Well i have grown more radical the older ive become. I dont remember saying that, but it sounds like me. Which is why i could have made it up, but i didnt. Well, when you say you have to stop somebody, in our time, you would ought to qualify. You dont mean bomb them. And i didnt mean stop them by violence, but they do have to be stopped. The contrariness of the mad faer. I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it. I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts, and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing, and reaped, as i knew, by luck in heavens favor, in spite of the best advice. He is one of if not the great writer at work in american letters right now, hes built this body of work thats coherent, cohesive, powerful, beautiful, quite amazing. And it also happens that its about the most important subject that we have. Whether or not were going to be able to build the kind of communities that can successfully inhabit this earth or not. As he nears 80 years of age, berry is going beyond words to civil disobedience. Keep up the good fight you all. In 2011 he joined a fourday sitin at the kentucky Governors Office to protest the mountaintop removal of coal. What prompted that . A man your age. Well, good company. What prompted me was the thought that when you have a major problem in your state, to which State Government is utterly indifferent, and youve taken every obvious and legitimate recourse, trying to meet and talk and influence and demonstrate and speak and write and nothing had word. Why is that . Why do we concede to organizations like the Coal Companies such monolithic control over resources that should be the peoples . Because in our society, people with money are bigger and more powerful and more noticeable and count more as citizens than people without much money. So we did confront the governor and tell him we werent going to leave. Were here to make our grievances and our petition heard. And the governor then made a very, very clever move, he invited us to stay. And we did stay the whole weekend, did a lot of publicity for our side and were beautifully treated by the security staff. And people who sent us food and bedding and good wishes and even came in and gave us massages. And it was altogether one of the loveliest weekends ive ever spent in my life. Are are you going to do it again . I dont think that theres any plan afoot again, but i wouldnt mind it. Did you have a conversation with the governor about why you were there and what you hoped would happen . We tried to have a conversation with the governor and we tried previously to have a conversation with the governor but the State Government of kentucky is not set up for dialogue or discourse on difficult problems. The issue of clean water in Eastern Kentucky has so far not been possible to raise in the halls of the government. Whats happened to the water there . Well, its being poisoned by the outflow from those strip mines. If you expose those streams to surface erosion and runoff you let loose all kinds of poisons. And so theyre getting into the watershed. What do you think you accomplished . The streams are still flowing dirty in eastern the streams are still flowing dirty. But a lot has been done in the last 50 years to stop that and theyre still flowing dirty. Thats a tragedy and its to be suffered. And i live on the Kentucky River. I know that its got stuff in it that nobody is talking about. I know it has. For one thing, the native black willows are gone from the shores. For some reason, they cant live by the Kentucky River anymore. As a resident of the Kentucky River valley, i feel directly is a threat. If the willows cant live there, how sure can i be that i will continue to be able to live there . Why cant they live there . I dont know. Its something in the water. Thats why we went down to the Governors Office. This is intolerable. Theres no excuse for it. And theres no justification for the permanent destruction of the world. My belief and ive written out of it for many years is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts. We have the world to live in and the use of it to live from on the condition that we will take good care of it. And to take good care of it we have to know it and we have to know how to take care of it. And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it. And weve ignored all that all these years. You wrote quite recently that the two great aims of industrialization, replacement of people by technology and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a small plutocracy seem, in your words, close to fulfillment. What do you think from your lifes experience might stall the momentum and perhaps even reverse it . I dont know. There are two or three things that we havent been able to confront or even acknowledge politically. One is that the aim of the Industrial Revolution from year one has been to replace people with technology. So its a little contemptible to hear these people express in surprise at this late date that we have an unemployment problem. I dont know that theres any politician of visibility who could say that. So thats, its important for people like me to say it, who have no power. The other thing that were