Wildling
Written by Isabella Tree
“In Wilding, Isabella Tree tells the story of the 'Knepp experiment', a pioneering rewilding project in West Sussex, using free-roaming grazing animals to create new habitats for wildlife. Part gripping memoir, part fascinating account of the ecology of our countryside, Wilding is, above all, an inspiring story of hope.”
The Book of Trespass
Written by Nick Hayes
“The vast majority of our country is entirely unknown to us because we are banned from setting foot on it. By law of trespass, we are excluded from 92 per cent of the land and 97 per cent of its waterways, blocked by walls whose legitimacy is rarely questioned. But behind them lies a story of enclosure, exploitation and dispossession of public rights whose effects last to this day.”
English Pastoral
Written by James Rebanks
“English Pastoral is the story of an inheritance: one that affects us all. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. And yet this elegy from the northern fells is also a song of hope: of how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future. This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against all the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all.”
Braiding Sweet Grass
Written by Robin Wall Kimmerer
“As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two ways of knowledge together.”
This Changes Everything | Capitalism vs the Climate
Written by Naomi Klein
“Forget everything you think you know about global warming. It's not about carbon—it's about capitalism. The good news is that we can seize this crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better.”
Sowing Seeds in the Desert
Written by Masanobu Fukuoka
“The earth is in great peril, due to the corporatization of agriculture, the rising climate crisis, and the ever-increasing levels of global poverty, starvation, and desertification on a massive scale. This present condition of global trauma is not "natural," but a result of humanity's destructive actions. And, according to Masanobu Fukuoka, it is reversible. We need to change not only our methods of earth stewardship, but also the very way we think about the relationship between human beings and nature.”
The Earth
Written by Emile Zola
“When Jean Macquart arrives in the peasant community of Beauce, where farmers have worked the same land for generations, he quickly finds himself involved in the corrupt affairs of the local Fouan family. Aging and Learlike, Old Man Fouan has decided to divide his land between his three children: his penny-pinching daughter Fanny, his eldest son - a far from holy figure known as 'Jesus Christ' - and the lecherous Buteau, Macquart's friend. But in a community where land is everything, sibling rivalry quickly turns to brutal hatred, as Buteau declares himself unsatisfied with his lot. A fascinating portrayal of a struggling but decadent community, The Earth offers a compelling exploration of the destructive nature of human ignorance and greed.”
The One-Straw Revolution
Written by Masanobu Fukuoka
“Trained as a scientist, Fukuoka rejected both modern agribusiness and centuries of agricultural lore. Over the next three decades he perfected his so-called “do-nothing” technique: commonsense, sustainable practices that all but eliminate the use of pesticides, fertilizer, tillage, and perhaps most significantly, wasteful effort.
Masanobu Fukuoka’s manifesto about farming, eating, and the limits of human knowledge presents a radical challenge to the global systems we rely on for our food.
At the same time, it is a spiritual memoir of a man whose innovative system of cultivating the earth reflects a deep faith in the wholeness and balance of the natural world.
Whether you’re a guerrilla gardener or a kitchen gardener, dedicated to slow food or simply looking to live a healthier life, you will find something here—you may even be moved to start a revolution of your own.”
Re-Enchanting The World: Femanism and the Politics of the Commons
Written by Silvia Federici
“An edited collection Silvia Federici's work, spanning over twenty years, in which she provides a detailed history and critique of the politics of the commons from a feminist perspective. In her clear and combative voice, Federici provides readers with an analysis of some of the key issues and debates in contemporary thinking on this subject. Drawing on rich historical research, she maps the connections between the previous forms of enclosure that occurred with the birth of capitalism and the destruction of the commons and the 'new enclosures' at the heart of the present phase of global capitalist accumulation."
Local is Our Future
Written by Helena Norberg-Hodge
“From disappearing livelihoods to financial instability, from climate chaos to an epidemic of depression, we face crises on a number of seemingly unrelated fronts. This well-referenced book traces the common roots of these problems in a globalized economy that is incompatible with life on a finite planet. But Local is Our Future does more than just describe the problem: it describes the policy shifts and grassroots steps – many of them already underway around the world – that can move us towards the local and, thereby, towards a better world.”
