Voices from every direction beckon us, even push us, toward better and faster technology, with the promise of more wealth, more pleasure, and, consequently, more happiness. But have we become so bewitched by the siren song of material progress that we've lost the ability not just to achieve, but to discern what true happiness is? What criteria do we use to plan for the future, for retirement? At the end of our earthly lives, how will we measure our fruitfulness? In this book Marcus Grodi discusses what he and his family discovered, mostly by surprise, after moving from the city to twenty-five acres of Ohio farmland. This move involved a radical shift in priorities for all of them, but mostly it helped them to discover some critical truths about our relationship to nature and to nature's Creator that apply regardless of where a person lives. He offers wonderful reflections on his going-back-to-the-land experience as a metaphor for drawing closer to God.

Luis J. Rodriguez writes about race, culture, identity, and belonging and what these all mean and should mean (but often fail to) in the volatile climate of our nation. His passion and wisdom inspire us with the message that we must come together if we are to move forward. As he writes in the preface, “Like millions of Americans, I’m demanding a new vision, a qualitatively different direction, for this country. One for the shared well-being of everyone. One with beauty, healing, poetry, imagination, and truth.” The pieces in From Our Land to Our Land capture that same fantastic energy and wisdom and will spark conversation and inspiration.

In this volume, Dana Naone Hall articulates, through essays, testimony, public talks, writings, interviews, and poetry, her 30 years of activism surrounding Native Hawaiian rights to traditional lands- including advocating for burial preservation, which ultimately led to the birth of the Hawaiian burial movement and the creation of state laws to protect remains and establish island burial councils.

There are few places left in this world where we can escape the influence and din of progress and technology. Voices from every direction and perspective beckon, even push, us forward toward more, greater and faster technology, with the teaser of more wealth, more possessions, more pleasure, and, consequently, more happiness and contentment. This is how the present American dream is now defined, and every investment broker and political candidate promises that if we trust them, we also can trust that one day it will all be ours. But have we become so blinded by the material, industrial, progressivist culture in which we live that we've lost the ability, not just to achieve, but to even discern what true happiness and beauty is? What criteria do we use to plan for tomorrow, for the future, for retirement, and when this life is over, are we anything more than just fertilizer to give back to Mother Earth what we have so irresponsibility taken from her? And in the end, with all the opportunities we've had in this life, what is important? What lasts? Has our culture's enticement to always look for an easier, labor saving means to do everything left us a flabby, flaccid culture? In this book Marcus Grodi discusses what he and his family discovered, mostly by surprise, after moving from the city to 25-acres of rural Ohio farm land. This involved a radical shift in priorities for all of them, but mostly it helped them discover some critical truths about life, simplicity, detachment, about our relationship to nature, and to nature's Creator, that apply regardless of where a person lives. He offers wonderful reflections about life from this “going back to the land”experience as a metaphor of authentic conversion and drawing closer to God.

As an investigative journalist, Monbiot found a mission in his ecological boredom, that of learning what it might take to impose a greater state of harmony between himself and nature. He was not one to romanticize undisturbed, primal landscapes, but rather in his attempts to satisfy his cravings for a richer, more authentic life, he came stumbled into the world of restoration and rewilding. When these concepts were first introduced in 2011, very recently, they focused on releasing captive animals into the wild. Soon the definition expanded to describe the reintroduction of animal and plant species to habitats from which they had been excised. Some people began using it to mean the rehabilitation not just of particular species, but of entire ecosystems: a restoration of wilderness. Rewilding recognizes that nature consists not just of a collection of species but also of their ever-shifting relationships with each other and with the physical environment. Ecologists have shown how the dynamics within communities are affected by even the seemingly minor changes in species assemblages. Predators and large herbivores have transformed entire landscapes, from the nature of the soil to the flow of rivers, the chemistry of the oceans, and the composition of the atmosphere. The complexity of earth systems is seemingly boundless."

How Native American history can guide us today: “Presents strong voices of old, old cultures bravely trying to make sense of an Earth in chaos.” —Whole Earth Written by a former Green Party vice-presidential candidate who was once listed among “America’s fifty most promising leaders under forty” by Time magazine, this thoughtful, in-depth account of Native struggles against environmental and cultural degradation features chapters on the Seminoles, the Anishinaabeg, the Innu, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Mohawks, among others. Filled with inspiring testimonies of struggles for survival, each page of this volume speaks forcefully for self-determination and community. “Moving and often beautiful prose.” —Ralph Nader “Thoroughly researched and convincingly written.” —Choice

An impassioned defence of global immigration from the acclaimed author of Maximum City. Drawing on his family’s own experience emigrating from India to Britain and America, and years of reporting around the world, Suketu Mehta subjects the worldwide anti-immigrant backlash to withering scrutiny. The West, he argues, is being destroyed not by immigrants but by the fear of immigrants. He juxtaposes the phony narratives of populist ideologues with the ordinary heroism of labourers, nannies and others, from Dubai to New York, and explains why more people are on the move today than ever before. As civil strife and climate change reshape large parts of the planet, it is little surprise that borders have become so porous. This Land is Our Land also stresses the destructive legacies of colonialism and global inequality on large swathes of the world. When today’s immigrants are asked, ‘Why are you here?’, they can justly respond, ‘We are here because you were there.’ And now that they are here, as Mehta demonstrates, immigrants bring great benefits, enabling countries and communities to flourish. Impassioned, rigorous, and richly stocked with memorable stories and characters, This Land Is Our Land is a timely and necessary intervention, and literary polemic of the highest order.

A leading environmental thinker explores how people might begin to heal their fractured and contentious relationship with the land and with each other. From the coalfields of Appalachia and the tobacco fields of the Carolinas to the public lands of the West, Purdy shows how the land has always united and divided Americans.

Rolling green hills dotted with Holstein cows, red barns, and blue silos. The Great Lakes ports at Superior, Ashland, and Kenosha. A Polish wedding dance or a German biergarten in Milwaukee. The dappled quiet of the Chequamagon forest. A weatherbeaten but tidy town hall at the intersection of two county trunk highways. Ojibwa families gathering wild rice into canoes. The boat ride through the Dells. The upland ridges of the Driftless Area, falling away into hidden valleys. . . . These are images of Wisconsin's land and life, images that evoke a strong sense of place. This book, Wisconsin Land and Life, is an exploration of place, a series of original essays by Wisconsin geographers that offers an introduction to the state's natural environment, the historical processes of its human habitation, and the ways that nature and people interact to create distinct regional landscapes. To read it is to come away with a sweeping view of Wisconsin's geography and history: the glaciers that carved lakes and moraines; the soils and climate that fostered the prairies and great northern pine forests; the early Native Americans who began to shape the landscape and who established forest trails and river portages; the successive waves of Europeans who came to trade in furs, mine for lead and iron, cut the white pines, establish farms, work in the lumber and paper mills, and transform spent wheatfields into pasture for dairy cattle. Readers will learn, too, about the platting and naming of Wisconsin's towns, the establishment of county and township governments, the growth of urban neighborhoods and parishes, the role of rivers, railroads, and religion in shaping the state's growth, and the controversial reforestation of the cutover lands that eventually transformed hardscrabble farms and swamps into a sportsman's paradise. Abundantly illustrated with photos and maps, this book will richly reward anyone who wishes to learn more about the land and life of the place we know as Wisconsin.