Humans are a keystone species

My interview with Lyla June Johnston

Hello,

For a long time I quietly believed that humans were the problem. I never said it out loud, but it shaped how I saw almost everything. I grew up in a family where religion was a bit of a joke, and as a teenager trying to make sense of where the planet was heading, I didn’t have a story that told me I belonged here. Dr Lyla June’s work was one of the things that gave me one, so I was grateful to sit down with her at the farm earlier this year.

Lyla’s argument is simple and quite radical: the Earth doesn’t need saving from us. It needs us to remember what we’re for. Her PhD research shows that for thousands of years, indigenous peoples didn’t just live off the land. They made it more abundant. They built clam gardens in the Pacific Northwest that fed people, otters and birds for 3,500 years. They planted chestnut forests that colonists assumed were wild. They burned land deliberately to keep it fertile and to prevent the kind of catastrophic wildfires we now see every summer. In her words, humans are a keystone species, with an ecological role that only we can play.

What struck me most is where she thinks the change has to start. Lyla grew up believing humans were worthless, and for years she lived that out. By her early twenties she was drinking every day. Things turned around when two elders told her she was sacred. She’s now 14 years sober, and she sees the same pattern playing out across our whole species: if we believe we’re a plague, we act like one. “In order to properly garden our outer landscapes,” she told me, “we must properly tend our inner landscapes.” That idea almost never comes up in conversations about climate, and I think it’s what’s been missing.

I also asked her the question I get asked most about our work here: can regenerative farming actually feed people? In Ibiza, where 96% of our food arrives by boat, it’s not an abstract question. In her answer she points to Hawaii, where a farming system organised around watersheds once fed an estimated 1.2 million people. Today fewer people live there, and around 90% of their food is imported. We also talk about why we’re all working so hard, and how those of us who aren’t indigenous can learn from these practices without simply taking from them.

She ends with the prayer that has carried her through everything. It’s only two words long, and I’ll let you hear it from her.

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With love,
Finn