Podcast Illuminates Essential Stewards of Western Lands
My earliest memory of land might be the smell of tomato vines. I ran barefoot everywhere and climbed every tree I could. “Growing up” meant spending less time in trees and more time on computers under artificial light.
Many of us might feel mounting eco-anxiety as calls to action accumulate around us in the face of global climate change. It is difficult to know how to use our time to make a difference. In its first season, the On Land podcast by Western Landowners Alliance highlights a group of women who have aligned their passions with purpose at the intersection of land and art. Theirs is the work of quiet contemplation and gratitude.
Melissa DiNino, one of the interviewees from the podcast, is both range rider and painter. DiNino exemplifies the complex identities that all the interviewees share: rancher and photographer, farmer and writer, artist and scientist. This seemingly simple Q&A podcast invites those with multifaceted identities—namely, everyone—to engage in the process of healing ourselves and our relationship to the land.
The first season was recorded live in Bozeman in 2021 during Art of the Cowgirl, a national convention that celebrates women’s contributions to Western culture. Interviewer Amber Smith, director of WLA’s Women in Ranching Program, invites each of her interviewees to defi ne stewardship. The result is an ongoing conversation about what it means to have a place-based ethic. For some of the women, stewardship means understanding humans as part of, but not central to, the ecosystem. For others, it means acknowledging that land is not a machine. It means listening and giving back. It means remembering.
One way to remember is through stories, and these women tell stories with their words, hands, and tools. They paint and photograph the “soft, quiet margins,” as DiNino puts it, of Western life, and contemplate the beauty of their repeating, intimate interactions with the land and with others.
Listening to these stories triggered remembrance in my own life. It has taken acknowledging how disconnected I became from land to begin my process of reconnection. Re-attaching my heart and hands to the earth that sustains me is an act of remembering. It is reminding myself to climb trees again, to slow down and smell the tomato vines.
Barbara Van Cleve, fifth-generation Montana rancher and well-known Western photographer, underscores a need to slow down when she sees her nephews herding cattle with ATVs. “It saves time,” they claim. To which she asks during an On Land episode: “And what are you doing with all that extra time?”
Although our technology can help us complete tasks more efficiently, it can also disrupt opportunities to seek meaningful relationships with our living and nonliving kin. In Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, Vol. 1—Planet (2021), Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer explains, “Despite our intimate intertwining with the ancestry and the ecology of other species, we suffer a deep estrangement from them, a phenomenon that has been called species loneliness.”
On Land’s first season spotlights women who are re-entangling themselves in this ecological web. They are helping develop a new, shared language around stewardship that rejects the harmful structures of colonization and separation. This new language will embody the intrinsic worth of land in all its relationality and complexity