The Gardens of The British Working Class
Written by Margaret Willes
“This magnificently illustrated people's history celebrates the extraordinary feats of cultivation by the working class in Britain, even if the land they toiled, planted, and loved was not their own. Spanning more than four centuries, from the earliest records of the laboring classes in the country to today, Margaret Willes's research unearths lush gardens nurtured outside rough workers' cottages and horticultural miracles performed in blackened yards, and reveals the ingenious, sometimes devious, methods employed by determined, obsessive, and eccentric workers to make their drab surroundings bloom. She also explores the stories of the great philanthropic industrialists who provided gardens for their workforces, the fashionable rich stealing the gardening ideas of the poor, alehouse syndicates and fierce rivalries between vegetable growers, flower-fanciers cultivating exotic blooms on their city windowsills, and the rich lore handed down from gardener to gardener through generations. This is a sumptuous record of the myriad ways in which the popular cultivation of plants, vegetables, and flowers has played-and continues to play-an integral role in everyday British life."
A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
Written by Helena Norberg-Hodge
“In a groundbreaking debut, farmer and social scientist Chris Smaje argues that organizing society around small-scale farming offers the soundest, sanest and most reasonable response to climate change and other crises of civilisation—and will yield humanity’s best chance at survival. Drawing on a vast range of sources from across a multitude of disciplines, A Small Farm Future analyses the complex forces that make societal change inevitable; explains how low-carbon, locally self-reliant agrarian communities can empower us to successfully confront these changes head on; and explores the pathways for delivering this vision politically.”
Overstory
Written by Richard Powers
“A story of a vast, unknown and interconnected world above the one we know, Richard Powers' thirteenth book brings together the lives of strangers, each summoned by trees. Arching from antebellum New York to late twentieth-century Pacific Northwest, it is a glorious, ambitious novel of how we can learn to recognise a history and pattern to the world beyond our own. Through an epic series of tales, separated by location and time, we rediscover our lost interrelationship with the vast and magisterial sentience of trees, and in the process we find our redemption."
The Garden Jungle
Written by Dave Goulson
“A story of a vast, unknown and interconnected world above the one we know, Richard Powers' thirteenth book brings together the lives of strangers, each summoned by trees. Arching from antebellum New York to late twentieth-century Pacific Northwest, it is a glorious, ambitious novel of how we can learn to recognise a history and pattern to the world beyond our own. Through an epic series of tales, separated by location and time, we rediscover our lost interrelationship with the vast and magisterial sentience of trees, and in the process we find our redemption.”
Who Owns England
Written by Guy Shrubsole
“ With staggering amount of journalistic legwork, Shrubsole uncovers the full scope of the rampant proprietary inequity of this country, which affects everything from the housing crisis to climate change.
Melding history, politics and polemic, he vividly demonstrates how taking control of land ownership is key to tackling everything from the housing crisis to climate change - and even halting the erosion of our very democracy."
Looseing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild
Written by Lucy Jones
“Now, in the moment of our great migration away from the rest of nature, more and more scientific evidence is emerging to confirm its place at the heart of our psychological wellbeing.
Delicately observed and rigorously researched, Losing Eden is an enthralling journey through this new research, exploring how and why connecting with the living world can so drastically affect our health.”
Green Ideas Book Club
Written by Variouse
“ An environmental classics series of 21 books. It celebrates the environmental writers and thinkers that have changed the way we think and talk about the living world."
Animate Earth
Written by Stephen Harding
“Stephan Harding explores how Gaian science can help us to develop a sense of connectedness with the 'more-than-human' world. His work is based on careful integration of rational scientific analysis with our intuition, sensing and feeling - a vitally important task at this time of severe ecological and climate crisis.
Animate Earth argues that we need to establish a right relationship with the planet as a living entity in which we are indissolubly embedded - and to which, in the final analysis, we are all accountable. The book inspires the reader to connect with a profound sense of the intrinsic value of the Earth, and to discover what it means to live as harmoniously as possible within a sentient creature of planetary proportions.”