Nick and I divvied up and took different interviews, I did a podcast with KPFA, a listener-funded radio show in Berkeley, and Nick interviewed with Thrillist 😎. You can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, in the embedded audio file below, OR you can read the transcript I created because I love reading transcripts, but that’s just me. If you have no idea what any of this means and this is your first time hearing about our farm, Solar Punk Farms, this podcast is a great introduction!
Transcript:
Fiona: Hello, and welcome to Terra Verde, a weekly environmental public affairs program co-hosted by the Earth Island Journal and KPFA. My name is Fiona McLeod. I'm the host and producer of today's show. Today I'm excited to invite you all with me to explore a vibrant pocket of the Bay Area's sustainability scene. Joining us today is Spencer Scott, one of the founders of Solar Punk Farms, a unique climate hub in Guerneville, California dedicated to bioregional regeneration. Spencer is here to talk with me about the vision behind Solar Punk Farms and how through a mix of science, art, community collaboration, and farming, they're working to engage queer folks, youth, and local community members in creating a more ecologically minded society, and to make sustainable living both practical and irresistible. Spencer, thanks so much for joining me today.
Spencer: Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.
Fiona: In addition to being co-founder of Solar Punk Farms, which Spencer started with his partner and some close friends, Spencer Scott is also a biologist, climate writer, and educator, and a Science Program Manager at One Earth. He has worked with organizations like Impossible Foods, Sierra Club, Terraformation, Climate Town, Grist, and with Paul Hawken—the founder of Project Drawdown—to create educational content aimed at furthering climate engagement. I'm really excited to be speaking with you today.
Spencer: I'm honored to be here.
Fiona: I wonder if you can start by telling us a little bit more about Solar Punk Farms and the vision behind it. What inspired the creation of this farm/climate hub/education center?
Spencer: Yeah, so I think starting with what inspired it… Nick and I, my husband who co-founded Solar Punk Farms with me, we quit our jobs. I was a scientist, and Nick was working as a brand consultant for tech companies. We started reading a lot about climate, and we got the climate bug. We were doing a lot of work as sustainability consultants, all behind our computers at our desks. We really felt the desire to get our hands in the dirt and do a regeneration project hands-on. We could just sense that there is something very important about being connected to a space and feeling like you are having a direct benefit in place. So, we sought to find a farm and a piece of degraded land to work on. Our goal was, you know… our land's not big enough to draw down a lot of carbon or make a huge impact in food security or anything like that. We are both interested in using the space to kind of hopefully move culture towards sustainability. That's kind of the largest vision behind our farm.
Fiona: You describe Solar Punk Farms as a center for bioregional regeneration. I wonder if you can explain what that entails and why bioregional regeneration is important for sustainability.
Spencer: Bioregional regeneration is kind of this new term that's emerging in the climate space. We felt really called to it because we wanted to create a hub for bioregional regeneration, which means we're focused largely on our local ecosystem, whether that's at our neighborhood level, the watershed level, or our actual [bio]region of earth which are delineated by the life that lives there. We're in kind of a coastal rainforest, so we're really dedicated to the Russian River watershed and to the coastal rainforest up the West Coast. The regeneration aspect is both the actual process of undoing past harms – where we live used to be called Stumptown because settlers came and cut down all the trees, some of them went to build San Francisco. We have a very long legacy of environmental degradation. Now, we're interested in how we steward the land, help the land heal, and bring back biodiversity and ecological resilience. That's our mission. It also includes aspects of cultural regeneration – how are we bringing people together, and how are we strengthening the ties of our human community along with our natural community?
Fiona: You mentioned earlier that you were seeking a patch of degraded land. The land that Solar Punk Farms is on was a horse pasture, is that right?
Spencer: Yes, that's right. It was a small horse ranch – 10 acres in total, but seven of those acres are redwood forest. The front two acres were just dirt and sand for the horse corral and arena. There was basically no life – very solid, sandy soil with a few weeds here and there, which was honestly perfect for what we were looking for. The whole point was to go through the process and see and feel what that felt like.
