In this provocative, wide-ranging book, Richard Manning offers a dramatically revisionist view of recent human evolution, beginning with the vast increase in brain size that set us apart from our primate relatives and brought an accompanying increase in our need for nourishment. For 290,000 years, we managed to meet that need as hunter-gatherers, a state in which Manning believes we were at our most human: at our smartest, strongest, most sensually alive. But our reliance on food made a secure supply deeply attractive, and eventually we embarked upon the agricultural experiment that has been the history of our past 10,000 years.

The evolutionary road is littered with failed experiments, however, and Manning suggests that agriculture as we have practiced it runs against both our grain and nature's. Drawing on the work of anthropologists, biologists, archaeologists, and philosophers, along with his own travels, he argues that not only our ecological ills-overpopulation, erosion, pollution-but our social and emotional malaise are rooted in the devil's bargain we made in our not-so-distant past. And he offers personal, achievable ways we might re-contour the path we have taken to resurrect what is most sustainable and sustaining in our own nature and the planet's.

A simply written chronicle by a man who abandoned the 1800s Philadelphia business world for a small farm in the New Jersey countryside. Features thoughtful reflections on how to choose a site, select crops and maintain them, the difference between city and country life, and the joy of establishing a home.

Helen and Scott Nearing, authors of Living the Good Life and many other bestselling books, lived together for 53 years until Scott's death at age 100. Loving and Leaving the Good Life is Helen's testimonial to their life together and to what they stood for: self-sufficiency, generosity, social justice, and peace.
In 1932, after deciding it would be better to be poor in the country than in the city, Helen and Scott moved from New York Ciy to Vermont. Here they created their legendary homestead which they described in Living the Good Life: How to Live Simply and Sanely in a Troubled World, a book that has sold 250,000 copies and inspired thousands of young people to move back to the land.
The Nearings moved to Maine in 1953, where they continued their hard physical work as homesteaders and their intense intellectual work pormoting social justice. Thirty years later, as Scott approached his 100th birthday, he decided it was time to prepare for his death. He stopped eating, and six weeks later Helen held him and said goodbye.
Loving and Leaving the Good Life is a vivid self-portrait of an independent, committed and gifted woman. It is also an eloquent statement of what it means to grow old and to face death quietly, peacefully, and in control. At 88, Helen seems content to be nearing the end of her good life. As she puts it, "To have partaken of and to have given love is the greatest of life's rewards. There seems never an end to the loving that goes on forever and ever. Loving and leaving are part of living."
Helen's death in 1995 at the age of 92 marks the end of an era. Yet as Helen writes in her remarkable memoir, "When one door closes, another opens." As we search for a new understanding of the relationships between death and life, this book provides profound insights into the question of how we age and die.

This one volume edition of Living the Good Life and Continuing the Good Life brings these classics on rural homesteading together. This couple abandoned the city for a rural life with minimal cash and the knowledge of self reliance and good health.

Join the real food revolution with a true pioneer in the Community Supported Agriculture movement-Farmer John Peterson and his farm, Angelic Organics. Angelic Organics is a leader in community supported gardening and biodynamics, helping to connect people with their food, their farmers, and healthful living.

The Little Prince is a classic tale of equal appeal to children and adults. On one level it is the story of an airman's discovery, in the desert, of a small boy from another planet - the Little Prince of the title - and his stories of intergalactic travel, while on the other hand it is a thought-provoking allegory of the human condition. First published in 1943, the year before the author's death in action, this translation contains Saint-Exupery's delightful illustrations.

The classic of common-sense economics. "Enormously broad in scope, pithily weaving together threads from Galbraith and Gandhi, capitalism and Buddhism, science and psychology."— The New Republic

Teaching all the skills needed to live independently in harmony with the land, from harnessing natural forms of energy and raising crops to keeping livestock and preserving foodstuffs, this new format of John Seymour's classic is still the most practical guide for realists and dreamers alike. AUTHOR BIO: John Seymour authored over 40 books, including the DK's best-selling Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency and The Forgotten Arts & Crafts. He died in the fall of 2004 at the age of 90.

The writings collected here are from a school of English thinkers in the 1930s and 1940s who were concerned about the desperate state of modern society. The writers include G. K. Chesterton, H. J. Massingham, Eric Gill, Hilaire Belloc, Herbert Shove, and Arthur Penty. They study various parts of the problem of capitalist society; the origins, benefits, and demerits of industrialism; the importance of art to society and its sufferance under capitalism; the size of commercial organization and its relevance to efficiency; the nature and purpose of work as a concept; and the crucial nature of understanding the present through real knowledge of the past.

This fictional outline of a modern utopia has been a center of raging controversy ever since its publication in 1948. Set in the United States, it provocatively pictures a society in which human problems are solved by a scientific technology of human conduct - and in which many of our contemporary values are obsolete.

Adam Smith's masterpiece, first published in 1776, is the foundation of modern economic thought and remains the single most important account of the rise of, and the principles behind, modern capitalism. Written in clear and incisive prose, The Wealth of Nations articulates the concepts indispensable to an understanding of contemporary society; and Robert Reich's new Introduction for this edition both clarifies Smith's analyses and illuminates his overall relevance to the world in which we live. As Reich writes, "Smith's mind ranged over issues as fresh and topical today as they were in the late eighteenth century—jobs, wages, politics, government, trade, education, business, and ethics."

The distinctly American gospel—never before published—of our great nature writer, mystic, ecologist, and prophet. "Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present . . . . There is something suggested by [the cockcrow] not in Plato nor the New Testament. It is a newer testament—the Gospel according to this moment," Henry David Thoreau wrote in "a sort of introduction" to Wild Fruits—his last manuscript and his transcendental gospel of the sacredness of nature. The difficulties of his handwriting, method of composition, notations, and pagination have kept his final observations and meditations from publication until now; thanks to the assiduous efforts of Thoreau specialist Bradley Dean, this great work can finally be brought to light. Wild Fruits is beautifully illustrated throughout with line drawings of the "wild fruits" Thoreau considers, as he writes, for example, "Famous fruits imported from the East or South . . . do not concern me so much as many an unnoticed wild berry whose beauty annually lends a new charm to some wild walk . . ." This work may be considered Thoreau's last will and testament, in which he protests our desecration of the landscape and envisions a new American scripture. As Dean writes, "the Thoreau New Testament suggests that the Holy Land is under our feet, as well as over our heads."

Virgil's affectionate poem of the land brings us the disappointments as well as the rewards of the countryman's year-round devotion to his crops, his vines and olives, livestock great and small, and the complex society of his bees. Part agricultural manual, part political poem and allegory, The Georgics' scenes are real and vivid, allowing the reader to feel the sights, sounds, and textures of the ancient Italian landscape.
This lauded new translation has been written by Peter Fallon, who, as a farmer and a poet, is uniquely suited to the task. It is coupled here with an introduction and notes by the classical scholar Elaine Fantham. Fantham's introduction considers Virgil's life and poetry in its historical context, while her notes gloss the many classical and mythological allusions. The combination of a faithful and lyrical translation with well-researched contextual information makes this edition the best possible introduction to Virgil's masterpiece. It is sure to delight all lovers of poetry and Renaissance literature.