ASUNCIÓN MOLINOS GORDO
When I was invited to take part in Thinking Like a Mountain, I immediately felt compelled to dive into the project. The subtitle comes from an essay by Aldo Leopold, and it resonated with something I had already been developing in my artistic practice: a concept I call campesino thinking—or peasant thinking. Essentially, the concept proposes a perspective on the work of farmers around the world that positions them as experts and cultural producers—intellectuals,—rather than reducing them to “food producers” or “raw-material suppliers.” Their work involves tremendous amounts of research, trial and error, and highly sophisticated knowledge production. And when I speak of “pensamiento campesino,” I mean the entire spectrum: livestock, fishing, everything—not only agriculture.
This reflection on campesino thinking began when I lived in Egypt and traveled throughout the Mediterranean basin. There I saw that many farmers—who may not share religion, language, methodologies, economies, or political systems—nonetheless share a worldview: a collective sense of identity and a remarkably similar way of thinking. They think long-term, for instance. Many sow seeds or plant trees whose fruit they themselves will never enjoy, because they understand they are part of a much longer chain. They also engage in intergenerational forms of responsibility and knowledge production—forms not immediately “recordable” or visible.
I often try to foreground the soil itself as evidence of this knowledge: fertile soil is the outcome of the peasants intellectual labor. In the workshop I conceived for Bergamo, the seed became the evidence. Seeds are also the product of the farmers intellectual labor and in the workshop we are going to learn about the histories they contained, how they came to be what they are these days.

GIULIA COSTANZO TALARICO
Thinking Like a Mountain immediately caught my attention as well—given my academic training, my activism, and my work. I identify myself as an ecofeminist activist and also as an academic activist: I work within the university while also participating in forms of collective knowledge production.
Knowledge today is constructed in profoundly violent ways that exclude so many situated and valid sources: peasants, Indigenous communities, women. Postcolonial and decolonial studies examines how relations between dominant and dominated subjects are produced, and how the identities of these groups are constructed as “subaltern”. Gayatri Spivak argues that this entails epistemic violence, because it casts the “Other” as someone whose subjectivity is erased, negated, treating “subaltern people” as if they were without history, as if they had no voice. In this sense, feminist theory has put forward powerful critiques of Western thought, arguing that traditional Western epistemology systematically excludes women as subjects of knowledge. As Sandra Harding explains, modern rationality presents itself as objective and neutral; yet it does so by universalizing a partial standpoint—that of the white, bourgeois, heterosexual man—thereby excluding other perspectives. For many years, the feminist movement has proposed alternative epistemologies that recognize women as legitimate subjects of knowledge. I work mostly with women in rural contexts, and they are still not considered legitimate sources of knowledge. In my experience, I have been observing that women are largely invisible in agriculture, and that their work is often seen as merely “helping” men with production. Likewise, domestic work is not recognized as work, but rather treated as a “female obligation.” This is the result of the sexual division of labor in rural contexts, produced by a capitalist and patriarchal system. Yet they carry perspectives grounded in territories and in bodies—deeply rooted forms of understanding that extend far beyond the frantic rhythm shaping today’s “Burnout society,” as philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls it.
What Thinking Like a Mountain awakens in me is precisely this long-term thinking you mention. A mountain is there in its territory. What would it think? What story would it tell after centuries upon centuries? And what transformations—what ruptures—would it name?