Fiona: Can you talk a little bit about what that process was like over these past few years? The land has gone from that kind of degraded horse pasture to what does it look like today?
Spencer: Well, today we have about 90 fruit and nut trees planted. We have kind of a large garden/small farm area for annuals, and then all sorts of perennial herbs and flowers growing everywhere we can – at least everywhere we could plant in four years. We're just about to hit four years. It's going to be a fun lifetime project. One of the first things we did was take a permaculture class at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center. It was a 12-week course. One of the things they taught us was about this thing called PATO, which stands for Prolonged and Thoughtful Observation. They had us sit in a chair – they called it a sit spot – and you'd have to observe in a single place over a long period of time. The goal was not to intervene too quickly because you'll make mistakes and kind of disrupt what is supposed to happen. You need to get to know the place before you start intervening. That took a while. We had a year of learning before we really started going. Then we had to decompact the soil. In regenerative farming, people often talk about no-till, but that's kind of like once you're at a place where the land is ready to grow. We had to do a big till to decompact the land, then plant cover crops that help shade the soil and bring nutrients back into it. We've been doing that every winter for four years.
Fiona: Thank you. You mentioned this a little bit ago, but I wonder if you can share more about the vision for engaging the community through education and awareness-building at the farm. It seems like so much of the dream behind it is creating a space that can both inform and inspire people to take action towards a more regenerative future. I wonder if you can share about the programming that you all have designed to achieve that.
Spencer: Community was always central to our goal. There are a lot of land projects out there that kind of go into it with an off-the-grid mentality. That was never our mentality, nor what we want to promote because we think that adapting to climate change is going to take community involvement. The stronger we are as a network, the stronger we all are. What we try to do at the farm is bring as many people to the farm as possible. One of our core philosophies on the farm is what are called eco-tones. In ecology, that means where two ecosystems meet, like a tidal pool or a marsh. It's usually in nature where the most productive things happen. We model ourselves after that. We want to know how we can bring people from San Francisco, from the East Bay, let them meet farmers in Sonoma County. We have the senior center across the street from us. We have events with the senior center every year. Community has been a huge part of our goal, especially because Nick and I are both storytellers.
We often joke that we don't want to call ourselves farmers even though we have a farm because we really respect what farmers do. We're on such a small scale that we're sticking to our skills, which is cultural storytelling. I'm a writer, and Nick's a brand strategist. Some of the programming we do is we get volunteers up for the weekend. We call them work/play weekends. The goal is to both expose people to land-based practices and also have a lot of fun while we're doing it. We want to make the revolution irresistible. Let's have fun while we're ushering in this new way of being and valuing our time. Everything we try to do, we try to make it very fun and engaging and get people up to see the process of regeneration hands-on.
Fiona: Amazing. I can really see that permaculture is changing how you engage with the land really mirrors and reflects the way that you are creating community in this space. It's really beautiful.
Spencer: Thanks. Yeah, absolutely.
Fiona: I would love to hear you share a bit about some of the philosophies that guide thinking at the farm. I've seen, read, and listened to various conversations that you all have had in the past and heard a lot about the philosophies of solarpunk, the speculative fiction movement, obviously reflected in the name of the farm. But then also, I know this vision and the model and space you've created has also been informed a lot by queer theory, permaculture, and regeneration. I would love to hear in your own words how these philosophies have shaped your approach and practice.
