This book inspired the many recent changes at TWL. Of course, we highly recommend it!
It is a lively account of a community working to combat suburban sprawl and discover how to live responsibly on the land. A founder of the Land’s Sake community farm in Weston, Massachusetts, Brian Donahue describes the joys and sorrows of farming in the suburbs. He calls for every community to protect its common land, establish community farms, and engaged citizens with the land on which they live.
Pollan writes about the ecology of the food humans eat and why–what it is, in fact, that we are eating. Discussing industrial farming, organic food, and what it is like to hunt and gather food, this is a surprisingly honest and self-aware account of the evolution of the modern diet.
Wendell Berry
The Unsettling of America : Culture & Agriculture KRL
In The Unsettling of America Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural development and spiritual discipline. Today’s agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families, and as a nation we are thus more estranged from the land - from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it. Sadly, as Berry notes in the afterword to this new edition, his arguments and observations are still relevant today. We continue to suffer loss of community, the devaluation of human work, and the destruction of nature under an economics dedicated to the mechanistic pursuit of products and profits.