As an academic working on the agri-food system and its consequences, I often find myself trying to explain concepts like “deterritorialization”—the way the local is stripped away, turning places into what sociologist Jan Douwe van der Ploeg calls “non-places”. Deterritorialization is a comprehensive process of rural breakdown that refers to a rupture between agriculture and territory, that is, a separation of agricultural activities from their local realities. Agriculture no longer fulfills its primary function of feeding and sustaining the community; at the same time, deterritorialization also takes shape in social relations, meaning a progressive weakening of the symbolic and cultural reference points of everyday collective identity. If I had to explain it to my grandfather, I would say: it means we no longer know where our food comes from. For my grandparents, this is incomprehensible; food always came from your garden, your orchard, your farm. But today that’s no longer the case. The global food system allows us to eat anything, every day, at any hour. Some years ago, a report by the NGO Amigos de la Tierra classified many “food miles” products as those that flood both large and small food retailers and can travel up to 9,000 kilometers before reaching our table. Chickpeas from Mexico, fish from China and Argentina, cereals from Ukraine, fruit from Peru and Uruguay and coffee from Vietnam are just a few examples. This report presents data only for Spain, which imported more than 25.4 million tons of food that travelled an average of 3,827 kilometers. However this is a global issue. That’s deterritorialization, and it creates disconnection from our land. And more gravely, it contributes to processes tied to climate change, desertification, and so on.
So what would a mountain think as it watched all this unfold? After centuries of green seasons, yellow seasons, brown seasons—suddenly the standardization and homogenization of landscapes: flattened terrain, monocultures, land effectively murdered to make room for them. As Vandana Shiva says, these are monocultures of mind, produced by a “culture of death” rooted in neoliberal values that foster an intrinsic violence capable of manipulating nature and societies in order to generate and accumulate profit and power.

ASUNCIÓN MOLINOS GORDO
Sure, we have to include another layer: geological time. The time of the world and of the communities that have inhabited it. Many Indigenous cultures, for instance, laugh at the notion of extinction, they think life is infinite. Cultures more attuned to life don’t conceptualize extinction in the same way. The very idea of extinction is tied to a particular worldview—industrial, capitalist. In terms of modes of thinking, how we think is inseparable from how we live and depending on one’s tasks, one thinks differently about life, death, continuity. For people like your grandparents—who know where food and life come from—it’s difficult to imagine an end to it, because they understand life as fundamentally unstoppable. And in geological time—which far exceeds human time—there are countless shifts and transformations. Geological time can absorb all kinds of systemic alternations without implying an apocalyptic end.
I was also struck by what you said about the non-place and the separation of food from territory. To me, that separation is directly tied to the dispossession of traditional agricultural communities, when the farming communities get dispossessed of their land, access to water, their labor, their means of production—they gradually get stripping away of their historical role as food producers and that is the first step to deterritorialization. Peasant communities, and small- to medium-scale family farms, have fed the world since the origins of agriculture. And yet, in recent decades, they have been displaced by industrial systems. Industrial food production reduces food to a commodity, a site of speculation. It is short-term: you grow a crop until you exhaust the land, then you move on to another country and repeat the cycle—an extractive mindset. By contrast, the defining feature of peasant and agricultural communities is not extraction but conservation: maintaining, sustaining, ensuring a continued cycle. This is why sociologist van der Ploeg talks about “depeasantization”: the erosion of family farming worldwide, for many different reasons. And with that erosion, an entire way of life is swept away—a world-system that has sustained us until now.
While researching soil, I found a striking fact: all life on Earth depends on the first twenty centimeters of fertile soil—everything from microorganisms to birds to insects. Peasants and farmers are the guardians of those twenty centimeters. So what happens when those guardians disappear, are eroded, and are replaced by extractive logics?

GIULIA COSTANZO TALARICO
Vandana Shiva says that our current agri-food model is creating agriculture without peasants—farming without farmers. In Shiva’s words, peasants are “not profitable” for agribusiness because their farming tends to be autonomous: they save seed, diversify, and rely less on purchased inputs. That reduces corporate profit-extraction points, since profitability is amplified by standardization and control: industrial breeding and input packages are designed to pull farmers back to the market repeatedly, while diversified, place-based peasant systems are harder to subsume into uniform supply chains. This is why the corporate model pushes standardization and dependency, extending it to the “digital” phase of industrial agriculture: “digital agriculture,” surveillance tools, and data-driven platforms deepen dependence and consolidate control, culminating in the vision of “farming without farmers.” Within the neoliberal system, having peasants caring for agriculture is not profitable. It’s better—according to that logic—to remove them: they don’t serve, they’re considered dirty, backward. And the production of knowledge excludes a peasantry that holds not only the wisdom of food but also the wisdom of territory. I find that outrageous.