Spencer: Absolutely. So obviously, solarpunk is a large one, we named our farm after it. And what solarpunk is for those who have never heard of it before… If you've heard of cyberpunk, and steampunk, these are speculative fiction genres, and they tend to be slightly dystopian. So it's like Mad Max or Blade Runner. It's these futures, that kind of project our anxieties of what might happen if we continue on our path. And they serve as warnings. And what solarpunk was trying to do is like, we have enough warnings, let's imagine the future that we actually want to live in. Let's start thinking about what it could look like. And then the beautiful thing about solarpunk as a movement is that from the get-go, it was like this isn't going to be just be a visioning practice, we're also going to ask how do we make this reality? And so that was basically the perfect name for what we're trying to do, because we're both trying to embody through the farm what could a future based on regenerative values look like? What could a life based on regenerative values look like? Model that to the world and make it happen.
And so that's been super formative for us. It's something we love sharing with everyone. I think it's really important to have practical optimism. And yeah, as you mentioned, queer theory also super, super important to what we're doing, I think, at its root, and you know, queerness is the spirit that isn't afraid to go beyond cultural barriers and kind of try new things. And that has been, I think, super helpful as we explore what it looks like to have a community land project in a more rural area with like a very queer-forward spirit. I think the queer community has always been really good at creating community in the face of adversity and finding joy in the face of adversity, and organizing against government inaction. And so these are all ways that, you know, we've learned from our queer mentors and elders how to show up in times of transformation. So those are, those are the big ones.
And as I mentioned earlier, permaculture has been super formative for us as well. The Occidental Arts and Ecology Center in particular, who are our mentors are incredible. They're our neighbors, just about 20 minutes away, and they mentor people all over the world. And what I really loved about them is their focus on justice. A lot of our class was less about gardening and more about social justice, because permaculture which means permanent culture is about you know, “how are we, how do we live together over long periods of time?” How do we create stable civilizations. And there's a huge natural, regenerative component, and there's also what they call people care and fair share. There are some contingents of the permaculture community that tried to like own and brand these methods of tending to your place. And our mentors were like, [that’s dumb] this is a new word for an ancient process. It's just like a word we're using to convey what we're talking about, and it is obviously very inspired by a lot of traditional ecological knowledge and indigenous science. So all of those things together kind of form the DNA of what we're trying to accomplish.
Fiona: And we'd love to hear just kind of on that note, you mentioned, you know, having enough warnings and trying to start to imagine what it could look like in the future. And I wonder you just talked a little bit about what the process and the transformation of the land so far has been on these 10 acres that you're stewarding. But I wonder if you can share about the vision looking ahead. Like what does this life based on regenerative values look like in the future?
Spencer: Um, yeah, it's so it's so fun being at the beginning of this and thinking about you know, What is this gonna look like. And in four years, I think we're just kind of at the beginning of really feeling like locals, like we've really integrated into our community. And like, anytime we go out to the coffee shop, we're saying hi to everyone, if we go to dinner in town we know eve every one of our servers. And I think that's like one small but very beautiful aspect that I felt was missing when we lived in the city of San Francisco. And I think the land itself, I really want it to be a community center in a way where it feels like so many people have helped us create it, and so many more will continue helping us create it. And so it really does feel like this isn't just our space, it's our community space. And I think it's really brought a lot of people together, which I love to see.
And I think, you know, at a certain point, it's kind of like, put your mask on before you help other people put their their masks on, because so much of our energy is going into regenerating our specific plot of land. And I hope at a certain point, we get to switch to start helping other people. We operate half as a nonprofit, we run all of our educational programming through our nonprofit, and I really want our nonprofit to start focusing on, you know, watershed health or helping raise money for other organizations in our area, again, really all still focused on our bioregion. But I think that extends from the Bay Area, because Guerneville is in relationship to the Bay Area, we are a tourist town, and it's kind of like, hard to separate those two things. So it's kind of from the Bay Area north. How can we start using our skills as communicators and storytellers to hopefully engage people to be excited about this movement? How do we start you bringing in other people or sending people elsewhere [to other regenerative projects]. So that's what we're super excited about.