having trouble confronting and both sides are having trouble to confront it publicly and speak of it, is the disaster of being governed by the corporations. Those fictitious persons. And, you know, youre waiting for the day when some politician of stature and visibility will finally say, we cant have this any longer, were here in washington or frankfort to represent the people, not to be employed or bought by the corporations and to serve them. Are corporations which have been given person rights under the first amendment, are they acting humanly, even though they possess well of course not. They cant act human. You cant have a bunch of people combine into a person. Thats not physically possible. In confronting these people who are so immensely more powerful than we are theyre in trouble on two fronts. The big corporations . The big corporations. One is the people like these who are working against them so to speak from the inside. And then because their premises are wrong, creation is working against them from the outside. What have you come to understand is the natural logic of capitalism . That you have a right to as much as you want of anything you want and by extension, the right to use any means available to get it. Ive been talking for a long time about leadership from the bottom and im convinced perfectly that its happening and that leadership consists of people who simply see something that needs to be done and they start doing it. Im wondering if putting your faith in the people is a wise im not putting my faith in the people, im putting my faith in some of the people. Which ones . The ones who are committed. These people. The country and i think vandana could tell you, the world is full of people now who are doing what i just said, seeing something that needs to be done and starting to do it, without the governments permission, or official advice, or expert advice, or applying for grants or anything else. They just start doing it. At the age of 30, Wendell Berry decided to return to the land of his birthplace. He left the writers life in new york city to settle on the farm in kentucky with his wife tanya. One of the reasons that his realization and his writing was so powerful, was that it stemmed directly from his life and what he was doing. Had he written all the things that he wrote without that piece of land, they would have still been powerful but it was that wedding of man and message, of life and of idea that i think makes him uniquely powerful character in our culture. Can you talk about what sustains you, what has grounded you, you talked about coming home to kentucky. Somehow it seems to me that your love for language, your continuing search to find the word that expresses precisely what you think. Your determination to do justice to the subject may have also grounded you. Theres a remarkable consistency in the 40 books and works that youve produced. Well, the language is secondary, but it imposes an obligation. Ive been extraordinarily fortunate in my life. Ive lived in a place ive loved. Ive been a friend and ally with my brother all these years. Lived with a woman ive loved. Love. Its a sacrament and its probably some kind of a necessity, to take responsibility to be to love somebody, and marriage is a way of acknowledging and accepting the responsibility. How long have you and tanya been married . 57 . Long time. And then ive had my children for neighbors, which is really unusual in our time, to have your children for neighbors. And then ive had a part in raising my grandildren. Many years ago, you said, if you make a commitment and you stick to it to the end, there will be rewards. Well, thats comes under the heading, faith. Faith. You still consider yourself a christian. I still consider myself a person who takes the gospels very seriously. And i read in them and am sometimes shamed by them and sometimes utterly baffled by them. But there is a good bit of the gospel that i do get, i think. I believe i understand it accurately. And im sticking to that. And im hanging on for the parts that i dont understand. And, you know, willing to endure the shame of falling short as a price of admission. All that places a very heavy and exacting obligation on me as a writer. A lot of my writing i think has been, when it hasnt been in defense of precious things, has been a giving of thanks for precious things. So that enforces the art. What are the precious things that you think are endangered now . Its mighty hard right now to think of anything thats precious that isnt endangered. But maybe thats an advantage. The poet, William Butler yeats said somewhere, things reveal themselves passing away. And it may be that the danger that weve now inflicted upon every precious thing reveals the preciousness of it and us our duty. Some of us, these people and their fries and allies that now cover the world, these people are free to acknowledge the preciousness of the precious things. When did you know you were free . And i ask that because of the poem you wrote, the peace of wild things. Youre free when you realize that youre willing to go to the length thats necessary. Then read your own poem. This was a long time ago. The peace of wild things. When despair for the world