Your question, in fact, is rhetorical: What is being produced by this mode of acting? We are already seeing the results. Climate change is only the tip of the iceberg. The data are terrifying: according to WWF, on average, we are consuming the equivalent of 1.75 planets. If you look at the planetary boundaries framework, we have already exceeded six boundaries and are close to surpassing a seventh—out of nine. That means we’ve crossed thresholds beyond which there is no return. Humanity is in danger—our planet, all living beings. This mode of production simply does not function.
Listening to you, I was also thinking about peasant and Indigenous movements. Recently, at the counter-summits surrounding COP30 in Belém, Brazil, Indigenous and local defenders protested the COP itself—protested what is being done internationally, which is, in practice, nothing. International agreements fail because they produce no real alternatives, while at the grassroots level—within movements—alternatives emerge from ancient, longstanding wisdom. An interesting example is La Vía Campesina, an international movement that brings together millions of peasants all over the world, small-scale farmers, Indigenous peoples, and rural workers. It fights for “food sovereignty” (the right of peoples to define their own food policies and to produce healthy food locally) and promotes agroecological farming, in opposition to the corporate agro-industrial model. Food sovereignty is collective wisdom shaped by lived realities across generations, that integrate new methods and ancestral knowledge in harmony with nature, while promoting justice, equality, and solidarity. As we say in Spain, la sabiduría de toda la vida, the wisdom of all our lives, with no fancy terms like green economy or circular economy. It is the campesino economy that has always known how to sustain territory, care for forests, care for animals and people.
Two things are important to underline. Firstly, this is not only general or communal wisdom—it is also deeply gendered wisdom, much of it produced by women who have been rendered invisible. Historically, in many places—especially across the Global South—men migrated, and women remained in rural areas. They stayed to care for territory, forests, animals. This remains true today. Second: these forms of wisdom are therefore not just any wisdom—they are often women’s wisdom, erased. It’s crucial to make this visible because internationally recognized environmental defenders are increasingly at risk, including many women who protect native seeds. They are seed guardians—seeds of resistance. In many cases, the protectors are women. According to La Vía Campesina, peasant women continue this work of conserving, protecting, and safeguarding seeds, which are the foundation of food sovereignty. Around the world, for centuries women have been responsible for selecting, conserving, and managing a wide variety of seeds. Moreover, women lead the fight against some of humanity’s greatest threats, such as climate change, species extinction, environmental pollution; in Latin America, they are widely recognized as defenders of the environment, las defensoras, who lead territorial resistance, putting their lives at risk—as in the cases of Berta Cáceres and Marielle Franco, who were tragically murdered.

Another key idea long emphasized by Indigenous, peasant, and feminist movements—heard repeatedly at decades of global-justice counter-summits—is this: What will we leave to those who come after us? We live in a society that consumes without limits. We consume one and a half planets—if not more. And that’s just the average. Some countries consume the equivalent of five planets—like the United States. Spain consumes about 2.5. These numbers are devastating. We do not stop to think about what we will leave for our grandchildren or future generations. Instead, we obsess over not dying, staying young forever, looking young. These are absurd priorities, if you think about it. We give no value to aging peacefully, to being an older person who knows and transmits knowledge. All of that disappears beneath the pressure to consume and appear attractive. So this question—what will we leave to those who come after?—is central across Indigenous, peasant, and global feminist movements. And it aligns with what you were saying: it is not about debating “extinction: yes or no,” “collapse: yes or no,” but about living in a way that actually sustains life. Sustainable development is, of course, an oxymoron. What matters is the sustainability of life, or lives—as feminist economics puts it. Life must be at the center. And not only human life. When we speak of soil, of course we talk about nutrients and insects, but for people in many villages the earth is spoken of as if it were a living person, with a personality. If it doesn’t rain, the earth feels bad because it’s thirsty, as an older man in my village once told me.