Fiona: Um, well, for anyone who's just joining us, we are here with Spencer Scott of Solar Punk Farms who has joined Terra Verde today to talk about bioregional regeneration, sustainable living and creating a more ecologically-minded society. I want to just kind of go back to something we were talking about a minute ago, where, you know, in your articulation of, of the vision behind solar punk farms, and so much of the work that you all are doing is that it's a space by and for the queer community, but also with a radically inclusive approach to inspiring anyone to take action to regenerate the bioregion in which they live, you're just talking about, you know, this future vision of so much of your work so far has been focused on the land that you're stewarding. But that also this educational component is bringing in folks from the Greater Bay Area and from all over and, you know, through social media, you're inspiring these conversations about kind of these local approaches to bio-regeneration. I wonder if you can just talk a little bit more about your goal to create a safe space for queer people to explore farming, it's kind of a happy coincidence that we're having this conversation during pride month also. But you mentioned before, you know, creating a strong sense of community and identity in a rural and land-focused environment. So I'd love to create a little bit more space for you to talk about that component of your work as well.
Spencer: Absolutely, yes. Um, well, I will say that we live in one of the most incredible rural areas in the world. I feel like, it's one of the most liberal rural counties in America, and Guerneville has long been a queer destination town. And so it felt like a very promising place just for us to live. And I know that there are people creating queer land projects all over the country in places that are much less hospitable to that. So I'm always like hat tip to them. But I do think that even so, people, especially queer people—who often find themselves living in cities to be near other queer people and open-mindedness—don't have a strong cultural connection to land or farming, or stewardship. And so our goal, definitely a large part of our goal, was to create a space that felt welcoming to the queer community. And I think everything we do is usually co-created by other members of the queer community. And that being said, as you mentioned, our goal is to be inclusive. Not everyone in our town or in our bioregion is queer. So it's not going to be such a safe space that we want to exclude anyone. And Nick has actually, he's been working on this. I wish he was here to talk about it, but he's been really talking about, how do we transform the need for queer safe spaces to starting to recognize queerness as a superpower that can extend out of our safe spaces. It's very important that we have these spaces where we can feel welcome and express ourselves fully, but we also believe that the queer community has so much to offer. And that if we're only kind of like sheltering ourselves in these small areas, then we're kind of robbing the world a little bit of what we can offer. So, I think we try to hold both of those [truths] at the same time.
Fiona: Yeah, that ties back I think, to what you were saying earlier about seeing queerness as the spirit that's not afraid to go beyond cultural barriers. I love when you said that.
Spencer: Thank you.
Fiona: And I also, you know, have heard or read, I think maybe this was from Nick, the comparison that “queer is to conventional as regenerative is to capitalism.” This is another place where I see both that permaculture ethos of incorporating and reflecting the way of interacting with the land, and also the way of creating community. I think the economic situation and context that we're in, and how regeneration and taking a regenerative approach, kind of subverts that in the same way that, as you're saying, treating queerness as a superpower also subverts the systemic power that the conventional structures we live in dictate. I don't know if you want to elaborate any more about that relationship that you see between queerness and regeneration, and how it comes out in the work that you're doing at the farm.
Spencer: Absolutely, yeah. Nick, I think said that in an interview we had. I coincidentally just finished an essay on queer ecology so this is very on my mind right now. And I think that like, yeah, you said it, queerness is what pushes past cultural barriers. But it's also because queer people have practice in uncovering buried truths, and confronting hard truths. A lot of the coming out process is realizing that society wanted you to deny something, and that it would be convenient if you kept denying it, but ultimately running up against the fact that you you can't deny it any longer. And so we see a lot of parallels between that spirit—that queer people are practiced at—being very important in addressing and coming to grips with the climate crisis. And I think that queerness is that spirit that helps us move through that, hopefully quicker, and we can see it, and we can build a community around it. And it's really just about seeing options beyond what we're taught to see. And I think that that has been really crucial in this moment.
