Category: Books

If you eat, pay taxes, care about the health of our children and communities, the fate of family farmers, or our country’s food security, this book is for you.

The Call of the Land gives voice to a swelling chorus of millennial agrarians who are working in cities, suburbs, countryside schools, churches, companies, and campuses to create a clean, secure, sustainable food system as a healthy foundation.

This part-travelogue, part-oral history, part-creative exploration of food politics will introduce readers to twenty groups working in agriculture and sustainable food production in the U.S. Throughout 2009 the authors visited twenty farms from coast to coast, talking to farmers about their engagement in sustainable food production, public policy and community organizing efforts. Interviews and photo essays with each farm/garden/project illustrate the inspiring histories, unique characters and everyday struggles of life on these farms.

Could there ever be an alternative stock exchange dedicated to slow, small, and local? Could a million American families get their food from CSAs? What if you had to invest 50 percent of your assets within 50 miles of where you live? Such questions—at the heart of slow money—represent the first steps on our path to a new economy.

Shell Games is a cops-and-robbers tale set in a double-crossing world where smugglers fight turf wars over some of the world’s strangest marine creatures.

Seed to Seed is part field notebook, part sketchbook and part diary. Built upon a narrative of the passing seasons of 2004, it relates that narrative to the life history of an ‘iconic’ plant. It gives a description of what is ‘seen’ and of the hidden molecular mechanisms that underlie the visible events in the plant’s life, and tells the story of the last ten years of scientific discoveries in Nicholas Harberd’s own laboratory as the team works on decoding the genome of a basic plant, thale cress – the fruit-fly of the plant world.

Clearly written, well-illustrated, and without unnecessary technical jargon, Holdrege describes through fascinating examples how living organisms develop and exist within the context of their environment, and asserts that genes alone cannot determine organisms because their effects are always qualified by the contexts within which the organisms live.