A brief introduction to Hart Hagan

Allow me to share the milestones that have shaped my environmental journey.

I grew up trapsing in the woods and along the creeks behind my house in rural Kentucky. We lived in a farming community. I was taught “conservation” by conservative parents and learned to identify birds and trees. Then I left home and forgot about the environment for thirty years. I noticed the increased populations of white-tail deer and Canada geese. I assumed we were doing alright environmentally.

In 2016, I learned that meadowlark and bob white quail populations had declined by 90% because they lacked the wildflowers that provide their ground-nesting habitat. I learned that monarch butterflies had declined because they lacked milkweed. I then co-founded my local native plant society, where we promote the use of native plants in our home landscapes, to support bees, butterflies and birds.

In 2018, I was listening to an audiobook called a Brief History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson, who told me that because of global warming, populations of plants and animals were migrating northward and uphill seeking cooler weather. I studied Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth and read Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything. I also read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, which provides a devastating critique of the economic and political system I had been taught to believe in.

But it would be another three years before I learned what climate change was really about.

In 2019

Meanwhile, I started a radio show in my community, and recorded over 400 episodes between 2018 and 2023.

In 2021, I lay in bed on a Saturday morning, listening to the voice of Judith Schwartz, as she read me her book Cows Save the Planet, And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth. Chapter Four is The Return of Lost Water, which tells the story of “A New Water Paradigm.” This is the idea that water and water cycles play a much larger role in climate change than we are led to believe.

In that same year, I read Gabe Brown’s Dirt to Soil, One Family’s Journey Into Regenerative Agriculture. Here, I learned the Five Principles of Soil Health, which is how you learn to care for the soil, mainly by not destroying it with tillage, chemical fertilizers, and by covering the soil with mulch or living plants, by keeping living roots in the ground at all times, and by planting a diversity of plants, which jump starts the soil food web and adds a lot of carbon to the soil.

By practicing the Five Principles of Soil Health, we prepare the soil to absorb rainfall, to grow healthy food, to avoid flooding and avoid drought.

So 2021 was the year that I learned the importance of both soil and water, and also ecosystems, in addressing climate change.

In 2022, I became associated with the good people at EcoRestoration Alliance and also Biodiversity for a Livable Climate. These are two organizations of people who understand that ecosystem restoration is essential in addressing climate change.

In 2022, I started my first real pollinator garden. My 2018 pollinator garden failed, but my 2022 garden in urban Louisville became a raging success in the first season and up to the present. I enjoy showing pictures, of which I have countless hundreds, contained within dozens of slideshows that I share in my free webinars.

In 2024, I began teaching courses with Biodiversity for a Livable Climate and am now teaching my seventh course: How Trees & Forests Shape Our Climate, and 8-week course featuring eight distinguished speakers. I have also taught courses entitled Healing Our Land & Our Climate, Food & Farming, Water & Climate, and Wildlife & Climate. Climate change is a prevailing theme, but mere temperature change is not even in my top 10 list of concerns. Ask me why.

I leave you with this quote from Bright Green Lies, the excellent book by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert. The book states:

“We’re going to suggest what is for this culture a radical redefinition of what it means for an action to be “green” or “environmental,” which is that the action must tangibly benefit the natural world on the natural world’s own terms. Not that the action helps fuel the industrial economy. Not that the action makes your life easier. Not that the action seems like a success, such that it helps you not feel despair. The action must tangibly help tigers, or hammerhead sharks, or Coho salmon, or Pacific lampreys, or sea stars, or the oceans, or the Colorado River, or the Great Plains. Environmentalism for the real world: what a concept.”