Fiona: I think that ties in a lot to hopefully what is becoming a broader recognition of liberation being essential for responding to, confronting, and solving the climate crisis. And I think just the way that you articulate that really ties that together.
Spencer: I mean, liberation is so important, because we've had a very centralized power system. And that's why we focus on regional regeneration, because we're not interested, nor can we be involved with regeneration everywhere. This is a decentralized effort that needs to happen everywhere. And so the more people who have the resources and access to make that happen, the better.
Fiona: What are some of the biggest challenges that you've faced over the past few years since you all started the farm? You and your husband, Nick, also both have full time jobs? And I know you said earlier that you don't consider yourself to be farmers. So how do you balance it all? What does that look like for you?
Spencer: Oh, gosh, well, it's definitely a balancing act, which means it's an ongoing process. And we're learning a lot. I will say, I feel like when we're in jobs we hate we spend all of our energy outside of our jobs recuperating in different ways. And I think that the farm is such a passion project for us that it doesn't, it doesn't tax us in the same way that work used to. We definitely are like… I've experienced burnout in my climate journey many times. I think you get better at recognizing when you're like, Okay, I need a break. But yeah, we work our job and then on the weekends, we often have volunteers or events or off-sites and it's like having a very time consuming hobby, but it's a hobby still and it's something that you love doing and ultimately we're trying to work towards a way that this could be our full-time situation. I think we both love what we do. I love working at the nonprofit I do, I get to work on climate on a global scale. But there's also nothing quite like getting that very visceral feedback from the work you're doing in a land project. So yeah, I think it's, it's kind of that. We take time off when we need to and otherwise the work we put in is kind of regenerative in its own way.
Fiona: It's such an inspiration for how to, you know, model your own life in a way that is, like you said, a balancing act, but this blend of passion, project, hobby, work, activism, community building… a little bit of everything.
Spencer: Yeah, yeah, it's got to be fun. And that's what we've been saying from the beginning. It's like if this is miserable, there's no sustainability in that, in the sense that it can't be sustained. So thank goodness for our community and friends and family that have made this so fun and have encouraged us and joined us, because we couldn't have done it without them.
Fiona: Well, you definitely do a good job of making, as you said earlier, the revolution irresistible…
We talked about this a little bit, a minute ago but looking ahead, I wonder if you want to share about any of the more specific future goals or projects for Solar Punk Farms. But then also, if there are any ways you want to share for listeners who might be interested to get involved, or supporting your work or your mission, a lot of listeners to the show are in the Greater Bay area. So this is very relevant to many of them.
Spencer: Yeah. Well, I think most excitingly, I think we're ready to hire our first person. And we want to approach it as almost like the the third member of a startup or something. Someone who's going to be interested in and dedicated to the farm. Ultimately we need someone who's going to be focused on the land project, the farming, the permaculture, the landscaping, and also someone to help us with the farming education we do. So keep an eye out for a job listing around that. We're really looking for someone that wants to be a co-partner on this project. And then I think we're really excited to do an artist in residency. We've applied for some grants around the intersection of art and mental health, and we want to talk about, how can climate storytelling, or works of art help with eco anxiety. A lot of people feel stuck and anxious about the climate movement, and we want to help, turn that anxiety into action. So I'm really looking forward to that. We run all of those things through our nonprofit, and you can donate online, if you'd like. Or if you want to come out to a volunteer day, we'll be posting more of those in the fall. You should follow us on Instagram, because that's where we announced them.
Fiona: Amazing. Well, that is unfortunately all the time we have for today. Thank you so much for joining me Spencer. It was really a joy to talk with you.
Spencer: Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure to be here.
Fiona: And thank you to everyone who tuned in to listen. To learn more about Solar Punk Farms, visit solarpunkfarms.com and you will find this episode of Terra Verde and other shows in the online archive on kpfa.org. And also on the Earth Island Journals podcast page. Have a great weekend. And thanks again, Spencer.
Spencer: Thank you so much.