Have we forgotten how to truly participate in the natural world? What can the ancient practice of shepherding teach us about ecological healing? How does physical labor connect us to the land, memory and belonging?

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu speaks with Helen Whybrow about her book, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life. Besides being a detailed account of the day to day, season by season life on her farm, where she and her family raise sheep, build a broad community, and maintain Knoll Farm, a center for activists, writers, artists and others to share ideas on how to promote healthier and more just ways of living together and in the environment, The Salt Stones is at base about the ways we are losing a sense of belonging, not only with others and with other forms of life on this planet, but also with the cycles of existence, of life and of death. Whybrow shows time and again that it is mostly a matter of developing ways of seeing and noticing what is all around us, and learning about and respecting the ways that generations of people and non-human animals have existed together in sustainable and mutually-dependent ways.

Helen Whybrow is a writer, editor and organic farmer whose book about shepherding, land and belonging, The Salt Stones, was longlisted for the National Book Award and chosen as a New Yorker Best Book of 2025. Her other titles include Dead Reckoning (W. W. Norton, 2001) and A Man Apart (Chelsea Green, 2015). She has a master’s in journalism and has taught writing at Middlebury College and the Breadloaf Environmental Writer’s Conference. She and her family farm and steward a refuge for land justice at Knoll Farm in Fayston, Vermont.

(0:00) The Salt Stones

(2:50) A Lifelong Love of Land and Language

(6:50) The Cord: A Story of Lambing and Life

(13:40) Literary Influences and Jean Giono

(18:15) The Erased Work of Nature

(20:30) Radical Intimacy and Participation

(23:45) Measuring Diminishment and Listening to Nature

(25:15) Lita the Ewe and Complex Ecosystems

(29:17) Kulning: The Lost Art of Herding Songs

(32:15) Embodied Memory and Physical Labor

(37:45) The True Meaning of Belonging

(43:30) Radical Hospitality at Noel Farm

(46:15) Closing Thoughts on Kinship

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