The co-founder of the award-winning Hell’s Backbone Grill and Farm, a staunch equal rights and environmental activist, and practicing Buddhist. Blake Spalding has tirelessly worked in a conservative, largely Mormon community to create a restaurant of love and health on the edge of Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

On this episode, learn about Blake and co-founder Jen Castle building cross-cultural bridges in a town with vast philosophical and political differences; what the Buddha might say to Republican and Democratic leaders over a gourmet meal; that a warm hearth and fierce determination are not mutually exclusive; how environmental protection gains were undone but quickly restored in the effort to save Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument; coming to one another with the intention of building something beautiful as a key to a common ground; and love being the ultimate renewable energy source.