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The Essential Agrarian Reader:
The Future of Culture, Community & the Land -- by Norman
Wirzba
A compelling worldview with advocates
from around the globe, agrarianism challenges the shortcomings of
our industrial and technological economy. Not simply focused on
farming, the agrarian outlook encourages us to develop practices
and policies that promote the health of land, community, and culture.
Agrarianism reminds us that no matter how urban we become, our survival
will always be inextricably linked to the precious resources of
soil, water, and air. This understanding demands that we become
active caregivers of the earth and its life-giving sources.
Combining fresh insights from the disciplines of education, law,
history, urban and regional planning, economics, philosophy, religion,
ecology, politics, and agriculture, these original essays develop
a sophisticated critique of our culture’s current relationship
to the land, while offering practical alternatives. Leading agrarians,
including Wendell Berry, Vandana Shiva, Wes Jackson, Gene Logsdon,
Brian Donahue, Eric Freyfogle, and David Orr, explain how our goals
should be redirected toward genuinely sustainable communities. These
writers lament the shortsightedness of economic and political ambition,
and call us to an honest accounting and correction of our often
destructive ways. They suggest how our society can take practical
steps toward integrating soils, watersheds, forests, wildlife, urban
areas, and human populations into one great system—a responsible
flourishing of our world and culture. The Essential Agrarian Reader
calls us to celebrate the gifts of the earth, a celebration manifested
in honest work and respect for the land.
Glitter & Greed: The Secret
World of the Diamond Cartel- by Janine Roberts
Rare, romantic, and forever: The diamond
industry depends on these myths to reap billions of dollars of profit.
This sensational investigation explodes such fallacies and -reveals
how multimillion dollar advertising campaigns create the impression
of rarity and romance. It reveals, too, a very secret and unromantic
world, one that is dominated and controlled by a handful of mighty
corporations.
Taking us through seven decades of intrigue and manipulation that
span the globe, Janine Roberts has written the most expansive and
explosive expose ever on diamonds; among Roberts’ revelations:
* How De Beers hides away rich diamond deposits—and where
some of these are located.
* How a long-term companion of Jackie Onassis was a CIA-linked millionaire
diamond merchant tied to coups and dictators in Central Africa.
* Just how diamonds are "fixed" to make them more expensive.
* How major diamond companies cooperated with Hitler’s Germany—and
how much they were paid.
* How industrial diamond supplies were artificially -restricted
to the United States during World War II, severely damaging its
war effort and how U.S. Intelligence came to suspect treason.
* How a major diamond deposit in Arkansas was sabotaged to stop
it coming into production.
* How the White House was manipulated into buying millions of diamonds
it did not need and now must sell.
* How terrorism found its way into the diamond trade, not recently
but many decades ago.
* How diamonds are secretly moved by the millions around the world.
The inquiry the diamond cartel did not want and tried to stop. .
. . If you have ever wondered what tales might lie behind the glitter
of a diamond ring, read this account of the most international media
investigation ever launched!
Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western
Culture -- by Carolyn Merchant -
Description: Visionary quests to
return to the Garden of Eden have shaped Western culture from Columbus'
voyages to today's tropical island retreats. Few narratives are
so powerful - and, as Carolyn Merchant shows, so misguided and destructive
- as the dream of recapturing a lost paradise.
A sweeping account of these quixotic endeavors by one of America's
leading environmentalists, Reinventing Eden traces the idea of rebuilding
the primeval garden from its origins to its latest incarnations
in shopping malls, theme parks and gated communities. With eloquence
and insight, Merchant shows how the drive to conquer nature and
to explore and settle the globe, springs from this utopian pastoral
impulse throughout Western history. Time and again, human manipulation
of the environment is our downfall: Eden is achieved by fencing
off pristine beauty in national parks and wildlife preserves, while
leaving the majority of the earth in ruins.
Strangely Like War: The Global
Assault on Forests (Politics of the Living) -- by Derrick
Jensen, George Draffan
Description- "It was strangely like
war. They attacked the forest as if it were an enemy to be pushed
back from the beachheads, driven into the hills, broken into patches,
and wiped out. Many operators thought they were not only making
lumber but liberating the land from the trees. . ." from The
Last Wilderness, by Murray Morgan, 1976
Derrick Jensen, prize-winning author of A Language Older than Words
and The Culture of Make Believe, and George Draffan, activist, researcher,
and co-author with Jensen of Railroads & Clearcuts, collaborate
again to expose the escalating global war on trees. Ever since Gilgamesh
cut down the ancient cedar forests of Mesopotamia, civilizations
and empires have foundered and collapsed in the wake of widespread
deforestation. Today, with three quarters of the world’s original
forests gone and the pace of cutting, clearing, processing, and
pulping ever accelerating, Jensen and Draffan lay bare the stark
scenario we face—we being not only people, but the nonhuman
fabric of life itself—unless deforestation is slowed and stopped.
A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the relationship
between deforestation and our ecological crisis as well as an essential
"handbook" for forest and anti-globalization activists.
