Soil and Sacrament PDF Download

Author: Fred Bahnson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451663307
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Recounts the author's experiences founding a faith-based community garden in rural North Carolina, and emphasizes how growing one's own food can help readers reconnect with the land and divine faith.

Author: Paul B. Thompson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317196872
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
In this second edition of The Spirit of the Soil: Agriculture and Environmental Ethics, Paul B. Thompson reviews four worldviews that shape competing visions for agriculture. Productionists have sought increasing yields—to make two seeds grow where only one grew before—while traditional visions of good farming have stressed stewardship. These traditional visions have been challenged by two more worldviews: a call for a total cost accounting for farming and an advocacy for a holistic perspective. Thompson argues that an environmentally defensible systems approach must draw upon all four worldviews, recognizing their flaws and synthesizing their strengths in a new vision of sustainable agriculture. This classic 1995 study has been thoroughly revised and significantly expanded in its second edition with up-to-date examples of agriculture’s impact on the environment. These include extensive discussions of new pesticides and the effects of animal agriculture on climate and other areas of the environment. In addition, a new final chapter discusses sustainability, which has become a dominant idea within environmental studies and agrarian political philosophy.

Author: Paul B. Thompson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134884419
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
The Spirit of the Soil challenges environmentalists to think more deeply and creatively about agriculture. Paul B. Thompson identifies four `worldviews' which tackle agricultural ethics according to different philosophical priorities; productionism, stewardship, economics and holism. He examines current issues such as the use of pesticides and biotechnology from these ethical perspectives. This book achieves an open-ended account of sustainability designed to minimise hubris and help us to recapture the spirit of the soil.

Author: Satish Kumar
Publisher: Parallax Press
ISBN: 195269292X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
In the first US edition of Satish Kumar's classic book, we rediscover how our spiritual and social well-being connects to that of our planet. Internationally-respected peace and environment activist Satish Kumar has been gently setting the agenda for change for over 50 years. As 350.org founder Bill McKibben says, "There is no one on the planet better-equipped to make you think and rethink how you're living and how you might change." The age of sustainability is grounded on the knowledge that we ourselves are very much part of nature; that what we do to nature we in fact do to ourselves; and that the earth has a soul, which we share. Drawing on the example of Rabindranath Tagore, Kumar advocates living with awareness that our personal choices have political and poetic resonance. In this book, he inspires readers with the knowledge we are all leaders and can create change in our structures and mindsets for lasting peace and a sustainable culture and society. Celebrating an emerging global consciousness that reveres nature, the book explores how, as a global society, we need to embrace diversity and be aware of our role as pilgrims on this earth. Joyful and heart-centered, Satish Kumar reminds us that to bring about change in the world, we must embody the change we wish to see.

Author: Scott Chaskey
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
ISBN: 1639550887
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
As a farmer with decades spent working in fields, Scott Chaskey has been shaped by daily attention to the earth. A leader in the international Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, he has combined a longstanding commitment to food sovereignty and organic farming with a belief that humble attention to microbial life and diversity of species provides invaluable lessons for building healthy human communities. Along the way, even while planning rotations of fields, ordering seeds, tending to crops and their ecosystems, Chaskey was writing. And in this lively collection of essays, he explores the evolution of his perspective—as a farmer and as a poet. Tracing the first stage in his development back to a homestead in Maine, on the ancestral lands of the Abenaki, he recalls learning to cultivate plants and nourish reciprocal relationships among species, even as he was reading Yeats and beginning to write poems. He describes cycling across Ireland, a surprise meeting with Seamus Heaney, and, later, farming in Cornwall’s ancient landscape of granite, bramble, and windswept trees. He travels to China for an international conference on Community Supported Agriculture, reading ancient wilderness poetry along the way, and then on to the pueblo of Santa Clara in New Mexico, where he joins a group of Indigenous women harvesting amaranth seeds. Closer to home on the Southfork of Long Island, he describes planting redwood saplings and writing verse under the canopy of an American beech. “Enlivened by decades of work in open fields washed by the salt spray of the Atlantic”—words that describe his prose as well as his vision of connectedness—Scott Chaskey has given us a book for our time. A seed of hope and regeneration.

