Post Carbon Fellows Wes Jackson’s and Bill McKibben’s pioneering work to fight climate change was featured in this article about this year’s Prairie Festival.

From the article:

One Sunday morning in late September, the 58-year-old McKibben was at The Land institute in the middle of Kansas farm country, preaching about the imminent crisis of climate change. It is, he said at the Prairie Festival, a cause of such existential importance to civilization that some people, especially those who are older, with less to risk, should join him in civil protests that will likely cause them to be jailed, as McKibben had been the month prior to his Kansas visit…

The Prairie Festival is the Land Institute’s signature annual event, this year drawing upwards of 900 people who assembled on chairs in an unpainted barn, its floors still of dirt, the overflow crowd spilling out to sit on portable lawn chairs and on hay bales placed under trees and around grain bins.

The institute was formed in 1976 by Wes Jackson with the goal of developing perennial grains that mimic the ways of nature. Civilization in the last 10,000 years has hewed to annuals such as corn and wheat and, in the last century, application of massive doses of petrochemicals. The institute’s motto is “transforming agricultural, perennially.”