We cannot forget those forms of understanding that were once obvious. I’m not trying to idealize or romanticize campesino thinking—rural life is not idyllic. But we should reclaim knowledge and wisdom rooted in territory, alive, proposing cyclical understandings of life and insisting on continuity with those who will come after—not wild consumption.

ASUNCIÓN MOLINOS GORDO
Yes, absolutely. I think the key is to re-signify these forms of knowledge, while many of these groups—mainly women from the Global South but also from industrialized countries—are stigmatized. They are considered uneducated, wild, in need of civilization or culture. When you strip people of cultural recognition, they are easier to eliminate. When there is a military project to enter and seize land, it is very different if the landowner enjoys broad social legitimacy or not: if society thinks farmers are destined to disappear—it becomes easy to push them aside.
How often do we hear in the media that a certain country is still mostly agricultural, as though that were a negative thing and agriculture were merely a phase a country must develop out of in order to become something modern, industrial. But as countries abandon agriculture, they lose their capacity to produce food, and we end up with complex crises on many levels. And in the end, returning to the notion of the non-place, we no longer know who will produce our food, because fewer and fewer people want to do it. The social stigma attached to peasant communities around the world is immense. Think of film portrayals: peasants as toothless, inarticulate, clumsy, lost in modernity—or, conversely, as noble savages, overly sweet and romanticized. But rarely are they portrayed as whole people: with idiosyncrasies, with intellectual agency, capable of making decisions, of challenging power—of protesting at the gates of a corporation or defending themselves when necessary.
The work you and me do—and the work of many collaborators, and thinkers like Vandana Shiva—is precisely this: from accepted platforms of knowledge production (like the academia, science literature or the art world) we work for the recognition of the rural knowledge production, for the recognition of their cultural production and therefore for the recognition of their cultural rights as cocreators of many, many things, including the actual seeds.
In fact, the workshop we’re running within Thinking Like a Mountain aims to make visible that the seeds we have today are the result of the intellectual labor of peasants worldwide. Thanks to their inventiveness in developing seed-improvement techniques, they created an enormous diversity of varieties—rice, corn, and many more—that are now disappearing due to industrialization. Many of these varieties were created artisanally—artistically, we might say—by peasant collectives. Some seeds tolerate salinity or drought, yet they never passed through a laboratory. And it never occurred to the people who developed them to claim patents or ownership; for them, seeds are part of the commons. Through these seeds, they inherited ancestral knowledge. They may improve something, but it remains for the next generation. No one says “this is mine.” That logic does not exist in campesino cultures—across borders, despite differences—because they share a profound certainty: you cannot fence off a field, patent a seed, or claim private ownership over shared heritage.
Our workshop, titled Crops Are Not Orphans, responds to the term orphan crops—used in English for crops deemed uninteresting to the global market or the seed industry. They are called orphans because they are not commercially valued. But these seeds are anything but orphaned: they are indispensable to many communities. They are part of staple diets, hold healing properties, play ceremonial roles, serve as gifts. Seeds have served many purposes—they were even used as currency long before money existed. So when industry labels these seeds orphans, it erases their origins and belonging. If something is called orphaned, it is presumed to have no custodians—and therefore can be taken, stripped, exploited. It is a cynical strategy of devaluing what is precious to those deemed unimportant.
That is why our work—in the spaces we inhabit—is crucial: to build complicity with broader society. To make visible what is not obvious because the knowledge is embodied; because for the people we collaborate with, these logics are self-evident. And if something is self-evident, it isn’t necessarily explained. So academia, activism, and art must create bridges, offering access to knowledge that not everyone has the opportunity to research, especially those who do not live in rural environments—or who do, but are disconnected from them.

GIULIA COSTANZO TALARICO
You’re absolutely right. And I see another risk as well. Academia has an important role in making things visible, but we must do it carefully, because academia often appropriates and co-opt both spaces and knowledges. The kinds of knowledge you’re talking about—seeds, territories, ways of seeing and feeling—are frequently not written down: there are no patents, no formal authorship, as these are mentalities, worldviews, cosmovisions, cosmogonies—knowledge transmitted orally. But sometimes academia appropriates those cosmovisions and from a decolonial perspective we speak of epistemic extractivism. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui warns us about that. She denounces the intellectual appropriation carried out in the name of a “discourse of decolonization.” This involves strategically recuperating the contributions of activists and thinkers from the Global South, only to circulate them as one’s own and without political commitment. She therefore warns that there can be no discourse or theory of decolonization without a decolonizing practice. So that’s something we need to examine within academia: the privilege of being able to write and attach a first and last name to ideas.
