Description:
A nuanced and empathetic account of the social risks faced by farmers navigating the effects of climate change in an era of political tensions
Farmers and ranchers are on the front lines of climate change, but many of them, like other rural Americans, remain unconvinced by climate science. Yet with droughts and wildfires becoming more severe, farmers have little choice but to respond. Margiana Petersen-Rockney offers a vivid account of how farmers manage the impacts and politics of climate adaptation in agricultural America.
Drawing on richly textured data from more than seven years of research in Northern California, Petersen-Rockney explores prevailing narratives of farmers as resistant to change, reorienting environmental policy scholarship and illuminating opportunities to increase the pace and scale of climate action. This is the first book to examine how farmers and the communities and public staff who support them navigate this contested terrain, and how climate adaptation decisions affect their livelihoods, families, communities, and the climate itself.
Review Quotes:
"This gripping book exposes the double burden of climate change in farm country, bringing readers into the living rooms of farm families torn between the demands of extreme weather and the demands of rural belonging in a divided society."--Liz Carlisle, coeditor of Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods
"Petersen-Rockney's richly ethnographic and deeply empathetic account of how family farmers are navigating climate change, often without naming it, will certainly make readers think differently about who and what is to blame."--Julie Guthman, author of Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry "Why deny climate change while farming under its specter every day? In a politically charged corner of Northern California, Margiana Petersen-Rockney reveals a quiet choreography of denial and accommodation: farmers who publicly reject climate change but privately adapt to its punishing realities. Urgent and incisive, the book turns a nuanced eye toward a central agrarian challenge: what farmers can--and cannot--control, as climate uncertainty reshapes rural life."--Nancy Lee Peluso, coeditor of The Social Lives of Land