Cooking is thinking! The spatter of sauce in a pan, a cook’s subtle deviation from a recipe, the careful labour of cooking for loved ones: these are not often the subjects of critical enquiry. Cooking, we are told, has nothing to do with serious thought; the path to intellectual fulfilment leads directly out of the […]

In celebration of the Millennium, this was a revised and updated version of the original Whole Earth Catalog, long considered the “bible” of the counterculture/environmental movement since its appearance in the late 1960s and the very first Earth Day in 1973, when people were beginning to think about being green and sustainable. According to the […]

This book by celebrated biologist Jo Handelsman lays bare the complex connections among climate change, soil erosion, food and water security, and drug discovery. Humans depend on soil for 95 per cent of global food production, yet let it erode at unsustainable rates. In the United States, China, and India, vast tracts of farmland will […]

“The plowshare may well have destroyed more options for future generations than the sword,” writes Wes Jackson in a review of practices that have brought U.S. agriculture to the edge of disaster. Tillage has hastened the erosion of irreplaceable topsoil everywhere and a technology based on fossil fuels has increased yields for short-term profits, leaving […]

The Appleman and the Poet, the fifth volume of Hubert Butler’s essays, completes a thirty-year odyssey embarked upon by The Lilliput Press in 1984. Beginning with ‘Russian Dispatches 1932–1946,’ Butler gives an evocative description – from the viewpoint of a bourgeois teacher – of a society in dissolution, before the onset of Stalin’s Great Purge, […]

Jackson views features of the landscape from historical and contemporary perspectives. In addition to the ordered political aspects of landscape such as roads, boundaries and fields, he identifies an equally important vernacular tradition linked with custom, adaptation and mobility. Different chapters focus on America’s agrophilia (love of horizontal spaces), stone as a building material, the […]

Extending the definition of ecology to encompass social relations and human subjectivity as well as environmental concerns, The Three Ecologies argues that the ecological crises that threaten our planet are the direct result of the expansion of a new form of capitalism and that a new ecosophical approach must be found which respects the differences […]

Compulsory ujamaa villages in Tanzania, collectivization in Russia, Le Corbusier’s urban planning theory realized in Brasília, the Great Leap Forward in China, agricultural “modernization” in the Tropics—the twentieth century has been racked by grand utopian schemes that have inadvertently brought death and disruption to millions. Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go […]

In the Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, Lucy R. Lippard, one of America’s most influential art writers, weaves together cultural studies, history, geography, photography, and contemporary public art to provide a fascinating exploration of our multiple senses of place. Divided into five parts—Around Here; Manipulating Memory; Down to Earth: Land […]