The Earth Only Endures: On Reconnecting with Nature and Our Place in It

by Pretty, Jules

• ISBN13: 9781844076130
• ISBN10: 184407613X
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781136554339
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-07-30
• Publisher: Routledge
• More Book Details

Summary

* Readable, moving essays on our relationship to the earth and the other creatures in it * A reminder of just how much we consume and what effect this has on our world For most of human history, we have lived our daily lives in a close relationship with the land. Yet now, for the first time, more people are living in urban rather than rural areas and thus an estrangement grows. Our modern lifestyles and economies, sought after as the most desirable in the world, are precisely those that would need six to eight earths to provision if the entire world's population adopted them. Jules Pretty has written a moving collection of essays which explores humanity's relationship with the land, with animals and with food. He describes how our consumption eats up the earth's bounty without replacing it. He discusses the obesity crisis. He explores hunting and fishing as opposed to raising animals for food. He reviews all the ways in which man interacts--and interferes with--the living and non-living world around him. The Earth Only Endures is about our relations with nature, animals and places. Focusing on themes of connections and estrangement, it offers directions for an optimistic future. We are rendering our own world inhospitable, and in the process risk losing what it means to be human. This book reminds us of our connectedness to that world, and so inspires us to reclaim that relationship.

Author Biography

Jules Pretty OBE is Professor of Environment and Society in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Essex, UK, and author of a host of books, including the acclaimed Agri-Culture (2002). In 2006 he received an OBE for services to sustainable agriculture in the UK and overseas.

Table of Contents

Preface: Green Places, Good Places	p. vii
Acknowledgements	p. xiv
Green Places
Becoming Green	p. 3
Birch Bark and Blue Sky	p. 9
A Room with a Green View	p. 27
Unhealthy Places	p. 39
Animals and Us
Where the Wild Things Were	p. 55
Hunters and the Hunted	p. 69
Animal Magic	p. 85
Food and the Land
The Fatta the Lan'	p. 99
Little Houses on the Prairie	p. 113
The Shadow of the Rain	p. 125
Rewilding Agriculture	p. 139
People and the Land
Legible Landscapes	p. 155
Exclusion Zones	p. 167
Life and Land on the North Atlantic Fringe	p. 183
The Future
Ecolution	p. 197
Liberation	p. 213
Notes	p. 223
References	p. 243
Index	p. 267
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