grows in me and i wake in the middle of the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my childrens lives may be, i go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And i feel above me the dayblind stars waiting with their light. For a time i rest in the grace of the world and am free. The grace of the world, take that a little further for me. What i meant it in the religious sense. The people of people of religious faith know that the world is, is maintained every day by the same force that created it. Its an article of my faith and belief, that all creatures live by breathing gods breath and participating in his spirit. And this means that the whole thing is holy. The whole shooting match. There are no sacred and unsacred places. There are only sacred and desecrated places. So finally i see those gouges in the surface mine country as desecrations, not just as land abuse. Not just as human oppression. But as desecration. As blasphemy. Let me read you this. No amount this is you. No amount of fiddling with capitalism to regulate and humanize it can for long disguise its failure to conserve the wealth and health of nature. Eroded, wasted or degraded soils; damaged or destroyed ecosystems; extinction of biodiversity, species; whole landscapes defaced, gouged, flooded, or blown up thoughtless squandering of fossil fuels and fossil waters, of mineable minerals and ores, Natural Health and beauty replaced by a heartless and sickening ugliness. Perhaps its greatest success is an astounding increase in the destructiveness and therefore the profitability of war. Thats as powerful an indictment of the consequences of runaway capitalism as ive ever read and surely if thats happening as we know it is, it takes more than reverence, and it takes more than words to try to reverse it. What do you say to those people who say wendell, please tell me what i can do . All right. Well, youve put me in the place im always winding up in and that is to say, well, weve acknowledged that the problems are big, now wheres the big solution . When you ask the question what is the big answer, then youre implying that we can impose the answer. But thats the problem were in to start with, weve tried to impose the answers. The answers will come not from walking up to your farm and saying this is what i want and this is what i expect from you. You walk up and you say what do you need. And you commit yourself to say all right, im not going to do any extensive damage here until i know what it is that you are asking of me. And this cant be hurried. This is the dreadful situation that young people are in. I think of them and i say well, the situation youre in now is a situation thats going to call for a lot of patience. And to be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial. Among Wendell Berrys neighbors in kentucky, young people are taking up that challenge. Jonas hurley is an emergency room doctor, but he and his wife julie want to become fulltime farmers. We looked for about two years for land. We lived in a neighboring town, in town and just been dying to get, get some ground under our feet and looked for a couple years and found this little parcel of land a few years back. Were not certified organ eck, but we dont use any chemicals. All of our own animal manures to fertilize the field. Movable fences for the animals. Thats key, movable fences. We move our fences around a lot just so the animals have fresh pasture regularly and then they leave behind what nurtures the field. Good rich soil makes good strong plants, good strong plants can fight many, many diseases on their own. Theres netting on the bottom because they will burrow out. Come on out. Were fairly well selfsufficient feeding ourselves and friends and family. Wed like for it to pay the bills so i can quit my day job and putter here and wed like for it to you know help feed good food to our community. I say to the young people, dont get into this with the idea that youre going to solve all the problems even in your lifetime. The important thing to do is to learn all you can about where you are and if youre going to work there it becomes even more important to learn everything you can about that place, to make common cause with that place, and then resigning yourself, becoming patient enough, to work with it over a long time. And then what you do is increase the possibility that you will make a good example and what were looking for in this is good examples. You and wes jackson have proposed, speaking of patience, and part of the answer, a 50year farm bill. What is the heart of it . The heart of it is to recognize that agriculture as we are now practicing it involves a highly destructive ratio between people and land. More and more land is being used and used fairly destructively by fewer and fewer people. This used destructively because the fewness of the people implies and requires a dependence on more and more mechanical power and more and more toxic chemicals. Arthur young, a farmer whose land is down the road from st. Catharine college, learned for himself what chemicals can do. I got to looking around at modern farming and i knew something was not right on my land. The water was running off quickly, it was not going in