Regenerating Inner Landscapes: A Conversation with Hannah Gosnell

Q: How would you describe the work you do in the world today?

Hannah Gosnell (HG): I feel like I’m in a bit of a transition. For most of my career—coming up on thirty years—I’ve worked in the human dimensions of natural resource management, particularly in the American West. I’ve focused on rangelands, regenerative agriculture, human-wildlife conflict, biodiversity, and the ways ranchers and farmers manage landscapes in places like Oregon, Montana, and across the Rocky Mountain West.

I really fell in love with the rugged beauty of this part of the country. For the last twenty years, my work has been very grounded in particular landscapes, focused on solving problems in specific places and ecosystems. More recently, I’ve zoomed out to engage more directly with bigger-picture work focused on conscious food systems and transformations to sustainability at a global scale.

At the core, I’ve always been interested in how people produce food and fiber in ways that respect nature and promote biodiversity conservation. Regenerative agriculture has been central to that. It feels like a dreamy win-win: good for the planet and good for people. I’ve also recognized that when farmers learn how to grow food without chemicals, they get excited about the planetary health aspects of the approach. As they begin to further understand soil microbiomes and ecosystem processes, they’re often overcome with awe, joy, and wonder. They become enthusiastic about working with nature. That excitement is self-amplifying: soils improve, biodiversity increases, and people feel more alive in their work, and more motivated to continue on the regenerative path.

Lately, I’ve been exploring what conscious food systems look like. I’ve been working closely with the Conscious Food Systems Alliance, a UNDP-affiliated initiative, to better understand the role of inner dimensions—values, mindsets, consciousness—in creating regenerative food systems. This macro approach is quite different from the place-based work of my earlier career, but I’m deeply enjoying the multifaceted nature of it all! 

Q: How did you find yourself in this niche—working at the intersection of social-ecological systems, sustainability, and rural land use?

HG: I was born in New York City and grew up in a suburb on the Jersey Shore. I went to a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania and completed my undergrad at Brown University. I had only been out west a few times to visit national parks with my family.

When I was about 21, my dad suggested I do a semester in the Rockies with the National Outdoor Leadership School. I had been on the rowing team in college and generally enjoyed being outside, but I had never experienced wild public lands in this intimate way. I spent three months backpacking, rock climbing, canyoneering, caving, and backcountry skiing around the Rocky Mountain West—it completely blew my mind.

There was this pivotal moment in October of 1987 in Great Basin National Park. I was lying under a beautiful aspen tree looking up at its golden leaves against a bright blue sky. I remember thinking, “This is so beautiful. I love this so much. I feel so connected. My life needs to be about this.”

Until then, I had been considering a career in advertising in New York City, but that encounter with the aspen tree altered my path in an undeniable way.

After college, I bought a pickup truck, moved out west, and started working in outdoor and environmental education. I lived in Yosemite National Park and worked for Outward Bound in the Southern Sierra. It was there that I became interested in public lands politics and the relationships between people and landscapes.

I eventually went to graduate school in geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder. My master’s thesis was about the politics of grazing on public lands. Even though ranchers are few in number, they control vast landscapes—around 90% of the West is grazed. I thought that if we care about biodiversity and wildlife habitat and want to fix public land policies, we need to understand ranchers. That began what has now been nearly thirty years focused on rangelands and the people who manage them.

Q: What drew you to more deeply explore regenerative and holistic management?

HG: I started attending meetings of the Quivira Coalition in New Mexico, which brings together ranchers practicing holistic management, the conservation community, and land management agency personnel. The ranchers who attend these meetings are the best of the best—people thinking about resilience, systems, triple bottom lines, biodiversity, and ecosystem processes. Many are interested in soil carbon sequestration and climate change mitigation as well. 

As I sought to understand this lesser known side of ranching, I often felt like an anthropologist, sitting in rural Montana kitchens listening to ranchers’ stories. It was fascinating and so different from my own upbringing. Stories were also deeply humanizing, I began to understand far more about the choices, impacts, and ethos of these communities through genuine human connection.

Regenerative agriculture is about bringing more life to the land, it’s about supporting systems to function in ways that replenish themselves. For the last fifteen years, I’ve studied people who are experts in regenerative agriculture and holistic management and tried to understand how they think. How do farmers make the shift from conventional to regenerative? I’ve learned that more often than not, it’s not just a change in technique, but a fundamental shift in worldview.

Q: What have you noticed about people who are willing to change the way they relate to the land?

HG: In 2010, I received a grant from the U.S. Forest Service to study climate-friendly ranching and the potential of carbon markets to change ranchers’ approach to land management. I went to Australia expecting to study how financial incentives would motivate ranchers to sequester carbon.

But what I found was that most ranchers weren’t motivated primarily by carbon markets. They were motivated by something much deeper—the inner dimensions of transformative change.

