Mother Jones – July-August 2019

16 MOTHER JONES |^ JULY / AUGUST 2019

OUTFRONT

in early march, just a week before the

Midwest was inundated by catastrophic

flooding, a dozen farmers gathered at the

First Presbyterian Church in Grinnell,

Iowa, for an event billed as a conversation

about “Faith, Farmers, and Climate Action.”

“How is God calling you to use your farm

to improve the world?” asked the evening’s

facilitator, Matt Russell. “We’ve got this nar-

rowing window of time in which we can

act,” he said. “When we think about climate

action—are you feeling any call to that?”

Russell directs the Iowa branch of

Interfaith Power and Light, a nonprofit that promotes a

religious response to global warming. A fifth-generation

farmer who runs a livestock operation with his husband

in nearby Lacona, Iowa, the 48-year-old nearly became

a Catholic priest in his twenties but then got a degree in

rural sociology. Now he preaches that America’s farm-

ers—a demographic seen as religious and conservative—

are a secret weapon in the climate fight.

Russell thinks growers care about global warming in

“far bigger numbers than past polling, research, and con-

ventional wisdom recognize.” According to a 2013 survey,

75 percent of Iowa’s farmers believe in climate change, yet

only 16 percent think the shift was due to human activity.

It’s not known if those opinions have held: When Iowa

State University researchers were putting together an up-

dated version of the same poll in 2017, President Donald

Trump’s Department of Agriculture told them they could

not include a question about climate change. But Russell

acknowledges that many farmers are reluctant to cham-

pion a progressive talking point.

“When I have a private conversation with a farmer, they

are generally not skeptical about human-caused climate

change. They just know they can’t talk about it publicly,” he

says. He views faith-based workshops as a “safe space” where

growers can discuss the issue. As TV crews and pundits de-

scend on Iowa for the 2020 caucus season, Russell’s goal is

to round up a 100-strong squad of farmers who are willing

to speak publicly about agriculture as a climate solution.

After a group prayer and a hearty meal of chicken

sandwiches and coleslaw, the conversation at the church

turned to cover crops. All plants, from a redwood tree to

a stalk of corn, absorb carbon dioxide and deliver it to

the soil. Left undisturbed, some of this carbon remains

there for millennia. In the past century, conventional

agricultural practices have stripped America’s soils of

more than half of their original carbon content.

COMMON GROUND

THOU

SHALT NOT

TILL

Inside the movement to

convert the heartland’s farmers

into climate evangelists.

personally took in about $54,000 in 2017

and $36,000 in 2018, after expenses.

And that’s the thing about resistance

grift. The phenomenon is real—there are

speculative books, monetized Twitter ac-

counts, and Pee Tape prayer candles, all

selling hope to an anxious audience. But it

hasn’t been that much of a cash cow, largely

because liberals are giving their money di-

rectly to people who can actually challenge

Trump. Democratic candidates shattered

fundraising records in 2018.

After two years of buildup, the Mueller

report, long hyped by the Democratic Co-

alition, did present a series of damning

findings about the president’s conduct.

But Mueller did not, as Dworkin had

hoped, “roll up on the White House, haul

[Trump] out in handcuffs, make him do a

perp walk in front of press and hold him

until trial.” And so the Democratic Coa-

lition moved on to the next cause. A few

days later, Dworkin emailed his list asking

for donations for a new campaign to re-

cruit Republican supporters of impeach-

ment. It was already trending on Twitter.

—Tim Murphy

MARCO CIBOLA