the soil, the land was becoming compacted, and i said this is not going to work. And i i just said enough is enough and thats really when i got into this thing of sustainable agriculture. See that little pile of dirt . That is a worm casting. Its very, very rich in nutrients. Im on about my third year without fertilizer. Not a lot of synthetic stuff goes on this soil. But i know its Getting Better because i can see the production and my grasses are Getting Better every year. You also recommend taking animals out of their confinement and putting them back in putting them back on grass where they belong. Why . Because in the first place its wrong for people to mistreat fellow creatures. To use them inconsiderately and and cruelly. Let me say that there is an inescapable cruelty involved in our life. We have to live at the expense of other creatures. Doesnt make any difference how vegetarian we are, were still displacing other creatures. But the rule in using other creatures and i mean plants and animals is to use them with the minimum of violence. As you talk about that i thought of your poem, for the hog killing. Would you read that . All right. This is all about the, the practical ethics. Let them stand still for the bullet, and stare the shooter in the eye, let them die while the sound of the shot is in the air, let them die as they fall, let the jugular blood spring hot to the knife, let its freshet be full, let this day begin again the change of hogs into people, not the other way around, for today we celebrate again our lives wedding with the world, for by our hunger, by this provisioning, we renew the bond. When you and i were born in 1934 there were almost 7 million family farms in this country. There are now roughly around 2 million family farms and most of us are further away from the foundations of nature than weve ever been. Well, theres another tough problem. And so you have to look ahead a little bit. I dont like to talk about the future very much because it doesnt exist, and we dont know anything about it. But one thing we know right now is that people want to be healthy and to be healthy you have to have a diverse diet and diverse agriculture employs a lot more people than monoculture. So you imagine people moving out into the landscape because it will pay them to do it. Itll be what we now vulgarly call job creation. But this will take a lot of patience, wont it . Itll take a long time. Do we have time given what agribusiness is doing . We dont have a right to ask that question. We have to ask whats the right thing to do and go ahead and do it and take no thought for the morrow. Resettling of america means . It means putting people on the land, enough people on the land, to take proper care of it and pay them decently for doing it. The fact that we and our families know the history of people having to leave the country because they couldnt make a living there, is the history of rural america. But that they left because they couldnt make a living is an indictment of our land policies. The idea that you have to go somewhere else, that you have to leave a fertile country in order to make a living is preposterous and its a result of the wrong idea of what we mean by making a living in the first place. To make a living is not to make a killing, its to have enough. What have you seen over a long life that prevents you from being fatally pessimistic . Well, hope. And, and in my work, in my, especially in the essays, ive always been trying to construct or lay out, map out the grounds of a legitimate, authentic hope. And if you can find one good example, then youve got the grounds for hope. If you can change yourself, if you can make certain requirements of yourself that you are then able to fulfill, you have a reason for hope. Do you think that youve put yourself in front of the locomotive of history, waving your arms and shouts stop . Oh sure. And you can do that very comfortably if youre willing to be run over. I suppose i went with my friends to sit in the Governors Office because i was willing to be run over. Were you . Yeah. Of course. You cant do that without being willing to be. Its dangerous to to do acts of civil disobedience. I think once youve once youve crossed that line, well, something is settled. Youve got to be contrary. Well, youve got to be contrary, but theres a world of pleasure in contrariness. Dance, they told me, and i stood still, and while they stood quiet in line at the gate of the kingdom, i danced. Pray, they said, and i laughed, covering myself in the earths brightnesses, and then stole off gray into the midst of a revel, and prayed like an orphan. When they said, i know that my redeemer liveth, i told them, hes dead. And when they told me, god is dead, i answered, he goes fishing every day in the Kentucky River. I see him often. Going against men, ive heard at times a deep harmony thrumming in the mixture, and when they asked me what i say i dont know. It is not the only or the easiest way to come to the truth. It is one way. So as you talked about hope and i thought of your poem, a poem on hope, if you will read this. All right. It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old, for hope must not depend on feeling good and theres