Trouble in Paradise: Globalization and Environmental
Crises in Latin America -- by J. Timmons Roberts
Description - Environmental degradation
in Latin America has become one of the most pressing issues on the
international agenda. The volume began to crescendo when space shuttle
astronauts photographed five thousand fires on a single night in
the Brazilian Amazon state of Rondonia in 1985, and grew shrill
when rubbertapper Chico Mendes was shot in 1988 trying to stop ranchers
from clearing rainforests near his home in Acre.
Since the early 80s, we've heard pleas from rock star, environmental
groups, and scientists, asking us to focus our attention on environmental
destruction in Latin America-oil spills, lax NAFTA driven ecological
standards, endangered indigenous cultures, and the destruction of
the rainforests. This volume presents an overview of the pressing
nature of these issues and the scope of the problems and seeks to
focus our attention on environmental destruction in Latin America
by examining several types of environmental crises in Latin American
countries. With discussions of the World Bank, urban pollution,
NAFTA, toxic pollution in maquiladoras, headline grabbing environmental
disasters, drug trafficking, and the 1992 Rio Earth Conference,
this book will be a must read for anyone interested in the future
of Latin America or world ecology.
The New Ethics of Eating
- by Erik Marcus
Description - In this book, you
will find the latest information about how what you eat affects
your health, the environment, and the existence of the animals who
share this planet. Vegan explains clearly how simple but significant
the switch to an all-plant diet can be. Adding weight to Marcus's
own arguments are in-depth discussions of ground-breaking work by
these internationally respected experts:
Heart specialist Dean Ornish, M.D. Nutrition scientist T. Colin
Campbell, Ph.D. Weight loss expert Terry Shintani, M.D. Vegetarian
nutritionist Suzanne Havala, R.D. Farm Sanctuary founders Gene and
Lorri Bauston Population analyst David Pimentel, Ph.D. Mad Cow expert
Stephen Dealler, M.D. Rangeland activist Lynn Jacobs
Diet for a New America: How Your
Food Choices Affect Your Health, Happiness & the Future of Life
on Earth - by John Robbins
New edition of the classic that awakened
the conscience of a nation. Since the 1987 publication of Diet for
a New America, beef consumption in the United States has fallen
a remarkable 19%. While many forces are contributing to this dramatic
shift in our habits, Diet for a New America is considered to be
one of the most important. Diet for a New America is a startling
examination of the food we currently buy and eat in the United States,
and the astounding moral, economic, and emotional price we pay for
it.
In Section I, John Robbins takes an extraordinary look at our dependence
on animals for food and the inhumane conditions under which these
animals are raised. It becomes clear that the price we pay for our
eating habits is measured in the suffering of animals, a suffering
so extreme and needless that it disrupts our very place in the web
of life.
Section II challenges the belief that consuming meat is a requirement
for health by pointing our the vastly increased rate of disease
caused by pesticides, hormones, additives, and other chemicals now
a routine part of our food production. The author shows us that
the high health risk is unnecessary, and that the production, preparation,
and consumption of food can once again be a healthy process.
In Section III, Robbins looks at the global implications of a meat-based
diet and concludes that the consumption of the resources necessary
to produce meat is a major factor in our ecological crisis.
Diet for a New America is the single most eloquent argument for
a vegetarian lifestyle ever published. Eloquently, evocatively,
and entertainingly written, it is a cant put down book guaranteed
to amaze, infuriate, but ultimately educate and empower the reader.
A pivotal book nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction
in 1987.:
Beyond Beef: The Rise &Fall of the Cattle
Culture- by Jeremy Rifkin
I've been a vegetarian for about 10 years
now. After reading this book, I know I made the right choice. The
amount o planetary destruction being caused by America's lust for
meat is simply shocking. The good news is that meat eaters are dieing
off rather quickly. Lets hope the planet can sustain the rest of
us until they change or become extinct. The race is on. Read
my article "Escape From the Planet of the Cows,
which uses this book as source material.
Bonelight - Ruin and Grace in
the New Southwest (Environmental Arts and Humanities Series)
- by Mary Sojourner
Description - When
upstate New Yorker Mary Sojourner reluctantly agreed to visit the
Grand Canyon of Arizona nearly two decades ago, she little suspected
that she was about to lose her heart to the daunting, gut-wrenching
beauty of the Southwest, or that she would shortly find there a
home, a passion for the land, and a cause in protecting it. Since
then, she has become acclaimed as an environmental writer and respected
as a grass-roots activist protesting the heedless development of
the Southwest's increasingly precious and embattled open spaces.
The essays collected in Bonelight reflect Sojourner's southwestern
journey from greenhorn to old-timer, from tourist to committed defender
of the land and the human communities that share it. She writes
of exploring the deserts, forests, canyons, mountains, and river
rapids of the Southwest, and of her passionate love for this austere
and ravishing landscape; of family, friends, and lovers, a woman's
wary passage into middle age, the discovery of peace and balance
in the execution of mundane chores and in the close observation
of natural surroundings; of the ways that development is destroying
the Southwest's fragile beauty, and of the greed and spiritual emptiness
that motivate much of this development. There is humor here, and
adventure, and the intense intimacy of a writer who dares confront
the world around her with bold candor and a lover's tender gaze.
Mary Sojourner's Southwest is a world that, through these graceful
and engaging essays, we can all share-and fall in! love with.
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