Author: Pierre Rabhi
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1594776474
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
The world’s leading expert on reversing soil desertification shows how ecology can flourish only when spiritual elements are present • Uses a parable from the African oral tradition to provide a living testimony of what has been lost with the rise of modern technology • Provides a vital account of the strong relationship between soil and soul and how this relationship can be restored As in the Heart, So in the Earth is a strong indictment of a civilization that, while seeking domination over the earth, mutilates, tortures, and desacralizes it. For Pierre Rabhi ecology is inseparable from spirituality. He shows how the growing desertification of North Africa is a reflection of the “desert” that is claiming the hearts and souls of the inhabitants of the Western world--how dead soil is mirrored in our deadened souls--and how reconciliation with Mother Earth must be accompanied by relearning our ancestors’ reverence for the soil. Using a traditional African parable grounded in the very wisdom of the earth, Pierre Rabhi seeks to initiate the reader into a time when the people that dwelled on this planet did so harmoniously and could converse easily with the land. Village elder Tyemoro recounts the gradual destruction of his village’s culture and all that has sustained it as the miracles promised by modern technology brought more harm than good. This same drama is recurring throughout the world, where indigenous value systems that have endured for millennia are torn apart by contact with modern civilization. Yet Rahbi offers hope--if those in the modern world will stop to hear the words of their ancestors who worked the land, for our destiny is linked irrevocably to that of the earth.

Author: Molly Scott Cato
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415500826
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
In a world of climate change and declining oil supplies, what is the plan for the provisioning of resources? Green economists suggest a need to replace the globalised economy, and its extended supply chains, with a more 'local' economy. But what does this mean in more concrete terms? How large is a local economy, how self-reliant can it be, and what resources will still need to be imported? The concept of the 'bioregion' -- developed and popularised within the disciplines of earth sciences, biosciences and planning -- may facilitate the reconceptualisation of the global economy as a system of largely self-sufficient local economies. A bioregional approach to economics assumes a different system of values to that which dominates neoclassical economics. The global economy is driven by growth, and the consumption ethic that matches this is one of expansion in range and quantity. Goods are defined as scarce, and access to them is a process based on competition. The bioregional approach challenges every aspect of that value system. It seeks a new ethic of consumption that prioritises locality, accountability and conviviality in the place of expansion and profit; it proposes a shift in the focus of the economy away from profits and towards provisioning; and it assumes a radical reorientation of work from employment towards livelihood. This book by leading green economist Molly Scott Cato sets out a visionary and yet rigorous account of what a bioregional approach to the economy would mean -- and how to get there from here.

Author: Liz Carlisle
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1642832227
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
A powerful movement is happening in farming today—farmers are reconnecting with their roots to fight climate change. For one woman, that’s meant learning her tribe’s history to help bring back the buffalo. For another, it’s meant preserving forest purchased by her great-great-uncle, among the first wave of African Americans to buy land. Others are rejecting monoculture to grow corn, beans, and squash the way farmers in Mexico have done for centuries. Still others are rotating crops for the native cuisines of those who fled the “American wars” in Southeast Asia. In Healing Grounds, Liz Carlisle tells the stories of Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian American farmers who are reviving their ancestors’ methods of growing food—techniques long suppressed by the industrial food system. These farmers are restoring native prairies, nurturing beneficial fungi, and enriching soil health. While feeding their communities and revitalizing cultural ties to land, they are steadily stitching ecosystems back together and repairing the natural carbon cycle. This, Carlisle shows, is the true regenerative agriculture – not merely a set of technical tricks for storing CO2 in the ground, but a holistic approach that values diversity in both plants and people. Cultivating this kind of regenerative farming will require reckoning with our nation’s agricultural history—a history marked by discrimination and displacement. And it will ultimately require dismantling power structures that have blocked many farmers of color from owning land or building wealth. The task is great, but so is its promise. By coming together to restore these farmlands, we can not only heal our planet, we can heal our communities and ourselves.

Author: Melina Rudman
Publisher: Harding House Publishing, Incorporated/Anamcharabooks
ISBN: 9781625247841
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
In these fifteen intimate essays, Melina Rudman explores the pain of loss and the joy of connection. She writes of gardening as a spiritual practice, one that has the power to ground us in the seasons and cycles of Nature.

Author: Patricia Monaghan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Discover the spirituality in your own gardening experience with the meditations, journal exercises, and simple rituals contained in this fascinating book by the author of "The New Book of Goddesses and Heroines". Featured are 16 schematics for unique gardens, including an angel garden, a fairy garden, a witch's garden, two sun gardens, and Kuan-Yin's Garden of Mercy. color insert.