the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight. You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality of the future, which surely will surprise us, and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction any more than by wishing. But stop dithering. The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them . Tell them at least what you say to yourself. Because we have not made our lives to fit our places, the forests are ruined, the fields, eroded, the streams polluted, the mountains, overturned. Hope then to belong to your place by your own knowledge of what it is that no other place is, and by your caring for it, as you care for no other place. This knowledge cannot be taken from you by power or by wealth. It will stop your ears to the powerful when they ask for your faith, and to the wealthy when they ask for your land and your work. Be still and listen to the voices that belong to the stream banks and the trees and the open fields. Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet. Your hope of heaven, let it rest on the ground underfoot. The world is no better than its places. Its places at last are no better than their people while their people continue in them. When the people make dark the light within them, the world darkens. Wendell berry, thank you for you can add clairvoyance to the list of Wendell Berrys many talents. Eleven years ago, in an essay for orion magazine, he wrote, if we make the world too toxic for honeybees, some compound brain, monsanto perhaps, will invent tiny robots that will fly about pollinating flowers and making honey. Well, believe it or not, this spring Harvard University announced the First Successful controlled flight of a robobee. One that could take the place of real bees and natural pollination. It would be funny if it were not so sad. This past winter a third of u. S. Honeybee colonies died or disappeared in a phenomenon scientists call colony collapse disorder. More and more, the culprit is believed to be certain pesticides, fungicides and herbicides that may be killing bees or adversely affecting brain and nerve functions. In april, europe announced a ban across the continent to prevent the use of a kind of pesticide known as neonicotinoids. Activists in the United States are suing the epa to impose a similar ban. The world would be a lesser place without the honeybee. A quarter of our diet depends on their pollinating skills, but we also admire their beauty, and grace. Observe. The Environmental WriterBill Mckibben narrates this short film dance of the honeybee. Lets think about bees in the hive. They go out every day when the temperature is high enough. Therere not like other farm animals, theyre this weird wonderful cross between wild and domestic and they head out into the open world and they come back as it were, with reports about that world, you know, what its like miles away. So one little bee yard some place is a kind of hub for understanding whole huge swath of territory. Understanding whether its been farmed well, or treated as kind of a monoculture. Whether its being saturated in pesticides or whether its producing a wide beautiful variety of flowers of all kinds. They are our sort of accomplices in figuring out how healthy and together our landscapes really are. One of the reasons i like being out with bees is that you do sort of slow down and enter their world a little bit. I think theyre quite beautiful, i like watching i confess i like watching in the early spring the first few days of bees coming back with pollen and just looking sort of at the pollen in their saddle bags as they return. And seeing what color it is and figuring out where what tree it must of come from whatever. And therere beautiful and that you get a sense of indefatigability, i mean, this is an Impossible Task to, you know, three grains at a time produce enough honey at time to keep the colony alive over the winter, and yet they do it and there is something quite beautiful about that too. I think most beekeepers are fascinated by bees themselves. This perfect example of the idea that humans could cooperate with another species to both of their Mutual Benefit we dont have very many examples of that in our society but thats what a beehive is. I mean, honeybees are like Everything Else on our planet, under all kinds of duress. I mean, the world in which we jointly inhabit is changing with enormous speed, so none of the patterns that any of us are used to exist in same way anymore. Bees are under threat because landscapes keep changing, we get better at everything that we do and take more cutting of hay, you know, we leave less time for clover to just sit there in the field. Life is speeding up for them just like it is for us and really neither us is coping very well with the results of that. So, i mean, what we could do to help bees is exactly what we can do to help ourselves, try to slow down the pace of change in the world around us. Human societies arent going to be able to cope with rapid Climate Change and neither can most animal societies, bees included. Human societies cant cope, turning everything into monoculture, neither can bees, they are a remarkable reminder for the need for a certain kind of stability, in