere combining intellectual rigor with hands on labor. Together they work to develop sustainable food supplies for our species and the ecosystem beyond the foreseeable future. Hear the excellent and inspiring stories about family, beginning a new school, softball rules, insulting meat, and the beauty of the small.
Wes Jackson established and served as chair of one of the country’s first environmental studies programs at California State University-Sacramento and then returned to his native Kansas to found The Land Institute in 1976. He is the author of several books, including New Roots for Agriculture, Becoming Native to This Place, Consulting the Genius of the Place, and most recently Nature as Measure. Wes is widely recognized as a leader in the international movement for a more sustainable agriculture. He was a Pew Conservation Scholar in 1990, a MacArthur Fellow in 1992, and received the Right Livelihood Award in 2000. Life magazine included him as one of 18 individuals predicted to be among the 100 important Americans of the 20th century. Smithsonian in 2005 included him as one of “35 Who Made a Difference.”
Founded as a nonprofit organization in 1976, The Land Institute is committed to researching and developing food production methods that sustain the land and soil, a precious resource in an increasingly precarious state around the globe.
The current agricultural paradigm takes a short-term/high-yield approach that is dependent on heavy chemical applications and petroleum consumption, and leads to soil erosion and degradation. We aim to change that.
At The Land Institute, we believe we must grow food in partnership with nature by planting perennial grains in mixtures that can help build and protect soil. We are dependent on our soil. It is everyone’s future.
“We’re not called to success, but to obedience to our vision.”
~Wes, then Laura Jackson