It is fundamental to make clear that what we’re saying is not ours. We learned it from peasants and farmers, from elders in our villages, from the people who hold this knowledge. What we’re discussing is epistemological: how we decide to construct knowledge. Because we still operate within a hierarchy in which one type of knowledge is valid and another is not—considered improper or inferior—and that is linked with how dominant knowledge has historically been built. Francesca Gargallo, a scholar Italian by origin, later naturalized in Mexico, wrote about how Western epistemology turns other knowledges into “others”: it refuses to treat them as equals because it does not want them as equals. It wants to minoritize them—not numerically but ideologically. She gives many examples, especially regarding Indigenous and rural women in Latin America and points out that we are half the world, yet we are treated as a minority. And I think the same applies here. You cannot truly claim that peasant populations are a minority. Everyone who lives in a city has some relative who lives in a rural area. And yet peasant life is treated as peripheral, marginal. This marginalization is deeply violent—symbolically first, and then materially through economic systems.
So we have epistemic extractivism on one side—centralizing a Western, modern gaze—and marginalizing everything else, bringing the feeling of being ignorant and of holding knowledge that doesn’t count. Calling seeds orphans it’s absurd: what feeds you and gives you life, is labeled orphaned simply because no one named or patented it—it isn’t profitable enough to matter. It’s an extremely violent way of constructing knowledge—and it’s reflected in economic and political systems that are destructive to the point of no return.

ASUNCIÓN MOLINOS GORDO
That’s exactly the violence at stake: systemic and symbolic violence in the places of enunciation. And as you said, this happens through cultural extractivism that academics can enact, and artists too—we’ve seen many cases—placing rural knowledge in some old-timey box to be studied again: you are the object of study and I am the clever observer.
In Spanish contemporary art, rural narratives have suddenly appeared, and many artists are working with them. There’s even a forum on culture and ruralities. On the representational side, small spaces are beginning to open for rural people. And yet, those spaces are often not occupied by people who are actually from rural areas. Instead, they are taken up by neo-rurals—people from cities, often from comfortable class backgrounds, who decide to go watch a hen lay an egg and, after three months of a “rural project,” are invited by major institutions to sit in a chair that is not theirs. Rural communities don’t need others to speak in their behalf. As we just mentioned, we have our ow voice, and cultural realms that are sovereign. We are not in need of a spokesperson that translates our worlds, we are only seeking only for recognition and invitations to share our knowledge in our own terms. To me that is a twist on top of a twist. Because now, even when a bit of space opens, we ourselves aren’t occupying it. So one thing I very firmly advocate for is this: whenever advisory groups are created—whether for policy-making in rural areas or for art projects, farms, wind farms, anything—there must be someone “at ground level” involved. Not only someone from the area, but someone who is recognized by the community—someone trusted, someone who has earned respect through good work. If we can use our positions to help secure real recognition of these figures as intellectuals, as experts, as knowledgeable, people who should be invited to those tables, like Josep Maria Escriba, a farmer from Lleida whom funded a working work to develop a plan for water management in Cataluña o Josep Bertomeu Polet, a farmer from the Ebro river´s Delta, who became a lifelong advocate for the health of the river, its waters and its sediments.
And the place of enunciation matters. Feminisms have taught us that the body is a place of enunciation: each person’s life circumstances—their backbone—must be there in these spaces. So the questions are how do we bring people together? How do we build networks where everyone contributes something? I might be good at weaving baskets or at writing texts—whatever can matter.