terms of things like climate and the need for a certain kind of variety, in terms of landscape and whats around us. We need to be making at this point in our society some wise decisions about the years ahead and so we need to be using some of that same focused and determined Decision Making that bees has successfully employed over a great many millennium. And now to the people who refuse to let democracy work. The people who hate government so much theyve shut it down. Unable to abide by the results of democracy when they dont win, they turned on it. Republicans have now lost three successive elections to control the senate and theyve lost the last two president ial elections. Nonetheless, they fought tooth and nail to kill president obamas health care initiative. They lost that fight, but with the corporate wing of democrats, they managed to bend it toward private interests. So we should be clear on this, obama care as its known is deeply flawed. Big subsidies to the Health Insurance industry. A bonanza for lobbyists. No public option. And as the New York Times reported this week, millions of poor are left uncovered by health law. Largely because states controlled by republicans refused to expand medicaid. As far as our bought and paid for legislative process goes, obamas Initiative Made it through the sausage factory. Yet even after both the house and Senate Approved it, the president signed it, and the Supreme Court upheld it, the republicans keep insisting on calling the law a bill, thumbing their noses and refusing to accept that it is enacted legislation. Now theyre fighting to prevent it from being implemented. Here was their order of the day on thursday from the popular right wing blog redstate. Com congressmen, this is about shutting down obamacare. Democrats keep talking about our refusal to compromise. They dont realize our compromise is defunding obamacare. We actually want to repeal it. This is it. Our endgame is to leave the whole thing shut down until the president defunds obamacare. And if he does not defund obamacare, we leave the whole thing shut down. Once upon a time when i was a young man working on capitol hill, it was commonplace that when a bill became law, everybody was unhappy with it. But you didnt bring down the government just because it wasnt perfect. You argue and fight and vote and then, due process having been at least raggedly served, on to the next fight. That was a long time ago. Long before the tea party minority, armed with huge sums of secret money from rich donors, sucked the last bit of soul from the grand old party of abraham lincoln. They became delusional. Then rabid. Like this if obamacare is ever implemented and enforced, we will never recover from it. It is an unconstitutional takings of godgiven american liberty. Thats false, of course. Just like those rightwing talking points that keep grinding through the propaganda mills of fox news thanks to obamacare, doctors will be forced to ask patients about their sex life, even if it has nothing to do with the medical treatment that they are seeking at the time. Not true. That Healthcare Plan puts a discount on the lives of elderly people and would result in the redistribution of health away from the elderly and the infirm to other special favored interests and patients. Again, not true. Nor is this, from the multimillionaire fabulist Rush Limbaugh what we now have is the biggest tax increase in the history of the world. Obamacare is just a massive tax increase. Thats all it is. Thats just a tiny sample of the lies and misinformation perpetrated by the right with the song and dance compliance of its richly paid mouthpieces. Sarah palin set the bar for truth at about ankle height with those fictitious death panels that she still insists will decide our rendezvous with the grim reaper. Of course there are death panels in there, but the important thing to remember is thats just one aspect of this atrocious, unaffordable, cumbersome, burdensome, evil policy of obamas and that is obamacare. Despite what they say, obamacare is only one of their targets. Before they will allow the government to reopen, they demand employers be enabled to deny Birth Control coverage to female employees. They demand obama cave on the keystone pipeline. They demand the watchdogs over corporate pollution be muzzled, and the big, bad regulators of wall street sent home. Their ransom list goes on and on. The debt ceiling is next. They would have the government default on its obligations and responsibilities. When the president refused to buckle to their extortion, they threw their tantrum. Like the die hards of the racist south a century and a half ago, who would destroy the union before giving up their slaves, so place down, sink the ship of state, and sow economic chaos to get their way. This says it all, they even shuttered the statue of liberty. Watching all this from london, the noted commentator martin wolf, of the capitalist friendly financial times, says america flirts with selfdestruction. This man is the biggest flirt of all, Newt Gingrich. It was Newt Gingrich who 20 years ago spearheaded the rightwings virulent crusade against the norms of democratic government. As speaker of the house he twice brought