'Without vision the people perish.' So wrote the poet William Blake. Lord Northbourne (1896-1982) was a man of exceptional and comprehensive vision, who diagnosed the sickness of modern society as stemming from the severance of its organic links with the wholeness of life. But like his better-known younger contemporary E. F. Schumacher (author of Small is Beautiful), whose work developed along very similar lines, Northbourne's occupation as a practicing organic farmer (he coined the term) was joined to a deep conviction that humanity does not live by bread alone, and that the fullness of life properly integral to human nature demands obedience to sacred law. Thus his vision of life came to embrace the interrelationship of God, humanity, and the soil as a unity presupposing a way of life in stark contrast to that of the myopic, mechanististic world he saw encroaching on all sides. And so, as it becomes increasingly evident that such a way of life stands to emperil our very future and that of the delicate ecosystem on which all life depends, it is time to re-examine the work of this pioneering thinker. In an age of specialization and fragmentation, we have much to learn from Northbourne, whose vision of what is required by a truly meaningful and sustainable society embraced religion, farming, the arts, the rural crafts, monetary form, and traditional metaphysics. Northbourne's later works, Religion in the Modern World and Looking Back on Progress, present his wider reflections on the Divine and human society, but always with the sensibility of a man who knows the soil, recalling in many ways the writings of Wendell Berry. He corresponded with Thomas Merton, as well as mountaineer and Tibetan Buddhist Marco Pallis (The Way and the Mountain), who introduced him to the school of perennialist writers. Northbourne translated René Guénon's The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, described by Huston Smith as one of the truly seminal books of the twentieth century, as well as Frithjof Schuon's Light on Ancient Worlds and Titus Burckhardt's Sacred Art in East and West. He was also an accomplished flower gardener and watercolorist, and a frequent contributor to the British periodical Studies in Comparative Religion, described by Schumacher as one of the two most important journals to read. Sophia Perennis is republishing all three of Northbourne's works, a fourth volume of uncollected essays spanning agriculture and metaphysics, as well as the 23-volume Collected Writings of René Guénon, including The Reign of Quantity. Lord Northbourne (1896-1982) was a man of exceptional vision, who already in the 1940s diagnosed in detail the sickness of modern society as stemming from the severance of its organic links with the wholeness of life. A leading figure in the early organic farming movement, his writings profoundly affected such other pioneers as Sir Albert Howard, Rolf Gardiner, Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, and H. J. Massingham. His path led him on to a profound study of comparative religion, traditional metaphysics, and the science of symbols, which he employed in incisive observations on the character of modern society. His later writings exercised considerable influence on his younger contemporaries E. F. Schumacher and Thomas Merton, and in many ways anticipate the essays of Wendell Berry. The republication of this milestone ecological text will be followed by three volumes of Northbourne's later metaphysical and cultural writings. "A major text in the organic canon, too long out-of-print" - Philip Conford, The Origins of the Organic Movement "We have tried to conquer nature by force and by intellect. It now remains for us to try the way of love." - From the book (possibly for front cover, if not too long?)

Max and Emmy pay a visit to Dragon Land, where magical creatures hide behind the lift-up flaps.

The book that launched environmental history, William Cronon's Changes in the Land, now revised and updated. Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize In this landmark work of environmental history, William Cronon offers an original and profound explanation of the effects European colonists' sense of property and their pursuit of capitalism had upon the ecosystems of New England. Reissued here with an updated afterword by the author and a new preface by the distinguished colonialist John Demos, Changes in the Land, provides a brilliant inter-disciplinary interpretation of how land and people influence one another. With its chilling closing line, "The people of plenty were a people of waste," Cronon's enduring and thought-provoking book is ethno-ecological history at its best.

The National Book Award Finalist and New York Times bestseller that became a guide and balm for a country struggling to understand the election of Donald Trump "A generous but disconcerting look at the Tea Party. . . . This is a smart, respectful and compelling book." —Jason DeParle, The New York Times Book Review When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, a bewildered nation turned to Strangers in Their Own Land to understand what Trump voters were thinking when they cast their ballots. Arlie Hochschild, one of the most influential sociologists of her generation, had spent the preceding five years immersed in the community around Lake Charles, Louisiana, a Tea Party stronghold. As Jedediah Purdy put it in the New Republic, "Hochschild is fascinated by how people make sense of their lives. . . . [Her] attentive, detailed portraits . . . reveal a gulf between Hochchild's 'strangers in their own land' and a new elite." Already a favorite common read book in communities and on campuses across the country and called "humble and important" by David Brooks and "masterly" by Atul Gawande, Hochschild's book has been lauded by Noam Chomsky, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, and countless others. The paperback edition features a new afterword by the author reflecting on the election of Donald Trump and the other events that have unfolded both in Louisiana and around the country since the hardcover edition was published, and also includes a readers' group guide at the back of the book.

A hope-inspiring vision of America's future that includes stories of positive change and addresses the possibilities of what could happen on a broader scale.

We find our way forward by going back. The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec says, but we can still honor the bonds between us. Settlers dominated and divided, but Indigenous peoples won't just send them all "home." Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps readers see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine a different future. Krawec asks, What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to Indigenous movements for solidarity? Braiding together historical, scientific, and cultural analysis, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the vivid threads of communal memory, Krawec crafts a stunning, forceful call to "unforget" our history. This remarkable sojourn through Native and settler history, myth, identity, and spirituality helps us retrace our steps and pick up what was lost along the way: chances to honor rather than violate treaties, to see the land as a relative rather than a resource, and to unravel the history we have been taught.

From a fixed point in the middle of English nowhere, Vron Ware takes you through time and space to explain why transcending the urban-rural divide is integral to the future of the planet. Rural England is a mythic space, a complex canvas on which people from many different backgrounds project all kinds of fantasies, prejudices, desires and fears. This book seeks to challenge many of these ideas, showing how the artificial divide between rural and urban works to conceal the underlying relationship between these two fundamental poles of human settlement. This investigation of rurality is oriented from a fixed point in north-west Hampshire, marked by a signpost that points in four directions to two towns, four villages and two hamlets. Through stories, interviews and reportage gathered over two decades, the book demolishes tired notions of rural England that cast it as a separate realm of existence, whether marooned in a perpetual time-warp, or reduced to a refuge for the retired, wealthy urbanites, extreme nature-lovers, and, more recently, anyone tired of waiting out the pandemic in towns and cities. It poses two simple questions: what does the word rural mean today? What will it mean tomorrow? The author is an ambivalent native, held captive to the land by an umbilical cord but always on the verge of fleeing home to the city. She writes from a feminist, postcolonial standpoint that is alert to the slow violence of historical processes taking place over many centuries; enslavement, colonialism, industrialisation, globalisation. Both argument and narrative are propelled by the urgent need to reconsider the concept of ‘countryside’ in the context of the climate emergency and the patent collapse of ecosystems due to intensive farming which has poisoned the land.

In the United States today, 50 million people don¿t have enough food. How is this possible in one of the world¿s wealthiest countries? Why hasn¿t the problem been solved? Is it simply an economic issue? Challenging conventional wisdom, the authors of Hunger in the Land of Plenty explore the causes and consequences of food insecurity; assess some of the major policies and programs that have been designed to reduce it; and consider alternative paths forward.