Nonetheless, I am worried about the speed at which everything is moving, and the speed at which the peasant social layer is being dismantled, sometimes through direct violence—like military incursions—other times through economic suffocation. There are statistics that people are not talking about, but unions—at least in France—have begun to highlight farmer suicides. In recent years, it was nearly two people a day—around 600 people in the agricultural world choosing to end their lives. This is not direct violence, it’s people being completely dispossessed of their capacity to sustain themselves over time. They lose community and loneliness is a huge problem. Moreover, Rural Europe, unlike Abya Yala (a term used among indigenous communities to refer to the entire American continent), has masculinized, because we women left. For example in my own family, my two brothers are farmers, as my parents and grandparents used to be as well. I’m the first who isn’t. And the same with all my friends—the boys are the ones who stayed, through industrialization and mechanization, agriculture also masculinized in a kind of testosterone narrative. So that’s why speed worries me, thinking of how fast things are accelerating and whether we are really capable of responding at the scale of the problem.

GIULIA COSTANZO TALARICO
I remember as a child in the 1990s, globalization was presented as a panacea, something magical and wonderful. It was marketed as a cultural and folkloric union, where everyone would travel everywhere and all problems would be solved. And little by little we discovered that globalization meant neoliberal globalization: structural policies shaping a different world, one that prevents territories from being sustained as they once were.
So yes, it is overwhelming, but there are many places where people are thinking locally and proposing alternatives—not as global models to copy, but as experiences to share, rooted in a specific place. For example, in Spain Red de Redes de Economía Alternativa y Solidaria (REAS)−The Network of Networks for Alternative and Solidarity Economy− is a nationwide network with a strong territorial structure that works at the local level and shares experiences through its national meetings. It promotes initiatives at the national, local, and community levels, for instance by organizing meetings and workshops to coordinate local networks while sharing perspectives and visions. In this sense, REAS is grounded in a shared Charter of Principles—drafted in 1995 and later updated, aiming to foster transformative and just economies. Besides, at counter-summits, at the World Social Forum, people share their territorial alternatives and diversity becomes a strength. I do believe social transformation is possible if we look from within our territories—if we reterritorialize a world that neoliberal globalization has deterritorialized.
Repopulation, for example, is essential in the countryside. Across Europe—and the West more broadly—we’ve seen the countryside masculinize. And even when women are present, they remain invisible, because they’re framed as helping, not working. There’s what experts call “statistical invisibility”, and it pushes women out entirely. But repopulation movements are happening. In Spain, and in Southern Europe more broadly like in Italy or Portugal, many of the people moving to the countryside are women who left rural areas, lived in cities, and later returned—sometimes not to their own village but to another one—bringing what they’ve learned and sharing it collectively.
Speed worries me too—everyone wants things fast, everything must be immediate, we live in a society that demands fast solutions, while solutions are slow. That’s why campesino wisdoms endure: they’re built over time, they don’t arise quickly. In the Zapatista movement, the snail is a symbol which stands for infinity, it is circular, moving, but slow. As they say, “We go slowly because we go far.” If we want to go far, if we want to leave something meaningful for those who come after us, we must build in a dignified way—which, in my view, also means slowly. The process needs time to unfold and I think we need to relearn that. And if we’re trying to reclaim past knowledges—which are also patriarchal—sometimes we need to re-signify things. And re-signifying requires putting our bodies into processes that sometimes hurt. All the times I’ve gotten the flu, I had to be back at work two days later. I love traditional medicine, plant remedies, as they hold incredible wisdom, and they really work, but they’re slow. I can’t take ten days to recover from a cold, so I take ibuprofen, ibuprofen all the way. And we’re practically addicted to it, but it feels necessary. It’s the demands of our society, where we don’t have the conditions to do things differently.
My grandmother told me how neighbors gathered to make bread, and while they worked they talked about their problems. We need to gather and talk, because when we do, we humanize each other again. We recognize one another. And I believe that’s where “social transformation” happens.

ASUNCIÓN MOLINOS GORDO
Yes—absolutely. Recovering real bonds, shared experiences. In the end, that’s also what builds identities: we build collective identities through collective experience.