about shutdowns of the federal government once, believe it or not, because he felt snubbed after riding on air force one with president clinton and had to leave by the back door. It was also Newt Gingrich, speaker gingrich, who was caught lying to congressional investigators looking into charges of his ethical wrongdoing. His colleagues voted overwhelmingly, 39528, to reprimand him. Pressure from his own party then prompted him to resign. Yet even after his flameout, even after his recent bizarre race for the presidency bankrolled with money from admiring oligarchs, even after new allegations about his secret fundraising for rightwing candidates, gingrich remains the darling of a fawning amnesic media. Im Newt Gingrich on the right. On cnn. Com the other day he issued a call to arms to his fellow bombthrowers, dont cave is shutdown. At least lets name this for what it is, sabotage of the democratic process. Secession by another means. And lets be clear about where such reckless ambition leads. As surely as night must follow day, the alternative to democracy is worse. At our website, billmoyers. Com, theres an exclusive video interview with environmental activist Bill Mckibben. That and a lot more are at billmoyers. Com. Ill see you there and ill see you here, next time. Dont wait a week to get more boyers, visit billmoyers. Com for more blogs and exclusive video features. This episode of Moyers Company is available on dvd for 19. 95. To order call 18003661917 or write to the address on your screen. Funding is provided by Carnegie Corporation of new york, celebrating 100 yeer h00 fiphilanthrop philanthropy. The kohlberg foundation. Independent production fund, with support from the partridge foundation, a john and polly guth charitable fund. The clements foundation. Park foundation, dedicated to heightening Public Awareness of critical issues. The herb alpert foundation, supporting organizations Whose Mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. The bernard and audre rapoport foundation. The john d. And catherine t. Macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. More information at macfound. Org. Anne gumowitz. The betsy and jesse fink foundation. The hkh foundation. Barbara g. Fleischman. And by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and Group Retirement products. Thats why were your retirement company. There is something so special about swiss chard, and im showing you all about it on todays show. Cooking with Julie Taboulie is made possible by our members and by viewers like you. Thank you. [ music playing ] if there is one large leafy green that i am just smitten with, i would have to say it would be swiss chard. In arabic we call it sillit. Today im showing two signaturestyle lebanese sensations. One is a spectacular main dish delight that will satisfy your appetite, and the other is our salad star of the day that will bring bunches and bunches of sunshine your way. Succulent and special as can be its none other than my swiss chard, large leafy greens lebanese style i am so excited because today we are making a meatless middle eastern meal starring my stunning swiss chard leaves in arabic, we call it sillit which translates to swiss chard. Today we are doing a duo of swiss chard dishes. We are doing our famous stuffed swiss chard leaves, very similar to our stuffed grape leaves and then also using the stalks here our swiss chard of our sillit to make a side dish as well and im going to pair all of our meatless dishes up with a tasty chickpea salad. So we are getting all of our protein in from the chickpea salad and the chickpeas will go into our mix that we will stuff into our swiss chard leaves. So we wont miss the meat at all. So you can see im using these beautiful green swiss chard leaves that i have right in front of me, and i also have another variety known as bright lights. You can see that the leaves are very similar, obviously in the same color, both being green. But the stalks here are red as opposed to the white stalks that you would find on the green swiss chard. With the bright lights, they call it bright lights also because youll find red stalks like this and the veins are red as you can see, where the veins on the green swiss chard are white. But youll also find a variety of colors like a beautiful golden yellow, a really nice orange color, even towards like a fuschiasort of purplecolor youll find with the bright lights. For my swiss chard dishes, well use both, both the green and the bright lights swiss chard. And basically what im starting to do here, we are going to start working right now to create both our duo of dishes. So, im just trimming the swiss chard leaves up by running my paring knife along the vein of the stalk, and we are basically deveining them first because we are using the leaves of the swiss chard to roll our stuff swiss chard leaves we call sillit. Then you can see i just deveined one like so. So then youre going to run your paring knife along the center of the leaf like that. And then you have two halves of the swiss chard leaf and depending upon the size of the leaf, youre going to get anywhere from 23 segments for each half of that leaf. So im just going to run my knife through to create small to