Ripening

“Uva uvam vivendo varia fit”

-Augustus McCrae, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Dr. Jonathan Lundgren

October 23, 2026

It is hard to stand close to someone that you disagree with on a fundamental issue. It is even harder to hear them deeply enough to understand why they believe in something that you don’t.

Sometimes I believe so much in something that I want everyone else to feel what I have felt. If I could just present the numbers. If I could just say the right words. If I could show them something. Then surely the rest of the world would see like I do.

But in the absence of severe moral and ethical breaches, this convincing often doesn’t work. People with a dissenting viewpoint are not empty vessels simply waiting to be filled with what I know. There is a reason that they disagree. And if we don’t see this, then the moat that we dig around our tribe gets deeper and harder to traverse.

Over the past couple of months, I have met so many people with different viewpoints that have slowly revealed something that I think is really important.

Sometimes a whole room of adversaries can stand as one.

One of my farmer friends from Spokane recently shared his story on stage. He explained how members of his family (himself included) had gotten cancer, and how that changed his farm and his life. He also explained how the current agroindustry has so successfully duped farmers into believing that this industrial food system and the associated chemical inputs needed to make it scrape out a living are somehow good for farmers. 

His experiences made him start farming regeneratively.

I met an ordained minister who was a spiritual man and believed that Jesus was the savior. But to him, churches have lost their way in this rapidly changing world. And he didn’t want to become one of the many ministers that were so afraid of saying something that might frighten parishioners away that they said nothing at all. Sunday after hollow Sunday. And so he quit and began helping churches across the country message that conservation and connection to the natural world are not polarizing or frightening, but are fundamental to Christian faith.

And he began to help churches teach the ethical reason of regenerative agriculture.

Another of my friends is active in MAHA. Her daughter got very sick when she was young. At the hospital, she was kicked from specialist to specialist and test after test, racking extraordinary bills. All because the doctors had conformed to a system where they were either too busy or misguided to actually help her. And she had to sit in a rocking chair at night hoping and praying that her little girl was going to be okay. This led her to have so much mistrust in the system and to start questioning the dogma that led to it. She looked to the food that we eat and how conventional food is grown and how this leads to so many problems.

Her experiences made her find regenerative food for her family.

I was talking with one of my friends at a major fruit producing company. Every year the margins for their farmers shrink, and the costs of doing business go up. Although he is corporate and everything that comes along with that, he cares about the farmers that support his brand. And he cares about the customers that he is trying to provide food for. But profits matter to him, because this is what takes care of all of those people he feels responsible for.

After years of trying to make the status quo work, he decided to start learning regenerative production systems.

These and many other people that I care about fall into tribes that don’t always get along. But these disparate experiences and viewpoints started to crystalize as I sat in the pristine wooden barn full of world leaders that had assembled at Al Gore’s Caney Fork Farm.

At Climate Underground, regenerative agriculture was raised as a predominant answer to climate chaos. The arguments about how climate change is affecting us and why we should care were compelling to the room of believers. But outside of that room there are a lot of people that simply aren’t going to think that this is something to worry about, and they certainly don’t feel responsible to change their lives in order to correct this issue.

I couldn’t help but think that we can win without convincing the other side that we are right.

Regenerative agriculture is swelling to fixation within our food system and our society. Not because it makes everyone agree to what they are passionate about. It is going to fixation because it simultaneously solves the problems that you and the people that are different from you are passionate about.

Stewardship means caring for something or someone else at least as much as you care about yourself. We all need to feel heard. We need to feel safe. And we need to know that someone real cares about us. What if to solve my problem, I just need to explain to someone that I don’t agree with that their fears and concerns matter just as much as mine, and the solution to my problem actually solves theirs.

“A grape ripens by living near another grape”