Often there was some kind of crisis: bankruptcy, drought, illness, divorce. A moment where they realized, on a deep level, that whatever they were doing simply wasn’t working. Crisis creates openness. If things are going well, people are much less likely to initiate change. But when you’re desperate, humility invites you to contemplate, “If what I’m doing isn’t working, what is another way?” 

That combination—crisis, humility, openness, and guidance—can catalyze profound transformation.

Q: Your work increasingly emphasizes inner transformation. How did that shift happen?

HG: While working in Australia, I was reading work from Karen O’Brien at the University of Oslo and diving into Ken Wilber’s integral theory. Integral theory gave me a framework to understand how the inner relates to the outer, and how individuals relate to the collective.

Karen O’Brien’s three spheres of transformation—personal, political, and practical—really resonated with me. You can change someone’s mind, but if politics and practices don’t shift, not much happens. Or you can change policies without shifting consciousness, and the mandated change likely won’t stick. Transformation has to happen across all three spheres. But the personal sphere is foundational, and I learned that shifting consciousness is often the first step in instigating large-scale change.

I became less interested in manipulating behavior through laws and incentives and more interested in changing minds and hearts.

Q: You also served as a coordinating lead author for the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment. What did that experience teach you?

HG: It was profound. IPBES—the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services—had already concluded in its 2019 global assessment that biodiversity loss is happening at a terrifying rate and that we need transformative change.

In the new assessment, we asked: What do we know about the underlying causes of biodiversity loss and nature’s decline and how transformative change actually happens?

One of the underlying causes of biodiversity loss we identified is disconnection from and domination over humans and nature, where humans see themselves as separate from and superior to other species.

One of the five key strategies we identified focuses specifically on inner dimensions: shifting societal views and values to better recognize and support human-nature interdependence by increasing nature connectedness, shifting cultural narratives, changing norms around production and consumption, facilitating transformative learning, and co-creating knowledge.

This reinforced what I had been seeing for years: you can’t heal the planet without healing people.

Q: You often reference Joanna Macy’s concept of the Great Turning. What does that mean to you?

HG: Joanna Macy describes three dimensions of the Great Turning: holding actions that stop harm, creating new systems and institutions, and shifting consciousness. All three are necessary.

Earlier in my career, I focused more on holding actions, on stopping harmful policies. Then I moved into creating new systems through research and teaching. Now I see that shifting consciousness is equally, if not more, essential to sustained transformation.

Q: You’ve also spoken openly about your own personal healing journey. How has that influenced your work?

HG: Through practices like yoga, meditation, and Internal Family Systems therapy, I’ve come to see how disconnected and dissociated I’ve been for much of my life, caught up in workaholism and academia. Over the past three years, I’ve become much more connected—to myself, to nature, and to others. I now see interesting parallels between my own learned disconnection, the disconnection in many farmers and ranchers, and the societal disconnection that’s at the root of the polycrisis we’re living through.

As part of my Nova Scholar’s project, I’m working on a braided memoir that weaves together three threads: my personal healing journey, my research on regeneration, and society’s broader need for transformative change. I want to write for mainstream audiences. Sometimes I think that I should have been a journalist or documentary filmmaker.

Q: In the midst of climate anxiety and ecological grief, how do you make meaning?

HG: I find meaning in connection to nature and in community with other sustainability scientists who are similarly grappling with eco-anxiety and exploring practices that help us navigate this strange liminal space we find ourselves in.

I think we’re being called to show up differently—to be more whole, more integrated, more coherent, and more open to the links between science and spirituality. Unconventional modalities and interventions like psychedelics, shamanic practices, and the wisdom traditions generally are being talked about more openly in my circles and are creating new avenues for insight. For me, these experiences don’t replace science, they supplement it. They make my science more alive and more interesting.

When I walk outside now, I feel the intelligence of the plant world in a way I never did before. I think about oak trees dropping acorns year after year, trusting that some will take root. There’s something about that trust that sustains me. Carl Jung’s phrase, the divine speaks in synchronicities, really resonates with me too. These days, I may not have all the answers, but I’m noticing, I’m connected, and I know I’m part of something bigger. 

Q: What role does connection to place play in restoring resilience and mental health?

HG: It’s huge. When people fall in love with rivers, soil, forests—when they experience true awe—they care differently. In Australia, I saw farmers participating in microscope clubs, where they examine their soil under a microscope, and engage in social learning with their peers, becoming utterly fascinated as they discovered nematodes and other once foreign microflora and fauna. That fascination leads to stewardship.

Nature relatedness shapes identity; in my mind, it is the foundation that defines how people see themselves in relationship to the world. If regenerative agriculture is about bringing more life to the land, then transformative change is about bringing more life into our systems and ourselves.

We can’t regenerate physical landscapes without regenerating our inner landscapes too, and the intersection of these two areas of transformation feels like the place where I am being called to serve.